"Yes, if they'll take the vows, but usually one starts when one is ten, and older novices tend to find it awkward."

"I wasn't particularly thinking I would. But I'm a little skeptical of orders that only pull from particular social groups, even when they have high ideals. That happened a century or two ago in an order of Knights not far from Skyridge, and their idea of what was evil and needed smiting drifted disturbingly quickly."

"I see. The Lights don't brook such shifts in our commitments."

"Before that happened, we didn't think our god would, either. Not to say you're wrong, necessarily. What do the vows look like?"

"In my order it's obedience, piety, chastity, and service."

"We actually don't have any magic for finding dark things; we have to do that ourselves. And non-paladins may have sigils of the Winter Light as long as there are enough to go around. But yes, a full paladin gets a mount and the powers of the Winter Light."

"What do the powers do, then? I don't think you've said."

"Paladins are stronger and faster, we can heal ourselves and our mounts of injuries, we are immune to the taint of dark things, and we can speak to anyone we meet."

"Sounds useful. Do all dark things have that taint? Oh, and you mentioned mages, are they dark as well?"

"Not all mages are dark. Liches are, but some mages are good or just ordinary people. Not all dark things can ordinarily pass on a taint, although we are also resistant to things like the whisper of a woke shadow. Oh, and we bless our weapons, it would be very hard to destroy the shadows otherwise."

"If a dark thing can't pass taint on, how do you know it's dark?"

"If it burns on contact with a sigil."

"Ah. Nice, clear-cut and difficult to fake. I can see why you're confident the orders won't drift away from the original purpose."

"And violation of vows means losing our powers."

"That's no bad thing either, though I certainly won't be joining. For all that I am technically in a religious order, piety and obedience are not my strong points."

"What does your religious order involve, then?"

"Following in the footsteps of the Incarnation of the judge, using her gifts to keep peace and to discourage violence and oathbreakers. There's a hierarchy, but it's mainly based on experience and used to ensure that judges get practice in smaller towns before they're responsible for larger ones or cities. And while using the gift for justice and peace is, strictly speaking, a devotional act, and we read some of her words for advice, it's all very pragmatic."

"You keep mentioning incarnations but I don't know what that means."

"Interesting. And you can adopt these powers by - what's the procedure exactly?"

"Usually there are relics and some line of office. For the judges, there are a few; the ones I know about are a set of scales and a statue. Someone with the gift who touches them gains the ability to give it to others. Generally, each city's top one to three judges will have that, and they give it to new members after we've gone through some training to show good judgment and responsibility."

"...and that's not too vulnerable to skewing the goals of the order?"

"The idea in our case is that the gift can't be corrupted too easily. It can't do that much outside the intended use. Some, if you're clever, but you can't compel anything; I'll probably be much less effective without the social capital of the institution behind me. Some other orders are more stringent, but I don't know the details of why the Knights fell apart in that city, and other things haven't. Also, though this gets into slightly mythical territory I don't quite trust, new incarnations usually appear when something big and important has gone off track."

"But some incarnations are things like thieves, so..."