Does this mean she doesn’t get to go home?

She’s already given up her platform to speak, so she can’t ask for a plain explanation of everything. 

Ah huh. He thought that might happen. He had a plan for it.

"I'm sorry, ma'am," he says to the sortition. "As the archmage says, this convention has no authority to free the sortitions or give you any choice over when or whether you return home. That would imply this convention had the authority to countermand the Queen, which would be in terrible error. Even the archmage, who some mistakenly imagine is a Galtan radical, is not so radical as to propose that this convention has any right to place any meaningful limit on the authority of the Queen to do this to you.

All this law would do is require that any agents of Her Majesty, if kidnapping people for the purpose of their use as sortitions, obey a decree to be issued specifying how Her Majesty intends to conscript people. It does not limit Her Majesty from issuing any decree of conscription she chooses. Her Majesty has the right to require any thing she wants of any of us at any time. She requires no justification. She is Lawful Good and it is Lawful Good when she orders people brought from their homes to this convention, and it is Lawful Good when she orders them executed, and it is Lawful Good if she chooses to release them to their families; but it is her choice, and not ours, and this bill does not oblige her in anything other than clarifying how she intends to employ that power which is hers by right as we are all hers by right. 

This law also permits your families to petition the Crown for your release, but the Queen will lawfully and nobly refuse their petitions, as the state's use of you is of more importance than your freedom, your lives, or the desires of your families, and if you do not perceive it that way that is only because you are not Lawful Good like the Queen. It is, as the archmage explained, a matter with great costs to you but with benefits to the state of Cheliax, which is far more important than you are. 


I grieve for you, of course, I really do. I know that you were ripped away from your families and your homes without warning or justification. I know that some of you have already been put to death and that most of you are greatly afraid. I know that even those of you who'd choose to stay might wish you had a choice. I know that many of you would stay, out of duty or for the salary, and that the use of force to oblige you in this was not even necessary. But to give you a choice would be to imply your choices matter. You belong to Her Majesty, as I belong to Her Majesty. You are commanded to obey and maybe die for your country, as many people are, and should pray for the strength to obey and die nobly in the Queen's service, and you absolutely may never try to make a rule that you do not belong to the Queen and are permitted to leave. 

You heard the archmage: you are not important, next to the interests of the state, and it is right and Good for everything that matters to you to be stripped of you in its service."

His tone is the same pleasant, level, reasonable one he has employed throughout the debate.

Wow, Lluïsa really misjudged Bellumar just because he wants her executed, he's actually pretty good at this.

He supposes he should be grateful that the delegates are so manifestly unafraid of him that they won't hestitate to do that to his face. There's no need to rise to the bait.

That said: he doesn't understand why Cyprian is rattling his sabers at Andoran when Taldor is right there. 

She’s even more confused after Count Bellumar’s speech!  But his level pleasant tone (with a bit of subtle smugness) demanding absolute obedience is quite familiar, she heard it from the village Asmodean priest in quite a few sermons.

She really hopes the magical disguise works.

What an idiot, Count Bellumar has confused Lawful Goodness with tyrannical Lawful Evil… oh wait he’s being sarcastic to make a point?  And the point is… the Queen and Archmage are Lawful Evil?

Fernando wishes Bellumar could get a taste of what the Queen and Archmage would do to him if they were genuinely Lawful Evil.  Fernando doesn’t even care about sending the sortition delegates home or not, he’s just annoyed this noble clearly has no idea what actual Lawful Evil is really like to live and suffer under.

Yes, yes, point taken, grabbing a bunch of random peasants to drag here was probably Evil, but the thing is that it worked surprisingly well, well enough that everyone with any sense is probably considering how to replicate it at home and turn up all the underutilized Tallandrias and Oriols in their own territory. 

He hopes Bellumar's sarcasm about what is Lawful and what is Good will not lead anyone astray; Cheliax needs less confusion about what that means, not more, even if it is a neat rhetorical point. 

Message to the archmage: If you ever reconsider allowing dueling, do kindly let me know.

Oh, fuck off, the Queen does own them. What are they gonna do, scold her for it? 

He's making 'the Queen getting to do whatever she wants' sound Asmodean but obviously all Queens, Asmodean or not, get to do whatever they want. That's what it means to be the Queen. 

Lluc goes and gets himself one of those anonymity spells. Now he just has to not stupidly say his name or his committees or anything.

Oh gods there are so many people here.

"I want to go home," he croaks, and then he gets slightly more ahold of himself. "It can be as Good as the day is long to drag me here and notwithstanding I don't want it and if I'd go to Heaven for wanting it that wouldn't make me know how. I -

"I've got a girl back home who I couldn't have a wedding for, because the late lord of the place liked celebrating everybody's weddings in his own way. We've got a little girl and another one coming and I spent my hour of warning before I came out here picking out names, since I was going to miss it.

"All I have to say here are the things that any fool can say and that I want to go home. And if that second thing doesn't matter, if that's not one of the things we're supposed to say, then you could just replace me with some other fool."

"Galt's constitution," says Bellumar mournfully, "took two years to write."

She heads up.

"It sounds to me like, if the Queen wants us here, then the only remaining disagreement is whether we think city watches and local sheriffs should have to specify what work of the Queen's they are doing, when they lock someone up, or if they can lock people up for any reason or no reason, whenever any of them feel like it. I say they should work for the Queen. I'm voting for."

"I am grateful for your support of the bill, Delegate Tallandria."

She had let a few people go past her in line while she wavered on speaking (she was trying to think of a framing that wasn't challenging Archmage Cotonnet), but hearing Lluc's speech and Count Bellumar's response, she thinks it is worth addressing.

"Galt went through several constitutions and was dealing with more disorder and chaos while writing them.  We've only been in session for 4 days now, we can consider accommodations for the sortitions after a few weeks and after seeing the royal decree clarifying the status of the sortitions.  Depending on the details of the decree, my proposal, to meet the Archmage's intentions with the four groups of people he has brought together, would be to allow sortition delegates that need to be excused to pass their vote to other sortition delegates, so that the total influence of sortition delegates is conserved and their voices well represented.  However, as I said, I think this matter could rest for a few weeks at least, so that we will have the perspective to take into account how much longer the convention is likely to last when recommending to the President and Queen that some sortitions be allowed to leave."

That came out wordier than she meant it to, trying to thread the needle of avoiding directly challenging the Queen or President while proposing something that was outside what they had indicated they would permit.

"As to the matter at hand, proposing reasonable lawful limits on detainment, I am in favor.  If someone is guilty, let them be charged, if someone is innocent let them go free, and a full week should allow enough flexibility for uncertainty or secrecy or other needs of law enforcement."

The line was pretty short, so Victòria didn't actually have much chance to figure out what she was going to say, but hopefully her speech will be okay anyways. It's not really surprising that an Evil noble would try to say that being Good means going along with whatever the people in power say but that doesn't make it right.

"What Delegate Bellumar said might be how being Lawful works, but that's not how being Good works. The Queen is Lawful Good, but that doesn't mean literally everything she's ever done is Good, and that doesn't mean she'd still be Lawful Good if she decided to stop being Good. Being Good means doing the right thing, not doing whatever the person in charge says to do just because they're in charge. If the Queen told you to go murder an innocent person for no reason, that would be Evil, and if you listened to her you'd be Evil too — like, she wouldn't do that, because she's Good, but if for some reason she did then her being Queen wouldn't make it right.

And it turns out that making the sortitions come here and not letting them was Evil? I was talking to an azata last week and it compared it to a less bad version of murder, and I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as murder or anything, but I do think it was Evil. And even if the archmage won't let us let them go home I don't think we should pretend it was actually Good, I think — I don't know how to explain this, but I think it's wrong to make innocent people have to pretend that it was right to hurt them?

Uh, like Delegate Iroria just mentioned, me and some of the other delegate have tried to come up with ways to make it so that normal people still count at the convention and the nobles can't just outvote everyone, without making it so all the sortitions have to stay even if they really don't want to, but if we can't vote on them either way I don't want to waste a bunch of time on them.

...To be clear, I think this is a good law and we should pass it, you're just wrong about Good."

"Why, Delegate, I would think that our noble archmage and our majestic Queen, who freed Cheliax from Hell, know far more than you or I about Good, and if they say that kidnapping hundreds of people to force them to participate in this proceeding is Good because its importance to the realm far outweighs their insignificant and pitiful lives, who are we to disagree? Who is an azata, even, to disagree? My conscience cries out as yours does, but when one's conscience and one's Queen speak in different directions, obey the Queen."

She doesn't actually want to be associated with Victoria.  Also, someone needs to explain to the Calistrian that every time she speaks in favor of something, there is likely some people that will oppose that something out of spite because they blame her for the riots.

It would be nice to just pass her vote off to Reuben and leave, but it doesn't sound like that is happening?

Maybe normal people's lives are insignificant to him, but that doesn't mean they don't matter!

Marit would really prefer it if his fellow members of the Judiciary Committee didn't attempt to disingenuously write laws that are secretly designed to make an entirely unrelated political point, but it's not like he didn't know that some people would be trying to do that sort of thing.

Can Victoria not detect sarcasm?  Or was that a cynical ploy to make Count Bellumar look bad by taking him at face value?  She thought Victoria wasn’t that subtle?

Count Bellumar sounds super Asmodean!  It’s probably sarcasm, but being Asmodean even sarcastically seems really suspect!  He doesn’t get in line to say anything, last time he spoke he sounded like an idiot.

"I think we should listen to the Queen and the Archmage, and not ask to go home if they don't want us to," she lies. "It's wrong to accuse the Queen of doing Evil things just because you disagree with her."