He knew the Reclamation was technically independent from Lastwall, but this is really ridiculous. 

“I had the chance to speak to a number of his men in the process of replacing the old nobility and asked them if they considered themselves citizens of Cheliax. They were universally quite insistent that they weren’t – that they were instead sworn members of the Glorious Reclamation, which was an incompatible obligation.” 

“What does it mean to you for someone to be a Chelish citizen?”

“That they reside primarily in Cheliax, are subject to Chelish laws – and of course are due the protection of such rights as the new constitution guarantees them.”

"Is this… different in some way from being a Chelish subject?"

“Subjects don’t have rights! Catherine – I mean, the Queen –  and I always intended that the people of Cheliax would be citizens, once we’d conquered it.” 

Subjects of Lastwall's government have rights…

 “This strikes me as possibly a misunderstanding that’s a consequence of different political vocabulary in different regions of Avistan,” says de Luna, sounding a bit happy about this, “though we’d need to conduct interviews with some of the Glorious Reclamation officers to confirm that.” A Galtan would consider 'citizenship' to carry primarily the implications Cotonnet just named! A person of Lastwall or Molthune would likely interpret the question 'are you a citizen of Cheliax' completely differently!

“Political vocabulary? You mean to say, when I thought I was asking them if they intended to live in Cheliax and abide by Chelish laws instead of moving back to Lastwall or Molthune as soon as the immediate reconstruction was over, they heard – I’m actually having trouble reconstructing what they could have heard. As I understood it, their objection was that their oaths to the reclamation preceded any other obligation including loyalty to any specific country. Surely being a subject would have the same problem?” 

“They are bound to obey the laws of Cheliax while they’re here as anyone else would be, and they would believe that subjects of a just government do have rights. I would expect that they thought you were asking if they considered the legitimacy of the Chelish government to derive from the will of the people in line with the Galtan conception of such, and intended by their presence here to imply or otherwise comment on that legitimacy, and were politely saying, ‘I am a member of an organization without a position on that question’. Rather than taking you to have asked anything at all about where they intend to live, which will probably depend on whether the Reclamation’s granting land here. This is just speculation not yet confirmed by an interview.” De Luna enjoys cultural differences between regions of Avistan. He once meant to write a book about them but couldn’t really justify it.

“Whatever Cansellarion thinks personally, if the reclamation as an organization has no opinion on the legitimacy of the present Chelish government we might have some more serious problems in the future.”

…yes he’s an idiot for getting excited about a matter of language during a tense diplomatic conversation with an ally. In tense diplomatic conversations claims will be taken as having serious geopolitical implications, not as being descriptive of common language usage. “I apologize, Archmage,” says de Luna, chastened. “I meant, on whether the legitimacy of the present government derives from the will of the people or from some other source, not on whether Her Majesty is the legitimate ruler of Cheliax, which to my knowledge the Reclamation was among the first organizations to acknowledge.”

It’s weird when de Luna calls him “Archmage.” It’s weird when anyone calls him Archmage, like he’s Nex or something and not a man whose problems are still bigger than he is, but it’s particularly unsettling coming from people who knew him before. 

“You don’t need to call me that. I’m not offended. It’s just that we clearly weren’t speaking the same language before, and I want to get ahead of any other potential confusions while we still can.” 

“As you say. Well, we should further investigate if that was a miscommunication or if there wasn’t anyone else in Cheliax who met the criteria, but that’s not the priority right now. Did you have a  process for discussing delegates who seemed likely to pose problems? Did Wain strike you as one?”

“ – No. As I saw it, most of the delegates were going to pose problems of one sort or other, and if I didn’t like it I might as well write the constitution myself. None of my companions were following the day to day events that closely. 

I wasn’t worried about Wain before her speech. If anything, I was optimistic – I wanted more people from Pezzack. And I didn’t realize she believed she was being forced to attend against her will.”  

"She believed she was forced to attend against her will?"

"That's what she told me. I believe it was your church that contacted her."

“We haven't spoken to Wain yet. We have the interview with the head of the church here in Westcrown, if you’d like to read it. He had no authority to command Wain, of course. He mentioned sending her the royal notice and a note to the effect that there were very few eligible priests in Cheliax and she was one. The church often has - problems with priests not under our command taking suggestions as commands, which may well have been in this case inadequately anticipated especially since he was when he wrote to her unaware she could not read. He remains under the impression that she wanted to attend; if we get the chance to speak with Wain we can learn if that is correct or incorrect."

There's something in his expression that makes him feel like that's - not getting at what Cotonnet was hoping for. "It stands out as a likely place where a serious error was made, though not the largest. If you have more thoughts on that one in particular I'll take them down but - we try to get down everything that happened before we start writing up all the serious errors, because once people start having a picture of where we went wrong we often end up - looking there for more detail and missing similarly large mistakes elsewhere. It is rare that something terrible happens without our having made quite a few separate enormous mistakes. ...would it be helpful to describe the whole process from start to finish?”

"You certainly can if you wish, though I don't see why you'd consider it a good use of your time." It's not as if they want him to participate in it. 

Being an archmage really doesn't seem like it suits the man. And De Luna really did like him, last time they met. There is absolutely no diplomatic way to say that. "...if you'd rather just continue we certainly can." 

Oh for gods' sake. 

"You have made it very clear that you want my recollections, nothing more. I had been hoping we'd be able to discuss what happened and come to a mutual understanding, but I didn't come here to tell you how to do your job. That being given – I'd much prefer if you didn't try to appease me.  If I was anyone else, you'd say that you're extremely busy and explaining your procedures is a waste of your valuable time: indeed, it is. My understanding of your process won't improve my memory. Please treat me just as you would anyone else. I won't mind. I promise, I prefer it." 

"....I don't understand what makes you say that we only want your recollections of events, but that's not so at all. And even if this were just an ordinary interview with a miscellaneous involved party it would be my obligation to explain our procedures, were there any interest in them, which there never is because most people aren't interested in procedures. The important constraint here is your valuable time!"

It was the thing where he offered to help and they immediately started treating him like a useful species of talking insect, but he can't say that. 

"I really meant it when I said I'd prefer it if you treated me like anyone else. If it's your usual practice to explain things, of course I'd like to know, but I came here to be of use, not to make you dance around the archmage and his whims." 

"...all right, should I treat you like anyone else who wants to know the procedures, or anyone else who knows them already and has read ten of these, or anyone else who doesn't want to know the procedures and is indulging me because they're vaguely convinced I work for local law enforcement?"

"...I did not realize that these reports were available to people outside the church heirarchy and would definitely like to read ten of them the next time I have a free minute. In the meantime, I'd like you to treat me as – someone who deeply regrets what happened yesterday, and wants to do everything in his power to prevent it from happening again, and who believes that the first and most necessary step is understanding what he himself did wrong." 

"Right. So I've written a couple hundred of these, a couple dozen really big ones on really important catastrophic mistakes. Most people haven't done as many but I had fifteen years with nothing better to do. If a prisoner dies in custody in Vellumis I write it up and when Cyprian declared himself Emperor I wrote that one too. - that's why I'm here, actually. You start with the interviews. I know it seems like we're - picking around things that aren't all that important. But the problem is that the mind can't keep five different stories alive at once, it picks one and then starts getting all its soldiers to dig in around that one. So we do the interviews first, even if we are ignoring very big obvious things that need recommending, to try to get down as much of the situation on the ground as it was when we started poking it as we can. It's not instead of talking about what we did wrong, it's - so that there's some record to refer to when we're talking about that. After the interviews, I build a timeline. I like to do it all visually, take over a couple of tables, flag every point where anyone made a decision, or could have, that would have prevented this. Three months ago a letter sent out to Valia Wain sounded like marching orders, that'll be on there. Around the same time no one asked 'should we hire a staff for the delegates?' That'll be on there. They probably failed to think about that because Iustin's inexperienced for his command and sleeping about six hours a night and working every waking moment outside his required break times, that'll definitely be on there. But the interviews are first, because there are probably thirty, forty things like that, and if we start by listing all the ones we can think of we'll miss more than half and then not really go back to them later. It's human nature. ...everyone else's nature too, as far as I've noticed.

Then from the timeline, you look at all the decisions that would have prevented this and - some aren't worth it. Maybe you could have prevented this by not letting people hold political debates, but that's not worth it, skip that one. Maybe we could have prevented it by funding all temples 30% more, but we don't have the funds, skip that one. And you figure out which decisions would have prevented it and also been a good idea, and that's your first draft. We write the core thing, but everyone with an interest writes their own takes on it, as a supplemental, and it all gets submitted together. There might be a few things in there which can't be distributed outside the Church - if an interviewee tells us something in confidence, if it's got guard schedules in it - but there's always a public version, and it'd make me downright proud if you took a look. 

Is that helpful?"