"I'll read the books you gave me. And - think. Thank you again. Both of you."

"You're very welcome," says Oliva.

"Belmarniss, did you want to - ask them anything else?" What does Belmarniss look like, Tanya spent at least five minutes absorbed in thought and not really tracking her reactions. 

Belmarniss has been flipping through a hymnbook; she puts it back. "Nothing I obviously can't ask at the library."

Then they can make their exit and free up the certified Good people so they can save more souls ...actually, probably that? It's a real thing? Apparently?

And that's good. Even if they need a god to do it with.

"You look, uh, like you've got lots on your mind, is it the kind of stuff that should stay there in private or stuff you'd rather get off your chest?"

"It's - mostly stuff I should probably think more about, first? I don't mind sharing but I don't know how much sense I'd make right now..."

...oh. There actually is something she should tell Belmarniss! Apparently she didn't, before, because she was - what, afraid of what Belmarniss would think of her if Tanya asked what she thought of her? That's just stupid.

"There's something I really should have said to you before now. I've been worrying that I'm dragging you into danger. We just had a conversation about how if some mysterious archmages with unknown capabilities knew about me they'd kidnap or kill me! That's not something" civilians "normal people should have in their lives, even by proxy. But of course I'm not actually dragging you anywhere, I just - don't know why you want to keep associating with me. And paying my rent, which is a much smaller deal in retrospect compared to the possible threats. Not in the sense that I can't imagine why you'd want me to stay around, but I don't actually know. And I worry that I'm - not doing Good by you, because I don't even know what you want. You've done a lot for me and - it's not just that I want to repay you or to get Good points from Pharasma. I want to be someone who just does good things when they want to. So. If there's something I can do for you please tell me what it is, because I'm a weird alien and probably won't guess it on my own."

"Well, apparently I became Chaotic Good at some point when I wasn't even convinced that was a game I was invited to play, and you keep talking up how you will be able to do gigantic cool shit that affects millions of people and that is the kind of thing I am interested in seeing done well with a minimum of friction. I have lots of my own reading to do before I can usefully point you in a direction with confidence, I'm still turning up fun common knowledge like 'apparently there are sapient tree fey and they make excellent boat material', but I'm not in a terrible hurry about it and you seem to be making progress on figuring it out at a good clip and it just means I'm sharing the inn room and saving you a second-circle slot every day, no big."

As always, Belmarniss is way ahead of her.

Tanya was furious with Select Oliva for a few minutes earlier. A military man fighting a war he thinks is Good, a war he isn't winning, handed a gigantic lever and simply refusing to move the world. That's dereliction of duty! Betrayal of his comrades!!! Well, Tanya doesn't know what his formal duty is now that he's retired, but that was her reaction in the moment.

Belmarniss is a civilian with no duty to anyone whatsoever. No comrades still fighting desperately for their lives on the front lines. Nobody is about to conscript her because Taldor is racist. No threat of eternal torture is hanging over her head. She doesn't have the training and experience to appreciate the stakes, but anyone can understand being repeatedly told they may be in great danger and should run away. Tanya kept dismissing her as a civilian, but civilians run away from the fighting. Belmarniss has the common sense not to walk into danger!

She simply noticed, that Tanya was a lever that might move the world one day, and put herself in position to use it. Guide it, maybe. She noticed the danger to herself, accepted it, and moved on without any fuss. That's just what you do when you're the kind of person Belmarniss is, and have a little fragment of anatta inside you.

Not as an agreement, a debt or a promise from Tanya in exchange for her help. She doesn't have that instinct. Even the Buddha who discovered enlightenment didn't also preach about good government and contract law. But it's still a very fundamental equilibrium promoted by incentives. Cooperate with cooperators, even without a written agreement. Do Good for everyone else in the world doing Good, or who would be doing it in the right circumstances, even if you haven't met them and never will.

"You're a very impressive and good person. I - didn't fully appreciate that, before. I'm sorry, for not taking you seriously. ...and I'm glad to have your company."

... wasn't there something else Belmarniss just said? Tanya replays the conversation in her head.

"They're building their ships out of people?!"

...

......

"I don't want to operate out of Taldor." 

"...Abadarans might know who if anybody is not building ships out of dryads, but I have the impression that the alternative, apart from having your ship eaten by sea monsters, is enchanting them with pounds upon pounds of spellsilver, so you might conceivably also want to find who's sourcing that exclusively from dwarves instead of from slave and convict labor if you are going to be real intense about that."

"...I really want to know if people would stop doing all that if everything became a lot cheaper and better and they could afford not to. Or if they'll keep - enslaving people and, and using their bodies as building material as long as it's a little bit cheaper or more convenient." It's an eternally litigated question in economic history and Tanya honestly has no idea which side is right. "There's only one world economy. Moving somewhere with ethical shipbuilding regulations wouldn't help anyone, the ships will still be there. I could teach people to build better ships out of metal and they'd probably build houses out of dryads or something. Moving would just be - catering to my sensibilities. Maybe I need to learn not to be upset with things just because they're in front of me and not halfway around the world." Or, more realistically, she can keep being upset and ignore it and work on getting herself out of Hell, hopefully helping some people along the way but not the vast vast majority of people who need help. 

(But it felt so good to belong to a country she could feel proud of. Even if it meant she only helped her compatriots.)

"I think harvesting dryads is dangerous enough that they probably wouldn't do it for houses?" says Belmarniss.

"What makes it dangerous? Maybe they could stand to have better protection." Although destroying the marine shipping industry (see: ship-eating sea monsters, who are probably ALSO PEOPLE) probably isn't a great idea.

"They grow in forests which are pretty dicey places to be. I think in the same way as the underground or the ocean where some are used to it but if you just walk in and aren't the sort of thing that lives there you're taking your life into your hands."

"...with the way people here behave I'm surprised they don't have a managed plantation of them outside the forest. A forced breeding program." If you're enslaving people and killing them for their bodies, and enslaving more free people is too expensive, and since you're already doing that clearly nobody cares what else you do to them, breeding them seems like the obvious answer?

"Might just not work for some reason, I don't know a lot about fey. Also they're not useful till they're quite old by human standards, it's not like you could get a crop every year even if you could make it work at all."

"Earth has managed forests of single species of trees which provide enough lumber for whole countries and they don't take up nearly as much space as the old wild forests, most land went to farms instead. Granted, the speed of growth influences the trees chosen, but some slower-growing trees are still valuable. If the natural forest, which is presumably mixed, contains enough trees of the valuable sort and they're not simply about to run out of them two hundred years after starting the practice, that limits the space you'd need in a monocultural plantation... Not that I want them to do this, obviously!"

"No, yeah, I get it, it makes sense to think about what a completely practically-minded thing to do would be to see if you can make it impractical somehow, but I don't know if it already is or if they just haven't thought of it for some reason."

"Well, I won't give them any ideas." Do they have time to go back to the library and read for a while before it closes for the day?

Some, yes!

Then Tanya is going to get a start on reading the Acts of Iomedae. (And check which other books the library already has so she can return the spares tomorrow morning like she promised.)

The Nethysians have Discipline in Soldiery, and the Acts, but not the other one.

The Acts are epic poetry in archaic Taldane (which, with Belmarniss's Share of the language she learned mostly from books of widely varying ages, is not all that much harder to understand than the colloquial kind, but it's different). It is clearly designed to be memorized and performed, with actors or as a narrative, and to be enjoyable and engaging as entertainment, and within that constraint it's packing a lot of moral philosophy between the lines. Young Iomedae has to (in between having exciting adventures, and while reflecting on which adventures to take up) seek out a paladin order suitable for her to join which accepts women, and contemplate whether Aroden Himself - of whom she's very devout, having at one point in her childhood spoken exclusively in scritpural quotations for an extended period of time - is on the up-and-up regarding the use of her toward what she suspects are their shared purposes such that she will not be bent toward any end she cannot countenance.