Blai studies the Acts and the commentaries and the theology books and the incident reports and the catechism.  By the time the convention is over, he's qualified to belong to the Church hierarchy.  If anyone was hoping that something about this process would reveal that actually he has a greater destiny which is incompatible with that, they are disappointed; nothing of the kind is in evidence, pamphlet notwithstanding, and so he joins the command structure as soon as they will have him.  He communicates to his superiors that he has an invitation from the Archduke of Sirmium to go Misarias and establish the Iomedaean church there and act as a reserve third circle cleric force for the occasional problem in that weight class.  His superiors are, as anyone could have guessed they would be, rational people concerned with the efficient use of resources, such as "native Chelish Iomedaeans" and "the goodwill of archdukes" and "the opportunity to have one of your guys settle down and learn to make wands".

Misarias is a second-tier city and has not already received an influx of many foreign clerics and lay-priests, not even by the time the convention is over; those are heading for ports, fetching up at borders, going where they've already specifically been invited.  (Arguably, Blai too is also going where he's specifically been invited.)  Misarias has a second circle Pharasmin who showed up with a nonce party to deal with some zombies and didn't leave; it has a newly minted Abadaran, and a Milanite.  The countryside surrounding it has some Gozrehns and Erastilians.  Blai's the highest circle cleric for miles around.

Lt. Sauer is reassigned elsewhere when the convention ends, so he's operating with only other staff he's picked up over the grueling months of convention.  And not all of those; several are unneeded for peacetime non-convention work, and not all of them want to travel all the way to the northern edge of Sirmium.  He retains Nonell, a scrivening wizard who lost a leg at the Wound for her discharge and is eager to spend the rest of her career copying the Acts and its commentaries day in and day out with incidental other spellwork as-needed; she sometimes will play chess.  He also hires away Fabre, a lay priest recently ordained and sent to help fill the gap created by Iustin's recall who finds that actually he can't stand Westcrown in particular, something about the street layout and the stink of the waterfront.  Blai plans to hire more people locally once they arrive.

He doesn't have to walk to Misarias from Westcrown the way he had to walk to Westcrown from Taggun Hold.  Archdukes personally inviting one places comes with a teleport to those places.  He and Nonell and Fabre assemble for their teleport and then - there they are.

The church they're giving him is, like all churches in the country, formerly Asmodean.  Someone's been over it with paint in four different colors - they may have run out of their first three - so it's strange swathes of white and blue and gray and rose-pink.  It may be more work to get it presentable from this state than from the unaltered one - red is an Iomedaean color too, after all - but it was probably kindly thought of.  They've also done the work of smashing the statues of devils beyond recognition, but they didn't recognize the blood-encrusted engravings in Infernal all over the floor - a fair mistake even if they had some exposure to the language in school, which is anyone's guess, the calligraphy is very stylized and the phrases very repetitive.  The pews have been looted with only gaps in the paint spatter to mark where they once stood.  One of the doors has been looted.  Three of the six windows in the main service chamber have been smashed and a fourth has a spiderweb crack through it.  There is fire damage in the records room, stacks of boxes of files of papers forever illegible and their contents consigned to the First Vault alone.  The desks, the chairs, the inkbottles, the hymnals, the rugs, the curtains, the dishes, the candles, the libations, the manacles and whips and racks and weights and pliers and hammers and knives, the tablecloths, everything that wasn't nailed down and a few things that were have been carried away by the time Blai and his staffers arrive.

Fortunately the weather is good enough that they can have services outside in the yard while getting the interior presentable.  The churchyard is weedy but spacious and most of it isn't filled up with graves (and won't be any time soon; the Pharasmin and his crowd are taking the bulk of that on now).  Blai hasn't written any sermons himself yet, but he's got a book of the best ones, and transcripts of a few of Iustin's which are much worse but might be useful to pull out in response to some specific situations unique to Cheliax, even hundreds of miles away from where he wrote them.  Fabre has written a few, too.

And Blai is competent to write sermons, now, as ideas occur to him; and to pick at the structure of a book he sends drafts of to de Luna for comments when de Luna has the time for it.

The job comes with a house.  The church doesn't have a rectory the way the one in Westcrown has, nor its own stable for visiting paladins' horses - once they have the sanctuary fit for services perhaps they'll turn some of the yard into a stable, but for the moment Blai is glad enough that the house has no previous association with the church, because that means it's still standing and largely intact at the time he's meant to move into it.  He hires a housekeeper.  He lets Nonell and Fabre sleep in the spare rooms - it's a substantial house - but Fabre gets his own apartment before very long.  Nonell stays.  It briefly looks like she might form a lasting relationship with the farrier up the street but that fizzles out before long.

It's a steady simple life: a dense but manageable pace of refurnishing and repainting the church with his first month's budget; and sermons; and spiritual counseling; and letter-writing; and chess with Nonell; and occasionally renting a horse and riding out with a couple other retired soldiers as a makeshift adventuring party to see about rumored skeletons in the villages or bandits on the roads or monsters in the river.

When he has been in Misarias for two years (and learned, in that time, to make wands), Nonell comes out and tells him that she would really like to marry him and has noticed that her hints haven't gotten anywhere, not the telling him to call her Nàdia (he didn't) and not the trying to make him jealous (was he in all seriousness supposed to take her apparent courtship behavior with the farrier as a positive indication of Nonell being interested in him?  How in any sane gods' name?) and not the chess (does she not even actually like chess?) and not the living in his house for two years (the housekeeper does this also, and he hasn't been charging Nonell rent).

He turns her down, because -

Well, obviously he turns her down, it's overdetermined and there's no need to get into any specific details about why.  If he didn't have enough reason before, the way she reacts certainly speaks poorly enough of her character to suffice after the fact.  There's screaming and crying and throwing things.  He has to march her out of the building and bar the door.  She hollers at the door for a while.  It is possible he is going to have a reputational problem if anyone believes some of the things she says, let alone any of the things she implies.  But since there is no way to prevent her from saying things he simply asks the housekeeper to collect Nonell's possessions and deposit them out the window and set the table for just him going forward.

Blai has, at least, a month to find someone else who'll play chess with him.

In the meantime he gets questions at the church, some polite, some pointed.  He is fairly sure that his answers to the questions - true yet brief as they are - leave several people with the impression that he is gay and pining for someone who dumped him twenty-two years ago, which.  Fine.  If a recurrence of the issue can be prevented by giving the impression that he is the jilted lover of (a very loose description of) Vicar Vilar, then fine.  It isn't like no-longer-Vicar Vilar is going to show up in Misarias and buy into this rumor himself, and furthermore there is basically no chance that Blai is not now a more powerful cleric than Vilar is or even was at the time, so he can fight him off, if it comes up, probably, not that he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about it and prepare slightly stupid spells just in case.

Vilar doesn't show up in Misarias.

But another few years later, Jana Rey shows up in Misarias.

She's twenty-five years older, and she wasn't that young when Blai knew her; she was maybe thirty then, so somewhere in her fifties, now.  She is, of course, dressed completely differently.  He was used to the black chausable over the scarlet robe, with the pentagrams embroidered in and the red glass beads dripping from the edges of her sleeves.  She's grown her hair out from barely-a-ponytail to a braid long enough to be worn looped back onto itself.  She gives her name as Alcantara instead of Rey at the Blue Dog Inn.

She has apparently reinvented herself as a traveling minstrel.  Blai knew she could sing - she always led the hymns - and she's picked up the lute at some point.  Perhaps she already knew how to play before he ever met her and it never came up, or perhaps it's new.  The banner she hangs over the back of a chair says Jana Alcantara Sings - Requests 1 Penny - Jump the Queue 2.

Blai first sees her giving a performance in the inn's common room, where he meets his present chess partner (one of the Abadarans) (an Abadaran almost certainly won't throw anything at you if you don't want to marry them, and at any rate this one is a married man) (they both like the inn's apple pie).

Blai recognizes her voice, thinks he's making it up, dismisses it, refuses to even look at her until his opponent is dithering over a middlegame fork -

- and the voice and the face are too much to ignore, together, but -

- this is a traveling minstrel.  She is not a vicar.  She hasn't been a vicar in more than half a decade.

She's alive.  She -

- may Hell be denied another soldier, that's his automatic thought now, coming unbidden.  And he doesn't have the slightest urge to fight it.  He might have expected some disquiet, he certainly hears enough of his congregation struggling with frustrated vengeful misery that has nowhere to go, swallowed like poison because the other poison is deadlier: but no.

May Hell be denied another soldier.  May Jana Alcantara sing for all the rest of her days, requests a copper each, and sing on in Axis.  However many people she sent to Hell, let her not join them.

Blai smiles.  He hears the click of a chess piece, and goes back to the game.

She doesn't notice him as the evening wears on.  He considers asking for a song, but while he does have a moment of thoroughly inappropriate nostalgia for We Who Will One Day Burn, there's nothing in particular he cares to hear.  His Abadaran chess partner buys one, though, goes over with a copper to pay for Citadel Rivad, and then her gaze follows him back to their table, and Blai meets her eyes.

She stares.  Her eyes flick down to the sword-and-sun and get even wider.  She looks at his plate, which has the crumbs of his finished pie on it, and presumably realizes he's been there for some time.  At the time she knew him he barely had the beginnings of the beard, and she's probably had scores of students, maybe hundreds, but she does recognize Blai.

She sets her jaw, plays Citadel Rivad and the next one and the next one, and makes no move to either confront him or escape the situation.  She got here on a river boat with a pack of other travelers and it'd probably wreck all her plans, to try to leave before the rest of the people who've stopped here are ready.

Blai wins the chess game, and he leaves the inn.  If she wants to find him, she can figure out how to do it.  If she doesn't, she needn't.  The amnesty applies to her as much as anyone.

She doesn't come by the temple.  He wonders what she might have said, if she had; but he already knows more about her eventual fate than he had any reason to expect to know.  She leaves town.  He stays.  He whittles wands, and writes sermons, and cures the blind and deaf, and hears the confessions of the penitent and the frustrations of the impenitent, and creates water, and he channels, positive, every day of the rest of his life.