“Mind,” Lucienne snapped after Yvain said his piece, “I am not here to provide charity or help. Quite the opposite.”

She absentmindedly waved her hand as she studied the cleric in front of her. He was certainly easy to identify at a glance, with multiple holy icons dangling from his large coat that enveloped him like the wings of a gigantic bat. With graying hair and possibly early wrinkles, she estimated that he was not the youngest in his profession anymore. That was a good thing, should he ever prove troublesome. The dark, wide-brimmed hat completed his impression as the harbinger of ill news. He certainly looked more intimidating than the last of his kind she had seen. That one had been significantly younger, sharply dressed, and entirely too fond of Valencian wine for his own good. His naiveté had been charming, then, but something told her that the good father here would be far less easy to perturb.

“I am Lucienne Desrosiers, of the house Desrosiers of Morsang-sur-Odesse in Valence,” the noblewoman introduced herself, but this time kept her hand firmly to herself. Perhaps it was not customary to offer it to men of the cloth, or perhaps she simply felt no desire to be touched by McNamara – who could say? “Now that introductions are out of the way, let me be very frank, Father: I need to reach this… Temnorapool post haste. What can you do to help me?”

Lucienne audibly struggled with the city’s name, which sounded crude and barbaric to her ears and merely speaking it felt like choking on thorns. It really did seem like Valence was the heart of culture, and that the arts and customs degenerated quickly the further one went away from her home land’s majestic mountain ranges. It almost made one shudder to think what sort of troglodytes must live even further beyond Perafidion and the seas. Would these savages ever be graced by the light of civilization and elevated from their hovels?

Her thin, blond brows furrowed deeply when Yvain turned around and began shouting of all things, apparently communicating with somebody who was yelling from the train’s front section. She could not care less if they were exchanging useful intelligence from both ends of the train at this point.

“Don’t do that,” she hissed at the sellsword, visibly annoyed. He was not her paige, but she would not tolerate such a rude interruption. Once she was satisfied that her reprisal was received and understood, she returned her attention to the Father, hoping against hope that he might have something useful to say.