It is not the man on the dark throne who speaks.  The man on the throne looks like he's playing an invisible tuba (possibly engrossed in some magical experiment, but it looks like invisible tuba) and not paying much visible attention to ongoing events.

Instead, it is this guy, who stands before the throne, who steps forth to near Opalyn and addresses her.

"So.  A young lady brought before us on charges of unaggrieved noblecide, banditry without a duchal license and without payment of the corresponding tax rate, and practicing dark sorcery without a diploma."

There is some laughter from the surrounding nobles -- the few of them who seem to be paying ongoing court events any attention, anyways.

Why are they laughing. Are they laughing at her? None of this is funny at all.

Should she lie? Seems unlikely to work. But saying "yep, that's all true," does not seem wise either.

Oooh, maybe she can promise to change? She would even mean it.

Is she supposed to speak right now or is she supposed to remain quiet? Can she figure that out?

"Hm.  Too terrified to speak, or wise enough to notice that you weren't asked a question?"

Opalyn takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders, and looks her accuser in the eye. She tries to project solidity and respect rather than defiance.

"Greetings, your, um," Excellence? Majesty? Healthy-Orphan isn't helping.

"I'm so sorry, I don't know the proper way to address you."

"Anyway, I sincerely apologize for any past misdeeds I may have committed, I would like to make amends, and I would like to live according to the law from now on."

"Oh?  And here I was about to say that the reports of you showed little management potential or ambition, and write you off as someone's future kept creature.  I admire your nerve, if nothing else, to turn over a new leaf instantaneously upon being caught and brought before justice.  There is a brazenness to it that an ordinary judge would not take well in an ordinary criminal, but as for myself, I find it worthy of some little interest."

"I have had a deep and sincere change of heart today."

And also mind.

He smiles, then.  "Of course you have.  And if you were to find yourself free, unchained, and unopposed once more, you'd experience just as instantaneous a change of heart in the other direction."

"Your heart is black enough to be my own protege, even, if you were smarter and had shown yourself far more capable."

"She is a delightful thing, is she not, oh courtiers of our bleak master?  Perhaps not trivial to keep corraled, but it might be fun to try."

Opalyn transmits DELIGHTFUL as hard as she can at the courtiers.

"But they will not take you as more than a plaything, you know, unless there is some prospect of a benefit worth all your trouble."

"So how powerful are, you, exactly?  By reports you've won victory over pissant barons and minor counts."

Hmmm, sounds like being more powerful is an advantage at the moment. What can she say about this?

Quick appeal to Healthy-Orphan for data?

Well, it wasn't at all hard to beat up those innocent nobles!

...also it may be significant that Healthy-Orphan did it entirely using brute force against people who were actually trying, like, visibly intricate spell constructs that Orphan never much cared to investigate at all, since fancy constructs couldn't beat HER.

Okay, she's going to try to strike a haughty tone and see how that plays.

"How powerful am I?" Opalyn scoffs.

"It's true, those opponents were weak. I obliterated them. I don't think anyone's really tested me yet."

"And yet here you are."

Yes, well, that's a fair point.

"I had my change of heart in the middle of the battle. I suddenly realized I wanted to --"

What. What is the thing that will play well here? Doing good? Probably not that exactly.

"-- contribute to the wealth and well-being of my world, and that this wasn't the way."

"Really.  And was this sudden change of heart contemporaneous with encountering your first wizard who was more potent than yourself, in some little baron's personal court?"

(It was contemporaneous with being sucker-punched by a really weird-looking spell that didn't look any more powerful than normal weak wizard magic, but went right past her shields, the last thing Orphan ever saw as herself.)

"He wasn't more powerful than me. He used a kind of magic I hadn't personally encountered before, and caught me by surprise. He was still puny."

She wants to say that his magic didn't cause her change of heart, but she's not actually sure that's true. How did Opalyn's consciousness get here, anyway? Could have been related to the spell.

"Oho?  An interesting claim.  I suppose it has a certain plausibility on the face of things.  Someone brought you down, and it could have been through their cleverness and your stupidity, more than their might and your weakness.  No young hero aspiring to Dukedom has stepped forth to claim your defeat, after all."

"But be it clear, young lady, this is not a place for idle bragging.  You will be tested.  If you claim to have slain counts without much contest, you are claiming at least a duke's power.  That is worth a little trouble from one of us.  But if you lied and so waste the time of the highest nobles of this Bleak court, you will be found out very quickly.  And your future will not be as pleasant as it could have been, for we will not be amused."

Opalyn is not sure if she has the goods to back up her claims --

(we do, we do! shouts Healthy-Orphan from inside the box)

-- but there is no way that backing down now helps this negotiation go better. Because it is a negotiation, Opalyn is pretty sure.

"Then let me be tested."

"A nontrivial administrative problem, when what we are testing is a dark sorceress of unknown power who claims to be able to shred her way through barons and counts.  I hope you see why we can't just ship you off to a mage academy, take off those manacles about your wrists, and have you pour power into a calibration battery.  You might just slaughter all around you, and vanish again."

"More generally, young lady, you've as yet shown no valuable quality about yourself except your magic and your ability to have very swift changes of heart.  And to make good use of your magic, we'd have to take off those manacles suppressing your power -- not just for testing, but on some more regular basis."

"Most criminals are not worth the trouble to keep them under control, if they will slaughter all about themselves and vanish at their first chance.  It is simpler to just kill them."

Ah, yes, that is a difficult logistical problem, now that Opalyn thinks about it.

Her brain is generating ideas -- Putting the prisoner into a transparent, magic-proof box! Asking the prisoner whether she's good and then zapping her if she says no! Getting ten prisoners almost as powerful as she is to vote on whether she's going to do something bad! -- but the ideas are all obviously stupid.

She stays silent.

"Have you any ideas, young lady, about how we could go about solving our problem?  Suppose a carefully supervised test proclaims you as powerful as a duchess -- what then?"

"Most of the ideas that I had immediately are stupid and won't work."

Opalyn takes a moment to make sure she really wants to say this one out loud, but probably the best way to come across as good and cooperative is to be good and cooperative. There's always time to turn on him later.

"It seems to me that the only way to be sure you can control something powerful is to put something even more powerful in charge. And you don't want to be wrong on the weak side. So if you're determined to try to keep something very powerful, you must have an even-more-powerful management infrastructure on top of it. Nothing else that I can think of would reliably work."

"So... if I'm as powerful as a duchess, then I guess you'll need... " -- consulting Healthy-Orphan's memories -- " a grand-duke or grand-duchess to manage me."

"A sensible first answer.  The difficulty is if they must be in your presence at every moment you are unchained, that any benefit is being derived from you --"