"Well, I told a bunch of people to go adopt children and now some of them are coming back around worried it won't stick if anything out of the ordinary should happen - mother comes back to claim the baby or they die and the executor of the estate wants to keep their stuff instead of giving it to the adopted kid or something."

(Victòria is Chelish enough that she could probably hide her general aura of hostility towards Delegate Napaciza if she wanted to, but she doesn't actually want to.)

If Josep was in charge of this committee, they would all currently be in their homes eating dinner instead of fretting over sorry brats.

"Well, that at least seems straightforward in principle, Sower. The law should recognize adoption as legal, irrevocable, and equivalent to a blood relationship."

Llei, on the other hand, is going to hide any feelings he might have about the Calistrian. They seem unlikely to help him here.

Well that seems like a fantastic thing to know if one is trying to figure out how to solve the orphanage crisis.

"They actually went out and adopted kids? How many?"

"How many kids or how many families, a few people got two. I think it was - nineteen kids that day but maybe a few more have gone in since then."

"I heard about the sermon. It hasn't gotten published yet, but despite everything I think it will be soon."

"Apparrently one of the Archduchess's people wrote it down while I was talking, yeah."

"Nineteen from one sermon? I want to know what policies get people to do that, and spread whatever you said throughout the entire empire. Irrevocable adoptions are only worth it if they don't interfere with them happening, because we're going to want a bunch of them to happen."

"I would like to contribute the fact that I've done a little digging since last week," which is to say that she asked Archduke Blanxart not one hour ago, "and it turns out that the orphanages - after halving their expenses from two years ago, so much so that deaths are up significantly - still cost more than half the cost of the entire army. If anyone, anywhere, thinks that the government ought to be spending more on something else, then ours is the problem that's standing in the way of it. I suspect this means that we can get a large number of the officers out there on board with incentives for men to raise and not abandon their children, which is the sort of thing that might actually make that fight winnable. We'll obviously want to think very carefully about what policies we put forward, but if they're good ones, I think it might matter."

That is a lot more money than she thought the orphanages cost! How many orphans are there?

That's catastrophic. Taggun Hold has orphanages, and there are a few rural ones in the south of the county, but - he doesn't pay for them, so he hadn't realized - he should check the numbers, of course -

"That does seem like the sort of thing that might allow fines for siring bastards to pass the floor. The problem, of course, is that the policy doesn't mean anything. Without clear law or custom on what marriage among commoners is, or what responsibilities it entails, encouraging it doesn't do very much to stop abandonment."

She doesn't see where he's going with this but she's back to radiating hostility in his general direction. 

"Perhaps the orphanages might, quite simply, charge for accepting children? If we allow a woman to sue the father for support of her child, and then allow the parents to, if they wish, pay an orphanage to take the child, I think overall abandonment should be much less of a problem."

"I think probably if you had to pay an orphanage to take your baby a lot of people would just kill them instead."

Well if they kill them, the state is also not paying for them. Win-win.

(He does not say that. He makes a thoughtful face and goes "hmmmm".)

"Ferrer's right; they mostly serve those with no ability to pay. Requiring payment is just telling people to kill them all. It's certainly cost-effective, if none of us care about suffering in hell forever."

"—Just to be clear, I don't think we should try to get more people to murder their babies to save money!"

"...sorry, Ferrer, that was sarcasm. Except for the part about you being right."

She thought it was probably sarcasm but people keep trying to act like she wants to murder innocent people for no reason and she wants to be absolutely clear that she thinks killing innocents is wrong.

"Yes, yes, of course, none of us wants to incite more people to murder."

Llei just wants men to raise their children! It's not that complicated!

...hm.

"A two-pronged approach, I think. Some policy for removing existing children from the orphanages, and for reducing the number of abandoned children going forward."

"For the latter, Your Grace, I suggest that one is not a large enough number of committee members who have experience with how marriages and families function outside Cheliax, if we mean to rehabilitate the institution. The Glorious Reclamation has added a significant number of delegates to the convention today. I doubt many of them have families of their own, but I assume most were raised in them. I suggest that we might do well to invite one of the Iomedan paladins to the committee, to provide more information about marriage and family in some context where they have been less damaged."

"That is a fine idea, thank you. I will raise it with one of them at the next opportunity. I may inquire with some of our long-lived or long-dead delegates as well, who would remember better times."

She manages to restrain herself, barely, from snapping at Delegate Roig.

She really doesn't understand why Delegate Napaciza is trying to recruit Iomedaeans to the committee, but she can't see any reason why it would be a bad idea. They're Iomedaeans, they're not going to secretly be plotting to hurt innocent people. Maybe he's planning to trick them like how he tricked Valia into thinking he'd repented, but it would be stupid for him to count on that working.

"Adding some more people who aren't Evil to the committee sounds good to me."

It's the thing where he's repented. Well. Trying to repent. And is therefore trying to suggest good ideas, and not bad ones.

Whatever. Llei doesn't have to care what teenage girls think of him, as long as the other nobles and the church think well of him. Unless they're his daughter Queralt, who looks five and mostly wants him to make up opinions for all of the horses in the stables.

"Avenger, while it goes against your natural tendencies, I request that you refrain from harping on the current alignment reading, known or suspected, of people present, and also those absent if it is not relevant. Many people are Evil and make up for their wrongs later; in Cheliax, a very great portion of those who are not Evil, myself included and likely yourself as well, have done so. Multiple Good gods, my own among them, bless all those who attempt it and feel very strongly that they ought to receive the chance to succeed. If anyone in this committee or elsewhere has committed crimes since the amnesty I would be happy to assist you in conveying evidence of such to the attention of Her Majesty's Justice, and if anyone here has committed specific Evil acts relevant to the business of this committee that is perfectly relevant and you are welcome to raise it. In other cases it is rude and unconstructive. Therefore, please cease, at least while we are engaged in our business here."

"Do you think it would be good for a family for someone to try to get their completely innocent daughter or sister or cousin executed for encouraging them to repent?"

What is she even talking about.

All right then.

"Avenger, I am on this committee because I have raised nine children in Cheliax, and I have buried four. Where I have done awful things, and I have, I have done them to protect them. I spoke at Select Wain's trial not because she told me to repent, but because on her encouragement a crowd of a hundred men broke into my house and murdered my daughter and my nephew in front of me, and because the Queen's prosecution asked me to stand as witness to it. I am not angry with the Select for being found innocent. I simply want a Cheliax where my children's lives do not need to be paid for in blood. 

If you believe that I have suggested something evil in this committee, say so. If you are angry that I admitted in court that someone murdered my child in front of me - the Select is alive. My family is alive. We have all seen our justice. It is over. Let it lie."

Sarenrae, bless this warrior and bring his blade to your side against the darkness,

"I think it was wrong for people to murder your nephew and your daughter. I'm sorry that it happened. I hope the people who did it hang.

None of those people were Valia Wain.

Trying to trick people into thinking an innocent person broke the law so you can get them executed because you're mad about something other people did is Evil. Maybe you think you've repented, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure part of repenting is that you're supposed to stop doing Evil things. I don't actually think that's very relevant to the things this committee is supposed to deal with, a lot of her family was murdered by Asmodeans, but I'm not going to just pretend like it didn't happen just because it didn't work.

I am perfectly happy not to bring it up in committee." (No she isn't, but she's pretty sure no one is going to call her on it.) "I'm not going to vote down your ideas just because you suggested them. You can tell because... I literally said I agreed with your idea. If you have good ideas I'm not going to secretly try to sabotage them, that would be stupid, I don't want to hurt random other people because of something you did. If all you want from this committee is to help protect people's families I'm not, actually, going to get in the way of that.

But if Delegate Noguera i Mata wants me to not feel upset about you trying to have my — friend — killed, I don't think I can do that and I wouldn't want to even if I could. —If he just wants me to not make comments about you being Evil I can... probably avoid that specific phrasing? Lluïsa is Evil and I don't have anything against her."

"Fine."

Calistria is legal in Andoran, which is to say that Her priestesses don't hide like they do in other places. He has heard sermons from them occasionally, though since he is noble, usually brief ones delivered to captive audiences who thought they had sat down for a play and saw it interrupted before the curtains went up. One of the important points that struck him as likely true, is that most whores are women who had their reputation ruined by the bad behavior of a man who promised marriage, and reneged before reaching the altar or betrayed his promises with bruises and scars. A delegate from Calistria on this committee ought to be able to represent the interests of those women and the children they bore, the people the family has failed, and so when it was suggested that She, not just Erastil, ought to sit on it he, after a moment of thought, concluded this was sensible enough.

This one does not seem to be interested in doing that.

So now he is considering that a secondary benefit of adding an Iomedan is that a two-thirds vote to remove Ferrer would then probably succeed.

"Back to the orphanages, then. We might consider a very low fee, but I suspect nothing low enough to avoid a large increase in infanticide, which was among Asmodeus's chief goals in the first place, is large enough to defray the costs meaningfully. It might discourage reckless pregnancy slightly, but I think that is not likely enough to be worth it to ask for an Abadaran analysis or something of the kind to determine whether it would be worth the small increase of infanticide it would certainly cause. Does anyone have other suggestions? Should we instead return to how to properly incentivize enduring marriages?"

"I think — for the marriage thing, not the orphanage thing — a big part of the problem is that a lot of men are going to be worse than not having a husband or a father at all. And if a woman knows a man would be worse than nothing, she's not going to marry him, and if we're thinking about it as how to get her to marry him anyway it's kind of solving the wrong problem. I don't know if I said that in a way that makes sense.

And then the other part of that is that a woman might not know if a man would be worse than nothing, and if you're not sure one way or the other it's a lot safer not to take the risk. 

So I think... probably the first thing you need to do is to make absolutely sure that the law protects people that are being mistreated by their husband, or for that matter by their father? Like, if a woman tells the Watch that her husband beat her senseless, they should treat that seriously and not ignore it just because they're married, if a woman's husband does that sort of thing a lot and she doesn't have a way to escape him to even report it it should be treated as self-defense if she kills him, if a woman wants to get a divorce she should be allowed to, if you don't let women divorce their husbands a lot of them will never get married in the first place."

Calistrians.

"I do not think the current problems facing Cheliax are those of too little possibility of divorce."

"Well, I think it depends? I don't think a man should be allowed to abandon his wife and children if she doesn't want him to and he doesn't have a good reason."

"Does Cheliax even have laws about marriage?"

"I think the laws about marriage are whatever the convention decides they are? But there's lots of things we could decide they are. ...I'm not sure what laws about marriage we already have."

"Cheliax has contracts, and it has other laws which reference the concept. Succession and inheritance, most obviously; children whose parents are married still typically inherit over those whose parents were not. But this is only relevant to those with property."

"Typically laws on the books which consider assault are either defined differently, or customarily applied differently, within a family. A father who strikes his daughter is considered differently than a man who strikes an unrelated girl of the same age. If I remember correctly from my youth in Infernal Cheliax, such assault would be a tort, in which the girl's father, or possibly mother, had standing to sue in civil court the man who did the striking; if it was his daughter he struck, he would be suing himself and therefore it was void. Similar things would apply for a wife rather than a daughter, I expect. In many countries there is the difference that a married couple is considered a single legal person and so a husband or wife assaulting the other is legally equivalent to giving yourself lashes voluntarily. Calistria of course disapproves, but the same legal principle also allows things such as perfect protection on secrets shared between couples without worry that they might be slander or evidence of a crime you're unsure if you committed, and also is the basis for strong demands on their shared property if divorce occurs."

Blink. "I wasn't saying it should be illegal to hit your family at all, everyone hits their kids — or, wait, is this like the thing where it turns out most places don't whip you for coming in last at school?"

"Virtually everyone save some wild early-Galt radicals does discipline their children with force with varying frequency and force. Cheliax is more severe than others, of course. My point was that a reasonable punishment for a particularly badly-behaving child would be considered assault against anyone else's child in virtually all countries, in one way or another, and a similar state of affairs holds for husbands and wives. A wife who has bruises may legally and morally be considered fairly punished by her husband; a woman who received the same bruises from an unrelated man is almost always considered the victim of assault, though if she is highly disreputable, e.g. of Calistria's profession, this is unlikely to be enforced in most places. I do not know the Queen's current law on the topic but I expect it to make the same distinctions, and this includes the family as a legal concept."

"It hadn't actually occurred to me that you could ban hitting your wife at all but I bet there's lots of women who'd be much more likely to get married if you did. But I was mostly thinking of husbands who're putting their wives or children in danger, not just who are hurting them at all."

"I would normally expect a woman in that situation to leave. ...I suppose this is probably much harder now that we don't have daycares, and not very symmetric to enshrine as a right if we're trying to prevent men from leaving."

"I don't see why it'd need to be symmetric, men and women are different and the law should reflect that. But — well, first of all, not all women in that situation can just leave, like maybe someone's husband hurts her badly enough she can't walk, and not all of them will be able to tell a guardsman either but as long as some of them can it'd still be helping some people. And — I mean, I don't think people should be allowed to get away with doing that sort of thing to their wives, but I also think — probably if the law might go after them for it they'd be less likely to even try? ...And also Delegate Roig said we should make it harder for people to get divorced, which would... make it harder to leave."

"Every nation in which the rights of men and women are not symmetric has asymmetries in the same direction."

Damn, 'no siring bastards' and gender equality are in direct conflict.

It's not technically having different laws for men and women, given wizardry....

"We don't have to do what other countries do, lots of countries do things that are kind of stupid." She's mostly going off the pamphlets here but probably not all of them are lying. "I think probably there should be asymmetries in both directions. Like, men are stronger than women, and that's really important to consider if you're making rules about what sorts of things spouses can do to each other, or who's allowed to leave whom, and it would be silly to conscript women when most of us wouldn't be able to fight. But then on the other hand, if there were a famine, it might make sense to give more food to men. And you'd hire a woman to be a nursemaid, and a man to lift heavy crates down at the dock, and not vice versa. ...Those are just examples, probably lots of those aren't things you'd need laws for, I haven't thought about what all the laws should be."

Perhaps, in this committee for the writing of laws, she should think a little more about what all the laws should be.

"I believe I would begin, in our sad present state, with a very simple law:

When a man and a woman marry, their oaths to each other shall be administered by a priest of a permitted church, and witnessed by two or more persons in good standing among their community. This being done, they shall then be held to these oaths: the man not to leave his wife and children, except in cases of adultery or other great provocation, and even then to provide for the children of the union until they have come of age; and the woman to be loyal to her husband, and to care for their children.

This shall be principally enforced by civil suit, the deserted husband or wife bringing a complaint against their spouse. The court may direct the straying spouse to return to their spouse and children, or require them to pay for their support, or declare the abandonment to have been permissible due to extraordinary circumstances (adultery, extreme cruel treatment, etc.).

"You should allow lay priests, this doesn't need spells and there's a shortage of clerics."

Nod.

...administered by a priest of a permitted church (empowered, or a lay priest of an organized church)...

"Would this do? Any man can call himself a lay priest if his church has no formal organization. The purpose is merely that it should be a respected man whose word is vouched for by something greater than himself."

"Yes, that's fine, it's just if I go home and I'm popping all over the village watering every cow, sheep, and goat for miles around I want to be able to designate somebody else to do the weddings."

"I'm not sure what this actually requires that women do, can you say what you mean by 'loyal'? Also, I think we should say that the court has to have the divorce cases judged by a man and a woman judge, if it's just a man or just a woman they might not understand everything they need to know to be fair."

"Most significantly that means to not sleep with other men, especially not in such a way as to produce children whose father could not be assured to be her husband. Many other things which create the appearance that she might be doing so, or considering it, are also considered disloyal to a lesser degree, depending on which country you ask, and higher classes typically have stricter standards than lower and city more than country. I would not be surprised if Menador or the Hellcoast had significantly different notions of what was unacceptable disloyalty before the death of Aroden; I have definitely heard Galt and Andoran differed in some ways before independence."

"I see two problems, here. First, clarifying that. A culture may have a flexible notion of disloyalty but the law should not. And two, we do not have civil courts or any civil law in effect. Andoran and Galt have perfectly functional codes of civil law and we may elsewhere decide to import one of them wholesale or with modifications but at present we have none."

....it's not bad. It's not amazing, either, but a requirement that men continue providing for any of their wife's children even after divorce is pretty good, on the national crisis front, and if the merchant wrote it it might have a chance.

"Actually bearing another man's children. It's symmetrical with making siring bastards a fine offense, sort of, and avoids having to legally define all sexual activity. I say we make the default obligations fairly narrow, and then allow people to make additional written promises by mutual consent, which can also be legally binding."

"Assessing paternity is difficult. An oath under truth magic that the lady in question is absolutely sure that a child is her husband's, at his expense if the answer is yes, would, I think, suffice. In cities that seems eminently practical; in small towns and villages perhaps not, but in villages I understand traditional marriage is stronger and the need for legal recourse rather than social is weaker."

"I had understood the lack of civil courts to be a temporary emergency measure. Do you believe, then, Your Grace, that they will not be reconvened until and unless this convention calls for them to be?"

"I think the lack of civil courts is an emergency measure in that we do not presently have a code of civil law of any kind. Evidently the Queen does not like the Code Cyprian enough to implement it on a temporary basis, and choosing any other code of civil law is not a priority for an emergency, and so we have nothing. A complete constitution will change that, and provide enough of a skeleton on which to build a civil code. But if we do not write a law that creates civil courts, or a constitution that provides for Her Majesty to create civil courts, then I think first we will be warned that we very much ought to, and if we do not heed that warning I think there will not be civil courts. Unless Her Majesty decides that democracy has failed her, which under those circumstances even as a supporter of Andoran and its principles I would concur that it, and we, had."

"Well. That... seems like an urgent matter, but one perhaps beyond the scope of this committee. I will raise it in the Trade Committee when next it meets, I believe. In the meantime... perhaps we can say that urgent cases of abandonment can be brought to a criminal court judge, until the civil courts are back in session?"

Victòria is not entirely sure what the difference is between civil law and regular law but she's pretty sure that if she asks the nobles are going to use it as an excuse to say that she doesn't know anything about how the laws should be. Maybe she can ask Lluïsa this evening.

Korva maybe thirty percent knows what a civil court is. It's the court where you didn't actually commit any crimes, so they mostly indenture you instead of mostly executing you.

"I don't actually think we need to rush it. No existing marriages were entered into under this system, so it probably shouldn't apply to any of them until the people involved make these specific promises."

"I think you are likely correct. This is a fine proposal for the basic form of marriage, and I have no particular modifications I would suggest beyond defining loyalty requirements, but there's no urgency to bringing it to the floor. I'm inclined to wait for us to have a few more ideas and bring them together."

"I think I would want to know what happens under this system if a woman leaves a man, but takes their children with her. It's clearly not a case of failure to care for her children, but I can certainly imagine people taking issue with it."

"...Well, that would be allowed, right, as long as she didn't sleep with another man?"

"I would say the most common outcomes in cases like that is for the woman to move back into her parent's home with the children, or for the woman eventually to return to her husband, because it is superior to letting her children die of poverty and that proves to be the only other option available."

"Looking on this as someone with the attitude of a traveler observing cultures from the outside, as I often found myself after I fled Cheliax: Almost every culture would consider it disrespectable. Many would call it outright disreputable such that she would find it difficult to find work in any profession but Calistria's, if she did not already have independent means to support herself. Almost all cultures would assume she had done something wrong by default. Usually the way to convince her community otherwise is for her to make credible accusations against her nominal husband and to have her family, the local priest, her lord, and/or some other patron respected by the community back her in that."

"I have known of high ladies who have done this but they have then taken great effort to conceal it from the casual observer, and my understanding in those cases is that furious political struggles were occurring out of sight between the husband's family and the wife's, to determine whether she would be forced back to him or permitted to raise his heirs out of his sight. And that the cases in which the husband's side won the struggle would have been kept quiet enough that I would never hear about them, unless his conduct later became dire enough that polite society rejected him and brought all his past sins to light. I have not in fact heard of any cases like that, but I have heard of cases where a husband was quite brutal, and it escalated past the point where blind eyes were opened, and in all those cases many past incidents of lesser severity, and actions his wife or children took in response, came to light." Never really expected listening to society gossip to prove practically useful in any way.

Blink blink. "I don't get how that would... help anything?" says Victòria, who knows approximately nothing about any other country's sexual norms. "Like — I mean, my parents weren't ever married, but if they had been, and people had decided she had to go be a whore, I don't see how... I mean she was perfectly fine at being a laundress? Or, I think some people thought it was pathetic that she hadn't just killed me, but I don't think it made her worse at her job, it seems kind of silly to tell a wizard she has to go be a whore instead just because she has a kid. And it sounds like the sort of thing that would make the orphanage problem worse too."

"Somebody doesn't have to be bad at their job for other people not to want to pay them to do it."

That doesn't really clear things up at all but Victòria isn't sure what to ask that would.

"In other countries, good reputation can open doors and allow opportunities. And one of the ways one must maintain good reputation, once you earn it, is by not associating with people of bad reputation. Thieves typically have the worst reputations among men, and if I was publicly friends with one, or even a former thief, my good reputation would vanish very quickly; to employ a former thief, not so quickly, but it would still begin to ebb away unless I redoubled my effort to maintain it. For women, thieves are less common but... Calistria's houses... are as disreputable as thieves, and a woman known to once practice such will even in Andoran or Absalom find it very difficult to find any other work unless they can escape their reputation, and past, entirely."

"...That part isn't confusing, but my mother was never a whore? She was studying to be a wizard and then she was a laundress."

"Sorry, I'm aware that as a practical matter she may have a difficult time providing for the children, especially without the daycares open, though I don't think most Chelish people - well, most of Egorian's people - are nearly so judgemental as to refuse to employ a capable woman who does have childcare arranged. I'm asking whether if, knowing the risks to herself and to them, she leaves and takes her children with her anyway, the suggested law has anything to say about it."

"Asmodean marriage contracts typically specified who would have ultimate authority over any resulting children. More often the man, but certainly not always. Without having agreed ahead of time, though, there's no trivial way to say who ought to have custody in the case of a disagreement, other than saying that it's always the father or always the mother."

Victòria is kind of confused by the concept of a father even wanting custody of his children. Her father certainly didn't. Maybe it's different for Evil nobles.

Josep thinks that saying that the father should always gets the children unless he specifically abandons them would be a fine choice actually. The Count-Regent does not sound approving of that option, though, so perhaps this is not a wise fight to pick.

"Yes, it's a difficult problem. The rules that govern situations where a parent does not wish to support their child should be quite different from the rules that govern situations where both parents want the child and are separated. I would be inclined to give preference to the parent with a more stable income and place in society, who can better raise the child to inherit that place, but that itself is not always simple to determine."

"Well, if it's a baby, obviously it's got to go with the mother, otherwise it'll starve. I guess if it's not a baby and both parents want it it makes sense to say it should go with whoever's got the better income? But I doubt it'll come up very much, I don't think most fathers are going to want to keep the kid. Probably a lot of them will be glad to have the kid gone."

"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."