Neither the dominate nor the other effect permits her to cast the spell, so she can't tell that the forbiddance is still up.

As a courtesy, her body is also going to cast a spell so that she'll still be rested in two hours as if she'd actually slept. And then she's going to telepathically tell her visitor - not, in fact, everything. All of Cheliax' secrets, but none of her own.

You had better be planning to stay awhile, she thinks as dryly as is possible under the circumstances. 

She does know all of Cheliax's secrets, and will tell them...does she have to tell them in a useful order.

Yes she does. That's what the dominate is for.

The voice in her mind observes that the sooner this is over the less likely it is that any of Lilia Ramona de Montero's enemies - or bosses, but that's a subset of the enemies, is it not? - will find out that anything out of the ordinary happened tonight.

And that plausibly being an interest of her mysterious possessing spirit, or they'd have removed her from this room, they may stop after two hours even if they have yet to get to the personal secrets. 

She doesn't say this, obviously. Doesn't even really think it. She gives, rapidly and in a useful order, the names and disguises of Cheliax's spies, its codes, its methods of secret communication, its secret negotiations with Razmir for a second front with Galt, its operations in Thuvia and in Molthune and in Andoran and in Galt and in Lastwall. She knows who in her own office serves other powers, and which spies from other nations Cheliax has discovered and is carefully watching. She knows the approximate strength of Cheliax's forces and where they are distributed. She knows Manohar's secret human-sacrifice-powered research project. (He wants to level people systematically. She respects this; it's real ambition. Hasn't gotten anywhere, though.) She knows a great deal about the protections and precautions of Aspexia Rugatonn and Abrogail Thrune, who is much less of an idiot than she was four years ago. She happens to know where Iomedae's artifact sword is. It's with the bloody imbeciles in Citadel Dinyar, who venerate it. They will all go to Hell all the same. She knows of not one but three portals from Hell active somewhere in Cheliax, through which devils occasionally rise to perform strange rituals. 

When she's through with Cheliax' secrets, which does in fact take most of the two hours even though the telepathy is quite fast, the presence departs her mind. The dominate remains, forcing her to pretend to be asleep, but in another handful of moments it's gone too.

She does feel well-rested. And the forbiddance is still there.

She gets out of bed.

She's not, in fact, going to tell anyone. They'd have more questions for her than she cares to answer. She probably wouldn't survive it. It could be a test, of course, of exactly that, but - it wasn't. Cheliax doesn't possess the resources to run that test. If Cheliax knew how to do that, Lilia herself would get to order it sometimes.

Cheliax, of course, may not survive whatever that thing tries. So some changes of plans are indicated. She wants to make sure, if she needs to depart on short notice, she has the most important things with her. 

(She does not bother feeling terrified, or violated, or desperately alone, or like the fate of Hell itself is on her shoulders. That is weakness, and she hasn't had time for weakness in a long time.)

...she does check around midmorning that they haven't already resolved that one project. It doesn't seem likely they'd have gotten it working and not told her, but - but there's one person who could do what was just done to her, and might, were she at liberty to do it and in doubt of Lilia for some reason.

They haven't resolved that one project.

Lilia orders people off to horrible fates until she feels better.

The very first thing Korva was told, when her masters first handed her a stick and an afternoon to spend seriously pretending it was a sword, was this: when you fight someone, and fight to win, you must always try to press forward. You will be tempted to pause, tempted to retreat, tempted to hesitate and call it being cautious. And you will lose, having let your opponent dictate the terms of engagement and lost your own momentum. So don't pull back, don't lose the flow of combat, and don't pause to think. Move.

....the people teaching her were, admittedly, rage warriors who fought in ways that she suspects are completely disjoint from what any sane, organized military force has ever done. But this is still how she fights, and this is still how she lives, any time she starts to feel the creeping need to rest. She constantly wants to pause, to breathe, to be sure that she's ready. But she has to ignore her own tiredness, to shelve any fear of what lies ahead, to move forward, forward, forward - or she'll stop moving, and not be in the position she needs to be in, and everything will be lost to her hesitancy.

So she does note, distantly, that she's already very tired of talking to people, after the morning conversation with the druid. And then she deliberately ignores it. She leans into the feeling that she has a plan that will work, and that she's going to execute it, before its moment passes.

She calls a general staff meeting for an hour from now, to discuss the new deployment plan. Her staff are going to hate how little notice she gives them for things, sometimes, but that's life. Or war. One of those things.

"We're pivoting," she says, when people have assembled. "We've been seeing unsustainable losses along the barrier, for the past few weeks, and today we're going to do something about it. There are two aspects to the problem. One is that there's a new demon ritualist, or the old one is back, and the demons are tougher now. I'm going to handle that one. The other is that we're trying to hold the barrier in winter, without our previous fortifications, and we don't have enough Endure Elements spells to send the bulk of our force patrolling. This second aspect is what this plan is concerned with."

"Our top wizards have secured a spell that allows the creation of a temporary extradimensional mansion. For anyone who hasn't been following our supply situation closely, this spell is where the majority of our recent extra food has been coming from. The plan is to keep using it for that, but not in Drezen. We're going to set up these mansions along the barrier, extend their duration using one of my spells, and maintain ten of them at a time along the barrier. We are going to station between one hundred fifty and three hundred men in each mansion, cycling them in and out of these mansions every few hours. This should allow us to field men without endure elements spells, allowing us to field many more soldiers a day."

     "Commander," says Captain Odan, "deploying a hundred and fifty men in each of ten stations would mean leaving Drezen itself virtually undefended."

"Getting to that. Since our endure elements spells won't be spoken for, once we're in position, we can use our existing casters to begin granting endure elements to our forces in Kenabres, allowing around a hundred of them to march up and join us every few days. It'll take some time, but we should be able to staff Drezen with newer troops. ...I guess that means we're starting out with more like a hundred men in each mansion, and then adding more later."

          "It's clever," says Dorgelinda, approvingly. "Have you accounted for the horses yet?"

"...nnnno. Let's talk about the horses."

There are, it turns out, a lot of things that have to be accounted for. Food and space for the horses. Mansion plans that can reasonably accommodate the number of soldiers they want to put in them. Coming up with new patrol schedules. Assigning everyone to specific mansions. Selecting locations for the mansion entrances. Making sure everyone's winter gear and other supplies are in order. Deciding whether this affects their timelines for telling everyone to cut it out with the theft and bribery. They are not, most of them, specifically her responsibility, but they need to be assigned to specific people if they're going to happen, and she assigns them. (It does, she thinks, affect their timelines for telling everyone to cut it out with the theft and bribery. If Galfrey won't get back to them about a charter, then she'll do what she has to without Galfrey signing off on it.) Regill and Dorgelinda are additionally assigned the responsibility of determining what the crusade ought to do with another ten thousand or twenty thousand or a hundred thousand gold, if it had it, and in particular what raising the most valuable fallen troops would directly trade off against, and at what point the raises become the best way of preventing additional deaths. Also they should get on that now. Like today. Because they're still not preserving the bodies.

She'd like to work on procuring more supplies. It feels easy, like something she won't get stuck on, like she knows how to carry her momentum through the task. But other people can procure supplies, and there are some things other people can't do. 

So she goes to the island, and tries not to pause to think about that, either.

Unsurprisingly, no one on the island actually has any idea what the material components of a reincarnation spell are, or what kinds of plants it uses, or where they could find out more about the plants or the spell in question. Madame Ozza, the alchemist, seems mildly intrigued, but not so intrigued that she's going to interrupt her current work on further cataloguing the magical properties of the island's soil. You might think, if you were naive and very silly, that Korva's followers on the island might want to be more helpful than random druids living in Chelish forests that she's never visited before and is not welcome to visit again - but you would be wrong. Of course. 

She hates this place, sometimes.

Aranka wants to talk about some completely different thing, how Thall has been working on a ritual that should allow the Desnans to transport her and several companions to the source of her powers in Elysium. 

"Isn't Thall - he's second-circle, right, how is he going to pull off a more complicated plane shift?"     

     "It's ritual magic, Knight Commander," says Aranka, and Korva can't tell whether it's meant with the attitude that Korva is a little slow. "Anyway, Thall is brilliant, and these things aren't all about raw power. Your powers should be naturally oriented towards their source, you see, and he said we should be able to use them to power it. But we'll all be casting it together, to keep it stable."

           "I wouldn't call it entirely stable," says Thall, quietly. Korva did not actually realize that he was listening. "It might work. Or it, uh, might take you somewhere else."

"...right. I'll - I'll get back to you on that, it sounds like something I'd want to be fully prepared for going in. And I have, you know, things to do. To keep our patrols out there from dying." And then she remembers she's talking to Thall, who unlike almost everyone else on this fucking island actually does contribute his spells to the cause on a daily basis. " - I'm sorry, Thall, I know you help with that. It's a fine project, and it'll be really impressive if it works."

     "I suppose keeping people from dying sounds important, too," says Aranka, agreeably.

The island is also where she's left Zara, who's watching her from the top of one of the little cliffs that are about. 

She needs to talk to her. She really needs to talk to her. But it feels too much like pausing, too much like something that will leave her stuck, and - she's afraid to, really.

On the other hand, Zara is one of the only people on the island who might actually be excited about doing something on the grounds that it is useful.

"Hey, Zara?" she calls up. "I have a mission that I need to assign someone to. Would you like it, or are you pretty busy?"

"I'm not busy!" 

She doesn't actually sound excited, exactly. Insistent, but not quite excited.

She's a terrible parent. She should fix that. She should probably not fix it this exact second.

"There are some mercenaries down in the town who are from a place called Nirmathas. I'm looking for information about a kind of plant that druids use for casting a certain spell. I don't expect any of the Nirmathas soldiers to know about it, but I think they might know some druids who would be willing to cooperate with the crusade, or might know some people who know some cooperative druids. I think they're also going to be mostly illiterate. So I need someone to talk to them, to see if they know anyone like that, and maybe to take down some dictated letters to those people, asking if there are any druids in Nirmathas who would be willing to help the crusade."

"...and you might want to talk about, uh, how the knight commander has been revitalizing the lands of the worldwound, and try to pitch them on why they might want to help us. If that's possible. Can you do that?"

"Yeah! I can do that. - but I might need some help making the letters good."

Zara is... probably not actually competent to execute this task well. But, on the other hand, she will at least try to execute it, which is still more than she can say for anyone else around here.

"It's okay. You're mostly just going to want to write down exactly what they say, we do want the letters to be from them."

"I'll see you tonight, okay?"

"Okay. But don't worry about me, okay? I'm doing fine up here."

Yeah no she's gonna keep worrying.

And then there's exactly one more thing she needs to do today. One more thing that it would be a gross betrayal to rest before doing. One more thing that she can't afford to think about before doing, and therefore can't afford to prepare for, even though this will, on some level, make it more painful than it probably has to be. But if she pauses, and lets herself catch her breath, lets herself count the costs of doing it - she just won't. So she's got to do it now, as soon as it's occurred to her that it's the thing to do.

She goes to check on Lann.

She's practicing with Finnean, at a makeshift archery target behind the row of houses where most of the neathers live. She's about as impossibly fast as before, loosing arrow after arrow in the time it takes most people to fire once. They all hit the target, which isn't very far away; they don't all hit the center. She looks pretty unhappy about this.

" - commander."

"Hey. How're you doing?"

"Well, I've improved a lot since a few hours ago. I don't have to completely relearn how to shoot, or anything. I'm still getting used to it, and a bow this size works a little differently than what I used to do, but I should still be able to fight."

"That's good! I kind of meant in general, though. Like, with regard to things other than whether you can still use a bow."

"Oh."

"It's weird. I keep feeling like I'm supposed to be in a different place than I am. It's not that I liked how I looked before, but... I was used to it, I guess. But hey, hanging out with Finnean makes it pretty much impossible to feel sorry for yourself."

"I can't imagine what it must be like," says the bow. "Having to get used to an entirely different form overnight. I'm not sure I could do it."

"You see what I mean. But don't sell yourself short, Finnean. I think you're doing great."

"At what?"

"Finnean, maybe I should be asking how you're doing, too. Do you need anything? Or want anything?"

"I'm okay! Thanks for looking out for me, Commander. I'm just happy to be getting some training in with Lann. Although - well, I don't want to complain, but it would be nice to hang out with the rest of the group at other times, too! I do feel like you all forget about me a little, sometimes. But I understand that you're all very busy."

"...of course. Sorry, Finnean. You're just... quiet. But it's on us to remember, really."

Man, it really is impossible to feel sorry for yourself while talking to Finnean. Not really in the sense that you feel any better about yourself, mostly in the sense that you feel like an asshole for ever having considered any of your problems to be real ones. She has, if nothing else, not yet been captured by a mad wizard who subjected her to torturous magical experiments and then turned her into a shapeshifting sapient weapon. Good to have perspective, there.

"...seriously, though, Lann. I'm sorry it's not exactly what you were going for. And I'm sorry that you had to choose so quickly. I know I would have wanted a lot more time to prepare, before making a choice like that. It's not all bad, I don't think - you'll live a lot longer, mostly, but - I know it's a lot to get used to. And - if you don't get used to it, we'll fix it. Maybe not until after the crusade is over, but if there is an after, then afterwards I'm going to find a way to get you a form you like. I don't know how yet, exactly, but I will. I promise."