"... Well, he really should have accepted her earlier polite deflection!" adds the cleric who has still had some trouble adjusting to life in the River Kingdoms, despite his years living therein.

"Aaaaaauuuugh I don't want to get dragged into a stupid war, I just wanted to use Pitax's river for my scheeeemes!!!"

"I'm sure it won't come to that."

It does.

It does come to that.

If Irovetti were stupid enough to challenge her directly - or worse, send an overland army at her - he wouldn't have been the tyrant king of Pitax for the past twenty years. Instead, he has been, and rather unfortunately for her desire to not have to deal with any of this, this was not by accident. The River Kingdoms attract bored, chaotic adventurers like honey attracts flies, most of them looking for their next opportunity for getting rich or circling up. Being king of Pitax is a good gig, or at least it has been for Castruccio Irovetti. He has been sitting on his well-established and prosperous (for the River Kingdoms) city like a well-fed bloat fly, sucking up resources, money, and talent, and demanding statues and poetry made in his honor, and doing whatever he wanted with anyone in reach of him at any time it occurred to him. Because no one could, or perhaps more accurately would, stop him, just as long as he kept to his little nowhere city and hurt only people that were smaller than him.

That is not to say he wasn't also shrewd about his choices - as far as Sivetrys can learn, his takeover of Pitax was quite clever, if very... River Kingdoms. He apparently invited representatives from the ruling trading houses to a high-stakes card game, beat them all at it (probably by cheating, likely by enchantment), on paper winning the rights to all betted assets (of which they bet more than they should have; also likely by enchantment). How much of that is exaggeration or painting over just directly Dominating people is up for debate, but what is not is that he then took hostages from all houses before anyone could put together a proper resistance once they realized what he'd done. From there, he was too much of a third-circle song-sorcerer and strong martial fighter to be directly killed by any of them. Pitax itself was also a smart pick for such a scheme; after all, it's a little nowhere city on a nice trading river, irrelevant to most geopolitics and thus not worth the attention of anyone bigger. Its former ruling class were not powerful enough to reliably beat him, and he caught them off guard and made living under his rule not actually worse than death.

Which is all to say: he's a massive bully, who is long used to getting his way, and is quite accustomed to being the biggest fish in a small pond, or set of ponds, depending on how one analyzes the River Kingdoms. But a clever bully, who uses guile instead of direct threat of force.

Despite the fact that she's a stronger spellcaster than he is - her six sorcerer circles to his three song-sorcerer circles - she's certain that he's a better fighter than a bard, and accordingly damned hard to kill. He looked at Bergamot like a practiced swordsman looks at a beast he can slay, abstaining only because he was still (incompetently) trying to win her over. While she adores and spoils her kitty with magical protections and buffs, and he's very accustomed to being the most dangerous and untouchable melee combatant in her party, she doesn't doubt Irovetti's assessment. In a straight fight, he'd probably kill her cat, especially with his two decades to prepare. And, well, she's a sorceress. If someone sneezes on her without enough protections up, she needs Tristian to Breath of Life her back to the world of the living.

Fortunately for her, she still has an intact adventuring party, all of which would take issue with their party sorceress getting bisected or enthralled. Irovetti has his bard's college, which contains people that will fight for him, but none more powerful than he is, and, well. Sivetrys has every reason to believe that anyone under Irovetti's power might, perhaps, have some reason to not want to assist their tyrant in being overthrown. Call it a hunch. Or call it what it is, which was directly speaking with several members of his college; the ones of the female persuasion had a very telling forced smile. He might have some more powerful allies in the wings, just a teleport away, but he has been fairly stagnant for at least a decade, and Evil - Chaotic Evil, especially - is usually not fantastic at making friends. That's not to say Sivetrys is going to discount their potential existence, just try to arrange things such that when a confrontation goes down, he does not have time to get off a Sending for help. Admittedly, this is just best practice regardless, but fairly important in this particular instance.

Also best practice is to avoid having family members that are in a state which they could be captured and taken hostage. Which Sivetrys has long had sorted, thank you very much, she tries to have some basic sense in her pretty head. Her father shares a wing of the forbiddanced section of her demiplane with Jubilost, devoted to the study and practice of alchemy. He is accordingly is in more danger from the scientific collaboration than hostile outside influence. Sivetrys still cannot personally create a demiplane, but she can cast one from a scroll, and has enough connections to make such a purchase. Making a personal demiplane permanent is similarly possible, and worth the high price. Having a demiplane does not make her completely unassailable, of course, it just makes it much harder. He'd need a fifth circle divine caster (or a seventh circle arcane caster), and a tuning fork of her particular demiplane, neither of which are exactly easy to come by. This is not to mention the defenses of the demiplane itself; one thing she can do at her circle is call outsiders to her service. Any death they then died would be permanent, so she's not careless with their lives, but archons make excellent lookouts.

Irovetti does, as far as she knows, make all of his defenses on the Material, which puts him at a major disadvantage there. However: he's had longer to build them, and more resources to throw at it, since his relationship with his polity is purely parasitical, versus her own more symbiotic one. Gods above know she's thrown an absurd amount of money at making Rivenholm stable and prosperous instead of prioritizing her own defense, comfort, and welfare above all else. (Not that she hasn't done that, too, she has a demiplane, but: comparatively.) Meanwhile, her Chaotic Evil counterpart seems to have mostly made his own palace gigantic, opulent, and fortress-like.

To put it lightly; any siege on either of their respective fortresses would really, really suck. Such is the nature of powerful adventurers fighting.

Thus why Sivetrys would really rather skip this whole 'confrontation' thing, and just quietly accept and harbor refugees from Pitax, build her country better than his, and let the Abyss have him when his ordinary human lifespan runs out. Yes, yes, Evil afterlives are a horrible injustice and Pharasma is bonkers, but one cannot say that high level adventurers have no idea where their actions will lead them. Not that she isn't dedicated to stopping Evil and minimizing suffering, she is, he's just... such a comparatively petty Evil. If she's not going to be mitigating his Evil shit by marrying him, she does not consider him her problem unless he makes himself her problem. She is not Lastwall, she does not ruthlessly triage her resources to the detriment of all forward, long-term thinking, but she does both have and follow priorities. If she wanted to pick a fight with something Chaotic Evil, the Worldwound is right there on the other side of Numeria, within easy teleport distance. There are plenty of literal demons available; she would know, she has ever been asked to teleport over and entangle a few dozen of them in Black Tentacles. (And provide buffs, and summons, and - look, there's a lot she can offer, all right? Lastwall, and some of the more organized sections of Mendev, know she's available.)

Anyway. Unfortunately, he seems to have taken issue with how the whole... entire Rushlight Tournament went down... what with the way she made him look like the boorish idiot he is. Something something, refused his advances, something something, insulted his pride, something something didn't let him rig his own tournament and instead her party fairly won it out from under him. These things happen. So now he seems to think she's a threat to his reign, and is also really mad at her, personally, and thinks the only way he can salvage his own reputation is to make her his dominated slave-queen, or something. Chaotic Evil things that would be unpleasant to her in particular. (But probably not worse than being forced to serve a lich in undeath for a possible eternity.)

But yeah, he's pissed with her. He makes this known.

Very mysteriously, her kingdom starts encountering strange problems that it had not been encountering before. Monsters transported to where they don't usually live and then left to run rampant, trade caravans on the Pitax side of her border are disrupted by well supplied bandits of unknown origin, and some truly badly written propaganda pamphlets distributed to anyone that can read. Just - absolutely awful. Not 'courting poetry' levels of bad (it would take a lot of work to be that bad) but still the sort of thing any self respecting bard would not make copies of unless under threat of death or unemployment.

So mysterious. Who could be responsible for this. How could this have happened.

These might have worked with somewhere else, but they are just not very good plans to sabotage her kingdom, is the thing?

Respectively:

Monsters where they aren't supposed to be! Okay, so this might have worked out, except the place he put the monsters was the Narlmarches, which, uh. Sivetrys has spent the better part of the last half-decade painstakingly negotiating with the dangerous forest denizens of. Because those denizens are fey, druidic, or otherwise not accepted in civilized society, but often still rational people who like her showing up to solve their less negotiable problems and casting Stoneshape and Wall of Stone to build stuff for them. None of which want to share their forest with foreign bloodthirsty monsters, actually. Sivetrys is personally called in to handle the worst offenders, but, uh. Those monsters do not have a long lifespan. They will make for fantastic crafting materials, thank you kindly, neighbor!

Banditry from outside her borders, ambushing her trade caravans! Just not a good idea to throw at a party that includes a song-sorcerer who has both Dominate Person and Modify Memory available. One single counter-ambush, and that whole entire operation is fried. Rather literally. By the sixth-circle sorcerer-queen who can Summon extraplanar assistance, Dispel their fire resistance, Entangle their camp, then blast it over and over again with Fireball from eight-hundred feet in the air. It is extremely one-sided, as these things are. Irovetti is not as practiced at high circle spellcaster-to-spellcaster combat as Sivetrys is, what with all of her lich and fey experience, and it shows.

Propaganda! This one is just genuinely funny. Maybe Irovetti was expecting her to be insulted by these pamphlets, but actually, she finds them incredibly entertaining, and not particularly threatening. She keeps copies of each one, cackling at the latest versions, and gleefully makes a public joke of them. She has corrections and commentaries scrivened on top in red ink, which happen to be much more entertaining to the general populace, and also a lot more accurate to the reality they actually experience. They become popular to read dramatically aloud, for those without their letters, so that all can enjoy the absurdity. It's quite fun, actually. She might start doing this recreationally, if someone else wants to make terrible pamphlets for her to write commentaries on.

She does eventually teleport over to the sweatshop where these travesties are being scrivened off, and sincerely entreat the scriveners there that they really could just be making better things with their time, and that if they want protection from, say, a terrifying Chaotic Evil patron, she is perfectly happy to provide it. But this is mostly because she feels that it's cruel to force people to make this drivel, not because it's threatening to her in particular.

If he does other things to make his displeasure with her known, she genuinely doesn't notice them. She suspects he hired assassins or kidnappers or something, but: she has a Ring of Sustenance, and sleeps in her demiplane, while not making it obvious to outside observers that she's not instead still sleeping in a Rope Trick in the well-fortified bedroom in her palace. Why ever would she give away that she's both sixth-circle, and has a demiplane? That would be silly.

But she really should make him stop his shit before he trips his way into something that might do more than mildly inconvenience her and her subjects, so.

Fine, fine. She'll go solve that petty Evil over there. Ugh. This is going to be such a pain...

Okay, so. Irovetti has a whole city behind him, but that city kind of hates him.

There were families in power before he showed up, and since they were and are the backbone of Pitax's economy, they are still around. Diminished, admittedly, but around, and perfectly amenable to 'Hey, how about I make that guy go away?' They were, after all, already plotting their vengeance and biding their time for an opening. They weren't very organized about it, but she can fix that. She politely gets information on Irovetti's capabilities and defenses from them, makes notes on which of the spies they have embedded in his palace that they would be willing to lend her, and quietly plans out how she's going to ambush and kill this guy.

He has a whole college of people that suffer, rather directly, from him. Many of them have access to his bedroom, which he does actually sometimes sleep in, like a chump. They are perfectly amenable to having someone else deal with that oaf for a night, and know the Forbiddance password, because he told them.

All the defenses in the world are useless, if you invite people past them, and take off much of your gear.

This is not something Sivetrys would ask of Linzi, but she doesn't really have a problem with it. He has a permanent See Invisibility up, but it doesn't see past Alter Self, now does it?

"Dominate Person," says someone who is distinctly not who he thought he was bringing into his bedroom. She did, with a lot of work, figure out how to make herself a lovely little vestment that lets her borrow from a scroll, without actually casting from it. Pulling out a scroll would give the game away, of course, and she's known to not be able to cast this sort of spell herself. Why would she? She has a bard.

There are plenty of ways to divest him of his clothes while keeping a lot of her own on. She didn't hear him complaining at the time.

More than a little risky as a play to make, she admits. He could, after all, resist the dominate, despite the mentally-dulling poison in his evening wine. Maybe it's the fey in her blood that drew her to such a poetic fall, because she really could not resist. It was just so easy!

He does not, actually, manage to throw off the dominate.

"I don't know what you were expecting," she tells him dryly, after having him relieve himself of all of his magical and non-magical items and arrange himself neatly under her big, fluffy cat, now released out of the bag she was carrying. "Wasn't this exactly what you wanted?"

She is not, technically, invited to next year's Outlaw Council, but she shows up anyway. To be fair, this time she was also providing transportation for another attendee. "I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce the replacement representative for Pitax," says Sivetrys, fully aware of how fraught it is, to introduce the guy you put in charge of a place you killed the last monarch of. "Gasperre Liacenza."

At least one other attendee is cracking up.

What ever could be so funny? What a mystery to everyone involved. Perfectly innocent teleportation sorceress, that's her.

"Welcome, Gasperre Liacenza, of -" and he glances at the man for what title he would like, precisely.

"Voice of the Council of Pitax, representative of the ruling families that have at last been restored after the pretender king Irovetti's beheading," he says, with great gravity.

"We are all surely relieved, that such a power hungry and wicked man has been deposed, by his own oppressed people, without overdue outside influence," says Sivetrys, with a matching gravity.

WHEEZE.

"Uh huh. No overdue outside influence. And stabbed twenty-seven times in the back, worst case of suicide we've ever seen."

"Oh, come off it, Martro, that was great," says Lady Janna Smilos, still cackling. "Fucking thing of beauty, that was, and no one can say he didn't have it coming..."

"Just saying. Subtlety needs work."

Eyeroll. "I am not going to out-subtle any of you, and I'd just annoy you all if I tried. I know that, you know that, let's skip it. He was lawfully beheaded, at the ruling of the residents of the city itself." After she, you know, teleported him to Galt and had him walk up to be beheaded. She even sprung for getting him to a Final Blade, to save him the Abyss that he'd almost certainly be sorted into. She's Good, after all. And a scroll of Flesh to Stone would have been more pricey than he deserved. "You'll note that I am not declaring myself queen of Pitax, and I was fairly paid by the residents of the city itself to help them with their problem."

She's allowed to use their river. Obviously.

"Yeah, yeah, you're not out to conquer us all, just sit up in your corner and play lady archangel with your wands. We know." He waves a hand vaguely. "Okay, miss bitch, how is Brevoy doing?"