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interruption.
    â€œNo. My father was a doubter—he carried that around like a belief.”
    â€œSo you’re just reciting this? It means nothing to you?”
    â€œNo, no . . . I don’t know. I knew people back in the village—I mean, where I come from—who had a great deal of faith, and it truly meant something. It made a difference.” I told Jed about my neighbor Mrs. Branson of the ten children. Once, years ago, her husband broke his leg and couldn’t work for many weeks, and they ran out of food. This was during a hard winter, and even if the Bransons hadn’t been too proud to beg, there were few people who could spare enough for twelve extra people. So she prayed. And then that very night, food appeared on her doorstep. Several loaves of bread, a wheel of cheese, a cured ham. Enough to tide them over.
    â€œDid she ever find out who left it?” Jed asked.
    â€œNo. But I knew. Those exact foods disappeared from ourlarder. And my father’s shoes were muddy in the morning, even though I’d cleaned them—I mean, they’d been cleaned—the night before.”
    Jed digested this story, which I’d never told anyone before. Lucille would have killed my father, had she known.
    â€œI think you lost me,” Jed said. “How does that story argue for belief? Maybe your neighbor should have just prayed to your father.”
    â€œWouldn’t have worked,” I said. “He hated beggars. But her faith gave Mrs. Branson the sense of peace and dignity that even my father, a doubter, had to respect.”
    Jed nodded thoughtfully.
    â€œI wasn’t really raised to be religious either,” he murmured after a moment.
    I turned to him in astonishment.
    â€œWhat? But your father is priest to the king!” I’d only recently learned that from Mary. So that was why he was supposed to be addressed as “His Excellency.” I continued in my amazement, “After the king, he’s the most powerful person in the church!”
    Jed shrugged.
    â€œState religion—you’ll learn this—it’s got nothing to do with God. It’s all show. Smoke and mirrors. If any of these people really believed what they mumbled about, they’d go do something, instead of just talking.”
    â€œSo what does that mean about you?” I teased. “Why aren’t you doing something, instead of just talking?”
    I thought we’d been friends long enough that I could joke like that.But Jed flushed a deep red and turned shy, as if I’d just accused him of being sweet on some maiden.
    â€œWell . . . uh . . . actually,” he said, stumbling over his words, “there is something I’m . . . um . . . trying to find a way to do.”
    â€œWhat?” I asked, full of curiosity. I had no idea what he might say.
    Jed looked down.
    â€œYou know about the Sualan War?” he asked softly.
    If he hadn’t been acting so strangely, I might have joked, “Do you take me for an imbecile?” Even the village idiot knew to curse Suala, because they were trying to take lands that belonged to our kingdom. At least, that’s what everybody said. I sometimes wondered what Suala’s version was. My father had once said—in the privacy of our own home—that the two kingdoms had been fighting for so long that they’d rendered the land useless to anyone.
    â€œYou want to fight in the war?” I asked incredulously. There were some who did—I remembered boys in my village who spoke of nothing but the glory they would earn in battle. But Jed didn’t seem the type.
    â€œNo,” he said, as if surprised I might suggest such a thing. “I wouldn’t give a minute of my life for that. It’s the refugees, the people who have been thrown off their lands by the war. Every time the battle lines shift, the people on the border lose crops, houses, barns—sometimes everything. And some of