Though these requests be somewhat onerous, the Queen will accede to them, not least in the light of that favor which Keltham is, indeed, doing for Cheliax.

For some reason the etiquette teacher made Keltham memorize this part very carefully.  Keltham does not really understand why he needs to negotiate with Governance like this, but okay.

Blah blah the Queen's the one who insisted on dallying with Carissa Sevar in the first place, knowing another had laid his claim to her, and such suffering as that may incur to Her Infernal Majestrix is hers to own blah blah.

YOU'VE MADE YOUR POINT, ASPEXIA.

Has she?  Aspexia Rugatonn is still trying to decide.

So be it then.  Abrogail Thrune does not wish Keltham of dath ilan, outsider and enlightener of Cheliax, to feel at all concerned that his Carissa Sevar would so be taken from him, and indeed, if they cost not Cheliax, she is more than willing to add on other terms meant to ensure that Keltham need never fear any sort of conflict between him and the Queen over Carissa's affection.  At all.  Ever.

Blah blah sounds like a great idea is Contessa Lrilatha willing to do the honors of writing up this compact blah blah.

blah blah Lrilatha is exceedingly willing to do her part to write stringent compact terms to ensure that Cheliax's enlightener, upon his project blessed by Asmodeus Himself, shall not have his delicate affairs further and needlessly complicated by the Queen blah blah

Everyone in the room, including Carissa on relay from Gorthoklek, gets a ringside seat to Keltham's wince and mental wish that Lrilatha would chill.  They're trying to preserve the Queen's pride here!

(Well.  Everyone in the room except the actress playing Isidre, a first-circle cleric of Asmodeus who has long since realized that the reason why somebody as relatively inexperienced as her was called in to serve as an impersonator at this Royal gathering, is not that everyone else is fighting at the Nidal front, but that they're going to kill her when this is over.  She's doing a great job of not showing any visible distress; which would, of course, result in her being almost instantly Dominated and then dying much more painfully.)

Statue, actually!  But obviously not one of the ones that gets warded against detection, just one that gets tossed into her personal collection to stick around until after she dies.  Abrogail does not want this gossip spreading in Hell while she's alive.

Carissa is not what you would call savvy in the nuances of the royal court but it has not escaped her that Keltham has managed to orchestrate an occasion for all of the Queen's advisors to publicly mock her over her handling of the Carissa situation. 

This is definitely bad for Carissa, the only person who any involved party can permissibly torture, which makes it hard to take any real enjoyment from, but she can abstractly appreciate the skill.

She is determinedly not thinking ahead to what Abrogail Her Imperial Majestrix is going to do to her, that seems like the same kind of mistake as thinking about what Hell will be like. She'll endure it when it comes and she won't get anything out of additionally enduring it in advance.

Contract's written up quickly enough.  Yes, Keltham, you have Contessa Lrilatha's word that it says what was discussed and contains no terms meant to be unexpected unpleasant surprises for Keltham.

Keltham reads it carefully anyways, of course.

The Queen reads it much more carefully.

Very standard language; it wouldn't do to include anything hard for Abrogail to check, that she'd have to stop to consider, and give away that such compacts are dangerous in front of Keltham.

What the very standard language says is 'fuck you, stop messing with Asmodeus's pet outsider unless the Church says you can'.  She can't even send him to fake etiquette lessons.  That said the legal language in which that 'fuck you' is written is very standard, for Hell.

But that's pretty much what Abrogail wants, at this point; and you know what, the etiquette thing would maybe not have actually been a good idea, maybe dath ilan also has an idea that there is more than one kind of flirting.

She signs it.

There.

No more fucking 'tropes'.

Keltham signs it, feeling weirdly like he's signing a wedding contract, even though this one does not technically commit him to doing anything at all except for letting Carissa Sevar fuck somebody else.

That... basically did happen without a single trope getting invoked at any point, as near as Keltham can figure it.  He's relieved, honestly.  There aren't even any signs of subversion or deconstruction, the whole thing happened with basically no complications or plot conflicts or unanswered questions or open plot arcs left at the end, unless you count the actual Carissa-Abrogail interaction which the viewpoint character doesn't get to see anyways.

Time to claim his reward.  Well.  Soon he'll claim his reward.  There's something else to arrange first.  "Contessa Lrilatha, I request that you give myself and my Carissa a moment, and then so long as we're here, if it's a good time, I would like to arrange a very careful and Asmodeus-okay demonstration of the fact that Cheliax could in truth have mind-controlled me had Cheliax been that sort of place."

Gorthoklek thinks faster than nearly any mortal could, and decides that it is worth not wantonly destroying a certain bit of value; he can claim it as a very minor favor from Sevar later.

Keltham's thoughts about his upcoming surprise will not be relayed to Sevar.

"With the leave of Her Majesty," says Contessa Lrilatha, "you and your possession could depart to the adjacent antechamber, where it will be possible for me to join you shortly for a demonstration."

(He doesn't own her yet but Keltham isn't going to object; maybe they do think that he basically owns her once she's given herself, like, presumably they would not have gone along with the whole thing otherwise.)

Blah blah oh you'd better fucking believe that he has leave to get out of her sight blah blah.

Keltham heads over to Carissa.

One more adoring incredulous glance at him and then she'll stand, and curtsey, and depart a step behind him. 

Keltham leads her to the indicated antechamber and then kisses her hard enough to make a non-wizard's lip bleed.

She hopes he feels incredibly rewarded! She hopes that this leaves him itching to do something like this to Carissa again, and noticing, maybe, that power is nice, and he likes wielding it.

Also, wow, kissing someone who has just arranged your rental to the Queen of Cheliax? Really really good. Even if you don't have feelings for him because you outgrew that.

It's more that, from Carissa's perspective, which is the only perspective that matters, Keltham has just pulled off a Difficult-Seeming Impressive Trick that Science Maniac Verrez himself would gaze upon with grudging approval.  Any feminine gendertrope that would not swoon at this scarcely deserves to be called a subtype of woman.

But yes he is definitely feeling very rewarded right now!  If they were in a cuddleroom he'd be taking off her clothes already but he is not, in fact, in a cuddleroom.  He has two more things to arrange before they can go there, the second one depending on the outcome of the first.