"In favor."

"Aye."

"Aye."

“Aye.”

"Aye."

"Passes unanimously. The performance licensing, then?"

Enric wants to celebrate a right agreed on with no debate, and one for Erastil too. Even if it’s just a book. But not yet, it still has to pass the floor. 

“Before we go to performances. We bringing this to the floor tomorrow? Who’s introducing it?”

"I'm happy to bring it myself, but if you or the Sower would like to, you're welcome to it."

"I think the Sower would have the best odds, as he is a priest and so it is rightfully his domain." Of making it not a political battle.

Whoever brings this to the floor looks good to anyone who worships Erastil. If Enric brought it, might give him a reputation. But he didn’t help with this one, wouldn’t be right to take credit. If Jilia brought it, all the decent peasants might think a bit better of her and worse of everyone calling her radical. 

No. It’d be wrong to do politics with Erastil’s holy book. 

”Agreed. Easiest if Sower Soler brings it.”

"It'll look a little self-interested, won't it?"

“Right, that might look bad. Like we’re using rights to give ourselves special privileges.”

"Clerics of Erastil are respected, trusted. Nobles may think they're inexperienced with politics and so prone to make bad decisions, but they certainly don't think they're schemers. I think a great many of the delegates, noble and religious and even some sortition alike, do think the Archduchess and I are schemers, and would watch this proposal for some sort of Mephistophelean trick. Sower Soler they might think was a fool, but never a rogue. If this bill fails, which I do not expect, it will because someone thinks it is a smokescreen for a plan to do evil under the cover of Erastil's work, and convinces others of this."

"Well, I can say it but I'd have to memorize it or else not get it said exactly as it was written."

“Could introduce it, then have one of the scribes read the whole thing out from the paper.”

Enric gives the note-takers a look of ‘if it isn’t imposing too much to ask’.

"If the President's convention staff weren't already told to do this for illiterate delegates they ought to have been and I will bother the President about it." Actually now that she thinks about it, he's the person whose view on whether factions are actually ruinous she would most trust and she might bother him anyway. "But if they won't, one of us will loan you someone to do it, Sower."

"Very well then. Hopefully it's less busy tomorrow, on the floor."

"I sincerely wish it will, but that's been wrong every day of the convention so far so I'm less hopeful than I might be. Urban Order and Judiciary will pass something that starts another loud fight, more likely than not. But we'll all have to carry on and hope events outside the hall slow down as well."

"So, uh, if we're all agreed that Delegate Soler will introduce that one, what's next on the list?"

She should probably figure out whether it makes sense to say anything about the natural resources committee she wants to introduce tomorrow. She was pissed about Coeliaris bringing her education proposals before the floor without talking to the education committee at all, and this isn't really the same thing, but she doesn't want anyone else to feel the same way about her. She just also doesn't want the secretary to write it down and for everyone to know about it before it happens. Is that stupid? Maybe that's stupid. She can ask just the Archduke Requena right after committee, however terrifying that feels, but - ugh. Maybe she can ask everyone? After the committee is officially over? Maybe it'll work?

She'll plan to do that and see if she's brave enough.

"Somebody was going to talk to the Songbird? That one definitely shouldn't be me."

"I sent a messenger to find her. Hopefully she'll be found soon and be here to consult. We can get started drafting something for performances while we wait, I think."

Laia is eventually dragged in, complete with her new shadowy defender. "Hello everyone!" she says cheerily. (She's an actress.) "I'm so sorry about the misunderstanding earlier, if I had only known - but it's all to be resolved now, yes?"

"Songbird, thank you for coming. As best we can, yes. Really I was terribly embarrassed I didn't think of it myself; one of my oldest allies in Kintargo is an opera singer and she would never forgive me if I didn't get this fixed. My initial thought was a performance license for a venue, with a deposit - I think it would have to be large, like for publishers, the floor seemed pretty clear about keeping those high - and then work out terms to make clear that changing the scripts is fine."

"So a trouble I have with the model where you pay a deposit is that - so we're used to the censors, right? And they were dreadful, but almost always, once they approved something, you were good to go. The exception was Pezzack, and you can tell from how dramatically that blew up that it wasn't happening everywhere all the time! Whereas - if I write a play, and there is no one in the world who can tell me, yes, I am sure this play is fine, then I must take on the task of the censor myself, and I must be right every time. If it's fine for a week and then there's a change in the weather and the eighth night someone takes it amiss? I'm meant to have predicted that and staked the deposit on it. If the principal actor for the villain is unprovocative but the understudy delivers a song a bit differently and remains in some hooligan's mind when they take to the streets? Again my responsibility. There is no point at which I can relax and go on with the work if the deposit is held hostage forever against my accurate divination. Possibly you have some scheme involving Abadarans but I've never met an Abadaran and have no idea how their own divine powers extend here."