Seldan can still reach him with Mindspeech from outside and will hold a link the whole time. This is an entirely normal way to feel on the literal first day of having a Companion! It does get less like that, once the bond is firmly enough in place then being physically separated doesn't feel like being actually apart in the same way. Also it's kind of silly that it's been how many centuries and there is exactly one room in Healers' with a stall for a Companion or a way for them to get in. You would really have thought that maybe eventually Valdemar would get around to horse-friendly architecture, but no. 

The injured people from Leareth's organization specifically are apparently sharing a room at the end of the hall already, but it takes Vanyel several minutes of talking to four different very tired people to determine this for sure.

And then there's a brief debate on bringing over the handful of other patients who would benefit from a spell that only heals injuries - there's an old man with a broken hip and a toddler who was badly scalded by pulling a pot of boiling water onto herself, and they would definitely benefit from Healing, but not everyone is fully on board with moving them to the room that currently contains the captured survivors from Leareth's kidnapping mission. Not that they seem that likely to do anything but they just seem like untrustworthy sort of people to be around toddlers, you know. 

Vanyel eventually just asks Blai if his channel could hit people out in the hall as well as long as the door was open. 

:As long as there's an unobstructed line from me to each person, yes.:

Blai wonders if Lastwall has horse-friendly architecture. He has no idea and is not sure if it will ever make sense to visit the place and find out. It seems like maybe the best area to do a Nap Stack in might be the stables? Unless the Companions are actually getting normal amounts of sleep while their Heralds run around madly, or the Healers catching a couple hours in the stables would be unthinkable, or something.

The Healers will carry the other patients over, then, the old man in a chair that four people have picked up the corners of and the child in someone's arms. 

There are three surviving mages from Leareth's strike force (a fourth didn't make it.) Two have fairly horrifying levinbolt burns and the third has a lot of broken bones from having been flung very hard into a wall. 

Feniss is also in the room, clearly uninjured but looking like she's had a spectacularly stressful last few days. Somewhat confusingly, the magic sword formerly belonging to Jisa is laid out on one of the cots, rather than in her possession.

Seldan thinks the stables are an entirely reasonable place for a lot of people to catch up on sleep! The Healers don't usually come over there much but it wouldn't be unthinkable or anything, and the Companions are weathering the slack of sleep better - they're very tough - but they certainly wouldn't say no to a chance to catch up properly on rest. 

Blai channels, and then if they don't need him for anything else in there he's going to walk right out again to Seldan.

Vanyel stays. Probably someone ought to explain to the recovered mages what in the world is going on, and no one else is offering, and he's already here. 

Seldan is waiting right where Blai left him! 

:I suppose we might as well return to the stables. I'm not sure whether to expect Savil to need us again, and I can keep mindreading random people from there just as well. Haven't gotten anything useful yet, though.: 

:Should we be figuring out logistics on going north to cast the prophecy on Jisa or Leareth before coming back down for a Stack tomorrow, or is that handled?:

:Well, neither of us can Gate and you aren’t even a Mindspeaker, and I wasn’t under the impression that any of your spells would help find where in the north they relocated to, which we need to target a Gate anyway. I’ll tell you right away if I hear any plans.: 

Back to the stables it is, then.  This was more relaxing as a prospect before, when he was coming off the overwhelm of having just gotten himself a psychic link to a magic horse, instead of after a sudden update followed by poorly scheduled healing, but the stables have chess in them now so they're still pretty good.

Seldan is noticeably slower at chess when he’s trying to multitask with several conversations and also passively skimming surface thoughts, but it’s pretty impressive he can do it at all. 

(He’s not actively interrupting Blai with updates, but his thoughts are accessible if Blai wants to track what’s going on.)

He has yet to find anyone thinking anything at all informative about Brightstar. He has more leads on sightings of White Winds mages and the Ifteli representatives in Haven, but this has yet to point anywhere especially useful. 

Twenty minutes in he has an actual update. :The mages you Healed have Gate-locations in the north and can manage the range. The awkward part is that last they knew, you were suspected of destroying k’Treva Vale. Vanyel is trying to update them on the situation.:

And it’s still the case that no one can reach Leareth or Jisa, even using the artifacts that ought to target them directly and that you would really think should be keyed to the shields on Leareth-run facilities. It’s been over two candlemarks now since their last successful contact. Seldan is getting very uneasy about it, and - a little worried that none of the people able to act on it are in very good shape to be making decisions quickly.

Should Blai go talk to the... kidnappers... or is this not the kind of suspicion where that would improve matters?

It's disconcerting that the fifty sending scrolls glued together aren't working. What are they doing instead of working?

One of them is a Thoughtsenser and, like, it ought to be pretty convincing if they read his mind that he cannot possibly have been involved with k’Treva (and is from another world and all that). Vanyel thinks he can talk them around to that in a few more minutes.

They’re having a “can’t reach the search-target” failure with the artifact, which unfortunately would look exactly the same if the problem is being too far away (though it really shouldn’t be), shields on Leareth’s end, or shields in the middle. It hadn’t seemed plausible to Vanyel that the Star-Eyed Goddess could do that using the Heartstone, but both of the other possibilities sound implausible too.

They really need to invent some shields that work more like saves than like spell resistance around here. Does the thoughtsensing kidnapper want Blai over there to mindread like now or like after a blitz game or two?

…They’ve got time for a game or two. And then will probably go meet somewhere other than the House of Healing - the Gate-terminus would make the most sense, if they're planning to imminently Gate out - but Seldan does not yet have word on that and wherever it is they can get there a lot faster than Vanyel-and-friends can. 

How does one get a Gate location and what happens if you try to Gate somewhere you don't have one? Teleports have a miss chance but it's also possible to aim one with a good enough painting.

You target a Gate with a search-spell routing through the Void, aimed at a target you have to hold clearly in your mind. It's possible to target a Gate-spell in a lot of ways, though Valdemar has apparently only recently relearned this fact after losing that part of their Eastern Empire heritage entirely - the simplest and easiest to learn (though it's still quite advanced) is to put the other end on a doorway-shaped thing in a place you've been before. You can also Gate to somewhere you've only seen in Farsight, or only seen in someone's memories, or - with highly specialized training - to an area marked on a map, or even aiming purely by distance and bearing; a prerequisite for that is the also-very-difficult skill of building the threshold unscaffolded on the other end, which Valdemar wasn't successfully teaching its mages even in Seldan's time and which they apparently forgot was possible at all in the intervening years. A painting would probably be harder than Farsight or memories but easier than dead reckoning. 

If you fail to hold the target clearly enough in mind, or have an inaccurate mental image, or are trying to Gate to a place that no longer exists - he heard this happened recently when Savil attempted to bring Blai to k'Treva - the search-spell just keeps looking and looking, draining the mage's energy the whole time. It's possible for an inexperienced mage to drain themselves unconscious like that, if they don't take it down in time - and taking an incomplete Gate down is nontrivial, the departure threshold has to be very stable to anchor the search-spell and so resists being dismantled - so it's generally not recommended. 

He's never heard of a failure mode of Gates being ending up in a random place instead, though, that's bizarre. 

So when the kidnapper opens a gate to a place that he's the only person in Haven to be able to gate to, every gate-capable mage in Haven is going to be supervising telepathically, right? So they can see the place? This is surely standard procedure whenever any gates to novel locations are opened? And whenever somebody new is working on learning to Gate they go on a field trip with a senior Gate-capable mage to all of the standard places?

(Checking that...) 

They can get every Gate-capable Herald-Mage in Haven to nab the Gate-location but that is disappointingly few people! Vanyel had been intending for himself and Savil to get it, but north of the mountains is extreme range even for them. Vanyel should have the power for it but is apparently unusually incompetent at Gates due to some sort of poorly understood injury associated with how his Gifts were awakened, Seldan should try to properly get the rundown on that but it seems to be a topic that Kellan finds upsetting. Savil can probably do it. There are only two other Herald-Mages anywhere near Adept-potential, one of whom has a bad heart that makes strenuous magic risky and one of whom is blind and suffered permanent lung damage in an accident a few years ago. The others just aren't powerful enough, and - without the permanent Gate-terminus, it was really bad that they lost the permanent Gate-terminus - none of them have that kind of range. 

There are of course several dozen other Adepts in Haven right now, but given their current situation it does not seem like they can reasonably trust White Winds with this. Maybe they can trust the mercenaries, Seldan personally feels that mercenaries are often very - he supposes 'Lawful' is right, it's not a word he had before - and can be trusted to report to whoever holds their contract and pursue whatever objective they're given by that chain of command. But this seems to be the first time in multiple centuries that Valdemar has actually engaged mercenaries and Savil and Vanyel are both nervous about it. 

(Reading between the lines, he's getting the sense that Valdemar's broader policies around Gating and Gate-training have been heavily affected by the fact that everyone hates Gating, which is unsurprising because Gates suck for the first several hundred until you get efficient at it. You should really solve this by making everyone do a few hundred Gates while still a student, but it's somewhat understandable that Valdemar settled on minimizing use of Gates instead, especially since they're brutal on the weather and Valdemar, unlike somewhere like the Eastern Empire, doesn't have a wealth of weaker mages to work on remediating that.) 

Oh, well, it trades off with Nap Stack, but once everyone has sleep he can fix blindness. As long as her eyes are still there and merely don't work. If they are actually gone it needs a Regenerate. Surely it shouldn't matter if it's at the edge of their range from Haven? As described it will still be useful to have ever seen the place if they want one day to go there from Waymeet.

...Control Weather is a seventh circle spell. It's admittedly an odd reaction to have to a complaint about a weather-mage shortage but they could make so much money doing weather magic on Golarion. (The gates too. The range limit is disappointing - cleric-spell Gates don't have those - but the throughput is like a miniature Teleportation Circle, and those are huge. The party of archmages is a big deal in part because you need two cooperating archmages to do a teleportation circle and that's not a condition that often obtains and it's a gigantic military logistics lever.)

Apparently starting from Waymeet still doesn't put anywhere north of the mountains in range for the weakest Herald-Mages, or make it a good idea for the disabled Herald-Mages to attempt it (though if Blai's magic can fix Sandra's eyes, that would be wonderful). If Savil does need to go north in the next few days, she could leapfrog it by first catching a Gate to Waymeet cast by one of the less trusted and less scarce non-Valdemaran mages. Or maybe it will matter one day in the future, but no one is really thinking that far ahead and Seldan isn't sure they're wrong not to be. 

Huh! Weather magic isn't even that hard. It takes power, but it's also amenable to being split up between people rather than requiring true concert-work (concert-Gates, for example, are possible but difficult, and Valdemar seems to have lost the lore for that too until quite recently.) He remembers the Herald-Mages complaining about it rather a lot, it's apparently tedious, but it doesn't even require Adept-potential if you have enough Master-potential mages to divvy it up. Valdemar may have a shortage, but Leareth certainly doesn't. 

...They should play some chess. Things might be about to get stressful again but they aren't stressful again yet. 

Jisa is standing watch and she can't get the stupid comms artifact to work. 

(She's not the only one - after some discussion with the kyree, and some time studying the shields and declaring that they're actually just as good as anything he has and less based on any school of magic known to other humans, Leareth Gated in some of his people - but she was the one tasked with staying in touch with Vanyel while Leareth gets some sleep. Also popping into the Void every ten minutes to CHECK HIS IMMORTALITY SETUP, which she half can't believe he trusts her with at all, but THAT part is going fine. It's still totally undisturbed.

She's not sure they're in the clear yet, obviously, but - maybe Vanyel got to Haven in time to defuse the trap, because the Star-Eyed Goddess wasn't expecting Blai's prophecies to warn them or for Vanyel to persuade a different god to send Blai a Companion. She's kind of delighted that Blai has a Companion now? It seems like it could be really good for him.) 

Ughhhhhhh. She feels like she's almost certainly just doing it wrong somehow, but she had it working before! At shorter range, maybe, but with more difficult targeting!

She tries again. 

It doesn't work again. 

Jisa grits her teeth. She's probably just screwing it up and will die of embarrassment when Leareth has no trouble with it, but - what if something happened to Van. Or what if they're all wrong and the Star-Eyed can directly interfere with spells at that level of granularity - it would be weird, scrying Haven apparently still works fine but... 

Enara snuggles up against her. :He won't be angry if you wake him.: 

That's not the point, the point is that Jisa will feel like she failed Fine. She knows Enara is right. 

She grits her teeth. :Leareth, we might have a problem–: