"That's a very good question. I want to have been less of an idiot yesterday. I need – 

– well, it doesn't matter. Has your staff figured out how far we're behind?"

"Quarter million, but we're optimistic about fixing it quickly. You're the person best equipped to do it, by optimizing your spell usage and getting as many Fabricate castings out as possible. They pointed out that you shouldn't be spending seventh circle spells on plane shifting in and out of the demiplane, we should get you a cleric for it. I think you should probably also hire a secretary capable of keeping your schedule and helping optimize things like that, so you don't have to do all of it yourself. And they want to explore interplanar fabricate trade, and see if we can establish something with the elemental plane of earth."

"There was also some discussion of - your spells refresh when you sleep, so we can make truly enormous amounts of money by giving you extra days here and insistently allocating spells for fabricate. But there are, you know, costs to that one, and we should think about how much we want to deploy it."

"What I should do is give the demiplane an entrance – I've been avoiding that for security reasons – and then I can access it by teleport and we can use the cleric somewhere else. Are there any fifth-circle clerics we can get who we haven't been using? Do you know how much I'd make if I stayed here and fabricated things until the convention resumes?"

"We're going to arrange for at least one fifth-circle cleric of Kofusachi, and make plans to construct a warehouse in Tian Xia dedicated to silk. I expect there are more we could get if we wanted them, really. If you literally did nothing else... around a million, I think, though it's difficult to account for prices continuing to go down."

"A bit over a month for me. That's not so bad. My staff won't be happy, though."

"I imagine not. I'm not necessarily saying you should do it, depending on what else you're doing."

"The teleportation circle team can run without me for a few days, if it has to – and I should step out for updates at least once a sidereal day in any case. For my other projects, it'll probably help. I'm behind on everything because of the convention." 

She looks out the frost-covered window, frowning.

"Yeah, alright. You should probably be out several times tomorrow, I suspect they'll end up needing you for more logistical things. But if you want to take a month in here, you can take a month. You have to bring the children, though. And make the demiplane bigger, because it's too small for them to spend a month in here right now."

"And here I thought we were trying to fix our our horrifying financial shortfall." 

"We are. You'll make more, in the long term - even the quite short term, really - if the demiplane is a place where you can spend extended amounts of time without going insane."

" - no, that's dishonest, and you deserve better. I mean, it's true, and I stand by it, but it's not why I said it, no. I said it because I am worried you are trying to do penance by spending a month of your life being miserable about the riots for no reason, and that sounds not only terrible for you, it sounds terrible for everyone else, too. But you're welcome to argue the point if that's not what you're doing."

"I don't think it's best for the children to keep them cooped up in here for a month with just me and the nurse, even if I do make it bigger. I'd prefer it if they could visit, of course, but I really don't think my sanity is at risk."  

"The children spend the vast majority of their time in the company of servants right now. I don't think it's healthy for them, and I don't see that losing access to the grounds is worse for them than barely spending time with their parents. Really I think we should rework our entire schedule so that we're consistently aging at the same rate as them, and have them in the demiplane probably a good two thirds of the time, but that's a different conversation. Ask them, if you like, whether they want to take a vacation with you for a month in the demiplane, and let them out on your next stop to the fabricate warehouse in Alexandria if they change their minds, but I think they will jump at the chance."

"I don't expect you to lose your hold on reality. I expect you to become tired, and despairing, and sloppy, and to make mistakes you would not have made if you had taken better care of yourself."

I can take care of myself once I've taken care of the rest of the situation I've caused – is what he wants to say, but doesn't seem likely to reassure Naima. The truth is – 

"There is absolutely nothing in the world I want more than to spend a month working on pure magical research without having to think about or speak to anyone involved with the constitutional convention. Which is why I'm not at all sure it's what I ought to be doing." 

"Do you have any reason to think it's not what you should be doing, besides the fact that you want it?"

"...the persistent fear that everything's going to explode again the minute I take my eyes off it?"

"...okay, that makes sense. I don't think it's helpful, but I can understand it."

"I think that to the extent that things might blow up again, that is Catherine's responsibility to deal with, not yours, and everyone else is on the lookout for more problems in the city now, too. Some things, like the legal proceedings involving convention delegates, you ought to have some involvement in, if possible. But you shouldn't spend four days stressing about them and then come back to the convention even more stressed out than you were before."

"The argument I want to make to you is that you matter quite a lot to me, and shouldn't be neglecting yourself and needlessly making this process more rather than less painful, especially when the less painful things are what other people actually need from you. You began this conversation by saying that what you need doesn't matter, and this would be wrong even absolutely nobody else depended on you having what you need. The argument that I think may be more convincing to you is that you will be much worse at running the convention if you run it while neglecting your needs and as stressed out as humanly possible. You will make more mistakes, and be less patient, and less thoughtful, and less wise. I didn't tell you to do this because I wanted you to suffer, I told you to do it because I thought you were the only person in the world who might be able to pull it off. But you only might, Elie. This is the sort of battle that requires one to be at their very best, and therefore it's of vital importance to everyone that you take care of yourself while you do it, insofar as that's possible."

"I'm not trying to punish myself. Besides, I managed to cause the events of the day before yesterday on the a full night's sleep. I'm perfectly pleased to spend a month in the demiplane if that's what everyone needs from me, but this isn't happening because I neglected myself, and I'd like to be very clear: providing for my own comfort won't stop it from happening again." 

"No, you're right, it won't. But I'm afraid your ability to handle it will get worse, if you do nothing else. And anyway, I..."

"...I'm really really glad that you created the demiplane. I don't think I have thanked you enough times for it yet. I don't actually want you to be out of communication for three days, after you have the conversations you need to have tomorrow. But I'll bear it, and I'll visit at night, because it is what everyone else needs, and I think it is what you need, too. But - I do also want to have a conversation about how we should use it going forward. I am worried about the structure of our lives in general, I'm just - only bringing it up now because Ishani said something and I haven't been talking to anyone enough to realize that we should rework our entire schedule to account for the demiplane, and rework the demiplane to make full use of it. I don't have to have that conversation tonight, if it isn't what you need, because I do think that you are doing something extremely important, and I do think that it is hurting you, and I would want to do whatever I could to make it bearable even if didn't, in fact, matter to anyone else. But we should have it at some point."

...He has no idea what he has to say to get this point across.

"The thing that is hurting me has already happened. It is happening now. It is going to keep happening no matter how much time I spend in or out of demiplanes. If you don't want me to spend a month in the demiplane, that matters, and if I am being a neglectful father, that matters, and if a month in time dilation makes me miserable, I agree that that matters, but it is not the problem here or even particularly closely related to it."

" - yes. I understand that the thing that is hurting you is has happened, is continuing to happen, and that things like it are going to continue happening. That's why I think it's important to figure out how to make this awful thing we've all asked of you more sustainable, and every other awful thing we've asked of you more sustainable. I'm not sure if - are you saying that that's impossible, or that the thing you need me to do right now is ignore the problem where you're miserable and focus directly on any problems the convention is causing, or something else?"

"I'm sorry I snapped at you. 

– The thing is, I don't think you've been asking very much of me at all. I was the one who wanted to have a constitutional convention, and I was the one who wanted to have it now. I still stand by that – though I'm less certain than I was – but I know it means that from their perspective everyone else is putting up with a great deal of pain and inconvenience, and my projects that will most directly make the world healthy and rich are all behind schedule, and generally you're all suffering quite a lot so I can play the mad Galtan. I'm not here because anyone made me do anything, and nobody owes me a way out." 

"...it is also true that I wouldn't have asked you to do this for anyone else's sake, yes. If I thought it wasn't important to you, I would not have asked you to do it for anyone else's sake, no. But it is important to you. And - "

"Elie, I have done a lot of things because they were important to you. Not, mostly, because they were the most important things that we could do, although many of them were that. But at least as much because I want to help you with your goals, because I care about you. And I intend to go right on doing that, even when it hurts. But - that is why I am doing this with you. So if it's also hurting you - and I knew it would, I just believed that it was the sort of thing that you had to do for yourself even if it hurt you - then it matters a lot to me, what I can do to support you in it."

"In general, there is a thing that I need from you. I need you to make this place one where we can reasonably and happily live out a large part of our lives, because the world needs us very badly, and I'm willing to help it, but - I intend to have many lives with you, right now, but I will only get this one once. And I do mean to spend a large portion of this one on having a family with you, and the best way I see to do that without neglecting the rest of the world is to make this place one where we can do that, and line our schedules up such that you and I and the children are all aging at the same rate and can live our lives together, as they should be, because I think we can do it without inconveniencing the world all that much, really."

"So I do want to talk about that. But I don't need it today. Today - regardless of whose fault it is or whether you deserve any particular pity for it - you are having an awful day, and need more than usual, and I want to prioritize giving you whatever will be most helpful to you. Then, if you are closer to all right later - maybe on Sunday, when I can plausibly spend eight or nine days with you and the children - we can talk more about what I need. But today I want to know what you need, and give you as much of it as I can."

"....also if you're thinking of adding an entrance and making major security tradeoffs I'd like to ask if I can use this place for remedy research work, which I've been reminded that I'm also neglecting very badly and potentially causing millions of deaths as a result, but that's another complicated discussion and I also don't need to have it right now."

"Of course. ...We're definitely going to need the expansion. I could bring some of my people in, why not. We could do it in shifts." 

"I think we should. I understand why we haven't, and that it'll set us back a bit, but I think it'll make everything else easier. I don't need my people using it imminently, just - I've been neglecting the project pretty badly for a long time."

"...Do you think Catherine was right, and we should have waited another few years?"

"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."

"I mean that I don't want you to do it on my behalf, because you are already doing more than I would ever dare to ask to help me rebuild this godsforsaken country, and the last thing I need right now is to know I'm taking even more resources from you that I will not be able to repay. That's not a reason to deprive the Chelish people of healing, so you should do it if you think it's best, but not if it's just to make me feel better."

"...Élie, we're married. I'm not - keeping a ledger of resources that you owe me somewhere. I'm not saying I'll do it out of obligation to you, either. I enjoy being able to give you things you value. Much more than I enjoy fulfilling most of my other obligations, really. I can certainly promise you're not spending down favors with me that you'll need later, I'm just not going to tell you that I'm primarily motivated by bloodless altruism when I'm motivated by finding it personally fulfilling, and then, you know, also incidentally think that it's probably a good idea now that I've thought about it."

" - do you think I'm meddling in this country this much as a favor?"

"No, of course not – but I know that you care about the remedies more and you're doing this instead. I hadn't assumed it was all because of me, or even mostly because of me, but it can't be easy for you and I don't want the end result of everything that happened today to be that you had to sacrifice even more because I made a mistake." 

She is silent for a - pretty uncharacteristic amount of time for her, really.

"I would actually really prefer it if you didn't try to decide for me which things I care most about. I'm - possibly sorry I told you? Because you're thinking about this completely wrong. There is no ledger. There is no sacrifice. There is me, doing what is in many senses my favorite thing in all the world, which is solving problems for the people I care about and then basking in the people I care about being momentarily impressed and grateful for my hard work. You can ask me to, instead of doing my favorite thing, do the same thing for reasons that make it miserable instead of satisfying, but in fact I absolutely refuse to frame it that way, because that's stupid. If it will actively cause you pain for me to do something because I want to help you, then I'll do it for some other reason that isn't either of those, and I will not tell you what it is."

"I can assure you that this doesn't trade off against the remedies at all. The only thing that really matters on that front is a demiplane that I can do research in."

"I'm not asking you to do anything! You should do it if you want to and not if you don't, and if the fact that it won't solve my problem makes you not want to do it, you're under no obligation. I'm asking – actually, this whole time, I think I've been asking you to stop treating me like the problem that needs to be solved. I very badly want the convention to go well. I'm going to do my best to see that it was. It probably won't. I will be miserable about it for some time, and then I will get better – I know that, because I've done it before. It'll be easier, since this time I have something to live for, but it can't be prevented. I don't even think it should be. If this thing fails – if it fails because of me – then it deserves my grief." 

"Okay. That's fair, and I'm sorry. If you do need anything, let me know."

"We need a load of fabricates every two and a half hours at the Alexandria warehouse, and a demiplane expansion when convenient. I'll move the children to Dahab's house on the island, for the week, so you can pick them up and drop them off there as convenient. Good?"

"That's good. ...I am always very grateful for everything you do. I hope you know that." 

"I do. I am sorry, I didn't mean to make it worse."

Well. There's nothing to be fixed here, then.