This was an awkward position for him to be in. He knew there were precious few ways that he was going to come out of it looking good. On the one hand, the woman across the table from him, nominally under both guard and arrest, was the chosen savior of Armes whom he—and everyone else in the city, just about—had turned up to cheer just the day before. On the other hand, there had been an incident of shocking violence involving an attack on one of the minor holy orders, and Dion had been at the heart of it.

Not helping matters was that one of Dion’s disciples was Harathes, who had been in Artaves’s class at the seminary, and had already attempted to intervene with his “old friend” to get the whole matter expedited. Artaves primarily remembered Harathes as the pompous prig who had been high priest’s pet and self-appointed enforcer of virtue two years running. The “old chum” line would not, therefore, have gone down well under normal circumstances. Except that Harathes had also somehow contrived to remind Artaves of that time Harathes had caught him sneaking a woman of decidedly uncertain virtue into the seminary, which had gone unreported at the time solely so it could be brought up like a bad smell right when it was politically inconvenient.

Do the right thing, Artaves reminded himself. The right thing for whom, though? He hoped to Armes that the final decision was not going to be his.

“I was attempting to heal my follower, who had been stabbed by the Brotherhood of the Dawn,” Dion said tiredly.

“Your follower the thief, who had broken into the sanctum of the Disciples of Gamograth and assaulted some of their number.”

Dion nodded. She looked half-dead, bag-eyed and hollow-cheeked. Artaves’s own facility with the power of the Light was minimal, but he knew that healing wounds drew deep on the physical endurance of the healer. It was entirely possible to end up saving a life at the cost of one’s own, or even just following the patient into death. The bandage about her head didn’t help matters either.

“I’ve explained that.”

“You have.”

And Artaves was unhappily aware that she had not explained it very well or very fully. There had been one of her followers kidnapped by Abnasio’s crowd, that was for certain—witnesses from the Heathen’s Quarter had been hauled forth to testify. That individual’s identity was something that Dion seemed rather cagey about, and there were all sorts of odd stories coming from the Brotherhood of the Dawn. Those who could be interviewed, that was.

“And so… ,” he prompted.

“And the monks were making it difficult,” Dion said, with admirable composure. “And I am afraid Abnasio decided that he was going to debate with me again, when I was occupied doing Armes’s work.”

“He tried to interrupt your healing.”