Mental sigh. :If we're lucky, it looked like a good idea in Foresight until we were all warned to expect it and now it won't. ...Though I notice that sentence had the words "if we're lucky" and I don't think we should assume we'll be lucky at any point in Haven, there's still a Heartstone there.: 

Taking the perspective of someone loyal to Vkandis or the Star-Eyed Goddess - who might reasonably not have expected Them to act this destructively, Seldan has no memory from his run as a Herald of thinking They were terrible in general - it's possible it does feel a bit like Valdemar suddenly and inexplicably deciding to ally with Tar-Baphon!

Seldan has the sense that Valdemar didn't exactly help matters there, in terms of how the Heralds presented the situation while they were rushing to get all their allies in place within less than a week. Of course, Leareth also didn't help matters by kidnapping Blai, in hindsight that was a serious mistake. Then again, at the time he must have thought the most parsimonious explanation was a single godplot and that Blai was used to destroy k'Treva, which - you know, if that had been true, Seldan can't say that getting the person in question out of Haven would be a mistake. So really it's just a mess all around. 

:Maybe, but Foresight could be too noisy to tell, especially since we keep obtaining prophecies that would not be possible with Velgarth magic and changing our course of action as a result. If I thought the gods could reliably steer events precisely, right now, I would wonder if it was aimed at something indirect and specific - as with how Vanyel believed the attack on k'Treva was targeted to affect Brightstar's actions - but I expect that to be difficult given noise. It is possible this was - will be? was going to be - not directly steered by Vkandis much at all, and was mostly planned by Iftel's leadership for - human reasons.: 

:If I were Valdemar's King, I think I would just inform Iftel's leadership directly that they know now and an invasion is doomed to fail.: Nayoki is aware that she's not a diplomat for good reasons, though. 

Is the King even going to be in a position to do things after another couple Restorations. He looked really bad, he might need to be caught up on weeks or months of events with the most recent few days probably the densest. Is this the best time today to cast an Owl's Wisdom on somebody. What if he casts it and then needs it later. Would it make sense to tell everyone to make a habit of having all important conversations out loud and near clocks so they can be more easily interpreted in prophecy, the Acts are pretty nonspecific about which conversations might have been taking place over Telepathic Bond.

Seldan's impression from Companion-gossip is that Randi has been doing a truly impressive amount of King-ing given his condition - like, he's not running Council meetings, Treven has been gradually taking over most of the work that would involve leaving his suite, but he had been managing a candlemark or two a day of being functional enough to take reports from Dara and advise Treven, and he's probably more or less up to speed. For awkward diplomatic meetings he would probably still suggest Treven, though, since ideally they would not be run next to Randi's bed and also the kid apparently has a real talent for it. 

It's possible Leareth could make more headway on figuring out what the goal of the Ifteli invasion was if he had an Owl's Wisdom, but it's also possible they're just missing too many pieces. And it would be frustrating to want it later and not have one. 

...He'll flag the point about conversations out loud to Nayoki and Leareth in case they weren't already reading Blai's mind. Though it would be pretty inconvenient, Mindspeech is good in an emergency even face-to-face because it's faster than speaking out loud and doesn't run into the same issue with people talking over each other. 

Leareth will absolutely consider a policy of having important conversations out loud. 

He was also paying enough attention to Blai's thoughts to catch the thought about the Owl's Wisdom. For right now he's inclined to get in contact with Haven via Waymeet and negotiate sending Blai and Seldan (and Vanyel if he's still going) with a proper entourage, which he expects to take at least a candlemark. If after that he still feels like he's missing something that might be important for what precautions to take, he might want to try it. 

How does the set-command work, why would it interfere with the gryphons understanding questions and being mindread about the answers? What are the capabilities of their entourage going to be, if they're not all Mindspeakers Blai should maybe learn a few words of the relevant language in advance in case things are busy enough Seldan can't translate everything. Is it possible to prevent Gates from being created in a location, like a Teleport Trap or something, to prevent the gryphon invasion. What is the state of comms with Iftel, how does Valdemar talk to them. What is Brightstar's status and is he getting transported anywhere. Is this level of Gating exceptional enough that they should be worried about really destructive weather events beyond blizzards, like hurricanes or tornadoes, or is the weather magic coverage sufficient to cope with that.

(All of those are really reasonable things to flag and not unproductive worrying at all! Maybe Blai only does that when it's not a terrifying emergency and he's run out of emergency-level problems to try to anticipate and needs something for that mental muscle to do instead. Anyway, Seldan is fortunately very good at quickly cataloguing half a dozen different lines of thought and adding them to a mental notes-slate.) 

Seldan has never personally tried to question someone under a maximally restrictive set-command because, well, in his day there were two Mindhealers in the entire Kingdom of Valdemar and their job was, like, seeing patients with mental problems and not using Mindhealing offensively in combat. But he does seem to have retained some context on what set-commands do, for some reason, including the fact that depending on the person they are varying levels of impairing for having thoughts. Maybe Nayoki has relevant experience interrogating people who are impaired at having thoughts but he certainly doesn't, and it might cancel out the effects of a coercive Truth Spell if "answering questions" counts more as an action than just having thoughts. 

Probably everyone who comes with them should just be a Mindspeaker, he can't imagine Leareth has a shortage. Seldan has the attentional capacity of a Groveborn and can handle a dozen simultaneous conversations if he needs to, but Mindspeech is just incredibly useful in general. (He wasn't a strong Mindspeaker as a Herald; he's not sure but he thinks he might not have had any strong Gifts at all, not all Heralds do. He is LOVING his new capabilities.) Blai learning a few words of Valdemaran does seem generally useful but probably not a priority in the next candlemark unless he's really good at languages and can pick it up without too much repetition.

Brightstar is with Jisa and should probably not be transported anywhere. Based on Jisa's report, he's probably not going to cause any problems in the short run. 

He's never heard of excessive Gating causing a hurricane or tornado; this isn't the season for tornadoes anyway. Admittedly he's never encountered this many Gates being cast, but it might actually be less risky now that it's been several days and any weather systems ready to move in have already done so. 

Iftel has a representative in Haven whose staff are handling communications with Iftel proper, he thinks? This only came up in passing as part of the background Companion-gossip and he wasn't yet viewing it as something to actively gather information on, which he's irritated with himself about how. ...He does think the representative might be a high-ranking priest of Vkandis from Iftel's church, which is...possibly not great...

He has absolutely no idea if blocking Gates is possible! It doesn't seem like it should be possible but Leareth would be the one who knows. He'll bounce that question over, in case Leareth is less able to untangle it from all the other thoughts flashing by. 

Blink.

:Blocking a Gate search-spell is possible but very difficult. The shielding can only be placed on a building, not a region, and I am the only one in my organization who can do it. It is generally cheaper to just work out of shielded rooms that no one knows the location of to Gate to.: 

Blai speaks three languages, two of them just shy of mutual intelligibility (you can get all the way to "mutually intelligible" if both parties cooperatively choose formal archaic phrasings rather than allowing slang and Infernal loanwords and so on but that doesn't reflect how Chelish and Taldane are used in most situations). He's not amazing at it but Comprehend Languages will speed him up a lot if he prioritizes it which it sounds like he should not do very soon.

That Iftel envoy situation does sound possibly not great.

Sounds like that's a dead end on the preventing the invasion altogether, but maybe giving diplomacy a chance will work, the spell should have a range of nearly a week as cast by Blai so they might be looking at something that would have taken days to unfold yet.

Seldan is hopeful about giving diplomacy a chance! Preparing to invade takes time, especially if you need a lot of well-rested mages and everyone lined up to run through Gates as quickly as possible, and they must have only just found out that the operation against Leareth failed. 

(...He's slightly disappointed that it's only just occurring to him now that they could have tried to pretend Leareth hadn't made it out, there was enough general confusion and he Gated out fast enough once he was up that the Iftelis might not have known otherwise. Plausibly it would not actually have helped anything for Iftel to believe Leareth was dead, but it's the sort of thing he would at least have remembered to consider if he were really on his game.) 

Nayoki and Leareth look at each other and seem to probably be having a private Mindspeech conversation. 

Nayoki looks back at Seldan and Blai. :It sounds like there are some logistics to figure out before we send you to Waymeet, if you would like to get some rest in the meantime?: 

He could probably nap if they don't need him for anything or want to ask him any more questions right now.

Seldan is in favor of Blai grabbing a nap, you know, in case something horrible happens ten minutes after they reach Haven and prevents them from arranging the Nap Stack plan. Can they get a room with a mattress and straw in it again? 

They can get that setup, sure. 

Perfect! Seldan will arrange himself as a pillow and then he, too, will try to sleep as much as possible before they're interrupted again. 

Zzz.

Seldan will be the coziest of pillows. 

(Another thing he appreciates about his Herald: Blai has clearly mastered the art of "sleep when you have the chance" and is not at all inclined to lie awake fretting, even when the situation ahead is fairly nervewracking. That's a skill that takes teenagers quite a long time to learn.) 

...Seldan is also going to work on the skill of sleeping when he can rather than lying awake making lists in his head of all the ways Blai is great. Zzzzzzz. 

And Nayoki wakes them a candlemark and a bit later. 

They have signoff from the Heralds on sending Blai and Vanyel in with an entourage of two dozen mages. It's not enough people to hold off an army, but it should be more than sufficient to get Blai and Vanyel out of Haven in a hurry if that seems warranted, and they'll have people trading off on comms-spell duty be able to stay in constant direct contact with Leareth in the north. Nayoki herself is volunteering to accompany them as far as Waymeet and then stay there to mindread set-commanded gryphons, which will in fact be easier to do if Blai can heal them first. 

Word from Haven is that the Ifteli priest there had already arranged to return to Iftel early this morning, which might or might not have ominous implications for when Iftel decided to plan an offensive against Valdemar, but probably means they can be less worried about some kind of direct miraculous intervention. 

The Heralds do think it's valuable for Blai to be back in Haven, particularly for him to heal the King as soon as possible but also they had another night of a lot of people losing sleep and would be enormously better off if everyone were, instead, rested. Nayoki thinks it's moderately likely that they have additional requests of Blai (or Vanyel) that they didn't want to put on the Mindspeech relay. 

Seems like a reasonable degree of precautions. It would probably still be safer to avoid Haven until all the fallout is over, but given that Blai can probably help it be over sooner, Seldan thinks it's worth the risk. 

Blai is ready to go though he is starting to be unclear on who feels like they have how much authority to propose that he be in various locations and what the protocol should be if they can't come to a consensus about that.

Seldan thinks everyone else's model is that the Valdemar's leadership has the strongest grounds to ask Blai to be in places, since he is arguably a Herald now, and Leareth is approaching this from the angle of trying to work with the Heralds. (Maybe complicated by the fact that it's deeply unclear whether Vanyel is thinking about things in terms of reporting to the Valdemaran chain of command, versus just dropping everything to stop gods from assassinating Leareth and grabbing anyone within range who can help with that.) Seldan himself is - probably going to be inclined toward seeing the Heralds as having authority here, if he's not thinking about it carefully; he was a Herald before, Valdemar was the country he had sworn an oath to, and things are more complicated now but he hasn't had a lot of time to reason through what his current obligations are. 

...To be clear, he doesn't think Blai is in any sense obligated to take the Heralds' requests of him as anything other than suggestions; he's just noting that he hasn't, himself, entirely untangled 'loyalty to Valdemar specifically' in his instinctive prioritization. He does think that giving the Heralds more capacity to respond to things sanely over the next couple of days is a particularly valuable place to intervene. 

Someone needs to go wake Vanyel and transport him over here - he is as far as Nayoki is aware still catching some rest at the same base where Brightstar and Jisa are - and then they'll be ready to go. 

Did Blai accidentally join a chain of command without realizing it - oh okay. Blai doesn't mind cooperating with the Heraldic organization, he just would have needed to do more research before becoming part of it to make sure this wasn't going to contradict anything else he's already obliged to. What is the oath in question, is it still operative for Seldan or did its hold on him die when his previous incarnation did?

Vanyel's relationship with the chain of command does seem to be very much a loose, in-passing acquaintance. It's confusing.

Blai can go wake up Vanyel if there's no more obvious person to do it.

Nayoki had flagged that perhaps Vanyel is in a jumpy mood and should not be poked awake by a stranger, but Blai doesn't need to worry about it and can just wait here, Jisa is still over there and can Mindspeak him without leaving Brightstar. Also, to be clear, it sounds like the reason she doesn't want to leave Brightstar isn't that she's worried he will do something murderous if not continuously under guard, and is more that he's a person she cares about and is having a pretty bad time.