“Young master Archmund Granavale!” said the young woman in a nun’s outfit.

  She was the adopted daughter of Mother Cera and Sister Isha, and she insisted upon being called Sister Catherine. She’d taken no vows, monastic, marriage, or otherwise, which made sense because she was about Archmund’s age.

  “Sister Catherine,” Archmund said, with a slight bow. He wasn’t in the habit of mocking people’s chosen names, no matter how unearned. He could roll his eyes in private while earning her favor in public. “How goes it?”

  “All is as it should be on earth and heaven,” Sister Catherine said. “What brings you here today?”

  “Festival preparations. Are your mothers around?”

  Mother Cera and Sister Isha were either very close friends or deeply in love, so either way Catherine had been raised in a loving family. But Lord Granavale had warned Archmund not to get entangled with the Church and he’d heeded that warning, always keeping Catherine at the distance of courtesy.

  “It’s always important matters with you,” she said, smiling. “When the other boys ask me to ask my mothers for spiritual guidance, they compliment my hair or ask me what kind of flowers I like.”

  Her hair, what little of it could be seen under her nun’s habit, was the exact same shade as Princess Angelina Grace Prima Marca Omnio’s. Her pale blue eyes also had a marked resemblance. It would be a discourtesy to say either, but it was a most curious coincidence. Perhaps he was delusional. In his past life, when he didn’t get enough sleep, he would sometimes see complete strangers and think they looked awfully similar to a long-lost friend.

  “I believe I sent ahead last evening,” he said. “So they should be expecting me.”

  “I don’t think they expected you to arrive so early,” she said. “So if you wouldn’t mind waiting?”

  He had planned this, of course. His ulterior motive was the investigation of blasphemous beliefs, which authority figures were less inclined to entertain.

  “Gladly,” he said. “I would hate to impose. If that wouldn’t draw you away from your duties?”

  She smiled. “My duties consist of making this place suitable for the visit of the Granavale Heir. I think teaching you of the Goddess would qualify, would it not?”

  Sister Catherine led Archmund into the church.

  “What of the people in your carriage?” she said, glancing over.

  “They’ll be fine.”

  Mary could keep Raehel busy, and in any case learn a good deal from her.

  This was the only church he’d stepped foot in as Archmund Granavale, but though he’d been here before, it always struck him how it matched the overall design of a modern Catholic or Protestant church or a synagogue from his past life — an altar/speaking area at the front and rows of front-facing seats.

  Though he supposed there were only so many ways to arrange a room that one person gave sermons to many in. It was convergent evolution, surely.

  Catherine led him to one of the side offices, which hosted a few chairs and a desk piled up with scrolls and petitions.

  “I don’t see you here very often,” Catherine said as they sat down.

  “We have a chapel in the manor,” he said. “I do most of my devotions there.”

  It was a lie. He didn’t do any devotions. What little he knew of the church’s teachings didn’t gel with his memories.

  “Do you,” Catherine said, her voice like she’d dealt people who pretended to be devout for ulterior reasons many times before. “Well, it’s no matter. House Granavale has always helped us if we ever truly needed it. Such aid is devotion in itself.”

  Archmund nodded. “I’m not opposed to talking theology,” he said.

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  “Oh?”

  He took a breath. He would be revealing his hand. “The immortal soul, and reincarnation.”

  She chuckled. “Reincarnation. Would you like to ask if I could peer into your past lives and see if you were Alexander the Conqueror?”

  Alexander the Conqueror was of course Alexander Omnio I. There was a common folk tradition, the Choosing Ceremony, in the east of the Empire. Children would choose toys, which symbolized the great figures of history that had been their past lives. It was vaguely reminiscent of a Buddhist tradition from his past life, but he wasn’t all too familiar with the tradition personally.

  Archmund had chosen a toy sword and a quill pen, which represented Alexander the Conqueror’s martial prowess and his shockingly-effective post-conquest legal framework. But other combinations had their own meanings.

  A pearl necklace and an olive branch represented the soul of Alexander the Bridgebuilder, who had married the Church with pagan folk traditions so delicately that both coexisted in the modern day. He too was Alexander Omnio I.

  A flint and sickle represented the soul of Alexander the Worldshaper, known for his dedication to farming but also his judicious use of arson against any rebels. He too was Alexander Omnio I.

  By Archmund’s estimate, half the boys in Granavale County were reincarnated from Alexander Omnio I under one of his many names.

  “You seem skeptical.”

  “Al Baker, Lex Potter, and Xander Cooper all tried to impress me by telling me they were the return of Alexander,” she said. “Obviously they can’t all be him.”

  “Obviously.”

  Even their first names were all variants on ‘Alexander’.

  “Obviously.”

  She appraised him. He hadn’t interacted with her much before he’d been endowed with the memories of another world, but he recalled he’d very much been a typical child at the time. By no means had they been close enough for her to be suspicious of his changes.

  “You’re skeptical about reincarnation,” he said.

  “The Church, despite all our miracles, has no magic to prove the nature of a soul, though our faith remains resolute. That’s why an unorthodox belief like reincarnation can continue to exist in so many forms across the Empire.”

  “You know about the rest of the Empire?”

  “Their practices and beliefs, but only from books. I’ve never left this place,” she said, and she sighed and looked wistfully out the window. Archmund sympathized. He wondered, briefly, whether he could persuade some nobles from neighboring counties to visit the Granavale Harvest Festival. Surely there were a few landless gentry who yearned for the bucolic Arcadias? Or they could stagger the weekends of the Harvests, if the seasons so allowed.

  “But most of it’s the same across the Empire,” Catherine said, turning back to him. “You’re born, you get one life to live, and if you live it well you rest forever in the bosom of the Goddess. Live wickedly, and your soul is cast to the Guts of Hell, where it remains until you escape. But most never escape.”

  “Not a lot of room for reincarnation in that framework.”

  “There’s some,” she said. “Say, few souls are pure evil. Few are pure good. Rebirth Theology teaches that souls in the middle are reborn until they become one or the other, and then they can move on. But in these parts people tend to believe Seed Theology, even if they don’t call it that.”

  “Seed Theology,” Archmund said. “No one would call their own beliefs something like that. What does it mean?”

  Catherine chuckled. “It’s incoherent. The immortal soul goes to the Goddess or the Guts of Hell depending on its virtue, but also at the same time it remains in the material world as seeds for new souls. And that’s how you get twenty boys all saying they’re the reincarnation of Alexander Omnio I.”

  There was a knock at the doorway. Archmund turned; Mother Cera and Sister Isha had come to join them. He hastily stood to greet them; they waved his concern away.

  “Archmund Granavale,” Isha said warmly. “So good of you to visit an old woman.”

  “Thank you all for having me.”

  Mother Cera was, despite her jokes, not that old. She was at latest in her early forties. Her hair, which she wore up but uncovered, had only the first flecks of gray, and her only wrinkles with tiny crow’s feet near the eyes and laugh lines.

  Isha was in her upper twenties, and her chestnut hair was wrapped in a nun’s habit, but Archmund actually couldn’t tell ages well at all. His mental frame of reference had been completely destroyed by his rebirth, especially since people used Botox in his past life but had magic Gems that changed their physical attributes in this one. People were either his age, babies, adults, or elderly. Mother Cera and Sister Isha were adults.

  “We got your courier,” Isha said. “You’re here about the Harvest Festival?”

  “I am,” Archmund said. While this was his first time taking any hand in things, Isha and Cera had been helping with the festival for years. He knew he could trust them with the grand scale.

  “And you don’t have any concerns about the Dungeon?” Sister Catherine said.

  Archmund frowned. He didn’t miss the reproachful glances Isha and Cera gave Catherine. “Should I?”

  “No, none at all,” Catherine said. “Our Miracles are working As Is Wrought. All is as it should be on earth and heaven. By the blessings of the Goddess, the Harvest Festival will not be beset by the wrathful dead.”

  Archmund wanted to look into what the Church’s Miracles were, and how they were different from the magic he knew, once all this settled down.

  “And you’ll be fine providing blessings to the fields and the townspeople?”

  “As we always have,” Cera said, though she kept one eye fixed on Catherine.

  “I’m grateful for your aid.”

  This had ultimately been a cursory visit out of politeness, Archmund thought as he left the church. It would be extremely rude and a great break from tradition to not acknowledge the longstanding friendship between the nobility and the clergy.

  He hadn’t expected to learn anything true about reincarnation, yet he felt unsettled.

  The restless and wrathful dead descended to the Guts of Hell, where they forever tried to return to the mortal world.

  And one of those hell-fleeing dead was his mother.