"I live and breathe only to serve Her Majesty, but where it has amused her Majesty to know what brings me happiness, yes, I'm attached to our not reverting to a country where almost no one ever gets a glimpse of the mud outside their village or the chance to prove they'd deserve such."

"As am I, as it happens." She closes the door and sits down. "I have come to ask your advice on how to do it, if you have any, and then to ask whether there's anything else I ought to be paying attention to in the course of fixing the country. Are you aware of where we are right now?"

"I have been told nothing and should be told nothing; I do not believe the question was ever settled of in what ways I might be compromised, and I don't need to know.

- the schools I think you could open tomorrow just with underemployed wizards who have instructions not to deal any injuries that'll get infected while there's no clerics. It does not matter if the children learn reading and arithmetic evilly, as long as they learn it. Tell the wizards you'll forgive their debts for four years' service and you'll have more than enough with no salaries."

"Maybe, but I think a lot of the debts are effectively nearly forgiven already, given the way the paper currency has all but collapsed. I suppose a few of them are probably having trouble earning even that much."

"Or who refinanced or who are flagrantly being cheated but without recourse because Her Majesty has seen fit to make all contract law the domain of her carefully selected hall of people totally ignorant of contract law."

"I can see how many of those we can scrounge up. I am hardly going to fix contract law, that doesn't sound like something that's amenable to throwing bags of gold at it. We do have new textbook manuscripts, though I haven't decided which combination I want to go with. I had hoped that we could call the teachers back to the wizard academies for some instruction on teaching without torture, but the money wasn't there, this year. Possibly we can make good use of pairing up new graduates and more experienced teachers. All of the new ones do have debt. Or should, anyway.

Do you have any strong objections to school attendance being voluntary? I'd intended that it would be, and obviously it's much cheaper to teach only the people who want to be there. Actually, I had intended to do all the prerequisite work first, and then if Elie and her Majesty didn't go for it, to open up a series of dirt cheap private schools across the country, as soon as taxes came in to prop up the orphanages. But that more or less amounts to the same thing."

"You realize 'voluntary' doesn't mean the children decide, or even really that the parents decide, it means that everyone tries to figure out what's more risky - giving the schools their children or refusing them. If you want the parents to meaningfully make a decision you want to charge them money for it. But of course that still has little resemblance to 'only teach the people who want to be there'."

"Do you have any objections to me charging money for it? I am actually also building up the beginnings of a school system in the Junira river valley, where I come from, and we've had pretty good starting attendance despite charging very nominal tuition. Obviously the customer base there is Abadaran, and they actually do go based on whether their parents want them there, but it seems healthy to me. And even nominal tuition does help make the system cheaper. It's not going to be perfect, nothing's ever perfect. But there's still a real difference between having a school around and not having one, or punishing truancy and ignoring it. I have been a little girl who had to be very stubborn to get permission to visit the temple. But no amount of stubborn makes a school or a stack of books appear if there isn't one, not if you're ten."

"I think charging a nominal tuition is a good idea. It also means if the teachers drive off their students they make less money, which seems desirable. Most of them will never amount to anything, and that's fine - well. Carlota would say they'll amount to something in the next life when they're not so tired and hungry and scared and busy. You've just got to have a route for the ones who can make something of themselves to do it."

"I actually think that reading is potentially quite useful even if you do spend your entire life as a farmer. It's difficult to see right now, because not very many people write for farmers, but I think there are quite a lot of things that they benefit from knowing. Even without considering pursuits that are purely of the mind, it matters if they know how to keep their children alive, or can keep records and agreements, or can read and send letters to people far away. But I don't disagree that a large point of general education is to give the children who shouldn't be farmers a way out of doing so.

Nominal tuition, then, low enough that most people who aren't completely destitute can pay it, if they choose to, with teacher salaries partially dependent on the number of students. I do want the new textbooks, but given the absolute ocean of underutilized copyists, we can probably finish them before winter term if we start the copying now."

She flounders for a moment, though not very visibly. 

"Thank you. I am very glad you are at work on this."

"Of course. What else do you think we need?"

"Schools. Civil courts. If you just adopt Cyprian's laws wholesale you can also hire away his staff. I think it should have been done right away with a mass invalidation of Asmodean contracts at the time of the amnesty but a mass invalidation of Asmodean contracts now will inspire a lot of justified terror about the convention not taking property rights at all seriously which it does not. I will probably be able to address that one but - it's important and there were not good grounds to neglect it this long. 

 I think if you were going to pick three things in the justice system to be very Iomedaen about, 'trials done by paladins, secret and swift executions' is not where I'd have spent them, I'd have gone for 'confidential confession' and 'time for spiritual counseling and reflection before death' and 'an elaborate published schedule of mitigating conditions'. 

But - I am not quibbling with you. You spend all your time making money to spend on Cheliax. I have no criticisms of any choices I know you to have made." All my complaints are about the Queen and also I am utterly miserable about having complaints about the Queen.

" - yeah, I was unfortunately actually sort of asking for myself. I can talk to the Queen about all of that - I don't think I particularly disagree with any of that, those do all seem important - but I don't personally set the laws here, and do not especially have time to determine which ones would be good for the country, or how they should be implemented. I do, in practice, determine much of what we spend money on, and I can also direct large amounts of foreign personnel and non-government resources towards Cheliax if I know where they would most help it. I know that's not as much your area, but I suspect you of knowing more than me about what's needed there, too."

"Priests would be nice, obviously. Books. Exotic creatures, exotic fashions. I think it is very harmful to Good's case, that the country is very observably so much poorer. Having all the things the Thrunes kept out would look so much better."

"I'm sorry, take pity on me, are you quite serious? I have been squashing the desire to start a fashion magazine for three years now on the grounds that I have absolutely no time and it's the most frivolous possible venture, but do you genuinely think it would be useful?"

"Yes! I don't know if it would be the most useful possible thing but - gods. People care about petty things. You can't stop them caring about petty things. Let them care about foreign fashions!"

"Goodness, I'm so sorry I didn't make time to speak with you before. My schedule is abjectly horrible, but still. As you wish, though I feel pretty odd about being told that one of the things you'd most like is for me to pursue my neglected passions.

As long as I'm here, you wouldn't happen to know what exports or anything else of value to the rest of the world one could employ a great deal of low level wizards at creating, would you? Besides books, I'm aware of books."

"You could try kicking off a craze for ice cream in Osirion."

"I could, but it won't keep. Oh well. Someone will come up with something, I suppose. For now I'm going to focus on putting everyone else's copyist clerics out of work. I suppose I don't have time for everything I'm already doing anyway, but my pumping money in won't do half as much good as figuring out how they can earn more of it themselves. I think there has to be something else, but one of them will have to think of it."

"I suspect they will eventually. ...I am grateful for all you do."

"Thank you. I am terribly vain and wither without it, actually. I'm very grateful for your work on censorship, recently, I think it's going to make Cheliax and Osirion a lot of money if nobody repeals it.

If there is anything else, before you put the mask back on - I'm not sure exactly what list of people owes you, besides the Queen, but you are owed a great deal by someone, and I am quite confident it's not all been paid, if it ever can be. I am not going to promise to do whatever I can for you, but - there are many things I would do, and I'd encourage you to ask for them, if there is anything I can do that doesn't personally horrify me. I'm overdrawn, right now, but I haven't forgotten. And if it's for Cheliax you shouldn't even think of it as me paying you something, really, I am myself still desperately in need of information about what this place actually needs."

Lilia's mind spins and wheels for a second trying to make sense of the claim that anyone owes her anything.

It's easier to interpret when she tries being Carlota.

"- you and Cotonnet haven't been thinking of - accidentally helping the spawn of Rovagug - as a betrayal, because it was accidental and somehow served the complicated secret events that followed?"

"I'm not going to talk about that right now, but no. And if you had never done anything else for me at any point, I would still, personally, think of you in large part as the person who gave us the information we needed to keep every soul in my husband's hometown from descending into hell. And that all on its own is worth quite a lot, to me."