Savil's eyes play over her - clearly checking with mage-sight, finding something, hesitating, pausing, moving on, deciding she's satisfied. 

"Let's go," she says, a little impatiently. 

It takes her a lot longer than it does for Leareth, or even his auxiliary staff, but a glowing doorway appears on the door of the building, and then flashes white to show a soggy field, and Savil glances back at Carissa before crossing. 

Carissa follows.

The Herald-Mage who interrogated her before is waiting on the other side of the Gate, stern and tense, with his Companion beside him. "Carissa," he says. "Since our previous introduction was a bit rushed, let's do it properly. I'm Queen's Own Herald Lancir." 

Another Herald is standing nearby, arms folded, watching. Lancir does not introduce him. 

She tries to look not very dangerous but also important enough it'd be a bad plan to execute her for espionage. It's a tricky balance to strike even though she's pretty sure it's true. She nods to them.

They don't seem hostile, exactly. Mostly just off-balance. 

"Well, follow me," Lancir says finally, and starts walking toward a building. 

Savil pats her Companion's neck and follows, falling into step next to Carissa. 

"Van wants to talk to you," she says, conversationally. "After this. Not sure what about. He may just - want to know more what Leareth's like, it sounds like they've been, er, trying to figure each other out for a while." 

"Yeah. I'd be - happy to talk to him."

"Thank you." 

Lancir leads them into one of the stone buildings, not the same one that she visited earlier, and then to a meeting-room. 

A tall, thin man is waiting for them there, and stands up when they come in. 

"This is Herald Jaysen, he's Seneschal's Herald to Queen Elspeth." 

"Pleased to meet you," Jaysen says stiffly, not sounding particularly pleased. "Well, have a seat. Lance, is Keiran coming?" 

"She's sitting this one out but she might come by later." Lancir pulls out a chair for Carissa, and another for Savil, before taking his own seat. 

"I, uh, have three hours of my translation spell a day," Carissa volunteers, sitting down. "We can do Mindspeech after that or I have magic that gives you my language."

"- Good to know. Thank you." Lancir glances at Savil, then looks back to Carissa. "...Er, the first thing I wanted to ask is - are you all right? We...were worried Leareth might've, well, mistreated you, or that you would've been punished for being caught." 

"He doesn't do that! I agree it's very weird of him. One time I pretended to have escaped and inconvenienced the whole facility for an hour and he didn't even take my magic items away."

This gets her a baffled stare from all of them. 

"- Er, why did you pretend to escape?" 

"I was pretty sure I was still too valuable for him to kill me and so it seemed worth risking whatever else he might do to get a sense of - what would change if I tried... and I would've escaped for real, if it'd turned out his security was inadequate, just, I wanted the first step to be something I could back down from, if his security turned out to be really good."

"And did they? ...I'm guessing so, since it sounds like you didn't escape for real." 

"And also he's a terrifyingly powerful immortal dark mage." 

"Yes. He noticed right away. He had a lot of different ways to find me and I didn't have a way around all of them. So I just - snuck over to the pool and went swimming, and he took it as a sort of practical joke, and everyone else took it as a sort of practical joke, and I wasn't punished, but he'd made his point about whether I could pull it off for real."

"Huh, he has a swimming pool? I - confess that wasn't something I imagined going with 'immortal mage's secret lair in the far north.'" 

"I asked for it when I first got there, as a way to check how many resources he was inclined to expend on impressing me. They built it the next day."

"- Goodness. That's...either very dedicated to impressing you, or his resources are even scarier than we'd realized."