A downside of being old is it takes him substantially longer to make it to the line, when he does decide he needs to talk.

"Pirates are the enemy of all mankind," he begins, "but the fleet we inherited should suffice for keeping them in line. We do not have any enemies we would need a fleet to oppose, and we should not seek to turn any friends into enemies. We are building a new Cheliax, and I hope we make a government good enough that the people of the world clamor to join us in the Age of Glory. War to expand the empire is foolish ambition spurred by Hell, who profits greatly from it."

Reunifying the Empire isn't expanding it. 

Annoyingly she started the attempt to say something anonymous before the conversation inexplicably turned to declaring war on Andoran.

"Surely Murder is already Prohibited by Law, making no Distinction between Rooted Dryad and Ambulatory Man? Though it will not hurt to bring Clarity to the matter, I believe it is possibly already a Crime."

Obviously dryads are subjects of the Queen like all other forest denizens. Obviously no one has ever felled any since the amnesty. There are no political implications here!

War is of course a valiant and honorable pursuit, and all good men should of course be willing to take up arms if necessary, but making war on Andoran now seems... premature, when Cheliax is still barely functional. There's nothing dishonorable about waiting until your country is stable before looking outwards.

Probably he should be finding a way to explain that but for some inexplicable reason he's feeling kind of nauseous. Hopefully he's not becoming ill, finding a third-circle cleric would be moderately inconvenient.

"Right, but it's like the paladin said about rewards. Dryad wood's like loot you took off a man you killed in his home, so we can't have it about."

If war to expand the empire is evil, wouldn’t that make Aroden and ancient Taldor evil? Which can’t be true, because Iomedae helped them in the orc war and in the lich war. He doesn’t say because he’s not going to argue with a duke.

They're the heirs of Aspex, not of Taldaris, and Aspex's conquest was diplomatic in nature (this is a bit of a polite fiction, but a very useful one.)

"We don't need a bigger navy to beat Andoran when it's time to fight them. They've got one archmage and we've got three, and our strongest paladin's stronger than their strongest paladin."

...it's already illegal to murder forest creatures? Nobody in the Forests committee thought so!

It is not already illegal to murder forest creatures; you might not want a city lawyer as your consultant for that one.

No, it's not, that's just someone trying to lie to them to get the druids to do Plant Growths without actually conceding anything. It's backwriting laws, Asmodean Cheliax did it a bunch. Calm down, Feather.

“If I saw a neighbor selling people’s bones, I wouldn’t trust him at all. Even if he didn’t kill anyone himself, it means he has friends who do kill people and take their bones. Probably ghouls or nidalese. What I mean is, if we want to be good neighbors to the druids and dryads, can’t act like it’s okay to carve them up. Can’t always expect the fey to think like we do, but this is just common sense.”

This one she thought was straightforward but now people are going "maybe we should murder Chaotic Good beings to make better ships" and "freeing slaves is bad and not good and we should fight Andorran about it even though we've agreed that slavery is bad". She doesn't say anything but she is paying close attention to the arguments that people make that land better than her best attempts would. 

Selling people's bones is a problem? Wow, that's going to be an economic disaster, drow fucking love people's bones.

He thinks they actually might not have a navy at all, it having been destroyed in the four day war, but this doesn't really seem like a useful correction right now and if it's true someone else will probably say it anyway.

“If the dryads are to be protected by our laws, they must be accountable to those laws as well. I have no objection to declaring the felling of dryad trees to be murder. But if so, when a dryad kills a forester, it should be treated the same anyone else who committed murder, too.”

"This here doesn't say a thing about that, only that you can't use her tree after you do whatever you need to do."

It seems a waste to not use it after executing the dryad for murder. He’ll wait and see what the convention mood is before getting back in line. 

Being held accountable to laws and then also protected by them is better than the current system of being held accountable to laws and then also completely abandoned by them for profit and personal gain. She is not going to argue with Vidal's point, here; he is irritating, and has a grudge against her personally, but her quarrel is more with the likes of the damnably anonymous prick arguing about the murder of dryads being necessary for national security.

What does being accountable to laws mean for someone who lives in a forest. Can they tell a dryad to join their army and then Lawfully execute her for not showing up? Tax their acorns and leaves? Prosecute them for writing letters saying rude things about someone?