It is, overall, an efficient and productive day. 

They plan the withdrawals of Predain's troops back to their pre-war borders. (Agreeing on exactly where the pre-war border was takes a surprisingly long time. Maps are hard.) It's going to take days to actually execute, but they do now have a plan and a timeline. 

Ma'ar's current strategy is that, in exchange for being very very cooperative on the question of pre-war borders, Predain is going to push hard on concessions related to the religious cultists. They do not think that the temple order of Vkandis should be left to its own devices on disciplining the priests involved in the superweapon attack on Iomedae. Dropping a superweapon on one of their allies is incredibly unacceptable and they cannot sign off on a peace treaty with Tantara until it's verifiably the case that Tantara can commit to that peace on behalf of all of its citizens.

(The priest who had been at General Movat's camp is still in custody, under guard by Urtho's people, recovering from the injuries sustained during his arrest, and hasn't tried to Gate out but they don't really have a plan to stop him. This is, in the long run, not an acceptable state of affairs, especially given that the other mages involved seem to have...fled to another country? Can Tantara perhaps figure something out with the Ceej Empire that will result in having custody of them too?) 

The immediate danger is reduced, because all of Urtho's superweapons have now been, if not fully dismantled, at least disabled thoroughly enough that it would require Urtho's personal attention to repair them enough to use. 

(Urtho is sad about this.) 

Yes, but Vkandis has been known to miraculously set battlefields on fire sometimes. Also some of His worshippers are mages, with combat training, who can personally act as explosive weapons if they're willing to die for it, and they are officially under the Tantaran chain of command but Tantara currently has no control over their movements. Do they see why this is a problem. 

The church of Vkandis has temples in the Ceej Empire; they haven't previously worked closely with the temples in Tantara, it's far away and the two regions speak different languages, but the Tantaran senior priests currently speaking for their church are in agreement that what happened was unacceptable, and they can do their own investigation and track down the culprits. 

Ma'ar wants some of Urtho's non-religious trusted advisors involved, and he wants regular updates and the option to check up on their work in more detail - he's very worried that they still don't have any official answer on whether Vkandis, separate from His church, wanted Iomedae dead, and after the recent events with the Star-Eyed Goddess he expects the answer is yes - but he'll take it. 

Speaking of the Star-Eyed Goddess. Predain also does not really have the sense that the shamans of the Kaled'a'in tribes are...actually meaningfully a church, let alone a government body that can sign a treaty and be trusted to keep to it. Silverhorse was a clan elder.

It's unclear if any of the other clan elders were involved, or even aware – in fact, after Ravenwing's interrogation, it's pretty unclear whether she and Silverhorse, when they stepped into the room with Iomedae that morning, had the slightest idea what was going to happen next. But it remains the case that sometimes Her shamans will, apparently, if She orders it, do things like abandon their ally in the spirit world and slit her throat while she's unconscious, and their people's clan structure does not even in principle seem to be one that can commit to not that.

He doesn't expect Urtho to be happy about this plan, but Ma'ar thinks that anyone of the Kaled'a'in people - unless they are willing to renounce Their goddess, which would be incredibly understandable after this - should not be allowed in Urtho's Tower or within a five-mile perimeter of it. Ma'ar is aware that these are people Urtho considers close allies, even friends, but - it's a temporary measure, just until they have a longer term solution. 

(His longer term solution is that Aroden is going to kill the Star-Eyed Goddess. This is not exactly a de-escalatory thing to bring up, under the circumstances, and he also doesn't want to spread around too many details of what happened to Iomedae, just in case it gives someone the brilliant idea that she's been very inconvenient and is probably much easier than usual to kill right now.) 

There are some specific people who Ma'ar does think have the right to know. Including - and he's thought about this back and forth and sideways, and repeatedly come to the same very surprising conclusion - some servants of the gods. 

Bestet in particular. Iomedae prayed to Her for aid, and She answered. ...Possibly the church of the Nameless God can be trusted as well, but it's less clear there that the god was involved, as opposed to just individual followers of Her who happen to be good people. 

Still. The sort of people who, in the absence of specific divine revelations from their god, will quietly and without taking any credit for it do the legwork to make sure no one in Predain will starve this winter, are...probably also the sort of people who will at least hesitate if their god orders them to do something awful. 

The entirety of the first day is spent on negotiating troop withdrawals and temporary solutions to their god-followers problem. It goes well enough that Ma'ar is, not exactly comfortable, but willing to come out in person. Next up, they need to discuss any commitments that Predain is or isn't willing to make on the use of blood-magic and/or compulsions. Ma'ar also wants to bring up Iomedae's idea, of bringing in one of the more trustworthy temple orders to serve as independent enforcers, with sworn oaths to use compulsions only in the very specific cases of, for example, holding a mage who Vkandis might at any moment give a divine order to explode. 

He would like to meet Marlana, the priest of Bestet who Iomedae seemed to approve of, and with a representative of the church of the Nameless God. 

They can both be available for that. 

(Marlana should probably not take the fourteen-year-old girl who has attached herself to her like a limpet. She'll make plans for that tomorrow.) 

Good. 

Ma'ar checks up on all of the things that need checking-up on and delegates overnight duties and then goes to bed early and sleeps like a rock for nine candlemarks straight. He has, as usual with the headband, very vivid dreams. 

In the morning he goes to see Iomedae again. He's not going to give her a situation report unless she asks; he just wants to see how she's doing, and get a report from the Mindhealer on any changes over the last day. 

The godheadache is much more manageable now. She probably could do things, but she probably shouldn't. She has no idea how to check that she's thinking correctly. This situation is very  complicated. Trying to act like herself-not-brain-damaged and solve problems that would be hard for herself-not-brain-damaged while in fact brain damaged would be silly. 

 If she's lastingly brain-damaged she'll figure out new strategies appropriate to that, but that will be a grindingly slow process and she shouldn't try it on high stakes things. 

She still doesn't remember any of the events of the day where the Star-Eyed tried something; she remembers more of the previous weeks. 

Ma'ar will give her a very minimal update, then, in simple words.

Urtho's superweapons are all disabled; even if the ceasefire falls apart, which he thinks is very very unlikely at this point, the continent won't be destroyed. Peace talks are proceeding. Predain is now in the process of withdrawing their troops from Tantaran territory. It's going smoothly.

(There are all the usual hiccups that happen when you try to move very large numbers of people long distances and also a lot of those people are very tense and not entirely happy about the ceasefire or the withdrawal. But they are tactical problems and he can handle them and Iomedae doesn't need to worry about it.)

They don't yet have a comfortable long-term solution for containing the mages who take orders from gods, but they're working on it. He doesn't need Iomedae to try to make any decisions. For one thing, he has her headband. '

(He is seriously going to miss it once she wants it back.) 

He's going to represent Predain in person at the next round of peace talks, today, so he won't be here. But he trusts his people and their precautions, and he thinks she's safe here.  

(He's arranged around-the-clock scrying surveillance, to ensure that they find out right away if anyone involved in previous attacks on Iomedae, or closely adjacent to people who were involved, is suddenly unaccounted for, even if Tantara doesn't pass this along. If that happens, they have a contingency-plan to immediately get Iomedae out of Predain, and additional plans to, if it comes to that, track down the mage(s) and detain them using compulsions. He's not going to jump to that without warning Tantara first; he's pre-written multiple letters to Urtho and the temple of Vkandis and the temples of Bestet and the Nameless god and one addressed to 'the clan elders of the Kaled'a'in' even though they aren't exactly an organization. That's a lot of detail that Iomedae doesn't need to think about, though.) 

Anyway, he thinks that she should rest and listen to the Mindhealer, and it's okay if she needs a long time to recover. 

She relaxes very noticeably, hearing that. She doesn't try to formulate her thoughts into words and it's not clear if she realizes she's being mindread but she's very impressed with Ma'ar, and glad he's here, and she doesn't expect him to do anything horrible because she wasn't there to stop him, and she has always hated being incapacitated but this is much better than it could be. 

Shakat thinks that at some point it will start to be necessary for her to push herself a little, to try to complete thoughts even with her very badly damaged mind, so he can see what's going wrong and patch it.

Now does not quite seem like that time, not yet. He'll do some slow and careful work on patching the remaining glue-and-acetone-damaged pathways where it is obvious what needs to link up. 

The Healers will keep offering her painkillers at regular intervals, but start to ease down on the dose. With anyone else, they would be trying to coax her to get out of bed before the days of bedrest weaken her muscles too badly, but Iomedae doesn't actually seem to be having that problem. If she starts to seem alert enough to be bored, they can have someone play music or something, as a distraction that she doesn't actually need to think about. 

And negotiations over the use of blood-magic and compulsions! 

...Predain's default here is that they do not agree to any changes in their laws on internal use of blood-magic. This isn't an expression of intent – Ma'ar will confirm that they haven't, in fact, killed anyone for blood-power since the beginning of the ceasefire – but they are reluctant to add any further restrictions on their kingdom's ability to defend itself, when there are servants of gods running around exploding things. 

They will of course happily commit to following Tantara's laws while in Tantara's territory. They will commit to aggressively subduing and punishing anyone caught using blood-magic illegally; here is some thorough documentation on the protocols around legal use of blood-magic. While these are relatively new laws - replacing a previous baseline of no particular legal enforcement - and were likely not perfectly followed in practice, Predain will commit to following them stringently, and will agree to have Tantaran observers. 

There are actually very few legal uses of blood-magic while not actively at war (and not actively working on any large infrastructure projects, but they aren't). The subjects need to have been convicted in a criminal court of one of these capital crimes, and the purpose for the blood-magic use needs to have been approved by the King. This is not a commitment, but as a general prediction, Ma'ar thinks that if they reach a peace treaty with Tantara - and aren't under attack by rogue elements from within Tantara - then Predain will probably not be approving any such projects in the next year.

(Predain does want to obtain Tantara's aid with post-war reconstruction. Tantara is wealthier, and they had more mages to begin with and then far fewer deaths; Predain just returned a few hundred mages in the prisoner exchange. Anyway, Ma'ar has this as one of the agenda items for later.) 

What they are definitely not willing to do is ban the use of blood-magic in wartime. Yet. 

Tantara can have very thorough documentation of the laws there as well. Mages have to be specifically approved for the right to use blood-magic in combat at all, and to have orders that approve its use in this particular battle, and these are the requirements around asking for volunteers, and this is the process for investigating if, after the fact, anyone raises the concern that the process wasn't followed, or that it was but the blood-magic wasn't strategically justified and so the process ought to be updated. Tantara can have documentation of five such investigations. Ma'ar was only personally responsible for flagging four of them.

They will never ever use the citizens of another kingdom that bans blood-magic, like Tantara.

(For the sake of full honesty, here are four cases where Ma'ar suspects this rule was broken, during the war. There may be more that he doesn't know about - though the aura of blood-magic use is quite recognizable, and there are clear reporting processes for someone showing up as having used blood-magic when they shouldn't have. None of them would have made the difference between a Tantaran soldier living or dying, it was all in cases where they were fatally injured already and a Predaini mage was frustrated about the power going to waste. It was still definitely against their laws and the mages in question were removed from their positions and stripped of their rank.) 

It's not something Ma'ar is unwilling to budge on ever, to be clear. They can and should plan further diplomatic talks about the subject. Predain just - wants a lot more security than they currently have in Tantara's ability to police itself, and a lot more confidence in stable relations with the various gods and their various temple orders. Ma'ar thinks that the initial peace treaty with Tantara is time-sensitive, and doesn't want it held up on Tantara solving all of its problems, or on things that aren't even within Tantara's control. 

This is definitely a topic where any discussion would predictably turn into a disaster, back in Urtho's Tower. But Ma'ar is older now and at least slightly wiser, he's had more practice in working with other people even though those people weren't Tantaran and Predain is different. He's met Iomedae, who explained a lot of things that he really should have noticed sooner but was too much in a hurry to think through.

And he has her headband. It's very noticeable that, in conversation, he's reliably several steps ahead of the other participants, able to anticipate their reactions, to imagine trying out different arguments and guessing what will land best before he actually says it. 

...Ma'ar continues to be less than perfectly comfortable with this, especially because he thinks that Iomedae would have counterarguments that no one here is able to think of, because they don't have her world's history and her god's teachings. But they'll have Iomedae for the diplomatic talks later on, and she can argue then that Predain is setting off down a path that leads to ruin. Ma'ar isn't taking that option away from her, but he is, he hopes, decreasing the odds that, say, Vkandis will notice in Foresight that Predain is going to be hard-pressed to hold off another attack. 

Urtho isn't there in person, but he's receiving regular updates. 

Ma'ar did not used to be this good at, well, this. He's changed; he's grown. Urtho has some kind of emotion about that. 

...the clearest piece of that emotion is that he desperately wants the war to be over.

Tantara will accept Predain's proposal. They're definitely taking them up on sending observers to make sure Predain isn't lying about their use of blood-magic. 

Compulsions, then. 

Predain is not going to be willing to ban voluntary compulsions as a professional requirement for jobs that people can just...not do...if they would rather not be under any mind control. The voluntary compulsions are very specific; they ban a handful of actions that he is pretty sure everyone agrees are bad, like rape and murder. They don't force you to obey orders, or alter your motivation to be loyal to Predain's current King. 

(This is mostly because positive compulsions are much harder than negative compulsions to set up right and without loopholes and Ma'ar does not have infinite access to well-trained mages, but also his shoulder Iomedae has some loud complaints about the horrible incentives that might lead to. ...His internal Iomedae has kind of a lot of complaints. Ma'ar isn't yet convinced that voluntary compulsions are necessarily horrible, but...he sort of predicts that Iomedae will change his mind as soon as they can speak properly about it, and arguably that means he should change his mind in advance. It's still not something to mess around with in the middle of a war, though; for one, there's kind of a lot of anger and resentment on the Predain side, a lot of people didn't want the ceasefire, and it would be incredibly awkward if some of them went and raped some Tantaran villagers.) 

He's also not willing to phase out involuntary compulsions for the purpose of holding prisoners. Again, Tantara can have such thorough documentation of their protocols for this, and when it's considered legitimate; it's still illegal to throw people in prison under compulsions for things that aren't actually crimes, and there are systems for reporting violations of that.

(Even if perhaps most of the reports, and most of the impetus to finish those investigations and punish the lawbreakers, came from Ma'ar personally. It's really annoying how he keeps trying to make there be actual laws and processes and then finds himself still doing 90% of the work himself. ...His shoulder Iomedae has a reaction to that, too, but even with the headband he can't quite imagine Iomedae in realistic enough detail to figure out what it is. Frustrating. He should practice.) 

Anyway, Tantara is of course welcome to ask to see documentation of future investigations, and report any violations they become aware of. And he does want to move toward a system where a neutral body can do this type of enforcement for both kingdoms, rather than Predain's government having that power; he has an agenda note to discuss that next. But from Ma'ar's perspective, Tantara is right now discovering the downsides of not having any system that lets you reliably hold very dangerous people. It's important to Predain that, while they're not currently interfering with Tantara's handling of the priest-mages of Vkandis or the shamans of the Kaled'a'in, if one of the apparently-hostile gods decides to send an assassination attempt into Predain's territory, then they can protect themselves and also have a living prisoner to question. 

Setting up a neutral organization to handle this is going to take a while. It's not just agreeing to do it at all; they'll need to recruit, vet people, train people, and set up all of their own processes, including for catching and stopping any enforcers who aren't following the rules agreed on. Ma'ar is thinking that six months would be optimistic. Once they have a plan for such an organization, Predain will sign a treaty committing to changing their laws as soon as the organization is actually running. But not before then. 

The Tantaran negotiators on site are unhappy, but Urtho isn't actually inclined to argue with this.

It...meant a lot, that several hundred of their people who he never expected to see again are now home safely. 

Meeting with Marlana of the temple of Bestet, then. 

...She's bringing the kid. The kid has been shadowing her for the last couple of days while she tries to make herself helpful to Urtho's people, and she's learning a lot. Which she's going to need, if she wants to go back to the River Kingdoms and, not just win a war, but make there stop being so many wars. 

(Also she's very easily bored and has clearly never respected the rules told to her by an adult in her entire life and this is not a situation where she needs to be running around getting into trouble.) 

She'll be very quiet and won't interrupt. 

Ma'ar is very nervous about this, actually. He's not showing it in the slightest. In general it hasn't felt like the talks today called for the same kind of confident, invincible body language that goes over well in Predain, but here it seems appropriate. 

He puts up a dozen varieties of shield on the wall before nodding deeply to her. "Marlana, right?" 

Ooooooooooooh shiny. He's SO good at magic. Maybe he'll agree to teach her how to do magic like that and then she can win wars with MAGIC instead of with doing a lot of figuring about where her troops are. (Marlana has been making her learn her numbers properly. She's picking it up very quickly but it's still boring.) 

...he's also pretty cute. For a man who's kind of old. He's probably not that old...? 

(Shayeen has rather recently begun to notice boys and now she can't stop.) 

Mental cuff on the ear. <Down, girl. He's definitely too old for you. ...And he fancies Iomedae, but that's a secret.> 

Oooooooooooooh shiny a secret. She's only very very slightly jealous that she obviously can't compete with Iomedae. 

(This is also perhaps not likely to remain that much of a secret for very long.) 

Need was fully aware of that. This is going to be so entertaining. 

All right. Focus. They can sit down, and they can talk, and this is a step toward his goals, and particularly importantly, it's a step toward figuring out how Iomedae can be safer. 

"First, I wanted to thank you," Ma'ar says to her. "...And Bestet, I suppose, but I have less idea how to thank Her directly. But I think Iomedae would not have survived without either of your help."