"Perhaps most unmarried fathers, who sired children carelessly and by accident. I think that most men who marry expect children to be a benefit to them and not a burden, in the long run. Though you are correct, I suppose, that unweaned babies cannot in practice be separated from the mother very well."

"Maybe in the cities fathers seldom want their children," says Soler. "We grow better fathers where I'm from and shouldn't assume in the laws that it can't be done anywhere else."

"Well, we need to have some stance on parents who remove their children for their own safety, if we're forbidding abandonment both ways. I don't think I'd say that women who take their kids and leave almost always do so because they fear for the children's safety, but it's not an uncommon reason. You don't want to legislate that a woman who takes the risk of leaving because she fears for her child's basic safety has done something wrong."

"....can we do something with making things that would be crimes if done to an unrelated child, like, grounds for the other parent to be allowed to divorce and gain custody, if they want to?"

"Then what happens if they've both of them been at it?"

"Well, then the children don't - oh, I see, you mean if they sue each other. Uh. ....I'm afraid I don't have a better idea off the top of my head than the judge awarding custody to the parent judged less of a danger to the children." She does not sound like she has much confidence in this tack.

"'Things that would be crimes if done to another child' seems much too broad. Taken very literally, that's everyone, not just because of punishments, but on kidnapping grounds."

That's not technically wrong but she's still suspicious of his motives for pointing it out.

 "We could... come up with a list of things that people shouldn't be allowed to do even to their children or their spouse? And then make them crimes, and also say that anyone whose spouse does any of them can get a divorce without getting in trouble for it, and the parent who didn't do them should automatically get custody if they want it."

"This would likely be a place we could learn from other countries, except most of their legal codes can assume a much greater degree of judicial discretion than any of the people of Cheliax will trust. Nor are they wrong to distrust it, in many cases; many barons and local lords, especially, are still learning to live up to that type of trust."

"I think for adults we can just say that being married to someone doesn't make anything not a crime that otherwise would be. I admit this system.... doesn't actually make any sense applied to children."

"...I think I see why that is intuitively appealing but it is actually quite extreme in practice. Spouses fight. Some quite often. Most husbands and wives do not wish this to, any time it leaves a scar or lasting bruise, invalidate their marriage or represent a crime that they can then be reported for by either the wife in a moment of anger or by any neighbor who notices and wishes to harm husband or wife."

"Bruises and scars are not a crime in Cheliax. Or - weren't two years ago, I may be mistaken about the intended reading of the new decrees. For violence to rise to the level of a crime, rather than a tort, it must involve a deadly weapon or a lasting maiming."

"It was, in fact, quite common for marriage contracts to change this, and declare that maiming and torture by one party were explicitly allowed and not criminal, if one had the approval of the relevant authorities. It would, I suppose, technically be disruptive to nullify those existing contracts. But if we're writing a standardized one, it doesn't actually seem very destructive not to waive the penalty for stabbing someone with a knife."

"I don't care what their contracts say, people shouldn't be allowed to maim and torture people just because they're married to them!" Victòria hadn't actually realized this was a feature of Evil noble marriage! What the fuck!

"Ah. I should have inferred that, but I had fairly little experience with near-equal relationships, outside my father's marriage and children, before I left Cheliax, and Andoran is, as you might expect, much stricter in what is considered assault. That is much less worrying."

"There should clearly be limits in what a marriage contract permits and I do not think its serves the souls or families of the nobility to permit maiming if the contract agrees, but I think I want to consult other precedents - Taldane, Andoren, Arodenite Chelish - before drawing lines there."

...He's thinking he's in favor of nullifying a great deal of specific clauses in Infernal-era marriage contracts while keeping the core intact but that's a fight to pick later.

"...what's a tort?"

"Grounds for a lawsuit. In the civil courts that we don't have."

"Something that's only punishable if the victim can do something about it and wants to, instead of something the Crown has a duty to punish," he says, mostly looking past Korva to the villagers among them.

"How's the Crown meant to find out about anything short of leaving a body lying around that the victim doesn't want to do anything about?"

"It used to be common for reports of illegal violence to come in through the clerics, when the victim went to them for healing, but we have fewer of those now."

Since Victòria became a priestess no one has come to her to report being the victim of anything she'd have killed the perpetrator over. As far as Victòria is concerned this is probably because she successfully scared the perpetrators off from whatever they'd have otherwise tried.

"Usually if they don't want to do anything, nothing will be done, anywhere. It's not the maximum of Lawful, to have laws go unenforced then, but I think it is not, with healthy people, a problem."

With Chelish people? Kind of a problem. But not one that's helped by forcing things.

Victòria is pretty confused about not wanting people who hurt you to be punished for it! Not wanting to go to the Crown over it makes sense, if the Queen hasn't gotten rid of all the Evil guards, but it doesn't make sense to want someone to just hurt you and get away with it.

Korva looks over the suggested law again.

"Maybe we want some kind of system where someone who abandons their spouse hasn't erred as long as they continue supporting the children in the interim, and we can build a system for addressing custody disputes on top of that, possibly including some list of things that should be taken into account as reasons to allow divorce or give one parent custody. I think the core of Delegate Roig's law is very strong, but it sounds like we can't meaningfully vote on this until we have a civil court system to manage it."

"Certainly we couldn't finalize it. I agree, and I think considering those things - and what conditions we might forbid in marriage contracts - are good things to consider going forward. But unless anyone has an urgent objection, I would prefer we begin considering them tomorrow. It's been a long day already."

Nod. That seems reasonable.

He looks around left and right, and sees no obvious dissent. "Alright, committee adjourned for the day. Thank you all."