Leaving your baby out to die or smothering it is evil, and Margarida knows she has only avoided doing so out of luck and circumstance.  She doesn't want this priestess anywhere near her neighbors who weren't as fortunate.  It is not like she can do anything though.  She'll continue to keep her head down and try to make it through this thing.  And she is more sure than ever Erastil is the only God worth trusting.

Ah. Sorry, son, sorry Archduke, but Antonio's never been gladder to be seated among the elected delegates. But, also - Fuck you, Valia Wain. You've fought one little rebellion and suddenly you're so sure you know how the whole country ought to be run. Try fighting a decade or two in the mountains, then maybe you'll understand why Narikopolus is still around.

...Iomedae, protect us from your servants.

"GLORY TO IOMEDAE!"

Alicia can't stop grinning. She'd heard the entire speech before, of course, helped draft it even, but Valia had scarcely needed the help on more than a few wordings. She waits a moment for the echoes of her comrade's voice to die down, then stands to speak her part.

"Perhaps it is a fool's errand, to stand here and speak after Select Wain has said her piece - but where some might say that Pezzack alone is an anomaly, I stand here and now to tell you it is not! Even in the villages where none dared to be the first to speak out, goodness remains - because while it is Good, to stand in the face of danger and rise up in revolt against Hell, this is not the whole of good. Goodness is when a mother helps her children to fake stupidity, that they might escape the infernal schoolhouse even a week sooner. Goodness is when a man is deep in his cups and says something the church of Asmodeus would wish him dead for, and those around him quietly pretend to have heard nothing and speak of it no more. Goodness is when you spare a kind word for a neighbor, when you sing a song while you work just to make the world a bit more beautiful, and when you feed a child instead of leaving them to starve. And goodness is when, having done evil, you listen to the part of you that screams at every torment and decide to change. Even the most wicked of men can come to virtue, if only they dare to try - the only evil that cannot change is that which is embraced like an old friend."

Valia is so cool. It's not that she didn't already know how cool Valia was, but seriously, Valia is so cool. Probably it's slightly embarrassing to be this awestruck by her speech when she was literally there when Valia wrote it.

She moves to stand next to Valia. "I second the words of Delegate Wain. 

Inside all of us, there is a voice that cries out for justice. That says the strong have no right to abuse the weak. That watches as the servants of Asmodeus walk among us and pretend to be just like anyone else and says — this is wrong.

Asmodeus tried to silence that voice. He failed. Now it falls to all of us to listen to it, even when it's difficult, even when it feels like it would be so much easier to just let the diabolists run your committees and enshrine their tyranny into law. We must have the courage to stand up against them, not only for our own sake, but for the sake of all the ordinary people of Cheliax."

Alexandre will stride up to the podium, giving not an inch.

“Delegate Wain makes many errors,” he says, in the tone of a sophisticated man inviting his sophisticated audience to recognize that he is being polite enough to not call her a liar, “but one will suffice: In wartime, it is not murder, but killing.”

And then he will go back to his seat.

No, sorry, burning down houses full of children when you could save them is always murder. War does not have to make men a monster. (There are a lot of people lining up to speak so she can't answer.)

Is there any way a first-circle priestess can even theoretically kill a fifth-circle wizard, because he absolutely has it coming.

Rouen is deeply tired. This is not an uncommon response here. She has too much work to do, and not enough time to do it in.

So she will go up to the podium and say, “The Order of the Pyre has already sent a message to the Church of Iomedae requesting their expert assistance in reforming our organization, and offering to provide additional support at the Worldwound to allow them to spare people for this task. I have written to the other Lictors suggesting they do the same.” Then she will return to her seat.

...success????? 

Someone needs to defuse this. She'll just have to extemporize. Fortunately she's thought a lot on one fraction of this topic.

"I can't speak for all of Cheliax, or even all of Ravounel; I am far too new to them, and to power. But I can speak for Kintargo. Kintargo contains many people who I would fight, have fought, dearly to protect. Even ones who curse my name for the things I had to do to keep the Thrunes from crushing them or to keep them from rising in a doomed rebellion that saw us all starving and dying in flames like the people of Pezzack. I considered, many times, if it would be right to let them rise, let hundreds of them die valiantly praising Iomedae and Milani and see the city burnt down to its foundations to deny it, and us, to Asmodeus. Perhaps in some celestial calculus it would have been right to let it happen."

"But if I did let the rebels rise, it would have been hundreds, not thousands. I know my people, and while many of them would have hidden and made any excuse for why they couldn't help the Asmodeans squash it, and hoped for the rebels to win wherever they felt their thoughts were secure, they would not have joined in, not without miraculous victories. The rebels would have died shining and golden, but they would have died, desperately outnumbered and outarmed."

"And the retaliation would have come after that. All those people I was fighting to protect, would have died in their thousands, and the majority of them would have been damned. Mothers who'd smothered a baby or had an abortion. Fathers who abandoned their children's mothers, or kept them, drank too much, and beat their families. People who were genuinely loving toward their families despite Asmodeus's preaching, but had no such kindness toward their slaves. It wasn't everyone, never everyone. I think I would have made Nirvana myself, and found many of them there with me. But the damned would certainly be more than half."

"And Kintargo, to all appearances, was significantly better off than most of the cities. It was always rebellious, always a city where Caydenite graffiti could be found in half the alleys you walked down, where I got news of the inquisition shutting down new Milani cults at least once a year. I checked, sometimes, if that happened in Corentyn and Ostenso, to see if I was right that, despite all the terrible trades I was making, I was preserving something special about my city. All the sailors who reported for me said that it was special; Kintargo seemed to be much more restive and un-Asmodean than anyone, though Pezzack came close."

"So Select Wain, I can say with some confidence that your rebellion sent a great many people to Hell early, who otherwise might have been saved, in time. Iomedae judged it worth the cost, and only She can say why, but you did. And I think you have drawn some badly incorrect lessons thereby. Correct them, before another half a city is sent to Hell by your actions."

 She takes pride in the fact that she prevented Kintargo from rebelling against Hell. 

She doesn't understand why Iomedae would have supported a rebellion against Hell. 

Is there something about becoming an archduke that sucks all of a person's morals and values out and replaces them with  'it's bad if rebellions happen, always, under any circumstances'? It seems like there must be.

—is it Evil to smother your baby? That's just— what you do, when the harvest is bad and you won't be able to feed your whole family otherwise. At least if you aren't the sort of — pathetic failure of a mother and a wife — who gets all upset about the idea, and leaves the baby out in the fields where it might end up rising, just so that you can imagine there's a chance the faeries will take it away and raise it as their own.

Well, it is true that sometimes you need to keep the young hotheads from flying off into fights they're not ready for. ...Shut up, that doesn't apply to me, my Rokoa said I could go. Sure, I had to convince her, but I did convince her! So it's fine!

Let's SUPPOSE, wildly and ridiculously suppose, that nobody he cares about is evil.

So fucking what.

If they all die because some monster swings through the valley and the lord is a green sanctimonious idealist who says the right things and can't cut that monster down, there are six afterlives left his little family can be scattered through. The babies both in the Boneyard where he'll never see them again, him in, where, the Maelstrom? Axis? Fucking Elysium? And his not-wife cooling her heels in Nirvana, or not cooling her heels because she's been turned into a goldfish and they haven't got heels, and she'll never do a bit where she pretends he must be a traveling merchant here to seduce her or that he's a faerie prince there to carry her off to the First World to live on honey and champagne or - anything. And neither of them ever get to make growling noises at their babies, pretending to eat them up, since in this scenario they've all been very toothily eaten for real.

Bitch thinks it's fine if they all die. If that's Good he doesn't want it.

He is a PENNILESS FISHERMAN. It turns out if you give up all of your everything you cannot trivially head off to the Worldwound.

This is all really intense!  He keeps waiting for the Queen to show up with a sensible set of stuff for the committees to approve and him to vote on, but he's finally realizing that isn't going to happen?  At least he isn't evil.  He should have checked with Sefora what she reads as.  And maybe come up with a plan to ride the current tide of emotions to make sure she and their peasants are in the clear.

"I want to answer the Archduchess. The Archduchess believes that under Infernal Cheliax's influence many people are Evil, and therefore they should never rebel against Infernal rule; after all, some of them will die in the rebellion, and those will go to Hell. She says that it was mistaken of Pezzack to fight back, that we should have served and obeyed the Thrunes instead, and hoped that one day an archmage would sweep in and save us all. To this I have a brief answer. 

My answer is that may all praise every Good god and most of the Neutral ones that the people of Galt, and Andoran, and Rahadoum, and Varisia, and Sargava, and Molthune, were not the beneficiaries of such wise counsel, as they would not have rebelled, and then been free of Cheliax, and then ceased to be damned by the works of the Thrunes. But would they not have been freed without bloodshed, if a few decades late, if only they had waited around for an archmage to save them? No! Because the archmage is from Galt, and without the revolutions none of us would ever have been free. The Thrunes were destroyed because of the willingness of people to rebel against them, at great risk, for the sake of the souls of their children and their children's children, and if men lacked such courage we would have been slaves to Hell forever.

 If your counsel is that one should not rebel against Hell itself, then the people of Cheliax have very little use for your counsel or for your rule."

Wow, really digging in her heels, isn't she. The only thing that will convince that girl that she's maybe incorrect is probably witnessing chaos in the streets first-hand. Voshrelka updates her likelihood of people killing each other, and begins acting accordingly. That is: assessing the room for threats and escape routes.

Is the argument room going to devolve into violence right now, while the archmage is right over there, watching? Er. While he's staring off into space, probably having some kind of archmage conversation in telepathy about tactics or magic or something, but nonetheless still close enough to stop them all from being stupid. Everyone is containing their stupidity, for now? Okay, good. Then she can save her Barkskin for later. Good thing she prepped Entangle, though, that's definitely going to come in handy. Where are the good windows for sneaking out in this building? She wants to know just in case this building gets rushed by a mob or something. Not that she thinks this has gotten out, yet, fortunately the girl with too much splendor for her own good didn't say any of this outside... but she's just going to try to figure out if any of these windows look like they can be pried open from the inside by a bird. Just in case.

"I believe that people should rebel against Hell, and should not rebel against the Lawful Good Queen who saved us all from Hell."

Valia is frustrated and angry that she's saying that like it's a refutation of anything Valia said!

Liushna's sympathies naturally lie with Valia, but that doesn't mean she doesn't respect the Archduchess. A good Rokoa puts her tribe first. 

...No one is talking about rebelling against the current queen? As far as Liushna can tell? Is she missing important nuance again, shit. 

It feels good, being part of a peasant mob instead of being a specific person thinking thoughts and taking actions.

We can do so much more when we're a hundred men and women, full of Holy Fury, with a speech like that in our ears and a shout of GLORY TO IOMEDAE on our tongues. We can burn down the manor and cut down the baron and his men as they try to escape the flames. We can take over this hall and throw out everyone standing between us and the Age of the Glory. We can, if Valia Wain stops letting the nobles talk her down and starts calling for blood, do 'driving evil out of the halls of power' right now.

Being a specific person thinking thoughts and taking actions, being Enric Porras who wants people to live good not to die fighting evil, that will resume once Holy Fury and GLORY TO IOMEDAE wear off. 

Spells aren't guaranteed to get a wizard out of mob violence but they've been pretty helpful in recent months.

Hopefully the delegates here assembled are mostly reasonable people who wouldn't join a mob, like that Enric Porras guy from yesterday.

Abadar abhors war. This is, Jaume thinks, one reason why: if you set about choosing the time and place of a war, you may gain a strategic advantage, but the chips with which you are gambling do not belong to you. Valia thinks that just because it's good if she wins more chips, that gives her the right to claim every soul in reach as table stakes. The Archduchess has the right of it. The noncombatants did not belong to their revolutionary neighbors. A bit of personal resistance is one thing. But the selfsame people who thought it was Asmodean and irredeemably wicked to own someone you bought and paid for are now thinking nothing of bringing down a nation's worth of wrath on a city full of uninvolved men, women, and children without investing one red cent in their futures, and most certainly without making sure it was in their several personal and individual interests. How heroic. Abadar help him, that these are his vacillating and bloodthirsty countrymen.