This makes her life unpleasant and makes her grateful for the good roads. She uses Endure Elements and is only a little miserable, with the misery still mostly outshone by the sheer joy of being in some limited sense free. 

(And it's not a very limited sense, right. She can't report Leareth but the compulsions she knows of don't actually prevent her from ditching the tracking items and going off to Rethwellan. She just - doesn't really want to, because she doesn't want to die forever when she gets old. Presumably Leareth reads her mind and knows this.)

By the end of the second day she is really unpleasantly chafed and astoundingly sore and has a bit of a hard time even climbing the rope into her Rope Trick. She sleeps well.

She keeps going.

The drizzle continues on and off, which at least means less traffic on the road.

And eventually she reaches Haven. There's an outer wall, stone and two head-heights high, and a gate, with a blue-uniformed Valdemaran Guard waving people through without paying them much attention. The sun is out, at least temporarily, and there are a lot of people coming in, some with vegetables or wares presumably bound for the market, others just on foot. There's one fancier-looking carriage just ahead of Carissa.

She waits for her Phantom Steed to run out before approaching the city on foot. It's not the kind of thing local magic can do. 

Then she casts Tongues and heads on through the gates.

Haven is...way way less nice than Cheliax in almost every way, actually. It feels crowded and dirty and it smells. The roads are paved, at least, the buildings in reasonably good repair. She seems to be in a merchant district; the road is lined with shops. People are shouting cheerfully to each other in the street.

She passes a Herald riding a white horse. He doesn't seem to notice her at all.

Leareth gave her some local money. She will try to find an inn with a nearby place to drink and talk to people.

She can eventually find a reasonably priced inn and a tavern next door, not the nicest establishment she's ever seen but it's seeing quite a lot of traffic. The rain looks ready to start up again and people out for the afternoon are seeking shelter and some of them are headed there.

Carissa is a scout for a merchant company from Ruval, she rides ahead and takes notes on the roads and on politics and what people are buying and selling and worrying about. She buys herself a drink and tries to get some conversations on this topic going.

She gets some interest, and then after a bit a woman - though it takes a moment to tell because she's dressed in men's clothing and is very tall and muscular - joins her across the table. "You're from out of town, huh?"

"Yep." Also she's reading all these peoples' minds.

"I'm Lissa." The woman is delighted to meet someone from far away, who sounds interesting. And she's very pretty. Lissa doesn't normally lean that way, really, but she's had a few drinks, and some part of her kind of wants to prove to her damned brother that not everyone is so uptight about it. Not that he's here tonight, he said he was "tired" or something. Oh well, that just means she won't have to keep an eye on him or worry about staying out too late.

Carissa is definitely not above sleeping with people on her spy mission but she's going to be strategic about who, probably, she wants to get close to the Heralds. That's not a consideration against flirting a little bit, though, and buying the woman a drink while she asks her about how Haven is doing and what trade goods are most expensive in Valdemar and which gods are worshipped here and what people think of the Queen.

Lissa will tell her what she knows about trade goods. She doesn't have much to say about gods, most of the Heralds go to the temple of Kernos and her family worships Astera (Lissa thinks with annoyance that her mother used to be quite enthusiastic about it and one of the few upsides of her not liking their new priest is that it cooled her down a bit.) They're overworking her brother, is how Haven is doing, she's only here for a couple of weeks and he's not taking leave for it; she rolls her eyes about this. The Queen's all right. Everyone calls her Elspeth the Peacemaker, she's well regarded - Lissa leans forward and admits to having met her, though she doesn't dwell on that line of conversation.

(Her thoughts steer away from what seems to be a painful memory, of torrential rain and thunder and sitting up in a room with a glass door to a garden, staring at a sleeping figure in a bed - and Queen Elspeth looking just like a normal person, talking like one too, being apologetic and mostly seeming tired and old...)

Ooooh, that's interesting and Carissa will order the girl some more drinks. She's heard about the Herald system, how does it work? It is true that people here don't think anything happens when they die, in Ruvan lots of people think you go somewhere nice and glory in the presence of the gods.

The way the Herald system works is they Choose nice kids and then overwork them. Lissa rolls her eyes again (and thinks about her brother, and the circles under his eyes, not that this is really because of his duties.) People talk a bit sometimes about going to the Havens when you die? But it's not like you can check, or - talk to dead people... (Her voice tightens on this sentence and then she trails off; she's thinking about her brother again, remembering him curled up sobbing, and then she shoves the memory aside.)

Lissa is at this point quite tipsy and this nice girl from Ruvan is very gorgeous and she kind of wants to not keep getting reminded of topics that make her sad and is also vaguely itching to pick a fight with some man who deserves it, but she's not socially graceful at the best of times and isn't sure how to turn this conversation into that.

She can do happier topics though she's not sure she can do - actually, she can probably find a man who deserves it, by reading their minds.

There are lots of men whose minds she can read, it's getting quite raucous in here, and this one is definitely thinking some not-very-nice thoughts about the young woman he's buying drinks for.

Then she'll frown conspiratorially at Lissa. "Mind if we move over to keep an eye on that guy, he's giving me a bad feeling."

Lissa looks startled and then nods. "Good idea, we'd better."

...In this case they'll be close by enough to spot the man putting some sort of extra something from a hip flask into the girl's drink while she's ducking out to use the privy.

Well, leaving your drink unattended is pretty much asking for that, and Carissa kind of thinks the girl has it coming, but instead she'll nudge Lissa so she doesn't miss it.

Lissa is pretty unimpressed too, but in her books that means a friendly conversation with the girl, who does look very young, and not everyone's mamas tell them what to be careful of. (Her mama didn't, Lady Treesa is airheaded as anything, it was the other women learning swordfighting at Lord Corey's manor who gave her those essential lessons.)

She gets up, not stumbling at all despite the number of drinks in her, and taps the man on the shoulder. "Hey. That wasn't very nice."

His eyes play over her face for a moment and note that she isn't exactly pretty, on top of being dressed like a man. "- What's it to you? You're not my ma. Bugger off."

"I'm not her ma either, but in a sense every nice girl out there's my sister, and you're not being nice to her."

The man seems to find this hard to follow. "Bugger off," he repeats. "Or I'll make you."

Lissa appears to consider this solemnly for a moment. "No," she decides.

- She waits until the man rises and tries to grab her arm before spinning, startlingly graceful given how tipsy she has to be, and catching him under the chin with her elbow.

It's not hard enough to knock him out or seriously injure him, but it does send him toppling back against the bar, grabbing at it for support. "You bitch -" He shakes his head for a moment and brings up his fists.