Nefreti gestures for a box on one of the towering shelves behind her desk to come float on over to their conversation. It contains a pinch of something sulfurous, a shrunken essay written in a man's unfamiliar hand, and a block of gold. 

"That's…not very metaphorical, is it."

"I don't actually speak in parables and puzzles. I speak very plainly and then everybody gets confused. It'll take us there."

"Fair enough. I don't suppose you know all of his weaknesses and can advise me on what spells to prepare?"

"You'll want Greater Angelic Aspect. I have a scroll for you." A different box on the wall. 

...It's a useful spell. She hasn't cast it in centuries, she never managed to get it working with her braindead god. And it was Iomedae's favorite spell. "Thank you," she says, only half resentfully.

"There are a lot of petrification traps in his demiplane, I would not have given it to you only because you desperately need to get over her by Oathday."

She wants to protest that it has been almost a thousand years, that it was a relationship of a single week that she has had plenty of time to get over and so must already be over - but this year has not been kind to that delusion. Iomedae is clearly still very important to her. Iomedae is clearly still very upsetting to her.

"Why do I need to get over her by Oathday?"

"You'd have to be over her for it to be a good idea to tell you."

"I met the Chelish defector," Iomedae says. "I asked her about the wedding invitation and she interpreted it as a - coded message. Which I guess makes more sense than some good thing having resulted directly from her attending a wedding. I really wish she could've picked some different code and saved us a lot of worrying."

"I wish that too. I'm sure there was another way available, it just seems so - pointlessly disruptive -"

"And kind of - showy, right. 'I know everything about you, even things you don't know yourself yet' - Cansellarion also looked incredibly irritated at Nefreti. He silently watched the whole conversation, presumably because - it was an easy conversation to make mistakes at, right, it felt like she was learning more from it than I was -"

"Mmm. Did you make any mistakes - or nearly make any mistakes he was there to prevent?"

"If I made any I didn't notice them and he didn't say in front of her but we didn't speak afterwards. Once she got the coded message the defector wanted to leave. …you know, I think I hadn't fully imagined out all the implications of - she trusted his Law as far as to be taken prisoner, as an enemy with incredibly valuable information, and in that situation I feel like I'd be constantly worried that it'd been a mistake or that I couldn't really trust an enemy that much and you'd think a Chelish person would be more paranoid than I but - she wasn't. Not about that. It was very soothing."

"I'd say it comes from having paladins as enemies but it's not like we weren't more paranoid than you're describing about helping Lastwall, and we're not even prisoners. And I'm a bit surprised they teach enough about paladins that defectors would notice they're safe around them."

"She was important. She said, uh, 'we keep the idiots ignorant but I can't do my job if I don't know what a spy sent to join a Lastwall paladin order needs to know and say.' And she said that Abrogail being in a bad mood had made her day to day work environment worse. But - why work for Cheliax at all, if you knew you had a choice and knew it was a real one -"

"I don't really understand it. But people do work for tremendously evil systems sometimes, even when they get very little out of it. It's not some surprising new fact about human psychology."

"I guess. I think I'd imagined it'd make more sense if I actually talked to them. I want to - know what to say to talk them all out of it. It feels like there has to be something." 

"Well, this one defected. There must've been something that did it."

Lilia goes to Vudra, as the first place she can think of that is civilized, distant, uninvolved in the Great Avistani War by any stretch of the imagination, and unlikely to remind her of anything in particular. Stays at an expensive resort that caters to foreign adventurers. Sleeps, poorly, and casts Greater Heroism on herself for occasional breaks from crushing terror, and murders a servant who startles her, and makes a point of not reading any news out of Avistan, or listening to the radio, which to her somewhat unpleasant surprise has caught on even out here.

She'll presumably hear on Oathday how it went, from the overconfident teenage girl, or from her absence.

.

Iomedae spends most of the next two days in a haze of project handoffs. On the radio she reports rumors that the army is marching on Egorian, and that the Chelish army has fled, knowing it can't face the weapons wielded by free people. She gives one last primer before she departs for Osirion on how a village can take down a first circle cleric.

And then she goes to meet Lieutenant Jeres. She is trying very hard to fight against her innate impulse to dislike him for being her legal guardian while (probably) possessing neither her father's virtues nor Evelyn's. 

He doesn't look delighted to see her. "Yes?"

Iomedae is not in fact a child - for real, this time - and doesn't need him to be delighted to see her. "How much material can we bring with us, and when should we be ready to depart?"

"Wealday morning. What are you planning to bring?"