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remedial goodness for Chelish archdukes
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"Are there other children here in Kantaria whose status might depend on who the Queen removes elsewhere?"

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She has to think about this. Obviously if the Archduke was going to kill any of his children he'd have done it by now, and the only ones the rationale applies to are Maleït's anyway. The Henderthane girl isn't here anymore. Most of the extra women around are from Menador, and you marry a southern man he usually doesn't come up to Menador.

"I guess Iolanda's husband is from the south, and her children probably have claims to somewhere," she says, dubiously. "But she didn't divorce him, so it wouldn't make sense."

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"Okay. I just - would really want to stop something like that before it happened, ideally. I don't want anyone to think that a good way to be safe under the new government is to kill children."

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Queralt isn't very sure that it's not, since she heard that some of the consorts in the south were killed with their spouses, and it seems like being very clearly not a member of your former spouse's family might help. But nobody ever said that the church and the crown had to be making consistent demands about which things you should believe.

"Sure. I think it's less bad in Kantaria because we stayed out of the war. It's just that Carme was in the south when the war happened."

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"I'm very glad that the war did not need touch here.

 

All right. I think we want to remove...all of the torture implements...and if there's someone who can either remove the Hell mural or depict a Chelish army marching on Hell to free everyone that would be good. I see why you wanted to rebuild it and I think in some ways it would be much better but - there are higher priorities and will continue to be for a long time."

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"All right. I'm sure we can get you some men for it."

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Then perhaps by Sunday they'll have a temple that's only slightly horrifying in which to host services.


In the meantime they should talk to everyone else in the Archduke's household who'll talk to them, partly to make it not clear where reports of murders are coming from and partly because it's just a good idea to get more oriented. They should probably split up for this; it'll go faster.

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There's a teenage boy who wants to talk to one of them! Entirely because it'll get him out of cantrip work for a few hours, but he really hates cantrip work. This is "irresponsible" and "short sighted" and "being a useless idiot who will die by twenty", but it really sucks, okay. 

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Sure, sounds great, they can head for a walk around the grounds. He doesn't think he's cut out to be a wizard?

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Oh, well, he's not saying that. Well, maybe he is. He can hang some cantrips fine, it just takes him a long time to learn new ones, and he hasn't gotten any of the combat ones down yet, and he won't be able to kill anything until he has at least one of them down consistently. He doesn't think he has enough of a handle on them to do first circle spells at all yet. He tried it once and it really didn't go well. He's supposed to practice ten hours a day until he's got it, but he feels like his brain is dribbling out through his ears if he doesn't take breaks sometimes. 

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Who sets his practice schedule?

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His mother, Estel. She went through the Westrown academy and wants all of her children to be wizards, though of course only some of them have managed it. Wizards are more powerful than archers in the long run, not that that's relevant to most people. He's an archer, too, of course, but not a very good one of those either.

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"And even if they don't get really powerful, even a weak wizard's a lot of service to his country, at the Worldwound or somewhere."

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"Sure. That's where the Archduke met her. Maybe I'll go, too, in a couple years, if I can hang first circle."

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"I'm trying to get a sense of how things work around here. Does the Archduke just have...a number of separate families, each with the children raised by their mothers?"

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"Sort of. Obviously we all live together, and some of his nephews and their families do, too. Right now there's Estel - my mom, the wizard - and Valeria, and that's pretty much it. When I was a little kid there was Maleït, but she was executed for murder, so her daughters sort of have different widows taking care of them, though they're mostly old enough they don't need it anymore. And he had kids with some other people a long time ago, but they don't live here anymore. Except Carles and Ivet and Queralt, I guess."

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"Who's Queralt's mother?"

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"She's dead, too. Killed herself, I think."

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"Related to the war and the change of leadership, or before that?"

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"Oh, no, when she was a baby. I think. I was, you know, also a baby."

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"Mmmhmm." What an awful tragic situation all around, really. "Have things gotten more difficult since the four days' war?"

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"Oh, I dunno. We haven't got a cleric, so people are doing less fighting stuff in the forest, but if we don't go in then pretty soon it'll start coming out a lot more. But I can't kill anything yet, so I'm doing most of the same things. Unless you have any tips on the Iomedan way to hang an acid splash. I'd kind of assumed it was the same way."

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"I think it is the same way, unfortunately, and I'm not a wizard myself and can't guess what way that is. I imagine it's frightening having the whole government change even if no one's bothered any of you about it."

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"We didn't especially like the old one." He is Very Clear on this point.

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"Asmodeus really has very very little going for him as a god to follow, and I didn't hear any other good things about the Thrune regime either. What do you study, outside magic and archery?"

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