...Ma'ar might grant a ceasefire. If he does, Urtho thinks it would be evidence that he thinks he can make the extra time work to his benefit as much as theirs. He seems to have very good intelligence on Tantara – not surprisingly, maybe, because he studied at Urtho's Tower, and for all that he was a prickly, troubled young man who made himself hard to befriend, he clearly did find some allies there. While Iomedae hasn't revealed many of her powers visibly in public, Ma'ar is very clever, and might be able to learn more and prepare better in that time than Iomedae is expecting. 

On Tantara's end of things, they didn't even have a diplomatic representative in Predain in the leadup to the war, and they had relatively little merchant trade; up until the last few years, when Ma'ar finally succeeded at clamping down on local banditry, Predain's trade roads were very unsafe. And Predain is...ethnically culturally different. Urtho will admit, with a faint flicker of embarrassment, that many of his own people are prejudiced against their northern neighbor. It is, relatedly, difficult for Tantaran spies to pass unobserved in Predain. Their best intelligence came from gryphon flyovers, but Ma'ar must have figured out some kind of ward-system to detect them even when Urtho provides the scout parties with covering illusions and shields. Right now they have a few low-level spies in Predain war camps, working as cooks or whatnot, but none of them are Mindspeakers and that means reports back and forth are costly and dangerous to pass along. 

He does know that many Predain citizens, including the captured prisoners - who Iomedae is welcome to try speaking to, though he thinks she'll be lucky to get any cooperation - see the war as an entirely unprovoked and unjustifiable threat to their kingdom's survival, and Tantara as an untrustworthy negotiating partner. 

Not surprising. 

She thinks the ceasefire is worth it even though Predain will presumably only accept it if it's to their advantage. You can't build trust without risking anything. It does seem very likely that Ma'ar will use the purchased time for spying, but that too doesn't have to be a bad thing; she wants Predain to believe that Tantara has some game-changing new options, though ideally they wouldn't know her exact location or that she's the full extent of the new options. They're going to have to believe something has changed for a negotiated peace. 

Is mindreading routine enough around here that it's unworkable to turn some of the prisoners and send them back as spies?

Urtho seems dubious of this plan but...sure, he's not willing to risk the communication-spell but he can try to send a messenger with a letter. Ma'ar probably won't have an envoy murdered. It's not the...kind of person he wants to see himself as...and, well, he probably genuinely doesn't want there to be a war. It's just that he probably isn't going to accept peace terms that include, say, Tantara getting to have any say over his country's laws on using blood-magic to build aqueducts, and Tantara is kind of not okay with them continuing to do that. 

Predain has fewer Mindspeakers than Tantara, but Urtho suspects that Ma'ar is quietly recruiting them as mercenaries from elsewhere, and making very efficient use of whatever number he has. Spies who can pass, ethnically and culturally, as Predain natives might not garner enough suspicion to warrant a routine Thoughtsensing check, if they're in low-level positions, but he wouldn't want to confidently bet on it. He would be very impressed if Iomedae can manage to turn anyone; everyone they've captured so far seems to think the sun rises and sets with Adept Ma'ar. 

Well, Tantara's not going to get terms where they can ban blood-magic in Predain, realistically. Tantara should try for pre-war borders, and then she'll go over to Predain and see what can be done to get them to cut it out with the blood-magic. It does seem like a horrendously bad idea to her, and a situation well worth addressing, but it does not seem likely to work out as part of the peace terms for this war which Tantara isn't winning. They can throw it into their demands but she wants Urtho to have realistic expectations here, and those are that pre-war borders would be very good news. 

Sigh. Urtho doesn't look happy about it, but she is clearly the expert on this and he's not going to argue. 

What are her spying abilities. Do any of her incredible magic artifacts give her some abilities to get better intelligence on what Predain is doing and how their King - who presumably is the one who has final say, not Ma'ar - is thinking about the war? 

Not really. She can send someone with the ring that splits injuries between them and they can communicate that way, but the rest of the tools she'd use for espionage she unfortunately does not carry on her person during combat, and paladins don't generally get spells for deception or illusion. Deception and illusion are very useful but so are knowingly not dealing in them.

She thinks that the thing to do is turn some of the prisoners, which she really expects to be possible; it seems like Tantara might be at a disadvantage at it, what with having started the war and what with the history of mistrust and discrimination. She is hoping that she can offer, instead, a perspective where a war of conquest in Tantara serves Predain's people not at all and it's in their interests to help her get a peace that leaves Predain strong and independent but inside its pre-war borders and done with all the conquering. She'll know more once she's spoken to them, though.

Urtho can arrange it, then. It's going to be another Gate; the prisoners aren't kept anywhere near his Tower.

They don't have any mages, at least not above very weak Master-potential; mages are difficult to capture alive at all and even more difficult to hold securely. Ma'ar, of course, does it with compulsions. 

Then she will go and meet Tantara's prisoners of war. She'll need an interpreter, which is seriously inconvenient for something like this, but it seems worth attempting anyway.

It's going to take another couple of candlemarks for Urtho's people to make this happen, by which point it's getting dark; it seems like they don't have to take important visitors to see the prisoners very often. 

The Predain prisoners are put up in what looks like hastily erected and equally hastily converted troop barracks, guarded with permanent mage-barriers. The conditions aren't amazing – it's further north and much colder than the region around Urtho's Tower, and the building is not perfectly airtight and is heated only by wood fires – but it looks like they're trying their best to provide amenities. 

The prisoners are clearly a different ethnicity from anyone else she's met so far; they look much closer to Chelish, actually, with dark hair and eyes and olive-tanned skin tones. Most of them are young. They all seem terrified of their captors, and of her. 

Iomedae's escort asks if she would prefer to speak to someone high ranking? 

How about they tell the prisoners that she is a powerful agent of a distant god, here to try to negotiate an end to the war, and wants to talk to them to understand what the people of Predain would desire from a peace, and then ask if anyone is willing to speak to her. 

The prisoners are SO SUSPICIOUS. That doesn’t make any sense and is almost certainly some kind of trick to get them to give away information about Predain’s strategy and what if she’s a Thoughtsenser.

It’s not like any of them know very much about Predain’s strategy, especially not current information. It’s also the only even slightly interesting thing to happen in months. And…if it’s real, somehow, then it’s not like the war is one they chose, and (since the prisoners are given approximately no updates) for all they know they’re homeland is losing it.

They confer among themselves in the Predain tongue and eventually send forward a representative. She is young and sharp and quick-tongued, and so so suspicious, and not intending to volunteer any information including in her thoughts until she’s gotten some better idea of who the powerful stranger is and who her god is and what she WANTS.

Iomedae likes her immediately. "First off, tell her that since I'm relying on the interpreter she should not assume you are not lying to me about what she's saying, though I don't think you are, and I also will find it difficult to substantively protect her if you don't like what she says to me, though if she thinks we'd have a significantly more interesting conversation were she to be subsequently released to her own people I will figure out how to get that done. Because of those constraints I am not going to bother asking about anything sensitive or especially related to the war. But I have never been to Predain, I can't safely go right now, and if I'm going to arrange a peace I need to know what I'm trying to protect. So I just want to know - what no one here would have told me, that everyone knows back home."

This is not at all what she was suspecting. She blinks suspiciously at Iomedae. 

"Ask her why some foreigners' god even cares," she says tightly. "None of the gods ever did anything for us before." 

This is relayed. 

"Well, Aroden used to be human Himself before He ascended, so He's a bit less useless about confusing things. Though to be clear with you, while He empowered me, I don't think He's paying any attention here and I don't think He can, it's too far away. I am doing this because I want the war to stop, and I'm using Aroden's magic because He gave it to me to use as I saw fit."

She is pretty sure that gods that used to be human are not a thing and that story is some additional layer of baffling ruse. It doesn't really matter, though. 

"Why do you care?" she spits back. "If you're from so far away." Most people want to suck up to Urtho. She's not quite bold enough to say that part out loud. 

"Mostly I find as many people I like when I'm travelling as I do if I stay at home. I wouldn't say that it's all of them but it's enough."

It's just words, of course. It's probably still some kind of trick. But - how dangerous a trick can it possibly be, if she's careful not to even think about what little she knows of their strategic resources? ...And there's something that feels oddly nourishing, about being asked just to talk about her homeland and why it's worthy of protection. 

Predain was always poor. While Tantara was lucky, in its climate and its terrain and its gods and of course in having Urtho, Predain was always a country too hilly and dry for good farmland, with a corrupt nobility, and warlords and bandits on three out of four borders. They had little to offer in trade and so the caravans passed them over. Some of their best and brightest had gone to Tantara before and trained under Urtho, Ma'ar was hardly the first, but - no one ever came back. Why would they, when they had found such greener pastures. 

But the people of Predain were always tough, and determined, and ready to work hard as soon as anyone offered them a way for hard work to actually build a better future. And Ma'ar was the one who offered that, when he left behind the wonders of Urtho's Tower and came back to found mage-schools and train engineers and soon they had aqueducts to bring water to their crops, and soon enough after that Ma'ar was advisor to the new young King, who was certainly better than their last King, and had the strength of will to actually enforce their laws and make their roads safe rather than trade bribes with the rest of the nobility. 

And Ma'ar brought them, not wealth - not yet - but stability. Ma'ar bought them a country where none of their children would starve, and if some of that price was paid in blood, well, who is Tantara to talk. They have thousands of mages, and did they ever offer their aid to help Predain build aqueducts to water their crops, or roads to transport their goods, or even just their weather-magic, no they did not.

Urtho is one of the most powerful, and wealthiest, men in the world. He could have chosen to help. He thought that Predain wasn't his country and wasn't his problem, and he even tried to convince Ma'ar not to go back, because Predain was backward and he would be unhappy there, which when you think about it really sounds like believing Predain doesn't deserve to be helped. And then Ma'ar came back to his people anyway, and she remembers it, remembers when he came into power and she learned that there would be a scholarship for her to go to school, because Ma'ar knew that if they were to be strong as a country, all of their best people would need to be educated, even if they had grown up as farmers. She went to the capital, and she didn't need to fear being raped or having all her coin stolen by the corrupt city guard because now in order to sign up they needed to agree to compulsions not to do that, and she learned to read and figure and keep a merchant's books and for a few brief years she thought her children would have a future that was better than the childhood she had known. 

And for that Urtho started a war. 

Predain was conquering many other countries, its neighbors. That has left her worried that part of what made Predain great, to its people, was that its borders were expanding, that it will not seem satisfactory if it is obliged by a peace deal to stay within them.

They weren't conquering countries! All right, fine, the tiny Kingdom of Avalle might arguably be counted as a country, but they'd been through three different Kings in a decade and were constantly having civil wars and they didn't do anything to stop the bandits who would fling around blood-magic, which even if it wasn't technically in Predain territory was plenty capable of wrecking their weather. And everywhere else was stateless territory, or landholdings ruled by bandit warlords, and their children were starving too and their people were dying of pointless violence.

She knows people from the recently-'conquered' lands. Half of them were more or less voluntary annexations though of course it's complicated when there's no one leader who speaks for the people in a region, or when their closest thing to a leader was someone everyone would be happier to see dead. But certainly everyone she's met is glad to be a citizen of Predain, even if it was very frightening at the time and they might wish some of the details had gone down differently. 

She has no idea if the King would be willing to sign a treaty that they can't expand. Mostly they just want secure borders and she has little context on the strategic situation there (and is carefully not thinking about the few pieces she does know that might still be relevant a year later.) 

Iomedae would make a lot of inferences from that, if she were thinking through what attitudes about conquest in Predain are and how much they reflect the attitudes of its leadership versus what they found it convenient for their soldiers to believe, but she's not doing that right now. People can tell when you're carrying their words off to sweeping conclusions, unless you dissemble, and she can but generally doesn't. She's just trying to make sense of this woman, her world, what she'd want from a peace. 

"Have you met Ma'ar? Do you know people who have worked closely with him?"

She hasn’t met Ma’ar.

She knows people who've met him. They say he’s brilliant, of course, and he’s very cautious and very competent, and sometimes it's frightening to work with him, not because he ever punishes his subordinates for innocent mistakes but because - they say - he's always ten steps ahead of everyone else, and he holds his people to very high standards (even if they say he holds himself to even higher standards) and he's not shy about clearly informing you of all the mistakes that he thinks you made. 

He cares, though. Even people who haven't met him believe that, and the friends of hers who have met him came away believing it even more strongly. He believes that Predain deserves everything that Tantara already has, and no one was going to swoop in from outside and give it to them out of the kindness of their hearts, and so if they were ever going to have that, someone would have to fight for it. And lots of people could have fought for it but Ma'ar is the person who did. 

- not alone, of course, he's surrounded himself with competent dedicated allies, but - she's pretty sure no one would have had enough hope to really try to change anything, if not for him. 

How do people in Predain feel about Tantara? It was suggested to her that people in Tantara don't think much of their northern neighbors.

Well, Tantara seems like a nice place to live, for the people lucky enough to have been born there? ...Or lucky enough to study there. Ma'ar apparently thought very highly of Urtho right up until Urtho started a war. 

She's not sure about the gryphons. They say Urtho is a peaceful man but the gryphons are bloodthirsty and seem to take joy in murdering Predain's people and they're terrifying. But the gryphons aren't anyone else's fault except Urtho's. 

(Mostly she hasn't really thought about it. Tantara was a distant fantasy that didn't matter to anyone's real life, and then they were an existential threat, and there was never really anything in between. She doesn't say that, though.) 

Then they can talk about other, lower-stakes things. What was the school she went to like? What would she buy if she were very rich, after the war? What foods should Iomedae try when there's peace and she can visit Predain? What songs do they sing? What gods do people pray to?

She liked her school! She doesn't really have any points of comparison, but her teachers were clever and seemed like they cared and they didn't treat her worse because she was a girl. 

She would buy...land by one of the rivers, probably. Not for herself, she never wants to be a farmer again, but she has younger brothers and cousins, and it would make her grandparents happy. She would buy a pile of those shield-talismans, the cheaper low-powered ones that won't hold off an attack with a sword but will save your life if a tree falls on you, she'd buy fifty and make sure her whole family had them. If she had anything left she'd buy - nice clothes, probably, she's never really thought about it before. 

She doesn't have strong opinions about food, but her favorite dish is catfish wrapped in burdock leaves with blackberries for flavor and baked in a ground-oven. 

...She's never prayed to any god. She can't think of anyone she knows who has.