"You only say that because you believe it won't work. If you thought it did—"

"The King needs to heal, not more distractions."

"He needs to wake, not rest more, Orthenon. You do not know him as I do. You have ever only served the King of Destruction. I swore myself to our lord when he was but a dreamer on a new throne. When Queravia passed, as it did when..."

She trails off, and shakes her head minutely.

"The fire in his heart requires a spark, not more kindling."

"Perhaps you have insight into the mind of our King which I lack, though I wish to contest that another day. However, I know you, Gazi, better than any waking man today. And I tell you you are unwell. You were unwell when you left, six years ago; I believed distance would do you well, but it is clear that I was mistaken."

Gazi's smiling mask slips.

"You believe I perpetrate a hopeless search to cling to a delusion of control. You, who have spent twenty years tending your master's estate in the vain hope that he will some day simply... get better of his own accord, I suppose."

Fortunes spent on mind-healers and remedies, decades of correspondence with distant lands met by failure after failure, his own long evenings spent reading letters and reports by his lord's throne, hoping one of them would move him to rouse. But Gazi knows all of this, and he suspects she will only take his failures as proving her point.

"You would rather I abandon the kingdom to ruin?" he says instead. "Allow Hellios and Elmvett to pry at our lands until the armies of six nations are on Reim's doorstep? Even with all of my attention here, Reim is crumbling."

"Perhaps then our King would stir himself to act."

"Do you hear yourself? It is entirely unlike you. What do you propose I do with this man from Izril? You have already wasted one of Amerys' scrolls on him."

"I expect you have your ways, my lord steward."

He sighs.

Has Blai been up to anything interesting while we were in a cutscene?

Casting Guidance on himself constantly trying to keep the food down. Practicing Prestidigitation's use for cleaning because he's been in these clothes continuously for two weeks while mostly not in control of his faculties.

Let me guess: he doesn't want the clothes provided in the closets, or the laundry services, or the personal washing and bathing facilities which aren't meant for cleaning clothes but can be repurposed for that without too much difficulty?

He should not like to give the impression that he might be accepting gifts under these circumstances, no.