Arlet gets home.  Her youngest has died of fever, her next-youngest has gotten it into her head that she's meant to be a cleric of Pharasma and goes around preaching amateur sermons about it day and night, her eldest has as Arlet predicted run off with the neighbor boy and is already pregnant by him, and Arlet's own boy - won't give back the farm.

The civil courts are back in session by then but they're backlogged all the way to Hell.  Nobody knew, nor needed to know, that Arlet had reason to do in her husband; if she does Biel in the criminal courts will have something to look at, and they're a mite quicker.  She'd just beat the defiance out of him but he's shot up another four inches and was already mostly kept docile with fear, not force.

She has gold in the bank, though.  She rents a room in her new son-in-law's (mother's) house, which lets her save a bit of face about why she isn't sleeping in her own bed in her own home, perhaps she's just looking to be a doting grandmother - and she hassles the magistrate as relentlessly as the devils below: it's her farm, it has always been her farm, her son's just a thief, it's her farm, Biel can't have it.

The magistrate is foreign.  Some installed Taldane fellow, a hanger-on brought in with the count's new foreign wife, and he wants to know why the farm didn't pass to Arlet's oldest son immediately (not her oldest child - not that Galla has any head for business, she couldn't be a wizard even with a magic hat - but the magistrate doesn't know that!) as soon as her husband died.  He asks her about why it might be that she didn't sell off all of her halflings, only a handful of them, when slavery was about to be outlawed - well, while slavery was being outlawed, she was all the way in Westcrown, and she was letting Biel manage things!  The magistrate takes that as proof that Biel's competent to manage things and - takes her farm from her, just like that.  Says something about how she will not require any pension from Biel's profits on her cows and her milk and her yogurt and her cheese and her butter and her pastures because of all she made off being a delegate.  Recommends that she retire and continue to dedicate herself to assisting her daughter, soon to be a mother herself.

Arlet goes to the count directly.  This is plausibly the most dangerous thing she has ever done, but she has checked in with herself and the alternatives are all murder (of Biel, or of the magistrate, either one).  The count was at the convention, she saw him; they didn't speak directly but she knows his face and has some vague memory of which things he scowled about and which things he nodded at.  And he must have passed muster with the Archduchess, mustn't he, to be count in this new day and age; so he can't be as enragingly dreadful about the concept of a woman owning her own bloody farm as is this man he's managed to emplace in the court.

The count hears her petition and says he'll think about it and sends her away.  Arlet waits two days, and then she's back again, demanding an answer or another audience - you wouldn't think it was too complicated but they did cut her off after she had barely begun to explain the problem, perhaps the count didn't understand? - and the next day, and the next -

Some servant in the castle whispers to her that she might not want to be so aggravating about it, as the count might be concerned that he'll have everyone trying the same thing if he gives her what she wants.  But surely the ship's sailed.  She is back again the next day for her farm.

The count squares the circle by conscripting Biel and making no formal ruling on who the fuck owns the farm.  Biel's young for it, but only if for some reason Arlet happens to remember exactly which year he was born in.  Maybe he's sixteen now.  Who can say.  Perhaps she simply can't recall.  Biel proposes checking his school records but who's going to do that?  Off he goes.

She moves back in, and gets a great big guard dog and lets the now-youngest would-be-cleric name it Esobok, and she puts everything back in order.  Biel never comes back home, good riddance.  Arlet lives another twenty years.  Then she dies and goes to Hell.