“Can’t say I have,” replied Hannah. “Sometimes there’ll be a thing that takes me some time to get, but it never lasts, ay? And there are deep unknowable mysteries, questions without any answers to them, but those’re different.”
“I don’t know,” said Mizuki. “She’s just a mystery to me, that’s all. I like her, I think, but don’t get her.”
“They’re all odd ones, if you ask me,” said Hannah. “Nothin’ wrong with that.”
“Even Alfric?” asked Mizuki. “I think he’s stupidly straightforward.”
“Oh, he’s got depths to him, and bends in the road,” sighed Hannah. “Loads of plans and he ends up out here?”
“Then how’d you end up out here?” asked Mizuki.
“Church of Garos,” said Hannah, shrugging. “I’m not too popular with the superiors. My guess, and only a guess, is that they wanted to get rid of me and didn’t care too much if I left. Maybe they were hopin’ I would, which is why Pucklechurch. But there was also a need for a cleric here, someone to take over for Lemmel, so it suited them either way.”
“And what did you do to upset the apple cart?” asked Mizuki. “If anything?”
“I’m a true believer,” said Hannah, standing up straight. “The thing you gotta understand about the Church of Garos, and all the others, is that none of the gods actually care about the church itself, they care about the clerics. The churches are more like… Well, let’s say you’ve got a guild of cobblers, ay? Just a whole bunch of people who cobble shoes or whatnot. They’re a guild because they all do the same thing and want to work together, and so they can talk to each other over the guild channel, and have apprenticeships and everythin’. But there’s nothin’ to say that you can’t learn to cobble without the guild. It would just be harder, especially because if all the cobblers are in the guild, they control the apprenticeships, don’t they? So it’s a bit like that, I s’pose, but different, because it’s like… Well, imagine that some people are cobblers because they’re mercenaries, they don’t really care about cobblin’, they just want the money, it’s a trade to them, and then there are others, people who are devotees, true believers.”
“In cobbling?” asked Mizuki.
“Well, I’m just tryin’ to make sense of it for you,” said Hannah. “You can imagine someone who was a good, devoted cobbler, who’d have learned cobblin’ even without bein’ taught, and you can imagine her bein’ a part of the guild because they wanted to keep a thumb on her and make sure she was stickin’ to what they wanted from cobblers.”
“And are you a part of the guild?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, there is a guild, right?”
“There are loads of guilds,” said Hannah. “There are enough clerics of Garos that if we were all in a single guild together, nothin’ would ever get done. Every mornin’ you’d wake up to a novel’s worth of discussion, I’d wager.”
“Are you not in a guild then?” asked Mizuki.
“Are you?” asked Hannah.
“I am,” said Mizuki. “Greater Plenarch Sorcerers’ Association. Nothing to write home about, really, it’s just some local mages. I mostly ignore the guild, but they help with getting some odd jobs in the area or giving early warning if there’s going to be some magical crisis or something, not that it’s been an issue so far. We’re all technically in competition with each other, so I can’t say that I get too much from it. Mostly it keeps us out of each other’s hair.”
“Ah,” said Hannah. “I was in the proper local guild for a bit, but there were some tensions with a few of the others, some disagreements, let’s say, about the nature of Garos and the best way to worship him and live by his symmetry. Some of it was on my end, naturally, but I don’t take all the blame. Easier for me to leave than them, since it was a few of the higher-ups in the guild that were talkin’ with me in the first place.”
“Huh,” said Mizuki. “So you argued with the guild leaders and were forced out?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that,” Hannah said with a sigh. “It was more the feelin’ of comin’ into a room and realizin’ that there’s no one that wants you there.” She frowned. “I’d reply to the mornin’ messages, and when I got replies back it was like… well, either like bein’ ignored, or like they were rollin’ their eyes when they’d reply to me.”
“Ouch,” winced Mizuki.
“It hurt, sure,” said Hannah, though the pain wasn’t as sharp as it had once been. “All these people who’re supposed to be as devout as I was, who’re supposed to be scholars and fanatics of the same god we all worship and devote our lives to, and it felt like I was the only one who really believed it. I don’t believe that’s true, but it’s how it felt.” She sighed again. It had been months since she’d left the guild, but she still sometimes felt down about it. She’d enjoyed waking up to read messages in the morning but not when it felt like she’d be berated for trying to join in the discussion or make her points. Someday, she would probably join a guild again, and she’d resolved to talk a bit less and not feel the need to chime in so much.
“How about we go outside,” said Mizuki. “We can practice some while we wait for Verity.”
“Of course,” Hannah said, nodding, grateful for something else to think about.
The backyard was a huge, overgrown space, and it seemed that Mizuki, or at least her grandfather, owned a lot of land around it. A few flowers grew wild, but the flora consisted largely of tall, leafy weeds, even in the raised beds at the back. Grass grew between all the cracks in the stone path, and a fountain held an unpleasant-smelling muck.
“Sorry,” said Mizuki, shrinking back slightly as she looked at what must have once been a garden. “I just really don’t have the time to deal with a garden, or know what I’m doing when it comes to plants, so. I should probably just fireball the whole place.”
“Nah, trees and nature,” said Hannah. “Reminds me of the prairies, which are kind of like home.”
“All right,” said Mizuki, turning away from the overgrown backyard and toward Hannah. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“You’ve already seen most of it, haven’t you?” asked Hannah. “In the dungeon?”
“Well,” said Mizuki. “I guess, but not under controlled conditions.”
“Sure,” said Hannah. “You should just know that I can’t do ‘magic’ all day, not like you can. Simple healin’, usually I don’t run out of that, but anythin’ more, there are some limits.” Hannah hated the feeling of Garos leaving her, but it came with the territory if you were pushing things. Broken bones could only be fixed a limited number of times, and that depended on how bad the break was.
“Start simple then,” said Mizuki. She was bouncing from foot to foot, limbering up and getting ready, as though her magic was something that needed flexibility.
“Basic symmetry repair,” said Hannah. She held up her hands. “My hands are perfectly identical, aren’t they, just flipped versions of each other?”
“Sure,” said Mizuki. “Hey, wait.” She moved closer and peered at Hannah’s hands. “The freckles are mirror images.”
“My whole body is like that,” nodded Hannah, grinning. “It’s called symmetricalization, it’s somethin’ loads of clerics of Garos go through. I can do it for you too, if you want, but it takes about a day, and it’s a bit,” she paused, “intimate.”