He resolves to catch her at being an archmage. It'll be hard, because she's trying not to let him, but not as hard, because she doesn't know he knows she is one. He has Nenio put up illusions, when they're training, which very few people would see through but Alfirin should with ease, because it seems like it'd be hard to guess what percentage of the time you should act like an illusion is working on you when it isn't, which is in any event hard to do. He spars with her, trying to see if he can catch her cheating to keep up. He spars with all of his other companions because he doesn't want to betray himself by paying more attention to her and so that means paying more attention to all of them. 

He spies on her, which betrays little because he spies on everyone. They keep turning out to be working for the demons.

His espionage only turns up an ordinary noble swordswoman's life - or at least what he imagines that to be. Certainly no signs of archmagery. She spars with him; Aspex consistently beats her, to which she responds with delighted frustration, but never any evident cheating. She considers challenging him to some bouts without armor, but decides against it; she'd win those, and that'd take half the fun out of losing their normal matches.  She sees through Nenio's illusions, occasionally, at about the rate you'd expect from a swordswoman of her skill. A little more often once she figures it's a test and starts checking for them every day. She goes to bed with Daeren and shapechanges away the child and he thinks, for a moment, that he's caught her, but it turns out she just has a magic shirt.

She is winning, in the sense that if he didn't know it was her he's not at all sure how he'd tell. He is in fact confused enough to look up, at one point, whether Catherine had a twin. (Catherine did not have a twin.) But, no, there's only the one of her. That's Alfirin. Just playing a very long game, with the patience of a very old person. 

The hard part of solving the little village in the Abyss of course is evacuating all the civilians once you've wrecked the demon's playplace, not fighting the dragon (which turns out to be white, even after True Seeing.) He consults with Mendev's leadership and finds some place that got butchered by demons where they can be resettled. They're back only six days later. It's good practice for the fight against a larger, scarier red dragon that they know is on their plates sometime soon.

She slipped on the ice, in that fight, and while she was recovering got smacked pretty hard by the dragon's tail. It had far too much momentum for her to turn aside easily with her little sword. Getting hit is really her least favorite part of combat, even if Sosiel fixed the broken ribs as soon as the dragon was dead.

She and Lann enlist some help to build a frankly insane contraption out of ropes under tension and spend a few days practicing dodging as it swings logs at them. Even after all that, she still can't parry one. No wonder Aspex always wins their fights.

Marit's problem, here, is that he's predictable. The Marit she knew would be spying on his subordinates to make sure they're not, themselves, spies, or secretly fiends plotting against him, or any of dozens of other possibilities best dealt with in Marit's mind by spying on everyone he knows. The facts that his Crusade is full of Baphomet cultists and one prior member of his adventuring party kept eating his men and half his advisors have betrayed him already aren't going to be making him any less paranoid.

Marit is, predictably, spying on Catherine, so Catherine will go along having nothing whatsoever to hide. It's only when Alfirin is very very sure that Marit is otherwise busy that she does anything which might clue him in to her presence. That means it takes her a while to do anything she wants to hide from him, but - she's patient. She'd be a very foolish person to make the choices she's made with her lives if she weren't capable of being patient.

She has a list of names. They're the names of outsiders who Marit meets with regularly in heaven, some socially and some professionally, names he'd been consistent about for at least a century -

She has dozens more lists of names of outsiders, whose main virtue in this case is that they were compiled by people other than her for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Marit. She finds three of the names on her list kind of close together on one of the other lists - then two more a little later. Perfect.

She goes seven up the public list from the first intersection and starts doing planar bindings when she can. She wears a different face and says she's looking for people who want to take a longer binding starting in about a month for operations against the forces of Hell, here are the requirements. She gets some takers, some that decline for various reasons. One of the ones she's interested in seems conflicted. It's fine, really, she says, if it has other things that are important, she's got a lot more angel names to try - well, it's not that it's important, exactly, it's more of a social thing, but the whole group cancels if one person does, most of them have important work in Heaven and don't answer planar ally spells - oh, that's very human of it - well it did used to be mortal, after all - well, at any rate, it's quite alright, should she cross this angel's name off her list or would it still be interested in shorter-term bindings - Oh, shorter-term bindings aren't a problem, this angel only has hard commitments every one-hundred twenty-eighth day - Alright, blessings on you, have fun with your heavenly social thing -

...She gets two more commitments to round out the operations that she is, actually, starting to plan over in Cheliax' Arcadian colonies.

Well. That doesn't really prove anything except that he's thorough, but it's certainly suggestive.

If she ever confirms that the Marit on crusade is somehow not the Marit who died and went to Heaven, and can figure out how to send a message without revealing any of her own secrets, she'll let the Marit in Heaven know that this particular friendship is a hole in his security. She doesn't really expect to be able to, though.

The fight with the ancient red dragon is in fact anticlimatic. Fights with dragons usually are, if you get to choose the venue and you know the type. They're immune to nearly everything it can do and have Protection from Fire and Resist Fire in abundance. They smite it. They slaughter it.

He doesn't have to use any spells, though he's not that careful about doing so with this group - Nenio, who doesn't care, Seelah and Lann, who don't know and wouldn't think to do anything about it if they did, Alfirin, who does know and is presumably enjoying herself immensely whenever she catches him at it, and Sosiel, who isn't particularly imaginative and has fairly shoddy spellcraft for being, now, sixth circle. He's more careful when they're travelling with Regill, but the Hellknights are out solving a different problem. (Regill should in principle have no way to detect magic at all short of seeing it cast, but Regill is competent and would, if he did notice something, follow up on it in an unpredictable way depending what he believed was going on.)

They get back and have celebratory drinks. He's pretending to be drunk. Alfirin is probably also pretending. Seelah is drunk sincerely and with abandon. He tries not to be too judgmental about this. People who do not have enough sense to lie to you seem better than people who possess enormous amounts of sense but might turn it towards that purpose. 

…and Seelah's most important qualification in some sense is that she does not remind him of Iomedae. At all. Not even slightly.

Catherine is genuinely slightly tipsy, though not enough to miss any steps dancing, and is pretending to be somewhat more drunk, though still not enough to miss any steps dancing. It was a good fight and she continues to live a charmed life and did not get so much as a scratch or a singe and most certainly not a collection of broken ribs from a tail strike - not for lack of trying on her part or on the dragon's, of course. She's having fun; she's safe here, more or less - safe from Cheliax at least - and getting stronger and making allies, she can afford to relax and it even probably helps, with the allies part. The knight-commander does not entirely approve so she looks him dead in the eye and does a complicated set of steps and twists and twirls to close out her dance that should leave him in absolutely no doubt as to her sobriety.

She still hasn't managed to drag Aspex on to the dance floor, but she gives it another try, raising an eyebrow at him and extending an arm in his direction.

(Alfirin is relaxed too, at least relative to how she was earlier today, riding along with Catherine's reckless abandon backed by the in-fact false presumption that she could be cheaply raised if anything happened. She doesn't like being drunk, it feels like she's always on the brink of making a mistake, but if she just doesn't take any actions then making mistakes will be a little harder. Not impossible, just harder. And at this point Catherine's character is well-enough established that avoiding the wine might be the mistake that clues Marit in to something.)

Marit catches the raised eyebrow and extended arm. He finds himself drawn away from all of the important and miserable questions he should really be contemplating by the sheer delight of contemplating his reply to it.

It's a profoundly silly game they're playing, at this point, but they are both of them too stubborn to be the first to give it up.  If he raises his eyebrow in response, is that ruining the fun? Does it make it too unambiguous that he's found her? (He has real reasons not to reveal this, even good ones, but he's well aware that at this point the stubbornness is half of his actual motivation.) What would he do, if Catherine, the charming swashbuckler, was throwing him glances while pretending to get drunk -

Well, he'd brush her off, because it would be terrifically unprofessional to involve himself with Catherine the charming swashbucker.

He shakes his head very slightly back at her and smiles and has another drink, or at least a sip of it before misplacing the rest, and then heads out, still smiling.

Things are under control, and he needs to figure out how to spend the winter. 

(Things are not perfectly under control by the high standards he is accustomed to. Another one of the civilian administrators that Galfrey sent turned out to be a Baphomet cultist. At this point on the administrative side he only trusts Irabeth, Anevia, Arsinoe, and summoned celestials and they're accordingly overworked. Lady Konomi has picked up that he trusts her substantially less far than he could throw her, and it's affecting their working relationship a bit even though he's been hosting all the parades for Galfrey she requests. He had to spend most of a week retrieving all the soul-trapping jewelry Darek Sunhammer had been leaving about. Response time to a Sending for help is north of two minutes if he doesn't just go himself, thanks to Nenio being distractible and frequently hard to find.

But - they're vanishingly rarely losing men on patrol. They're doing better about that than Lastwall; he went and snooped on Lastwall's records so he knew the rate to beat if he wanted to be smug, which he absolutely did. (He is smug even though he's spending more money than them to achieve this result; he did an analysis and he's pretty sure that his spending more money will save in the long run, at his expected rate of success at making his soldiers stronger.) They have six wizards at fourth circle, now, and two at fifth, and Nenio at sixth. He hasn't identified a Baphomet cultist meetup in a month; there are still some cultists, he's sure, but they are lying very low.

It's not the Shining Crusade. But in five years, it might be reminiscent.)

So he needs to figure out how to spend the winter. 

He sends Lastwall Commune requests as often as he'd send them if he thought they were probably not corrupt and their god probably worth obeying. He does not really trust the answers, obviously, but he does not openly defy them. 

(If Iomedae were really worth listening to and wanted people like Marit to cooperate with Her, She'd have arranged for it to be possible for him to ask her some more pointed questions that weren't filtered through the Church.) 

But in any event it'd be out of keeping with who he's pretending to be, not to ask whether they ought to spend the winter on the Crusade priorities still possible to accomplish then or on Her other work, and also he's kind of curious what Her church will say She answered. 

(The Iomedae he knew would be doing something about Cheliax. And maybe you have to close the Wound first or risk losing it during, but -)

He is examining a map of present-day Cheliax when she enters his office one day. 

- if it were anyone else entering unexpectedly he'd use an illusion to blanket the map, or come up with an excuse for it, but it's Alfirin so he does not bother.  He in fact wants her to see it, is willing to trade her some coins in the guessing-game for it. Here's what I'm thinking about. I'm sure you're thinking about it too. What's the plan?

"Aspex," she says, because it's Catherine speaking and that's the only name she knows him by. "I would say you're getting ahead of yourself, with the situation here still precarious, but it would make me the world's third greatest hypocrite so I shall keep my silence."

Who, he wonders, is the world's second greatest hypocrite. And where on the list would she rank their complicatedly dead mutual friend - this is not a productive line of thought. "The situation here has been precarious for a century," he observes. "One might not want to wait on it improving. Though apparently she does. Want to wait."

Catherine blinks confusedly once, but is clearly not supposed to be confused by that sentence so only once, and then moves on - Aspex can clarify if it's important and not just small talk - "Well, waiting for the right time is sometimes the wiser decision - I myself am waiting for the right time. That happens to be what I came to talk to you about, actually - to apologize. In advance. Because when I think I've found the right moment, when I leave this crusade, I'm afraid I'm going to be taking a lot of your best people with me. Not Derenge, obviously, and Nenio thinks you're a more interesting puzzle than I am, but - I think I can win over most of the rest and I don't want to catch you by surprise with it."

Well, in a sense it's what he wanted, which is for them to actually talk about the plan.

In another sense it's a strange, strange framing of it. Marit has been subjecting everyone he meets who can take it to the intense sustained pressure that strengthens them as fast as it can be done with acceptable casualties, and to anyone who has known him his entire life - and she has - it'll be obvious he's been doing it for that front as much as for this front. Obviously when there's an opening to handle Cheliax they'll put everyone there.

He would kind of have expected her to discuss, with him, when that moment is drawing close. Which perhaps is what she's doing, but - oddly direct for if they were still pretending not to know each other, oddly indirect if they are admitting that they do.

Well. This is Drezen. They have uprooted a truly astonishing number of cultists, spies, quasits, etcetera - and they're speaking out loud. She may just have adopted a policy of literally never saying anything out loud that would amount to an acknowledgement that she's (possessing? impersonating? reincarnated as?) Catherine. 

Also she could just be trying to throw him off balance even while they talk Cheliax, for fun. Either way, he can play that game too. "Huh!" he says. "It's a strange crusade commander who wouldn't hold that against you, an announced intent to run off with all my allies to go win back your own silly southern throne. Though I suppose it surpasses an unannounced intent. Either way I don't think you have the strength, yet." Obviously she doesn't or she'd have done it already. 

Something is a little off about that response - it doesn't seem quite in-character? Oh - Aspex isn't surprised, he already knew - he's just pretending this is new information...she doesn't know why.

"I don't, yet. I'll probably need to leave here before I do, to make more allies elsewhere. Reconcile with Cyprian, for one -  If you ask me to resign, for this, I will, without making a fuss of it. I'll come back to - steal your people - later, it wouldn't be fair to you to take them now when I don't need them yet and the ones I'm most sure of are your healers - Daeran likes me, Sosiel's Andoren - I could get Seelah too."

There's again a vague sense of strangeness, perhaps from comparing this Alfirin to the Alfirin in his memories which are much more recent than hers are. Some things are the same. Some things you'd expect to change, in nine hundred years, and in whatever happened with Iomedae, which must have hurt her as badly as it has hurt him. - he should just answer the explicit stated topic of conversation and not try to address any of the rest.

"It wouldn't be fair to yourself if you take them now, I'm better than you at making them stronger. And of course I'm not going to ask you to resign."

He shakes his head and smiles tiredly at the map of Cheliax. 

"I was - pleased when I realized you were positioned to go for it. There's no one I'd rather have it. I never imagined you wouldn't leave, once you were ready, and you're welcome here until then. I…" no, everything else he might conceivably say is something he certainly wouldn't say to Catherine. "...admire your swordsmanship."

(Her swordsmanship is excellent but of course he is mostly only impressed because he knows she's a ninth circle wizard. Most ninth circle wizards couldn't also be nearly his equal in a swordfight; he had in fact rather imagined he was the best swordfighter in the world among people who could also cast sixth-circle arcane spells, and this is still probably true but by a much smaller margin than he'd imagined. )

She's glad. She was pretty sure he'd back her, he's by all reports Lawful Good and - he was uncomfortable working with Regill, briefly, he's clearly not in denial about Hell being bad or Cheliax being a humanitarian nightmare - But it feels nice to have it confirmed, to not have it as an apparently poorly-kept secret. She smiles at him.

And he complimented her swordsmanship, which - he's done before, obviously but this time is different, more personal - a little bit awkward, hesitating - Aspex is shy with her. It's not really what she'd have expected from the man, but - it's flattering, and kind of cute. And at this rate he's never going to make the first move before she steals all his best people and runs off to fight a war and marry Cyprian in five years.

"I admire yours too," she says, and leans forward to kiss him.

(Alfirin, who has been watching Marit much more closely than she has Catherine, is as surprised by this as anyone)

- oh. 

Well.

He is really very very surprised. Surprised enough that for the first few seconds what he does is nothing, while he attempts to reevaluate - it's not that it doesn't make any sense - she was always an intensely private person, he had no idea who she had, if she had anyone -

‘It's unprofessional' is a little bit of a side note. They are both of them professionally in the business of picking up all the pieces of this shattered world and he's running a Crusade right now but it doesn't matter very much alongside the other things, as she just said very pointedly.

They shouldn't be stupid, but they are not operating in the context for which Iomedae lay out her rules, and also Iomedae was just a person making her own wild guesses off her own deep confusions -

Less of a side note is that Alfirin should of course be long dead, and that she did something such that Discern Locations aimed at her turn up nothing and Nightmares claim there is no one to find, and she can be found only by looking for Catherine de Litran. He's thought a little about how you'd pull that off, though surely much less than she thought about it in order to do it. It's more likely to be something resembling possession than simple impersonation. He doesn't need to know her plans, he doesn't need to know how she did it, but he does, in fact need -

...He's not reacting how she expected him to. He's kind of not noticeably reacting at all?

Catherine pulls back, confused and a little hurt. "I'm so sorry, I must have misread something - Thank you. For your support with Cheliax." She stands up and makes as though to leave.