"It's not a trick question," says Lilia, irritably. 

"Yes, your majesty."

Then he'll push out his aura of courage to include her. "Your loyalty isn't in question. I understand this - probably seems to you like some bizarre test. I swear it's not a test at all. I am a paladin, do you know what that means?"

"Yes, your majesty."

"So you understand that I am bound by my oaths not to lie, and that I am telling you the truth when I say you won't be punished for leaving my service to work for our ally instead, nor for contemplating doing that. I am asking - not ordering, just asking - that you check whether we can offer you something better than our ally will, even if she offers you something better than what we're paying you now. There's no action you could take about this situation that would lead to you being punished for disloyalty." Does she still look confused and like she's expecting him to have her tortured if she says the wrong thing?

"Most of the people I've hired fled the country during the war," Lilia says. "I spent the end of it in Vudra, personally. The thing I explain to them, when I am trying to persuade them to come back, is that if they are working for us, and then they decide they'd rather do something else, they will be allowed to go do that. The crown is no longer a yawning rift which keeps a permanent grip on anyone foolish enough to wander near it in the first place. Because when it was, all our best people ran away. But part of not keeping a permanent grip on people is that they are allowed to entertain other job offers. If the Lord Marshal tells you to stay - or just counts on the fact you'll assume you're supposed to - then what do I tell the next ten people I'm trying to convince to come work for him?"

Cansellarion shoots her a grateful look.

Carissa looks suspicious. "I would expect that not punishing defectors causes more of them," she says carefully.

"Oh, if you were still enlisted our life would be much easier," says Lilia. "Even paladins are allowed to punish defection among their soldiers. But what you are is a free Chelish citizen freely serving the crown, and there are lots of those, and many of them are only here because they trust the Lord Marshal that he'll let them quit if they think of something they'd rather be doing. This is how most places work. It is not how Asmodean Cheliax worked because it could not recruit enough talented people that way, and because Asmodeus would rather have slaves than free people even where they didn't trade off in numbers. But it is how the Reclamation government works. If it worked some other way I would have stayed in Vudra."

(This is true of some other ways it could've worked, though of course if the Reclamation government was simply Lawful Evil she'd have worked for it, so it's an Asmodean kind of truthful. Lilia is pretty sure this is still about as much as it's possible to be a paladin about hiring people.)

"You have my family's bodies," she says.

"We do?" asks Cansellarion. Did Montero do that, or is there someone else who's been cataloguing the war dead for some reason? "We can have them shipped to you in Almas if you request it."

"Sevar, is there anything that you - wouldn't do to someone, even to get them to do what you wanted?"

"Well, I wouldn't - destroy their soul or something." 

"Good. People around here would consider ‘your family will go to Hell if you don't work for us' to be at least as bad as ‘we'll destroy their souls if you don't work for us'. It will absolutely not be raised in a civilized dispute. It is not leverage we have over you. It is something I looked into because in your place I'd have wanted someone to look into it. I won't object if you appreciate me accordingly but if you decide to move to Almas and spend every waking minute denouncing the Reclamation we'd still send you the bodies, if you want them."

"Oh," she says. "Thank you. I think I understand."

"I'm glad. You're dismissed."

She will flee at a mostly dignified pace.

Cansellarion gives Montero a relieved smile once Sevar has left. "I do not know what I'd do without you… probably hire another local consultant who is less talented and accidentally enslave half a dozen of my citizens before I realized it was happening. Thank you." He is tracking, in the back of his mind, how ‘Become indispensable to the Reclamation government' is the first move in a number of nefarious plots by Lilia or her mother but for now he's mostly just very grateful.

Lilia is deeply satisfied to have gotten a smile. She smiles back. "You'll get the hang of it." I'm not making you more dependent on me, but less so.

"I'm sure I will eventually." If she keeps uncovering deficits of his faster than he repairs them she'll still become more indispensable…and she can already keep track of Chelish internal politics better than anyone he could replace her with.

"She has a mother and a sister who died in the sack of Corentyn."

"And you found their remains? That's very thoughtful of you. You meant what you said about condemning her family to Hell being categorically out of bounds?" He knows she meant it about the Reclamation, and he's pretty sure she meant it about her current policies. He's wondering if it's a principle that she truly believes in, either now that she has the space to do so or even before.