"I am." He seems kind of glum about it.

"Not your dream gig?"

Shrug. He doesn't seem to be in a very talkative mood.

Oh well. She'll chat with Liss and try to read his mind.

As with Leareth, it seems that she can't get past his shields to read him.

He occasionally participates in the conversation, mostly when elbowed by his sister, and the rest of the time stares into space a lot and looks vaguely sad and despairing.

(Lissa's mind is still totally readable and she is WORRIED about her brother and doesn't seem surprised at all by his moodiness and keeps trying to refill his drink-glass even when he makes faces at her.)

Fortunately Lissa is pretty capable at holding up her end of a conversation and she also seems to have some practice at coaxing her maybe-shy brother to talk once in a while.

Vanyel can be convinced to talk about weather-magic a bit, tonelessly, not quite making eye contact.

Carissa feels fairly free to make up random things about how government works in Ruvan in order to elicit commentary on Valdemar. Ruvan ends up coming out a bit Chelish, of course. In Ruvan everyone in House Thrune can inherit but there's a lot of intrigue around who does, the current Queen's uncle died in a suspicious accident when she was seventeen. In Ruvan there's only one religion allowed for primary worship though some groups are permitted to secondarily worship other gods.

Lissa grimaces a bit about this and says it sounds like the nobles aren't very into following laws, unless assassinating your relatives is legal for some reason - she supposes they might not have Truth Spell to check, since that's a Herald thing and also pretty new, do they?

There's truth magic but she doesn't know how it's done locally, probably not the same way, since in Ruvan it's done by priests through the gods.

Lissa shrugs and doesn't seem that curious about it.

Vanyel, however, does perk up at this point to say he read a book about the Eastern Empire once and it sounds sort of similar, except he thinks you're not allowed to worship any gods there, just the emperor's ancestors.

Lissa rolls her eyes and smacks him lightly on the shoulder. "Van's constantly reading weird obscure books."

Huh! Are the emperor's ancestors, uh, around doing things, such that worshipping them is useful, or is it more that you have to substitute something to get people to cut it out with the gods.

Vanyel shrugs. To be honest he hasn't heard of the gods doing much overtly either, he's not sure it would make a difference. Except for -

(At this point he trails off and goes quiet and looks very upset.)

Lissa looks more worried, and hugs him, and goes off to buy them more drinks.

"If you don't like being a Herald are you allowed to - take a leave of absence, you know. See the world. Train in magic in some other country, that's a good way to get better at it..."

Vanyel gives her a baffled blank look. "I dunno why I'd want to do that."

"Liss makes it sound like your job sucks."

Vanyel turns and makes a face at Lissa. "No, it's - all right. I mean, it's really important. To the Kingdom. And - some of it's interesting."

"Also he's extremely good at it but he's also too modest."

Vanyel blushes and looks down at the floor, and then something seems to remind him of an upsetting thing again, and he shrinks into himself a little, his eyes resolutely fixed at just below the table-edge.

Well, she can change the topic. She wants to learn about Vanyel for Leareth but it's impressive Leareth gets him to talk at all.

Lissa (who of course has no idea why this is especially important to Carissa) joins the team of 'get Vanyel to talk, ever', and they can bounce around between topics for the next candlemark.

"I should go soon," Vanyel says finally. "I have Mindspeech relay tomorrow." He sounds like he's trying to sound apologetic but in fact is mostly relieved.