"Oh. I can't remember not wanting it. Ma says it started when I was six - Who wouldn't want to be a paladin, really? I mean - if you want to be a soldier, right. If you really want to be a farmer I guess maybe it doesn't appeal as much."

"I guess I was mostly comparing to having a lot of children, who could themselves be soldiers. Or to being a wizard before it became clear I'm not smart enough. It seemed to me like probably being a wizard was the best way to fix the entire world all at once by yourself, but only if you were very good at it, which turns out to be quite the catch."

He laughs. "Well, I'd be no good at it - And being a paladin doesn't mean you can't be a father some day - I guess you can't but that's different."

"Right, it'd be a terrible idea to have all the paladin orders celibate and breed lawful goodness right out of your population like an unfavorable color of sheep. But my mother's theory, and she did have half a point, was that women who'd make good paladins should instead have five sons who'd probably inherit the aptitude and who could pursue it without choosing between that and children." Iomedae lacked the vocabulary to articulate her disagreement at the time. She's vaguely curious if her mother was ever persuaded. It would be sort of like her to be unpersuaded even when Iomedae won the war and became a god.

"Huh. But you disagreed?"

"I figured that it was the sort of puzzle easier to sort out if one was a god, and yet the gods did pick women sometimes so it couldn't always be decided in the one direction. I think if I were arguing the point with her now I'd say that it is bad for societies and the people in them if only men in them hold power because there are concerns they will miss, and that a person really has much stronger evidence about their aptitudes than they'd arrive at reasoning from first principles, but at the time I didn't know to say either of those things so I said we'd see if I got chosen or not."

"Well, the Goddess doesn't really choose on a schedule, so how would you know if your ma was right?"

"We agreed I could try when I was twenty, for a year, and I wouldn't be too old to get married if it hadn't happened by the end of it."

"Oh!" He squints, trying to guess her age. "And She…chose you already? Or are you just pretty sure it'll happen soon?"

"She chose me about six months ago. Mom's dead, but in a sense I think I won the argument."

"Oh. I'm sorry." Goddess, he hopes those weren't related but they probably are.

"Thank you. I think probably my mother is happier now, but I do sort of wish fewer secret things had happened and I could complain to more people about all of it. …does the Goddess not choose on a schedule, if you've got something else you're planning to go do if you're not going to be a good paladin? It really seems like it'd save people a lot of time to be predictable that way - you could have two tracks, 'this is what I want to do regardless, pick me in thirty years if that's what makes sense' and 'make up your mind within one'..."

"Oh. Maybe She does, I guess I never really thought about it. I'm definitely in the first group, see - going to be a sworn knight of the order even if she never does pick me."

"That makes sense," says Iomedae seriously. "I think that's how the Lord-Watcher is, right?"

"That's what they say! That some people the Goddess chooses for their strengths, and some people the Goddess doesn't choose because of their strengths, or something like that. I do really hope She chooses me, though. What's it like?"

"... probably better under different circumstances. Not that I wish it hadn't happened, I've never once wished that, but - I think if I had chosen the order first, and satisfied myself of all my questions about the Goddess, and - been able to tell the people I'd have wanted to tell - then it would be a very beautiful memory, probably. I wouldn't have wanted Her to do anything different. I guess I want to live in a different sort of world, but - that's why we've got to build it, right."

"Yeah. Got to build a better world, can't just wait around for it to happen. The Goddess never just waited around."

"I guess She didn't."

Iomedae spends most of the rest of the day on edge about what she can identify on close inspection as 'whether Cansellarion is going to tell her she needs to clean her room'. Observing to herself that obviously no he won't does not seem to help.

"I think some of my fear of taking the oaths was about being a foster child," she says to Alfirin.

"Hmmmm, like you think Cansellarion will tell you to do things that he thinks are good for you even if you disagree, and you'll have to listen?"

"Like - like I spent all this time in this context where it was universally agreed that I was supposed to listen to someone who it had been decided was more qualified than me to decide what things happened to me, and even when she was right and I didn't disagree it shouldn't have been her choice, because she didn't have all the context - couldn't have all of the context - not that I had all the context, either, but it was my life - and I expect I'd have a different set of fears if Evelyn had been bad at her job but in fact she was good at it and it's just that everyone agreed she had the right, and so all of my ability to act in the world ended up - compressed and narrowed to pass through one person -."

"Yeah - in a way it doesn't matter whether she was right or wrong, just that she was getting to decide and we weren't - obviously it matters in a different way that she wasn't terribly wrong all the time, but - for what was bad about being a foster child, separate from what might be bad about having a bad foster parent - what matters is that we weren't free. And now you're feeling like you're again not free, even though you chose it."

"Yes. And I think I thought of being an adult, being fully a person, as - getting to be the one who decided. And obviously it would've been very different for both of us if Evelyn had said 'hey, I'll feed you both and get you an education but you have to follow my rules', we'd plausibly both have taken her up on it, we wouldn't in fact have been unfree. Free people can agree to be predictable for various reasons - can want to - I don't want to be free to lie on the radio - It's not actually very similar at all. But there's a part of me that doesn't see the difference, and that - doesn't know how to have someone have power over me without panicking. …and that is making Cansellarion a really excessive share of my mental universe. I really do not think 'try to make my boss happy' is a good use of half my thoughts."

"Oh no. That's far too many of your thoughts…I think something a lot like that is why I don't want to enlist with Lastwall myself. Right now I'm free to tinker with engines and build factories and teach people chemistry and physics and stuff and - if I worked for Lastwall I would have to tinker with engines and build factories and teach people chemistry and physics and stuff and it would be awful."