"Why? I wanna see."

"There's nothing to see. And if there were, you ought to be away from the window, so it doesn't see you."

She sits down heavily, away from the window.

"We're not going to go out and help?"

"Why in creation would we do that."

"Well... when the earthquake hit, we helped."

"So? We didn't do shit when there were bread riots last year."

"Well, yeah, but then we were watching the babies."

There is something fundamentally wrong with this child. It's probably the angel blood. 

"Zara, during the earthquake, we went to help the orphans because it was my job. Now, it is not my job. My job is now to write a constitution. So that's what we're going to do tonight."

"Oh. I guess that makes sense."

She writes something else on her paper. Scratches it out. Taps her pen.

....helping the orphans was not her job. Her job was to watch children during the day. So why....?

"The thing of it is," she says, after a while, "we knew where the orphans were going to be. We knew that they, specifically, were going to need help, and we knew what kind of help they were going to need."

"Going into a dangerous situation with no clear plan, no particular idea of what you plan to accomplish, and flailing around wildly when you get there, makes you no better than the mobs themselves. Good intentions do nothing, if you have no clear concept of what it is that you intend to do."

"Mmm."

"And, furthermore, during the earthquake, our house had already been destroyed, and we had nowhere to shelter anyway. You should always consider self-interested cowardice much more strongly when it gets you any of the things that you want. Cowardice that works is only a vice for paladins. Cowardice that doesn't work is a vice for everyone."

"I thought paladins couldn't be cowards?"

"Not the point. The point is, if you have nothing to lose anyway, or will lose more by running, you ought to be brave. And if you have nothing to gain, risk losing what you do have by fighting, and can avoid the whole situation by staying home, you ought to stay home. There is some kind of virtue in never running from a fight, but it's one of the stupider virtues and there's no reason to go around cultivating it unless you are a very particular sort of person. I am not that sort of person. So we are staying home, and writing a constitution."

Zara nods, and curls up beside Korva. 

"Is the convention really full of diabolists?"

"Everywhere's full of diabolists, Zara. 'Diabolist' is just a word for having enough sympathy for evil that someone thinks the queen should hang you for it. It's like 'heretic'. Almost everyone's a bit of one."

"Do you think they're going to write all the same laws up again, though, if we don't stop them?"

"No! Because I'm sitting here, writing new laws! What the fuck kind of good is it gonna do anyone, Zara, if we get ourselves killed throwing rocks at diabolist lawmakers, when we could have been writing the damned things ourselves?"

This settles it. Zara picks up one of the discarded papers, and sets to reading it.

"All the schools should teach draconic. And magic. And astronomy. And fencing."

"We are trying to cut costs," she says. And then thinks of Delegate Rado, and scribbles combat training? in a corner of her paper.