He can't afford a radio, but the temple of Sarenrae can. There's a line winding out the doors and around the block to take a turn on the headset. He waits in line, once, but it's not really interesting enough to wait in line again. Someone else in his town who can afford their own radio starts putting out an anonymous gazette each day based on its contents. Mainly the prices and storms and stories and chariot races, but occasionally they copy down a prayer or mention a particularly good or particularly bad piece of dance music.

At some point someone on the radio starts broadcasting something called "Radio Free Avistan." It seems like a nice idea, but not such a nice idea to be worth waiting in line to hear. Anything really important should make it into the gazette.

There's an interview with a priest of Abadar. The gazette-writer doesn't seem to think very highly of him; they put out a scathing editorial about the dangers of gambling. There's a big fight at his work about confidentiality oaths.

His life mostly feels pretty similar.

Her brother asks for her help ensuring that he doesn't miss anything important. She looks at him like he's stupid and hands him her notes on the past two weeks of radio programming.

Still, there are far more than two channels on the radio, even ignoring the adventure stories and chariot races and so on. There are people selling summaries, of course, but she doesn't trust them not to botch anything more complicated than recording the list of prices on the Abadaran channel, and even that's dubious.

(Her brother is barely sleeping. Presumably, being not a complete fool, he's determined that it's worth it. She's hardly going to tell him to stop.)

She considers asking her father to help with the project and decides against it for reasons she can't fully explain, even to herself.

After the interview with the Abadaran, there's an argument among the other workers at the courthouse about whether you really ought to keep an oath of confidentiality. (What if someone asked for an oath of confidentiality, only to confess to murder? Or worse, to the fact they were planning to commit one?)

He thinks the entire question could be avoided by simply not swearing unrestricted confidentiality oaths, which seem like a bad idea for a whole host of reasons, and says as much. One of the other employees points out that if you do swear such an oath, then maybe people will be more likely to confess their murder plans to you, and then you can turn them in. Milites is pretty sure that anyone stupid enough to confess to murder just because someone who works for the courts promised them confidentiality is also stupid enough to give themself away in other ways.

It doesn't seem very complicated to her.

(They've made an exception to their normal strategy so that both of them can listen to Freedom Radio. Not because of the idealistic talk about virtues, or even the interview with the priest, but because sometimes it talks about how to prevent and cure disease even without a priest, or scare off the sort of beast that can sometimes be found within the limits of their town, and that's important enough to miss an hour of updates about storms.)

(He thinks Augusta's being a bit credulous about the "germ theory of disease," which seems speculative at best. Freedom must believe it, but that doesn't preclude her simply being wrong. Still, everything he's heard suggests that the diarrhea cures and so on actually work, so he's not going to just stop listening.)