"If you insist, Fatebinder." Some of the others look annoyed; probably they were looking forward to watching the bloodthirsty induction rite.

"If they don't want him back enough to make it worth our while, you did capture him fair and square.  Right now, though, we're trying a different strategy.  ...And if the Disfavored come 'round to complain again, should that fall through, try telling them that stripping the man of his false honor and treating him like the average conscripted peasant is perhaps a worse humbling if it gets out.  The Vendrien Guard wants to martyr themselves.  It's a strategic mistake to let them.  ...Hm.  I should likely raise this matter to the Marshal.  Well.  May your battles be bloody; I'll get out of your hair."

She writes down 'Tarkis Demos - QO officer, noble?, check surrender terms re: Disfavored, oathbreakers' on her diptych of things that need doing.

Next!

The Marshal is looking for her. "Fatebinder! Since you're going to be playing an important role here, I think we should give you another bodyguard. I have just the man; he lost his unit in the Edict of Storms and we've been wasting him on training duty since then."

"Marshal Erenyos!  What a coincidence; I was hoping to speak with you on another matter.  I will be glad to have him, I'm sure.  He wishes to fight?"

"Yes. He'd much rather be back in the shieldwall, and I don't blame him, but - well, see for yourself; he's hard to fit in a regulation phalanx. Barik! Over here, I've found your new assignment."

Standing by the training field is - a walking suit of armor, the strangest suit Ophelia's ever seen. He's a mass of twisted metal, iron and bronze wrapping around each other. It's not clear where the joints are, though he seems to be able to move relatively easily.

Also, he smells. Of both human waste and lye, pretty strongly, like he's trying very hard to remove and cover up the unpleasant smells and failing.

He walks over. "Iron Marshal. Fatebinder."

Verse stifles a chuckle, with a "don't mind me" kind of expression.

Oh dear.  "Barik."  She will shake his hand, if it's offered; it's not like the waste gets up there.  Probably.  (She will also acknowledge a salute.)  "I'm Fatebinder Ophelia Vaudelle.  I'd say it's a pleasure to meet you if it weren't for the circumstances under which you're meeting me; please accept my condolences for your loss, instead."

She adds 'Alchemy research for Barik: smell reduction' and 'consult available Forgebound, ?Vellum expatriates? re: what the fuck is w/ Barik' to her planner.

He shakes the hand offered. "I have heard you proclaimed the Edict that has made us busy."

"She has. And she's going to be moving between our forces and the Chorus doing liason duty. I judged she needed a better escort than a single Scarlet Fury, and you are an excellent soldier. Detached duty is a better use of your talents than training, especially given your current state."

"Yes, Commander," he says, slightly resigned.

That doesn't seem quite like he's really willing, but she'll bring that up later, in private.

"Well, welcome aboard, Barik.  I'll want to get an idea of your skillset and how you fight, and run through some spars afterwards between ourselves; I try to avoid them, but I expect that we will end up in a fight sooner rather than later, and don't want any of us to trip over eachother when we do.  Before we start on that, though - 

"Marshal Erenyos, I've heard some things about what the Disfavored are doing with ranking prisoners, and if you have a moment I want to talk about ways to spook the horse the Vendrien Guard are hitched to, rather than spur it."

"We can discuss it, but I don't think our policy is going to change. I was all for allowing a peaceful surrender, but if they can't be trusted to keep to an oath, I don't see that we can reasonably leave them alive."

"I have been meaning to ask what they were sworn to, in particular.  Sometimes the words matter.

"...I don't think that executing them is a necessarily disproportionate response for their crimes, no matter how I might wish otherwise, given that they're surely breaching Kyros's Peace, and worse, knowingly - that's a death penalty for sure - but I've heard that many are quite keen on torture, and then death.  That plays into the Guard's narrative of the Overlord's brutal hands crushing the people. 

"If the message you want to send is that you will not work with oathbreakers - you may as well humiliate them further by refusing to deal with them at all, rather than bloody your hands with their deaths; let the Chorus erase their vaunted names and turn the Guard's penchant for figureheads against them - at least if I were planning the crier's speech.  But someone needs to show honor to the people, since the Vendrien Guard have claimed they are honorable, and - oddly enough - smallfolk don't much like torturers.

"I suppose, then, before I review the surrender terms, that my policy request is that if someone dies for being an oathbreaker - it should be quick and clean, and then you can mount their head on a pike.  I would also propose the option of exile - stripping them of name and title, becoming some other new person, then shipping them off...somewhere very far away, I suppose, since we've no land that's not our land left...but we're locked in here, so it's really rather moot."

"Tch. I don't like it. They could have fought us to the death honorably, and then we would have given them honorable deaths; to give them the same after they had terms of surrender accepted and then betrayed sits poorly with me, like it encourages every other army to give a false surrender and then a sneak attack, as they did. I don't think there was much room in the oath, either; it wasn't sophisticated, I believe it just went 'I surrender to Kyros and his laws, as my liege has before me. I pledge to lay down arms and not oppose the Overlord or the Overlord's Peace, and so to be accepted as his vassal and protected by that Peace.'"

"I somehow doubt you mount the heads of those who died honorable deaths on pikes.  But I do take your meaning; you say they are outlaws.  I think I cannot disagree, if that is what they swore to.  I suppose the question is whether you can consider an oath taken at swordpoint to be - valid, true, bearing upon your honor - and whether how you treat even an outlaw reflects on your personal merit.

"There's not a lot of precedent on that."

"Not most, but we have put ringleader's deaths on display in the past. As for oaths at swordpoint - the surrender was concluded under blue flag. They'd lost a lot of men and knew it, but the Queen and her high nobles signed the treaty. If the officers whose oaths of fealty bound them to follow didn't like it - well, they should have made like the three leaders of the Vendrien Guard; fled, or died trying. Those three, I will admit, broke no oaths to us or to Kyros. Just to their liege-women."

"We had two heads spiked at our camp in Stalwart," Barik confirms, "Unbroken leaders who we captured, executed once we concluded they weren't going to consider an exchange of prisoners. They died well."

Ophelia nods.

"Then as much as I don't like that the world is this way, I can hardly change it now.  Not without a vast change in circumstances.

"I do - hmm.  Wonder how you resolve conflicting oaths; if they consider themselves most bound by fealty to their smallholders, for example, that would - explain this behavior, somewhat.  Much like how many laws can - bend - in the service of Kyros's Peace."

"Well, when they weren't rising in rebellion, our plan was to maintain a garrison large enough to discourage idiots and let Tunon's people resolve the complicated questions. Unfortunately, there were substantially more rebels than we were told" - she throws a brief sidelong glance at Verse and Bitter Quip "- and the garrison wasn't large enough to hold. We've been lenient to any civilians not supporting the Oathbreakers, as far as I'm aware."

"That's good.

"I meant to say that - I'm wondering if some of the lords may have 'risen' because they expected that otherwise their fiefs and people would have suffered for it.  Though I'd hardly know the circumstances of who declared when how."

"Then they shouldn't have taken the new oaths. Now they have; they can either go to Tunon for resolution or kneel like they swore they would." Her voice is intensely contemptuous, in a way that it hasn't been even for discussing the Oathbreakers.

"Honor is not mine to judge, Marshal; only the law in its plain letter.  And the question was of honor; is of honor still.

"...I feel as though the problem is that they may have been - and would be - in fact materially prevented from going to Tunon," she replies, mildly, "by the rebellion's forces coercing them, especially any parts of it that have assassins, and that if they now continue to be so barred from requesting judgement by both sides, then.  Well.  That seems like a problem has occurred, somewhere in the present process.

"I wrote a paper, the once, on judgement of those who were significantly under the power of another at the time they committed a criminal act.  I think that if you make this a question of law, I would apply the 'surrender to Kyros's Peace at first opportunity, and there will be no stain accrued for a coerced or unknowing act' doctrine I wrote then, to the situation of 'all of my neighbors have forsworn Kyros and will kill me if I don't say that I will fight with them' now, and be quite wroth over any who were denied the benefit of civilization because of it.  Though we tread on heavily hypothetical - nigh-illusionary - ground, without an example of such in evidence.  I don't imagine anyone's tried, even if they knew of this."

A thought hits her.

"...Was there even a Fatebinder assigned to this province, before?  Tunon's Court is rather busy; he doesn't - can't - ride circuit.  Perhaps that would have helped."

"We had one here to supervise the surrender itself; I forget his name, middle-aged man with a spear, used illusion magic and some lightning when we had a Bane attack. I don't think we've had anyone stationed here for more than a fist besides that. Some passing through, naturally, since this was pacified ground and a good central road, but if there have been any since the oathbreakers started their rebellion, they didn't make themselves known to the Iron Guard."

"...Pagolo, possibly; I don't believe I've ever met the man but I have heard of him.  Anyway.  Can't change the past, as far as I know, so I believe that's all I have for the moment; I may have something related to my original inquiry - but properly refined - for you overmorrow, once I've a sense for some relevant things.  I believe tomorrow I will visit the Scarlet Chorus's encampment, should there be no news from our opponents."