Which, of course, 'the Emperor' will relay to his allies on the other continent by Telepathic Bond as soon as it arrives on his desk that evening. 

He's cautiously optimistic? They're not going to see a decision today, but he thinks Marit's testimony is enough that he can lean on the council to send Iomedae a stern diplomatic letter demanding that the Knights of Ozem offer formal apologies and reparations to both side (method of payment to be decided later, resurrections a possibility, the Empire is not going to want to supply diamonds for it but Altarrin is sure he can come up with alternate diamond sourcing that doesn't strain the crusade's resources.) And if Iomedae persuades Jean to accept a treaty that gives him pre-war borders, even if the Empire has no intention of giving cultural artifacts back that are currently on display in Jacona, then - they might be able to bring this to an end to the war in Oris within two or three days. 

...he doesn't want a blatant or even very suspicious intervention in the civil wars, but he wouldn't complain if it were within Alfirin's abilities to, say, give General Norean and all of his top staff who dine together food poisoning tonight. Just to keep them distracted for a day so he can buy more time to argue with the council. 

- how's Bastran doing? 

(He's been alternating crying fits and asking for the sleep spell, and has refused all offers of food and company, but he hasn't made any attempt to harm himself.) 

It has been solidly sixteen hours since anything went horrendously wrong.

The Crusade is now ensconced within the walls of Urgir; if Tar-Baphon comes for them, there’ll be time to call help, and also realistically he’s not going to attempt that, not in the winter with his armies recently beaten and the Crusade possessed with many more diamonds than he thought they had. He might try something desperate, but there’s no real reason to think Urgir is where he’d try it.

The Emperor of the Eastern Empire has his ministers supportive or at least cooperative with his plans for peace. If the Emperor of the Eastern Empire is in fact a body-double operating on behalf of an enemy power because the real Emperor is suicidal and surrendered in the dead of night, well.

 ....it’d probably be counted against Iomedae’s Law, if she went to trial, which she isn’t planning to.

The Church of Aroden in Beset is getting good foot traffic due to the free magical healing and food. 

The Mirrorgrave is presently disembodied. His spectres are presently both contained and intensely supervised. His undead allies are deader than undead, and there are no signs Tar-Baphon sent anyone else. 

Iomedae has no remaining excuses not to talk about her feelings.

Alfirin doesn’t really have any excuses left either. She steels herself, finds Iomedae in one of the mansion’s sitting rooms, and sits in an armchair across from her, because sitting closer feels unwise.

“If you’re not unusually busy, I’m planning to do my Wisdom in the morning before I sleep. If there’s anything you want to say before I do, now’s the time.”

She takes a deep breath, and then doesn’t say anything, and then takes another one, and - “would you like me to? I’ve - been thinking about it, and I do have a lot to say, but it’s not very carefully filtered for - being good for you to hear, or being the objectively correct reflection of human values, or even for being what I’ll really think once I’m not in pain.”

“From a certain point of view the wise thing to say here is ‘No, not now, I should decide that tomorrow when I’m wiser.’

…Which is to say, yes, but tomorrow I might look back on saying that and wonder what I was thinking.”

“The fact you’re going to enhance your Wisdom tomorrow is in fact a little bit loadbearing, in fact. If this is a catastrophe we have an obvious mechanism by which to reset from there and not spend the rest of my life detectably bristling at each other.”

That is more reasonable sounding than “Let’s get all possible foolishness done while we still can,” which was not none of Alfirin’s reasoning in starting this conversation now.

“OK. Not tomorrow, then.”

And Iomedae closes her eyes. 

“Right. Well, first off - this is my fault.” She does pause there, for Alfirin to interrupt if it’s false, but she’s pretty sure it isn’t and pretty sure Alfirin won’t reassure her it’s false if it’s true. 

“...I would not say that it’s obvious how to assign blame here. But if you want to start with the frame where it’s your fault we can do that?”

Impatient gesture. “There are virtues I aspire to, which I think are important, and if I had credibly possessed them, you wouldn’t have done it without - without talking about if there was a way to get the same goods at a lower price - and, and if you’d never met me, then, you wouldn’t have been - in such a hurry, and so scared -”

There’s some truth in that - and Iomedae had other things to say. They can argue about whose fault it really is that Alfirin murdered seventy-nine people later, if that still seems important. For now she’ll just give a very slight nod of acknowledgement.

“And I’m pretty distressed about that,” she goes on, “both in that I keep imagining - I keep imagining everything about it, actually, and I should probably stop, but I don’t feel like I understand yet what question I’m trying to answer for myself with the imagining, so I haven’t made myself stop. Imagining - what you believed, about me, about the world, what you were thinking, how afraid you were, wondering if I’m imagining wrong how afraid you were because I can’t remember what it’s like, and then, I try to be balanced, right, in where I’m letting my pain dwell, and that would mean spending a hundred times as much time imagining the people who you murdered, and if they were afraid, and what they were like, and what I would have thought of them and then of course that gets one into just an astonishing number of logistical questions, really, I’m not even sure how I would murder a hundred - 

-you didn’t say how many, I decided on a hundred in my head because it seemed like not the most important part to be spreading a lot of my sense of uncertainty over -

How does one murder a hundred people? Do you buy them? Do you go out and find isolated villages whose neighboring villages won’t even notice for a month until the cobbler fails to show - you don’t have to answer this, I’m not actually sure it’d be a good idea to answer this, it is terrible not knowing and it would be terrible knowing and it doesn’t matter, because - 

Because if you thought it was a mistake I would forgive it in an instant and if you don’t think it’s a mistake then you will do it again, and again, and again, where it’s similarly called for and probably eventually when it’s less called for, because I do think that people are - shaped, over time, by which trades they in fact end up making, and I said earlier it’s my fault and that’s part of what is my fault, cornering you into being the kind of person who’d do that kind of thing and stand behind it for forever and I don’t, actually, know how to bound how much harm that was. Is. Will be. - and I’m angry at you, for something about all of that, though I’m not actually sure what specifically.

“I was not, if you consider it all together, more willing to make those trades for having met you.”

“...Seventy-nine. Most of them were not afraid, most of them - never knew - just fell asleep one night and never woke up -”

She nods, mostly the normal way people nod and not the strangled way peoples’ necks move when broken. Mostly. 

“I thought of - I thought of the most cutting possible account of why I was angry with you, and refined it in my head until it shone very brightly, but I think it’s - it almost can’t be true, it’d be coincidence if it was, if the sharpest knife I knew how to draw happened to also be the actual explanation for why I am angry. Probably I am angry for normal human reasons like feeling - stupid, and betrayed, and grieved, and childish for not having priced this in properly already when if someone had asked me decades ago I wouldn’t’ve said this was that improbable -”

Another nod.

“The cutting account - uh, blunted slightly - is that I think civilization only works because most people, if they aren’t desperate, if they aren’t starving and their sister isn’t dying of fever, won’t knife a stranger in the gut for ten gold pieces. Enough of them will, obviously, that you have to spend a fair bit of the strength of your civilization on making it not a good idea, but most of them won’t, and that’s - that’s most of why, there’s anything, instead of - you can see what being slightly more instinctively murderous than humanity gets you, and it’s not -

-

-anything we care about -

And so it feels like, actually, the whole project of civilization doesn’t really, or shouldn’t really, have space in it, for people who are that selfish, and like if it manages to limp along having them, it’s the same way armies manage to function even though some of their soldiers are cowards who’ll turn and run.

I don’t know what I’d do, in a world where people are that selfish. I think it couldn’t be - the things I have done - I feel like in a sense my whole life is a bet on most people being better than that, deep down."

"The thing I actually believe is of course that it’s some kind of cross-section of unselfishness and Law, that you need, and it’d be insane to claim you don’t possess it, and a civilization full of you would probably function fine, and if it was missing - something - well, a civilization full of me would be missing something too, I do know that. But it does feel like there’s something there, in the direction I am inclined towards angrily stabbing at, that there’s a sense in which this horrible ludicrously complicated world gets to present you all kinds of trades, especially if you’re inventive enough to go out looking for new ones, and I think I’m right to feel afraid of what world would result from you making all the trades that look as good as killing seventy-nine people to set up a backup form of immortality in case you ever run out of clones and allies at the same time - 

- And I do realize that forever is a long time and you probably will have, someday, run out of clones and allies at the same time, unless and maybe even if the church is charged with helping you, and that you won’t want them so charged because you don’t want to only do things it won’t rip me to pieces to countenance."

There are things she could say, to defend herself - it wasn’t just selfish, she didn’t just do it to live forever, she can raise the dead and she can prevent death from aging and she doesn’t need the gods for any of it and maybe someday it won’t just be her -

- That’s not a dream Iomedae shares -

- It wasn’t just selfish but the selfish reasons were enough -

- Iomedae is right, civilization should not really have space in it for people like her -

“...I am having a harder than usual time reading you, and I can’t tell if you want me to defend my actions or - just nod along because they’re indefensible - “

“ - please do, it’s easier to - think about explanations than to think about things I’ve entirely built in my own head -”

“OK. I’ll try. It - wasn’t just for immortality - it was definitely for immortality, I think you’re overestimating the number of powerful wizards who finally die in their sleep even though they have clones and allies and insurance and by rights ought to make it to old age -

- But also this is - it’s the same thing that lets me raise dead. I could prepare it before, I could cast it but the spell would just fall apart -

- raise dead and reincarnate and heal and remove disease and - it doesn’t take a god -

- I know that doesn’t matter as much to you, you’re planning to become a god yourself and -

- I wouldn’t counsel someone else to make the same trades, unless they were - very like me already - more like me than anyone I’ve met -

- If you count on net it’s sixty-eight. I know that’s not much better and - it’s not really fair, to them, to count on net. It’s probably less than sixty-eight, those are just the ones where - I’m very sure - "

“- it does matter, a great deal, to me, if there’s a route to wizards doing resurrections. I’m planning to become a god but even if I can fix everything that way, and I probably can’t, Aroden’s been at it for nearly four thousand years and his first planet isn’t even good enough - obviously it’s worth investing down a thousand other routes, even if it weren’t worth it for its own sake because people should have more within their reach - you’d have had volunteers, for a project like that, if it doesn’t consume their souls or something -

No, the relevant differential is - well, substantially it’s between something you did openly with volunteers and something you did secretly with people you murdered, and - and I’m guessing that’s not the part that was altruistically motivated -"

“Achaekek. And - obviously not just Achaekek - “

- Also Iomedae, and anyone else who might eventually oppose her.

She doesn’t say that but she doesn’t particularly attempt to conceal thinking it. 

“Yes. Though the others that I thought would oppose me for that in particular were Urgathoa and Pharasma.”