The coronation goes as well as these things can go, though. Big party, fancy chair, expensive hat, delicious food. She'd had invitations sent out to many of her peers (ugh) in the River Kingdoms, and a few of them even actually sent delegates. In an attempt to assassinate her, or leverage her against their own enemies, of course, but it still counts. Compared to the usual upstart kingdom (or more often 'kingdom') in the Riverlands, she's a shining beacon of legitimacy and order. Even has a fancy royal title that she didn't make up herself. A sorceress of her power in charge of a place is notable enough to be known, creatively, as the Sorcerer-Queen. Groundbreaking stuff, really.

So she shouldn't be surprised when she gets an invitation to attend the annual Outlaw Council. That is, when all of the powers of the nebulously defined kingdoms in the River Kingdoms all show up together to talk about times when actually they should tone down the backstabbing, for the sake of not being conquered by Cheliax or Galt or something. Huh. That's interesting. Usually, the attendees just sort of... show up... at the appointed time, in the appointed city of Daggermark, and nobody particularly cares if they were invited or not. She likely could have attended the last couple without being looked at askance, she just had more immediate problems to deal with than overall security of one of the the least stable regions of Avistan. And now she's just... actually been invited. Weird.

It's not clear if it's because they think she's too lawful to show up without an invitation, they're willing to acknowledge her now that she's actually calling herself a peer, they want to make some of the other attendees look pathetic in comparison, or if they've actually all decided that she's the biggest threat in the region and want to deal with that accordingly. Not directly at the council itself, probably, because if that truce ever breaks, the entire region will fall entirely apart and definitely be conquered by someone, but later is fair game.

Well. Whatever the reasons, it's clear that she absolutely needs to show up, squishy caster or no. Something something legitimacy, something something being nonthreatening, blah blah, blah blah, her moderately fallen angel has the eloquent explanations of the politics of the matter.

Nobody is especially happy about her needing to teleport to Daggermark under as many defensive spells as can reasonably be afforded, with only a bard, a ranger, and two large and menacing beasts to protect her from the bad assassins that could stab her to death in a single round, but, well. Here she is, overly excited bard and extremely miserable ranger in tow.

And if they break their precious vows and kill you despite all arguments about why this is stupid, what then? grumbles the ranger, over the group's Telepathic Bond.

Then we all have a bad time and are down a diamond when you inevitably retrieve my corpse. Cheer up, at least no one is going to expect you to talk, here!

I am in a Telepathic Bond with Linzi.

Sivetrys ignores Linzi's telepathic 'Hey!' and concedes the point.

Thank you for your sacrifice, you're a good friend.

The meeting hall in which the fabled council of outlaws is held is for council members only. Only them, too, no sending representatives to speak for them while they hide safely behind their walls. Her bard and ranger can wait outside with the rest of the retinues of the rest of her (ugh) peers.

She does manage to bully her way into getting to bring her gigantic pet leopard inside, though. Her arguments are manyfold, and she has a great deal of fun making them. Her kitty, Bergamot, is connected to her by sylvan magic, and is essentially her familiar. Does the council keep out other people's familiars, too? No? Then why is this different? Is it because normally, familiars are harmless? Oh, that's adorable, how incredibly naive, someone needs to get out more. Some familiars can carry and activate wands, you know. Which is worse, a leopard, or an intelligent and wand wielding invisible raven? Besides, is anyone else being asked to disarm entirely? No? They don't ask the leader of the Daggermark assassins guild to give up all of her knives, no really? Weird, that. Not very neutral to have everyone but the hosts give up their ability to defend themselves, is it? Anyway, they have heard she's a sorceress, right, she can't really be disarmed except in an antimagic field, do they have one of those around?

It'd be possible to go on, but the guard unfortunate enough to oppose her realizes that she's not budging on this, and that everyone else is starting to get impatient about the holdup. He budges, and in she goes, with her gigantic predatory cat. Hey, she's showing up in person, as a pure spellcaster, they need to let her have something to get her in the door.

Her welcome is about as she expected, really. Which is to say, someone scoffs at her and asks who started letting stray bitches of Brevoy into a meeting of River Kings.

"... Is that the best you can come up with?" she snorts. "Come now, I've been up north for years at this point, you've had plenty of time to come up with creative ways to insult me."

This was clearly not what the man was expecting, and some of the other guests look a bit amused, so she continues.

"You could call me a half blooded bastard, if you like. That one's even true. Or stick with my old title of baroness if the crown offends you. Might even be able to manage some nice alliteration, there. Bastard-bred baroness bitch of Brevoy, maybe? Hm. Bit unwieldy. And it'd be embarrassing for a mere baroness to have ever so much more land and power than you. What was your name again?"

 "I am -!"

  "- wasting everyone's time. Stop stirring up trouble you can't handle, pup, you're not fooling anyone," someone else cuts in.

Oh, look! Someone with actual power is talking! That would be... Raston Selline, of Mivon. Probably the closest thing she has to an ally, here. Not that they've ever met in person, before, just exchanged letters and envoys. His delegate didn't even make any attempt to kill her. Probably because he's her southernmost neighbor and does not, in fact, want to piss her off so much that she'll go and actually attempt conquest. Which is for the best, really, she doesn't particularly want to also be queen of Mivon. It'd be a hassle, and she'd really need to kill a lot of people, and it probably wouldn't even stick without her constantly babysitting the place. And throwing fireballs. It wouldn't even accomplish anything long term, it'd just be a grab for power. Why is everyone worried she's going to conquer them, again?

"Mayor," she says, cordially, and with a smile on her face. He has a similar problem that she'd been having; in Mivon, they have elections. They're a bit rigged, and the parts that aren't rigged involve honorable dueling, which equates to also being a bit rigged, but she appreciates the effort. She will accept his silly title that everyone else refuses to use in favor of 'king,' like how everyone refused to use 'baroness' with her. It's just polite.

"Your highness," he says, dryly. "Varn isn't with you?"

Sivetrys's smile turns wry and she shakes her head. No, that'd be too nice. One definite ally and one probable ally would really be quite the treat, wouldn't it.

"He's fled from politics," she answers, seriously. Technically he's also sworn fealty to her, but really, he was fleeing politics. Nobody he'd politicked with had come to save him and his people, besides her, and so in his mind they could go to the Hells or the Abyss for all he cared. Very reasonable of him. Terrible that she can't do the same.

"And declared you his queen. Hiding behind your skirts, is he?"

The speaker is a woman who the River Kingdoms can actually agree probably isn't a monarch of some kind. Because she's being the Supreme Vessel of the Assassin's Guild of Daggermark. She has tried to have Sivetrys killed (well, been paid by others to try to have her killed) many times already, and it has yet to stick. Not an ally, though complicatedly not an enemy either. A bit of attempted assassination is just fair game, for her, when the money's good.

"Pretty much," she agrees, brightly.

The lady snorts. "And you, your majesty? Will you retreat to hide behind Brevoy's skirts?"

What is this, an attempt to bait her pride? Get her to prove herself to be the next Razmir now, before she's properly got a power base set up? Obviously the poking is pointed, but she's not sure which of the available traps this woman is trying to lead her into.

"I think neither half of that skirt is all that protective," snorts Sivetrys. "Or concealing. Or welcoming, for that matter."

Eyebrow raise.

This woman absolutely knows all of this already. So having her say it is... giving her an opening to explain herself to those less educated? That's actually rather nice of her. It makes her even more suspicious. She will still use the opening, though, just - watching for backstabs.

"The sanctioned coronation is more in the vein of 'enough rope to hang yourself' than an actual alliance," she says, for the benefit of everyone but this very deadly woman who could absolutely kill her in under thirty seconds, here, in close quarters. "That and trying to placate me for how worthless their 'alliance' was before. This way if I decide to fly over and start flinging fireballs, I look like the next wannabe Razmir, and they have a chance to maybe con someone into trying to kill me."

The meeting is... surprisingly boring from there. There's a lot of posturing, of course, but the majority of the people in this room don't actually want to piss her off. Once they understand she's not an extension of Brevoy, they mostly want her to explain it to them. Is it likely to want to march south? (Absolutely not, Brevoy is currently trying its best not to fall into a civil war.) What about Numeria? (March, no, raid, always. This should surprise no one, Numeria is always doing this. The barbarian clans were recently beaten to a pulp, though, so expect it from the Technic League, not them.) Either way, the tone of the council is not that she's the biggest threat that they must all ally against, but that she... has as much right, if not more than, many of them. It's deeply weird. She was expecting more hostility or resistance.

Her impression is that this is because she bothered to show up. It would probably be different if she declined, after the invitation, and she sees hints that some of the earlier councils did involve more openly discussing if she was a threat. But, well, the fear is that she will be the second coming of Razmir, sorceress-with-big-cat edition. Razmir certainly never bothered to show up to any of these, even though arguably he's in the general area to count as an honorary River King. He'd just never deign to. So... maybe showing up to one is enough to let her skip the others without having too much scheming behind her back? That'd be nice. She doubts it, but it'd be nice. The main topics at hand ultimately aren't very relevant to her, and it's kind of not worth two teleports, a telepathic bond, buffs, and most importantly her time. She has better things to do with all of them than this. But she's a queen, so she will politic.

After they ask her opinions on Brevoy, they talk about how Galt continues to be trying to spread its perpetual revolution, and Cyprian's future conquest plans, and Ustalav being a wretched country whose only export is undead, and blah blah blah all stuff that's either a bit too South or West to really matter to her country in particular. She listens, nods, makes concerned noises, but she knew about literally all of this already. Despite this, she agrees to send funds and some supplies (wands, mostly) to people she doesn't like and doesn't trust, because she has pattern recognition and would like those messes to keep being too far away to be a real problem for her, thanks. Compared to the other attendees, she's practically a team player. Her motivations are entirely 'leave me out of your shit, please.'

It's essentially a bribe, but everyone in this room is also fine with that. It even seems like it's likely to work fairly well.

So it's very annoying when, after she returns safely to her lands without incident, she immediately has to start dealing with a neighbor attempting politics at her.

It comes in the form of.... a gigantic golden statue.

Of herself.

Nude.

Posing as one might expect a statue of a nude woman to be posing. Her facsimile is, to its credit, apparently trying to cast something.

"What... the actual fuck," says a woman whose eloquence has abandoned her entirely in the face of this. ... This.

"It's a gift. From the King of Pitax," offers her secretary, Namel, helpfully. "It's gilded bronze, not full gold. We checked."

"Why..." she begins, and then stops, because her question was going to be 'Why would anyone make this.' She knows the answer to that. Lots of people like looking at pretty women, especially in the nude. "... did he send me... this... as a gift?"

The last question was a little plaintive.

"His Majesty King Castruccio Irovetti is famous for his love of the arts, and is a patron for many aspiring sculptors."

Namel is using that dry tone of voice she has, when she feels the answer is obvious, but she's too polite to say it out loud to her boss.

Answer is obvious, she's just too much of a sixth circle workaholic spellcaster to notice. Right, okay, she can put together this puzzle. Sivetrys stares at the statue.

She was under the impression that Irovetti mostly had gaudy statues made of himself. She doesn't know of many instances of him having statues made of others, why would he want her represented in a light that he sees as flattering?

".... oh, gods, he's trying to court me, isn't he."

"Yes, ma'am, I believe so. The statue came with a poem, if you'd like to read it."

She doesn't, really, but she does anyway.

So.

The poetry is so bad that, even though she's not particularly religious, she feels that it's kind of offensive to Shelyn herself. Both on an artistic front, and on an 'emotional understanding of love' front.

She has the grace to not immediately burn it, but she's sorely tempted. She'll just have to leave it where Linzi can see it, and she'll do it for her.

Once the terrible statue is hidden under a large blanket, and the affront to poetry itself is in prime destruction-by-bard territory, she does get to properly thinking about it.

Highly questionable artistic tastes aside, it's not the worst possible match?

Pitax is her western neighbor, and its capital city (if not its countryside) are comparatively older and more established than Rivenholm's downright provincial capital of Ivoria. They have access to the Yhalt river, which connects to Kallas lake, which itself connects to both Lake Encarthan and the Inner Sea itself. The closest alternative is through Mivon, which, yes that is one of the reasons why she makes a point to get along with them, but their river also goes directly through, and is primarily controlled by, Galt. So. Since they do not particularly look kindly on those who give themselves crowns, even tasteful silver ones that were only accepted after literal years of cultural pressure, that is not in fact the safest export option available to her or anyone working for her.

Sivetrys is many things, but one of them is a wand-maker. This makes her a businesswoman, too. Teleporting her wands of Endure Elements, Fireball, Grease and Entangle all the way to Lastwall and Absalom (yes, in that order of importance, yes she is taking a loss by not going with Absalom first, Lastwall is both closer and also aligned with Good, they get first dibs, especially for the dangerous wands) is expensive. Having reliable river access to both, protected by another powerful adventurer and a whole lot of merchants and warlords and whatnot who have a vested interest in trade being reliable, well. ... That's a pretty good deal, actually.

Admittedly, it's sort of... selling herself to a guy who is distinctly not on the upper end of the alignment spectrum... who is hated with a passion by at least one of her friends, and who is at least rumored to take whatever he likes from anyone he finds attractive that he has power over, and who at the very least definitely okayed some truly distasteful artistic works, but...

Access to Kallas. That she didn't have to kill anyone over, that everyone can agree is very legitimate and above board, and forward-thinking and really definitely not anything like Razmir. It gives her a solid and firm ally against Cyprian, if he makes it further north, instead of Mivon, who is an ally in some senses but then also distinctly elects a mayor, and Brevoy, who she just spent the better part of the last year personally pissing off. This would be both the form of Irovetti himself, and the established council of Pitax, who really just want to make money, and an item crafting sorceress with teleportation is actually really useful for that. It would neatly cement her as not just a puppet of Brevoy to the rest of the River Kingdoms, having gone very obviously native, and maybe get them thinking about not just petty power squabbles, but coming together for larger, more ambitious power struggles.

It's - look, she agreed to be a monarch, so she's thinking like one, it's her responsibility to do so.

She wouldn't have accepted this thankless job and its and its nest of headaches and hornets if she didn't think she could do some good with it. Some Good, as Pharasma sees it, too, but mostly just. Stability and safety for people that want to live their lives. The River Kingdoms are objectively a flaming disaster, petty warring banditry masquerading as monarchy, killing people and redrawing lines every campaign season. She came here specifically to circle up, because it sucked, without being quite so dangerous and soul destroying as the literal Worldwound, because she was only barely second circle. And then she killed a terrible guy who was making people miserable, then stayed a bit too long in a reliable location, with access to Fly and Fireball and the desire to not leave people to suffer, and - people started to rely on her being there. Sivetrys is not, actually, Lawful. (She does not see how it is viable to be Lawful in the River Kingdoms while in charge of a country, and dealing with the people she has to deal with.) But that doesn't mean she just wants to abandon the job she's picked up, either.

If she wanted - what, a quiet life, a pleasant husband, to pop out half a dozen kids that are well fed and loved, to have a comfortable retirement in some nice place that didn't have fucking trolls trying to make their own troll kingdoms where other sapients are for food, she could have it. She could have had it for a while now. She is a powerful sorceress that crafts wands and magical trinkets, and she can teleport. Instead, she fought the lich. (Technically, Vordakai was a demilich. However, Sivetrys is not Lawful, and does not have to be perfectly accurate in her rhetoric. Lich was in the name, therefore: it is lich in explanations.) She risked a fate worse than some afterlives, being bound to her own corpse working for said lich, enslaving everyone else he could touch until he ran out of power to puppet them, until someone killed him. Instead, she put the party together, talking people she loves like family into something incredibly dangerous, she wrote to Lastwall to lend her a paladin for a really just cause, she hit sixth circle and tore his gods-damned sanctuary down with a barrage of Greater Dispel Magics, and then she (along with her party, and that very nice paladin) killed him, permanently, completely, such that he will not be coming back.

What kind of danger is an asshole mortal husband, compared to facing a potentially infinitely torturous existence, being forced to ruin the lives of people she'd fought for?

Not much of one, is what. Not really. Not long term. And that's - how she thinks, now, most of the time.

But, also, it might just be a dumbass decision that she's talking herself into because she's too Good for her own good, and has more splendor than sense when it comes to making arguments. She knows these things about herself. She tries to compensate for them.

So she'll be sensible about this.

".... ssssssooo not that I'm not thrilled to see my old schoolmates again, and rub in their faces how incredibly awesome I've become, but..."

"This is a foolish, naive, and doomed endeavor that will end only in sorrow and bloodshed, or perhaps poison in the night?" offers the resident critic.

"Yeah. That."

"Hey, it's a tournament for adventurers. If my nascent aspirations of a River Kingdom dynasty are all actually in vain, there will nonetheless be some really nice magical items to buy." And maybe copy the design ideas of. What? She's not Lawful, she doesn't have to play fair.

"Ew. Ew, ew, ew. Literally anyone else, Sivi. Troll king. Stag Lord. Some guy you met at the tavern. Ekundayo. You don't know yet, but you'll see."

"I think it's very noble, to want to try and turn an evil man from his dark path," says their cleric of Sarenrae.

"Nope. Nope. Nope. You haven't met him, I have. You don't know how wrong you are, but you are so, so, so wrong, and you will look back on this day, and you will wince."

"I don't think he can be worse than the statue and poetry," says Sivetrys, and then off they teleport.

He is so much worse.

So, so, so much worse.

He specifically asked for the statue, in all of its - itselfness. He is himself something of a bard, and he wrote the damn poem.

"NOPE," she says, the minute they're back in Rivenholm, under her Mage's Private Sanctum and away from prying ears and eyes. "Nope, nope, that's, nope, nope nope nope nope ew Prestidigitation is not enough I need a bath -"

"I told you," says Linzi, who is being very strong and containing her smugness about how right she was. (She was very right, though.)

"You did! You absolutely did! I apologize! I should have listened! I was foolish and dumb and did not realize how he's - just -"

Sivetrys requires snuggles with her kitty, a normal and rational way to deal with upsetting things.

"Gross? Handsy? Self-absorbed and narcissistic? In desperate need of a laundry wizard, and a bath? Like twice your age, which is pretty impressive considering you're a half-elf?"

"Yep. Those. All of those. Ugh." She buries her face into leopard fluff.

"I do think you acquitted yourself fairly well," offers Tristian.

"If by 'well,' you mean gave every petty two-bit gossip columnist some juicy material for the corner scrivener's to copy, then yes, certainly."

"... 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?"

"That is sorcerer-bitch to you, thank you," sniffs Sivetrys, and then: yeah, fine, she will be a good participating River Kingdom citizen. If this place even has any of those.

Between her risky (but so efficient!) personal handling of her rival monarch, the monsters he so kindly dumped on her lands that required killing, the cleanup of his remaining allies in Pitax itself, braving Galt to get him executed in a way that wouldn't eventually cause a demon to exist, and her general actions being a prosocial Good aligned teleporting sorceress, she does soon reach seventh circle.

Hm. Maybe there's some benefits to petty in-fighting after all.

She'd still rather skip it in the future, though.

(She has the tasteless statue's gilding scraped off, and then the bronze melted down for wand rods. She's not one to waste gifted materials, after all.)