The Saintess Did Not Deny Sin
The salvation that damned Creator had spoken of was a far sicker pastime than I had expected.
Seven years had passed since my reincarnation, and a person had died. Not by a demon's hand, nor a monster's. By a human's.
The next morning, a single set of wet clothes hung alone on the drying rack in the laundry yard. Water dripped from them, drop by drop. I knew whose they were.
I opened the dining hall door, and the familiar scene laid itself out before me—all of it, save the empty seat left at one corner of the long table.
The truly chilling part was not that someone had died. It was that not a single person in that hall, not one, so much as glanced at the empty place.
Lust sat with her hands clasped, a benevolent smile on her face as she offered up a prayer. Gluttony had her nose buried in her bowl like a beast, chewing down lumps of meat and swallowing them whole. The rest were no different, indifferently clearing their own shares.
People called those of us found in the same basket the Seven Sisters. What a joke. In our previous lives, we had been perfect strangers.
Strangely, I was the only one who remembered that past. The other six could not even recall who they had been. Memory was the only thing they lacked.
Every last one of these little shits is exactly the same.
Clack.
In the quiet hall, a spoon struck the bowl in a steady rhythm.
Videllia. Envy. There was not a hair of disorder in her. She spooned her soup at precisely the same pace as always. Someone had died on a cold floor the night before, and that fact failed to disturb her measured meal by so much as a second.
She was the one who had killed that child yesterday. The motive was simple: the girl had looked happier than she did. However young she was, it was still murder.
I had assumed the convent would handle it—isolation, punishment, whatever they saw fit. Nothing happened. The guard never came. The dead child was entered in the records as a transfer to another convent, and the nuns kept their mouths shut. There was no reason anyone would cover for a mere orphan like her, and yet.
I quietly took up my own spoon and turned it over. This world really did have demons and monsters. And before I ever worried about what waited beyond the walls, there were six of them in here I needed to watch. I was also the only one who understood that dying again, in this place, would be the end.
So the moment I learned to read, I went straight for the books. I needed this world's common sense, and the Church's rules. I had no intention of living out the rest of my life here.
…Is it only Videllia?
"All of you, come in."
The abbess's face was unusually hard. It was the first time all seven of us had been summoned to her office at once. Uneasy, I stuck to the back of the others and followed them in.
An unfamiliar girl sat in the middle of the room, about our age. Rose-pink hair, and a face so without flaw that the lack of anything to fault was what caught the eye. She wore plain clerical robes, nothing ornate, and yet somehow she was the first thing you saw.
Stranger still was the abbess. The old woman who stood highest in this convent was sweating cold, and she was doing it in front of a child who looked about seven.
"Everyone—everyone, show the proper respect."
Even her voice shook.
"This person is the Saintess."
The Saintess. I narrowed my eyes, quietly. I had read of her. A being the Church treated as exceedingly special, whose authority could not be measured by age or station.
Someone high up, then.
In that case, the work was simple. In front of the person holding my evaluation and my disposal, I behaved. No subordinate wins a fight with a superior. Even winning is a loss. I shut my mouth behind a perfectly meek, perfectly good expression.
Not everyone knew how to survive a room the way I did.
"Hah? The Saintess?"
The one who was Wrath lunged out first. The name the convent had given her was Iresia.
"So what. Being the Saintess makes you all that? You want us to get down and grovel?"
"I-Iresia! Hold your tongue!"
The abbess went white as a sheet.
"How dare you speak such impiety to the Saintess—"
The Saintess lifted a hand, lightly. That alone cut the rebuke short.
"It's all right."
A clear, gentle voice. Far from angry, she looked us over one by one, the way someone might examine a curiosity. Then her gaze stopped in one place. Videllia.
"I hear you caused an incident."
Videllia's shoulder flinched. I moved an eyebrow by the smallest fraction. She knew. She knew what had happened the day before yesterday.
"…What."
"They tell me you killed someone."
The room went still. Videllia bit down hard on her lower lip.
"She was obnoxious first."
"How so?"
"…She acted pretty."
"…"
"Acted kind. Smiled all the time. Got along with the other kids."
A small hand clenched the hem of her skirt.
"Even the nuns all liked only her."
Videllia muttered it, barely above a breath.
"She looked happier than me. So I hated her."
I waited for the Saintess's answer. You must not kill. Envy is a sin. Repent. If the doctrine hammered into our ears for seven years in this convent meant anything, that was what ought to have followed.
It did not.
The Saintess rose. She walked to Videllia, then bent her knees to bring her eyes level with the smaller child's.
"Then."
She asked it softly.
"You'd dislike me as well, wouldn't you?"
Videllia lifted her head. Anyone could see it: the girl before her was a child who had been raised on love. Videllia glared at that face for a long while before she answered, small.
"…Yeah."
"Do you want to kill me, too?"
This time there was no reply. The Saintess studied her for a moment. And then, as naturally as anything, she drew the child into her arms.
"…!"
Videllia's body went rigid. I blinked, caught for an instant. The calculation had come out wrong.
The Saintess slowly stroked the tangled hair.
"How strange."
"…What is."
"Our Videllia is this pretty, too."
"Liar."
"Why?"
"Everyone says my eyes are wrong. Says I make them sick."
"Who says that?"
"All of them."
The Saintess stroked her hair again.
"Were you envious of what the other child had?"
"…"
"A pretty face?"
"…"
"Friends?"
"…"
"Being loved?"
Videllia's eyes wavered. The Saintess looked at her and smiled, tender.
"Then you may be envious."
Videllia's eyes widened a fraction.
"…What?"
"You don't have to force that feeling away."
"Why?"
My brow twitched before I could stop it. I had heard this logic somewhere before. Videllia stared at the Saintess as if she, too, were hearing the words for the first time.
"If there is something you want, you may have it."
A brief silence. Then Videllia asked.
"…Even if I take it?"
The Saintess did not answer at once. She smoothed Videllia's hair once more instead.
"There is more than one way to obtain what you want."
"What if she won't give it?"
"Then you show the Lord how badly you want it."
"…"
"For a child who asks with all her heart, the Lord always opens a path."
Videllia said nothing. But her face was no longer braced and wary, as it had been a moment before. The corner of her mouth had lifted, just a little.
The Saintess drew her into her arms again.
"So from now on, don't sit with it alone. Come and tell me."
"…Why?"
"I'll help you."
Watching them, the abbess let out a breath that sounded like relief. A merciful Saintess, embracing even a child who had committed murder. To that old woman's eyes, it must have looked exactly like that.
I saw something else.
The Saintess knew Videllia had killed a person. Not once had she said that killing was forbidden. She had not told her to cast envy aside, either. She had said it was all right to be envious. She had said the feeling had a reason. And she had told her, next time, to come and find her.
The murder of two days ago had been buried without a trace. Two days later, a Saintess who knew of it appeared. It sat a little too neatly to dismiss as chance.
The Church teaches that sin is to be abandoned, suppressed, repented. The human being called the Saintess was the precise opposite. I looked at the pink-haired child smiling like an angel, Videllia held against her.
After that day, the Saintess came to the convent rather often. It did not take long to confirm what I suspected.
Of course.
That woman had no intention of curing our appetites. Quite the reverse. She did not press them down. She did not try to erase them. She gave them a direction instead, and in exchange she collected the conduct she wanted.
The first result showed in Iresia.
"You may strike this person as much as you please."
The convent's rear yard. The Saintess indicated a man kneeling on the bare earth, hands bound behind his back, his face gone white, his whole body shaking. A criminal, they said, already sentenced to death by a Church tribunal. Thief, murderer, heretic—I didn't know which. I didn't care to.
Iresia's eyes lit.
"For real?"
"Yes."
"Can I kill him?"
The Saintess tilted her head, as if she were considering it. Then she smiled, very prettily, very kindly.
The corner of Iresia's mouth climbed all the way toward her ears.
Thud!
"Gyaaaah!"
Crack!
"S-spare me—! Ghk!"
I sat in the shade a little way off and turned a page. It was not a sight I particularly wanted. Pinning my eyes to the book, however, could not stop the sound—the dull snap of breaking bone, and the screaming. In the end I looked up.
My gaze went where it always went. The convent's high, thick wall, and the sky beyond it.
Before long the yard fell quiet. Iresia came back drenched in red from the crown of her head to her feet. It was hard to believe she was the same girl who had just been beating a man. Her face was that content.
The numbers didn't work. How long would a seven-year-old's bare fists need to leave a grown man in that state? What I had just heard had been far too short.
I looked at the Saintess without thinking. She was not surprised. It was the face of someone confirming a result she had already expected.
A chill crept up the back of my neck.
That woman.
She isn't sane.