Page 121 of The Sundered Realms

Most of the people surrounding her ignored this sally, but one responded wryly, “We do know you’re Serenthuar-trained.”

Got one. That was a start.

“Yes,” Liris agreed easily, “which is how you know I’ve never been anywhere, because you’d have known about it. I do of course know that your government is full of more corrupt shitheads than is even standard for a government—“ Snorts from two of her captors. ”—but I thought you were freedom fighters.”

“We are,” the same person replied mildly.

“Working for demons?” Liris continued lightly, like this was an amusing intellectual exercise and not of profound importance. “Taking orders from a foreign caster? How do you figure that ends with you having more freedom and not less?”

They said, “When we reach the end of journeys and are called to witness, the balance of our souls may be determined. But not before.”

The cadence was practiced. This was memorized—and, in fact, a passage Liris thought she recognized. The dialect was different, but that sounded like an old holy book.

“Are you a priest?” she asked in some surprise.

They smiled. “You don’t think a person of faith can be a rebel?”

“You are only the second priest of my acquaintance,” Liris said, “but if the current trend continues, I will have to begin assuming that all priests must be in the business of undermining the powerful for the sake of their charges.”

She’d been aiming for a laugh there, but the priest nodded thoughtfully. “There is some truth to that, I think. At least among those of us devoted to serving faithfully, be that our gods or our callings or our flocks. In Theiraos, the government is unwilling to bear any checks or challenges at all. You are not likely to meet many priests here, but those of us who remain are all rebels of necessity.”

Far easier for a person under duress to betray their faith than to keep it.

The priest was waiting expectantly for a response, and finally Liris said, “I understand both sides of that dilemma better than I’d like. But it seems to me that very dedication should make you more resistant to demons, not less, so clearly I don’t understand something.”

“Ah.” The priest nodded. “Serenthuar must do most of its training with books. I imagine what you’re missing is the consideration of people’s lives. Not in a distant, top-down view of numbers, but what it means to live.”

Liris hadn’t really expected them to have an answer to that.

She closed her eyes; breathed. Opened them: listened.

“Before the Sundering,” they said, “Theiraos was, geographically, much larger. As were most realms. We had miles of coast along an ocean. The paintings that survive from those days will break your heart with the clear beauty of them, particularly contrasted with the viscous residue that coats anyone who passes through our cities now. And those cities are the only way most people can live it all.”

“I am from Serenthuar,” Liris said impatiently. “You don’t have to convince me that the Sundering had consequences. But Theiraos, like every other realm that has ever existed, had bad governments before that, too.”

“So it did,” the priest said. “So it may again. But in this age, we are unprecedentedly constrained by our borders. When guarding a single portal is all it takes to trap your citizens, we too easily become hostages. The very land that sustained us has been sundered from us. In any age, as you say, there has always been difficulty, injustice. But once, we were not constrained in these ways. People had more options. They could leave. They could try their hand at other ways of living and doing and being.”

“Could they truly? What was once an accident of geographical constraint is now an accident of magical constraint,” Liris pointed out. “Redistributed differently, I grant you, but it was never fair to begin with.”

“But what if it could be?”

That wasn’t the priest. Liris glanced in the other direction, where Chaeheen had shouldered in among her guard-circle.

“What if,” the priest said softly, “we could save all our people in this lifetime from the cages they’re confined in? What if we could give them not all the choices in the world, but more of them, freer of constraints? Is that an idea you can understand?”

Liris’ mouth opened; shut.

“Your problem,” the leader said fervently, snapping Liris’ spell pad closed, “is that you dream too small. On our current path, the rebels will fail, and Theiraos will stamp out its own people’s spirits for generations. We have to be willing to take bold action, or we’ll fail our people. We have to be willing to dream of a new and better world in order to create it.”

Liris understood that Jadrhun hadn’t had to work to convince these people at all. They had done the work for him.

“Some risks,” she said, “are worth taking. And some costs are too high.”

Chaeheen’s passionate expression closed. “And you don’t get to decide that for us.” She jerked her head at the priest. “Stop talking to her now. She won’t see.”

The awful part was, she did. They believed they were as right as Liris did, that they were fighting to save lives. Liris understood now how they remained on different sides, and she didn’t know how to bridge that.

Or rather, she might, and Chaeheen did too, which was why she’d just shut the priest down.

---