Valia Wain has been given her mail, but she can't read it. She has asked for a copy of Acts - which she also can't read - and been laughed at. She wants Feliu back but she cannot have one of the most powerful paladins in Avistan guard her day and night until they get around to killing her, and it would be selfish to try to convince him to stay, so once Ser Cansellarion left she asked him to also.

She isn't really very scared of dying. She's very scared but she doesn't think it's of dying. It's of - everything being terrible for ever. It's of people being damned because of her. It's about spending the rest of forever staring into the glaring chasm of a mistake bigger than any good thing she'll ever do.

Well, would she like to speak to him?

- she cannot really ask the Archmage Cotonnet to read her mail, and she was mostly desperately wishing for a visitor who'd read her mail. But certainly she'll speak to him. She probably owes him an apology too but when she reaches for it none of the things that come out of her heart are an apology at all.

She stands and bows, deeply and decidedly ironically. She noticed the first time they met that he hated when the people of Pezzack grovelled.

"Archmage Cotonnet."

Yes, yes, yes, Chelish people like to play Chelish games. He doesn't care, he's done. 

"Select Wain. If you don't mind, I'd like to know what you wanted to accomplish yesterday, and if you feel you've done it."

"I wanted the people of Cheliax to stop being ruled by Evil men Abrogail Thrune appointed, and obviously not."

"I don't think it's obvious at all. You might have wanted the people of Cheliax to know that we can't actually stop a riot without major casualties. You might have wanted news of the riots in Westcrown to spread to Menador, where there are more holdover nobles and it would take us much longer to intervene – this wouldn't have worked, but I don't think you'd have known that at the time. You might have wanted to permanently disrupt the workings of the convention because you consider it unjustly constituted. You might have wanted the aristocracy to be afraid. You said that yesterday, didn't you? Fear is very powerful. You might have wanted them to think about the mob every time they order an execution, or raise taxes, or speak on the floor. I don't think this would improve the quality of their governance, in the main, but as we've already established, you don't think much of my judgement. You might have wanted to accomplish any number of things." 

"Oh, I also wanted them to be afraid. I think I - it's kind of hard to track what I was thinking, really, because once you know something it's hard to remember not knowing it, but I think I wanted them to be afraid, and to repent, and I figured that if they didn't do that then word would spread - yes, to Menador, slowly, but eventually - and people'd be rid of them. I didn't think there'd be riots in Westcrown yesterday. Westcrown isn't ruled by Evil people Abrogail Thrune appointed. I figured that if people took it seriously they'd - bring some copies with them, hidden, when they rode out somewhere that still is. 

But - I would not have told people that they should not be afraid, if I thought they'd die for nothing. I didn't want that. And - Feliu thought that I betrayed the Queen. I didn't mean to. She freed us from Hell. You freed us from Hell. I was not meaning to declare war on the people who freed us from Hell, but on the people they'd forgotten to free us from. So I failed."

" – Among my own mistakes here was the failure to produce some kind of remedial civics handbook. Let's start with this: you should betray the Queen, whatever she did in the past, if you think that her rule is incompatible with freeing Cheliax from the devil. The fact that the Queen and her allies have opposed Hell before should make you question your assessment of whether this course is necessary. And you should definitely understand that counselling people to engage in violent rebellion is betraying the Queen and her government, because, if you didn't think that that government was corrupt, simply reporting the diabolist nobles would always be a better option." 

" - of course I would betray the Queen if I thought she would get in the way of freeing Cheliax from the devil!" Ordinarily she'd be nervous to say that out loud but they're going to kill her regardless, it's sort of freeing. "No, the thing I thought was that the Queen didn't want those people in power but either didn't know of them - but the people they oppress do - or wasn't allowed to go after them. Maybe she'd - promised not to or didn't have an army."

"I imagine someone has already explained to you that that's not so. We – when I say we I mean the Queen and her adventuring companions, including myself – did replace almost all of the old nobility. The ones who remain are there deliberately. We certainly wouldn't need an army to replace them.

We actually did promise not to abolish the Hellknight orders. There's a reason for that. During the war, when it became clear that we might win but not yet certain that we would, the heads of the orders came to us and offered not to fight if we agreed to let them keep existing. We insisted that they replace their entire leadership, and they agreed. We insisted that they reform their rules under the direct supervision of paladins, and they agreed. Most of them do have some legitimate reason to exist, like fighting demon cults or tears in the fabric of reality or things like that, except the Order of the Rack which we really did get rid of. I'm still not entirely happy with this compromise. I would make it again in a heartbeat, because winning the war was much more important than eradicating every last collaborator from the face of Golarion. I suppose it wouldn't technically be a violation of our promise to let the Queen's subjects tear them all apart with impunity, but it does not, to me, seem quite like dealing with them lawfully.

I believe that you didn't know these things. I think you probably could have figured them out, if you'd tried." 

"I don't really see the justification for having any nobles at all. Less so for keeping any of the evil ones. I should have learned it was deliberate before deciding what to do about it."

"We thought about that! I should say, I thought about that. That's what we did in Galt. What happened was that a truly astonishing number of innocent people died, especially in the north, because in most places in Avistan people rely on their local nobility to defend their villages from monsters. 

I know that's not how it is in Pezzack, to the great credit of Pezzack. But your way of doing things has costs. How many adult men would you say there are in a typical Hellcoast village, to every adult woman?"

"About half as many." The men fish and the ocean's very dangerous. It's all right for a man to have two families, if he's a good fisherman and can feed both of them. It had not particularly occurred to Valia that this was unique to Pezzack; surely everywhere is dangerous.

"Right. In most places, the numbers are about equal. Farming is relatively safe, unless something comes out of the woods and goes after you. When it does, their lords are supposed to come and kill it for them. That's why they're there. Twice as many men live; in exchange, they live less freely." 

"There are a lot of things worse than dying young, and nobles are one of them."

"It's been a long time since I've been accused of being a friend to the aristocracy, but I have to say that it depends on the noble. If they do their job, if they have just laws and follow them, if they're not unchecked and arbitrary tyrants – well, life is very good. People will put up with a great deal if it means they get to see their children grow up. 

Of course, those aren't the only options. Let's go back to Galt: Cyprian is experimenting with restoring some of the nobility, but most of the actual defending people from monsters is carried out by a civil defense force composed of veterans of his wars. As far as I can tell, this works. Soldiers are more likely to survive and become strong than peasants in fishing villages, because they have more resources and more training. They know how to obey orders, and they're loyal to the government. If they start using their power to rape and pillage the people they're meant to protect, Cyprian can reassign them or have them court-martialed, and they'll go. Lastwall actually does something similar – every adult man serves or has served in the army, and those veterans do most of the local defense work. The consequence, of course, is that if the king or the emperor or the ruling council is itself tyrannical, it becomes much harder to do something about it."

Valia is so tired. This is - interesting, and it matters, only it doesn't matter to her any more, because she's going to die, and probably the whole situation made it less likely that the people of Cheliax will ever be free in any of these ways. "You can do that, and teach the soldiers to be loyal to Good, not to the Queen. Or at least I'd think you could."

"You could, with time. I think it's a better system than having an aristocracy and one day I'd like Cheliax to get around to implementing something like it. 

Right now the problem is much closer to convincing the soldiers and guardsmen we already have that rape and pillage constitute disloyalty to the Queen and more importantly that they can hang for it."

"That's what I'd expect if you didn't replace all the Evil Asmodeans in power, yes."

"Oh, it's actually much better in Menador than most of the rest of the country."  

"The things you are saying seem inconsistent with the claim that you and the Queen replaced almost everyone terrible."

"Even if we wanted to, it's not actually in our power to replace most of the population of Cheliax."

"Most of the people of Cheliax aren't Evil. Asmodeus liked saying that, but He's the god of lies. The people of Cheliax love their families, and tell secret stories of when things were better, and feed their neighbors when their nets come up empty even though you have to pretend you traded it for a favor. Hell told women to fear men but most of them if they come across you hiding in the hills will be proud they know how to make you a fire. Hell told men to fear each other but the only thing we ever really had to fear was Hell."

"I don't think it's very useful to think about people as good or evil. Mostly, they're just people. They love their families, they'll feed their neighbors when the crops don't come in, and they'll report them to the secret police for worshipping Erastil a little too fervently, and they'll beat their children, and they'll beat their wives, and if they're a soldier far from home and nobody knows them and their commander doesn't care, then, yes, they will steal and rape. That's a problem for every army in the world, not just Asmodean Cheliax, though it's worse here than almost anywhere else. 

I believe that every reasoning being has the capacity for good. In this country, at this time, it is in most of them rusted with disuse. Pretending otherwise does them no favors." 

"I think people are - substantially what you expect of them. Expect Goodness, and get it; expect Evil, and get that. Everyone's pretending, a little bit, but pretending to be Good is not that different from the real thing. 

Did anyone ask the people of Menador, if they'd rather have to fight monsters themselves but be ruled by the Thrune's appointed lords no longer? Or did you just decide what was best for them?"

"Actually, we did. We asked a lot of people. My wife did most of this work, not me, but that was something I insisted on. We asked openly – we asked in disguise, because we knew people would want to tell us what we most wanted to hear – we asked while reading their minds, which I'm not proud of but do think was necessary."  

"And they wanted the Thrune's appointed lords?"

"Overwhelmingly, yes. If I were you I wouldn't actually lean on this too much: they see it as a choice between the people they know can protect them, or something uncertain, or no protection at all, and I don't think any of them have much of an idea of how things might be better. But with that choice in front of them – yes, they want their lords. 

The important thing to understand about Menador is that it is the most dangerous place in Cheliax. Bulettes are native to the mountains there and they can and will eat whole villages if they're not stopped.There are undead and kuthite cultists constantly spilling over the border with Nidal, and even more constant raids by the mountain orc clans. It isn't like the Hellcoast, where a village can be safe at the cost of half its men. Without very serious military investment, nobody could live there at all. 

Again, I didn't do most of the talking to these people, my wife did. But what she found, over and over again, is that when something swept down from the mountains and tried to eat their whole family the nobles did something about it. They also burned heretics to death, of course, but they did their jobs. Most Menadorian noble boys do die in battle. By and large, they want their people to be safe. We kept them in power for the exact same reason Abrogial Thrune the first kept Archduke Narikopolus's ancestor in power, instead of deposing and replacing him like she did almost all the pre-Infernal nobility: the work they do is necessary, and for the moment, we have no one else who can do it for them." 

Archmages are less cool than myth had led Valia to expect. She'd think you could just put up a wall of fire or something to keep the monsters out. 

"I'm glad you checked," she says, because that's less rude. "...you should...tell people...any of this."

Élie doesn't feel like an archmage most of the time. His personal demiplane has three rooms and not even close to two billion people in it. 

"You're right. I should have. 

We did try to explain the process in Menador, and in the the other archduchies where we actually did replace the old nobility. It wasn't a priority along the Hellcoast, because you'd gotten rid of your nobles and seemed to be doing fine without them. But I should have tried to create some common knowledge for the delegates before the convention. What do you think would have been most valuable for you to know, three days ago?"

Valia closes her eyes, and considers. 

"That in Westcrown people are afraid and resent the Queen and if you tell them that they can resist there'll be riots that very night. That all of the nobles still in power are there because they fight monsters and we've got to find a better way to do that if we want to be rid of all of them. That you don't think there are any diabolist nobles, but there are lots of Evil ones, but that as far as you know they aren't actively going around doing lots of new Evils and if they are it'd be worth telling you so. That anything you say, people will think your god means it, and they are scared not to listen to Iomedae because they think She's like Asmodeus. That everywhere's very different from everywhere else and if you've only been to one place you should figure the rest might as well be a foreign country.

That - we're not safe at all - the convention still follows the normal rules of how powerful people work - and you'll die if you do anything stupid and that half the things that seem like they'd help are treason. I know I should've known that one. That it's smarter not to talk unless you can read, because everything that matters is in writing and you'll miss too much of it to have a chance of doing anything helpful instead of awful and disastrous, and that having been summoned by the Queen to the convention does not mean you have good ideas or that you'll make anything better. That you won't go home again."

Well, Lucien she's not. That's going to make this conversation easier. He was expecting the kind of horror that calcified into self-assurance and a burning eagerness for martyrdom – not sour resignation.

"I'm sure a lot of people have told you today that you're not really responsible for what happened today because you are a child and didn't know any better. I would like to be frank: that's bullshit, and we both know it. You are an adult women. You have rallied mobs before, and those mobs have killed innocents before. You knew enough to understand that you were right to do so then, and if you had tried, you could have learned enough to know that you were wrong to do so now. I don't think you're the person most responsible for what happened last night – the better part of the blame there falls on me for putting you in this situation – but it was well within your power to make different choices. This is fatalism, and it's beneath you. 

I don't want to make promises, but I think it's very unlikely that you'll die. In the first place, you haven't broken the law, and in the second place, Alex Cansellarion wants you to live and so do I. You have just had the opportunity to learn one of the most valuable lessons there is in this world, and as one of the very few people alive today who has had the same privilege I can say with some authority that killing you would be a waste." 

"No one's told me that. That would be obvious nonsense. I've only talked to you and Feliu and Alex and they just said - that I got it wrong and hundreds of people died, because they can't lie and they're not stupid. I don't think last night was your fault. I don't think it was anyone's fault but mine. But if you're asking what you could tell Valia of three days ago that would actually be useful, the answer is "shut up and do not participate in this convention". That is the short advice I'd give myself, if I could wake up yesterday morning. There are all kinds of more complicated things I think work differently than I thought three days ago but the very obvious takeaway from that is that I should not have done things. I should have spent the convention in the back corner learning to read."

"Certainly you should have learned to read. Separately, your superiors in the church should have made teaching you to read a priority as soon as they realized that they had two empowered clerics in all of Cheliax and one of them was illiterate, which is part of a much longer conversation I will be having with them. 

Do you think it would have been best for the convention, and for Cheliax, if you had stayed home in Pezzack?"

"...obviously yes. Hundreds of people wouldn't be dead and some of them damned!"

"Oh, certainly your actual involvement in the convention made everything significantly worse. I think you could have been a great asset, if you'd approached this a little bit differently, and acting like you only had one course of action available to you is neither helpful nor accurate."

"I arrived here the evening before the convention started. I wandered the city until I found my way to the temple, introduced myself, and got introduced to Blai. I learned that there's sermons in the morning, and started attending them, and asked Blai to read me pamphlets and to read me a book about the Galtan revolution after I was advised I needed to know Galtan history. I made literate friends and I asked them for advice, including about being sure the speech was legal. 

Obviously there is some set of questions I could have asked first which would have worked better, some set of sermons I could have attended that would have been more useful, a different history book to pick up. Similarly there's probably a Wish that kills Asmodeus dead, so what's your excuse for not having figured it out and cast it?"

"Absolutely none.

I have spent the past ten years asking myself every day if I made the right decisions in Galt. I don't know if I let too many innocents die, or too few. I don't know if there was something I could have done to preserve the Republic. I don't know if preserving the Republic made us stronger or weaker in the real war, the one against Asmodeus. I don't know if there's something I could have done to make myself ready to challenge the infernal regime a year or two sooner – and I do know how many people died and were damned because I didn't. There are any number of important questions I don't have the answers to. The one thing I am certain of is this: if I was able to strike a greater blow against Hell at the age of thirty-two than at the age of twenty, it is because I have spent significantly more time thinking about how to do it right. I will be thinking about what I could have done differently for the rest of my natural life, and I expect it to be a long one. That's what fighting evil is." 

"You didn't ask if I could have, from three days ago, done anything useful with the rest of my life. The answer to that would've been obviously yes. I'm not saying that I was done fixing things. The question you asked is whether I could have done anything useful with your constitutional convention, held this week, and the answer to that is obviously no. It was stupid to invite me, and it was foolish of me to speak. If I wanted to accomplish anything at thirty, I should have spent the year I was eighteen reading."

"Choosing to invite representatives of the Good gods worshipped in Cheliax is not actually one of the choices I regret, leading up to this. I suppose we could have left Iomedae with just the one, but we weren't doing literacy cutoffs for anyone else, and some of the illiterate delegates have made very useful contributions." 

"You could have made it an invite and not a summons!! Admittedly I would probably have come but given what you were forcing all of us to risk I think the decent thing to do would have been to give us a choice."

"...It was an invitation. We didn't make attendence mandatory for anyone except the sortition delegates, which was trying to solve a different problem. I think I see how – what did the summons you recieved actually say?"

"Well, I had it read to me." He really seems to on some level keep forgetting this. "But I was told it said that by order of Her Majesty of Cheliax Aspexia III, and then a lot of other stuff about her, a constitutional convention was to be held in Westcrown and the Church of Iomedae was being given seats in the convention and I was directed to come to the Church of Iomedae in Westcrown and would be compensated for my time and my travel. And then a date."

"The message we sent to clerics of gods without formal churches is that Chelish empowered clerics of non-Evil gods are invited to attend the convention, their god was entitled to so many seats, and if they were interested in representing their faith they should report to Westcrown or their nearest major temple. Formal churches we left to handle the matter internally. I'm not actually clear on your formal relationship to the Church of Iomedae, but I don't think they would have intended to order you to come against your will." 

"I'd have come regardless but I definitely thought I was required to. That's probably not the most important thing, though. ...the 'sortitioned' were kidnapped and forced to attend, though?"

"Yes. ...If you asked me yesterday, that's the thing I'd have guessed was the most likely to go terribly wrong. My thinking was – we were going to have elections regardless, since we'd hardly be making an effort to represent the will of the people without them, but we also couldn't ensure that they'd be free and fair. The kinds of people who are most likely to win elections in Cheliax are unafraid of seeking power and probably used to it, rich enough to bribe or strong enough to make threats. The sortition delegates were an attempt to avoid that. We chose them at random to make sure that we'd have some people in the room who knew what it was like to live in Cheliax as ordinary people – but ordinary Chelish people wouldn't want to be in that room. If we left it up to volunteers, we'd have the same problem we started with: a room full of delegates who are all the sort of person who is used to pursuing power under the infernal regime."

"They wouldn't want to be in that room and many of them would be completely correct to not want to because there is nothing at stake at the convention that's worth never seeing their family again to them... I think that was immoral. I see the reasoning, I know that otherwise the nobles will just use the whole thing to give themselves power, but they're going to do that anyway and just bribe people, and...

 ...you have to convince people that your convention is a risk that is worth it to them to take because there is something at stake at it that they can help with and that matters to them. You don't just get to shove them at the nearest pike and call them a martyr when it impales them. I...the thing Feliu said that made me conclude I made a mistake last night is that he thought the people who were fighting would not have fought if they knew better, that they were being moved against their interests and not - reminded that they were allowed to move in favor of them. That's...betraying people, using them. I didn't want to do that.

Maybe it's good for Cheliax, to force some of its people to be at the convention, to provide their perspective, but - the people of Cheliax don't belong to the state of Cheliax."

"I think it will take at least ten years to convince the people of Cheliax that it's safe to interact with the government in any capacity, and I didn't want to wait that long. I don't think there was a moral way to get them in that room. ...I am coming around to the perspective that given that that was the case, I shouldn't have done it, but I'm trying to reserve judgement until the whole thing is over and done with. 

I don't know what Feliu said to you last night, but if he's got you convinced that you somehow hypnotized the helpless masses into rebellion he's wrong. Some of them thought that they were going to be martyrs and go to heaven, and some of them just wanted an excuse to kill their old enemies and get in some looting, and for most of them it was probably a mix. Disinterested altruism for the suffering people of Menador doesn't get thousands of people in the streets." 

"I said to him that I think people mostly only revolt if there's a lot wrong under the surface already. He said he thinks - sometimes you're in that situation and there's a spark, and sometimes you're in that situation and luckily there's no spark and things slowly improve and everyone calms down and then instead of being dead hundreds of people are alive. I'm sure they were muddled up about their motives. People usually are. It's - terrifying, right, and it's so confusing even when you haven't ruined everything horribly -"

"Yes. It's very confusing, and I'm sorry to report that it never gets any clearer. 

That's why I wanted to talk to you now, actually. I've met a lot of Iomedeans who do not do well with confusion. I was afraid that when called to speak at your trial – and maybe the other trials you'll have to testify at – you'd have decided that everything that happened last night was a small price to pay for the chance of purging the diabolists and the dead rioters are all martyrs in heaven." 

"I think that it would be worth it, if hundreds of people died and it drove diabolism out of Cheliax forever. But that's not what happened. I don't even think there was a chance of that happening, not really, not from this. Probably things got worse."

It -" and now she's crying, and of course deeply contemptuous of herself for it, "it is... very hard to think about the idea that the people they killed in Pezzack might also be in Hell for having lived under Asmodeans before being murdered by them. It feels like - one of those things that nothing that happens, even if we do beat Asmodeus, will ever make the universe acceptable, ever. But - there are a lot of things like that. I can live with one more, for as long as I live. And if the people trying to kill evildoers in fact go to Hell for it then they should know that so they can make their choices."

The proper Chelish thing would be to ignore this.

“l’m not a paladin, but I can make you a little braver for the next while, if you want me too.”

Braver? Is it cowardice, that's clouding her mind so badly? But she nods.

Greater Heroism.

He didn’t prepare the spell - doesn’t have it, in fact - but if he’s going to be perfectly honest he’s half having this conversation with Valia and half with himself age nineteen, and he remembers what it felt like the first time a friend was maledicted because of a mistake he made. 

Oh. 

Yeah, it was cowardice that was clouding her mind so badly. Apparently. She'll process that later. She looks back up at him. She's crying more now but no longer minds it; what's he going to do, think less of her? 

"I don't know what I'd have decided to think if Feliu and Lord Cansellarion weren't here. But - I don't think it's that I was right about everything. Because I can still tell whether I win or lose, and I lost this one. Even if they are Asmodeans, they're still in power."

"Whether you won or lost matters much less than whether, in expectation, you were right to pick the fight. Sometimes the deck is stacked against us, and a hundred or a thousand people have to try and fail for one of them to succeed. 

...A lot of people have gone to Hell because of choices that I've made. They'e all stayed with me, but the thing I find truly hard to bear is when I look back and know that I wasn't thinking clearly about what I was trying to accomplish and wasn't prepared to pay the price. Even then – in the end, you do learn to bear it."

"I wasn't thinking clearly. I was trying to solve one problem - people being confused about whether the excising diabolism committee was going after everyone who'd ever done a bad thing or what, and I wanted to be clear that I considered the diabolists and Norgorber cultists and the evil nobles a problem and not everyone else - but I wasn't just thinking about how best to do that, and I wasn't really expecting this price, and - if I'd been trying to cause a riot last night I'd have planned it, you know, I'd have known who was a good fighter and what our target was and what we'd be doing in the chaos. I stayed late asking the scribe to read me back the judiciary committee notes."

"That would be a good thing to say at the trial. Not the bit about how you'd have planned it, maybe – 

– but I probably shouldn't be giving you advice on your defense. I'm don't want to secure the best outcome for you personally, and anyway you'll have a lawyer for that. I'm thinking about the city and the rest of the convention. But in either case, establishing that you neither predicted nor intended the riots will help."

"I wasn't really planning to have a defense, the people are dead. Lord Cansellarion thought it'd matter that the speech was legal but - he's not Chelish. I do - want people to know that I got it wrong and didn't want this. I am sure I will not be allowed to give another speech but I think I could explain."

"The point of a trial isn't to determine whether people died, it's about whether you broke the law. I admit we haven't yet secured a right for the accused to speak in their own defense – and if you do that might move the convention against it, which is something to consider – but the Queen certainly isn't obligated to forbid it." 

He's Chelish and has no excuse. "It does not matter to the Queen or to anyone in Westcrown whether I broke the law. Or rather, it matters to them that I broke the law, and if someone insists I didn't they'll lose faith in the law."

"I flatter myself that I know a bit more about what matters to the Queen than you do. I don't think it matters to very many people, but for the moment, those of us who care are going to make most of the important decisions over the next few days." 

"Well, if I am given a chance to speak, either at a trial or to correct the old speech, I will check with sensible people first that I am not getting anything horribly wrong and then I will explain how my first speech was a terrible mistake. They won't believe me but I ought to anyway."

"I'm hopeful that if enough people manage to say true things in public for a long enough time, someone will eventually believe them. It won't be this time, but one does have to start somewhere." 

"I'm very convincing." She smiles very slightly. "If you think it might matter, then I would appreciate it if you would arrange for me to be allowed to speak. ...ideally not at a trial, actually, because at a trial I think I'm supposed to be addressing the legal side of things and that's not what I most want to tell people. ...I would also appreciate it if there were someone who could read my correspondence and take dictation. Everyone who has come to visit has been far too important to waste their time on that."

"I can't promise you'll be allowed to speak before the trial, but if you can write up a draft of a speech I'll see it's taken to the Queen. Have your lawyer write it, once we've found one – it would be so much more convenient if Comprehend Languages imparted literacy and it really doesn't seem like it would be very difficult to modify, but I hardly have the time – Herru might be able to do it, if she's not too horribly busy – and for now I suppose I should have a secretary sent up. I'll see it's done. 

Is there anything else you'd like to say to me?"

There are many things. None of them would be wise to say. 

"The people of Pezzack think very highly of you." They'll stop when Valia doesn't come home.

"I'm glad to hear it. I hadn't imagined they thought of me at all. 

There is one more thing I would like to say to you. I'm worried that the lesson you're going to take away from this is that your error was acting at all, when you were ignorant. This is not true. It may matter more to you that it is also a kind of weakness. It's easy to convince yourself that you couldn't have known better, because it's a way of saying you weren't really responsible for what you did. I'm sure you're about to object that you are taking responsibility for your actions. What you are doing is accepting blame, and that's a different thing entirely. Whether you should feel guilty for what happened last night concerns no one but you and the final Judge. If you can't accept that you have control over your choices and could have acted differently, it is going to be a very serious problem for a great many people. 

For what it's worth, I think the real underlying problem here is that you chose not to treat Lawfully with your allies. I'm certainly the last person in any position to blame you for it, but by virtue of your position, I recommend that you think very hard about whether you were right to do so. I can't answer that for you, and I don't think you'd thank me if I tried. 

I cannot promise that your correspondence here is private, but I will do my best to see that it is not in any way altered, and if it is obstructed, you'll be told. If you're mistreated, write to me – actually, write to Cansellarion, he's better equipped to do something about it."  

Valia is so profoundly sick of the archmage. She thinks that Élie's diagnosis of her errors is stupid and missing the point. He seems persistently convinced that she's having trouble observing that she has control over her choices and should have acted differently, when this is both blatantly obvious and the reason she thinks it would have been wise to skip his stupid convention. She cares about whether she did right by the people who risked their lives for her words; she isn't sure that that's a matter of Law, because she's still not really clear what Law is, but it obviously matters. She cares about whether she wronged people who were trying to be Good because she misinterpreted the fact they were still Evil. But by 'allies' she doesn't think Élie means either of those; she thinks he means the powerful people who Valia inconvenienced, not the powerless ones she got killed. 

She cannot see what would possibly be gained by arguing the point further. 

"I will to the best of my abilities write if I am mistreated," she says icily. She doesn't care whether he misses her meaning or not.

Yeah. He's met a lot of Iomedeans in his time – either they grow out of the unshakeable conviction that only they understand the true meaning of right and good and trying to understand why anyone else might do something they disagree is enough to make one a dirty collaborator, or they die, or presumably live quiet lives in Lastwall and never come to his attention.

"Good luck to you."

It is in no sense productive to anger the archmage. "Thank you for coming."

" – One last thing. Would you prefer a secretary from the palace or one of my own people? The advantage of a palace secretary is that I can have them brought here immediately and their other work is probably less important; the advantage of a person in my organization is that they can get word out without being beholden in any way to the palace guards, though of course they do answer to me and you might very reasonably not trust my judgement." 

She absolutely does not trust his judgment but it's still an easy choice. The palace ones absolutely wouldn't report a complaint about her treatment in the palace; the archmage has many shortcomings as a person but 'protecting the palace staff' really seems unlikely to be one of them. "I would prefer one of yours. - thank you."

That's only moderately inconvient (or he wouldn't have offered). He sends a message through one of his telepathic bonds for Xiulan to bring Netsai on the next teleport; she doesn't speak Chelish well enough to understand Hellcoast dialect but she usually has a Tongues up. 

"She should be here this evening, then." 

"I am very grateful." She really is. She has been attempting to adopt a broad perspective about being mistreated in prison since in the end it doesn't really matter very much but it's a difficult thing to adopt such a perspective on and it would be very painful for Iomedae to leave her now of all times, in addition to being taken as proof of her guilt.

She probably thinks he's only doing this to spy on her letters so he can concoct a story about her guilt at the trial, but it doesn't matter. He is not going to get anywhere here. Valia Wain will eventually learn what world she lives in, or she won't, and if she's ever going to realize that the difference matters before one starts giving speeches about it it won't be because he said so. 

He nods and teleports out. 

She doesn't actually think the the secretary is a trick. If the man wanted her dead he has several thousand very straightforward ways to do that and doesn't really seem the type to lower himself to doing it through hired spies. She does think the secretary is as intangible as the assurances that the delegates would have the archmages' protection, right up until the woman arrives.

Well. Time to review her mail, then. You can't not do things just because they probably don't matter at all.