She carried Martin about half a mile, and can retrace her steps. Past these parking lots and these warehouses and these empty lots and -

There’s a tow truck, moving a battered trailer. There’s no one around.

“La migra came, we can’t help, and we need go in case it not gone,” she says to Evelyn. 

(Did Iomedae really carry a grown man that far by herself? She must be even stronger than she looks, and she looks pretty strong.) 

...Oh. Shit. This is the worst timing imaginable for what was almost certainly an ICE raid on Iomedae's friends' camp, and...probably not a coincidence, that it happened shortly after some police attention was directed at the situation. 

"You're not going to be in danger," she says quickly. "You're with me and we're not doing anything against the law. ...Do you think they might just have moved? We could drive around more and look." 

“They no have left their homes, if they move on purpose. You with me not help, you still no have sword. We should go and not be seen. 

If la migra care if people did anything wrong they no take the children.”

...What exactly does Iomedae think ICE is such that Evelyn having a sword would possibly help??? That's so concerning. Evelyn wants to say something reassuring - that they won't hurt the kids or punish them, and it's not like they could take the adults and leave the kids to fend for themselves at the campsite - but that's not obviously true, from Iomedae's perspective, or honestly even her own. She's definitely heard some tragic awful things on the news about kids in detention centers. 

They can go, though, it's clearly not doing Iomedae any good being here. 

"I'm sorry," Evelyn says, because she's struggling to think of anything else to say but an 'I'm sorry' is nearly always appropriate. 

Iomedae is not in feelings mode. Everyone may well be dead or worse and it may be her fault but it will not be better if they get her and Evelyn too. Iomedae is going to get back into the car, pray fervently for guidance, and concentrate very hard on detecting Evil and clutch her tiny useless knife.

Evelyn is in fact concerned about what Iomedae thinks happened here! She's...not really sure what she can or should say to try to reassure her, given that it's not like she knows the exact details of what happened. 

"La migra won't have hurt them," she says. "They're - like the police, sort of, except that instead of arresting people like Martin they arrest people who are working here without papers. It's - I'm not going to tell you it's...fair, or okay...but the people will have been taken to a detention center, which is a bit like a jail. They're - probably very scared and upset - and the adults are likely to be sent back to the country they came from, but - the detention center gives them food and a place to sleep in the meantime, and la migra have to follow the law too, it's against the law for them to hurt people." Wheeeeeeeether that is always how it works in practice is another question, of course. "And I don't know exactly, but I think for the children they might try to look for foster parents, like they did for you. I - could probably email your social worker and find out about the children?" 

“La migra is the government?”

"...A department of the government, yes. In English we call it ICE, which stands for Immigration & Customs Enforcement. ...What did you think they were?" 

“- a very terrible thing. Probably eat people or do worse than that. …arrest people and take their children away still very bad but it good if it not eat them. And I have to obey the government.”

Oh noooooooo poor girl. "No, no, nobody will have been eaten! It's still very bad, yeah - I think a lot of people feel like ICE isn't fair, people come here from poorer countries because they're desperate and need to send money home to their families, and we snatch that away from them, but - yes, it's better to follow the law while it is the law, even if we wish it were a different law instead." 

“This happen because me?”

"...I don't know. Sometimes ICE decides to go around a whole area and find camps of people living without papers, and that might have been nothing to do with you. And - it's not your fault, Iomedae, even if the police did decide to look in this area because of Martin and talking to you." 

"Maybe I not know word fault, but if I take Martin to government, and government go take all my friend children away because I did that, I owe my friend for the wrong I cause to them, and I need change what I do so that not happen again next time I try solve a problem.

I should have kill Martin maybe?"

Evelyn is pretty used to hearing shocking horrifying things while driving, and does not jerk the wheel of the car at all. 

"I am very glad you didn't kill Martin," she says levelly. "Killing people is illegal - well, it's complicated if it's in self-defense, but it's always better not to kill someone, if you have any alternative, and in this case you had an alternative. And it would have been investigated by the police if anyone found out, even if you were eventually cleared of any crime in court because you were defending yourself."

Though...Iomedae maybe has a point that it - well, quite possibly led to her friends feeling betrayed, they must have been trying so hard to stay under the radar of the authorities.

"...It might have been even better to fight him off without hurting him badly enough that he'd have died without the hospital," she says carefully. "There are classes in fighting without weapons, and they would teach you how to defend yourself from a rapist without risking him bleeding to death on you." 

"I try that first but then I have to draw my sword because he was bigger. I need more fighting practice, stop people but not kill them even if no God healing them and no can tell government.

Of course it is better not to kill someone, if there are other ways to make other people safe from him. But the thing I did? It did not make people safe. Now they never safe again, because of me."

Evelyn wants to reassure her that her friends will be all right, one way or another, even if they do end up deported to Mexico, but - she can recognize the feeling of wanting to say something because it will make her feel better. And - nobody is directly going to end up dead or in danger, but - Mexico is more dangerous than the US, and some of those workers must have had dependents back home relying on their income, and now if something happens - an illness, an accident, a home burned down - there won't be money for treatment or rebuilding, will there. If the kids are taken into foster care, that's arguably better than being deported but they might never see their natural parents again. There's all sorts of harm waiting in the future, downstream of a reasonable decision made without full information, and Iomedae isn't going to feel reassured if Evelyn tries to excuse it. 

She doesn't feel great about implicitly condoning Iomedae ending up in the same situation again, Iomedae really shouldn't be running around with illegal immigrants, but Evelyn. also can't think of a way to say that which will land well at all. 

...She's not even going to get into the faith healing thing again right now. At least Iomedae is taking seriously that she can't count on miraculous healing from God if she has to defend herself again. 

"I'm sorry," she says. 

Iomedae mostly isn't paying attention to Evelyn. Evelyn doesn't carry a sword and cannot be useful for figuring this out.

She wronged them. She believed it was safe to take Martin to a church, because she was a paladin, because no reasonable local lord would, in response to a paladin bringing an injured man who'd attacked her to a church for healing, exile all the farm workers and steal all their children. People had told her that the local lords weren't reasonable but she'd imagined that the taxes were high, that they wouldn't help with monsters, that they'd murder you for speaking ill of them, not that if you brought someone to a church for healing they'd find out, exile everyone, and steal all their children, because why would they do that. Because why would the priest call them, if that's what they would predictably do.

She knew that many things here were confusing. Different beasts, different crops, food comes in cans, a hundred things. But she didn't put the pieces of the picture together, she didn't guess that because the beasts were different the evils of the lords would be, even though in retrospect it is completely obvious. She hadn't wanted Martin to die slowly and terribly of infection from his wounds, and she hadn't wanted to put him to death on the spot, so she'd ignored his warning, when he'd understood what she didn't, when he'd had an accurate picture of what forms the evils of the local lords could take. 

She can't fix it. She still understands too little. She doesn't know where la migra will have taken them. Evelyn will not let her wander the wilderness looking. She would not be permitted to take them away even if she found them. They may give the children to foster families, Evelyn said, and Iomedae neither possesses the means to take care of them nor the right by local law. 

Evelyn told her that if she left Evelyn would have to tell the police, and she didn't understand what Evelyn meant by that or why she was saying it, why the police would care, but they would care because they are in the habit of seizing children and giving them to strangers, and the children are not permitted to run away. And not permitted to earn money. And not permitted to carry a weapon. They can be transferred, Evelyn said, between foster families.

Iomedae is - she understands, now, it's easy once you're staring right at it - a slave. They gave her to Evelyn because that is their custom with slaves who they regard as children. Evelyn is a kind person. Something out of a thought experiment from a theological debate, a slaveowner who sincerely desires the welfare of her slaves, requires nothing of them she would not require of a guest. It is heartening about human nature, that that's a thing that exists. It would be childish, to blame Evelyn for any of this, and Iomedae is not in fact a child. 

She is very, very far from home. She does not have the protection of being from an important family, to which she was accustomed; she does not have the protection of being a paladin, because while the laborers understood what it meant, and took it seriously, no one else does. She cannot take actions with the assurance of someone who will be vindicated if they are in the right, who needs to act justly but who'll be granted the opportunity to prove they acted justly. She cannot see any of the consequences of her actions, and she can do unfathomable harm, blindly, doing simple things like stopping by a church to request a service that very church had told her five days earlier that God offered freely. 

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Aroden tried to do the right thing, and miscalculated. He was far greater than she is. The miscalculation was greater, too. Scripture is sparse on the details, but it was his selection to power in Azlant, that terrified the algothulls into calling down a terrible thing from the sky; they feared him. He must have had no idea they could do that, were willing to do that; he would have done almost anything to prevent it. 

Azlant is gone. More people died in one moment than there are in all the world today. Aroden was a powerful enough wizard to be immortal, and awoke to a world where the sun would not rise for hundreds of years, so full was the sky with ash, where everyone was starving.

And he wrote it all down, all Azlant had known, so that people could rebuild, and then he fed them, and built things, through the hundreds of endless years. He didn't fix it. He couldn't fix it. He just looked out in the world at what needed doing, and did that, for longer than a whole human lifetime, for longer than ten of them

The holy books do not say all that much about how He felt about it, because -

- well, here Iomedae's extrapolating, but the obvious reason why is that He wrote them and He thought it was not worth particular attention how He felt about it. There's a time for that. The time is 'once they've won'.

All that is asked of Iomedae is that she get over having destroyed the lives of fifty people who were kind and good to her because she was stupid and ignorant and arrogant and wrong. It really should be trivial by comparison.

There are several hymns about this exact subject, about standing up again in a world shattered by your own idiocy and carelessness, about doing the right thing knowing it may be that you've done more ill for the world than you will ever be able to do good, about not being good enough or strong enough for the problems that are nonetheless yours to solve. Iomedae is very glad to follow a god who has a bunch of hymns composed about this exact subject.

They're ones she liked before, but finds that they land quite differently, once you have actually made a terrible mistake you cannot fix and cannot be forgiven for. 

She sings them all through to herself in her head and does feel better, at the end. She does not cry. 

She needs to understand this place. She has spent her whole life chafing at being told she is too small to do things, but she is, actually, too ignorant to do things, right now, here, and expect them to go well.  The affordances she was accustomed to relying on don't exist. She keeps repeatedly being wrong about things. She needs to understand the laws and the lords and the politics, and until she knows all of that she should do as little as possible. ...this is not an easy prescription, because it doesn't actually answer 'should you let a man who attacked you die rather than get him healing', she's not sure that a better appreciation of this would actually have saved her from the mistake, but - it's a mistake that is very stark and obvious and worth correcting even though it wouldn't have saved her here.  

The obvious thing that would've saved her here is - listening to Martin, even though she was very angry with him and he was very angry with her and she was very scared and he had the obvious reason to be lying to her and he wasn't even trying to explain in a way that made any sense. Listening to him at least enough to go wake some other people and ask them. Or being better at taking people down without a sword, Evelyn has a point that that's a good solution. 

She cannot think of anything to say to Evelyn that is not a lie, so she does not really speak.

...Yeah. Evelyn can't think of much to say either. She doesn't feel like putting the radio back on. They drive back mostly in silence. 

A few minutes out, she clears her throat. "We - should decide what to say to Lily, if she asks about your friends. I don't want to upset her." 

"If you not tell her that this what happen if she get attention of government, then maybe she will get attention of government and destroy lives of many people who were only kind to her."

That...is not at all the objection Evelyn expected Iomedae to have, mostly because when would that possibly come up, but she can see why it makes sense, from Iomedae's angle. And - it's not an angle completely foreign to foster children, really, many of whom have had the experience of finding the courage to tell someone about their treatment at home, only to see their family ripped apart and their siblings spread between different foster homes. That isn't Lily's situation - these days, she seems relieved more than anything else to have been separated from her natural family, which almost speaks louder to how much she must have suffered there than any specific confession could 

"I don't think we should lie to her," she says, very carefully. "I certainly think it would be wrong to tell her we met your friends and they were fine, even if telling her that they aren't okay makes her sad and scared. I - don't think it's appropriate to tell her the whole story, she's not old enough to really understand it, and - I don't want her to take away the lesson that it's dangerous and bad to talk to a teacher or a pastor about a bad thing happening to her, because in a lot of times and places in her life, I think it would be the right thing, to trust that they would help her. I think you're right that it's complicated, and when she's older there's a more complicated lesson she could learn, but I think if I try to explain to her why it's okay and brave to - tell a teacher, or me, if she's being hurt by someone - but it was bad for you to go to the church with Martin, then she's going to be very confused and scared and not know what to do. ...Also I think a lot of specifics might be very upsetting to her, because of ways she was hurt, and I think it's okay to not tell a child her age everything, even if we shouldn't tell her things that are false." 

" - if a man - that - to her, she should tell me. She should not tell the government. Maybe they will send from the land many people no involved, maybe they do nothing. They no -

- they no see us as people whose word has meaning. If they will kill a man on our word, only because his life also has no meaning to them."