Leareth was hoping they would let him sleep long enough to overlap with Vanyel's sleeping hours - which are often very late, Herald Vanyel's long working hours are notorious enough that Leareth's spies in Haven actually hear about it - but it seems like that isn't going to happen. 

He's not sure exactly how long they let him sleep, but it feels like about fifteen minutes later that someone is waking him. He has a throbbing headache and feels incredibly dehydrated. 

She's given the First Arcane Comprehend Languages and herself Tongues, since she's the one who can give him orders. "You can drink." They ventured out and found a well; probably the locals aren't at the point of poisoning their own wells and if they are, all that'll be lost is the prisoner. "And you can speak," since the geas has a one-hour time horizon and that will have expired.

He looks dubiously at the water they've brought him. It's probably fine, but war, with all its dead bodies, is not exactly good for sanitation - if they got it from anywhere close to a river that at some point has dead bodies in it...

"May I use magic to sterilize it first." 

"I don't know enough about how your magic works to safely let you do that."

Well, hopefully he's not going to die of dysentery now. ...They do have healing magic, he remembers, and probably letting that happen would at least look embarrassing to their superiors. He drinks the water, and waits for further instruction.

"You are blocking mindreading, even in your sleep. I want you to take down your shields so we can read you for confirmation of what you told me yesterday. Confirmation you're serious about the Worldwound will be helpful for arranging transit there."

"Of course." 

How thoroughly does the compulsion actually force him to do that? 

It doesn't seem to; it seems to be entirely blocking actions, and not obliging any.

He lowers his shields in the way he would for close concert-work with another mage - not entirely, enough to pick up on intentions and loud surface thoughts without his deliberately sending them, nowhere close to enough to allow a deep-scan or poking at his memories. 

Leareth's current intentions aren't hostile. He's tense, but not exactly afraid. Mostly he's curious. Curious and confused and wondering (on a level deep enough that Carissa won't be able to get all the threads of association from this thought) if the whole thing Vkandis was trying to achieve here was getting him off this plane. Inconvenient, but the Worldwound does sound deeply concerning. They would have to be lying to him about a lot of things before he would no longer be willing to help cover that gap, and it's not obvious to him why they would be motivated to lie about that. 

"What questions do you have for me?" he says, addressed mostly to the First Arcane. 

He says something to Carissa in another language. 

"Valdemar. What do you know about their capabilities?"

"They have a non-magical army of - in the vicinity of ten thousand total troops, I think? Though many are still tied up with the civil war situation in Karse. Their government is run by an institution called the Heralds, who are - indirectly selected by their country's god, in a way, via a system set up eight hundred years ago when the kingdom was founded. Heralds almost always have Gifts, but mage-gift is oddly rare there, and their casualties during the war were high. There are approximately a hundred and fifty active Heralds at this time. Around a dozen mages, I believe, not all of them strong." 

Some of them, of course, are strong, but they're also the ones Valdemar would be least willing to risk; their most senior mage, Herald-Mage Savil, is Adept-strength and from all reports very impressive, but she's almost eighty, and deeply involved in the day-to-day running of the government. (The rest of that thought stays well below the surface.)

Leareth says some more things about Valdemar's resources: the House of Healing and their unusually good education system for Healers, the Bardic Collegium and its use for propaganda. Valdemar also has a higher rate of Mindhealing Gift than most places, though 'higher' is still...five or six, he thinks, in the entire kingdom, it's a very rare Gift, and of course all of those groups are noncombatants. 

Leareth's thoughts are mostly very focused on the content of what he's saying, retrieving facts and statistics from memory. It comes across that he has some sort of interest in Valdemar, moreso than in, say, Hardorn. He manages to avoid raising to surface thoughts that the information sources he knows this from are his spies, as opposed to more general information-brokers who he paid for their intelligence. 

She doesn't seem to need to translate for her superior when Leareth is talking; he's nodded along. They both relax considerably, at the claim that Valdemar has a dozen mages. 

"Does your organization have plans to interfere in our operations in Iftel?"

Huh. Some sort of magic, he's guessing. In a layer of his sensory-perception that he's not sharing right now, Leareth lets his mage-sight play around both of them, noting details to think about properly later. 

"Not at this time, no. If I remain out of communication with my people, I predict they will begin making plans for a rescue, though cautiously because we are not allied with Vkandis." Leareth's visible thoughts hint that this is a serious understatement. "Our operation near the border was simply to understand what was happening, since as far as I know it is unprecedented for Iftel to be at war." 

His thoughts flicker to various hypotheticals under which he might have considered interfering, though of course all of that is moot now that he's their prisoner. 

They both have a fair bit of magic up! It's quite different from mage spells - precise, defined, intricately knotted, weirdly high-power for the things it's visibly doing. 

"You read as Lawful. If you were to give us your word about - going to the Worldwound and not interfering with operations here, or about agreeing to join our fight, are there circumstances under which you'd give it falsely, or betray it later?"

"...It is not entirely impossible, I suppose, if I found out later you had lied or substantially misled me about this war, or about the Worldwound itself, or other relevant parts. However, when I give my word, I take it very seriously. ...Relatedly, I would be reluctant to make an unconditional, indefinite promise. It would take much less, for example, if you asked only that I give my word to remain at the Worldwound and not interfere for a year." 

Leareth is mostly thinking that he dislikes negotiations like this, where he's missing vast swathes of context and has little recourse to fix that, whereas the party he's negotiating with has much more resources and can freely gather information. It's frustrating for someone else to have the upper hand. He's - well, out of practice at it. 

(Though they'll have a hard time finding out much about Leareth himself from anyone but him directly - he keeps that thought folded away, though.) 

She asks him to repeat everything he said to her the night before, about Karse, Rethwellan, Jkatha, and the Star-Eyed Goddess.

Leareth does.

All of it is, apparently, the truth according to what he knows. His thoughts let slip a little more personal context; he's operated frequently in Rethwellan, recruiting mages and consulting scholars. He has contacts in Jkatha. He really doesn't like the Star-Eyed Goddess, though from his perspective She was the one who was hostile first. He gives the Dhorisha Plains and the Pelagirs a wide berth, which is inconvenient. Also Valdemar now has a Heartstone, a Tayledras magical technique that's believed to be miraculously granted by their Goddess, and this means Haven is not a safe place for him to ever be. 

"What's your objection to the Star-Eyed Goddess?"

Leareth's initial, instinctive, half-suppressed thought is 'that she does not appear to care at all about human flourishing in the long run.' His second thought is that he's not at all sure how to answer that question in the framework they've been speaking within. 

"I suppose She is - narrow-minded, in a way?" He takes a breath, slowly, lets it out and tries very hard not to think of previous plans that ended in pointless disaster. "She protects Her interests, which are highly specific, and does not care how many human lives this disrupts - which would be fine if one could communicate with Her and make arrangements to account for that, but our gods are - not especially able to communicate, and rarely interested in trying. ...Also I feel that Her pacts with the peoples who serve Her are not very fair to the humans now alive and serving those roles."  

See, he does keep talking like he's Good, no matter how he reads. "Why does that bother you."

"- Because if they were fully informed, I think they would not choose to make such a pact? And I...feel that an important part of what contracts and agreements mean is that - both parties should endorse a commitment to those conditions? Also, I am not sure what I think of the fact that children born now to the Tayledras or Shin'a'in peoples do not realistically choose it for themselves at any point." 

Leareth is trying to parse Carissa's expression. She's having some sort of reaction, he's pretty sure? But he's still confused enough about what her philosophy is - separate from what Asmodeus wants, which he's also pretty in the dark about - that it's difficult to predict which part of his perspective she would even find surprising. To him it feels like a natural extension of what he thinks she means by Lawfulness? Of course, maybe there's a failure to communicate concepts there as well. He should expect a cultural gulf, and magical translation - however that works, the fact that it's even possible is a revelation he needs to pore over later - but he should expect it not to perfectly compensate for differing worldviews. 

Most of these thoughts he holds pretty close to the surface.

"I...don't see how that affects you in any way."

"...Many things about the broader state of the world will end up affecting me in some way? I live here." 

Also, Leareth is thinking, it's not actually weird to care about things that affect other people. It's rarer that people explicitly care about the future - about people who don't exist yet, who they'll never meet - but a lot of people would, if they ever sat down and laid out all their goals and values and reasoned through to the natural conclusions. 

(Vanyel did. Vanyel cares. Leareth keeps this thought tucked well away in the depths.) 

- whatever. Arguing with the prisoner: not productive. "If I gave you permission to use magic to demonstrate the making of magic items like the ones you took off me, would that also enable you to do anything else?"