The Countess of Seguer is busy trying to figure out how to make money off the rumors about the slavery committee. There's got to be some way. (She sensibly signed all of her slaves to twenty-year indentures before she came here, so it has to be some more subtle way than that.)

She'll stop for the Archduke, though, obviously. "Archduke. We're honored."

"Countess. How was today's meeting of the Committee on Forests? I'm on the Committee on Nonhumans, myself, and seeing as the two seem to touch on similar concerns, I wanted to ensure that they don't end up making conflicting recommendations."

"For the most part the druid prattled on dishonestly while everyone pretended they care about anything other than Plant Growth. I think our recommendation is going to be "close the portal to Hell, and send the druids diplomats who are very good liars and can pretend we don't think all their other priorities are stupid, and may the archmages invent an alternative to obliging our civilization to bend the knee to druids.' Well, we won't put that last bit in writing."

"Dishonestly in what regard?" It's not impossible, but between the two of them at least one is certainly willing to be dishonest.

"Her account is, approximately, that the forests are governed by a council which would be happy to stop monsters from leaving their borders if only Cheliax were reasonable enough to negotiate. Even the other druid delegate was laughing at her."

"I found it wiser to humor her." It's called diplomacy; perhaps Asmodean nobles genuinely haven't heard of it. "If the forests were independent powers, as I said this morning, we would certainly have ample cause for war with them under the ordinary law of nations; and if they do manage to police themselves, the better for us, no?"

"Well, sure, but they won't and can't. 

With all due respect, honored Archduke - I see the merits of humoring the druids. They have something we want, and there are those willing to scrape and scrabble at their feet to get it, and more than those number who are willing to smile and nod along while being fed outrageous lies. But there are no druids listening." Come to think of it that's harder to tell with druids than with most things. She tosses out a casual Detect Thoughts. Yeah, no druids listening. "Are we to be obliged even in our own homes to pretend that dirt-coated tree-hugging commoners with delusions of grandeur are a font of great wisdom? Let us at least be honest here, if we must leave our dignity at the doors of the convention hall!"

"I think that forests are both a colossal waste of land and a danger to anyone who lives near them, and while I suspect that just burning them is likely Evil I do think they should be obliged to pay for the trouble they cause us in some regard or another. Plant Growth has been the usual way, and I find it acceptable at least until the archmages make it obsolete."

"But it's not the druids I'm really asking you to humor. It's the archmage who invited them here. Do you really think they're going to just let us put whatever we want in the constitution? Of course not. People seem to get it with regard to slavery but the same thing applies to nonhumans. I'm trying to put in provisions that, on paper, respect the fundamental equality of all thinking beings like Cotonnet believes in, but that still turn out okay when faced with the reality that some thinking beings aren't, actually, equal. If you just go around saying you want to burn the forests and kill the strix, you don't do much more than cede the floor to the radicals."

"It's a dangerous thing, there being obvious truths that everyone is too afraid to say, and there's some advantage to being the one who says them. Burning the forests and killing the strix is not a radical position but a natural one. In a real vote it would win out. It won't win out here, because the vote won't be a real one, but I don't think there's as much reason as you imagine to not say it. Maybe they'll be more willing to adopt your compromise position, faced with mine."

"Maybe. Or maybe they'll just conclude that humans don't see them as people and thus can't be reasoned with. And they are people, Countess. Deeply unreasonable people, in many cases, but people nonetheless. The forests will probably burn, in the end, and the world will be a better place for it, but it will still have been a tragedy, and the men who do it will probably still go to Hell for it. I don't want to put in the constitution that we're going to burn the forests, because—"

"—have you read the Acts of Iomedae, Countess?"

"Of course." Threw out all the old holy books and purchased all the new holy books the day her father was put to death.

"I'm thinking of the part where the Crusade has just ended and Iomedae is debating with her officers what to do about Belkzen. She could have conquered it; she had the greatest army known to Golarion since Aroden stormed the Abyss, and Belkzen has been around since the Age of Darkness, but she could have conquered it. If she doesn't—well, her country has a horde of orcs on its border for the rest of time. It still does. They lose a lot of men defending it, and Lastwall is still a fifth part smaller than it was in my time. But—you can't make peace with orcs any more than you can with a forest. Probably even less. It wouldn't have been war, it would have been slaughter. And she said—no. The orcs still matter, in their own right, even if they can't be lived with. It's not worth the cost."

"The worst part is that I don't even think she made the right decision. She thought the Age of Glory was coming, and if she'd known it wasn't—well, it's obvious to me that Lastwall can't afford to hold that border right now. If she'd known how things were going to go, she might have decided to just do it, and then maybe we'd have some fucking priests. But it was the right kind of decision. You don't do the horrible thing just because you can convince yourself it's worth it. Even if you turn out to be right you've still made it seem a little less horrible, until one day it just seems—what was the word you used?—natural. That's how Hell gets you." He should really use the past tense, in Eulàlia's case, but it's not like being raised Asmodean was her fault.

"You're not obliged to believe any of this, of course. You can dismiss it all as sentimental crap, and you won't go to Hell over it. Aroden would have just burned the forests, and he stayed Lawful Neutral. But it's why I, at least, am going to vote that the constitution should say that Cheliax desires peace with the forests and the strix and everyone else, even if I know it's probably not going to happen."

How do Iomedaens even manage to ruin toying with people by making them guess what the loyal answer is. You’d really think wholesome fun like that would be hard to ruin but they manage it.

“I understand, sir. I hope we are too pessimistic.”

"Tomorrow during the general session I'm going to move to merge the Forests and Nonhumans committees. The Duchess de Chelam split them, I think, to keep the druids contained, but first of all it didn't work, and second of all our proposal is likely going to end up covering forests as well. If the motion doesn't pass I don't know that the forests committee is worth that much additional effort to keep in line. We'll make sure Nonhumans reports first and its recommendations are already in the constitution before Forests does, and then the floor can just ignore whatever nonsense they end up proposing."

“All our proposals are reasonable enough. It’s just “negotiate for plant growth” and “fix the Hell portal and dragon” and “monsters should be dealt with.””

"That sounds reasonable enough, if no doubt arrived at after a great deal more drama than necessary, but—"

"The committee on nonhumans did not quite get as far as 'proposals'. I spent most of the meeting debating the definition of a monster and debating which races actually prefer self-government and trying to argue for a formal ban on nonhuman nobility without overly offending the orc baron who's actually a reasonable moderator between us and the radicals, and explaining to the druid what a tax is and to the kobold what a government is supposed to do. The gnomes were solely focused on protecting their ancient arrangement, which was fine because I think it's a reasonable model for how to deal with at least some of the other races—"

"The proposal I'm going to introduce tomorrow is going to say that nonhumans either need to integrate into human society and obey human law—which I think will work fine for the halflings and probably no one else—or else govern their own affairs in a way that prevents depredations against humans, acknowledge the suzerainty of the Crown, and pay fair and reasonable taxes. We can send the exact nature of the taxes over to one of the boring committees—I want to talk to an Abadaran about a scheme by which the forests pay the same taxes as the same area of civilized land, to reflect the fact of what they could be. That's fair and reasonable, I think, and they can probably pay it in castings of Plant Growth but it will still, if I understand my Abadaranisms correctly, shrink the forests over time."

"The main effect of inviting all these savages certainly seems to mostly be time wasted explaining things to them. Your proposals sound reasonable to me. I think that the people on forests would vote in favor." No comment on the non-people on forests.

"If someone is capable of hearing an explanation at all then obviously we should try to explain before we move to killing them." This woman makes a great show of wanting to be an Iomedaen but she has no idea how Lawful Good is supposed to work and it's not supposed to be his job to teach her. This example is going in his inevitable letter to Lastwall.

"Obviously someone should but I don't think you need to grab every single high ranking person in all of Cheliax away from their lands before the situation at home has stabilized and make them all do it personally in one on one conversations!"

"Obviously the convention shouldn't have been so soon. I think other people have already tried explaining that to the Archmage Cotonnet. As for explaining civilization to the druids, or trying to, there used to be an Arodenite order that did precisely that. They made few outright converts, but they got us logging and Plant Growth and a semblance of peace. Now there isn't anyone who will even think of it as a thing that might need to be done until it actually comes up. My experience is that this is true of almost everything in Cheliax you can possibly think of."

"I did try negotiating with my nearest druids for Plant Growth. They killed the envoy, because they're fucking savages." 

"Likely any previous 'envoys' entering the forest in living memory were there to do the same to them. The advantage of the convention is that the druids willing to show up have already been selected for being willing to attempt peace."

"Unfortunately that seems to me they were selected for being delusional about what the actual barriers to peace are. ...well. Feather is delusional. Tiumfane seems like a sensible person and we voted to get his Hell portal closed and dragon slain, though anyone who thinks votes can do that is as delusional as Feather is."

"In general this convention does not seem to understand that they cannot order Cotonnet to do things. Legally speaking we could probably order his companions who are counts to do things but, first of all, if they obeyed it would be because they planned to do it anyway, and second, I don't think that's even the sort of thing we're here for."

"At any rate, I'll try to explain some things to Feather if I have a chance. She didn't seem obviously delusional to me but perhaps we never got onto the subjects she's delusional about."

Seems like a waste of his time but it's not her place to tell him so. "Yes, honored Archduke."