It was a long time ago, that Altarrin had Merda brought to him. She'd gotten herself in trouble. No. That's how she tells it, when anyone's listening, but it's not how she thinks about it in her own heart, behind Thoughtsensing shields trained the hard way. She'd been raped, by an important man in the Imperial Court. She'd done exactly what any blithering idiot would do in that situation, and marched right on over to the nearest legal office and reported him. It would probably have gotten her killed, maybe compulsioned out of her mind and shipped off somewhere. 

Altarrin attempted to explain this to her while she seethed at him from as far away as she could get at the same dinner table. She was a blithering idiot, but not enough of a blithering idiot to fail to realize that she was in danger. He explained that she couldn't afford to make enemies like that, not without friends. She seethed. He explained that there were ways to move against someone like that, and that he wished they were easier, wished the Empire functioned differently, wished it was a place that could keep the promises it had made to her as a child studying for the exams. He spoke as if it deeply and personally grieved him. He apologized to her. 

Then he put his arm around her, not even like he wanted her, like he wanted other people to know he had her, and tried to guide her off to his private rooms, and she bit him. 

Afterwards he apologized for that too. And said - a lot of things, many of them useful and important, about the hidden rules of the Empire they were both bound to serve, and among them that these rooms were the only ones he had, in the whole palace, where no one was watching, and no one would wonder what he was hiding.

She isn't sure if he didn't fuck her because he never fucks any of the girls or because he was not inclined to be in biting range again. 

She grew up.

If she ever owed him a favor, and she's not sure she did, she has long since repaid it. 

She doesn't think about it much.

"Wouldn't anyone prefer young women? Aging is a bitch." She gets the last document. "Let's be going, then."

Then they can go! Ketar spends the walk chewing on that statement and trying to figure out whether or not Merda disapproves of Altarrin's taste in women. A lot of people seem to feel like it's clearly better than the alternative - Carissa seems to feel that way...

Ketar doesn't even try to read Merda's mind. He might or might not be able to get through her shields – they're very good, for someone un-Gifted, but his Gift is powerful – but even if he could, she would definitely notice. He really badly wants to know more of what's going on, but not enough to antagonize the person who he's officially reporting to right now, or antagonize Altarrin by mindreading someone he apparently trusts with important secrets. 

...He's totally going to see if he can mindread the mage-gifted guard once they rendezvous with him, though. All mages are taught shielding but most of the junior ones aren't very good at it. 

Hakkon, the mage-Gifted guard, is a relatively junior one! Merda did not choose him for his reputation as a subtle actor or a good liar; he'll tell everyone everything and they'll know they got everything. That's the point. He is shielding, as best he can, and wishing he had more context. 

     "You're here in case Altarrin's latest girl is bitey," says Merda, with a twist of her mouth that suggests some private humor.

That's not more than he had already. "I see."

      Quieter, with an air of secrecy: "She's got a Wild Gift. For making mage-artifacts that can imitate some Gifts she doesn't have. She isn't allowed to use them without permission, and shouldn't be able to; if you see her try, stop her."

Well, that's interesting. "Understood."

And off they go to Altarrin's chambers. 

Altarrin will be there, with Carissa, indulging in some chitchat around the remains of a late breakfast spread, apparently relaxed and not particularly surprised to see them. 

(Altarrin is not a junior mage. His native shields alone are probably the best in the Empire, and he wears talismans as well. Which is good, because it means it would be rather difficult for someone to check and notice the absence of his usual mandatory compulsions. 

There are official checks, including random ones, that he can't evade just by dint of his position; it's the system he came up with himself, because Archmage-Generals are actually particularly well placed to, for example, assassinate the Emperor. He can't risk going without for more than a day. But a random check before this evening isn't that likely, and...it's easier, much easier, when his mind is his own. It's not like he really has the option of taking them off at night in his quarters, since they're self-protecting.) 

One of the servants answers the door and lets in the arriving party. Altarrin leans back in his chair. "- Oh, is it that time already? Carissa, dear, I am afraid I have meetings after this." He stands, holds out his hand for the files she brought. "Thank you, Merda. Do you have other business here as well? Oh, and, Ketar, you must be here to offer a Mindspeaker's perspective on Carissa's fascinating Gift...?" 

Ketar bobs his head. He can't, in fact, read Carissa yet, not until she takes off her talisman. He might or might not get anything she's deliberately trying to push at him? Merda, presumably, is entirely competent to put loud surface thoughts on the outside of her shields if she wants to give him instructions. 

He can mindread Merda's guard and also all of the servants in range, though, and wait to see what the plan is next. Does Merda seem to want him to convey anything to Carissa in private Mindspeech? 

The servants vary in how loyal to Altarrin they are and relatedly how much of the brunchtime conversation they'll be passing on to related parties, though it was mostly boring. The girl talked a lot about the citystate she's from. Altarrin didn't seem like he was that interested, but he patiently let her. One servant who was planning to pass on a lot of the conversation is now frantically trying to think of something else, like the embroidery on this napkin.

Merda's guard is of the opinion that Carissa is hot, and also looks pretty harmless. Looks can be deceiving and he's not an idiot and not going to drop his precautions, but it seems pretty clear from the bathrobe and the loose hair and the smiling at Altarrin how she's trying to play her cards and it's not 'with some murder'.

"I'm taking notes for Ketar," Merda says, bored. The intended implication, to people who play Palace games, is of course that she's taking notes for whoever she pleases and Altarrin can throw her out if he's that afraid of people getting a look at his girl, and that she probably arranged this entirely for that piece of information. She makes that visible to Ketar in case he is an idiot and would object he can take his own notes. 

Carissa does not think she's been disloyal, but she nonetheless feels an unpleasant jolt of nervousness when Altarrin's people enter for the loyalty check. Three of them, a young man who is nervous and a Security in the same mold as the ones who have escorted her when she left Altarrin's chambers and a middle aged woman who is hard to read, but looks - irritated, maybe. Perhaps she is too important to loyalty-check Altarrin's lovers and hasn't cottoned on, or is pretending not to have, that there's something more going on here. 

The person Carissa is pretending to be, scared and clinging to the kind of security she can recognize, has to fight back a temptation to cling to Altarrin. But she's not pretending to be incompetent, so she does fight back the temptation, and it's revealed only in a last pleading glance at him.

There being a culture gap that's a plane across, here, Merda doesn't know quite how to read that. The girl is scared and bad at pretending, or else pretending to be scared. But the person she is in pretense has nothing to be scared of. Altarrin is dangerous. Ketar's just a bright-eyed well-meaning child, and whatever harm he does her it'll be through what he reports to Altarrin, which ought to be obvious.  Or does she not believe the 'bright eyed child' thing? Or is she pretending not to believe that?

(Ketar will nod agreeably at Merda's claim to be note-taking for him. In actual fact, he really doesn't want to take his own notes, he's going to have to improvise a conversation about a Wild Gift that is completely different from Carissa's actual magic while also reading her mind! Either that or he has to come up with an excuse to go do this in Altarrin's bedroom and maybe make all the servants think that he's trying to seduce Carissa– all right, fine, it's probably implausible that he would do that in front of Merda looking impatiently on.) 

"You're going to have to take off that amulet for him to learn anything," Merda says, pulling out a piece of paper. "Altarrin makes them very well. I'm surprised he lent you one."

The person Carissa is pretending to be is proud of having convinced Altarrin to part with the amulet, and doesn't want to think she whored herself out for it. "I traded him one I made," she says defensively. 

Merda waves her hand impatiently. "Don't account your trinkets too highly, he's generous with all his girls. Why'd you even ask for it?" The real reason is obvious; it gives away the whole game. But there had better be a cover reason by now.

"She had never seen workmanship like it before! I suppose nowhere else compares to the Empire, in terms of skill at artifact work - though we did know that already." Altarrin says it with a satisfied smile, though of course it isn't exactly an answer to why he gave it to Carissa in the first place. He taps the borrowed Glibness pin. "Though I am nonetheless pleased with my end of the deal. Anyway, I will leave you to it." 

Tucking the files under his arm, he pats Carissa's shoulder, in a way that's fond and not entirely perfunctory but certainly isn't lingering; he's a busy man, his window for a pleasant unimportant breakfast conversation is over.

"I expect to be gone two, three candlemarks, I will pass on a message if it goes longer." To the servants, "- Please bring her anything she needs to be comfortable here, she is a newcomer and I would like her to come away impressed with our Empire's amenities." 

And he heads out, not looking back. 

Fake Carissa isn't an idiot. She doesn't blink after him looking wounded. She's fine.

She looks back to Merda a little defiantly, and then removes the Thoughtsensing talisman. 

With her headband on, fully rested and slightly less disoriented, the most notable thing about Carissa's mind is that it moves very, very fast. She has a lot of concepts to reference, and she's referencing most of them only in passing, jumping to them and on to something else. The woman's in charge but the man is the one with the mindreading power. Interesting implication of local Gift strength not improving with combat experience -- Gift deftness does, of course, but if you aren't a Thoughtsenser you'll never become one and if you are a Thoughtsenser you can read her mind while still in school. She isn't sure if they're going to ask real questions, the kind they can't speak aloud, or not, but -

- she thinks an apology in Ketar's direction. There is a procedure for loyalty checks, at home, and for an announced one one is expected to do the reviewer the courtesy of restraining one's thoughts, in part because competence at restraining one's thoughts is an input into how seriously to take the results of the loyalty check and you want to force people to display the skill routinely. But also partially because it's annoying for the mindreader, to get the worthless contents of most peoples' worthless heads. (Carissa did it for eight years.) The thoughts get old very fast. It's harder to meet standards of professionalism in this context because she's not clear what they are and because they're pretending to have a completely different conversation on the surface, but if they're conveyed she'll abide. 

(Chelish loyalty checks also usually take place with the target restrained, at least at the Worldwound where most people could do a lot of damage if they thought the wrong thing, panicked, and decided not to go quietly. This place isn't Lawful Evil but she's not sure she's propagated that to all the places it should properly go because it's still not as if she's ever had any input from some place that wasn't.)

(She's not thinking about Altarrin at all, besides thinking what fake Carissa is thinking.)

"At what age did your Gift manifest?" says Merda. 

[Tell me if you want to prompt her with anything in particular] she adds to Ketar.

"I was eleven. I couldn't - do anything with it, really - so my parents sent me off to the mage-school, figured they'd figure out whatever it was. Which they did, eventually."

"It doesn't run in the family?" Wild Gifts usually don't, but there's the theory that's how all the normal Gifts got started, Wild Gifts that did inherit reliably enough to not die out. Some of the early Empire's work was on Gift heredity, and it's all fairly puzzling but Merda's read it all. 

If the Gift is in the blood then Altarrin should get her with child; she'd rather he not, so she'll claim it doesn't. (A dozen associated concepts she's leaping between in her head - a person with high intelligence from another world is more valuable than a person of high intelligence from your own world, to a breeding program, because they might have arrived at it from different pieces, with higher variance in the children; she isn't Keltham, to imagine it might be a favor to her children not to bear them, but she's Evil and she doesn't want to so there (is Evil in fact about that, she hasn't reexamined everything downstream of realizing one should kill Asmodeus); honestly she should calm down and revisit the merits of pregnancy in terms of lighter punishments and incentive to keep her alive but it feels impossible thanks to the stupid internal injuries that she mostly hasn't been looking at; it is contemptible to be hung up on Keltham in a world where he doesn't exist, she's like 80% sure he wouldn't even want that from her and the remaining bit is mostly 'maybe he would want that because it entails her being miserable' which he would be quite reasonable to want.)

She does not actually pause. Headbands are convenient.

"It doesn't. After I turned out to be useful the mage-school went back and checked my sisters and brothers and cousins, in case it'd been missed lying dormant in anyone, but there was nothing."

Ketar follows along. Or does his best, anyway. She's impressive. 

Her emotional state, which is what he's paying the most attention to, is...disorienting. (Also he had half-forgotten that, while he knows the contents of Carissa's head rather well, Carissa hasn't even seen his face before now.) Is she in trouble? He's not sure! She's calm about it, if so, but...she would be, it's a survival skill in her own world, her home country is horrific (and it's still kind of background upsetting, almost hurtful, that she's seeing the Empire as similar.)

She certainly isn't thinking about Altarrin in the way she would if she actually wanted to be sleeping with him as a temporary fling, let alone as though she's on a path to falling in love with him, so - the inference is that she's faking her side of it entirely, as a survival strategy. Which doesn't imply that Altarrin is treating her badly, of course - and Ketar would, on reflection, actually be surprised if he was - but it's still a sign that she feels stuck, right? Maybe more stuck than she should, because her own world is horrible.

(What sort of punishment is she hoping she would avoid, by being pregnant?)

(He wonders what happened, in Cheliax, to give her that little mental flinch.) 

Ketar isn't entirely following the part about intelligent people from other worlds. In actual reality and not the cover story, Carissa's magic definitely doesn't run in the blood, but - does depend on intelligence, and so it would be in Altarrin's interest to have a smart child with her. Is that the sort of thing Altarrin would push Carissa into doing? Ketar doubts he would hold back on account of it making Carissa sad, but he would probably...pay her, or something? for the unpleasantness? ...and also it's a long term sort of plan and, while Altarrin is definitely someone who makes decades-long plans, he's not going to decide on one less than a week after Carissa arrived, so probably Ketar doesn't need to do anything about it? 

He definitely isn't going to ask her to restrain her thoughts to avoid being rude to him. (Thoughtsensing checks in the Empire don't have that convention, though sometimes particular questions are asked.) He's tempted to ask her to slow down her thoughts, but - that sounds hostile, right? And he's probably missing things, but he really doesn't think he's missing a scheme to murder all of them and escape. Beside, faster thoughts means more information, right, as long as he can keep up.

He doesn't prompt her with anything yet. She's thinking plenty of informative thoughts on her own. 

:No specific concerns about her loyalty so far: he relays privately to Merda, in case she's still nervous about that. 

"How was your mage-school? How much tutoring did you have?"

Fake Carissa is sad about fleeing her school, and defensive. Real Carissa doesn't know enough about mage schools to bluff through much of this. "It was fine."

"Until it wasn't."

"I thought we were here for Ketar to take a look at the Gift?"

"Carissa - it's Carissa, right - 

- you'll have enemies, here, just because you look useful to Altarrin. We're not your enemies. Altarrin asked us to come here, and I understand that you left your mage-school under difficult circumstances, but the more we know about your Gift the more we can be helpful."