"You may sit." he gestures at the chair on the other side of his desk.

She does that. Reasonably swiftly. She does not want to waste his time and she does not want to look like she thinks she's going to die of this (though she is going to die of this - not today, but inside a decade) - lest he start wondering why she thinks that and whether it's because she is a traitor of some kind.

"Please don't make any promises about what I'm about to say - We're going to send you to Almas, to teach some of our allies how to enchant guns and to learn from them how to run a factory to make guns in large numbers. Our ally is probably going to make you an offer to stay there in Almas and work directly with her instead of here in Westcrown. You're allowed to accept that offer. You won't be punished for accepting that offer. But I'd be glad if, before you do, you tell your supervisor on the trip to Almas what the offer was and give us the chance to match it. If you decide not to tell your supervisor you won't be punished for that either. Do you understand?"

They say that the royal court makes men go mad and it's suddenly very easy to understand why. What game is this? What move is possibly the winning one? Jehanes was a very straightforward person, by comparison. No promises. No disputing his claims that she won't be punished for defecting. No lying, presumably, about the very direct ‘do you understand'. Carissa wishes she'd had time to do something clever with all her new spellsilver though of course they probably deliberately timed the test for before she did. "I hear you, your majesty, but it pains me to imagine that my loyalty is in such question," she says after what is probably an unacceptably long pause. 

He puts a hand to his forehead. "Montero, do you -" He cuts off.

"...Sevar, would you prefer to be less afraid?"

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

Carissa prefers not having stupid human frailties to having them. "Yes, your majesty."

An instant later Carissa is enveloped in a calming presence. She is, indeed, less afraid. "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?"

Does he think she's stupid. That's probably a reasonable conclusion given how well she is handling this. Carissa fought at the Worldwound and knows what paladins are. They will pity you, won't fuck you, sense Evil, and can smite demons. They get their powers by obeying Iomedae. 

"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."

She's still pretty confused! Not, at this point, about what he is trying to convey, he said it quite a few ways and she is not going to entertain the theory that he's outright lying when he just told her not to, but about - why??? Why not punish her why offer to match some other offer when he can just order her to not desert why speak to her at all is she valuable or not and if she's not why play nice and if she is why not hold onto her -

"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?"

The Lord-Marshal shoots a grateful glance at his secretary

"I would expect that not punishing defectors causes more of them," says Carissa, because it sounds like the woman is trying to make a suspiciously complicated argument this isn't the case and if that's what the suspiciously complicated argument is saying then she doesn't buy it. 

"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."

It seems to Carissa like it could work that way for this woman and not for Carissa, and indeed like that's the obvious move, to let the people who know this is on offer get it in their contracts while the people who don't know it's on offer don't get it in theirs. She isn't sure how to articulate this complaint and doesn't really want to waste important peoples' time complaining they gave her the contract meant for people who know the dance better than she does. "You have my family's bodies," she says instead. She means it as assurance she won't leave even if she's absolutely allowed to do that. 

"We do?" asks the Lord-Marshal. "We can have them shipped to you in Almas if you request it."

Carissa is back to being bewildered. 

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

Okay that is a more normal test sort of question. And her usual answer is probably still acceptable under the new regime. "Well, I wouldn't - destroy their soul or something." That denies it to Asmo-Iomedae. Denies it to Iomedae. Carissa is a good citizen of the new regime.

"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."

Carissa is still half convinced this is nonsense but the woman's impatient voice makes it make perfect sense, at least in the moment, drenched in the warmth and safety of the Lord Marshal's power-whatever-it-is. And she's supposed to believe it, so it's not a good idea anyway to chase down the nagging feeling that it wouldn't make sense if she looked too closely. "Oh," she says. "Thank you. I think I understand."

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

Then she will exit as gracefully as she can and stare at her work until her heart is pounding at fighting-demons pace and not being-tortured pace, and not try at all to think about whether any of that makes sense because it had better.