"You'd have to be over her for it to be a good idea to tell you."

"I met the Chelish defector," Iomedae says. "I asked her about the wedding invitation and she interpreted it as a - coded message. Which I guess makes more sense than some good thing having resulted directly from her attending a wedding. I really wish she could've picked some different code and saved us a lot of worrying."

"I wish that too. I'm sure there was another way available, it just seems so - pointlessly disruptive -"

"And kind of - showy, right. 'I know everything about you, even things you don't know yourself yet' - Cansellarion also looked incredibly irritated at Nefreti. He silently watched the whole conversation, presumably because - it was an easy conversation to make mistakes at, right, it felt like she was learning more from it than I was -"

"Mmm. Did you make any mistakes - or nearly make any mistakes he was there to prevent?"

"If I made any I didn't notice them and he didn't say in front of her but we didn't speak afterwards. Once she got the coded message the defector wanted to leave. …you know, I think I hadn't fully imagined out all the implications of - she trusted his Law as far as to be taken prisoner, as an enemy with incredibly valuable information, and in that situation I feel like I'd be constantly worried that it'd been a mistake or that I couldn't really trust an enemy that much and you'd think a Chelish person would be more paranoid than I but - she wasn't. Not about that. It was very soothing."

"I'd say it comes from having paladins as enemies but it's not like we weren't more paranoid than you're describing about helping Lastwall, and we're not even prisoners. And I'm a bit surprised they teach enough about paladins that defectors would notice they're safe around them."

"She was important. She said, uh, 'we keep the idiots ignorant but I can't do my job if I don't know what a spy sent to join a Lastwall paladin order needs to know and say.' And she said that Abrogail being in a bad mood had made her day to day work environment worse. But - why work for Cheliax at all, if you knew you had a choice and knew it was a real one -"

"I don't really understand it. But people do work for tremendously evil systems sometimes, even when they get very little out of it. It's not some surprising new fact about human psychology."

"I guess. I think I'd imagined it'd make more sense if I actually talked to them. I want to - know what to say to talk them all out of it. It feels like there has to be something." 

"Well, this one defected. There must've been something that did it."

Lilia goes to Vudra, as the first place she can think of that is civilized, distant, uninvolved in the Great Avistani War by any stretch of the imagination, and unlikely to remind her of anything in particular. Stays at an expensive resort that caters to foreign adventurers. Sleeps, poorly, and casts Greater Heroism on herself for occasional breaks from crushing terror, and murders a servant who startles her, and makes a point of not reading any news out of Avistan, or listening to the radio, which to her somewhat unpleasant surprise has caught on even out here.

She'll presumably hear on Oathday how it went, from the overconfident teenage girl, or from her absence.

.

Iomedae spends most of the next two days in a haze of project handoffs. On the radio she reports rumors that the army is marching on Egorian, and that the Chelish army has fled, knowing it can't face the weapons wielded by free people. She gives one last primer before she departs for Osirion on how a village can take down a first circle cleric.

And then she goes to meet Lieutenant Jeres. She is trying very hard to fight against her innate impulse to dislike him for being her legal guardian while (probably) possessing neither her father's virtues nor Evelyn's. 

He doesn't look delighted to see her. "Yes?"

Iomedae is not in fact a child - for real, this time - and doesn't need him to be delighted to see her. "How much material can we bring with us, and when should we be ready to depart?"

"Wealday morning. What are you planning to bring?"

She should really have asked Cansellarion if Lieutenant Jeres has all of the project context or if she is supposed to explain that. "...guns and prototypes, tools, cartridges, casting equipment, the radio transmission equipment…"

"We can get a couple bags of holding."

"Thank you, sir. Is there anything we should know about - Osirion, or how the project scope will change - Cansellarion said you'd have instructions for me about censorship -"

"The radio project will continue as normal, but without any incitement to crime or proselytizing for anarchic gods. There are other laws about what you can say but those are the only ones that would've been violated by previous broadcasts. We'll go over the rest when we get there and have a local expert on hand. I have no orders regarding the scope of the engineering projects, I assume they are to continue as normal subject to the constraints imposed by the workspace and limited tooling." Someone else has presumably been given management of the engineers, someone actually qualified for that job.

"Thank you, sir." Iomedae feels that a little incitement to crime is good for the development of a balanced character but that's honestly a lot less restrictive than it could be. They aren't demanding she not criticize their government. Yet. 

Osirian law does not prohibit criticizing the conduct of the pharaoh's ministers. It does prohibit falsely claiming that the pharaoh himself is in error, what with how he is Abadar and most such claims are facially incorrect when you realize you're making them about Abadar. They prohibit incitement to crime and evangelism for anarchic gods and evangelism for evil gods and obscenity and libel. They really feel they are being very reasonable. 

Iomedae tries not to glance at Alfirin during this lecture because if they get indignant together they'll be more indignant than it is wise to be in front of the Osirians. "I intend to obey your laws," she says.

The Osirian looks slightly surprised by this, actually. Freedom does not come across as the kind of person who believes one ought to obey laws. "We are glad to hear it."