"It's certainly been eventful in between the backdrop of disease-riddled tedium."

"I will honestly be so glad to go home again. I am still somewhat on edge, here, and it did not help being miserably ill and still trying to be vigilant for gods setting things on fire." 

"So you're saying that if we have to move the capital we should not move it here."

"I mean, if we were to move the capital here, it would presumably have more than half a dozen guards all of whom also have the flu. Nonetheless I - will probably have some poor associations with this place, after all of this. And if we move the capital it should be to somewhere prettier and on more trade routes, not deliberately chosen to be remote and hard to reach." 

"Yes. And maybe farther north for easier Gates to your sites."

"It would be slightly odd to have a capital at the far northern edge of the country, but I suppose coastal kingdoms often have their capital at a port, and - hmm, Valdemar should probably just annex the territory between the northern border and the mountains, it has no state-level leadership and so is mostly just full of bandits."

"How can it be mostly bandits? They'd have such a commute to do their banditry if there isn't a population of not-bandits."

He chuckles. "'Mostly' is perhaps an exaggeration. Unusually high per capita and the few warlords who have the local control to stop them are mostly equivalent to bandits who happen to own houses." 

"I guess that sounds worth annexing if we have the slack to button it up."

"I think between my people's help, and the Heralds no longer needing to worry about either a future war with me or the situation with Karse–" He breaks off. "Unless Vkandis decides He is not fond of this plan. It would be just like Him to nudge off another war about it, and I will be so annoyed if that happens." 

"They're getting less subtle, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if Karse and Iftel joined up and attacked."

"I have also been anticipating that." He gestures at the pile of notes on his bedside table. "I have been trying to draw up some contingency-plans for a response to it, if it happens. I think that with our strength combined we could hold it off, but - it depends very much on what Iftel has and nobody knows anything about them, it is so frustrating." 

"Yeah, even having trained myself to remember it the fact that nobody else does makes it hard to collect good intel."

"It is honestly absurd that I was never able to get spies into Iftel. - Or, well, I was, but they were never allowed near anything important and always had very boring reports about their countryside vineyards and such." 

"Did they write things down or did they try to report from, uh, memory?"

"Writing things down when one is a spy is often fraught; Iftel specifically searches everyone's possessions at the border, very thoroughly, so any notes they took needed to be well-disguised as something else, which often made them cryptic after the fact." 

"Wow. So I think we can conclude they have something in there and it seems all things considered unlikely that it's a giant basket of candy."

"Given - recent news, I think it is a higher priority to learn more, and worth considering new strategies." 

"I'm good at obfuscated notetaking but should definitely not go myself."

"You should definitely not! You would be a very good candidate in other ways, though; you are also unusually good at noticing your own thoughts and training yourself to evade the force that makes Iftel uninteresting and forgettable. I wonder if you could teach someone else the skill." 

"I could try but I'm looking at a rather intimidating to-do list and have never managed this task before."

"Can you think of anyone else who seems as though they already have some of it?" 

"I'm not particularly talented at figuring out based on people's observable behavior whether they think a lot like me. Or possibly I am and nobody thinks a lot like me, I guess."

"Fair enough." Sigh. "I will add it to my own list of things to plan for. We really do need more of us." 

"It'd be very handy." Improper kiss. "I'll check you for flu again tomorrow. Love you."