You think, brother, that you are duty and honor bound. That every time you barricade that bridge, every time you round up the defiant in Bazaar, you wield Joan's holy sword in your hands. That your judgement is her justice, your enforcement, her will.

You mistake her silence for agreement, her complacency for approval. You are letting others put a carrot before you.

Don't be offended. I do not intend any insult. After all, I too once thought that Her will was the iron in my spine, Her righteousness the strength in my thrust. It is hard to avoid.

Look around you, open your eyes. The people of Hom starve this winter, growing thinner each time your precious Watch decides we must be taught a lesson. It is justified, you think, because we are nothing more than criminals, we have fallen from the grace of our Fatimas because we have committed grievous wrongs.

You see that boy over there? He's no more than seven, and for the last three nights has cried himself to sleep with an empty knot in his gut. I hope each night he finds his fill in The River. His crime? He had the audacity to find Agnes herself in a game of Hide and Seek. That woman holding him, is not, of course, his mother. An Evan farmer until she gave witness that suggested that High Judge Naith'on judged rashly in the case of a Dahlian convicted of beating a Concubine to death. She found herself Fallen for telling the truth of what she'd witnessed in Duskfall by the light of last year's harvest moon.

The Dahlian? He was dragged away behind proud cavalry steeds to be left as meat on the threshold of the Skyrealms. They didn't bother to tie him there, he could no longer walk.

Can you really think that Joan the good, Joan the pure, Joan the warrior who watched her brother give his life up to the destruction of the Beasts would advocate serving them tribal flesh on which they nourish their twisted forms? Justice's blindfold is not so thick as to serve two tribes, is it? Joan's children are no more than Tera Sheba's pawns. The fields of Vimary nurse their crops on the blood of the Fallen, spilled for the crime of speaking their minds.

Is this really honor, is this what you want? I know these things make you uneasy, but I think it is time and past time that you asked yourself who you are really serving.

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