[So he isn't human, for all his shape is theirs but for his strangely pointed ears and sickly pale skin. Before she had come to this place... Hayame was unable to identify with the idea of being quite so rare an existence as that. Jinba were by far outnumbered by the human population, but having grown up in a stable she had never felt cause to feel as if she were that rare of an existence, even while knowing that she was-- for who would pay the price of a small fief to own something that was common?

Here, though... now, in a world where not a single other living being looked like her, where the native population looked upon her with shock and confusion and the members of her own sect often made incorrect assumptions and reacted with surprise at her shape... ?]

I would not know what free jinba believe in.

[Without much thought, that is how she answers. How would she know such a thing, when she had been raised amongst humans, and the only sense she had of religion was what she could mimic from them in attempt to appear more civilized? The Armless resented their jinba overseers almost more than their human ones, so she had hardly had friendly conversations with them about their culture...

Because like her human masters had treated them, it had been easier to think of them as less.

But as her hooves clop softly on the stone streets, as she lets herself remember... more painful things, days of relative peace that she could have perhaps even kept if she'd just believed in them... she does recall enough to say,]

... "The Great God of the Mountain".

[Matsukaze had said that phrase before. She'd seen him lift his hands skyward as if cupped in supplication, brief and rustic, not like the formal, ritualized prayers of the stable master or the priests that blessed the exhibitions and auctions.]

I have heard they believe in such a thing.