Thomas was six the year he finally worked up the nerve to ask Brother Halvard the question he'd been circling since roughly his second week of temple school, which was, translated out of the careful diplomatic phrasing he'd rehearsed the night before into the blunter version that actually came out of his mouth: "Why do we worship Him if He doesn't need it?"
He asked it after the morning service, not during — he'd learned enough decorum in six years across two lives to know some questions belonged in the emptying-out afterward rather than the middle of the thing itself — while the other children filed out toward the noon meal and Brother Halvard stacked the low prayer-benches against the schoolroom wall with the unhurried economy of a man who'd stacked those same benches ten thousand times and found the repetition restful rather than tedious.
"Explain what you mean by need," Halvard said, not looking up from the benches, which Thomas had come to recognize as his particular way of buying a child a moment to sharpen a half-formed thought before making them say it out loud.
"He's not like the Duke," Thomas said, working it out as he spoke. "The Duke needs the district to trust him, or his authority falls apart — that's why he serves them, isn't it, at least partly, even if it's genuine too. But the Unseen doesn't need anything from anyone. He weighs Perrin's woodpile whether Perrin thanks Him for it or not. He'd go on being — being whatever He is — even if every temple on this whole continent burned down tonight and nobody ever sang another hymn to Him again. So when we come here and sing, and kneel, and thank Him for things He already knows we're thankful for, since He already knows everything — what's actually happening? What is it for, if it isn't for Him?"
Brother Halvard set the last bench against the wall and turned, and Thomas saw the particular light in his teacher's eye that meant the man was about to enjoy himself thoroughly.
"You've built your question backward, and that's alright, most people do at first," Halvard said. "You're asking what worship does for Him. Ask instead what it does to you. That's the door, Thomas — walk through that one instead."
He crossed to the low table at the front of the room, where a plain metal bowl sat filled with water for the children to wash their hands before the noon meal, and beckoned Thomas over.
"Look in," Halvard said.
Thomas looked. Saw his own small face looking back, wavering slightly with the settling of the water.
"Now stir it."
Thomas stirred it with one finger, and the reflection scattered into confusion, light and shadow chasing each other across a surface that could no longer hold a single steady shape.
"That," Halvard said, "is a mind fixed on itself. On its own wants, its own grievances, its own accounting of who owes it what. It's not a bad mind, mind you — every mind starts there, yours and mine both, it's simply where a mind sits by default, the way water sits still and reflects whatever's nearest until something disturbs it. Worship is the practice of turning that water — deliberately, regularly, on purpose, whether you feel like it that particular morning or not — away from your own reflection and toward something steadier than yourself to look at instead." He let the water settle again, watched Thomas's face reform in it, clear and whole. "You don't come here to inform Him of anything. You come here to remind yourself of something, over and over, until the reminding stops needing to be deliberate and starts simply being how you're built. That He is good. That you are not the center of the accounting, however much your own nature would prefer you were. That love is owed outward before it's owed inward. A man who kneels here every week for forty years doesn't do it because the Unseen was starved for the fortieth year's kneeling and finally satisfied. He does it because forty years of turning your attention, again and again, away from your own reflection and toward His goodness instead, changes what kind of water you are. Calmer. Clearer. Slower to muddy when someone jostles you." Halvard smiled. "You've watched Perrin gain strength from a woodpile. Has it ever struck you to wonder why a boy who barely knew his neighbor found it in him, that particular afternoon, to offer his own blistered hands for her sake at all? Where do you suppose that comes from, before the qi ever enters the accounting?"
Thomas hadn't wondered, not in those terms, though he found now that he wanted to.
"Worship first," Halvard said, answering his own question with the satisfaction of a man reaching a conclusion he'd walked children to a hundred times before and never tired of arriving at. "Not always in the temple. Sometimes just a habit of attention, a mother teaching a boy to notice the ache in a tired neighbor's back before he's ever set foot in a schoolroom like this one. But worship first, in one form or another, however plain, however unremarked — because a heart that has practiced, again and again, turning its gaze off itself and onto something worth loving is a heart that's already halfway to the woodpile before the tired woman even sets down her axe. The kindness doesn't come from nowhere, Thomas. It comes from a mind that's been trained, patiently, to look outward as its resting posture instead of its exception. Worship is the training. The woodpile is the exam."
He carried that conversation with him for weeks, the way he'd once carried the old market woman's finger, gripping it with more attention than his outward calm let on. But it was a second conversation, some months later, that lodged deeper and stayed longer, because it was the one that finally made him uncomfortable in a way theology rarely had, back when theology had mostly been a pleasant intellectual exercise for a Sunday-school teacher with more curiosity than holiness.
It happened because Thomas did something that troubled him, and — being Thomas, being a man who'd once run a business on the principle that problems named honestly got solved twice as fast as problems left to fester — he went and found the old woman from the market square to confess it, since by then he'd learned her name was Sennet and that she held some quiet, unofficial rank among the temple's elders that nobody bothered giving a formal title to because everyone simply understood it was there.
"I helped carry water for the widow Corah this morning," Thomas told her, sitting on the low stone bench outside her small house, where she was shelling some local legume into a wooden bowl with the unhurried patience of someone who had all the time this world was willing to give her and no particular anxiety about spending it. "Her hip's been bad since the frost, and it was heavy work, and my arms ached the whole way, and I didn't complain and I didn't ask for anything in return, and I think — " he stopped, made himself say the ugly part plainly, the way Sennet's directness had taught him ugly parts were better said plainly than dressed up " — I think I did it partly because I wanted to. Because Corah's kind, and it was cold, and her hip really was bad. But I think I also did it because some old, stubborn part of me was thinking, the whole time, this is the kind of thing that gets weighed. This is the kind of thing that builds toward the Sect. I wasn't only thinking of her. I was thinking of myself too. Of what I'd get for it." He looked at his own hands, still faintly sore from the buckets. "Does that ruin it? Did I just carry two buckets of water for nothing, because half my heart was doing arithmetic the whole way there?"
Sennet did not stop shelling. That, more than anything she might have said immediately, told Thomas the confession hadn't horrified her, which was itself a small relief.
"Tell me something first," she said. "When Corah's hip gave a twinge on the third step and she nearly went down, and you shifted both buckets to one arm without thinking, so you'd have a free hand to catch her — did you pause, in that moment, to check your accounting? Did some ledger in your head note, ah, this next bit will surely weigh heavier, best make certain I'm noticed doing it properly?"
Thomas thought back. "No," he admitted. "I didn't think anything. I just caught her."
"There it is, then." Sennet set down the bowl, and looked at him with the same directness she'd fixed him with as an infant, before he'd had words to answer it. "You're troubled because you assumed the wanting and the loving have to be two separate rooms in a man's heart, and that the wanting spoils the loving the moment they share a wall. But that's not how a heart is built, Thomas, and it's certainly not how it's rebuilt, which is the harder and slower work, and the work all of us are actually here for. You came to this world — I know a little of what you are, child, more than you think — wanting something. Strength. Purpose. A way out of a long patient waiting that felt, I imagine, like it might never end. There is no shame in that wanting. It's an honest wanting, and honest wanting is the only kind the Unseen has ever had any use for building on."
"But if I'm doing loving things for the strength," Thomas pressed, "doesn't that make the strength the real goal, and the love just — just the coin I'm spending to buy it? Doesn't that make me exactly what Brother Halvard warned about — a merchant with trumpets, giving for show, except my show is only for myself instead of the market square?"
"A merchant with trumpets gives once, loudly, and stops the moment the applause fades, because the applause was always the entire point and the giving was only ever its delivery vehicle," Sennet said. "You carried two buckets of aching water on a cold morning for a woman who couldn't thank you loudly enough to matter to anyone watching, because nobody was watching, and you shifted your grip to catch her without a single thought spared for what it would earn you. That isn't a merchant's giving, child. That's simply a man whose heart hasn't finished growing yet, doing a true thing with a mixed motive, same as every single person who has ever stood in this square has done a true thing with a mixed motive, because mixed is how hearts begin. The question was never whether your motive started pure. No one's does. The question is what you do with the wanting, and whether you keep showing up to carry the water even on the mornings the wanting has gone quiet and there's nothing left in it but Corah's sore hip and the cold." She picked the bowl back up, resumed shelling, and Thomas understood, from long practice with her rhythms, that the important part of the lesson was coming now, delivered almost as an aside, the way she delivered the things she most wanted to land softly enough to actually be caught. "Here is the paradox, and I want you to hold it carefully, because it took me the better part of sixty years to hold it without dropping it myself. You cannot become loving by demanding of yourself, from the very first day, a heart already scrubbed clean of every selfish thread. That's not how any of us are made, in any world, Purgatory-born or native. What you can do is keep doing the loving act — the buckets, the woodpile, the sitting with the lonely — honestly, with your mixed heart fully attached to it, wanting included, and let the doing itself be the scrubbing. A man does not become brave by waiting until he feels no fear and then walking into danger. He becomes brave by walking into danger while afraid, again and again, until one day the walking has worn a groove so deep in him that the fear, when it comes at all, no longer gets to drive. It's the same road here. You do not become loving by waiting until the wanting has burned itself out. You become loving by loving anyway, with the wanting still lit somewhere in you, until the doing has worn its own groove, and one morning — you won't even notice which morning, that's the strange mercy of it — you'll carry someone's water and realize, only afterward, that the whole walk there and back, you never once thought of the Sect at all."
Thomas sat with that a long while, the way he'd sat with Halvard's stirred water, the way he'd sat with Corwin's account of the Duke on the road.
"So the way to gain power," he said slowly, "is to stop chasing it."
"The way to gain power," Sennet corrected, gently, "is to keep doing the loving thing so honestly, so many times, for so long, that the chasing quietly dies of neglect somewhere along the road, without you ever having to murder it on purpose. You cannot kill the wanting by glaring at it. Believe me, child, I tried that path myself as a girl, and all I managed was a great deal of glaring and no growth whatsoever. You starve it, instead, by feeding something else in its place, over and over, meal after meal, until the something else is simply what's left standing when you finally look." She glanced up at him, and there was real warmth under the directness now, the warmth of someone who'd walked this exact stretch of road herself and remembered every stone of it. "That is the whole paradox your Lord-Marshal on the far border will never solve, whatever dark ledgers he goes hunting for instead. He wants the strength without the years of forgetting to want it. There is no such door, Thomas. There has never been such a door. The only door that has ever opened onto real strength in this world is the one marked serve, and serve again, and serve so long you forget you're keeping count — and the terrible mercy of it is that the door only opens from that side. You cannot reach through it and grab the strength first and hope the loving catches up later. It never does. It has never once, in every record the temples keep, done it in that order."
Thomas walked home that evening turning the paradox over with the particular vertigo of a man who has just been handed a truth simple enough to state in a single sentence and complicated enough to spend a lifetime actually living. You get there by forgetting you're trying to get there. It sounded, put that baldly, like the sort of riddle a lazy teacher offered to end an uncomfortable conversation. But he'd felt the truth of it in Sennet's stillness, in the unhurried certainty of a woman who'd clearly tested the thing on her own hide across sixty years and found it held.
He thought of his old life, briefly — of ambition as he'd understood it there, the steady grinding logic of getting ahead, where the wanting and the working were meant to point in exactly the same direction the entire time, where a man who stopped wanting the promotion typically stopped working for it too, and rightly so, because there the wanting was the engine. He wondered, walking the darkening lane home with the day's last light banking gold in the trees the way it had that first autumn afternoon at the woodpile, whether that had been part of what needed purging in him all along — not the wanting itself, which Sennet seemed to think was no sin at all, simply the raw material every heart started from, but the old-world habit of trusting the wanting to stay in the driver's seat forever, instead of trusting it to eventually, mercifully, climb into the back and fall asleep while something better took the wheel.
Feed the something else, he thought, meal after meal, until the wanting starves quietly in a corner it never even noticed was starving.
He resolved, walking the last stretch of lane toward the warm glow of his own house's windows, to carry water for Corah again tomorrow — not to test whether he'd feel differently about it, which would only be the old accounting wearing a new disguise, but simply because her hip was still bad, and the frost hadn't broken yet, and that, when he actually turned his attention to it and let the wanting sit quiet in the back for a moment, seemed reason enough all by itself.
It was a small thought. It did not feel, that evening, like the hinge of anything. But Thomas — six years old, twice-born, older by seventy-some years and one long patient wait in Purgatory than his own small legs would have suggested to anyone watching him walk — had learned enough by now to suspect that most hinges felt exactly that small, right up until the door was already open and a person looked back and finally saw how far they'd swung.