At the end of that day Leareth goes to talk to Pexa again and make sure she's getting along well with her new governess Alleara and taking care of her cats. 

"Daddy," says Pexa delightedly and tells him about her day's adventures and then demands he do spinny magic.

Does reading her mind clarify at all what she means by that. 

She recalls being spun wildly in circles on the floor by some kind of force barrier, and screaming with glee, while her daddy does the magic and her mommy sits in a stuffed armchair nearby, giggling.

...Well, Leareth can try his best to replicate that. At least for a little bit. It looks tiring. 

:Tell me if I am doing it right: he instructs, and then attempts to set up and spin a force barrier that seems similar. 

He is doing it right! She is so delighted! She shrieks and giggles and spins around bursting with unadulterated joy.

That's - weirdly pleasing, actually. Leareth is still mostly on the side of hoping that the mystery of a child he met a few days ago thinking he's her father will somehow resolve itself and go away, but...if that happens he might, possibly, miss her a little bit. 

He spins her until he's both tired and slightly worried he's going to give her motion sickness and cause her to throw up on him, and then hands her back to Alleara. 

She seems unsurprised by getting to see her father only ten minutes a day; sometimes he is VERY BUSY and CANNOT PLAY WITH HER even though he LOVES HER SO.

...This continues to be awkward but it could be worse. Leareth is content to visit her once a day in the evenings and entertain her with magic for a bit. 

Leareth reviews the modified security precautions, and about a week after the hasty evacuation, they organize a more orderly return to the previous research base. 

Carissa has resumed her magic research. She's trying to engineer Clairvoyance, which is going to be related to the spellform for scrying, but she's not having any luck, and she's a little worried there's some trick to it she doesn't have a good way of deriving. She does, in the course of experimenting with divinations in general, get Enter Image, but that's not good for much now that she's not trying to spy on everybody.

Leareth continues checking in with her every so often but mostly leaving her research priorities up to her. 

The day they move back in, after he's found Pexa a two-suite bedroom and made stars on the ceiling of her new bedroom for her so it'll feel more homey, he spends a bit in the library, and then heads over to Carissa's room. "I tracked down my copy of Seldasen on ethics, if you are still interested in having a look?" 

"Sure! Uh, what ...is ethics, exactly."

"- Probably you will best understand how I use the term by reading the book and forming an extensional definition that way. The...simple answer, for this, is 'the study of how scholars and philosophers think people ought to behave', which is separate both from how people do behave and from what sorts of actions are strategic for accomplishing a given goal. I - suppose some people might call it the study of Good but I suspect what we mean by that here is different from how it is used in Golarion." 

He offers her the book. 

She takes the book. "It actually sounds kind of more like Law? Law for humans is mostly about what behavior and what rules produce functioning societies."

"Oh - yes, that could be, though I expect you will find it to be something of a mix of both. The Heralds are Lawful, for example, but Law does not determine the difference between what they think is correct behaviour in terms of running a kingdom, and how Cheliax does things. And I am certain they would not even consider running Valdemar like Cheliax, even in exchange for Cheliax's wealth." 

"Well. I'll read it."

The foreword to the book is about what it means to be a Herald. The Heralds' oath, that all of them make in front of the monarch when they graduate and are granted their white uniform, is included in the text and then discussed. 

I pledge you my heart, that we may build and preserve our land and people together.

I vow to obey our Laws and seek the Truth in every thought and deed, to heal the wrongs and bring aid to those who suffer, and by the strength of my hand to restore and keep the peace.

The deeds of those who lived before, the legends of our past, have shown me the way, and my Companion has opened a door in my heart.

It is upon love that we build this foundation, and for love that I will serve Valdemar as long as there is breath in me.

This is our sacred trust. My path stands clear before me, and where you lead, I cannot be afraid.

Upon my soul I vow this to you, that the light that is our people may never fade.

To be a Herald, Seldasen writes, is to take on the duty of holding a kingdom together, year after year, generation after generation. This is the sacred trust they were handed, a mantle passed down from the first King Valdemar, who tried to build a place that was different and better from the homeland he had fled with his family and people. 

He acknowledges that the Heralds' oath is not, exactly, an instruction manual on how to be a Herald. It's flowery and metaphorical - pretty words, but what good are poetic words when you need to decide which of your people to send into a battle where they will almost certainly die? When you need to decide whether to hire on the mercenary company your kingdom can afford, to defend its borders in a time of desperate warfare, knowing that the mercenaries in question would never, ever clear the bar to be considered as Heralds themselves, and aren't even particularly interested in following Valdemar's laws at all? 

Sometimes reality is hard and unfair and you need to compromise something. And the Heralds' oath isn't an instruction list on what things can and cannot be compromised, either, because reality has never been that simple. But what the oath does is gesture, vaguely, at the spark held in common between all Heralds. Valdemar has never been just its land, or just its laws, or just its monarch. Valdemar is and always has been its people, and the responsibility every Herald takes on is to give those people a world that is safe, where they can live and love and raise their children without having to be afraid. 

We are only children, Seldasen writes, and there are no parents, not in all the world. We face adult problems, and burdens that are too heavy to bear, and we break. We fall down, and we pick ourselves up and keep going, because what else are we going to do, when there is a kingdom that we must protect? 

Carissa spends a while puzzling over what problem is presented by hiring unLawful mercenaries or by commanding soldiers. But it's compelling writing? The guy is - well, a paladin, to a first approximation, but he seems to be really really trying, to make his kingdom a nice place to live.

She reads it straight through.

Seldasen presents several different viewpoints or frameworks that Heralds can use for reasoning about ethics, which for him seems to boil down to 'how to make decisions so that the world around you will end up being a nice place to live'; he says that ethics is relevant to almost everyone, whether they're running a kingdom or not, but especially important for Heralds because of the responsibility they bear - because the people of Valdemar trust them and defer and listen to them about what will make their lives and their children's lives good.

You can think about ethics as a matter of principle, which is somewhat different than a matter of law, because there are ethical principles that aren't and shouldn't be encoded in Valdemar's official law and punished by the courts. Lying is wrong. Stealing is wrong. Murder is wrong. All of these can be cashed out more concretely - it's not just 'because', the most straightforward summary is that actions are wrong in principle if you wouldn't want your neighbours or your king doing them to you. Most people do not want to be murdered, or lied to, or stolen from, and so doing these to the people around you is predictably doing them a disservice, and this is - more universal and less subjective than matters of preference that vary, like favourite foods. Seldasen thinks this is a reasonable framework for Heralds to use most of the time; it's not generally confusing, most of the time, and drawing clear bright lines makes it easier to avoid rationalizations. The difficulty comes in when different principles conflict, which will inevitably happen.

You can think about ethics as a matter of virtue; to be ethical is to be kind and generous and loyal and brave and to keep your promises, and such and such. Seldasen thinks this framework is helpful when you're trying to figure out what you should do and not just what you shouldn't do. Heralds need to do a lot more than not lie and not steal and not murder people. That being said, different virtues can also conflict, and the framework doesn't in itself give a strong sense of whether being loyal is more important than being generous. 

You can think about ethics as entirely grounded in the people you're being ethical for. The ethical course of action is what saves lives, or what makes people wealthier, or what prevents crime and disease and hunger and fear. This frame is in a sense a lot simpler than either of the others; you won't run into conflicts between different principles or virtues, there is nearly always a fact of the matter about what saves lives. The difficulty is that any course of action has many effects, in the immediate and medium and very long term, many of which are hard to predict in advance, and so it's easy to, with the best of intentions, do far more harm than good.

...

And then he goes through so so many examples of hard choices, where it's not clear what to do and different ethical frameworks might give different answers. Seldasen adores controversial frustrating examples. He never claims that there's one true right answer, here. Sometimes it's obvious from the writing that he leans a particular way, but not always. 

Murder, for example: generally wrong. Saving the life of an innocent person: generally good. But imagine yourself besieged in a city, at war, and an innocent woman - a citizen of Valdemar - and her child, ill with plague, begging to be let in. Or even climbing the walls. The city has Healers; they might well be able to save the child's life without risking the lives of others. But they might not. The woman and her child might die anyway and spread disease to the besieged soldiers. She might turn out to be a spy. There is always uncertainty. But in these conditions, it's at the very least not obviously wrong to refuse to save one person, in exchange for saving many more, and perhaps even to kill to woman in order to prevent her getting in. 

There are a lot more examples. Is it ever the ethical choice to disobey a superior's orders. To conceal information you know about a crime committed. To lie to someone who trusts you. Seldasen admits readily that many of the examples are carefully chosen to be as difficult as possible, rather than because they really happened, but life is often unclear, he says, and some of the examples are real ones that occurred in his life, or to his friends. (He doesn't specify which of them.) 

Obviously you don't let the woman with the plague into the city, why would you possibly do that. She can't think why you shouldn't lie, either. Stealing things is bad but it seems absurd to handle this by trying to convince individual people to care enough about strangers to not rob them, instead of to have harsh penalties for robbery so it's not worth it...

She thinks that maybe the things that people in Valdemar consider a dilemma are not the same as the things that people in Cheliax consider a dilemma. But - there aren't books like this in Cheliax, it's very obvious there couldn't be.

She wonders if Leareth thinks any of these are difficult dilemmas.

She sets it down and gets back to work.

Leareth comes to see her the next day, which is a shorter interval than usual. 

"I had a question for you," he says, seriously. This is also not his usual opening. 

Which makes her tense up, a little. "Oh?"

"How would you feel about returning to Valdemar, this time officially on my behalf? ...I spoke to Vanyel last night. For - reasons that I do not fully understand - the Heralds are much more willing to countenance having you come and talk to them more than about having me send someone else." 

"...that's weird. Uh. You don't think they'll kill me? Or try to take me hostage under the mistaken impression you're very invested in me?"

"I do not think they will kill you. You - well, you read Seldasen, right, and I imagine it came across how committed the Heralds are to their principles. They might try to take you hostage but it would be stupid to do so and they would promptly get a very unpleasant surprise, which they know - in fact, they ought assume I have even more capabilities than I revealed just then, which I do."