Well. Lilia doesn't know that her mother wouldn't do it, and if her mother did it then it would be right. …she does kind of hope her mother wouldn't do it, which is clearly just spillover from the fact that Lilia is being a paladin now and this is easier and more useful the more of Lilia's mothers goals she can share with Lilia even while Lilia's being a paladin.

He can't possibly be asking if she's ordered people condemned to Hell for being annoying. He knows she's done that. Because he can't be asking that, the answer isn't obviously a no, but because he knows that she did that, it can't be too uncomplicated a 'yes'... 

"I guess there's a level on which I used to feel like - everyone should just toughen up and fail to be intimidated by threats to send their families to Hell," she says. "- I am aware this is a ridiculous thing to have believed. It was easier than -

…I meant it."

"You're a very unusual person." He's pretty sure she's still evil, but she plays the part of a lawful good Reclamation official very well, and he can almost imagine it's not an act. He wouldn't be shocked if she said under Abadar's eye that it wasn't.

The evil druid who Lilia went to for the Cyclic Reincarnation won't take money for his services. Many druids are like that. They'll give you justifications about the soul of the metal speaking to them and crying out not to be so used, or about the spiritual dangers of interacting with bankers and others who live in a world of inventions and pretensions instead of the real world of soil and honest work. Maybe some of them even mean it, but Lilia is good at telling when people are lying to her, and this man is. She is an Asmodean, if not one who worships Asmodeus, and has no trouble guessing the real reason. 

The reason he doesn't take money is that it lets him set the terms of the negotiation in territory familiar to him and unfamiliar to his counterparty. Once you've agreed to pay someone in poisonous tree frogs you're going to have a hard time bargaining with them about precisely which poisonous tree frogs, especially if they are an expert on poisonous tree frogs and you learned yesterday that they can be used as a spell reagent at all. 

You might expect that since Lilia is an Asmodean she wouldn't begrudge someone his clever negotiating tactics, but in fact she resents it immensely, just as he no doubt resents hers. Asmodeanism is not an ideology whose adherents end up liking each other. Usually before she goes to him, she spends a few days reading up on druidic reagents, just so she'll be a little less ignorant than assumed, but there's a lifetime of study in it and in the meantime Cheliax is doing its very best to rip itself apart. This time she instead sets up a Telepathic Bond with a consultant in Absalom who can feed her facts about the plants and animals he names, and who knows enough to identify the price he quotes her for Endel's Cyclic Reincarnation as extortionate, even by the standards of someone selling a sixth-circle spell with expensive requirements that his order forbids him from selling and that many people would pay their very souls for. "I hadn't realized you'd previously been giving me a discount," she says mildly. 

He barks sharply with what could pass for laughter but isn't, not really. "My needs change with the seasons."

"Mmmhmm. Sting-sap trees grow only in Vudra, vexalis only on the coast of Nagajor, curare only in Arcadia, and slow-sloths a mere six hundred miles from here but they are famously impossible to transport by Teleport. You do not like to speak of prices, but I would expend, in bringing this to you, four times what I expended to achieve your last set of requests. Should I ask again in another season?"

"What's the man to you, anyway?"

Endel, of course, is nothing to her. But she thinks that making him young again is the best way to put pressure on Alex to do the same thing without the pressure visibly coming from her, and Alex is - what is Alex to her? She does not want him to go off to Heaven; it seems as wasteful as running a job search, finding the best candidate for a role in the whole country, and then feeding them to a pack of wild animals because Infrexus wants someone to blame for his latest error. 

And young men find celibacy much more taxing than old men do. 

"Barely an acquaintance, but I have a grand plan in which he's a step. Does that affect the price?"

"Well," the druid says, "a Chelish noblewoman becomes young again, no one necessarily presumes that anyone is selling youth in contravention of the laws of the order. You could've done all sorts of things. Stolen someone else's youth. Bathed beneath the full moon in the blood of strangled babes."

"Does that work?"

He shakes his head scoldingly. "Try it and find out...anyhow, a nobleman of Lastwall becomes young again, the people who don't know anything will be curious, and the people who do will know someone's selling."

"Lastwall's turning out miracles like they fall from the sky in the summer rain. A nobleman of Lastwall becomes young again, everyone will figure that this can be done like the radio can be done, or the guns, or the steel."

The druid makes a disgusted face. "Only an ignorant fool would imagine that grasp of trivial mechanical things like the radio or guns or steel would allow one to make old men young again."

"Or the fertilizer," says Lilia, "or the curatives."

"Still trivial. They wield what they barely understand, to clumsily set in motion processes over which they have no power."

"I like travel," says Lilia, "and can be sent to the edges of the world, if you please. But time is precious to me, and I cannot bring you the slow-sloths. Will you do it for all the rest, and a slow-sloth freshly dead?"

"Your grand plan, of which he is an instrument - is it Lastwall's? To grind up the world for mechanical marvels?"

I, like you, don't care at all whether the world gets ground up for mechanical marvels. It would not be wise to say that. She has to allow him the pretense of his druidic ideals. "Do I strike you as someone whose grand plan would be Lastwall's?"

"I'll take the slow-sloth freshly dead."

She tells Endel that her acquaintance will make him young again if he'll pay six thousand Absalom pounds. This is, technically, true.

"So are you going to do it?"

"I'm not sure yet. Six thousand pounds - that's a raise dead. Less than a nice belt."

"Too indulgent?"

"Ha! No. Much cheaper than I was expecting. The problem is just that…"

"You don't trust her?"

"I don't know. Do I? Should I? I've barely met the woman, you're the one who gets tea with her and Abadar every few weeks."

"It…seems too convenient to be true. But I don't know what she could possibly hope to gain by lying about it, given how quickly we'd find out. I don't have any reason to suspect a plot here in particular, just -"

"You're just worried because she's Myrabelle's daughter. And the old Cheliax' spymaster."

"I suppose."

"Her mother rescued me from a Chelish prison. I'm keeping an open mind about which way to count her parentage."

"We're not supposed to -"

"Remember that she saved my life when deciding whether or not to trust her? I suppose you're right. You're much better at that sort of thing than I am."

"Or remember that she's still alive at all when deciding whether to trust her daughter."

"Yes, yes. So we imagine Lilia's just a former leading member of the old regime who happens to have reasons to hold a personal grudge against you - that seems worse for their interests -"

He ignores that last point. 'Act on secret information only when it's in Myrabelle's interests' isn't what Myrabelle asked for, and isn't something that he'd be confident in his ability to follow or eager to agree to.

" - Who defected before the war was won, gave us essential intelligence, and has since then sworn under a truthspell in Axis that she's not plotting against us."

"Well there's my answer, I guess. You should ask her if this is all part of some nefarious plot and if it isn't I'll go for it."

"Have you lied while appearing to be under the effect of any truth spells since we last spoke here?"

Lilia can beat a truth spell but it did not, in fact, come up in infernal Cheliax very often. Occasionally if she wanted to persuade a specific person of a specific point; occasionally if she was trying to root out a traitor in her office. But one wouldn't just go around asking people if they have betrayed you at every opportunity. Partially because of course they have, and partially because, well, it seems unsporting.

This Lilia is Lawful Good and is of course just glad to be able to be trusted by her allies so they can together reap all the benefits of being Lawful Good at each other. "No," she says.

He's not surprised. She'd never say 'yes' to any of these questions unless it was part of some incredibly elaborate plot. For almost any conceivable purpose she'd flee the country rather than confess and be imprisoned.

"Have you lied to me any other times?"

"No."

"Did you lie to Endel at all during your passport interview?"