"I have lived sixteen years under Asmodean rule and one year free of it.

Under Asmodean rule, it didn't matter if you were innocent. It didn't matter if you'd done nothing wrong at all. If you angered the wrong nobleman, if you offended the wrong priest, if you were defenseless or poor or someone no one would miss, they'd convict you just the same. When I was fifteen I saw an innocent woman tortured to death for a crime she did not commit, simply because she made a convenient scapegoat.

I had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that you would be different.

Valia Wain did not write her speech alone. She cannot read, but it was important to her that what she was saying was legal. And so we checked. It is no secret that I disagree with the Queen's decree on the twenty-ninth of Desnus, though perhaps she will have me arrested for saying so. But unjust laws are still the law, and Delegate Wain and I reviewed her speech to ensure she complied with it.

If rioters somehow managed to interpret her speech as a command for them to murder innocent people, then prosecute the rioters. Prosecute those who whipped up the mob against innocents. Prosecute those who strung up men who had done no wrong from the lamp-posts. Those men did Evil, and they should face justice for it.

But it was those men who did Evil, not Valia Wain.

Valia Wain killed no innocents. Valia Wain did not tell them to kill innocents. Valia Wain did not, in fact, even tell them to kill the guilty. Valia Wain stood before us and told us that Evildoers ought to go to the Worldwound far away from the people they'd hurt.

You have pardoned a man who burned innocent children to death in their homes, and now you seek to put an innocent woman to death for a speech which broke no laws, simply because wicked men used it as an excuse to do Evil.

A few days ago someone warned me about the risk of repeating the Galtan Terror. At the time I thought that was silly. That it couldn't possibly be difficult to kill the guilty and not the innocent. What I didn't realize was that those in power would be willing to kill a priestess of Iomedae over someone else's actions, and that most people would just sit back and let it happen.

It is not too late to do justice here. It is not too late to distinguish yourselves from the tyranny of Asmodeus. But if you kill her, it will be.

Thank you."