"I can probably figure out something reasonably clever with contingencies in case it does."

"I'd expect a contingent Break Enchantment to get nearly everything, though I didn't get a good look at the weird one. I don't think Alfirin did either."

"I did! Afterwards, I mean. Eidetic memory. It's very clever – a sort of modified spell resistance that also acts on the subject's own magic and scales with power of the spells he can cast. I was thinking I should rederive it for you, actually. You wouldn't have your spells, but you don't need them, and there aren't many things that grant spell resistance that durable, it lasts until it's removed."

"Huh! I'd be delighted. Well, I'll want to see it on a lot of other people first but if it works as advertised I'll eventually be delighted."

"In exchange, I think I've got thirty years of gossip to catch up on."

"There's not really that much to it. Iomedae and Alfirin were involved, as young women - before Iomedae was appointed Knight-Commander of the whole Crusade - and Iomedae decided that such attachments were inconsistent with her efforts to become a Lawful goddess while still alive, and Alfirin left the Crusade, which grieved Iomedae greatly, and Alfirin came back eventually and they have both been meticulously professional ever since, but it's the meticulous professionalism of people who have to keep being meticulous."

He shakes his head.

"I'm not surprised that they were involved, you know. I knew that. It's just that – when you think about goddesses, or even the sorts of people who grow up to become goddesses, you'd expect them to be better at it."

"At dissembling? Iomedae is after years of study solidly all right at it but those of us who've known her all along can still read her."

"Oh, no. At talking to people."

"Oh, she's spectacularly good at talking to people. She'd have to want to."

"Then maybe talking to people isn't the skill in question. Both of them. Alfirin's also very competent generally."

"My guess is that Iomedae is worried that if she thinks too much about it, she'll have a realization which will make the current situation untenable. The current situation is important to maintain. Therefore, better not to think about it. - this is in general a catastrophically dangerous way to reason, though I acknowledge it's less dangerous in this specific case." 

"...Gods. I hope she doesn't make a habit of it."

"Of course not! We'd have lost!"

"You'd think having an awkward conversation wouldn't be more horrifying to contemplate than all of Avistan being overrun by walking corpses."

" - now I think we're talking at cross purposes. The current situation isn't damaging the Crusade; they're worried that poking it too much might be, so they're not poking it too much."

" – huh. Leaving this much unspoken seems more dangerous to me than – well, than most alternatives, really."  

“Did it go wrong in your timeline?”

– Most answers he could give here seem disrespectful to his Alfirin and her reasonable expectation of privacy. 

"As far as I can tell they never spoke of it again."

He shakes his head tiredly. "After the Crusade maybe I'll tell Iomedae she's out of excuses. If Alfirin hasn't vanished to be untraceable by all magic."

" – I hadn't thought of it in these terms before, but it does seem like everyone in your command structure" – thinks emotional intimacy is a kind of tree, and not a nice tree, one of those uncanny deformed ones you get around planar rifts – "...is very self-sufficient."

"- most of us are dead. Or - most of the people we grew up serving alongside."

Élie's first reaction is to take offense, but there's just no polite way to say that he bets he'd win a dead friends by volume contest. 

"I only have my own experience to go by, of course, but I'd expect the opposite effect."

"It's not that people don't get close to each other. But if you're not able to keep going when they're gone, well, you probably fell off a long time ago."

"There's the closeness of comrades-in-arms, but – are you married?"