Chapter 7
HAD SHE BEEN plain Johanna Brouwer, she would probably have stopped going to church at that point. She had only started going to church a few years before the fires, because so many people spoke about it, and because the services were very well attended and the wooden pews told her many stories about the people who sat in them.
But she had left Johanna Brouwer behind ages ago, and more than ever, she realised that her survival, indeed the survival of Saarland as independent country, relied on a careful balance between the Church of the Triune and the Belaman Church, between magic and those who abhorred it, between true Saarlanders and those from elsewhere.
Had she been plain Johanna Brouwer, she might have barged into the service late wearing her clogs, stormed to the altar an
