"Not at all! I told you, I met her when she showed up in my bedroom in the dead of night as a mysterious noblewoman who wanted me to join her schemes. - I suppose, in the end, she had the last laugh, as here I am now, in all her schemes."

"I don't believe you'd mentioned some of those details before, actually.  What sort of scheme was a Prestidigitation adept of Corentyn being invited to join, by this mysterious noblewoman?"

"Oh, you know, high treason, regicide, that sort of thing. I shouldn't tell of all her tricks; what if she wants to use them on other people?"

"Well, congratulations on passing your loyalty test, then.  Assuming you did pass, and all this isn't the aftermath of your failure where you're told that you die a horrible death as soon as you stop amusing her."

"You'd have to be one idiot of a wizard to agree to mysterious noblewoman schemes to overthrow House Thrune....though I'm not sure that is actually what she's testing." She shrugs. Sips her drink.

...chills it, with a Prestidigitation, made convincingly wobbly off her hand like she never quite mastered spell scaffolding. "Anyway, she already did the 'die a horrible death as soon as you stop amusing me' thing, I doubt it'd be as fun the second time."

"You're actually confident of surviving the romance, then?  I won't say there's nobody in Cheliax who can lay claim to being one of her surviving exes, but it's by all accounts the exception rather than the rule."

"Well, we'll see. But just between you and me, I think she likes me."

"I'm glad I don't have your problems."  He raises his wineglass in salute to her a final time, and respectfully departs.

The thing about Cheliax is that its surviving nobles are not the sort to charge in heedlessly.  There's a Countess who seems at first to be toying cruelly with the naive beauty, but it rapidly comes clear that the Countess is maintaining firmly in mind the possibility that this isn't a naive beauty, and isn't particularly taking any emotional satisfaction from the process of probing this possible facade.

But it's Cheliax and there will be somebody.

This recently-ascended Baroness, who looks a bit like Avaricia in the sense of maybe having bought her own looks from the same purveyors, doesn't believe that Miss Incognito is an innocent beauty picked up by Abrogail Thrune and thrown to the wolves.  But she wants to know if Miss Incognito is some other manner of enjoyable victim, because so far it looks like people have just been probing her cautiously and that's a sad look on Hell's country, isn't it.  If Miss Incognito is here to be hurt, the Queen will be pleased with the first to dare hurt her, especially with so many others having shown themselves too cowardly.

"The Queen must favor you much, to invite you to such an exclusive gathering as this," says the Baroness, who feels confident in her Sense Motive against most people's Bluff short of the Queen.

"I think she's hoping I'll have fun, yes. Though I notice she really invited rather a lot of people."

And what does her Sense Motive tell her about this answer?

Carissa's giving her Bluff a lot of exercise this evening, and she has her Glibness pin up, and she was actually very good at this even before that. 

She's hard to read. 

However, 'I notice she really invited rather a lot of people' is ...in reserve to be interpretable in retrospect as an insult, say, rather than outright being one.

"It takes a number of people to run a successful war, many fewer than have been deemed worthy to be here."  The Baroness gestures at the chained shackleborn tiefling, who now has an older woman interestedly casting some minor sorcery spells against him, to test his resilience.  "Even that sad thing contributed; you can't have a successful war without an enemy, or loot, or a conquered people to learn their new place."  Subtext:  And what's your place here, then?

"Good of the Queen to invite one of them, then. Though I have to say, I don't know that I like it. Why'd they cut off his fingers." It's an apparently sincere question, with the slightest note of concern for the poor thing.

"Well, you know what they say about shackleborn.  Couldn't have him going around fingering people."

"I don't know what they say about shackleborn, actually." And probably it's changed in the history books, now that Nidal is conquered Chelish territory instead of a technically-allied independent polity.

"To put it another way, at a party like this one, you're either one of the ones who does the fingering, or you're one of the fingered.  Cutting off his fingers serves to ensure nobody becomes confused about which role he holds here."

"They have him chained up and they're doing an auction! And it seems like some bloody expensive symbolism, what with how whoever buys him is going to need a Regenerate to make him useful!"

Maybe she really is just an innocent who does not understand the way that the court in Egorian works, at all. If she's bluffing she's bluffing incredibly well.

"Nobody here gives a fuck about the cost of a Regenerate, not that he'll get one.  He's being sold for purposes of interesting suffering, and doesn't need fingers to suffer."

" - right. 

Sorry, where I'm from people buy slaves to...do things."

"There's things he can do without fingers, once he's properly broken.  It takes a long time to break shackleborn, but they're good for a longer time after that than most human slaves after you break them.  He's a good investment for someone who wants to practice their hobby of cruelty in a medium that requires a long effort of the hobbyist and rewards that long effort with a lasting bit of craft."

"And you wouldn't want him fingering anything during the process."

"Are shackleborn an interest of yours?"

"They weren't, but that was before a couple of thousand such went up for sale in Cheliax and somebody at the victory party so forcefully called my attention to them.  I don't care enough to win the auction on this one, but maybe I'll try my luck with one of the others.  And cut off their fingers, and leave them off, now that you've brought the subsequent possibilities to my attention.  I know you don't want your name spoken here, but is there a way I could mail the fingers to you?"

" - what're you trying to prove? Obviously we won and can do as we like with everyone in Nidal. I just don't personally happen to want anybody's fingers."

"Yes, that would be exactly why I'd have the fingers delivered to you, you see, because you didn't want them.  It's a question of who in Cheliax gets to do what they want with everyone in Nidal; the ones who want tieflings to have fingers, or the ones who want them not to.  So far it looks the Fingerless Tiefling Party is winning."