"That makes sense. We probably want to tell him as little as possible, right? If he is with his organization he'll know anyway - if he's telling the truth, his organization is cooperating with the Tayledras, so he would find out things we told Vanyel when we manage to get in touch." 

"Right." Jisa nods along, but seems distracted. 

"Sounds like our next step is for Jisa to figure out communications with other people in Velgarth."

"I'll do that! I suspect I need to understand the basic communication spell better in order to try to get our artifact to pair with either of the ones in k'Treva that Vanyel made. I have all his notes, though." She frowns. "Leareth gave us permission to read his notes. I - hadn't bothered - because I figured most of them weren't about magic, but...probably a bunch of them are about Sauron, actually, which might be actually relevant now."

She makes a face. It really does not sound like enjoyable reading. "Also I'm not sure what language he'd be writing in, or if he might've done them in code, but Trev speaks about six languages and Stef knows a lot of codebreaking tricks." 

I was training to be a spy at one point, Stef explains in private osanwë. It sort of stopped being relevant once - Vanyel... Could be useful again now. I know how to use Bardic Gift in some pretty unusual ways, and...maybe the Enemy wouldn't be expecting that. Katha was the only one who knew details and she got out safely. 

Seems worth taking a shot at, at least. 

"All right. So next step is I try to learn the communication spell from Van's notes and then aim at Starwind or Moondance or Vanyel, I don't know which of them has the artifacts at this point. It might take me a bit, learning magic just from written instructions is hard and Vanyel wasn't intending his notes to be a textbook." 

:You've got me: Yfandes reminds them; she isn't inside with them, due to being horse-sized and not fitting, but she's made a habit of riding along with Jisa - it doesn't really matter at this point that it's unheard-of for a Companion to do that with anyone but their Herald. :I can send you my sense-impressions of Vanyel casting the unaided spell and working on the artifacts: 

"Right. That'll help." 

"It sounds like the situation in Velgarth doesn't require immediate intervention, anyway, if Leareth's telling the truth."

"That seems right. It's not good but it's not imminently getting worse either." 

"Yeah. So - let's get at Leareth's notes, have Jisa work on communications - have the mathematicians work off the notes Leareth's people sent over -

- and ask some other people if they think getting Nelyafinwë out seems worthwhile."

Treven squares his shoulders. "All right." 

"Great. Stef, Jisa, if you can stay a moment longer and talk about codes with me maybe we can figure out who can help you with the notes."

"Of course." And the two of them hang back. 

It would be really nice right about now if she was good enough to do a privacy-barrier, but she isn't, and Maitimo was the only Quendi with a shield-talisman that had one built in. 

What did you want to say?

Deep breath. There is not really going to be a way of phrasing this that will make it go over better so he might as well just say it and get it over with. Maitimo and Leareth were, er, in a relationship. Starting about a month before the attack on Haven. I wouldn't have said anything, but - it's relevant, right? To why Leareth might especially want to get him out alive. 

Huh. You mean that they were having sex? Whose idea was that?

I mean, I assume both of their idea? Stef is definitely not going to say anything about the part where it was sort of his and Jisa's idea. I don't know. Leareth confided in Vanyel about it and Vanyel told me, obviously.

Huh. Are you sure it started after the war?

The original war with Melkor, you mean? Um, yes, pretty sure. 

:Melody would have known otherwise: Jisa adds. :I think it took Leareth a pretty long time to - be the sort of person who could even be close to other people that way? He was really self-reliant before the war. And then I think Maitimo would've waited, even if he was interested, until Leareth was, er, less horribly traumatized: 

So probably Leareth has poor judgment about how much it matters that Maitimo has been enslaved by our enemy.

I don't know that I'd expect that? I think he knows exactly how bad this is. He might not be unbiased when it comes to reasoning about the odds that we even can get him out alive, versus killing him. But he'd understand if we had to kill him. He'd be upset, but he's - not the sort of person who'd let that drive him, right?