Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Fraud who's been playing the role of a noble paladin for so long and so well that they almost believe it themself
"So," Malia says, sliding herself into a seat across the tavern table. She painstakingly arranges her beaker of mead and a waxed paper package of street food in front of her. "The archer says she's known you ten years, aye?"
The thin-faced paladin pauses, fork hovering over a half-demolished meat pie. "Aye," he says warily.
"And you're pretty handy in a fight."
He carefully carves out another bite-sized chunk of greasy pastry. "Thank'ee," he says.
She unwraps her own meal, neatly aligning the small and distictly flakier pastry parcels with each others' edges before picking one up and delicately biting off a corner, releasing the scent of goat-meat and tubers and vicious spice.
"How long," she says, "have you been lying about being from the Ordo Pacificus?"
He visibly freezes, eyes downcast to the depths of of his pie.
She chews, swallows, takes another bite. "The Ordo doesn't take people," she says with her mouth full, and makes a little gesture up and down him with the pastry, "of your skin."
"Not many, aye—"
"No, I mean. As an institution." The wizard fastidiously licks an oozed line of thick curry sauce off her fingers. "Extremely racist, much more so than the wider church, and contrary to the order's reputation. Which is probably why you've got away with lying about it, this far from the Ordo headquarters."
He stares down, and clears his throat. "Nigh fifteen years," he says, a little raggedly. "Deserter from m'Lord's army. Y'put on a white tabard and say the right sort of thing, folks stop being suspicious you can handle a sword." He puts down the fork, hand trembling. "Funny," he says, "afeared so long of being found out for no real paladin, 'tis almost a relief."
Malia squints at him. "You are a practising believer, though."
"It ain't a bad creed."
"You pray to the Pacifican god—"
"Come a point it felt wrong if I didn't."
She keeps looking at him while she eats the rest of her first pastry, brushes grains of salt from her fingers, and picks up the second. "...I saw your god grant you a miraculum at your beseeching," she says.
"A man uses the god's name, figure the god either acts like the man's entitled, or smites him. Figure so long as I ask for only the things a real paladin would, it's only to the god's glory to grant 'em."
"...You sincerely worship the god, you sincerely do the work of a paladin of the god, you sincerely hold yourself to the moral standard that a paladin of your god supposedly always does, and the god agrees with you to the extent you're granted the miracula of a paladin of the god—"
"Ain't the way it works, wizard." He picks up his fork again, grimly smashes pastry into congealed gravy.
"Because you told people you came to it by a finishing school for nobles that wouldn't have had you?"
"Came to it wrong, and so never came to it at all." He looks up with hard eyes and a firmed jaw. "Was there owt else?"
She shrugs. "Your theology is stupid and your pie looks shit? Welcome aboard."