They don't explain what they're taking Valia to, when they come to take her, and she considers resisting, but she thinks it's not allowed and while she'll accept doing something illegal when they try to rape her she doesn't want to put herself in the position of doing something illegal when they've just decided to move her to a different cell or something. She goes with them. Down another flight of stairs, to another windowless room, and there's a woman there, a cold and contemptuous important woman who is nonetheless a relief to see. The guards chain her to her chair and then leave. 

"Valia Wain?"

She nods. Would say something, actually, but she suddenly can't find her voice. 

Well, she's been hoping to stop having to be around people who keep kindly telling her she's not going to die and she's pretty sure she's gotten her wish now.

"I'm Her Majesty's Prosecutor Merixtell Canillo. You are charged with two hundred forty one wrongful deaths - that number almost certain to increase as search efforts continue - with murder, with incitement to murder, with incitement to treason, and with treason, and with conspiring with your allies and confederates to achieve all of those same. They will all be similarly charged." They may or may not actually charge all of those, and they don't actually know yet if Wain conspired with anyone; there's no rule she has to say things that are true. 

Oh no oh no oh no oh no of course they knew about Alicia and -

- no, it's possible they didn't know, it's possible they're just trying to get her to say something - 

It would be convenient right now if the girl was a bit more of an idiot, but everyone's an idiot when they've gone long enough without sleep. Alicia, that's something to start with, and more where it came from probably. "You were permitted to meet with your lawyer. Did she explain the charges to you?"

"When I met with my lawyer no one had told us yet of any charges, ma'am."

"She'll be informed of them in writing. Have your friends retained the same attorney, or a different one? The recommendation in criminal conspiracy cases is that you each secure your own attorney; for your attorney will attempt to establish your innocence perhaps at Miss Alicia's expense, and hers to establish her innocence at yours."

"I don't - I didn't ask my lawyer to -" did Lluisa tell the prosecutors about Alicia and Victoria? She was an idiot, to assume that Lluisa wouldn't do that because she had a spell for it, what does a spell mean -

"We will get this over with more quickly if you are competent to speak in complete sentences, Miss Wain. If you had been inclined to incoherent stuttering all along, two hundred forty dead men would live; but you were by all accounts a very good speaker, and I'm sure you're capable of it now. You did not ask your lawyer to craft a defense at the expense of your associates, Alicia and Victoria, with whom you are charged with conspiring in treason, incitement, etcetera."

"I did not ask that of my lawyer."

"If you wanted to protect them, the thing you should have asked of your lawyer is to negotiate with the prosecution to confess your full responsibility for all of your crimes, and absolve them of any part in them. Yours, Wain, is the name that was on every tongue as they marched through the city murdering, looting and rebelling against the Queen; we've charged conspiracy because you did have co-conspirators, but it's not the element of this situation that's most important to us. If you accept full responsibility for this, perhaps the charges against them can be dropped."

Valia is not an idiot and can tell when she is being obviously manipulated. That awareness does not create any obvious escape route from the manipulation.  If it's a real offer she'll take it; if it's a lie then she of course shouldn't; it's probably a lie, but how probably?

"I will bear that in mind, ma'am."

"Was it Victoria's idea, to write your speech down and distribute it within the convention hall to other delegates?"

"No."

"Alicia's?"

"No."

"Yours, then."

When you're confused you should try to think, not just - reflexively do the thing in front of you, especially not when the enemy put it there. It probably does not help Alicia or Victoria to confess to any - crimes? Was making copies of her speech for the floor a crime? Other delegates did it all the time! It might help them to make a deal in which she confesses, but only if the deal is actually in ink. And she trusts the person who read it to her. Maybe Blai - no, Blai was recently an Asmodean. Maybe Feliu.

She doesn't answer.

"Valia. You are a subject of a Lawful Good Queen. You betrayed her, spit in her face, killed her people by the hundreds, and in response She has protected you, permitted you to write letters and hire lawyers and seek the counsel of anyone you'd seek it from. Do you have complaints about your treatment, in Her custody?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then you owe the Queen the truth. It is Our solemn duty to make this city safe, and bring to justice its murderers, and more than that to understand how this came to pass, that no one need fear it again. Did you intend for hundreds of people to die?"

"No!"

"Then tell me what you did intend."

"I don't - it's hard to think about, right, because - so much happened - but I know I didn't intend the riots, because Feliu said to me afterwards, if the speech is published there'll be riots in Westcrown, and I was very surprised that he thought so. And I didn't intend treason against the Queen because the Duchess of Chelam said, during the debate over the speech, that one ought to rebel against Asmodeus and not against our Lawful Good queen who freed us from Asmodeus, and I didn't even - understand what she was getting at - because in my mind I wasn't calling for rebellion against the Queen. I - so people were scared of the committee on excising diabolism, right. One of the delegates on it had told us she was scared that we were going to just end up - condemning everyone in the whole country as not good enough. And I talked to the Inquisitor Shawil, and he said that we needed to - focus on a few important evils. 

So the point of the speech was to let everybody know that the excising diabolism committee wasn't about making them scared. It's not - good for people to be scared. That we were focused on people who were - still in positions of power and Evil and doing awful things, that no one else had anything to fear from us. And - to put the evil nobles on notice, I guess. That even if they were powerful and the people of Cheliax were weak, that it wouldn't always be that way."

"That some day the people of Cheliax would rise up against them and kill them, if they didn't repent and quit their titles and flee to the Worldwound. I read the speech. It's very well composed."

"Yes. But if anyone had asked me, 'should we kill them right now' I'd have said no, because - well firstly because you can't very well tell people to repent and then kill them before they've even had the chance to, and because - I imagined their own people rising up against them? Because those are the people who know what they did. Every person in Pezzack can tell you the crimes of the nobles of Pezzack."

She looks animated, by that. Sincere. Ready to give a sermon. "The old nobility of Pezzack? Under House Thrune?"

"Yes. The thing is, that when a nobleman orders one of his servants beaten slowly to death because he spilled a glass of wine, he hardly remembers it. It would never occur to him that anyone else would remember it either; the people are nothing, to him, and so he imagines we are also nothing to each other. But that's not true. That servant had a mother, and one of the other servants knows her, and slips out that evening to tell her what happened so she doesn't just have to wonder why her son never comes home; and that servant had brothers, and sisters, and a lover, and a baby named four months later after him, and they remember. They remember without doing anything, for a long time, because they know it's hopeless, but ten years later, when the moment comes, they remember. All across Cheliax, people remember, and the Queen's amnesty means nothing to them because of course what was done to them was never a crime in the first place."

"And someday the people will rise up and get vengeance for all of the crimes they remember but no one else does."

"Yes. And - it would be better if we could avoid that. It would be better if they would repent and go to the Worldwound and escape damnation. I have been told that some of them are trying to do the right thing now, with the support of the Church, and I think it is a great evil, to speak in condemnation of a man when he has changed his ways. But the ones who haven't changed their ways - and they haven't all changed their ways, come on, have you ever met a noble? - I do think that some day the people will rise up against them."

"And you will be with them?"

.....not her too, of all people. "I'll be dead. Obviously."

"Do you intend at trial to admit your guilt, then?"

"You should present my lawyer with that deal you mentioned, if it's real. But - my lawyer said" and maybe I was a naive idiot to believe her "that at trial she would defend the Law, not me, and Her Majesty, because - Her Majesty's decrees have no meaning, if we cannot refer to them to determine guilt and innocence. And that I am innocent, by Her Majesty's decrees."

"So you wish to be found innocent, but only if you truly are. That is commendable. I cannot say that I share your lawyer's reading of Her Majesty's decrees. There was a problem in the city, you know, with people issuing denunciations of others, hoping that someone would follow up. It is different, I think, than the matter you spoke of in Pezzack. One thing for a grieving relative to remember a grievance and eventually take his own revenge for it; another entirely, for him to whisper it out onto the air hoping that some other man more inclined to murder takes it up, without checking if it's a true grievance or a false one. One thing for you to go burn a noble's manor to the ground; another for you to call on others to do it. And it sounds like you did intend that the evil nobles of Cheliax be killed."

"I'm not sure. I'm sure that sounds - dishonest - but it's - hard to remember not knowing the things I know now - I know now that it would lead to lots of deaths if the people of Menador, the families of their victims, rose up against them, because the archmages say that there is nothing else that can protect the people against the monsters and things coming out of Nidal. And they're trying to repent, and the church is working with them, and you can't betray people who are trying to work with you."

"What if there is some noble who has killed servants for careless mistakes, and who is not trying to repent, and who is not necessary to keep the people safe from monsters?"

"Is it treason against a Lawful Good queen to hope an evil man like that is gone, and never again has the power to hurt anyone? I know I should - try reporting him to the Queen first in case she just didn't know about it."

Is it treason to call for armed rebellion against the rightful lord of your lands if he killed a servant once and isn't sorry? Yes! It is treason! Very nearly the definition of it! "So you would petition Her Majesty for redress first, and go with pitchforks and torches and kill the man only if Her Majesty declined to act?"

"Yes. I think one of the most important errors was - I assumed that Her Majesty didn't have the power to do something about all the evil nobles. I couldn't think of a Lawful Good reason for them to all be in place, so I assumed that it wasn't her will at all, and that her will would not be subverted in fixing it - just like, you know, if you run across bandits on the roads, you don't think 'well, maybe Her Majesty likes these bandits and that's why they're here', you just figure that word hasn't gotten out yet and you should either kill them yourself or get word out, depending."

"If you had understood that Her Majesty had the power to replace the nobles, then you would have understood your demand for their replacement to be rebellion against Her Majesty."

"Well if I'd understood she had the power to replace the nobles I'd have just asked her to do that!"

This interrogation is going well, in that the girl is definitely a traitor and is happy to discuss the precise boundaries of her treasonous convictions, but is not something they want to do in public in front of the riotous people of Westcrown. Luckily Canillo's job is just to get as much as she can; other people will figure out how to use it to hang her. "What about Ibarra? You denounced him in your speech, and of course people went to try to kill him, but he wasn't an evil noble."

"I didn't expect them to try that." If there's a powerful wizard who's a Norgorber cultist going around, getting together a posse to go after him is very reasonable, but she shouldn't say it.

It doesn't actually matter if she says it or not. "What did you intend, when you denounced him to a crowd as a Norgorber cultist?"

"That if he do Norgorber cultist sorts of things at the convention the other delegates would be wise to him and on the lookout for it."

"But surely it had occurred to you that the men might get together a posse and go after him, as that's what any reasonable men would do if they learned there was a Norgorber cultist in their midst."

"The Archduke wouldn't even agree that it was good reason to not have him on our committee, so I figured that people just didn't actually think it was very bad to be a Norgorber cultist."

"I don't really think you're that foolish. I think you're lying to me and yourself to try to evade justice. You knew full well that any reasonable person would round up his friends and try to be rid of a Norgorber cultist who'd burned children to death in their homes. You praised the courage of the people of Cheliax, and that's the courage you meant."

The people of Pezzack would certainly have done that. She hadn't, in fact, been expecting the people of Westcrown to, but she's not sure why not. Maybe just because the Archmage Cotonnet had asserted that the delegates would be protected, and she'd assumed he meant some archmage thing by that. It wouldn't have surprised her if the first mob to attack a delegate all turned into frogs or something; isn't that the kind of thing archmages did?

She shakes her head.

"When we agreed that you owed the Queen the truth, Valia, I meant all of it, the parts that speak poorly of you along with the parts that speak well of you. Anyone clever and courageous and capable enough to light a city aflame on her second day visiting it has the courage to admit she did not do it while full purely of high minded ideals and convenient misconceptions."

"I'm not saying that! I was absolutely being - small-minded and willfully ignorant. But I do not think I was specifically intending to get Ibarra killed." Not that she'd have been sad if he was killed. Evil powerful wizards who are trying to make everything go as badly as possible really do seem a uniquely terrible idea to put in charge of writing the country's new code of laws. "Anyway we read the decrees very carefully, because I was trying to obey the Queen, and it would obviously be prohibited to say falsely of someone that he's a Norgorber cultist, but I think it was only illegal to say truthfully of someone if I said people should do something about it, or, uh, I forget the phrasing but said it and didn't have any reason for saying it other than to get people to do something about it, so I was careful to make it clear that I was saying it because if the committees went badly, maybe it was because of the Norgorber cultist who wanted to make things go badly, and I was pretty sure that made it legal to say, if you had a good reason that wasn't about stirring up trouble."

"Do you defend your denunciation of Blanxart on similar grounds? He's the one you actually did get killed."

"I don't even think it's denouncing somebody to say that he didn't want the Norgorber cultist removed from a committee! No one would round up a posse about that even in places where people do handle problems themselves!"

"You weren't intending to gently imply he was perhaps a bit of a Norgorber cultist himself?"

"I don't know any more about him than what I said, and didn't mean to say more than that." Well, she's pretty sure he sucks, because he's an archduke. 

"Valia, I would like you to imagine the perspective of a brave person of Westcrown, reading your speech after you gave it. I will read a bit of it to you. 

If you swore your fealty to Abrogail Thrune and still possess the lands, slaves, titles and riches that you stole under her auspices, and you are not repentant, then you ought to be afraid. If you are a devilspawn, you need not be afraid because you are a devilspawn, but you should be afraid because you are an evil titled devilspawn. If you came to the conference cloaked in magic to conceal your Evil, with the intent to extend the suffering of the people of Cheliax, as Delegate Ibarra did, as he was not alone in doing, you should be afraid. If you burn children to death in their homes, you should be afraid. If you worship Norgorber, you should be afraid. If you worship any power of Hell, you should be afraid, and if you worship Asmodeus you should certainly be afraid.

Afraid of what? Afraid of me?  I am not powerful; any man strong enough to radiate Evil is strong enough to kill me in one blow.

Afraid of Elie Cotonnet? No, for he invited you all, and he has said that we are forbidden from requesting that you be expelled, or indeed from debating whether your deeds and your history ought to be an impediment to your participation. 

You should be afraid of the people of Cheliax.

 For they are not in the end different from the people of Pezzack; we are all one people. The people of Cheliax know what you did to them. They witness how you have prospered from it. The only thing that stays them from retaliation is the fear that they are, themselves, as guilty as you, and as damned. But they aren't, so your peace is a lie. If I were you I would repent while you still can. I would give up your lands and your titles and your slaves and your riches; I would cease to impede the functioning of this convention with your petty Evil dealings; I would go to the Worldwound where your victims cannot reach you. That is my advice.

But to everyone else my advice is, be unafraid. This is our country. We are a strong people, a brave people, a good people. Asmodeus always feared us, and all the riches of Hell still left his grip so weak one theatre-hall of people could shake a city free of it. 

What do you suppose this brave person of Westcrown would conclude that you want them to do?"

Oh.

She hadn't actually revisited the speech, in her memory. She'd been busy thinking about what Feliu said, about what Lord Cansellarion said, about whether she is going to get Alicia and Victoria killed along with her. She had remembered the conversations that went into the speech, and the decrees they'd consulted, and -

They would think that they ought to get their friends together and stop the Evil people.

She shouldn't say it - or, she shouldn't say it if she wants to be found innocent, but she won't be found innocent anyway, and - Lluisa wanted to serve the Law, not the cause of Valia surviving -

"Valia, many of these men are going to go to trial themselves, for the things that they did. Are you going to tell me that they were fools, to read that speech and think you were warning them of a great evil they ought to get together with their friends and go and fight? That they are liars, when they testify that they believed you wanted them to do it?"

"No."

"What would a man who read your words believe you wanted him to do?"

"He would believe I wanted him to stop the powerful Evil people."

"And you did want that."

"I wanted them to go to the Worldwound -"

"You had some quibbles about time, about process, there were things that you wanted to do first. You imagined that the speech would lead men to hushed planning, that they would wait for further opportunity to properly strike, that there was some rebellion in their power which was not rebellion against the Queen - because there is still Good in you, Valia Wain, and you knew it to be Evil to rebel against the Lawful Good queen, and so flinched away from the fact that you were doing that. You did not expect your words to bear this fruit that very night. But you wanted the enemies that you named to die, by the hands of the liberated people of Cheliax."

If they didn't repent. If they continued in their crimes. If they continued in twisting the convention in service of their evil aims. And she didn't name them, she very pointedly avoided naming people in the part where she was saying that people meeting those descriptions ought to be afraid. She did that to follow the law. 

"When I warn someone it is - with intent that they heed the warning."

"This is cowardice, Valia. You entreated people to be brave and then flee, yourself, to cower in your seat and pretend you are an ignorant little girl who has never seen violence. I have agreed already that you intended a process, that you intended more caution, that you did not plan for these men to die this night. But answer me what that man of Westcrown ought to have believed that you were asking of him."

"That he should kill the unrepentant Evil people still in power, and make his country free."

"Should he hang for that, Valia, for that outrageous misrepresentation of a priest of Iomedae's words?"

"No. No, please don't - they were trying to do the right thing. They trusted me to have checked carefully enough, before I warned them, they were trying to protect their families and their country and their freedom -"

"You are the one who called them forth to kill your enemies, and told them it was right."

"Yes."

"What they did, they did obeying you."

"Not - not all of them. But - some of them, yes."

"There is a rare spell, Valia Wain, that grants a man faculty in a language, including in reading it, even if he cannot read. I have arranged to have it cast on you, now, so that you can read, and sign, the confession that we have prepared for you."

"I thought you were going to negotiate that with my lawyer."

"We are discussing with your lawyer the situation of your co-conspirators. Accepting responsibility for your crimes will help them."

"I don't believe you."

"If you believe that you have been treated unfairly, or unlawfully, you can now write - and I will convey - your complaint directly to the Queen. But I think, Valia Wain, that you have been treated very fairly, and very lawfully; that you called on the people of this city to take up arms against Evildoers, and hundreds of them died for it, and that you have been asked only to assume responsibility for what you did, and offered only that if you accept responsibility we will deal more leniently with your co-conspirators, mindful of your primary guilt. We write that in the confession, too, so the state cannot later retreat on any assurances it has made you, and so that no one can say you were tortured, or falsely promised mercy - they'll say that anyway. But the document will be the truth of the matter, for people who know the workings of a Lawful Good state. We can put it down in writing right now, that you have accepted full responsibility for the riots in the hope that the Queen will deal more leniently with every other party to them." She starts to write.

Valia is confused, and scared, and angry. "Can I ask anyone for advice, in this? Friends of mine who can read?"

A scornful glare. "It is not the custom of Her Majesty's government that all criminals be surrounded for interrogation by their friends who can encourage them in obstinacy or in treason, no. We will give you a copy of your confession, so you can review it with them afterwards if you'd like."

"I see."

"I understand that it is a difficult and frightening thing, to admit one's guilt. It speaks well of you, that what has moved you when we spoke is your loyalty to the Queen and to the people who mistakenly relied on you. I have seen many such cases, and I hope it brings you some small comfort - they usually feel better, when the confession is done. By repentance we free our soul of our sins; you are a murderer, but you won't go before the Judge as one."

"I, uh, still can't read this."

She's not lying, either. She takes a second to focus on Wain's thoughts, and then - "Huh. Iset, can you get the prisoner some eyeglasses?"