"Good luck."

Off he goes.

"...I really hope the Queen sees reason." She glances at Ember.

Count Arendae steps around the Queen's guard to fill in the space Thall had been sitting at. There's a scowl on his face, and his tone is significantly more acerbic than usual.

"Ah, of course, if one of Iomedae's blessed servants behaves like our dear Prelate, the only remedy is to appeal to another. Truly your wisdom is beyond compare, Ser Seelah."

"In this particular case it is more to do with her being a queen than a paladin."

"Certainly I would never dream of suggesting that Her Majesty the Queen might err."

Wow, what did she say to him.

He does not seem inclined to clarify at this juncture. "I don't suppose you will have a moment free later this evening?" he says frostily to Blai. "Or have you already filled your calendar with litanies to Iomedae?"

"...I expect to be around and not dramatically busier than usual."

"Then I suppose I shall consider it an appointment, presuming that I do not tragically perish from excessive drink during tonight's festivities." He stalks off.

What the FUCK did she say to him. He supposes he will find out??

"He's frightened and in pain, but one of the things he's frightened of is other people noticing that he's frightened and in pain, so telling him so won't help."

"Then thank you for not bringing it up to his face."

"If someone left a conversation with Chief Sull acting like that, it would be a bad sign about both of them. Is it the same for surfacers?"

"I assume she said something that greatly displeased him but I don't know what it was so I don't know which, if either, it reflects on."

...If no one stops her Nenio is going to return to interviewing Ember about her life experiences.

Blai has no reason to stop her.

He doesn't really know how you're supposed to speak to a queen. There were queens back home, occasionally, queens and kings and the occasional duke or emperor or, once, a pharaoh. A mayor, in the town where he did his apprenticeship. But just because he could probably have stumbled through a conversation with the king of the kingdom next door without offending him doesn't mean he knows how to speak to the Queen of Mendev with his head on the chopping block.

She could in fact simply order him to join the Crusade or die. He would probably agree, even, most people don't want to die even if they're very sure they'll get Elysium. But Galfrey has been at this for more than a century, and she's well aware that if she tries that on a devout Desnan she'll be lucky if all that happens is that he deserts in the middle of the night. 

"Please, have a seat. You are Thall the Wallflower, is that correct?"

He sits. "Yes, your majesty."

She smiles reassuringly at him. "I was hoping to get your side of the story."

"The story of... being arrested?" It has been years since his nickname fit him but none of those years involved speaking to a queen!

"I expect that will be part of it, but I understand there to be... context. Context which the Prelate's account may have presented unfairly."

That's sure one way to put it. He's not going to tell her anything the Inquisition doesn't already know, he's not stupid, but it doesn't really seem like telling her the story can make anything worse. He'll go through it, starting from the first time he had the dream.

"...so we went to Hulrun to ask him to let us in and fix the Wardstone. But he didn't believe us. He said that probably the whole dream was some demon's trick, and that there was no way the Wardstone could be corrupted. —Ilkes and Ramien are clerics, there's no way a demon could sneak into their dreams without Desna noticing. So we talked about what to do, and — well, Ramien thought it was a bad idea, but the three of us decided to break in and try to fix it ourselves. We knew we were breaking the law, but — we were trying to save the city, we weren't just doing it for fun..."

And on through the rest of it, up to Blai intervening with Hulrun, skipping over some of the parts in the middle about how exactly he evaded the Inquisition in the days after his first escape.