"Money's worth different amounts every week now, so I'm not sure there is a right amount. Thirty's not wildly wrong, I guess.

...what if he's already indentured?"

"It's a good suggestion... I have some reservations about the state of indentures and their conscionability in the present climate and I'm not sure how quickly that can be alleviated, but it might be unavoidable to solve the problems in parallel rather than in sequence."

Victòria is still pretty confused about what Delegate Fazil said but she's not really sure how to be less confused. "I think most people don't just have thirty gold lying around to spend, I think this would basically always be indenturing the father unless he's really rich. Which is fine if that's what we want, just, I know sometimes nobles don't know how much money is a lot of money."

"This is only if the mother of his child would rather not marry him, if I understand correctly. If he's poor but she'll have him no money has to change hands."

"What does the proposed law do if the woman," it having already been established that she is a reckless promiscuous idiot or no one would be in this situation, "cannot confidently name a single man. Does she get half from each of two men? Do the whores get some coin off a hundred, if they learned their real names?"

"Right, sorry, that's what I meant, it'd be basically always indenturing him unless she wants to marry him. ...Uh, also, what happens if a man gets two different women knocked up at the same time, like the opposite of what Delegate Fazil was thinking? You can't indenture him twice at once."

"That the fine is not easily payable is the intent, yes. We would like most people not to do this, and if they do it, to fix the mistake by marrying. An easily payable fine will not change behavior, not here.

I don't know what to do about multiple possible fathers, and I expect it will come up. If someone impregnates multiple women... indentured for twice the time is simple enough, I suppose. But on that note, I mention again that this whole strategy is uglier if the man is already married to someone else."

"I hesitate about indenturing a married man for betraying his vows. That further impoverishes his family, who are also the victims of his conduct."

"Exactly. But the damage is the same. Certainly if a married man can pay the fine without it, I think he should be made to, even if in some cases this does impoverish the rest of his family."

....are they planning to standardize on vows that promise male fidelity, that seems really optimistic. He's - well, actually not fine with it at all, now, but -

"Osirion lets men have two wives. I am not wholly enthusiastic about this. It has both benefits and very stark drawbacks. But it seems remiss not to even introduce for the case of a married man who has fathered a child outside his marriage."

"I'm not completely opposed to enshrining polygamy but it doesn't help in the least with the women who can't name a specific man so it is at best incomplete."

Now there's an idea.

"...I'm not sure if this makes sense, but... so, the idea here is that men shouldn't have kids they aren't going to care for, and whoever's taking care of the kids should be able to afford for them to eat and so on, right? Is there any reason we couldn't do Delegate Fazil's idea of half each, or some other fraction if it's more than two men? Which man is actually the father is basically going to be luck, it'd be better if you knew for sure which one should pay but it doesn't really seem like you're being unfair to any of them, if a man doesn't want to maybe have to pay the fine he can just sleep with other men. It doesn't work super well with the marriage part but at least it's something."

This will complicate the business of prostitution to an almost hilarious degree but Elorri does not actually have as a desideratum that the business of prostitution go on unimpeded even if he would have expected the Calistrian to.

The Abadaran does! Sort of! "I think it would amount to a fairly extraordinary tax on prostitution, which I don't have a principled objection to as it is a great evil but I notice Osirion and Lastwall both abhor prostitition, presumably checked if they could be rid of it, and allow it anyway, which is suggestive about whether we'll regret that."

"Have we got anybody about who'd know more about why they couldn't be rid of it?"

"Are you, uh — they don't speak Chelish in Osirion, right, are you using 'Evil' to mean something weird—" She is trying to find a way to make sense of what he said and coming up blank.

"...I don't know how Pharasma judges the act of paying a starving desperate woman to endanger herself and injure herself for a man's momentary pleasure, in those cases where it does not result in a child. We know it's Evil when it does. It seems Evil to me regardless."

"I actually think it's fine to make specifically forms of prostitution that can result in children more expensive, though I don't know if this specific proposal is manageable. We're not actually outlawing extramarital sex in general. And I expect that any solution that tries to carve out a complete exception for prostitutes will be useless. Half of women are prostitutes when the last child is starving.

Polygamy is probably worth considering, but - I would honestly kind of expect it to erode the sense that we're trying to nudge people to actually marry each other and not sign some arcane contract justifying their promiscuity, aside from my concerns about it eroding the status of women."

Half of - that's probably an exaggeration but the orphans were very much not an exaggeration - ugh, he misses his wife, maybe he should have brought her only then who would take care of things on the farm -

"It might do that. Awkwardly you do now have a lot of immigrants following the Inquisitor Shawil, some of whom just are married to two women, in a meaningful sense, and who I think it might be wronging to enshrine but one of those marriages in law, but that you could probably fix by recognizing marriages from countries with other customs, without allowing plural marriage in the Chelish system itself."

"It's occurring to me now that when I rode assizes and people presented themselves to me as married I did not... check... and did not encounter any situations where it seemed like it would have helped anything to have a way to check. On this one topic out of all of them I managed to get by on believing what people told me, more or less. I don't think anyone told me he had two wives but it would not have made much difference to most things I ran into."

(Victòria is still pretty confused, but less confused then when she thought he was saying prostitutes were Evil.)

"Saying marriages in other countries still count even if they wouldn't count here seems fine. ...Probably we'd need to be careful about how we write the law, it would be silly to, like, punish someone for breaking the promises we put in our law if that's not what's in the law where they came from."

Half of women are actually only figuratively prostitutes. There are a lot of jobs you can't get if you won't sleep with people, and a lot of people who will give a girlfriend things other than money.

"Well I don't see how you could have checked, we don't - oh, right. Uh, I don't remember which committees I've told what, but Egorian has awkwardly kept the tradition of weddings without keeping the tradition that they can be relied on as a definite commitment. Lots of women have been married lots of times and never divorced anyone, because the marriages have no legal standing necessitating it. I understand that where Sower Soler comes from it's the opposite, people meaningfully marry but there's nothing to mark it but that they move in together.

For this reason I kind of think we should probably not count anyone's existing marriages under any new laws, and any punishments for having children outside of marriage should have a significant pause before they go into effect to give everyone a chance to actually make promises. It makes sense that if we do make laws about it we should probably be sure to acknowledge foreign weddings as legitimate, I can see how it's probably unfair to not."

Llei is quietly trying to work out whether the thing he has is a solution to all of his problems or a ridiculous insult.