"Once I have established a precedent I will have the option to take them aside in private and talk about their mistake the way I take it this is done in Lastwall. If I take people aside in private right now everyone else will assume they are being horribly tortured."

"I appreciate your efforts to make it clear you are not going to torture the people under you… Is the kneeling necessary?"

She honestly never contemplated not requiring the kneeling. "A little motivation to hate your boss and want to take her job is healthy for productivity!"

"...Is it?"

"Served me well for a long time."

"Hating your boss or having your subordinates hate you?"

"More the former. I was actually a popular person to work for. The competition had some distinct deficits of character." She - ought to let him talk her around on this, though. He will be pleased to have done so, and feel a little less suspicious that she's wiggling out of all his attempts to corral her, and in fact she doesn't know if the kneeling is necessary because she never considered not doing it. 

" …does it not feel to you - I suppose it wouldn't feel frightening, to you, you're a paladin… if I imagine adopting a policy where I never, even as punishment, oblige my subordinates to acknowledge my power over them, it feels like it will swiftly stop being true that I have that power, and that feels very frightening, because being wrong about who will obey you is a mistake you cannot afford to make even once…"

"Hmm. I don't feel that way, and I think it's not just being fearless… I expect this is a product of us having experience in different environments, that for me most people following me wouldn't have their loyalty reinforced by being forced to acknowledge their subordination like that, and also that having a disloyal subordinate is a survivable mistake and not even necessarily a catastrophic one."

Lilia considers it. "Do you find anything comforting in obedience, outside that it implies that whatever was ordered will in fact get done?"

Alex pauses, thoughtfully. "No, I don't know that I do."

"Huh. I'll try it your way but if it gets me murdered I'll stop trying it your way."

"I appreciate that, though if you suspect you're about to be murdered please let me know… will we be able to raise you straightforwardly if you are murdered?" Or can only your mother do that?

Only her mother can do that. "I've made my own arrangements."

Yeah that sounds like only her mother can do it. "Understood."

Being a paladin about punishing people is easy: don't punish people. Being a paladin about sex is easy: don't have any. Being a paladin about hiring is genuinely annoying. Lilia is accustomed to hiring people within Cheliax by informing them that they now work for her, and hiring people outside Cheliax by blackmailing them, or finding someone they would choose to work for and impersonating that person.

Carissa Sevar technically has a free choice as to whether she wishes to come work for the Crown, but she's not going to believe that and there are not really any contortions Lilia could go through which would make her believe that. She's pretty sure that the Iomedaen thing to do here is to try as hard as possible in that direction nonetheless, but she can't get over her innate distaste for groveling for things she won't get thereby. So she has someone find Sevar in Corentyn and invite her to a meeting; the girl will either flee the country or take the job, and the kind of people who flee the country did it already. 

"Sevar," she says, "I wanted to congratulate you. A good many brilliant people have been working without success on figuring out how to lay the standard enchantments on firearms. As I understand it some of them had nearly a year's head start."

She is trying to keep her face steady but it's easy to read that she did not know they knew that.

"You are well-informed, ma'am," she says neutrally.

"And you are underpaid. Have you considered working for the Reclamation government?" Insisting any more vehemently than that that it's a voluntary choice would just be insulting and distracting.

She indeed looks impatient at the supposition that she came to this meeting intending to perhaps decide not to work for the Reclamation government. 

"It would be an honor to serve."

"We're working to establish a gun industry in Westcrown. One plan that has been floated is to send you and some other brilliant Chelish people to Vigil or Almas for the next year, to trade what you've discovered for tutelage in gunmaking so that we can build the industry at home. Explain the implications, please."

" - Cheliax would have its own weapons and not be relying on Lastwall and Andoran? ...you'll get wildly ahead of Jehanes? …you may as well give me a Teleport scroll because if I want to defect I'll have the opportunity?"

"None of those are false. The implication which I would personally be attending to in your position is that what you figured out, yourself, in a few months of work, is something that Cheliax thinks it could trade for the secret of firearms itself. - with plenty of other wrangling behind the scenes, to be clear, but - how much are you currently being paid?"

"Forty Absalom pounds a week, in spellsilver," says Carissa, whose file indicates she has never been this rich in her life and who is navigating the currency crisis through mostly refusing to use currency.

"Let's make it four hundred. And you'll get to learn all of the secrets about how guns are really made, and you're vastly less likely to die in intra-Henderthane infighting."

"Yes, ma'am."

Someone who was a blithering idiot might presume this was a paladin-approved, consensual sort of hiring process. Lilia smiles warmly at her.

"As someone trying to improve recruiting for the Reclamation government, I am curious if there's anything that kept you from applying to us in the first place aside from your low self-esteem."