Here's the Sower.

Jilia is partly subdued, and partly suppressing lingering anger at Bellumar because it isn't helping and arguably did not help at all. But she's here.

The Archduke is here. He's been beaten, and now the next step is to find what victories can be found after that defeat.

Every day, Enric gets closer and closer to actually proposing ‘abolish the cities and let everyone go home’. 

Theo doesn't actually think that highly of people but he's still disappointed in them. And he's here.

This convention is such a dreadful mess. She'd call it a microcosm of the mess that is Cheliax but most of Cheliax is reasonably-sized villages and things cannot get quite this momentous in those.

Honestly, Korva does not feel like she's received any particularly new information about people on the bloodthirstiness front today. 

"Well, I, for one, am disappointed by this morning. It does render a lot of our work yesterday fruitless, seemingly. However, this morning Her Majesty told us she'd reject law proposals we sent her if they commanded her to appoint officials, pertained to foreign policy, or were grossly unwise in some other manner. There's already a significant line of petitioners at her palace asking her to use that power to reject this morning's law, and I'm hopeful she will."

"In the case where that comes up, and I put our proposal to the floor after all, I'd like to add the whole list of punishments from the other law to those we ask Lastwall about. Even the lions. It's wasting some of their time, but I'd rather ask and take the Church's time for the few tricky questions than leave it in doubt. Especially if I'm wrong about which ones are tricky to answer. Any objections to that, or can we move on to other business?"

"I don't expect Lastwall to approve 'lions' as a sentence. Maybe an option people can be offered the way the Final Blade is, I suppose that's not completely out of the question though I'd be a little surprised."

"If we ask Lastwall about everything in that law can we also ask about — there were some men with the sortitions who were saying to make women fight each other naked and then sell the winner to the highest bidder — if we do ask Lastwall about the law, can we also specifically ask about that? Assuming they'd say that's not okay, I mean, if they'd say that's fine then we shouldn't ask."

"They are not going to say that's okay."

"I'd rather not dignify vile boors like that with the convention taking note of them. I'd guess they... thought the convention had just shown it didn't care about Iomedae's opinion and were flaunting it. I'd be shocked if they thought that was right, or Good, or acceptable to good people. It wouldn't teach them a lesson. They just don't care."

"...but if there's a chance Lastwall even might say that lions are okay, even if it's just really unlikely, I wouldn't want a magistrate to sentence people to — that—"

"I don't think it's even illegal to do that to people right now? Even the Lastwall law would only ban it as a criminal punishment; it wouldn't do anything about indenture or employment contracts. I'm fine with asking Lastwall about things, and I appreciate that censorship was urgent, but I don't want to drop our work on general rights in favor of reacting to every specific awful thing that comes to our attention."

Okay but this awful thing is really upsetting!!!!

“Could take some time to work on rights that put limits on what contracts can do to people. That’s important work for every serf or indenture. For city type marriages too.”

Nod. "I think that's a good idea. I liked your speech a couple days ago about how we don't need to make people be serfs to bring in the harvest, maybe we could start with just... getting rid of serfs? And then over on Family we were talking about having a rule that anything that would be a crime to do to anyone else is still a crime to do to your spouse no matter what your marriage contract says, so maybe we could start by doing the same thing with indentures and all the other kinds of contracts?"

For some reason she feels nervous and a little sick about the idea. Why does she feel nervous, it was a good idea — oh, because she was assuming the sortitions were mostly people like Korva or Enric or Lluïsa, reasonable decent people who don't want to just go hurt innocent people for no reason, and not people like those two men. And getting people to vote for rights even if the Evil nobles were opposed seemed like it should be doable, but if there are a lot of sortitions like them, or priests like Chosen Artigas, it might be a lot harder. 

...and also because this morning she voted for a law she thought would probably be good overall and then people immediately started talking about how they wanted to use it to do awful things to people who didn't deserve it. That too.

"The abolition of serfdom will not be an easy fight to win," Xavier says.

"What is it people like about having serfs so much?"

There are more regular people here than nobles but maybe that doesn't help if a lot of the regular people are awful, especially if lots of the awful regular people aren't serfs.

"The more men you can command, the more you can have your will, whatever it may be. A man must be very good indeed to vote for a tax on himself or for the loss of his own laborers, whatever the need. The superiority of Galtan liberty in commerce and in war is clear, but as we have just seen a law does not only need to be just to pass, it must also have more than half the votes."

"Sorry, uh, how does Galt come into all this?"

"One of the first deeds of the Galtan assembly was to abolish serfdom, like that of Andoran after it."

“If Galt has no serfs and does better in commerce and war, that helps our case on the floor. When we were talking slavery, I heard worries about going hungry. Do we know if Galt has more famines than other places, or if they did right after abolishing serfdom?”

"Galt abolished serfdom in the middle of a successful but multisided war of independence from Cheliax," he says, "and famine always comes with war."