Virtuous Thief

The priestesses' rings drummed against the top of her desk like death bells clanging in the steeple. Morgan made attempt after attempt to look her in the eye but couldn't hold her withering gaze for more than a few seconds at a time. She was older now than when he had been growing up in the church, her softly feminine beauty becoming coldly austere, as unapproachable as it was absolute. Her worry-lines and few grey hairs didn't make her look any degree motherly or grandmotherly, more like a frozen, unmovable angel of judgement like the ones that hung in the balconies. Perhaps she smiled more when she spoke to the other acolytes, perhaps the warmth was still there. It was just hard for him to tell any more. More and more, the only thing that he could associate with her in his mind was a hickory ruler striking him across the backside.

She reached into her drawer and he flinched in anticipation, but she drew out a slip of paper instead of her usual tool.

"Do you know what this is, Brother Morgan?"

"No, reverend mother."

"Later, then," She stood up from her desk and looked out the window with a sigh. "Do you dispute the accusation?"

"No mother," Morgan knew better than to argue against these things, even when he did have a case. Once you gained a reputation, it was hard to lose it. "I stole Brother Torron's book, as he said."

"And why did you steal his book?"

Morgan hesitated for a moment, "I'm not... completely sure. I think... because he was showing it off so proudly... more than having it I just wanted to teach him a lesson?"

"And would Ablutia, goddess mother, not have 'taught him that lesson' herself?"

"No, reverend mother, the goddess mother does not hate the proud nor resent them their possessions."

"So why should it have been your job to act where the goddess mother would not have?"

"I have no excuse, reverend mother," Morgan let himself relax, let things slide over him. He mentally prepared himself for another week or two of awful work. "I acted on a foolish emotion and it was a mistake I can only seek forgiveness for and not undo."

The priestess stood at the window for a long second and Morgan felt the casual ease he had been slipping into pass over him and vanish.

"It may be that you have run out of forgiveness in my cloister, Brother Morgan."

"How do you mean, reverend mother?" Morgan felt his heart drop.

She sat back down at her desk and handed him the paper, a small data sheet with a series of numbers that didn't make an immediate amount of sense.

"The Order maintains records of how many disciplinary actions are given in each cloister. The ones which give the least are rewarded with greater funding and favor, the ones which hand out the most are put under scrutiny. Spend a long time as the most disciplined cloister and it can be very bad... it could involve having to re-do our certifications, or even the demotion of the reverends."

"I see," Morgan started, "But... wouldn't this incentivize lying? Or bending the rules so that you only give out discipline for the worst offenses?"

"It is mostly on honor, Brother Morgan. Not everybody seeks to lie, especially those who are trustworthy enough to find themselves as reverends. Lies happen, yes, but there are penalties. Greater reward comes with greater scrutiny, after all."

"I see." Morgan murmured, "But I do not understand what the numbers mean."

"I'll put it simply," The priestess sighed, "On the left is the best cloister in the church. They have given out only forty-eight disciplinary actions in the past year. Be of no doubt, I have been there, I can attest to their piety. On the right is us. That is less than one action per each person in the cloister. On the right is the cloister with the most disciplinary actions. They have given out a hundred and fifty two in that same time span. That is more than three times as much."

"And that..." Morgan gulped.

"Is us." The priestess nodded. "But there is an unfortunate piece of math which I have performed below. You will notice, if I remove all of your disciplinary actions..."

"Then our cloister only has... twenty-three."

"You begin to see my predicament."

There was a long silence between them before Morgan tried to speak again.

"Does this mean... do you intend to move me, reverend mother? Or is there some other punishment..."

"It means we will be asking you to leave us." She said coldly.

"Mother!" Morgan tripped over his words for a minute.

"You have lived by the church's kindness since we found you." She was clearly trying to keep any emotion out of her voice. "When you were but a child, we could no more have sent you out into the world than sent you to death. As you grew older, we tried to shape you into the kind of man who would make a fine addition to our order. But now, even if the world outside of our order is alien to you, you are an adult. You must be treated and measured as we would an adult. No brother of your age would have been given half of the mercy you have in the past two years."

Morgan was surprised that he wasn't crying. It was too big, the moment too wide and too unimaginable. Any thoughts of leaving his friends, the reverend mothers which had been as good as his family, all of that was secondary, for a time, against the wholeness of the world, suddenly coming in around him like the ceiling of a cave. Too massive to reason with, too tight to navigate.

"I..." Morgan tried to make himself purely rational, as she had been doing. It didn't work. "What of my things? My quarters?"

"We have already arranged this." There was a slight tremor of disappointment in her voice, "You will be taken on as an apprentice with a local craftsman until such a time as you have the means and status to stand on your own."

"And my mission project?" Morgan had been working on an elegant patchwork depicting the goddess mother's rise from the raw clay of reality.

"Taken as apocrypha." She responded flatly. "You will be compensated for the time lost, as it was quite a fine work, but it must be treated as a religious work by one outside of the church."

"Ah..." Morgan cleared his throat, but it felt like the lump there didn't notice, "Am I ever... allowed back?"

"I cannot answer that question no." The priestess sounded half-angry, "By law I cannot. But you would start from the lowest of acolytes, and as an adult you would be expected to pay the wages of your sins. For one like you, this may not be possible. With your expulsion, the disciplinary acts... they accrue in such a way..."

She trailed off and shrugged, leaving him to fill in the blanks mentally.

"Then..." He swallowed it, remembering one of the goddess mother's teachings, that the most evil of men are those who have seen the light and then chosen to forsake it. "My vows?"

"Would have to be retaken, treated as void." Her voice became wholly official. "You can no longer perform sacraments or act as witness for healing. Trying to do either now will be treated as impersonation."

"And my vow of chastity?" Morgan adjusted the cage that made up part of his habit subconsciously.

"Difficult to say. The church is of two minds. As the craftsman is your new guardian, he becomes the only one capable of freeing you into normal life. If you find him to be onerous with your vows, abusive in some way, or if you feel it to be the nobler option, you may seek to become castrato, but it is to your discretion."

"That's not fair!" Morgan suddenly felt the rush of emotion he had been waiting for, but it wasn't sadness, it was an angry sort of despair. "If all of my other vows are forfeit, why does chastity remain?"

"Because, child," The priestesses face didn't so much as shift, this was clearly a part that she had been training for. "Those other vows were ones of power granted by the goddess so long as you remained in her favor. Chastity was a vow of sacrifice, regardless of if the goddess favored you or not. This was agreed to when you took it."

Morgan didn't bother arguing that such an agreement had been made when he was barely mature enough to understand the extent of them. Taken at the first sign of his puberty. He got the feeling that it didn't remotely matter, and that it would only draw out this increasingly painful argument.

"Now, then," The reverend mother seemed to sense that any sort of real questions or arguments were petering out in favor of emotional complaints. "Do you need anything of the goddess before you leave?"