Beneath a Spellsteel Crown
Fifth Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
Even after the recent renovations, Dragon's Roost's audience hall can still become crowded on the days you hold court personally, not only with petitioners and court officials that have grown around you like mushrooms after the rain, but with local Sorcerer's Deep potentates whose privileges date back to the time your rule ran only as far as the shores of the island you are standing on now and whatever your raiders could enforce when they were not taking the chance to rob whichever Essosi traders looked the richest. Now many of those traders are your subjects as are the former slaves set loose from their chains, yes, but also faced with a world transformed.
It is these transformations that shake the pillars of your rule even as you forge them, that press you to run ever faster before the tide lest it drown you. The first case before your consideration is in some ways typical of what has been brought before you in the wake of the conquest of Tyrosh, a contested inheritance following the death of a wealthy absentee landowner who had never even set foot on his estates.
The steward makes a decent point for having been the one to care for the land and the people, and for fully collaborating with the Legion unlike many of his neighbors. The fact that many of the former slaves did not abandon the land but continued to work there as free tenants makes him one of the success stories of the Tyroshi hinterlands, but he is still not the rightful owner and unfortunately said owner was not so accommodating as to be involved in daemon summoning or the worst of the slave trade. The worst that could be said of him according to both the Inquisition and your mother's account of court gossip is that he was sickly and ineffective, practically a recluse by reason of his fear of illness. By all accounts Nakeqor Irniros had died incidentally during the looting, leaving behind a recently widowed daughter and a passel of opportunistic cousins.
The latter you quickly dismiss as opportunistic sycophants who would promise you anything you might want to hear and then run the lands into the ground in a handful of months, but Lady Irniros carries herself with dignity in her dark veils, demanding her heritage on strict legal principles, not even deigning to glance at the former steward who is trying to claim them as his own.
What do you do?
[] Side with the Lady—the law must be upheld not only for principle but because the decision will further reassure the remaining aristocracy of the Three Daughters
[] Side with the Steward—the man has been managing the land for decades, not only with shrewdness and skill, but with enough wit to welcome the Legion from the first
[] Decree that the two will marry—it would be seen as a decent compromise by most, though there is a chance the matter might come to judgement again, for murder
[] Write in
***
Cases involving magic rarely make it as far as needing your personal attention these days. The Scholarum prefers to deal with its own members before any transgressions grow large enough to come to your attention, and the Inquisition takes it as a point of pride not to involve you in their cases and work instead through the local magistrates, for discretion is after all fundamental to their mission. However, neither institution truly holds sway over the case that comes before you today.
It begins, as to many headaches do, with a wedding. Glyllo Argolys had not only managed to lose an eye and a hand to a painted lizard recently, the healing of which had bought his support in the recent conquest of Myr, but he had also fallen in love and married a young woman while on his sickbed. The bride was of considerably lower birth, though not impossibly so, such that his peers argued that the lizard had rattled his wits or that missing an eye had made him blind to her scheming. There had even been a rumor that the young magister was feverish and thus in no fit state to make the decision. He wed her regardless, hand and eye restored... and then the tale turns from the stuff of third-rate ballads to something requiring royal judgement.
It seems that Lady Nesora
did use magic to seduce the magister, nothing so overt as a charm or compulsion, but she had bargained with the fey to make her more charming, to grant her for a time that spark of grace and confidence as could match a lady of the faerie. On the third day after the wedding that gift was spent, leaving Glyllo claiming that he had been bespelled, which under the laws of the realm would grant him an annulment. The issue arises from the fact that no magic had directly touched him. Were you to simply argue that all magic that enhances charm and glibness of tongue is enchantment then you yourself are enchanting the whole court in this very moment. On the other hand you could simply hold the fey bargainer responsible, cast the onus upon them... save that you have many fey in your employ and it would ill serve you to demonize them.
What do you decide?
[] Find in favor of Lady Nesora—she was legally wed, and therefore the arrangement can only be settled with divorce
[] Find in favor of Lord Glyllo—he has been deceived if not enchanted
[] Table the matter in public and try to negotiate a face-saving compromise later in private
-[] Write in
***
The last of your petitions that day is by far the strangest, though they ask for something that you had been expecting for half-a-year and more. An unfamiliar knight bearing a white and purple shield walks in escorting an elderly septon leaning on a knotted cane who would seem a begging brother but for the fact that he is wearing shoes. The knight introduces himself as Ser Bonifer Hasty and swears himself to you as quite a few had done over the past months, enough so that you had left a standing order that any knight wishing to do so is to be allowed in. The taking of an oath is usually a brief affair, words reaffirming loyalty and responsibility exchanged, perhaps the odd bit of reminiscing from the more gregarious among them.
Somehow you do not think the septon is going to be so accommodating...
Glancing around the throne room as Ser Bonifer rises to his feet to take in the mood of the hall, you are surprised to notice your mother looking intently at the knight, obviously recognizing him. Odd... most hedge knights who had so much as seen the royal box at tourneys make special note of the fact, yet Ser Bonifer is quiet on the matter.
"Septon Cerran, Your Grace," he introduces his companion. "A faithful servant of the Seven and a wise man I have found. He has sought you out for the past month but could not obtain an audience, and so I... slipped him in." A faint shadow of what must have been a wide and oft used smile in his youth flashes across the knight's features.
"Your Grace," the septon begins. "Freely do I call you this, for I have long thought it an unjust and ungodly thing to pass you over for the claim of a rebelling lord. Like you, I have found shelter in the east from foes in the Seven Kingdoms... though I admit my exile was rather less productive than yours was..." He pauses while a faint titter passes through the room. "Yet now perhaps I have found a task to set my hand to, for though I have seen many wonders in this city there are no septs to cater to the souls of even the faithful who are here much less any who might wish to embrace the Seven. I humbly ask for patronage as your House has given in generations past."
How do you answer?
[] Write in
OOC: The Lady who got married through a fey bargain did so through a +6 Charisma enchantment, so one of the most ubiquitous magic effects.
And since there are three Hallows, there are three Magic Circle Against Evils, so the range is multiplied to a 360 ft. radius.
