Wow. They are absolutely not going to drive out at almost 9 pm on a Friday night to...feed...random illegal immigrants??? Evelyn is pretty hard to shock, at this point, but this is in fact the first time she's ever had a child refuse to eat dinner because she hadn't personally fixed systemic poverty yet.  

...it's probably terrifying, to truly believe that if you don't fulfill God's will then you'll go to Hell. Put like that, it makes perfect sense how anxious she is about this, and also poor girl. 

"I'm sorry. We can't go feed them right now. But - you know them - how about this. I can try to find a phone number for a charity that helps workers like them, who, uh, don't have papers to be living in the US. I'm sure that's a thing. I think it can be hard to help the children there, because they're - scared of getting in trouble for being in the US without having papers. But if you think they would trust you, then you can tell them it's safe, and then the grownups who are already trying to help people like that will know who needs helping." 

She relents slightly. "If it's safe I can tell them it's safe.

I don't have papers."

"...Yeah. But sometimes people have children and don't tell the government about them, and that's different than if they came across the border when the law said they shouldn't have. ...Also I think the kids usually wouldn't be in trouble, but their parents might be sent back to their country."

Whiiiich is poorer. Don't bring that up right now. She literally just managed to calm Iomedae down about this. 

The microwave has been beeping plaintively for a while. She gets up and brings Iomedae shepherd's pie and a fork and plops it in front of her. Hopefully this results in her eating it rather than freaking out some more that she's not paying Evelyn for room and board. 

She is a very hungry teenager and will look longingly at the food and then back at Evelyn. "The people who pay for the food because I am a kid, if they know I am a holy warrior of God, they want me eat the food? Or give it to someone who cannot work for their own food?"

There is not a box on the social services form for 'is a holy warrior of God' because that isn't actually a thing. ...Evelyn is absolutely not going to say that out loud, it won't help. But this clearly goes a lot deeper than a story Iomedae came up with to escape an arranged marriage or something. 

(Didn't Joan of Arc have visions of God advising her? And was a teenage girl, too. ...Evelyn isn't really sure where to go with that line of thought, except that there's some sort of shift, in how she looks at Iomedae, if she's thinking of it as "fostering someone like Joan of Arc" - however she ended up that way - and not a traumatized girl raised in a horrible fundamentalist sect.) 

"They want you to eat the food," she says firmly. "And go to school and learn more things and work very hard, and then once you're a grownup you'll know how to help a lot more people than you can right now." 

"Then maybe a holy warrior eat the food. But I should pray. And I should not eat it for ...una hora y media, para que no decidir solo porque tengo hambre." 

That is juuuuust about within Evelyn's ability to puzzle out. "...I'm not going to be angry if you want to pray before you eat, but you aren't going to get less hungry." 

"Sometimes I do. But that is not - the wait is - I don't know how to say. In Spanish also. The wait is not I will be less hungry. The wait is, I am not weak."

UM. 

"Did you - often have to go without food at home?" she asks. "I mean before, with your family. Though also in the last six months."

Because saying that eating when she's hungry is weak is....uh. Concerning. 

"No, my family have enough food all the time. I sometimes without food since I came here. I got pay for food, but I share with the children, so I without food some days."

"That was very generous of you. I hope someday soon we can have you fed every day and them."

"The richest country in the world. Maybe we can. I can pray now about if later eat the food?"

"Of course you can pray, love. You can go up to your room if you want privacy, or stay here, I don't mind."

Evelyn is going to have a lot of feelings about a lot of aspects of this situation as soon as it's not deeply unfair to Iomedae to be focusing on that instead of on what Iomedae needs, but - well, even aside from the part of her fostering training that said very loudly that best practices included supporting a foster child's religion, she doesn't object to the praying part per se. It seems deeply important to Iomedae, and it might help her sort out her head and adjust to this huge change in her circumstances. 

She has no particular intuition that one should pray in private, and praying in that vast rich room that is supposedly hers seems harder than praying in Evelyn's kitchen. She smiles, and closes her eyes and prays.

Prayer is not about the hope that your god will send a vision on the spot to answer you; gods work across uncounted worlds, on great and important things, and cannot answer you all the time. Prayer can call your god's attention to something, if it's very important; Iomedae has spent lots of time fervently pleading with Aroden to fix the Evil afterlives, just in case he can and just didn't realize he was supposed to. But mostly prayer is to give your mind over to your god and see if things are clear that way which aren't clear otherwise.

Would Aroden take food from a program meant to feed the poor? Probably, if he were hungry and needed it, because he was the only survivor of Azlant and had reason to suppose he could help more people if he was strong. Iomedae is not the only survivor of Azlant. Iomedae is a better swordsman than her brothers and never gets sick but there are ten hundreds of people like her, maybe more than that. She will be able to help more people in the future if she eats, but so would anyone she takes the food from, and she isn't special. If anything she can endure hardship better, because she is a paladin; it is much less likely to cost her paradise and less likely even to weaken her to the point of illness. She won't steal in desperation and she won't lose the ability to support herself. 

Evelyn says that the people who give the food would still want her to eat it if they knew she was a paladin. She isn't sure she believes Evelyn. She isn't sure Evelyn really understands that she is a paladin. The travelling workers did understand - well, it took her a while to get enough vocabulary, but once she had the words for 'the god who was human once' and so on, then she explained and everyone thought that it made perfect sense of her, of how hard she worked and how she shared her food and how she told stories and sang songs and children loved her, and they'd call her over for help when they were injured or sick, though she won't have healing powers until she is stronger. They acted like people who know enough about Goodness to trust it and be inspired to it when they see it. When she explained that Aroden would give her miraculous healing when she got stronger, they told stories of the miraculous healings He'd done through holy people they knew. (She thinks priests here don't channel like priests at home; no one ever proposed going to stand around a church until all their minor wounds were healed. But they knew that Aroden could heal people.)

Evelyn is rich. That is not incompatible with understanding that Iomedae is a paladin. Most paladins are rich, really, because you need armor and a sword, and only rich people have those, and you need to let a strong healthy child go off to spend their life in Aroden's service, and desperate families can't do without a strong healthy child. But Evelyn seems to have instincts that - don't have exceptions for miracles and holy people in them, maybe because she has never needed either. 

This isn't prayer, this is just thinking. Thinking is important, but the thing she wants right now isn't actually to try scrabbling around with her own inadequate tools. It's to give her mind over to Aroden and see if it's clear then.

What does Aroden see, here?

Aroden sees a country that is farther up the slope that it is humanity's birthright to climb. The richest country in the world, Evelyn said, and she was only a little bit boasting. Aroden sees the big houses and the magical beasts and the flat flat flat roads as far as the eye can see and the indoor water and how even the poor children are clothed and Aroden sees humanity marching towards its destiny. Aroden does not see a world that has no need of holy warriors. There are still poor people, and frightened ones, and people who have wealth but forget that they can't take it with them to Axis. But Aroden rejoices in this place. It is good soil to grow in.

Its people are good and generous. Evelyn is a very confusing person, but she seems to have taken in Iomedae as an act of charity, and while Iomedae mostly feels resentful and frustrated because she does not need to be the recipient of an act of charity and it is baffling to pick her as the target of such rather than any of the many people who do need it - Aroden, she thinks, is impressed. Aroden is glad that the world is so rich that it can afford this. And from the perspective of a god, Iomedae is small and weak and ignorant and confused. Not because she's a child, but because even adults are on only the first step of their journey which they are entitled to end in godhood. Aroden is proud of Evelyn, and above petty irritation because her choice of people to help is silly; all of Iomedae's decisions probably look just as silly when you are a god. After all, she was just feeding the children in front of her, and didn't even think to ask if there was somewhere where children were even hungrier -

This is still not prayer, but it's getting closer.

Aroden, Who knows the strength of civilization, show us the habits that build it; Aroden, who knows us in glory, hold our memories of greatness close to our hearts, so that we will know when it is in our reach, and know how to reach for it. Aroden, who gave me the strength to be a holy warrior, give me also the wisdom to choose my fights wisely, and spend my life well in your service, and help as many people as I can, and help me grow strong enough to save everyone, literally everyone, and do not let my strength come coupled with contempt for weakness, or my wisdom with contempt for foolishness, and withhold Your grace for me, should my conduct ever be unbefitting of a paladin, and if it's unbefitting to eat meat pies from the charity of this country help me grow in understanding and explain why to Evelyn. And help the lawmen to stop the man who assailed me from hurting anyone ever again, but help him also to not be damned for it, and look after my family and give them the strength to build paradise in this world and find it in the next one, and look after everyone else too, all the families and everyone without a family, in the Empire and in this strange country and in all the worlds You travelled to and any worlds You didn't.

And make Hell cease. 

(She always ends prayers that way.)

She takes a moment to compose herself, when she is done, and opens her eyes. "I think - I can eat the meat and I have been - ingrato, y altanero, and I say sorry. - I still not eat para una hora y media but I will eat then. And you are trying good and I should say, gracias, Evelyn, you are a part of all grow to Heaven together."

Evelyn is possibly, maybe, internally melting into a puddle of awwwwwwwwwwwww. 

"Oh, love. It's okay. You aren't ungrateful. You're - I won't say I understand your faith but I'm trying to, I promise." She really wants to give Iomedae a hug but it feels too early for that. 

"Do you have more questions? About living here, about the police, other things...?" 

"I need talk to police about man more? They say yes not today."

"Not today, no, and probably not for - weeks, at least. Once he recovers, the police will arrest him and charge him with a crime. I think they won't need to talk to you for that, they would have already asked everything they need to know. He might stay in jail or he might be released and told to come back for his trial, uh, volver para el juicio. When the trial happens, they will probably want you to testify about what happened to you, and hear everything you know about what he did to other girls. Does that make sense?" 

"Weeks? I need bring him food weeks?"

?????????????

"You...don't need to bring him food?" How in the world did she get that impression. "The hospital will feed him while he's staying there, and if he goes to jail then the jail will feed him, and otherwise he would be going back to stay - wherever he lives, I guess - and buy food like he usually would. - He's a grownup, right?" Probably the social worker would have mentioned if the rapist was going to be tried as a minor. 

" - the jail will feed him good? He is grown."

"I'm sure they will." It's not going to be steak and caviar but Iomedae seems to think that homemade shepherd's pie is a luxury food. "Not - fancy food - but he won't go hungry."

...Possibly she remembers there being some sort of scandal in the news a while back about food in prisons, but it wasn't that they weren't feeding the inmates. 

"But the children go hungry if they obey law." Iomedae is not mad at Evelyn but she is kind of confused, here.

Oh. Oh no. That must be confusing, and - probably kind of upsetting? Evelyn opens her mouth to try to explain and stops and realizes that she isn't sure she's ever actually thought about this before. It's kind of hurting her head. 

Also Iomedae is looking at her with - that expression on her face - and it's not an accusing expression but it still makes Evelyn feel like something someone might find on the bottom of their shoe, because she's not fifteen and illiterate and from a deprived background and yet Iomedae is already doing better than her on - caring about other people's problems, despite all the problems of her own she has - 

"It might be hard to explain until you know more words," she says quietly. "But I'll - try." Deep breath. "I - think it's not that there isn't enough food to feed all the children, food doesn't cost very much, it's more that the government doesn't know where they are to send the food? There are lots of charities that will give poor people food - if children go to school, and they don't have enough food at home, they can get breakfast and lunch at school, but a lot of the children without papers won't be in school. And there are food banks, places you can go where people who can afford more food than they need themselves can give some of it to a charity, and poor people can go there and get food for free. But the poor people need to know about that, and - trust that the government isn't going to have someone ask to see their papers - I'm pretty sure food banks don't check your papers but if people haven't been to school and can't read in English then they wouldn't know that." 

She can repeat bits of that in terrible Spanish if Iomedae seems confused about vocabulary as opposed to confused about something deeper than that. 

She needs some bits repeated. Seems to think. "...food ...bank? in a church, is how to do it. If holy warriors of God say, no one check papers, they know it's safe. Holy warriors of God no lying. The government give the food to the churches, the churches give it to the poor."