Select Wain has a good point with her suicidal, eloquent speech.

It's precisely wrong in Lluïsa's case, but pointedly so.

The Queen is Mephistopheles. (Maybe. But when you think about it, who else was ever going to overthrow Asmodeus in any way?)

Fine. Mephistopheles owns her soul; she is not free, and never will be.

So it's Mephistopheles looking out from behind Magistrate Puigdemont's eyes over the dominate. What can he do? Take her soul again? Threaten her with an eternity in Hell? No, and no. That is guaranteed, and therefore irrelevant.

"All right. That at least one Evil noble would end up dead because your speech would inspire people to develop the virtue of being indifferent to the consequences of their actions, and then go and kill them."

"That's not what the virtue is but I agree that I expected that as a consequence of my speech changing peoples' hearts and knowledge, they would become less likely to cooperate with injustice and more likely to fight it. And depending how exactly things happened and whether that virtue got there ahead of some other ones - then, if I'd been right that Cheliax had Evil nobles, I'd have expected to make it more likely someone fought them."

"So you got what you expected, just much faster, and with a different concept of what made someone a worthy target. Unjust bankers, unjust lawyers, unjust lawmen, unjust devilspawn...three hundred people dead, because you succeeded at teaching them this virtue of yours."

"I made a great many very foolish mistakes. I do not think the speech was illegal but of course it was a terrible error."

"Do you imagine that mobs would have burned the city down, but for your words?"

"No."

"Do you agree that you, in writing your speech, in arranging for your speech to be distributed, made the people you denounced in your speech immediate targets for that night's mobs?"

"If I'd expected mobs at all I'd have expected them to go after the people I said should be afraid."

"What, then, is this defense of innocence? You meant for the terrific violence that resulted from your speech to be slightly more convenient, and more distant, and less manifestly destructive and unreasonable. But you intended it."

"I wasn't actually planning, sir, to say I was innocent, but my lawyer thinks so, and she's a lawyer, and I'm not."

"I have no further questions."

At the last, the client's trust.

She is innocent, she has to be, they checked — she checked — could she have stopped this if she knew more about the law—

"You said you wanted your speech distributed throughout the country. What did you do to bring this about?"

"- oh, nothing, your honor, because after I gave it Feliu told me it was dangerous and it might inspire riots if it was spread through the city, so I declined to give it again at the Church of Shelyn, and I didn't help with any pamphlets. But it was too late."

"Do you know anything about how it made it to the streets?"

"Well, there were lots of scribes in the room, and lots of copies circulating, and I guess someone took it out of the halls, or was watching the halls with magic. But I don't know anything that anyone who was there doesn't know."

"The copies that were distributed in the hall when you gave the speech, did you write and copy those yourself?"

"I can't write, sir, so I couldn't do any of the scribing myself. I did give the scribes the copy the other delegates and I had put to paper when we wrote the speech."

"Did you tell anyone else of your intent to spread it to the streets, before changing your mind about whether to do that?"

"When we were planning the speech we planned it to follow the pamphlet rules too because we wanted to have it as a pamphlet, but after I gave it Feliu warned me before I did anything else to spread it."

"Do you believe the delegates who helped you compose your speech might have arranged to spread it outside the convention hall?"

"I don't think so, your honor, because they were arrested and interrogated and then released, and probably they wouldn't have been released if they had spread the copies, since it's not settled if that was illegal yet."

"They were not involved, your honor."