A few years ago and the answer would've been a simple but polite no; he'd learned not to laugh it off entirely, but it was still something that struck him as peculiar and a little absurd. It's not just Baedal that's made him stop and think, but most of the answer is still 'no' - it's just more thoughtful, these days.

"We let the lowlanders fight over their gods, mostly, where I'm from," he says, reflectively, pressing a thumbnail to the side of his jaw (near his neat, sharp beard) for a moment as he thinks. "A woman I knew called us 'culturally atheist'." When she was in a good mood with him. When she threw him out, she called him a money-grubbing mountain peasant, but that's, you know, another story entirely. "But I'm given to know there's more to it than hiring mercenaries to take out the ones they think aren't doing the thing right."

It's just that, frankly, that's the familiarity Seoraj has with religion.