Eutropia is, formally, Co-Emperor. No, not Grand Princess, Co-Emperor. She was officially appointed while using a Greater Hat of Disguise to Alter Self into a man, so that she met the requirements that were never written down anywhere but that every Taldane nobleman knows by heart. Stavian is pretty sure the steelnecks will have her head in a week anyway, when he goes down, but the old man’d never forgive him for it if he let the Vratzes get it without even trying to keep it in the family.

“Reform is strictly a matter of necessity,” she says. “With the Galtan military reforms now reaching Cheliax -”

“Pour yourself a drink. Relax. No need for oratory, we’re not in the senate.”

"This isn’t the time for your humor, father.”

“You’d think that after these tutors I got you you’d learn the first thing about ruling.”

(His boots were resting on a silk cushion; he’d never caught the servants yet, changing them out, but somehow it was always clean.)

“The first thing about ruling is, you change up what you say for your audience. You tell the Senate you’re restoring its rightful privileges and bringing back the glory days of Taldor, you tell the generals you’re finally listening to all the letters they’ve been sending you about everything the army needs and their army’s back pay is coming in a month, and you tell the officials that reform is a matter of necessity. Your dear old Dad you want to try the please-father-can’t-I-have-a-treat on, usually works wonders. I remember when you used to tug on my cape, up-now down-now fly-now…”

“The new army of Galt is two hundred thousand men. Andoran has sworn to raise one to match it. The infernal general Gorthoklek was forged from three of your predecessors and the man who forged Myridia and named to overcome them both. Avistan is on the brink of the greatest war in centuries and the Empire is on the brink of destruction, father, the Empire you’ve given your life to serve, the Empire that has lasted four thousand years, the moment is now and the end has already begun and doesn’t this mean anything to you?”

“Eight.”

“This is the eighth time since I took power the Empire has been on the brink of destruction. First time I signed the Lex Ordinarius about it and then the third and, hmm, fifth times were about good old Lex Ord. Second thing to know about ruling is that unless the boiler boys have busted your Forbiddance and cracked the door open, the Empire’s not on the brink of destruction. You’ve got time. Use it.”

“We have time today. Will we have time when Galt’s armies storm south?”

“There’s these things, love, if you look at a map, called mountains -”

“He’s beaten mountains before.”

“Found old Straben’s path, described in the third edition of Geography of the Five Kings Mountains, rather a shame the passage was omitted in the fourth. Hell of a difference between checking Isarn’s library and making it through the Fog Peaks and the Verd when the dwarves are as ticked off as they are.”

“And if Andoran turns against us, or he turns on them and then to us?”

“Verduran Forest’s a fancy name for the world’s biggest swamp, darling. Ever tried to paddle through it?” He shudders theatrically. “Be glad I never put you through that.”

“The path down the coast has been followed by a hundred invading armies.”

“Yes, there’s reasons we let Flavio build a castle. Well, let him bribe us to build a castle. Lex 4606’s a really dreadful piece of legislation but it’s the only way we’ve paid the Guard.”

“You’re leaving the Empire to be pillaged by whatever invader sees - correctly sees - we’re weak, and leaving your own lords to manage their own mistakes.

“Aren’t you supposed to be Good? Flavio’s a blue, so he’s for the Chelish. Andoran invades, besieges his castles, we send a fleet pirate-hunting - Andoran’s got a dreadful fleet, all threes and no big ships worth the name - and it’s not like they can take a city we can resupply, they go home after they burn the countryside and now he’s got to tax his peasants raw just to bribe the tax-collectors off him and can’t spend anything on his pals in Hell, victory for Iomedae and all that.”

"And then Qadira invades, or the easterners, because the army can't fight back. We need one that can."

“Which army? The Vratzes’? The Tzimsko lot? The schools? More than one emperor has fallen by trusting the steelnecks -"

“Not the generals, not the lords.” She made a quick cutting motion. “They’re treacherous tyrants. Go past them. Did Taldaris rely on his noblemen? Only the ones he made. Has Cyprian, or Codwin? Cheliax did and you’ve seen what it did for them - ‘the finest army in Avistan,’ as we all knew, routed by townsmen with pikes, but townsmen with fire in their blood! Speak to the people of Taldor! Speak to those who love their nation -”

“My love, my dearest darling, who guards your door?”

“The Ulfen Guard.”

“Who you trust because we pay them. That’s what they die for, little discs of metal. Maybe they really like my face, think pictures of it are the most important -”

“Really remarkable thing, whoever came up with money. No. The Ulfen Guard will fight for us, die for us, guard our doors while we flee out the back way, swinging their axes until they fall. No Emperors’ been assassinated by the Guard, and every Emperor trusts them. Why? Honor? Honor and two bits will buy a drink. The Ulfen Guard trust us because they don’t give a shit about Taldor, they just want to get paid. If you really want to see what people who love their nation will do, take a look at Galt. I think Cyprian really loves his country; horrible story, considering how much of it he’s already killed in Druman mud. Certainly Luke did, and poor King Charles." He shakes his head. "My darling, even the Vratzes love their nation. If you want to find a good Emperor who will really and truly serve his people, look for a con man smart enough to want to keep riots down who doesn’t care what country he rules as long as it's rich."

“It is that all you think you are?”

“Oh no, I love the Empire, that’s why I’m so bad at being Emperor."

"If you want reform plans, let’s talk about reform plans. So you want to put an army together that can beat Andoran?”

“Or Galt. Or Cheliax. Or Qadira.”

“Restore the greatness of the Empire,” he said, nodding. “Right. Pick a steelneck to run it, he asks why a girl’s heir instead of him, we all die. Lead it yourself and - well, you’re no steelneck, but you grab one for the tactics and ride herd on him and take the Ulfs along so he doesn’t stab you in the back and there’s a mutiny back home, and my head's on a stick and you're off in the wastes with any army you can't trust and a general who wants you dead and no taxes. Pick some senator who talks the right talk and swears he’s got the Strategikon by heart and then he goes up against a real enemy they beat ten kinds of hell out of him and you’ve got no army."

"And, love, where are you going to find the men? The frontier armies hold the frontiers, that's all they do. Adin? Porthemos? There's not the men there -"

“I will find them in every village and every city in Taldor.”

“And that gets you Galt, darling, and we both go Charlie’s way. The only thing worse than the nobles is the mob - the only thing worse than Andoran is Galt. But say you find the men. How do you pay them? Castle tax pays the Ulfens, harbor tax pays the Hales, land tax pays for the dole, takes the head tax and the hearth tax to pay the clerks, sales tax is for the palace, dwarf tax pays the schools, and the rest’s limping and hoping and getting whatever’s left over.”

“Collect the taxes,” she says, "for once. All of them. Enforce the laws. The army will be with you if you keep your vows to them, if they are paid and fed and given their rightful rewards -"

“I tried that once,” he says, sighing nostalgically.

 “It was the most unholy mess. They couldn’t find any purple ink for the order and then the fires took three days to burn out. I had two thousand people executed before the Church of Iomedae interceded and the rest were shipped to the Worldwound. The goddess paid the freight.”

“The taxes on the magnates, then. End their exemptions.”

“That’s where we get our generals, dear. Try that and half of them rebel and they take their armies with them. Before we can bribe their troops out from under them, this time.”

“And if we taxed the peasantry harder, for long enough to cut the knot?”

“They don’t have the money.” 

"They did."

"Oh yes, a thousand years ago. Freeholding farmers, veterans of the service granted land as compensation, without the nobility’s exemption from taxation, just what the Empire was built on. We've run out. Care to make more?"

"Why is this impossible?"

"Land, darling; there's none left. Say it’s time for a land reform program and try to buy the right off the magnates, everyone bribes the inspectors and what do you know, you buy two hundred thousand acres off the nobility and somehow only three change hands.”

"No."

"No?"

"No. You have many fine explanations for why everything is failed, but the Empire has been great before, and it can be great again. There are men who agree with me, lords and senators, commons and soldiers, and when you say that all is hopeless I have not lost hope."

"You haven't, no. You will do what it takes to win? Whoever you have to go through?”

She nodded, once.

“You know,” he says, “there’s an emperor, eighteen hundred years - I don’t know if your tutors told you about him - Bassanius?”

She shakes her head.

“This was long before the Ulfen Guard. There were some nasty sorts running things, the Insomniacs - guards of, hmm, Horatiu the Second, he’d pulled them out of some tribesmen back on his property, fanatically loyal to him of course, and of course by Basso’s time they’d really taken over. It was them and the Clubbers that were the guards that mattered, and they hated each other but any time the Emperor wanted to do something that wasn’t pay them to do nothing - make them drill, send them to war, train up an army that could really fight - they’d whip his head off and pull one of his cousins on the throne. And of course the Keleshites could see that, and pressed us hard, them and the Iobaran raiders and the tribes up in what's Galt today. Around and around it went, emperor after emperor, the Empire circling the drain as province after province vanished to us."

She nods.

“Well, the Palaean dynasty had been pretty well established by that point, and nobody would think of an emperor who wasn’t one of them would amount to anything, and good old Basso was the last left but a lunatic and a priest of Torag who couldn’t be pried out of his shrine with a crowbar. Sensible fellow."

"That gave Basso room to work. He tried to put a new army together, but they told him they weren’t having any of it, so he gave up on the project and just tried to make the Insomniacs and the Clubbers really, really hate each other. He gave it everything he had, blew on the flames, and before long the Clubbers could be talked around to the Soms being even worse for the empire than the way things were. So he hosted a big feast for all the Som generals, got them all in one place, and then the Clubbers came in and butchered them all."

She's grown up in Taldane politics, too, yes.

"They spent the next week hunting down the survivors and settling old scores before they said to the Emperor, well, fair’s fair, we’re your guards now, and that’s when the Volghars he hired from up in Iobara shot the Clubbers full of arrows. Then they looted the capital - that’s where the great big hammer at the grand temple of Torag comes from, the Volghars broke the old one trying to pry the gems out. Dreadful people, Volghars, but they didn’t know politics and when he had to pay them off, they went, because by then we had an army worth spit he’d trained when they weren’t looking, and we went and conquered half Qadira and most of our eastern provinces. Basso the Great, they called him."

"He went to Hell, and I do believe he’s a Duke now. Well. Part of one."

“You know, I rather like the idea of the Maelstrom. It seems so restful, after a life in Taldane politics. No responsibilities, and I can just sit back, and rest, and relax, and watch Golarion go to hell.”

“That’s what you do here.”

“A job I have experience at, too!”