"You - what - where– ...nevermind, later. What questions would you need answered, to be willing to help us? I realize you don't have any context, and - it's easy for anyone to say their side is in the right, but..." Shrug. "Predain needs to be stopped, and the fact that we're less willing to commit atrocities means we're losing ground." 

"I have a spell that ensures that no one within its reach can speak a lie. It doesn't change one's answer, or oblige one, but it stills the tongue from speaking one they knew was wrong. It can be subverted, but not trivially. Would I have your permission to cast it?"

General Judeth looks at her for a long moment, hard and level. 

"You may," she says finally (and gestures for her guards to be watching with mage-sight, if they aren't already, which they should be.) 

Zone of Truth. 

Iomedae can throw off the Whispering Tyrant's spells more often than not; throwing off her own is utterly trivial. She doesn't, though, as a courtesy, and watches everyone else closely; she can usually see if they throw it off or not, and even better they usually assume she can.

Neither General Judeth nor Calli even know they're supposed to be trying to throw something off! The mage-guards are on alert for a spell, and will notice something unexpected happening and try to resist it, but they're not particularly advantaged at this. 

General Judeth has failed to notice anything happening, and waits politely for Iomedae. 

"The spell is in effect. Please tell me about your war, your aims, your enemy."

General Judeth will do that! 

Predain is Tantara's neighbor, to the north. While Tantara is one of the more prosperous kingdoms in the region – and certainly one of the most magically advanced, home to Archmage Urtho – they've historically been a peaceful country. They aren't used to waging war with their neighbors. 

Predain was, until recently, poorer and more backward - and more violent, with frequent internal conflicts and succession crises, but they had never been organized enough to fight Tantara until Adept Kiyamvir Ma'ar rose to become one of the King's top advisors, and rapidly advanced Predain's industry and mage-education as well as pushing expansionism. 

They started off conquering the smaller city-states and landholdings to the north and east, and Urtho was initially hesitant to advise any response to the King of Tantara. Adept Ma'ar had been among his best students, once, decades ago now. Urtho never wanted to end up at war. But Predain kept gobbling up territory, and sooner or later they were going to run out of room, or tire of conquering the cold rocky land to their north and look for richer pastures. And whatever Ma'ar wanted - the man did claim in his letters to Urtho, which were friendly on the surface, that he was interested in an alliance with Tantara - the King of Predain clearly had his own ideas for their country's future. 

Also, under Adept Ma'ar's guidance, Predain was making some very concerning policy changes. The country had fewer mages trained well enough to do the massive concert-melds required to raise bridges and towers, but Ma'ar was too impatient to wait for that to change in its own time, and so they legalized blood-magic and began a program of executing convicted criminals for power in order to do infrastructure projects. They instituted standard mage-compulsions, made them part of the oath of loyalty and service for their Guard. They started breeding mages, paying Gifted women to bear children with Gifted men who often weren't even their husbands. 

Diplomatic communications failed to persuade Predain to stop conquering its neighbors - which at this point had included an actual kingdom, if a small one - or turn away from their various horrible policies. The the King of Tantara was alarmed, and eventually Urtho had no more reassurances to offer. Tantara's intentions weren't to fully conquer and annex Predain, just to secure their own border and find a more persuasive route to getting Predain to stop conquering everything in reach, because clearly polite letters from a former teacher and mentor weren't convincing. 

It went wrong almost from the beginning. For all his flaws, no one could argue that Adept Ma'ar wasn't a brilliant strategist, and he was far more willing to be ruthless than Urtho could countenance in his own army. Even with more, better trained, and better-shielded mages, in many battles Tantara ended up overwhelmed by weaker mages bloated with blood-magic. Adept Ma'ar was apparently even willing, in some circumstances, to order his own people to Final Strike in order to turn battles around. Urtho had gryphons, but Adept Ma'ar carried out his own frantic Great Working and made his own flying species, the makaar, less intelligent but far more violent and bloodthirsty. 

And then he conquered the capital. It happened in a single night. He used an artifact of dark magic, called a dyrstaff – smuggled into the Palace, the spell it bore wove its way into the minds of everyone within range, and overnight while they slept, cast a spell of escalating fear and panic. Nearly everyone fled in incoherent terror, and in the morning, Adept Ma'ar was able to Gate his own forces in, nearly unopposed. The King was evacuated in time, barely, but the frantic rescuing force had found him cowering in his own wardrobe, and he wasn't a young man. He never recovered his wits after the shock, and died a few months later. 

Urtho - a peaceful man, who spent his life teaching students - was left as their only remaining leader, and he's starting to run out of ideas. 

- that does sound like a serious problem! She's correcting, mentally, for the obvious ways that a people tell their own story, but several of the concepts being passed along through Telepathy here are in fact quite bad. Running your government on mind control: quite bad. Executing prisoners for magical power you can use for infrastructure projects: quite bad. ...she can think of her allies of hers who'd venture a full-throated defense of it, of course, but they wouldn't actually do it, because down that slippery slope lies -

"Do I understand correctly that using, uh, blood magic, in combat, is very useful, a substantial strategic advantage, but that a taboo on it existed prior to Predain's rise?"

"Yes." General Judeth ducks her head. "They - don't use captured prisoners from our side, for it. Apparently the mage-soldiers have compulsions against doing that, and against - mistreating them - Adept Ma'ar seems to think it's quite humane of him. But they'll use their own criminals, or - ask for volunteers, and of course you wonder how voluntary it can really be..." 

" - that's actually promising, though, if there are laws of war they are still abiding by - do you know which ones -"

"Is it? Urtho says that Adept Ma'ar has always done whatever he wants - whatever he can justify to achieve his aims - and when you're lucky, the thing he wants isn't the most horrible thing you can imagine. ...There were debates, when he was a child, there's a story that he tried to convince the other pupils you could prevent the city guard from raping helpless women by compulsioning them against that – to be clear, we don't even have a problem with that, Predain did. But he's never respected any of our laws just because they were the law, only if someone could - win an argument using logic." 

“The question is whether he’ll respect a parley so we can talk, or peace terms if he signs them.”

Shrug. "He might. He's certainly kept offering parleys to Urtho, he's still writing to him even now. I've asked Urtho, Urtho...doesn't really expect him to keep his word. He would probably keep to peace terms if he agreed to them at all, I'm sure he'd rather be spending all those dead convicts on bridges and not explosions, but - he'd only accept if they were favorable enough to Predain - they're winning -" 

“Yep, that’s how that goes. We probably first have to change that they are winning. But the aim has to be a negotiated peace, eventually - does the King have a more moderate candidate successor -“

"We think he wants to appoint Ma'ar as his successor. I don't know that we'd be better off with any of his sons. Though it - might be that he wouldn't be a problem, if Ma'ar were no longer in power." 

This has occurred to her too. A lot of things have occurred to her, actually, but that's certainly one of them. "Is there some respected neutral party that could guarantee everyone's safety for a parley - some other kingdom, a temple order -"

"There isn't really another kingdom with enough military force to step in and guarantee anyone's safety, that cares to intervene in this or that both sides have pre-existing relations with. And - I think temple orders must be one of those customs that Adept Ma'ar doesn't care about because no one ever brought up a sufficiently logical argument in debate class for why it matters. Urtho said he never liked religions or saw why anyone would worship gods. He's - he doesn't slaughter the people or anything, he's given the peaceful monastic orders in cities he conquered safe passage to evacuate, but we know for a fact that he's gone on and taken over the temples to turn into barracks. So I'm not hopeful." 

"Do you have a secure avenue to talk with him remotely."

"Urtho has a communication-spell. It's not secure - worse, it's theoretically trackable and could be used to target an attack, not easily but he's - very very good at magic. Urtho's been blocking it. Ma'ar - has been sending letters - but we certainly don't trust we have a way to reply that would only reach him." 

"Can you tell me about Tantara. How it's governed, who it educates, how its soldiers are conscripted, which persons can travel if they choose -"

She can tell Iomedae about Tantara! 

It sounds like a reasonably Lawful place. Fairly standard hereditary monarchy, though King Leodhan had no heirs, he would have appointed someone if his death had been any less unexpected. Major kingdom-wide decisions and new laws are passed with the approval of a council of nobles - most of them currently vanished, either dead or in hiding, after the incident in the capital - and an appointed set of ministers, not necessarily of noble birth. A court system run mostly independently from the Crown, with regional judges elected by the local populace. 

Urtho's Tower educates any and all Gifted children who come to it - not just mage-gift, but other Gifts like Healing and Mindspeech and rarer ones like Fetching or Farsight or Mindhealing. There are even classes for the un-Gifted, and merit scholarships. Kiyamvir Ma'ar arrived as a penniless illiterate orphan and was offered a place in the Tower with no questions asked. 

(Iomedae can read between the lines that away from Urtho's Tower, education is far more haphazard; some lessons are offered at temples, but a more thorough education is mostly only available via private tutors to children of wealthy or noble families. And not everyone Gifted, has the resources or the wherewithal to make it to Urtho's Tower in the first place.) 

They started out with a volunteer army. Conscription for mages and for Mindspeakers, anyone between age fifteen and forty-five with at least a Master-potential Gift or a Mindspeech range of at least a mile, was phased in only a month into the war. Conscription for Healers started six months later (early on they had plenty of volunteers, and casualties have been much lower among noncombatants.) They've now started conscripting un-Gifted troops as well but...probably too little too late. 

...When it's not wartime, anyone can travel anywhere they like? Unless you count convicted criminals, maybe, who usually serve sentences doing agricultural labor, the death penalty was used very rarely. You couldn't, like, wander into the Palace or into Urtho's Tower without being stopped and asked to state your business, but would rarely be refused if your errand was innocent. Towns can and do vote to evict troublemakers, but it has to be really quite a lot of trouble caused before it's worth the hassle. 

Slavery, serfdom, subpopulations where things are a bit more complicated (the bird-soldiers?), any of the other wide range of things societies sometimes turn out to be doing and not thinking of as a bad thing necessarily? The Zone of Truth runs out, which she doesn't indicate and also doesn't much worry about; her current assessment is that if Tantara is founded on lies, this woman doesn't know them, and that she believes herself to be spending the lives of her people in desperate defense of the most prosperous, Lawful and Good place in her world.

Slavery is illegal, and being caught dealing in slaves - which does sometimes happen - is one of the few capital crimes. It seems like they probably have de facto serfdom, though not of an incredibly oppressive variety. 

The gryphons are Urtho's project. He loves them like a father, and ensures that they're provided for, and breeds them as part of his continuing work on perfecting the species. The gryphons weren't made for war, Urtho wouldn't have done that, but maybe because the base species used were predators, they're well suited to it, psychologically. Nearly every adult volunteered in the first weeks of the war, and plenty of juveniles tried and were turned away. 

General Judeth does indeed seem very sincere in her defense of Tantara's virtues, and genuine in her terror for their future. 

"I'll do another channelled healing. It's a thirty foot radius, you can really pack people in, it'll work so long as they're not actually dead yet and unless they're very experienced soldiers it should restore them to full health. - maybe even if they are very experienced soldiers, I don't know how that'd work in another world. In the long run you'll want a specialized building built with multiple floors, if you only have me to channel, but first we should find out if I even get my channels back tomorrow, I'm uncertain. 

After that I would like to meet Urtho. I do not want to see Tantara conquered; I do not know yet how best I can avoid that."

General Judeth smiles at her, tiredly but with deep gratitude. "We can probably get everyone in the Healing tent into a thirty-foot radius, and some of the walking wounded. And there's going to be a message-Gate at sunset, we can send you through to the Tower with an escort. ...Is there anything we need to be careful of, about the healing? If you're really - from another world," which is something she's barely interacted with, it's too strange and too abstract and everything further away than tomorrow morning's deployments and supply-missions feels too unreal to matter, "then is it possible it'd have strange side effects for us? Do people need to rest afterward?"