Throughout Angela's career as a paladin and a warrior she's been unusual for being a woman. There are other female paladins. The Inheritor Herself was a female paladin. But it's not the right life for most women, even the ones who really think about it and come to their own conclusions instead of accepting the default without much consideration. Adventurers and combatants of all stripes are mostly men.
At the Worldwound, Angela was for a time in command of a squad of women who for whatever reason did not want to interact with men. A Calistrian, the one she mentioned to Avenger Ferrer, and others whose preference on this matter was mediated mostly by their own experiences. Women from cultures which would (however grudgingly) permit them to fight, but not to be around unrelated men - seldom Osirians, due to the distance involved, though she did get someone who'd been a student of Nefreti Clepati's, once; Osirion is merely the most famed of the societies with something like this at issue. Angela's job was to be the liaison between her women (even the phrase sounds strange in a way "her men" would not) and the command at Crusader's Fort, any other forts they might visit. A buffer; an aspirationally, if not yet magically, fearless go-between; a hinge to allow these women to serve and circle up in an environment that was hostile to them in all the usual ways with the cold and the demons and the stew and also one more way besides.
Angela spends the Convention on - well, Convention business, great heaps of it, more reading than you can shake a sword at, endless meetings and subtext and comparing notes and listening to speeches and delivering them, fact-checking and preaching and voting and Detecting Fiendish Presence and Detecting Evil and trying to address the results not with her sword but with her voice and pen.
On the tenth and the twenty-fifth of each month, with some wiggle room if those days turn out to be too busy, Angela treats herself to a really nice lunch (it's cheaper than dinner and not less fun) at a nice restaurant. Sometimes she brings another convention delegate, though buying theirs if they want her to do that is more of an operating expense than a self-maintaining indulgence.
There is an elected baroness - a dreadful product of the local nobility, elected by what Angela has little doubt was intimidation more than popularity - who goes to one such lunch with her to talk about Goodness. Baroness Moya is confessedly dreadful. She is interested in becoming less dreadful, but not interested in pretending that she never was to begin with; she doesn't wring her hands and murmur about how terrified she was of stepping out of line, claim to have been seeking the Good in every deed before the Reclamation ever got underway, dress up all her self-interest in the fashion of the day. She doesn't want to go to Hell and it's now reasonable to want and possible to achieve, and she's gone to Angela because -
"So many of the foreigners, who ought to be the ones who know what they're doing Goodness-wise, clearly despise women," Baroness Moya explains over their oysters. "I'm not claiming they should like me. You and I both know I'm no good. But I can't respect their reasons, when I know they'd have liked my brother better. He was worse. As bad as I am and on top of that he had a dozen bastards, and he only didn't have two dozen because slips won't swell however many times a man has them."
Angela nods just enough to indicate that she heard, expression flat. Slurps an oyster. In Heaven she can have oysters for breakfast every Waterday if she wants, probably, and also hardly anyone she meets will be like this.
Repentance is of principally practical interest, to Iomedaeans. The only person it will directly help, if Baroness Moya should fall on her knees proclaiming her sorrow for every tortured captive and every poisoned rival, is the baroness herself. And there are other ways for the baroness to help herself, which help others in the same action. She can go around saying she's no good and dismiss remorse as a queer pastime for other people, but if she takes Angela's advice on how to administer her holding, train her magistrates, handle all the cousins and bastard nephews in her castle dungeon, enforce whatever agreements are made here at the convention with the Whisperwood's non-diabolical occupants about the forest, then she can do some good for herself and for others also. She's thirty-five, she's got time.
They meet occasionally while the convention is going on and Angela does her best to impart the principles according to which the Baroness ought to live out the rest of her mortality. And at their last such meeting -
"Have you given much thought to what you'll do, once you're released from the Reclamation?"
"Some," says Angela. "Not to the point of having come to a conclusion."
Baroness Moya throws back a drink. "Adventuring? Going home? Back to the Worldwound?"
"I have thought about all of those things, but becoming a delegate required asserting that I mean to live and work in Cheliax as one of its citizens," says Angela. "I don't think that necessarily precludes going back to the Worldwound, and it would by the letter of the statement no longer even preclude going back home as I'm Molthuni, but I'd need to double check. I might adventure, if an appropriate party formed, but I think perhaps much of the work to be done in Cheliax is best done with longer-standing relationships than itinerants tend to form, in a stationary fashion."
"That is such a you thing to say. Anyway. I've got a farm that grows the kind of incense you want for Atonements. Well, I say 'farm'. I say 'I've got'. What I mean is I know where a decent number of the trees are, and the forest's forever trying to grow up all around them though they're pretty close to the edge last I checked, and the forest hasn't gotten any nicer with the portal to Hell - didn't we vote to have it closed, months ago -"
"That is what I remember as well," says Angela.
"Well, if it's been closed it's not yet changed the kinds of letters I'm getting from home about fiendish bears. Anyhow. The incense isn't any different, for whether you want your Law back or if you want to be a goody-good, right?"
"As far as I know, the spell component is the same either way, yes," says Angela.
The baroness pours another and drinks it. "Take the trees and a swathe around them. Take a few of my men if you need them to help defend the place. Have a fief."
"I am sworn to celibacy and cannot produce an heir for such a fief," says Angela.
"...do whatever you want with the place," says Baroness Moya, waving a hand. "Put the trees to work. It's my good deed for the... until I think of another one."
"A monastery," says Angela, after a moment of silent reflection. "I could have a little order there to harvest and process the incense, propagate more trees if that can be done to bring down the price of the Atonements, and maybe attract a cleric high enough circle to cast the spell herself."
"Herself," remarks the baroness.
"It's customary for a monastic life to be a retreat, from some aspect of the world that is tempting, damaging, or both," says Angela. She does not herself experience men as being either of those, but she thinks a lot of women do. "I don't think there are enough places in Cheliax for women to... opt out of the entire business. To not marry, certainly, many don't; but to do so in a way that endangers no children nor the women themselves, that's more difficult. Perhaps this isn't the right thing for them, but it doesn't seem to have been tried sufficiently, and I think it ought."
"Well, I said do what you like with the place," laughs Baroness Moya. "I'll get you something in writing and a map."
This is probably not the most efficient thing to do with a stand of incense trees. But Angela does not judge, in this moment, that there is a more efficient way to get ahold of the trees to any useful end; they are not, unless she takes this offer, hers, but the barony's. The Baroness, if she can't give her favorite paladin this land, might well let the forest have it. And - Angela is pretty well specced for minding the border with a forest that spits out fiendish bears.
"Yes," says Angela, "when I'm released from the Reclamation, I would like that."
The Whisperwood is indeed trying to encroach on the area, when Angela gets there. Her cleric, a widowed old woman imported from Molthune at the Baroness's expense with a letter to Angela's mother and an explanation of the demand for Atonements among Chelish people, has been restored from death enough times in her adventuring career to have a hard time with walking a couple of leagues, let alone chopping down saplings and building a monastery. So Angela hires locals for the purpose and guards their advances into the forest herself with only a few advance buffs from the Select. She can figure out where the border is meant to be based on where the ivy and the rocks in the ground are suspiciously wall-shaped, and goes not one step beyond it, and marks it with a fence. There must have been a whole village devoted to these trees, once, maybe before the civil war, and the demand would have dropped to... not nothing, but lower, in a country where everyone expected Hell, and only needed incense if they connived too Chaotically to cast their diabolical spells.
Some of the trees are on the other side of the fence and Angela leaves them be. Perhaps the druids want them sometimes too. Perhaps all her trees will burn down one day and she can get a cutting from the forest-side ones from the forest peoples to re-propagate. Perhaps none of that will happen and it will just be an act of Law like thousands of others which, themselves, do nothing else, yet together form a bulwark across her entire life.
She puts up a tiny church, and an outbuilding near the road where if a man wants an Atonement he can see the cleric without troubling anyone else who joins their number, and a dormitory of a sort that will be easy to expand because they don't know how many women will want to join them. They work out a set of vows that they'd want to ask of short-term or indefinite residents complete with release conditions, and emergency contingencies in the event of fiendish bears. And after sleeping on it, they swear them before each other and Iomedae.
The two of them are alone for the first few months except for the builders and the forest monsters, and then the Baroness sends them one of the cousins from the dungeons as an alternative place to stash the inconvenient relation, and word gets around. They're not set up to take women with sons, but they can take ones with only daughters, if the edge of the Whisperwood seems to such a person a safer place than wherever they were before. They can take farm girls who don't want to marry the boy next door, town girls who don't want to have four babies with four fathers, and runaway daughters of any age. They can take would-be clerics and paladins, when those start coming out of the younger less damaged generation, and catechize them and send them back out when they're ready. They can take a wizard student who's rubbish at transmutations and accept her help in fighting monsters till she's got Alter Self stabilized and can brave her classmates again.
And they can harvest the incense, carefully, gently, sometimes talking to a dryad who'll shyly peek over the fence about how to go about it, and the Select can smoke it into a scroll, or cast with it directly, or wrap it up and send it on to the Sarenrites or the Abadarans because some people would rather go to Nirvana or to Axis. They can propagate the trees and try different things to see what makes them likeliest to grow, and expect to be there in a decade when they're ready to cut into for their sap. They have a garden, and a training yard where Angela teaches the girls to fight, and a kitchen where some of the girls teach Angela to cook. (Angela is embarrassed to have never thought of this before. She expected too early to be a warrior all her life. But of course she should know how to cook. The humblest flour and honey can make something really fine.)
And once a month Angela goes into town for supplies that they can't grow, the buffer and the interface between her women and her monastery.