"- makes sense. I can tell you how Iomedae does it but it's not as if anyone else in our world could repeat it, and I don't know if you can either. She'll, after a significant victory, have songs commissioned about it, and issue high-level adventurers awards, and write Kings letters of commendation for the heroism of various subjects of theirs, and when she goes back to Oppara she'll arrange a parade, and some arena sparring against ludicrously powerful summoned outsiders to show off, and then she'll badger 'em for more money. And she circulates churches, recruiting, though she's - more careful about that. You want to get all the people who should fight and none who were just overawed and have no business being there... if you're us. You might not have that luxury."

"My current policy is, honestly, to accept everyone and then deal with the Iomedans - and Regill, in other cases - making faces at me about it. But - I don't do any of that other stuff, right now, so 'everyone' consists almost entirely of people who have made the journey to Drezen themselves to ask permission to join the crusade. Which includes some weird people - treants, Aivu, a troop of literal mimics - but they're all people who put some work into getting to us."

"We, uh, only have about five people who are consistently with us and capable of casting teleport, right now. It's possible that I should be spending at least some of those resources on recruitment efforts in Absalom or Oppara or Westcrown - none of which I've ever been to - but obviously that trades off against fighting demons, scouting areas to advance to in the spring, using those teleports for logistics - I suppose maybe we could try to buy food and recruit at the same time. And it would be pretty clearly going over the heads of some of my advisors from Nerosyan, who I am pretty sure want to handle a bunch of those things themselves - sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for bad, but they're the people Queen Galfrey sent me."

"Lady Konomi would have a fit," says Daeran, who's been investigating the mansion, but apparently also listening. "You should do it."

" - I can't make much in the way of guesses about the political situation in Nerosyan, but - the inevitable situation of any successful Knight-Commander is that they end up amassing a force much larger than the army of the country that sponsored them, and personally loyal to them, and that will tend to make their sponsors nervous, and also you're not going to close an Abyssal rift without a force that in fact is much larger than the forces loyal to the government of Mendev of all places, and it makes sense they'll be a little bit squirmy about that but you in fact do have to navigate that rather than let them push you around about it."

This observation visibly makes her uncomfortable. It isn't visible for very long, but it's there.

"Aranka could go recruiting in Absalom," she says to Woljif, entirely because she wants to look like she's saying it to someone and not because Woljif has any particular opinion on Aranka. "She has the skills for it, and keeps writing songs anyway."

"Aranka will do whatever interests her, and has no ability to identify military competence."

"So we'll get some people with better judgement to go with her. The fact that she doesn't technically work for us is arguably better, since Lady Konomi can't reasonably expect us to stop her."

"I will do it," says Daeran, solemnly. "For the sake of the crusade, I will go to all of the best parties in Absalom and talk up your heroic efforts."

"That's so generous of you, Daeran. Unfortunately, you've proven yourself completely indispensable. I will, however, write a letter to Queen Galfrey praising your heroism in particular."

" - sorry, Commander Marit. They're good suggestions, we're just tired. And, if I'm being honest, I don't particularly want to leave what forces we do have to face the cold and the demons alone, while I go off to try to win popularity contests. Maybe that's necessary, but my gut says the morale effects would be devastating right now."

Being terrified of having to try to go to foreign places and win popularity contests is probably completely unrelated. Definitely.

"You know your men," he says agreeably. "But crusades are a political game as much as a military one, annoying as this is to every person fighting in one because they truly believe in the cause and think that ought to be sufficient."

"As Lady Konomi keeps telling me."

She thinks about the way Lann's face twists in disgust at any suggestion that they spend money on luxuries, while anyone in the camp goes hungry.

"Well, we can certainly write more letters, and I'll think about who's worth spending a teleport on to do recruiting in person. Regill, do you want, uh, a letter of commendation sent to her Majesty Abrogail Thrune II?"

"No," he says, coldly. "But it costs the crusade little to do so. Setsuna Shy has unambiguously earned recognition, if you're looking for other candidates."

"Lady Konomi is Nerosyan's delegate to you? Or yours in Nerosyan?"

"Nerosyan's delegate to us. We don't, uh, have a separate delegate to Nerosyan." It honestly did not occur to her before this conversation that she could send one there. Or anywhere, really.

"It's your first season!" he says sympathetically. "But you want one, so you aren't only hearing whatever one specific person with her own agenda wants you to hear about the court politics there. It doesn't have to be one of your own useful people, you can get a long way just with some relation of Count Daeran's who doesn't always see eye to eye with her, or something. - the Shining Crusade functions more or less like a state, which is to say we have diplomatic and espionage operations in most countries whose politics might matter to us, but we've had time to set that up and it's not really your first priority. But in Nerosyan - yeah, I'd think about getting some people this winter."

"That makes sense, yeah." Daeran doesn't have many relations anymore, she doesn't think, but maybe Anevia can find someone. At least she's pretty sure Anevia knows what she's doing.

She's suddenly very tired. Or, no, she's been tired for as long as she can remember. She's suddenly very aware that she's tired. And she feels a little bit sick about being in charge of any of this, again.

"This is all invaluable advice. I'm sure you're aware of that, by this point in the conversation, but - you see what we mean about lacking experienced people."

"War is among the most complicated of human endeavors. The fanciest richest best-educated kingdoms in the world" which Mendev very much isn't, "sometimes get a bloody nose in their first real war in a generation, because there's so many things you only learn by doing them. You're not going to know everything; the important thing is to be a fast learner.

Do you want to take a closer look at the headband, so you feel comfortable wearing it - it really helps, we pass it around when we debate things -"

"...yeah, I should do that."

She detects magic and looks at the headband, seeing if she can see how the magic winds around it.

It's not, fundamentally, a different sort of thing than a lesser headband, just done with such precision that three spells can be woven into one without interfering. It's a little hard to trace them all because it radiates magic so brightly.

She looks at it for a while, but she isn't really looking at it, after the first half a minute or so. She's looking at herself.

She doesn't want to put the headband on. Why is that?

Well, in the first place - she doesn't think that these people are demons, or controlled by demons, and if this is a dream, it's a very impressive one. Any demon that could do it would clearly need to have read her mind very thoroughly before it could have gotten any of the strategically relevant information that she's at this point freely giving to Marit. Any demon that could do it ought not need to trick her into wearing a cursed headband; it could just dominate her. She does know stories - legends, really, it's hard to say whether there's any truth at all to them - of things that demons and other creatures can only do to those who freely accept their gifts, and she knows other stories about what cursed items can do, or items that have their own wills, like Finnean (who's been sitting quietly with Arue, this whole time; she really ought to remember to include him more). And if it were a trap - it's almost certainly not, but if it were - that's about the one remaining place that it could be, at this point. But she's accepted gifts from strange people before. Not everything she wears was looted off a corpse, or found in a dark cave. Usually, she finds her own ability to check the item's magical signature to be enough.

In the second place, the reason she does feel the impulse to put it on is not that she thinks it will improve her ability to think about important questions, or that she really wants to be more mentally capable. She is, instead, embarrassed to be so ill-prepared, and feels like refusing to wear it would make her look like an idiot, who Marit will think poorly of. And maybe she really will be being an idiot, but - she shouldn't make important tactical decisions out of embarrassment. It isn't safe to reason like that; it makes her too easy to manipulate. She is newly aware, right now, of just how much she's allowed people to manipulate her by making her feel like an idiot.

In the third place - 

She's afraid of it. That doesn't make sense, does it? She's had people hit her with Fox's Cunning and Owl's Wisdom and Eagle's Splendor simultaneously before, and it shouldn't feel particularly different than that. And she's had magic wine while wearing her current headband, an alluring charisma one she looted off a succubus; that ought to feel pretty similar again. Having an artifact headband would feel like that all the time, but this one is a loan, so it ought to be exactly the same feeling as the spells, only a little bit more intense. She's only ever piled all of the spells on herself before combat, but this isn't entirely unlike a combat situation. She's trapped in another world, and unsure whether she can go back. This is exactly the sort of problem that having more intelligence and common sense might fix.

So it's just that her reasons for doing it are bad ones, then. It isn't, separately, the sort of thing she'd normally expect to be a bad idea.

She takes her current headband off, and puts the artifact headband on.

It is fairly immediately obvious to her why she didn't want to wear it. She's exhausted, and being more cunning and wise and charismatic than almost everyone who's ever lived doesn't make you any less tired. It makes some thoughts come easily enough that you can think them in spite of being tired - but then you have no excuse not to try to think of the next thing, and the questions that remain are even more draining than the last ones. In an emergency situation, you can set that aside and try to push on through to the limits of your mental abilities anyway - but the thought of living her life like that, trying to convince people that she's limited by her ridiculously high mental abilities instead of by her steadily building exhaustion and self-loathing - well, that's how she lives her life anyway, really, but the higher the mental abilities, the higher the mental cost of pretending that your actual limits aren't based on tiredness and emotional strain, or of pretending that every other part of you isn't fraying at the edges.

But it won't be her life. It'll be ten minutes. She can be a hero for ten minutes. She does it all the time.

"It is a nice headband," she says. "All right, where were we?"

" - it's not so you can keep up with me, you were doing fine at that. It's so you can notice any important respects in which we were - considering the wrong questions entirely."

"Hmm."

Well, what are the questions they're asking in service to? The point of a crusade is to conquer, not to just survive; otherwise they would just hold the existing edges of the wound. She needs a plan to win, and doesn't have one. Up to this point, she's either been following orders - Galfrey told her to take Drezen, so she did - or reacting to other people's requests, either those of her advisors and companions, or those of people who have come to her for help. She's been treading water, mentally, letting all of the large-scale strategic decisions be made by Galfrey and the pack of Mendevian vultures. 

There's an argument that this is reasonable. Galfrey has been holding the worldwound for a century; Korva has only been fighting at it since Galfrey gave her command six months ago, and has no previous military experience. But Galfrey hasn't given her further instructions, besides that they need to take the rest of the worldwound territory back from the demons, and nobody else has actually managed to take any territory back since the wardstones were first placed.

There's also the obvious fact that she's treating the crusade like this because, on some level, she's no different from Woljif or Daeran. She didn't want to be here, and was cornered into commanding the crusade by Galfrey. But it was Korva who promised the angels in the Kenabres wardstone that she would see them free, someday, and it was Korva who took up Lariel's sword and agreed to use it to see his mission through.

So if she's going to win, she'd better figure out how. She's just - well, she's scared that she's not allowed, is what it is, she's afraid that any attempt to treat the crusade like she's not just an extension of the will of Queen Galfrey will be taken as a rebellion, and she's scared of what happens if Galfrey decides she's a rebel. 

This will not be a good excuse for losing, not now that a couple thousand soldiers have pledged their lives to her cause.

"...well, I'm mostly finding myself thinking about how the crusade's relationship to Queen Galfrey seems confusing and unhealthy, and also that none of us actually have any idea how to close the wound yet, but I guess those still clear the bar of being things that I wasn't looking as clearly at earlier in this conversation."

Marit nods. "Those seem like - the right kind of thing, possibly. Do you want to talk with me about them or should I leave you and your comrades alone?"

Honestly Korva would like to stop talking to ANYONE, because the longer this conversation goes on and the more she turns her decisions over in her hands the more obvious it becomes that she has been a COMPLETE DUMBASS, and the headband is if anything increasing the fairly crippling embarrassment that comes with that.

"Well, approximately everything you've said has been helpful so far, so I'm going to guess that talking to you for a while longer will continue to be helpful."

"All right. Queen Galfrey's a paladin of Iomedae? But has a - tense relationship with your crusade?"