It's a matter of degree. This was a major theme early in the quest—Mathilde started her career by embezzling her spymaster funds to pay student loans, and Van Hal made a big impression on her with his opinion of that kind of thing. De Verezzo levels of embezzling? You get dealt with. Mathilde levels of embezzling? Well, nothing's provable without significant effort, and there's bigger fish to fry.
Worth noting that said levels of embezzlement were not only fairly low, they were going directly towards an immediate, substantial, and understandable need. Those student loans Mathilde was paying off were investments into Mathilde's ability to perform well as Spymistress of Stirland, and she did her job VERY well.
Also notably, once Mathilde didn't have that pressing and immediate need, she stopped doing it, even though having that money would have definitely made things a lot less precarious financially.
Similarly worth noting that the first major task Mathilde performed in her role was finding the missing tax codes and feudal contract (and records) of Stirland, which made a massive difference for Stirland's finances quite quickly. Given that De Verezzo's great sin was embezzlement on such a level that it substantially weakened the armed forces of Stirland, Mathilde basically immediately made the opposite kind of difference.
Combined with the fact that Mathilde was shoved into the position without warning or preparation, started with no budget, no informants or intelligence apparatus of any kind whatsoever, a bunch of student debt, nowhere to even sleep aside from a crappy, small, musty room somewhere, with the previous Elector Count
and Spymaster both being traitors, the essential documents and records of the state stolen, and a Vampire conspiracy threatening Stirland itself (and another conspiracy choking
her personally), it's almost crazy that the Grey College itself didn't step in to help at least a bit.
Abelhelm, Wilhemina, and Mathilde carried Stirland out of the deep, dark pit it was in without the people of Stirland ever knowing it, and Mathilde played her part when she was literally a brand-new Journeywoman with student debt and a magical conspiracy hanging over her head, under threat of death, with her own Master explaining that she had to cooperate with said conspiracy that was unsanctioned or be declared a Black Magister and hunted down.
I really like Regimand, I do, but jesus christ he fucking threw his apprentice into high-stakes hell with major student loans to repay and nothing more than the clothes on her back, and he had to be written a letter from said apprentice asking what the fuck was going on to give her any guidance whatsoever.
Eike's curiosity about why Mathilde didn't even contribute to a single paper until her mid-20s really brings to mind how batshit insane Mathilde's Journeying experience was. At least Dragomas went on his great journey into the Dark Lands entirely by choice. The fact that Mathilde finished her Journeying by leveling Castle Drakenhof and submitting a paper on reverse-engineered necromancy, got promoted, then went right the fuck away from the Empire to go join an expedition to reclaim eight goddamned mountains full of greenskins, skaven, trolls, and giant spiders and had a
far better time says it all.
Mathilde's Journeying was so absurdly rough that it pretty much burned her out on living in the Empire at all (save perhaps the Grey College), let alone focusing her efforts there.
It also says a lot that of the entire magical item repitroire Mathilde has, precisely
one of them enhances her ability to do traditional Grey Wizard things (and it's a divine magic item given to her by her god, to boot); the rest are all about fighting, killing, helping you do the killing, or surviving the fighting. Mathilde isn't outfitted like a spymaster, or an assassin, or an infiltrator, she's outfitted like she's a fucking Doom Slayer. She outsourced the spywork to a Perpetual as much as possible. She's the most atypical Grey Wizard alive, and I think a big part of that was being forced into being a kind of typical Grey Wizard under so much stress, fear, pressure, and high-stakes responsibility (and nothing to work with) without any kind of choice from when she was barely an adult, ending only with a big war where her own near-death experience while surrounded by undead was so minor a footnote that she basically never even registered it.
As a Magister, getting startled into a massive battle by the roar of a rampaging Emperor Dragon and four different enemy factions (and a mountain full of trolls) erupting into violence, finding out that she was the one in command and now had to deal with a complicated, three-dimensional battlefield was a challenge, not a crisis. Being told that a million-strong Waaagh was on its way and would arrive the next day had her react with an honest-to-god dismissal of "whatever, that's tomorrow's problem" before deciding to try killing as many foes as possible before the Waaagh arrived (so that she could kill them too).
A big, multinational pie-in-the-sky project to reverse-engineer Waystones in the first collaborative project between elves and dwarves in thousands of years, with her at the head of the project? That's the easiest, safest period in her life thus far, by a wide margin. And she still got a jumpscare by a Greater Daemon of Tzeench as a treat.
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