Ember will give Brenda a hug, then.

"It'll be okay. The important part is that I think he won't hurt as many of them now."

Ember can get four arms worth of hug back. "That is important. Thank you for making that happen."

Now, how does she phrase this without sounding like she might be questioning Brenda’s decisions…

“You have beaten people stronger than him. If you wanted, you could make him stop, and he does not seem like the kind of man with many allies.”

“Wenduag, he’s the Prelate, not a demon cultist! We can’t just kill him because we don’t like what he’s doing!”

“There are ways to stop someone without death. Perhaps without even needing to strike him, if she just stole all his prisoners.”

"I can see your point, but--I don't want to just make everyone do things my way because I'm good at fighting. Even if it's open and shut this time, and I don't actually know that it is, I don't want to go down that road. I don't know how to run a city and even if I did I shouldn't just take one over. But I've been thinking. How was Hulrun chosen as Prelate? How is the government of this city chosen in general?"

“I think he was appointed by the queen? But she might just pick the highest ranking member of the church, or who the local church recommends or something, I’m not sure. Uh, outside of the prelate there’s Count Arendae and the city council, and Irabeth is in charge of the Eagle’s Watch, and then there’s the churches but that might just be that people listen to them? The gods pick their clerics and the count got it from his parents but I don’t know much about how the council gets picked. Plus there’s Terendelev, I don’t think she has a title but you’d have to be mad not to listen to her.”

Nobility and churches, she thought so. But first, "What determines who's on the city council? For that matter, what determines who's Queen?"

“Like I said, I’m not really sure. I’m not from Mendev, I just came here to fight the demons, and the politics of it all goes over my head. I assume the queen inherited it from her father or uncle or something but she’s been in charge for a long time.”

"I'm absolutely going to learn more about how things work here before trying to convince anyone to change them, but in America, the people living in a place get to choose who governs them, and if the government makes laws they don't like they can replace the people who came up with those laws and put in new people who'll change them. It's one of the things we're proudest of, as a country, that we get to choose our own leaders."

"Oh, like in Andoran. I always thought that sounded a little intimidating but they also all seem pretty proud of it."

"Intimidating?"

"Well, yeah. If you're responsible for picking who's in charge, what if you pick someone bad? I feel like I'd just be super nervous all the time and not really do a good job of it, and then I'd be letting everyone down."

"Ah, yeah. But you're not doing it alone, right, everyone in the city or the country gets a vote and the majority wins, so if you're totally wrong other people will vote for someone else and there are only problems when more than half of everyone is wrong at the same time. And that does happen sometimes, but there's a new election every few years so you're not stuck with a bad pick forever."

The temple of Iomedae is easily recognizable, both by the giant statue of a woman with a sword in front of it and the fact that it has a notably different construction from the surrounding buildings. It's larger for one, designed to be able to fit large crowds of people, and has different architectural sensibilities than most of the other buildings in Kenabres. Perhaps the closest match would be the Blackwing Library, though there are still differences other than the fact that the temple is in better repair - recent battle damage excepted, of course. The statue is noticeably newer than the temple itself, but still probably not objectively new.

Also unlike most of the city, there are civilians visible around it and a number of crusaders on guard duty.

She finds an out-of-the way place to sit down and wait and looks very seriously at Seelah. 

"Seelah, I need a favor. I am going to start reading wizardry books. When Terendelev and Hulrun and the rapid response team start arriving, I need you to make sure I notice. This may require punching me in the face."

Seelah nods seriously.

"I can do that. Is there anything else you want me to get your attention for?"

"Uh, fire, earthquake again, plague of locusts again, less friendly dragons, that sort of thing." She isn't kidding. Well, she's maybe kidding about any of those things being especially likely, but she's not kidding about needing her attention to be actively drawn to them.

"Got it."

None of the books are detecting evil so hopefully that means they're not cursed books and this is more like the thing where you need to not be interrupted while praying to prepare spells or something.

Yeah this is not a mind control situation this is just Brenda being Brenda. She falls on the books like a ravening wolf, if wolves were careful with expensive irreplaceable items. Goodbye Golarion she will be back Eventually.

Fortunately for her privileged book standards obtained from living on a planet four centuries after the invention of the printing press and mass literacy, these books are straight from the curated private collection of an archmage. The unfortunate volume limitations of a bag of holding mean that she doesn't have everything from there, but she does have everything that caught her eye and quite a few things that didn't. Hopefully she's a fast reader and/or is good at prioritizing!

She is a fast reader, and more so with the headband, and even more so now that she's part notebook and can read by putting a hand on the left page and another on the right page and then pick them up and turn to the next pair of pages with a third hand. Her fourth hand is in her pocket, discussing everything she learns with Alpina, but Time Enough For Love means that doesn't slow her down at all.

Then she can learn a lot about (and, from handwritten notes on many of the pages, about Areelu Vorlesh' opinions and commentary on) various gods, polities, kinds of magic, and wherever else she ends up bouncing to between one book and another. Kenabres seems to be too local for the details of its ruling council's selection criterion to appear, but the fact that Queen Galfrey is a century-old Paladin of Iomedae or that Andoran and Galt have indeed been experimenting with various kinds of democracy are absolutely in there.

When it comes to witches, though, the sources of knowledge available to her seem to follow pretty predictably from the fact that Areelu Vorlesh doesn't consider most books on the subject worth the paper they're written on. There are exactly two normally published works on the subject, one of whom is more of a compendium of arcane knowledge than about witches specifically. Everything else is varyingly handbound or partially compiled sets of notes, many of which appear to be in Areelu Vorlesh's own handwriting. According to her, a witch is someone who makes a deal with a powerful magical entity for arcane power - entities which need not be limited to evil outsiders, and indeed she notes several empyreal lords known to pick witches. From what she has been able to determine, their magic is somewhat less versatile than that of wizards and sometimes idiosyncratic to the entity that granted it, but that in exchange they can do many things otherwise limited to clerics and have access to hexes, which can make the spell slot limitations of wizards look like something of a bad joke. There's also some musing on the possibility of creating an artificial witch patron or even her granting witch powers herself, though as of the notes being penned the latter was still something she was working on rather than an unalloyed success.

Getting more oriented to this planet feels amazing. She isn't spotting an obvious hack to get witchcraft, but it's still important to learn about.

Is there time to read anything on the basics of wizardry before she has to stop? She doesn't expect to be able to learn any spells today, especially not without a wizardly friend or rival to activate Anything You Can Do, but a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

She can at least get a solid layman's understanding, including the fact that she'll need to get a spellbook and special inks from somewhere and somewhere to copy spellforms from if she wants to cast anything more complicated than the cantrips in this introductory text, though figuring out the notation on spellforms enough to read them on sight rather than puzzling them over a bit at a time will take more time than she has available. Her knowledge of math seems mostly adequate to understanding introductory wizardry but there are definitely a few things she'll need the books to explain to her and probably higher level wizardry has more of it.