Brother Diaz prayed. It was hardly the first time. Prayers are to a monk as stones to a mason, after all—you really can’t do the job without them. Back at the monastery he’d filed into the church dawn, noon, and evening, occasionally led a service for the locals, a couple of baptisms, one slightly anticlimactic funeral. But he’d done plenty of private praying, too—that he might finally make a mark, make his brothers jealous, make his mother proud—and he liked to believe he was really rather good at it. Congratulate himself on his thorough knowledge of the psalms. It was only in this moment of
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