"Oh. Well, it's more aesthetic, at any rate."

"Thank you." Why does he care if she likes his name this is not important. 

They get to the temple. Leareth goes in and asks to see their library, and gives the librarian a passphrase, which gets him a more senior priest a few minutes later, to whom he gives several additional code phrases, and this earns him a very surprised look but also some correspondence, they've got a couple non-urgent letters that were waiting to be picked up by someone locally. Convenient, he'll get his mail faster too.

They are in code. "Where would be a good place to sit down and decipher these properly?" 

"We passed a park? I don't know what your privacy standards are here."

"I can do privacy with magic." He's mostly counting on the fact that nobody in the city knows who he is and that if something happens he can Gate them out in about five seconds. 

"You didn't seem to think so yesterday in the library." But she sets off parkward.

"It is much easier if people are not going to end up sitting five feet away. Also I hope this will be quick and I can show you the result in writing." Also he's feeling slightly less paranoid now that it's been overnight and there hasn't been a murder attempt on either of them. He surveys the park - if it's mostly empty that's fine, if it's very crowded he would rather find somewhere different. 

There is a nice empty bench to be had. She leaves six inches between them when she sits on it.

Leareth makes sure there's no one within ten feet, and puts up several different variants of privacy spell, which is probably overkill but whatever. He decodes one of the letters, writes it out in Rethwellani. It's short and not sensitive, good, he knows it's about the number of graduates of various mage-schools in Rethwellan this year, but to Belrun it won't be at all obvious what it's about, except that it clearly is a real letter that's about something. 

He shows her. 

She attempts to figure out how the code works so it's clear he's not just making something up on the spot.

Leareth considers explaining just enough that she can do the first few words herself, and then decides to sit back and see if she can get it on her own. She's clearly very smart and he will be impressed if she can. 

She can do this with sufficient margin notes.

All right, wow, that is very impressive and kind of terrifying, it's not one of the really secure codes because this is a very mundane message but still, she could probably get that too if you gave her weeks and the resources for it - and that's not even her field, she's a Healer who studies diseases by growing them in eggs, and, and–

Leareth is fairly sure that this is not just the lifebond talking and all of that is objectively impressive, especially in someone who is only in her early twenties, but he's not completely sure. Also all the shields in the world aren't going to stop him leaking some amount of 'wow!' through the lifebond to her. 

"Wait, were you having me do this part because you thought it'd be cool if I could extrapolate your cipher? I thought it was so I could be sure you were actually decoding letters held by the Temple of Astera and not just doing extemporaneous composition."

"I mean, I assumed you had a reason for wanting to do it other than showing off, and that is a sensible one, but that does not mean it is not additionally impressive." 

"Okay. Sorry. Generally kind of touchy."

"About people thinking that you are impressive? Or something more broad than that?" He should try to avoid upsetting her. This isn't something Leareth is normally optimizing for, and he may or may not be any good at it, but his emotions have decided to care way too much about whether she is upset. 

"About mind-control-based emotions and behaviors flying around in any direction."

"Fair enough. I am not exactly pleased about the fact that I keep having emotions I did not decide to have. ...Is that related to why you cannot do Healing-melds?" 

"Healing-melds and horse nightmares and not being willing to see a Mindhealer and yesterday being the worst day of my life, yep, all one package labeled in large letters 'stay out of my head'. I suppose it could be worse, you could be one of those people who thinks it's terribly romantic."

"I am not inclined to care which things are romantic or not, and even if I did I would not find lifebonds romantic." 

...Also they are going to have an enormous fight about this, possibly quite shortly in the future, and he really isn't looking forward to it, even though it adds zero new information to his model of the world that many people - probably most people - think a lot of what he's willing to do is terrible. 

Maybe the gods' entire plan, instead of killing her, was to lifebond him to someone who cares a lot about ethics so that he'll drop using any methods that involve mind control or whatever else turns out to upset her, and then he won't have enough layers of precautions for a plot against the gods and it won't work and if gods were the sorts of beings that could laugh about things they would probably be laughing at him right now. 

She finishes decoding the letter. "Okay. I think the letter is good enough I'll take a Gate to the cache, save some riding. I'm not good at it."

"Fair enough. That is fine with me." 

Leareth will head off in the direction of the nearest place where a Gate won't be extremely obvious and suspicious. It's going to be a little obvious, but Rethwellan, unlike Valdemar, is full of mages and is not specced with a system to detect non-state-sanctioned magic use. 

Follow follow. "I've never been through a Gate before."

"It can be a little disorienting - careful not to trip–" He starts to offer her his hand and then worries this is patronizing or something and now he is almost blushing again and why. 

She considers for a moment, sighs, and takes his arm in a businesslike manner and squeezes his hand in a less businesslike manner and then blushes furiously.