He moves as quickly as he dares, trying to stay ahead of the searching party - he can silence the noise that running makes but that takes magic and if he's in a hurry and the searchers are good then it'll be detectable in itself... 

They're moving in tight groups of three.  They're faster than him but they're spiraling out across the whole area, and where they're moving in force it's toward the cave entrance. 

He can stay oriented to where they are with mage-sight and head away from the cave entrance rather than toward, this is probably worth it even if it takes him longer to get to the river. 

- he can't sense him but that's not surprising, he'd be shielded. He feels simultaneously proud and frustrated. He looks out at the landscape, trying to guess where Leareth might be, where he might be headed - 

Telumë is hugging the bottom of a narrow gulley with a stream in it, which is going to at some point lead him to the river proper, at which point he can slip underwater and swim away. 

He wanted the notes, he wouldn't have gone too far away - but he wouldn't've stayed in close, either, they can skip searching the areas nearest the camp - 

- is this the first supply cache Leareth has reached, that's really the crucial question, because if it is then they've got him - maybe not here, maybe not now, but he can't make his way to his old organization without accessing one of them - but he was competent enough with the compulsions and it's been long enough that he suspects it wasn't - 

- how would you get out of here, if you could barely use magic - 

- he moves the forces over towards the river.

...Someone is thinking cleverly. Telumë senses them switching direction, tries to gauge whether he'll make it to the river before they cross his gulley at his current pace - his illusion isn't detectable at more than a few yards' distance but it might be possible to sense up close, he's not perfect yet. If they are going to then he'll go for speed over stealth and just try to make it to the river at all and if it looks like that's going to fail he'll - figure something out...

He'll make it to the river ahead of them, he was a mile away and they're not yet that far out -

Then he can stick to stealth and creep forward at a pace where he's making less noise than the stream in the gulley already is, and when he reaches the water he'll ease himself into it as silently as he can. 

They arrive a few minutes later. Search the area.

The moving water makes it harder to maintain his own illusion too, keeping it up for more than a few minutes is going to drain his reserves, but it also makes any residual magic nigh-undetectable at range. Telumë floats downstream on his back, invisibly, and watches the shore. 

The mages search the coastline. One of them casts some kind of spell upriver of him, maybe a net - it lets water through, whatever else it's doing. Some of them peel off to search through the forest. 

Telumë is getting pretty tired, his current body isn't the best swimmer in the world and he keeps getting smacked in the face with waves when he's trying to breathe. Also he's cold. He doesn't have a lot of options other than floating away and keeping an eye out. 

It takes them a while but eventually they peel off the shore and head back in, checking whether they missed him in the forest nearer the mage's camp.

He doesn't think they missed him hiding in the forest. And he doesn't think they missed a Gate, unless Leareth knows how to do an undetectable one and remembered it and never mentioned it. But they can't really maintain a military-looking presence in this country for that long without inviting all kinds of problems - damn it - (he's so clever -)

Telumë is shivering uncontrollably by now and getting close to the point where it's going to be a choice between heading for shore and risking actually drowning. Which would be the stupidest way to die again. His illusion is flickering in and out a bit and he's not sure if anyone is nearby enough to spot that.

...He ducks underwater, so at least they won't see him if he loses it entirely, and then tries to scry again using his artifact, fortunately still in his water-sodden pocket. This sucks, all the notes he had with him are soaked now, the preservation-spells on the paper might mean they're salvageable but he's not sure. He aims for back near the camp itself, around the spot where the reinforcements Gated in, but keeps his mental 'eye' well off the ground to get a good bird's-eye view of the surroundings. 

A tall Quendi, red-haired, staring out over the river valley, speaking quietly with a few people nearby without taking his eyes off the river. A dozen mages and a hundred more people who aren't mages, stamping through shrubbery. Most of them look frustrated; the Quendi is hard to read, but one might go with 'wistful'.

Telumë remembers that Quendi. 

- stars, beautiful through alien eyes, strong arms around him - 

Half a dozen other memory-fragments bombard him, and now he can't see anymore because he's crying – this is very irritating and not helpful at all, maybe it's a thing that happens to fifteen-year-olds.

He floats for a while longer and then reinforces the illusion and swims diagonally toward the opposite shore. 

They don't find him. 

Then he will burrow into a bush, still shivering, and cast some wards that don't require concentration to maintain, and a tiny heat-spell with his body wrapped around it (weather-barriers are more efficient but he hasn't properly re-learned that spell), and cry until eventually he falls asleep. 

It's been two months. 

It's been two months and they haven't heard anything at all, from Vanyel or from Leareth's organization or from Leareth himself. They're still in Valinor, staying with Nerdanel. Fëanáro's wife. Maitimo's mother. Not having any news for her keeps bothering Jisa even though it's not the most critical piece of any of this.

Vanyel is still alive. At least they know that much. And at least she has Treven with her. 

"Jisa, dear?"

Jisa twitches. "Yes?" 

"It's Fëanáro. He thinks he figured out how to direct the Silmarils to do - what you were planning." She sounds like she's putting some effort into not sounding faintly disapproving.

Jisa carefully does not cheer, or gleefully jump up and down, or do any of a number of visible expressions of triumph that she's certain Nerdanel would disapprove of. "That's good news," she says solemnly. "...I'm sorry, I know you wish we had better options than this. But - I'm not going to die, I'll be fine. It won't even be horrible like it was for my father." She's long-since given up keeping that secret about her parentage, since apparently Vanyel told Fëanáro for some reason and doomed it ever remaining a secret, and it's not like it matters anymore anyway, her other parents are dead. "Stef can painblock and if nothing else works we can go to Lórien. It's going to be all right."