He went back east along the street after, lingering at shopfronts. The city was feverish with talk, people out and about despite the cold. The sun helped, a little. He was extremely tired, Thierry realized. Hardly a surprise. He was tempted to go to Silvy’s, after all, and sleep, but didn’t. He did go back across the river. He’d had an idea. He’d go to a sanctuary. Not the one they’d been planning to rob (that would have been a bit much, really) but another one close to it.

He really needed to sleep for a bit.

—

Adelie Villar was unsurprised to find Thierry asleep in his room when she came back from the morning rites across the way. She’d stayed standing at the back of the sanctuary, as she always did, unless it was a memorial or thanksgiving day for herself.

Ambroise was always telling her to come forward, sit or kneel with those gathered, make the sign of the sun disk among them—but she had chosen her place.

She remained after everyone else left. She tidied up, readying their small sanctuary for the evening rites. There had been nine people this morning. The usual six, and three others present for whatever reasons had brought them to Jad that day.

Ambroise never counted, never cared, had often said he’d lead the rites for a single person if need be. That was…fine. But donations from a single person—or nine—wouldn’t keep this sanctuary going. Adelie cared, and she counted.

Ambroise Villar was gentle, wise, deeply pious, truly generous. Adelie and her son knew how generous. He had given them both his name. He was a man the god surely loved. And he was also, sometimes, painfully innocent about how the world worked. Mostly concerning money. He wanted her to put in fresh, tall candles for evening rites every day. She didn’t. Good, clean-burning candles were expensive. She knew that. He didn’t.

Adelie took care of the budgets—for the sanctuary, for Ambroise’s rooms attached to it, and for her own little house—out of the wages he paid her, plus an allowance for expenses. She was frugal. It was necessary. She worried their sanctuary might be shut down and sold off by the city’s high patriarch in his Great Sanctuary on the island. Ambroise was widely respected for his holiness, but…in Orane this winter, times were very hard. Two sanctuaries had already been closed and sold off, even as new ones were rising in better neighbourhoods.