"We do it over the lake, generally, so it won't kill you if you time it badly - the paladins just take the hit, they can't Feather Fall - and we Dimension Door or Teleport up, because it's more fun the higher you go. If you go as far up as there's air to breathe it's - a whole minute, on the way down, seeing the world get bigger."

Okay as described that does actually sound kind of fun.

"It seems - arguably kind of wasteful? Not in your context but possibly distractingly so in this one. I dunno."

"Spare spells, first thing in the morning, right before you refresh them. You've got to hold some Teleports back for emergencies and you won't on the typical day have emergencies.

And some people think it helps you improve faster, that it's like combat in - pushing you on the edge you need to be pushed along.

And - so, obviously any crusade is going to have some difficulty relating to the fact that resources are constantly scarce and also that living under constant scarcity is very bad for people. My previous commander - hadn't needed to eat since she was twenty-five, and when she was younger she wouldn't eat, because that was food that could be going to starving people. But - but food is part of how human beings relate to one another, extend hospitality and recognize it in another, and war is hard enough on ordinary human impulses without deliberately ripping out some of the ones it wouldn't, actually, be all that costly to preserve. The good grows inside us in complicated ways, and most people can't just stop caring about ... whether their life feels good to live, feels good to imagine continuing to live, feels like it could one day be good."

It's okay, she wants to say, my life has never felt good to live. But that would be an obvious ploy for sympathy, and she would like to not be any more pathetic than she's already being.

She can't think of anything immediately better to say instead, though.

"I actually don't personally have spare teleports most days, they trade off against all of the other spells that I do by mimicking instead of poetry. I guess Ember and Nenio often do, though we try to use a lot of them for supply stuff."

"Well. It doesn't have to be skydiving, but - it's okay to take a break, when things get tough."

"Can the break consist of complaining, if I take three minutes about it and then get out of your hair. I feel like complaining would be restorative."

"Go ahead."

"I miss my daughter."

- wow okay that's a lot of feelings this was probably a tactical error.

" - wow, yeah, no kidding, I bet you do."

"She's a slave in the Thanelands and I haven't seen her in almost eight months and I don't know whether she's okay or whether it's safe enough to bring her to Drezen."

" - okay, that was too much complaining, I ought to go look for rocks now."

" - have you tried scrying her?"

".....not since before I had teleports."

- there's sort of a ridiculous realization, here, that she has been locking the fact of having a daughter away in a box, and not looking in at it for far too long, because looking at it or thinking about it hurts, and now that the problem has been mentioned it actually seems like there are probably dozens of ways to solve it, and like there have been dozens of ways ever since she took Drezen. It's only that by the time she could solve it, she was out of the habit of looking at it, because looking at it hurt too much. 

"- well, I guess I'd propose that you scry her, and then maybe we Teleport over and get her, and if you're worried about her safety we have a permanent demiplane now? Or, uh, the place where you found me, which is accessible only to you."

"I guess I think the floating island is probably pretty safe anyway."

"...I don't really know why I had to have that conversation, but - thanks, I guess, and I should probably be working on that, too."

"Let me know if there is anything I can do."

"Yeah."

All right, that's enough unscheduled feelings for one day. She's going to spend the rest of the day working on scheduling a meeting between various people about the legal reform stuff, and also checking whether the copy of her charter is back from Nerosyan (it isn't), and at the end of the day she can scry Zara.

She's sleeping on the floor of a longhouse with some sheep, by the time that Korva gets around to it.

Okay.

Korva could keep ignoring this. Zara is not in immediate physical danger. It is deeply unfair to Zara, who would like more than anything in the world to live on a floating island of eternal springtime with three baby dragons and a bunch of mimics and children who braved the elements to help fight demons and help save the world, and would probably not like to keep being enslaved in the Thanelands. It would place her in the same category as Greybor, or Woljif's dad, and Marit won't think very much of her now that she's revealed more of her serious personal problems to him in a fit of temporary madness, but it is an available option.

...why, exactly, is she tempted to do that. She loves Zara more than anything in the world. She's been taking care of her all alone since she was sixteen years old, working as many odd jobs as she could in order to keep feeding her. She did everything she could not to be separated from her when they were captured. She became a skald and then a raider in order to protect her. Everything in her life, in the ten years between getting expelled from school and being made Knight Commander of the Fifth Crusade, has been ordered towards keeping Zara safe and cared for and happy. Drezen is not actually so unsafe that she's tried to do anything about the dozens of other children who live here now, between the Neathers and the Wintersun refugees and the kids who ran away from their orphanage.

So - why?

Well, if she goes and gets Zara, she will have to explain - everything. She's a different person than she was six months ago. ...Zara probably thinks she's dead, given she hasn't come home at the end of the raiding season, and she still doesn't know what happened to the rest of the raiding party. She would have to accept that everything is different now and nothing can ever go back to being the way it was before. She didn't particularly like how it was before, of course. 

She might have to explain some of the things that happened before six months ago to everyone else. Or she might not! Honestly if she told Zara that they needed to not tell anyone anything about themselves or their history, Zara would be perfectly capable of following this instruction. This would be kind of absurd of her but it is, technically, an option.

She would have to have feelings. A lot of feelings. The feelings would come out of the box, and she wouldn't be able to put them back. She's not sure whether she would be able to stand having so many feelings, or what failing to stand them might entail. If she turns into a nonfunctional wreck overnight, the crusade could very well buckle with her. 

It doesn't really make a lot of sense to predict that leaving Zara and herself better off would make her less capable of carrying out her duties. She does seem to be terrified that it will. 

She doesn't want people to see her. She doesn't want Zara to see her and form opinions about her, or think she's cool, or alternatively hate her, or alternatively see what a wreck she actually is underneath the thing that she appears to be. She doesn't want anyone else to see what kind of person she's been, either. The bulk of her forces need to see her as - a figure out of legend, and not the disaster she is. She doesn't have a close enough relationship with any of her companions that she wants them to know anything about the kind of person she really is, any more than they already do. She trusts most of them with her life. But with her self? With not laughing at or pitying or turning in disgust from the thing that the noble hero really is, underneath all of the magic and legend and dramatic wind and butterflies?

Except, apparently, she also does want someone to see, or she wouldn't have said anything to Marit.

None of this is an adequate justification for wronging Zara this much. The fact that Zara doesn't know she's being wronged doesn't make it the same as being decent to her. 

She teleports in, before the scry cuts out. And then she teleports back to her room, with a groggy and confused child in her arms. It is, after all, that simple.

" - mom? What - where - ?"

"Complicated questions."

"I will answer all of them eventually but I'm not sure I can answer everything, right now. The raiding party died, I think. I got drafted to fight at the worldwound indefinitely. I have been promoted and I think the worldwound might be my personal responsibility right now. I have killed a lot of things and I can teleport now, which is what happened just now. I think it's safe here. We are in the crusader city of Drezen, right now, complicatedly in Mendev, and are crusading to close the worldwound."

"A lot of things have happened. A lot of very weird things. I have - a lot of things I need to do, and am going to need to keep doing, and a lot of things I need to show you in the morning. But I'm here now. And you're safe. Unless the demons kill us all."

She is maybe going to need to just hold Zara, for a while, before she can say the rest of what she needs to say. But she's here.

Marit goes paladin-baiting in the evening, when he's done training soldiers for the day. Puts on a new face for it; it's well known that Marit, here to train the soldiers, is a Lawful Good Iomedaen fighter and it'd be weird for him to be asking basic questions about Her religion.

...he probably shouldn't think of it as paladin-baiting when the thing he wants is information they should be happy to give him, about their goddess. 

He finds Seelah and some of the people she's eating with.

"Are Lawful Good gods really different from each other?" he opens with. "It seems like once you're Lawful and Good there's not much else to vary in except, like, what hobbies you have."

"Now there's a question! I wish we had a cleric of Erastil around to give the competition a fair shake. I, for one, though, am not about to hang up my sword and take up farming."

"Is that what Erastil says you should do? He's the god of farming, so he thinks everyone should be a farmer? And Iomedae's the god of fighting so she thinks everyone should be a warrior?"

"Mm, I don't think it's quite that simple. I'm no theologian, but I'd say the world needs farmers and fighters both. Otherwise we'd all be fighting evil on empty stomachs, which I have to say, I don't recommend doing unless you have to. But Erastil's church has more to say about growing crops and raising families, and Iomedae's is more concerned with protecting those people from everything else that's out there."

"And neither of them have anything to say about which you should be?"