Lissa's the one doing most of the talking. She at least notices that Thellim is up and moving, and glances sideways at her, but doesn't interrupt. 

The sugar seems very slightly gritty, and the cream is visibly starting to separate a little in the milk, but the combination tastes acceptable. 

It can taste like whatever so long as it contains calories.  Thellim broadens her mindspeech to include Lissa and Yfandes.  :Sorry for the delay.  Roughly - we made a scientific discovery I'll try to explain later, and Melody has an interim treatment plan that she hopes will be more effective than what the last Mindhealer did but we can't make promises.  Melody is walking around to clear her mind, and would like Vanyel to drink something first.  I'm not quite sure what 'tea' does but water, milk, and/or sugar all sound like good ideas to me.  I could repeat this to Vanyel directly, but thought I'd give you a chance in case there's - some more known thing that you say to Vanyel when you want him to drink some water and sugary milk.:

:Good! I'm so glad you have a plan: Lissa rolls her eyes. :And I wish I had a better strategy there than relentless nagging - I'll ask him, though: 

Yfandes reaches out to just Thellim, almost diffidently. 

:Could you - I don't want to delay things - but is there any way you could move somewhere I can be closer to him? It's just...really hard, waiting out here when he's this miserable. And I think he'll find it easier having his mind poked at if I'm there. ...Er, just to warn you, he really hates having Mindhealing done to him: 

(Lissa only)  :Lissa, we need to all move somewhere warm and comfortable that Vanyel can be in physical contact with Yfandes, which is, of course, quite important under circumstances such as these.  Let us all remember this fact the next time we are dealing with Companion-havers in great distress, because neither THEY nor their COMPANIONS will simply TELL US RIGHT AWAY.:

(Yfandes only, much more gently)  :Do you know anything about why Vanyel hates Mindhealing?  Is it - physically painful for him, or - do you know why?:

:Oh, gods, yes, of course - not the stables, we should have somewhere private - I think I can kick people out of a storeroom or something...: 

A pause, somehow giving the impression of a frown. 

:- I think a lot of it is that he finds it embarrassing, honestly - he gets very self-conscious about feeling like there's something horribly wrong with him and he needs all this extra help: 

Yfandes is VERY DISAPPROVING of this and thinks Vanyel should have all the help all the time.

:Other than that... I mean, he doesn't like thinking about it or being reminded of it, right, it's - well, it hurts all the time but it's more in his awareness if he has to actually interact with it. And...hmm. There could be some negative associations from early on, at least with his previous Mindhealer? He - didn't really want to get better, at first, and I think he felt pretty coerced into getting Mindhealing help at all, however badly he needed it. He did it anyway - because he knew how badly Valdemar needed him - but I think it rankled: 

A mental snort. :- And here I am, arm-twisting him into it again. He'll go along with it, at this point, but I'm pretty sure if it'd been up to him he would be moping by himself in a corner somewhere. He...spends a lot of time just wishing the world could leave him alone, you know: 

:Do you know what the previous Mindhealer did?:

:To some extent, sure. He did some blocks at first - basically putting a wall or fence up around a particular traumatic memory or association - but later on he decided that wasn't going to help in the long run and he stopped. He did huge numbers of what he called redirects - smaller patterns, basically trying to disrupt a particular unhelpful thought-pattern by nudging it to finish with something else - particular for negative thoughts Vanyel tends to have about himself which are obviously not true. Other than that, they...just talked a lot? I suppose Lancir did a lot of nagging him too, on things like eating and sleeping enough, or not being INCREDIBLY RECKLESS and trying to personally fight twenty bandits at once -: 

:That's - honestly around my worst-case scenario for what I was afraid Mindhealers would try to do if they didn't understand what they were looking at.  We really can't make promises but I definitely hope that Melody can do substantially better than that.:  If she's not just overestimating a new friend, Thellim somewhat suspects Melody might have done better than that even without Thellim showing up.  :Did Vanyel get - the best Mindhealer anybody could find regardless of price, or did he walk into a teenager's pop-up Mindhealer stand and get the fifteen-minute special?:

:Lancir was the Queen's Own Herald - er, basically the Queen's second-in-command, responsible for all the Heralds. He was the only Mindhealer in Haven, though. What with only having - hmm, four, five of them in the whole country - the ones with the Healers' Collegium mostly travel around on circuits to cover more area and population. Van needed someone he could see regularly, every week, and it helped that Lance had context on all of his work, and full authority to give him less of it when he judged necessary, but...well, I'm sure the man would have been more skilled at the purely technical Mindhealing-Gift aspect if it were his day job and not just one of a hundred responsibilities: 

Oof.  :I'm sorry for thinking ill of him.:  How does an entire economic region manage to be so overstretched?  Even if the whole place is the size of a medium town, shouldn't fewer people generate fewer problems for the fewer people to handle?  Lower GDP per capita, she supposes; probably half the population have to be farmers if the whole is going to eat.

:He would understand. He - would be glad you're here to criticize him, I think - all he ever wanted was to find a way to help Van with this...: 

And then Melody gets back, and Lissa grabs a wool blanket and then steers all of them off, through thirty seconds of miserable grey drizzle, to the back room behind a barn. The floor is piled with crates and sacks but it has a hayloft. 

She guides Vanyel into sitting down on a crate, then looks around and gestures questioningly at Thellim, then starts dragging crates aside to clear some floorspace for Yfandes. 

Melody, recruited to help as well, suggests with reasonable cheer that Thellim could maybe clamber up the pile of crates and toss down some hay so Yfandes will be cozier on the floor? 

Thellim is happy to have a straightforward problem that can be solved with just her BRUTE STRENGTH.

While she's working to toss down hay, Thellim tightbeams Melody a summary of Yfandes's report; Melody should check with Yfandes if she wants a fuller or more original report.

Previous Mindhealer Lancir tried to use 'blocks' to steer Vanyel away from the traumatic thoughts and memories, gave up after deciding it wouldn't help in the long run.  Lancir later added 'redirects' against some negative statements-about-self (which somewhat resembles cognitive-behavioral-therapy but they can go into that later).  Lancir tried to argue Vanyel into taking better care of himself, but wasn't a professional therapist and was trying to take care of Vanyel in between trying to run half the Valdemarian faction.  Thellim's secondhand take is that Lancir tried to use a treatment plan on Vanyel as if he'd been through a horrific fire with painful burns and had lost his family in a way that he blamed on himself; which doesn't completely fail to map onto Vanyel's problems, but doesn't get to grips with the enormous black hole anomaly in Vanyel's brain.  Thellim is not claiming she could have done any better given Lancir's knowledge base and workload, and Yfandes thought Lancir cared and did what he could.

Vanyel didn't like that style of Mindhealing.  Yfandes reports Vanyel feeling coerced into Mindhealing, ashamed of needing Mindhealing, and wishing like the world would just leave him alone for a while.  Thellim doesn't blame him, but thinks her people's ethicists would not say they have to listen to Vanyel's inner wish to be left alone, if Vanyel's outer self gives verbal permission and they have a new and hopefully better treatment to try.  Thellim feels mildly queasy about Yfandes having told her some of this, but will just pretend that she is a doctor herself and following a doctor's code with respect to it - just be the confidentiality-bound medical personnel that Yfandes is treating her as; though it's supposed to be a bigger deal than something you just decide to do one day.

Melody listens calmly, seeming a lot less frazzled than before her break.

:- Understandable. It...must have ben hard for him, having his Mindhealer be the same as the person responsible for - well, assessing his performance as a Herald, sending him on dangerous missions, all of that: A small internal sigh. :I do hope I can manage it better: 

And she turns to Vanyel. 

:Herald Vanyel. I'm sorry for taking so long to get my bearings; I'm ready to try some things now. I'd like to talk through my plan with you first, though, if you're ready?: 

Vanyel shuffles closer against Yfandes' flank. :I'm ready: 

:To start - I can see you've had a lot of detailed Mindhealing work done. By Queen's Own Lancir, I'm guessing. My sense is that he did a lot to help you, hmm, route around the broken lifebond, and function better - but he couldn't actually address the damage?: 

:No. It's...not fixable: 

:- He may have been right about that. But...maybe not. Thellim's insights from her world's scholarship on brains have been very helpful for seeing more of the underlying problem, here. It's... Hmm. It's not just emotional damage, if that makes sense? You could sort of imagine it as something like a head injury - it's not exactly that, either, but there's something broken in the very basic substrate of how your mind thinks, and that's not something people get from traumatic experiences or painful memories alone. I think it's affecting you especially hard right now because you're under so much stress - ideally you'd get a break from that too, to rest and find your balance again, but I don't control the war schedule: 

She tugs her sleeves straight, adjusts her position on the crate, and blinks owlishly at Vanyel. :I don't think I can safely repair the damage at the level where it happened, just yet - I need to do more research on it - but it's possible I can later. And I'm quite confident I can mitigate it some, here and now, a lot more effectively than blocks or redirects did, and without much downside risk. It won't feel like previous Mindhealing work you've had; I'm not sure what it will feel like. And of course I haven't done this before. Are you willing to let me have a go anyway?: 

Vanyel seems to be only half following this; his body language is exhausted, closed in on himself. 

:If you think it'll help me - keep going - then yes, of course: His mindvoice is flat, more resigned than hopeful. 

:Yes. I think so. And I think it'll help set some groundwork for doing more later: Melody glances at Thellim. :I probably won't need to ask you as many questions as I usually would for more standard Mindhealing - what I'm doing will be at a smaller scale than what you're introspectively aware of, I think. I do intend to check in often, and I want you to tell me right away if something feels wrong or bad, all right?: