Those Who Would Not Be Gods

31. After: Cecile

"Priestess, you can't let them bully you into—"

"Bully, nothing! We're talking the basic amount of food they need to survive. The Shrine does not need these ridiculous tithes! For one, I certainly do not eat half as much as Fabio did."

Matteo rolled his eyes. Or rather, he didn't, but Cecile could see the effort he put in not to roll them. "The builders and workers need to eat, do they not? Or should we just let the roof fall in?" He gestured.

All around them, workers and earth mages worked in concert. Where there had once been draperies and benches, now there were ropes and scaffolding. The Shrine's grand hall was packed with them. The wall that Anima had knocked down was apparently important to the structure of the whole hall. An old man who knew more about architecture than most of the Shrine combined had taken one look at it and refused to step back inside the building. "It's amazing the place hasn't caved in already," he'd said. Now, the roof was propped up by several pillars of earth, and masons were working quickly to repair the far wall. Dust and dirt were tracked all through the Shrine's grand hall, leaving the place looking bedraggled, the prized hunting dog who'd found a puddle and become a mutt.

Cecile huffed and stomped out of the grand hall. She'd seen enough. "We don't let them starve, no. But we should find food from somewhere else, not heighten the tithes on our own people, who are already pushed to the brink. Surely one of the neighboring domains has surplus they can share?"

A week had passed since Anima's attack on the Shrine. No one knew what had happened to his illusionist friend. She'd had posters—listing an impressive bounty—put up all over the city and townships, had their best chasers on his trail, to no avail. That's the thing about illusionists, she thought to herself. Hard to catch.

He'd get caught when his soulstone ran out. Wherever he'd gotten the damn thing from, there'd be no more doing magic once it ran dry. If he was using it to constantly remain undetected, it'd only run out more quickly. It was a small consolation. Smaller to the families of the guards Anima and Cajetan had killed. The attack on the Shrine itself had been oddly non-lethal, but they'd apparently picked off the guards from the walls the night before. And no one had noticed. But of course not. The wall guards were the ones who were supposed to alert everyone else to danger. They'd been killed without alerting anyone, so by the time anyone had noticed the next morning— she sighed.

I should reorganize the watch. We need a better system. More redundancy.

"Speaking of, what's the status of my pardons?" Cecile asked, rounding the corner. She swapped the paper she was reading to the back of the pile and scanned the next one. It was a nice proposal, for certain, but did they really need another festival? The commoners were pressed thin as it was.

Nadia spoke up. "Hugo's has been processed. He is scheduled to be released immediately."

Cecile nodded. Good. "And Raffaele?"

From her other side, Matteo sighed. "Priestess, how many times have I said it? You can't release him. It would show a terrible lack of discipline to our troops. Letting a heretic go, as one of your first acts? Hugo is bad enough, but this sets a dangerous precedent that I don't—"

Flipping to the next page, Cecile tuned him out. She was still working on Matteo's demotion. It turned out he was near invaluable to the everyday running of the Shrine, the little weasel. Fabio had been too old or too lazy to do most of his work, so he'd pushed it on to Matteo. Matteo, in turn, had become indispensable to completing dozens of mundane tasks, everything from greeting various dignitaries and dealing with the local lords to calculating how much food to order for the Shrine for the week. At least someone knows, Cecile supposed, since the alternate, with Fabio dead, was that she'd have to figure it all out alone. Unfortunately, it meant Matteo was a fixture in her Shrine for now. Even demotion wouldn't be possible until she figured things out on her own.