Agnes balked. Whipping had never been a punishment the matron allowed, though abstaining from corporal punishment had nothing to do with benevolence. The Gray Matron would never hurt her children in a way that would leave scars. Neither Nox nor the other children had cared much about her rationale. The fact was, the Gray Matron wouldn’t risk their market value by marring them. Agnes was not a virtuous woman, but she was a shrewd merchant.

The bishop’s eyebrow remained frozen expectantly.

“Your Grace, I thought perhaps public repentance would suffice. The girl will kneel here for the peers to see until this time tomorrow morning,” the matron said woodenly. Agnes was not a woman easily won over by pity or begging, and this would be no different. “With the cold of the night and the long hours, it’s a fitting, miserable punishment.”

“This child destroyed property, did she not?”

The matron inhaled slowly. “She did, but—”

“Property that belongs not only to the bellies of orphans but to the All Mother herself, does it not?”

“Yes, but you see—”

“And she was out of bounds, in direct disobedience of the safety and virtues required of the children, was she not? Or are your children allowed to wander the private kitchens, to desecrate items meant for service to the All Mother, and to vandalize spaces forbidden to them?”

“No, Your Excellency,” she said. Her answer was as stiff as her back. Tension stretched from the pepper of her bun to her very feet as they planted on the cobblestones.

He closed his eyes while reciting a text from the Blessed Obediences. “Though I’ve known suffering, I make all things new. In the absence of mercy, I create goodness. It is through my pain that I can rightly see.”

Nox knew the text. It hadn’t made sense to her then, and it didn’t make sense to her now. While many matrons and devotees interpreted this passage as a call for clemency, empathy, and benevolence in the presence of cruelty, men of the cloth had used this verse to justify correction.

“Pain is purifying, is it not? To punish this disobedient child is to cleanse, so that she might rightly see, to be made new, and to create goodness,” he stated. He steepled his fingers just as he’d done upon entry that morning. The indifference in his voice seemed crueler than if he’d been angry. He wished to see a child suffer for little more than semantic appeasement.

“Many interpret ‘the absence of mercy’ to mean that the All Mother is calling for mercy…” Mable’s words flitted away on the breeze at the sharp, cutting glare from both Agnes and the bishop.

Nox knew that Mable’s feelings mattered little against an important, more pressing truth: One should not bite the hands that feed them. Farleigh needed the church’s provisions more than it needed to protect the innocence of the children within it.