"I don't know. I understand, I think, why you want the populace to agree together about what their governing authorities should do. I think it is probably very hard under any circumstances, and these are bad ones for it, because the populace is very badly hurt. But I don't know if they would be hurting much less without the convention, and I don't know how much less hurt they would have been in three years."

...she has a guess. She doesn't like the guess. Elie will not like the guess. But Elie is always owed her honesty, no matter how uncomfortable it is.

"...having seen the delegates, I do sort of think now that they would probably have produced a better constitution if given several more years. But I don't know yet what they'll write. And - I think a lot depends on what those intervening years were like, and a year and a half hasn't healed them as much as I'd have hoped, either."

"It matters what happens in a year and a half – or five, or ten. I could have written something just to show what it looks like, and we'd implement it provisionally, and then call a convention to write something new once they see it working. If we don't give them any reason to believe that things could be better, why should they? We did in Galt, but – "

"Well, you can still give them existing examples, even if you haven't written your own. I think - they may need more direction? I realize all of the reasons that's fraught. I'm not actually sure now is the best time to talk about it, either, though if you'd like to we certainly should before the convention reconvenes."

"I'm going to have to give a speech when we reconvene, starting with my own mistakes. Certainly lack of direction was one of them. 

– which doesn't mean I know what direction to give them, or that I have any credibility left after what happened yesterday." 

"Well. You can tell them what a constitution is. I'm not sure that's adequate, but it might help. You could... hold a session of answering delegate's questions about what happened, and what's going to happen, and why you did this, and what they're allowed to do, if anyone is willing to ask them. But we probably won't have any idea what you'll say about most of those things until we know what's going to happen to Valia."

"I know what I'd say if they asked me what I was thinking, for all that's worth. The thing they really need to know is what's liable to get them arrested, though, and I can't help them – I don't know either.

I wonder if I shouldn't take the opportunity to come up with some new rules for conduct on the floor, just to make sure I get to it before someone concieves of a motion to limit floor speeches to delegates whose families have records going back to the time of Aspex. Or worse. You'd think Axis would be a civilizing influence on these people." 

"I think that's also likely to help. They're - scared. We can at least talk to Catherine, about what protections are possible. But I think they also probably need more direction about the convention itself ought to work."

There are a lot of responses that would be unhelpful here. (Like, "Obviously" and "How should the convention work?" and "I gave them one rule, which was that they weren't allowed to actively attempt to kill each other, and at this rate I'm not opimistic about introducing others"). He settles on – 

"I know. I wanted to give them some freedom to figure that out for themselves – it's so hard to dictate form without influencing the results – but maybe I should be more comfortable with that, too. Catherine would say so."

"Yeah. It - would be better, to give them more of the power, if they had any idea what to do with it. But none of them actually want to be here. They didn't risk their lives and families for the chance to do this. So - it can't look like it looked in Galt, you understand? Because this isn't Galt, and they're not Galtans. They do have things that want, decisions they want to be allowed to make. But -"

"It's the same principle as the surveys, right? When you give a survey in Osirion, you can just ask something. If you ask it six ways, and also what people think their neighbors think, and also mindread them, you get different answers, but they're clustered, and the direct question usually tracks the mindread results better than the complicated tricks. In Cheliax, the difference between different survey types is much wider. Everyone is guessing what they're supposed to say. So if you want to know what they actually want, you have to do a lot more investigative work. And it makes sense to me that maybe here, you need to do more structural work. And maybe it does limit the results some, but - we didn't go into this expecting perfection. We can't. We're hoping, I think, for something that contains republicanism. Something genuinely informed by the people's genuine desires, which gave them a genuine voice in how they would be ruled. But it could be that they're not ready to do all the work we'd hope, in the process, and - maybe they do need to have some government that gets some of it right, for a while, to get along with, before they can do the thing completely right."

"My gods, I know it's not Galt!" 

He really didn't want to say it. These are ugly thoughts, dangerous thoughts, at any rate profoundly unhelpful thoughts, and now they're coming up like bile. 

"Everyone likes to talk about Galtan terror and Galtan anarchy, but the truth is that this wouldn't have happened in Galt. It would have been organized – that's what people don't understand – after the first six months – they remember the Rova massacres, but those didn't precipitate out of the pure air! The sections had to be armed, and there were the provincial soldiers, the tribunals in the commune, the – the prisons" – he remembers that terrible sleepless night, six men and a list of names, deciding who to release to the uncertain mercy of the streets and who to grant the peace of the final blade, watching the corpses pile up through the small dark hours, not knowing if it would be Chelish troops in the streets tomorrow and their heads on a far crueler block. 

"You could say the people of Galt acted without compassion, without mercy – fine – but the very worst of it happened because we had an invading army at our gates and we were all about to be maledicted or slaughtered. Not when we were safe – and, believe me, we knew the difference. Even at our worst, we were better than this. Westcrown never once took to the streets when it actually mattered. It's like that everywhere, except maybe Ravounel and Pezzack. The people of Cheliax are pathetic rank selfish cowards, and I never for one moment expected that they would produce something perfect or even particularly good – 

– And that's not the point. You don't earn freedom by being good enough for it. Just the opposite: they're vile and debased because they've never been free. Freedom is a skill – a muscle – one that's atrophied for seventy years of infernal rule and millenia of gentler tyranny before that. If they think they're dancing to the mad archmage's tune they'll never learn to use it. Do you think we didn't have the same problem in Galt? They're not stupid: they'll know if we're trying to keep them on a leash. And – I still don't think you're wrong – but – they lesson they will learn is that we told them they were free, and we lied, and that they're supposed to measure an invisible line and carefully prune away the pieces of their souls that tell them they deserve to cross it. They'll be good at that. They've practiced all their lives." 

She meant that Galt did it better! Galt was a much easier situation in which to get this right, because the people involved wanted it and were willing to fight for it! Imposing popular rule on a people that doesn't want it is very nearly a contradiction in terms, and of course it's going to go worse this time! But -

She has been thinking of this all wrong. When Naima doesn't want to do her job, or work on her projects, it is because the process is awful and painful and she hates it, not because she's afraid that she'll fail. The work will occur if she does it, and in any case cannot possibly make anything worse. She had thought - she was asking Elie to do something very awful, something that would make him want to collapse, something that would cause him constant pain. So, it was her job to make the pain bearable, to provide relief. To make the process less painful so that he could get through it. Then it would be over, and he could know he did his best.

But it is not enough to have tried, then. This is the only chance; he cannot try again next year. So he is afraid of how it ends. Of having taken his one shot at making his glorious dream a reality, and instead destroying any credibility the idea had left. No more dream, then. No more republics, reaching towards the sun. Only Andoran, with its pirates and its nobles and its children dying in the streets. Only a chained Cheliax, which walks, but could have flown.

"Is the thing that you need for the Chelish people to be free, and safe?"

Yes. 

"I don't want to say that, since I'll have to get by without it." 

"We thought for a long time we would need to get by without a Cheliax that wasn't ruled by hell!"

" - look. Fine. I can't give you a free Cheliax. Only the six hundred people in that convention hall, and the fifteen million people outside it, can give you anything resembling a free Cheliax. But if that's the thing you need, and you need it more than you have ever needed anything but the defeat of Hell, and you don't think it can be achieved without a people that feels safe and not panicking, then - I don't know if I can give you that, either. But I have not tried. Not like I would try if I had been thinking about it like that."

He's really a very lucky man. 

"It's not so bad as that. I needed a free Galt more at one time, or I thought I did – but I don't think it makes sense to say you need something, if in time you can live happily and never have it. There are a lot of things I want and can't have. The problem is really that we've been too succesful. One gets out of the habit of living with failure." 

"I certainly hope you can go back to being happy if you fail, or if you succeed only incompletely. But if you only get one chance at this, and want it very very badly to succeed, or need to know that you failed honestly, having given it the best shot anyone could -"

"You need to decide what you're requiring of people, and tell them. If invisible lines will kill the whole project, then tell them exactly where the lines are. If they can't go home until they have a constitution, then explain to them what a constitution is. Accept that their freedom is not unlimited, as Ines's freedom is not unlimited. But tell them what freedoms they do and do not have, and let them work within the space we can honestly promise them."

"I need to talk to Rasima. I wish I had been thinking about it this way six months ago. I will probably go grovel at the Keleshite Emperor and ask for a small army of Serenite clerics. There are a lot of people I can ask favors from once if something is important."

"I don't know what freedoms they do and do not have! That's Catherine's job! I don't run this country! And the people who live here aren't children. We none of us have unlimited freedom, but it is my – not my right, my obligation, to help Ines learn to exercise hers while she lacks the wisdom to act in her own interests. These are adult men and women, and even if they don't know what they want, I don't have any more right to tell them than they have to tell me – and I don't even think that's the problem. At least half of them know exactly what they want, and it's to murder and tyrannize their fellow men as much as they can get away with. Wherever I draw the line, they'll do their level best to cause as much damage as they can without crossing it. What do you think Wain was doing? What do you think her enemies are doing now? 

"And it's the obligation of a government to tell them what they can and cannot get away with, whatever it is they want. - but that's not you, you're right. I will speak to Catherine and see what visible lines can be posted. I suppose in that case you only need to tell them what they're here to do."

"Which I should have done from the beginning. I think I've been avoiding it because I know – it won't matter, will it? I can't give them something they don't want." 

"I think it will matter. I don't think it will be enough. But the next thing might, or the next, but only if enough of the other pieces are in place. They're not going to grow in all at once."

"I'm sorry for lecturing you. That isn't what I meant to do at all. I meant to help you think about anything else, really, and tell you I think you're doing something very hard, and that I admire you for it. If you need Cheliax tended to more than yourself, right now, then that's what I'll do."

"Will bringing the children help at all, or do you want to be alone? I was - thinking about what I would need, really."

"I'd like to see the children. It's good to remind myself there are some things in my life I'm not failing at. ...You shouldn't burn your favors on this. A pack of Sarenite priests would be helpful, of course, but I don't think the calculus is actually different than it was yesterday. They won't make the convention more likely to go well." 

"They won't. But they'll affect how people respond to what you create here. Not immediately, but in terms of what the country that abides by it looks like, when people make their assessments in ten or twenty years. I suspect a mess of a constitution looks very different ruling a people that feels secure and has what it needs, and a people that has nothing and would not be equipped to follow even a perfect one. I do wish I'd done it earlier, but I'll do what I can. Not just that, it's just the most obvious thing."

"Well, can you get them for ten or twenty years, or can you get them for a week? A month?" 

"Well I don't know, I haven't asked. I was thinking more like two years, off the top of my head, I bet that's short enough to get and long enough to catechize a first crop of replacements."

" – Oh. That would be helpful. You should do it, if you think now's the right time, but I don't want you to do it for me." 

"Élie, I don't actually habitually pick battles because of how objectively important they are. I can see why you -everyone, really - might be confused on this point, but I don't, and don't especially want to move even further in the direction. I am inclined to say that this is, actually, the best likely use of a favor from the Emperor of Kelesh any time soon, but favors I've earned from the Emperor of Kelesh aren't actually public property, and I don't know that I especially plan to treat them as such."