Knowledge is not the same as belief.  Sometimes it takes a living example to understand higher things.
 

    I believe in redemption.  Every week when I go to confession, the priest tells me my sins are forgiven.  I am a new person now, he has explained, and my penitence has created in me a clean heart.  Unfortunately, my sins haven’t been forgotten.  My past will always be with me, at least as far as Kiya is concerned.

    When I touch people, I know their hearts.  I know their motivations, their dreams, and their fears.  That talent made me successful in my former career, for I could easily judge what a man wanted of me.  I knew with a touch what pleased him, what matter of flattery he preferred to hear, and what he wished as my lover.  Men paid well for my perceptive touch.
  
    Understand that I’m not beautiful.  I am pretty, perhaps, but my mouth is too wide and my dark eyes too far apart for true beauty.  My hair is plain brown.  I’m short, with a slim body that does not inspire poetry.  My talent pleased my clients, and I rose to some status in my world, a courtesan rather than a simple whore.  I moved from one protector to the next, whomever I found tolerable.  That was...until the day I met Kiyaden Sidreiyan.