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Bathing takes up the rest of your morning.
You take a plate of finger foods with you. Though she might not have her assistant and scullery girl working with her any long, the castle chef - Katya - got along without her for years, and is not so old yet that she <span class="mu-i">needs</span> the help. She prepared breakfast for Damien, the Earl, the castle staff, and all the attendant men-at-arms who guard this border village. For you, she fried up little sausages and rolled them up within a thin, savory pancake of battered cabbage and green onions. Stuck into a wooden goblet for their presentation, you snack on them as you wash all the troubles of this early morning away.
Again, you have to wonder how a good kid like Rebecca falls in with a crowd of apostates. Her view on the church as a whole is understandable, from what the Good Father Durandal told you about her past. He rescued her - and several other girls and boys - from the house of a Hollylander Bishop whose actions disgraced his title. Good inquisitorial work... that got him an early retirement from the Inquisition for kicking over a political hornet's nest. Too much power at play, too many scions of disgraced houses among the victims, too many people displaced. Rebecca was one of those urchins that fell through the cracks and landed there, LORD only knows how or when.
Could it have begun there? The Dark One's Depravity slipping into the sinful house of a bishop who did not deserve his flock would not surprise you, may the LORD forgive your doubt in His institutions upon this base Earth. But mortals are mortals, and power births sin like rotting meat births maggots.
Yet if it came from there, what reason would she have to hate the LORD and love the Dark One? She would have experienced the depravity of Nameless get and understood why such apostasy must be opposed at every corner.
Good Father Durandal has the same nose you have, one blessed by the LORD to know the difference between good and evil. Indeed, he taught you its use, and the use of scent to divine the presence of sorcery and powerful khemistry. Any priest of the Dark One would not have been able to come close to a girl under his care, let alone groom her into a true believer in the false truths of the Nameless. So it must have happened before the purge of the Aconian Diocese, when he took her and all the other unclaimed victims of that bishop as his wards.
From Rebecca's own experience, it must have happened before the Bishop's men stole her from the streets.
A doubt tickles at the back of your mind: does it really matter how she fell? You already forgave her when the LORD's grace seized you, when you reached into your heart and drew the form of your very self to cut apart the Demon. She has her penance, and you intend to see it delivered by your own hand, no matter how repentant she may become once she realized how the cult pulled the wool over her eyes. Yet leaving it unknown leaves a pit of dissatisfaction in your stomach.
