Belrun will attempt to lend Leareth the opposite of consequence by leaning on him.

This seems to help! Treven keeps talking to Leareth and is a bit less stiff about it and also smiles at Belrun several times. 

And then Randi is asking everyone to sit down so they can have their meeting. 

If there is no assigned seating Belrun will just take whatever chair she happens to be standing nearest.

There does not appear to be assigned seating although the Heralds are all sitting together at one end. Vanyel is seated next to Shavri and his expression is very neutral, which externally makes him look icily composed, but is in fact the face he makes when he wants to be literally anywhere but where he is. 

King Randale calls the meeting to attention. 

There are sixteen lords on the Council, representing different regions of Valdemar. This makes the total size of the meeting RATHER LARGE. Given that, it's maybe not surprising how difficult it is to keep on track. 

Belrun writes down all their names and current seating positions and distinguishing traits as they manifest them.

They're initially kind of hard to distinguish because nearly all of them are men older than sixty. Lord Kathar, portly and round-faced, does not look particularly intelligent, but the points he makes are actually pretty good - although he also opposes Randi's political opinions on nearly everything. Lord Preatur's main trait seems to be that he hates all religions and temple orders and would like them to serve fewer infrastructure purposes in Valdemar please. Lord Enderby represents the general area where Vanyel is from and they seem to know each other; he seems practical-minded, and mostly backs Randi's decisions. Lord Alcott is the youngest person on the Council by maybe twenty years, and quite new to representing the south; his predecessor, Lord Taving, lost his Council position and was sent back to his holding in disgrace after the scandal where it was discovered he had been supplying Karsite rebels. Lord Leverance and Lord Kaltar seem to dislike each other and frequently snipe at each other's points for no especially obvious reason. Lord Lathan's single most distinguishing trait is that he is obnoxious and, based on the mostly-concealed sighs from the Heralds every time he stands up to speak, they agree unanimously on this. 

Interesting! She pays particular attention to Lord Preatur because he has a point and she's curious what things should serve infrastructural purposes in his mind instead.

He seems to at least get that the Heralds absolutely cannot replace this role, there aren't nearly enough of them. (Lord Alcott appears confused on this point.) Lord Preatur thinks they should hand more responsibilities to town mayors and magistrates, and add some additional roles there, where people will receive a stipend from the Crown in exchange for providing those infrastructure needs. 

Is the counterargument mostly about the budget or what?

That's Lord Kathar's opinion. Lord Enderby and Lord Lathan both seem to think that on average, town mayors are going to be more corrupt than temple priests; it's unclear how much of this is bound up in the fact that they have firm relationships and mutual agreements with the temples in their regions, and less so with the secular leadership. Lord Leverance thinks that the current system works fine and why risk changing it, it'll be a lot of overhead and it might turn out to not work fine. Lord Kaltar is sniping at this but not in a very contentful way. 

She experiments with various ways of diagramming the opinions in play and winds up covering several sheets of paper with names and arrows and symbols.

Belrun also has a chance to witness Vanyel's Demonsbane act, as he calls it.

It consists mostly of the fact that everyone pays rapt attention the second he moves to speak; it's unclear Vanyel is doing anything in particular to cause this, versus people simply reacting to his war hero status. He does speak with the same coolly poised manner, unreadable as a marble statue; it's very unlike the way he's spoken with her in the past, though it's not entirely dissimilar to Leareth's previous default mannerisms in the dream with Vanyel, that Belrun once called his 'dour painting' act.

(Vanyel's internal state throughout is that he hates it when everyone looks at him, thinks it's stupid, and would really like this to be over now please, but this is not apparent at all from his exterior.) 

It's interesting! She's not sure she can do the dour painting thing but it's notably effective.

Treven does remarkably well for an eleven-year-old at sitting through three hours of meeting. Eventually they break for lunch, having covered everything on Randi’s opening agenda.

She works on getting her diagrams to tidily express all the information she wants to note in a compact way while she eats.

Leareth leans on her. It might help him seem more approachable - multiple people seem to be considering approaching him but being too intimidated - and it's also exhausting being on high alert all of the time. 

She is happy to be leaned on and lend inconsequence. Maybe she will feed him a bite of her fruit salad, that seems very inconsequential.

Vanyel has such a hard time watching this, and a few of the lords’ bemused glances at each other, with a straight face.

Poor Vanyel, who is using his consequence and might need to keep it. She winks.

Vanyel winks back and then returns to his conversation, appearing to pay full attention to Lord Lathan and not showing any sign of annoyance at all. 

He Mindspeaks her privately without looking over. :Would you keep doing that if you ended up Queen?: He sounds a little incredulous. 

:What, leaning on Leareth? Winking at people? Taking notes?:

:I mostly meant the part where you’re feeding him food off your plate like - teenage lovers, or something: