Galfrey's first instinct is to move within ten feet of him and cast Greater Aura of Courage. Her second instinct is that this is obviously wrong, because if she moves to within ten feet of him he might turn into some horrible monster with arms ten feet long and then kill her before her guards do anything. This happens altogether too often for her tastes.

"I can have someone cast Remove Fear," she says.

He looks very slightly surprised. Thinks about it for a second. "Thank you." It's not as good as the paladin aura but also comes with less strong associations of Iomedae which is probably a good thing. 

Galfrey will briefly walk out, leaving him without any visible guards!

Marit feels slightly insulted that she thinks that he'd think this was a good opportunity to escape. Obviously there are invisible guards. 

She doesn't think he thinks this is a good opportunity to escape! She thinks he might have already escaped and been replaced by a shapeshifting fiend that thinks this is a good opportunity to escape.

She returns with a serious-looking middle-aged person with no particular holy symbol.

Remove Fear.

"Thank you."

He closes his eyes and tries to think harder and let anger deflect him from one topic to another less. What can he prove, which doesn't require a trip to Absalom. Without dragging other people into it -

- no, that's probably a foolish constraint. She is not particularly likely to execute Good Mendevians serving in the Crusade for having also served him. Hulrun fell.  

"Anevia Tirabade helped me with the murder investigations and can describe them to you. The Select in Drezen did spiritual counseling for everyone executed. She spoke to them privately and would have been in a position to notice odd behavior - or magic, though I bet she didn't think to check them for magic. Ember sometimes assisted her. ...I didn't name them earlier because I was afraid you'd kill them too but on reflection I ...think you probably won't.

...you could scry the dead. If my account is true, they're in the Abyss, or gone. If it's false one assumes they'd be in Heaven."

This sounds like it might remotely be evidence. Not the scries, they're almost worthless, but the interviews might be useful.

"I would expect to find them in the River of Souls," she says. It's entirely possible they aren't, but even then that's not strong proof, because Malediction would do it and he could easily afford a lieutenant with a scroll or two even if he can't cast it himself.

Can she afford to take a day off to talk to the interviewees. Probably the Queen cannot. Probably she has to. She doesn't have Message, though, so though she could scry she would need to delegate any interviews.

...does judgment take longer these days? It probably does. He should have looked that up. There are too many things it would've been useful to know.

"Or you could ask Iomedae. You will notice I haven't disputed any of the heresy charges - you can probably have my head on heresy, if that's how you want to handle this - but I am very confident that She would've said not to do this."

"How old are you?" Galfrey asks.

"Why do you ask?"

She raises an eyebrow.

"Soul trials used to go faster. If you caught that I am moderately impressed."

"They did," says Galfrey, who had been adventuring for more than a decade when Aroden died.

That's not confirmation that she did catch that and that it's what inspired the followup question, but he tilts his head in a measure of respect anyway. "Why not ask Iomedae? You think Lastwall'd lie?"

Possibly, but she's more concerned that Iomedae might lie. She's goddess of winning, not honesty. If Aspex wants to be King of Sarkoris off of the backs of millions of dead Mendevians, she's probably in favor. "No comment," she says pleasantly. "Heresy is chiefly of importance insofar as it is strong evidence you are an enemy of Iomedae, all the gods of Good, and the state and people of Mendev, and an ally of their enemies." Such as Daeran Arendae.

"Is heresy strong evidence of that? It has always seemed to me that almost everyone is a heretic. They arrested Iomedae for, ah, 'believing that the prophecies of Aroden's return are false'."  Someone who was born after the end of prophecy might have said it. They would probably have said it a bit less bitterly.

"Hatred of and enmity to Iomedae is clear sign of hatred of and enmity to Iomedae's allies, yes," Galfrey says. He is doing exact words shit and she really dislikes exact words shit.

"I don't hate Iomedae and just told you that I am confident she does not regard me as an enemy...Your Majesty, I cannot help but return to the point that the Commune which actually would be strong evidence about whether I were an enemy of Iomedae and all the gods of Good has not been run and, it appears, will not be run. If you don't trust Lastwall, and are reluctant to command your clerics to ignore their idiotic Commune policy, ask Erastil, or Sarenrae, or Torag, or Desna. If there is some insurmountable logistical barrier I would be gladdened to know of it.

Otherwise, the obvious conclusion is that any defense on this point will be rejected for the same reason the Commune has been rejected. I am not an enemy of Iomedae nor any Good god, and you could easily determine this if you wanted to know it."

She already asked. Erastil said UNCLEAR. If he hadn't, Galfrey would have been much less worried. As it is his desperation for a Commune is genuinely a good argument that in spite of regularly slandering the goddess he is aligned with her interests, if not those of the other good gods. "Your statement has been noted," she says. "I am more than slightly surprised you so freely slander the goddess and then then expect her assistance."

"I think that on encountering such a contradiction I would wonder if the purported slander that was reported to me was accurately reported."

Yes, she did do this. It took her quite a while and him quite a lot of conspiring with Daeran to arrest him. "That you doubt the Good gods are opposed to Asmodeus." He's also, himself, strongly opposed to Asmodeus, which is morally correct but very rude to bring up. "That you see no difference between Asmodeus and Iomedae. That in private you regularly insult her and those who follow her."

"The first one is at least half true. The second is mostly false. I might have said that the differences were fewer than I had expected to find them, and the differences are indeed fewer than I had expected to find them, but I do not think you could interpret my resource expenditures as implying any indifference over whether my soldiers go to Heaven or Hell. 

I do not think you heard that last firsthand." The one person who was privy to such complaints would not have reported him to the Mendevian authorities over them. "But I will confess that I have complained in private that it was upsetting to witness summary executions of foolish teenage Desnans in the streets of Kenabres during Deskari's attack, and that I think Ember should not have been burned at the stake, as her patron is to the best of my ability to determine Andoletta, Empyreal Lord of protecting the innocent, and that it strikes me as the case, in general, that whatever specific virtues the mortal Iomedae embodied, whatever there was to her conception of the Good beyond that demons shouldn't eat the world, under the exigent circumstances it is not in evidence. 

None of this gives me any pause about what the Commune will say. It is in evidence that She cares about the Worldwound and I am trying to close the Worldwound. Or assassinate some demon lords until the Abyssal side collapses into infighting and can't sustain organized operations on the Material, that was my backup plan."

Galfrey is very tired. He is being inspiring and charismatic at her and she is sick and tired of people being inspiring and charismatic at her. Just one more thing she needs to cover, fortunately. "Where is Daeran Arendae?"

"I don't know, your Majesty. 

I will observe that if I were planning to betray you, or considered it an acceptable price for any other plan I had, I'd have fled myself with de Litran, left Arendae, and then returned to Drezen after the predictable thing had happened."