There were certainly signs. Frostbite particularly liked Catherine, but he'd also liked Naima; she'd thought, at the time, that he'd just been one of those men who obsessively preferred gaining access to women. She'd refused to answer certain questions during the interrogation; she hadn't thought twice about it, since she and Elie were also tremendously annoyed with the whole thing.

They must have guessed everyone, over the course of years of guessing who Alfirin might be. She'd spent several years thinking that she herself was Alfirin, and spent several months lightly suspecting her husband of not being alone in his head. He was a powerful wizard, and exactly the right age, was obviously aware of almost everything she did. But she hadn't seriously suspected Catherine at any point, because - well, yes, the ages were exactly right, and the politics made sense, but Catherine wasn't a caster, and it seemed more incomprehensible, somehow, for the ancient witch to be a fencer than for the ancient witch to be a man.

She feels stupid for looking at the very sensible list of quests to do in preparation for the overthrow of Cheliax, and wondering who Alfirin could possibly be, that she thought she could let them do all of this and then somehow come out ruling the country herself, which she had always suspected was Alfirin's goal. She had never considered for a moment that the plan to install Catherine as queen of Cheliax was, itself, that plan. 

She feels even more stupid for spending so much of her time thinking herself the special one, thinking so much of this was somehow her own story, for alternately dreading and hoping for the transformation that's been happening under her nose, all this time, to one of the few people in the world that she's come to think of as a friend. 

But the story is not about her. And neither is this.

How are you doing?

Even after fifteen years of war, Isarn is a really beautiful city. It's a sticky night, and the chestnut trees are blooming; there are street-lights dancing in the river and young soldiers dancing with their sweethearts on the bank. Élie's fetched up at the Bridge of Lace – so-called for its stonework – and if the structure's looking a bit shabby, it's an elegant sort of decay. A couple of kids pass by with a bottle of wine, debating philosophy, probably escapees from school. When he was their age, he'd killed his first Chelish spy. That would have been the year that he met Catherine.

I've been thinking I should stop taking actions in pretty much full generality. 

We agreed we wouldn't do anything that tipped our hands until we'd decided on a course of action.

I know. I promise I won't do anything rash.

...I was going to say I wouldn't do anything stupid, but I think I've proven you can't count on me for that. I'm so scared, Naima. Everything we do seems to be exactly what she wanted. Or – this is the part it hurts to say, hurts even to think, but this seems to be the evening for painful truths – or maybe it's what Mephistopheles wants. I must be the one he has an interest in. We know who's behind everyone else. I may end up damning most of Avistan to ten thousand years of tyranny if I keep going on the way I am. 

That is a distinct possibility. But it's not one we can thwart by not taking any actions. We're in the thick of it, now, and - I admit it is terrifying, but it also means that we may well be the only people in a position to stop it.

I don't think we were meant to find out that Catherine is Alfirin now. Or - I don't think Catherine accounted for it. I guess it's possible that it's somehow part of Mephistopheles's plan, in which case we have to figure out his plan and thwart him, too. But you don't thwart ancient powers by sitting on your hands, either.

So I've been told. 

He remembers talking with Lúcien – another dead friend – about some speech he hadn't wanted to give. It would have been almost ten years ago, and they'd been walking by the river not far from here, and another hundred-odd suspected diabolists had just been murdered in their beds by the mobs he'd helped drive on. He'd felt ill, thinking of all those souls denied the peace of the Final Blade. Lúcien had listened and nodded sympathetically and told him he'd better get over himself. "We all feel regret, and that's all to the Good, until it becomes a distraction from our duty. You will do your duty, won't you? We can't drive the devil from our borders by waiting for him at home." 

Lúcien had been right then, of course, and Naima is right now. He pushes the memory towards her. 

You shouldn't worry about me. I always do get over myself in the end. 

That doesn't seem quite -

She sends him thoughts that aren't quite tied to words the way they ought to be. Something feels wrong about that. Maybe it's that she doesn't know what their duty is, here, that there's no obvious direction that they need to keep marching in and avoid being swayed from. It's not a question of determination or strength, at least not only. It's a question of finding the narrow path, the path the gods and powers have not accounted for, like a leaf fluttering unpredictably in the wind, and somehow managing to steer that path themselves just so, even though that's actually kind of impossible, even though the very uncertainty of the leaf's path is what allows it to land where it wasn't supposed to.

Or maybe it's not impossible. Maybe it only looks impossible if you're assuming that the space you're aiming for is very narrow. But 'something other than ten thousand years of tyranny' isn't a small target at all. Hell is tiny, compared to the infinite vastness of the chaotic planes. It doesn't seem like it can actually be true that the vast majority of possible outcomes end in Mephistopheles controlling all of Avistan. There has to be a way to strike the structure that knocks it off the charted course.

Perhaps her patron sees furthest through the fog, the caulborn had once said. Her patron, not Alfirin, not Mephistopholes, not Abadar. The thing that is delighted by the breaking of the old order. The thing that would exalt a worm, and be delighted by it because it was real, because it was not a toy that could be perfectly controlled or predicted. 

So if Élie is a marionette whose strings are being pulled by Mephistopheles, he couldn't have picked a better partner for cutting them. They just have to figure out how.

I didn't know what my duty was then, either. 

...We can't trust any of them. Not your patron, not Abadar, not even Iomedae and her people – at least until we understand her history with Alfirin. Whatever he wants, he's still trying to puppet you, and that's unacceptable. However far he sees, we're going to have to see farther. 

Yeah, I guess so.

What do you think she wants, then? Alfirin, I mean. For another person I might say becoming queen of Cheliax was enough of a plan, but...

I asked Nefreti that. She told me that Alfirin spent one of her lives trying to create a shell of positive energy around all of Golarion, like Nex has around his demiplane, so that the Gods couldn't see inside. ...This would be much easier if we knew for certain that she was our enemy. 

I'm not at all sure she is. But we do know she's kept her plan and her identity secret all this time, which suggests she doesn't think we'd go along with it if we knew. Or possibly that she doesn't trust us to keep it secret, which I suppose wouldn't be so absurd.

I think maybe we need to scribe's binding her and see for ourselves.

That's – yes, that's an excellent idea, that's what we should do. As soon as we possibly can after hitting ninth circle, ideally, so she doesn't suspect. We should do it at home, so you can prepare the spell on the leyline – actually, we should test how leyline enhancements work on spells with saves, that doesn't often come up – we should see if Bestow Curse stacks with Evil Eye – 

It's so nice when a problem has a magical solution. Magic is honest and clean, it rewards knowledge, it is incapable of deception – and the last time he really wanted to believe something, it landed him on a bridge in Isarn with a couple of washerwomen debating if Citizen Wizard's girlfriend left him or if he's just been ordered to the front. 

Somehow I don't think it's going to be as simple as that.

Oh, definitely not. But at least it's a way of being able to see what one of our dear patrons is plotting.

Do you think we should tell Ione and Shawil?

Hmm. Yes. I don't want to act unilaterally on something like this, the worst thing would be to splinter the party for no reason and leave our only friends feeling desperate and off-balance. We always hate it when Shawil does that, anyway.

We'll need some way of putting her back, after. Scribe's Binding isn't easily undone.

Freedom might do it. I can probably beg it off Felandriel Morgethai if we're about to invade Cheliax. Or Nefreti, but I'm not sure how I feel about owing her another favor. Otherwise, I suppose I'll have to figure out Wish. 

Even if we trust Ione, we can't be certain Alfirin doesn't have ways of getting information out of her. It seems unfair after everything she's been through for her to be the only one left in the dark, but – fairness may not be a luxury we can afford. 

She also has plenty of reason to be afraid of us right now. The last thing we want is for her to panic and assume that we're going to do the same thing to her, once the plan is underway.

The last thing we want is for Alfirin to Charm her again while she has sensitive information. 

Okay, so there are a lot of ways this could go terribly. That doesn't mean that not telling her isn't also, predictably, going to go terribly.

How about if we start researching the spells we need without telling her, but we don't go ahead with the actual plan without her buy-in. We can break enchantment on her again before we do, in case anything's happened to her in the intervening time. But I don't want to go ahead with Binding Ca- Alfirin, not in a way that will predictably cause Ione to panic as soon as we move.

Half the reason we're doing this is that Alfirin wasn't honest with us, and that's suspicious. It may be that she has a perfectly good plan and simply didn't trust us to keep it secret. It may be something more sinister. Either way, Ione was honest with us.  I want to be honest with her. I don't want to give her obvious evidence that we're just like Alfirin.

We should tell Ione right before. 

...I'm not upset because Catherine lied to us. We don't trust her for the same reason she doesn't trust us – we can't know that we want the same thing. We're certainly going to lie to her going forward. We're going to have to lie to a lot of people. I'm already lying to almost everyone about what the engine I'm building really does, and what resources we really have, and what we mean to do when the war is over. I wish more than – almost anything else, really, that we lived in a world where that wasn't necessary, but we don't, and if there's one saving grace in this it's that I remembered that before destroying our chances irreparably. 

I'm not upset with her. I'm noticing that I'm not the first person in this relationship to come to the conclusion that our interests may diverge enough that I might not want to help her. And also noticing that, as far as Ione goes - it's not that Catherine has lied to Ione. It's that Alfirin did possibly quite deadly experiments to make her whatever she is, from the time she was a very small child, and then as soon as she reappeared, she went on treating her like a mildly defective magic item that needed to be herded into doing what it was told via the use of more magic. 

It may be that it's not safe to tell Ione our plans a long time before, I grant that. I am willing to tell her right before we're ready to move. But I am not going to treat my longtime allies the way that Catherine has treated Ione. I don't think I will even when it comes to Catherine. I might have, once, but - not now. But Ione can't know that, right now, and I don't want to make believing that about me any harder than it has to be, especially when I'm in the middle of trapping an ancient witch inside a book.

I understand. I don't even think we disagree on how to handle this, really. I don't want to lose because we were too fixated on not resorting to the methods of our enemies. And I don't want us to give ourselves permission to treat people like objects because the enemy is worse, because we can justify anything that way – 

I'm sorry. I can't help feeling like I'm twenty years old again, and trying to decide how little evidence we need to execute traitors, and somehow making both mistakes at once.

Catherine had always been of one mind about that: laws are laws. They should ratify the constitution and abide by it, no matter what the enemy might do. He'd envied her certainty, then. He wonders if any part of it still exists in her. 

Yeah. I've never - done this before, I guess. And I think in some ways that's better and in some ways that's worse.

This is morbid and I probably shouldn't say it but I'm thinking it and I'm going to say it anyway. I was just thinking that if you were keeping a big secret, or lying to me about something, for anything resembling a good reason, I think I'd forgive you for it quite easily, probably even if I disagreed with you about the decision afterwards, unless it was really egregious or something you specifically promised not to do. And if you were doing to me what Catherine did to Ione, taking away her ability to reason properly about the evidence she did have, magically manufacturing trust to then violate, I would not.

Not to say I at all suspect you of doing either of those things. I was just thinking about it.

...You could test that. If there was a persistent Charm on you stepping into an anti-magic field should suppress it. Naturally you wouldn't want me to cast it, but you could do it from a scroll. And of course if you're ever really worried you can read my mind, I'd let you. I know you don't really think I would, but I feel better knowing how I'd check. 

That's true. Maybe I should step into an antimagic field at some point, just on general principle, in case anyone else has done anything to me. I'm not actually worried enough about this to be very motivated to do it, but of course I wouldn't be, so maybe I should do it even when I feel it's obviously not necessary.

Mostly I am thinking that I went to a lot of effort to be sure that the person closest to me was someone who would never do anything like that to me, and I think I was exactly correct to prioritize it so highly. And I feel sorry for Ione, I guess, for not having had that.