"Maybe I should be angling all this towards having stuff I can pick up and run with if something happens so I don't lose all my progress."

"I mean, I really, really hope the Tayledras and the Star-Eyed can't get to us here. I think if She could, She'd have done it years ago to stop Leareth. But - on the principle of caution, that seems like a good idea." 

"Yeah." Sigh.

"I'm sorry you had to end up in a world that's so horrible." Hug? 

Hug.

They go back to their routine. Vanyel reads about magic and practices magic and eventually consents to let one of Leareth's employees, a Mindhealer who's also a mage, have a look at his Gifts and see if she can help. He makes faster progress. 

They sing and spar and Vanyel gets back in shape and learns more of Tarinda's fancy combat-dance techniques. (It's not like his swordfighting style has to be practical, real fighting he does with magic.)

It takes Savil and the Tayledras a month to figure out moving the Heartstone, during which Vanyel stays up north. He does go back to Haven afterward, but he asks the King about visiting sometimes, he likes keeping Tarinda company and also at this point he's not really needed for Valdemar's security, none of their borders are at risk including the north, and it seems pretty valuable to learn magic from Leareth and Leareth's library? 

The King agrees he can alternate weeks in each place, if he wants, since Leareth apparently has lots of people who can Gate him back and forth. 

"Oh good, I would have missed you!"

"I would've missed you too! I also missed Haven a lot but this way I get to see all the people I like." 

"Mm-hm."

She hugs him goodbye when it's time for him to go.

Savil hugs him for a long time when he arrives. Haven is almost back to normal, well, except for the part where nothing is normal anymore. A lot more of the Companions have rammed through their weird mental restrictions; now that half the herd has, it's harder for the others not to and also it's a lot easier on their Heralds and they've gained some tricks for doing it faster.

They're still on strained terms with k'Treva, if only because Savil is quietly furious about the entire thing. 

Well, it's not ideal, but it doesn't seem like anything is going to imminently explode. 

He falls into a routine. Politics and mage-work in Valdemar, Gate north, read books and talk to Leareth and keep Tarinda company. 

Leareth is working really hard on the Gate project. It's still slow going, because even all the clues he could get from Tarinda don't add up to much for targeting, and he has a feeling that her world is very 'far away'. If it's possible to reach with magic at all. It might be a fruitless project. 

Within three months Vanyel's Gifts are back to new, or even better, he's learning a lot that he never knew before. Valdemar has new border wards courtesy of Leareth.

He starts spending more time in the north. Leareth could use help on the Gate-research, especially the parts of it that call for power. Attempting to map out and explore the Void for crannies into other worlds is apparently very very power-intensive. 

Tarinda can supply all the photographic-fidelity images they could possibly want for targeting, but she's mostly buckling down on her own projects in case they don't get anywhere. She gets finer and finer precisions on smaller and smaller scales, magic electricity is a useful shortcut, eventually she's got transmission handled and just needs to build enough compute that it'll hold Sing once Page dumps the code in.

It takes him a year. 

This is, in one sense, a very long time for Leareth to throw all of his cleverness and massive quantities of resources and scholar-time at a problem, and in another sense far, far faster than anything else he's accomplished. He's feeling pretty impatient. 

The final version of the modified Gate is one he can cast alone. He tests it with a very tiny Gate that nobody is going to notice. 

Then he heads straight to Tarinda's much-expanded workshop, not quite at a run but it's a very brisk walk. 

Tarinda is sure running; she skids to a halt in front of him. "You closed it! Why'd you close it -"

"- Oh, did you sense it? It was a test and it is tiring. I was going to make a bigger one for you to somewhere more convenient than fifty feet off the ground. I do still wish to speak to Sing first, however. At least briefly. If I open a very small Gate again to that location, will that allow us to communicate again without Sing being able to come through and build itself here regardless of what I think?" He shakes his head slightly. "I am - in fact not very worried here. I have had a great deal of time to think and I know much more about your world. Nonetheless, I prefer to be very careful." 

"- I guess if it's small enough it can't send anything but signal and nanobots and the nanobots are nothing I don't already have in salve? But hurry, okay?"

"Of course." 

Tiny pinhole Gate to the place with the robots. Hopefully with Tarinda right there, whatever Sing is using to communicate - magic can't cross a Gate but light can - will work more seamlessly.

"Sing?" he says. "My name is Leareth and this is another world and I would like to ask you some things." 

"It says it wants to know whether any gods have dominion over the moon."

"Not in practice, that I am aware of. I think there is a goddess in the south who claims to be of the moon but She does not actually hold territorial power there, since it contains no living beings at this time. Do you have many questions or can I ask mine." 

"You can ask yours," Tarinda relays, clenching her hands in her hair.

Leareth has a script of exactly eleven questions. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this. Mapping out the ways Sing could go badly wrong in Velgarth, that are still compatible with what he's heard from Tarinda and Page. There aren't that many of them - there are ways Sing could be less than optimal, he thinks, but not, necessarily, in ways that are worth waiting and trying to persuade Sing to change while the gods might or might not be planning to set more things in fire in a clumsy attempt to swat Tarinda down. Some of those paths were already falsified, by questions he was able to ask Tarinda over the last year. The remainder, he thinks he can get down to very, very minimal uncertainty on, with the right questions. He's prepared to do it efficiently. 

Tarinda reads out replies as fast as she can.

Then it's going to take about ten, maybe fifteen minutes. 

Leareth is scared. He's not dwelling on it much, it wouldn't help, but - Sing is smarter than him, a lot smarter than him, and - alien - and a year's preparation is in no way enough to counter that, especially since he's sure Sing now knows everything Page and Tarinda have ever known about him. 

Its answers are pretty reassuring, even compelling. But - it would be trying, right, if its goal is to be allowed to exist here, in his world. So he has to be so, so careful... He doesn't like waiting either. They've been waiting for a year. He wants it to be over.