Oh dear. Well, that certainly explains why he only gives one surname, and has an archaic accent. (She had more important people to investigate than a resurrected peer who was being wholly reasonable.) She itches to respond, this is the kind of problem she ought to be ideal to fix, but this is the wrong city and she has been far too busy to get any sense of who to push to counter an attack like this. There's no way to make it come out positive... but she can still do the straightforward thing, respond in kind and mitigate it.

"Get a copy of that page for ourselves. Without the smudge. Title it... The Last of Heaven's Sons, Devoted of Iomedae. And send a messenger to his lodgings to check if he wants that copied and distributed, or if he's doing it himself."

He's not allowed to write about it; the Queen and her wizards are watching him. But he's allowed to talk about it. About it, and about the observations of the priest of Iomedae: that the convention is full of unrepentant murderers, that they are forbidden from even voting to expel them; that if anyone is to do anything about it it'll be the people of Cheliax.

Wow, that archduke is old and probably knows all the Ancient Laws.

(Surely, no one seriously thinks Thrunes from that long ago have any connection to recent infamous Thrunes, right?)

[crossposted from i'm not afraid of a little fire]

Her first thought is that she doesn't see why she should care about some random archduke from hundreds of years ago. There are probably a lot of Thrunes. She doesn't see what's so special about this one in particular. (Were the Thrunes even diabolists back then?)

But — she knows that name. There's a Delegate Blanxart who's an archduke on the Diabolism Committee, and she's almost positive his name was Alfonso. And it's not that it couldn't be a coincidence, but based on the title, it really doesn't look like it.

Delegate Blanxart was the one that kept bringing up Galt. Delegate Blanxart was the one who was defending Delegate Ibarra. Delegate Blanxart was the one who tried to insist on her getting an Early Judgment — which she was fine with, at the time, but she can't help but wonder if there was some sort of trick to it.

Delegate Blanxart stopped showing up when they made it clear they weren't going to tolerate Evil influences.

A lot of things suddenly make much more sense.

(Probably the archmages and the Queen didn't know he was a Thrune. No matter what else they've done, she can't imagine they were consorting with diabolists on purpose.)

She looks back out at the rainstorm. Even if she knew where to find him, she's not going to be able to manage anything in this. 

...She really, really wishes Evil people would stop signing up to the Diabolism Committee. It feels like a stupid thing to wish. In hindsight, obviously they'd be signing up to undermine it. Just. It sure would be nice if they didn't.