Feather would also like to know whether anything that's said in committee actually matters or if they're going to settle it all with duels later!

"Fiducia, I continue to be interested in the question of whether there was a vote to make slaveowning a capital crime without notifying slaveowners and with no exemption for ignorance, and if so how the members of the committee voted on it."

Yup.

Do humans who aren't like small children stop being that way?

No.

"It's spread throughout the meeting, is the trouble, but some of it is in the next item. 9. Delegate Permira proposed that all slaves be emancipated without regard to species and compensated with a division of their master’s land, and that the penalty for failure to comply should be death."

Message reply: "I have no reason to fight you because even if I win it's not going to hurt her. I don't know you and have nothing against you." (Except that you're friends with a horrible woman, but she manages not to whisper that part out loud.) "Maybe the archmage could teleport my friend here but I really think duelling by proxy is stupid. Sigh." (He presumably hears that too.)

"I apologize for what I said," she says out loud, because the human law turned out to be not as useful as she'd hoped at first. As long as the horrible woman doesn't demand an explanation of what exactly she's apologizing for and why, she can get this past the thing that made everyone she knew able to tell whenever she was trying to lie, when she tried lying once as a child.

It's not a good apology but she isn't sure she has much to gain by trying to take it further, and she doesn't want Cute Boy to feel ill-done-by in having sprung to defend her. "I know you are ignorant of the gravity of the insult you offered," she says solemnly, "and I accept your apology for it."

He's in one telepathic bond explaining to Naima that Cansellarion is trying to destroy the country and they really need to prioritize restoring Catherine to her body as soon as possible, and another trying to talk a panicked assistant through fixing the Westcrown arcane engine, which is leaking chaos energy again, and he only zoned out for five godsdamned minutes – 

"There will be no dueling. Not by proxy, not on the convention floor, not anywhere, not at all. Have I made myself absolutely clear?"

"Is dueling illegal in all of Cheliax now?"

"Are we supposed to simply tolerate these outrageous insults?"

Between this and the fact that he's presumably the one who picked her for this convention, Dolor is beginning to actually like Cotonnet. Before coming to Westcrown she'd assumed the rumors of him being a genuine radical reformer turned rebel were all talk, but shutting down the nobility's nonsense like this is a good sign.

"President, I beg you to reconsider!" He wasn't going to kill the guy!

Duels, with restrictions to the appropriate weapons and methods, would immensely favor Thea, but by the same token the nobility probably has bullshit Asmodean trickiness that lets them rig the choice of weapons and rules to ones they prefer and Thea doesn't, so it isn't really that much of a loss.

This sparks an idea... are nobles not used to being able to duel people?  Thea could deliberately provoke a noble if she really needs to set them off balance, then hide behind the Archmage's ruling.  It smacks of cowardice, but the convention seem to encourage any and all tactics so she'll at least keep the idea in mind.

"I do not have the power to make anything illegal in all of Cheliax. As a matter of order, I am forbidding it for the members of this convention, while they are ostensibly engaged in the practice of government. For the second time in two days, I would like to remind the body that all of you are adults and endowed with the use of reason. Act like it."

These people are absurd. Dueling is for aristocrats and children. 

These people are aristocrats!!

And only barely not children!!

He knows it's not their fault, but they don't have to act like it. 

"Now that all that nonsense has been concluded—Mr. President, what is the status of my motion that the constitution decline to recognize the institution of chattel slavery? To be clear, and to answer the earlier objection of the Duchess of Chelam, I do not propose to abolish slavery at the instant the motion is passed, but only when the constitution created by this convention is promulgated. Nor do I move that the Slavery Committee cease its business, as there are many other questions to be discussed besides that of abolition itself; I move only that its members refrain from referring to any person as property."

TAKE THAT, EVERYONE WHO OBJECTED WHEN LIUSHNA REQUESTED THE EXACT SAME THING. 

He's being ridiculous, and if anyone else in the committee were proposing a vote on abolition without having bothered to deliver their proposal in writing or define all the terms in it she would rip them to shreds on the floor but he's the archduke so she can't do that. 

(The point of the vote isn't to put actual language in the constitution, it's to tell the slavers to fuck off.)

"I must have missed my review copy of the proposal under consideration, did anyone get two by mistake?"

"Count Bellumar, I merely wish to establish the mood of this convention on this critical question so that we do not waste our time forming committees to draft language that will never pass the floor." A glance in Delegate Barro's direction.

"Your grace, I believe and hope that the mood of this convention is that abolition should be done carefully, thoughtfully, and not in a fit of spite, in some reasonable fashion that doesn't lead to half the harvest rotting. And if this is our mood, then no vote in haste can demonstrate it."