Leareth thinks Karal is managing fine, and it seems higher priority for Leareth's staff to get to know him; they already know Leareth, and Leareth can remind himself of who they are just as well by watching along with Karal's conversations. He doesn't interrupt. 

Aha, so she does know the name, and presumably the story as well.  Someone, he assumes Nayoki, does quick work.  Everything here seems very efficient and tightly run, so it's not surprising.

"Well enough," he nods.  The Foresight dream probably isn't something he should chat about with random women in the hallway.  "But how do you tell when it's morning, down here?"

And, since he's pretty sure it'll be easier for both of them not to pretend nothing strange is going on: "By the way, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to tell if I was Leareth. He's still very," there's open affection in his voice, "obviously himself."  She probably knows what he means by that - he has trouble imagining anyone meeting Leareth and not noticing the ways he's different from just about everyone.

She seems to know what he means; she bobs her head and smiles before answering his earlier question. "Well, there's a skylight in the dining hall. For those of us whose work in on a schedule, the Mindspeakers on duty will go through and tell us when it's half a candlemark before our shift or whatever. I think some of the mages will set timekeeping wards, or have an artifact for it, but a lot of people don't bother. ...Most of the researchers sleep when they feel like it, which isn't always at night." 

"Ohh, you're just all... doing an entirely different thing here than anywhere I've ever been. I can see how that would happen! I'm going to have so much to get used to."  Mindspeakers on duty, mage artifacts everywhere - what a strange and fascinating place.  But it seems to have normal pleasant people in it, so far, which is a very good sign.  "Was it a big adjustment from where you lived before, too? ...Assuming you weren't born and raised in Leareth's underground base. For all I know that happens all the time!"

Rosta laughs. "I wasn't born and raised in Leareth's underground base, no. I grew up in Rethwellan, went to study at one of the academies that does Mindspeech training, and was - very carefully recruited. There was a lot of security vetting, which - my friend who recommended me did warn me, but I maybe hadn't thought..."

Aaaand she's maybe not going to say more on that topic, since Nayoki did not confirm that Leareth's new not-roommate - who seems lovely - is fully read in on The Plan, and that's got to be an awkward enough conversation without her putting her foot in it and making it moreso.

She shrugs a little. "Leareth does a lot of recruiting in Rethwellan. Anyway, it's - probably less of an adjustment from the student life than it is for you? I was used to being surrounded by very clever people working and sleeping at all sorts of odd hours. Mostly it's just - more magic and less sun. And better books. And not being in a city, though I don't actually miss that, I never did get used to the smell in Petras." She shakes her head slightly, smiling. "It's odd to imagine being born and raised here, but two of my friends here - they're with the mage-researchers - have a little daughter. She seems happy enough." 

(Leareth is faintly surprised to notice how much he's enjoying this! It's fascinating, to see his work described from that perspective, and get to see Karal react to it.) 

And they're now at the dining hall. It does indeed have a skylight, or rather some clever arrangement with mirrors that reflects the sunlight at a better angle (most of the year, the sun doesn't get that high in the sky even at noon.) There are long tables against each wall, and a sideboard at one end of the room with a spread of the sort of breakfast foods that can be left out and keep for a while. There are a couple of men at one of the tables having a very intense discussion - one of them is evidently a mage, and mathematical illusion-diagrams are involved. 

Karal stops near the middle of the room to look up at the skylight, trying to see how it works and just enjoying the brightness, but keeps talking. 

"Ah, right, everyone here would have been very carefully chosen and recruited, except for your friends' little girl and me..."  He grins, amused.  "I should meet her and compare notes sometime."

"So what do you do here?  You said you were training in Mindspeech, but what sort of daily work does that mean?"  How this entire place works has to be enormously complicated, but if he starts by finding out more about the nearly randomly chosen thread of Rosta's job and how it interacts with what other people do, and does that again enough times, he should have a picture of this life that makes sense to him.

Rosta laughs. "Oh, I'm not really in training anymore, that was years ago - though I'm still learning, there are lots of opportunities for that here. Leareth has us do a lot of range exercises - apparently in Valdemar it's common for Mindspeakers to have a fifty-mile range, and he thinks that's something more people could get to if they bothered to aim for it. I can do thirty miles now, for directional Mindspeech with another decent-strength Mindspeaker, so I do regular message relays with some of the other facilities, for logistics and things, and on-call for emergency messages..." 

She can happily talk about her duties with Leareth's organization for a few minutes. She's not herself a researcher, but it's common for researchers who don't have Mindspeech themselves to want the boost of sharing thoughts directly, and so she's also been training in the type of concert-work required to hold a link between two or more others who don't have Mindspeech themselves. It's a lot more interesting than the training for range extension, which basically just means a session every two weeks or so spent holding increasingly long-distance links until everyone gives themselves backlash. 

(Leareth does think - remember thinking? odd how he remembers that specific fact - that the Companions are probably part of the answer to why Valdemar has so many long-range Mindspeakers, enough that most of Valdemar's land area is within reach of the Mindspeech relay system. But people do improve with drilling, and it's an incredibly valuable skillset to have around.) 

Karal serves himself a big plate from the side table, impartial between familiar and unfamiliar dishes like a man who mostly thinks of food as fuel, and eats with a soldier's efficiency as he listens to Rosta's stories with obvious interest.

It does seem like an incredibly valuable skillset in a lot of ways, once you have enough Mindspeakers around that you can have them do such a wide variety of things!  He's interested in what all that is like - the mind-link concert-work sounds fascinating, and he starts saying he'd be happy to volunteer to walk thirty or fifty miles into the tundra for range practice, except he immediately realizes they'd just have people Gate for that.  He's never worked closely with mages or other Gifted people - in Karse they're... either priests or, more recently, dead, or in most cases both...  which would definitely add up to a different environment than a Rethwellani university, and he expects it'll take him weeks to stop being surprised by various things getting done with magic here.

(It's clear that he's finding adjusting to a new place like this a really interesting exercise and looking forward to it, and his response whenever he's inevitably wrong about something obvious is amusement rather than embarrassment.)

"I'm sorry - I assume you were doing something when I ran into you, I shouldn't keep you. I imagine I'll see you again later."  ...Well, if he lives - but these are Leareth's people and he trusts him to be able to explain his absence sensibly, without needing to distress this happy friendly woman for the sake of a relatively unlikely possibility.

He could happily get into another conversation or five like this (maybe not with the mage-researchers, he'd like to preserve some math-free times in his schedule), but he knows they have other things to do today - this bit of normal life has been very helpful in getting his mental balance back, but it's been enough for now, if more important things are waiting on his readiness to deal with them.  He'll spend a moment finishing his meal and waiting to see if internal or external hints about the next steps materialize without his involvement.  (He wonders if Nayoki or anyone else has been Mindspeaking Leareth and keeping him unaware of the conversation - it would be a bit surprising given how open Leareth has been with his thoughts lately, but how quiet Leareth has been this morning has also been a bit surprising, so he's not sure.  Maybe Leareth just needed a few minutes of relaxingly unimportant normal life too.)

Honestly, Leareth has mostly been enjoying watching Karal's perspective as he learns about Leareth's organization. (And observing with interest how quickly Rosta relaxed with Karal, even knowing Leareth was right there; it's...hard for him not to be intimidating, he suspects, but apparently Karal is sufficiently the-opposite-of-intimidating that people aren't self-conscious even when he thinks they would be if he were more obviously present.) Also, he - did have the sense that Karal needed this. 

He's pretty sure Nayoki is nearby and was probably waiting for them to finish breakfast before interrupting. They do have other things to do - he wants to get a more thorough briefing from Nayoki on the status of his northern operations, and flesh out his notes on last night's dream, and then probably get a start on reviewing past notes to refresh his memory - but none of that is screamingly urgent, and giving Karal the chance to adjust also seems like a priority. 

...Leareth is curious if Karal has any thoughts on the Foresight dream, actually, though - only if it's a topic Karal is in the mood to think about.

Yes, Leareth is objectively a very intimidating person.  It's a good thing Karal doesn't think he could react that way to someone he's this close to - having someone be anxious about you in your own mind would probably be pretty unpleasant.  For both of them, really.

And the way Rosta was acting makes sense - it'd be different if she was actually scared of Leareth, he's pretty sure, but if it's just a reflexive intimidated reaction, she'd have no reason to try to keep it up when her instinctive mind wasn't doing so because Leareth wasn't visibly there.  (... He's glad she wasn't scared.  He only now realizes how upsetting that would have been.)

He does need to think about Vanyel - in the mood might be overstating it, but it doesn't feel like it'll hurt much, and it's very obvious now how important it is.  No wonder you were worried about that conversation.  It must've taken you so much restraint not to tell me more about what he's really like, when I was imagining something entirely different!  But I'm glad you didn't.  It would've... felt wrong, not to see him for myself first.  Not to feel that visceral shock that turned all his emotions upside-down.  Just a memory and an explanation wouldn't have done that.  But you're right, he's... managing to be kind, and trying to be fair, despite how much he's obviously suffering, and very few people are like that.  And he's talking to you - not just because you're there, but like he really might let it change something.

Yes, Leareth agrees. I think you needed to see it for yourself. ...He was worse off than I expected. He is - always suffering - (and Leareth should really at some point explain more of what he knows about Vanyel's history, it's important and relevant) - but I think he was not so obviously miserable, before the war. An amused mental huff. I would be tempted to write to his King and insist that he be granted leave, if that were not an utterly absurd thing to do under the circumstances. 

Vanyel was the first one to manage lucidity within the Foresight dream; Leareth had been having it too, for months, but it wasn't until Vanyel broke the script and said, "This is dream," that he realized they were both there. (It's not how Foresight dreams usually work. He's nearly certain that this particular Foresight dream is the direct intervention of a god, and its shared nature could well be a separate intervention, in which case he still doesn't grasp the purpose of it - and is instinctively suspicious - but he's not going to ignore the opportunity for that reason alone.) 

Vanyel has always listened to him, and gone and read the books that Leareth recommended, and Leareth is fairly sure that what he's telling himself is that he needs to understand his enemy in order to have a hope of winning, but - at least some of it is that Vanyel, as a person, wants to understand things. 

...Even in the unaltered script of the Foresight vision, the confrontation never played out to its conclusion, but the subtext is obvious, the plot it's leading up to: Vanyel calls down a Final Strike, in hopes of stopping Leareth and delaying his invasion enough for the army to get there. Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense on multiple dimensions, it's deeply unclear what Vanyel is...doing there...by himself, with an army implied to be candlemarks or days but not weeks away? But it might have worked, if Leareth were unwarned, and - Vanyel's life would make sense, if it were about shaping him into a weapon powerful enough to take out unwarned-Leareth, and into someone who would make that sacrifice entirely willingly and perhaps even see it as a relief. 

It absolutely won't work with warning, though. Leaving Leareth unsure what whichever god or gods were involved in setting up Vanyel's current trajectory are aiming for. He doesn't like it. But it's still not a case where aiming that paranoia at Vanyel is going to help. 

You... could end this war, somehow, couldn't you.  It's awful for Vanyel - of course it is, now that Karal puts together all the information he has on what things have been like, how the Butcher in White has to constantly travel and hide to evade attacks and strike from a distance, how much of Karse's effort is directed against him, and how much easier it would be to kill anyone near him than the man himself...  And Leareth has so many resources at his disposal.  There was something in the dream about the war weakening Valdemar for the invasion - but also about Leareth stopping some of his war preparations as a sign of good faith, and it might not be a bad idea to do something more in that direction.  Especially something that would also make Vanyel less awfully miserable and-- not even easier to talk to so much as make it easier for him to think, because he's clearly barely managing right now.  Karal isn't at all sure if it would be a good idea, doesn't know enough of the context and wouldn't trust himself to make this decision anyway, but... it's something that could be done, he thinks - and stops his thoughts there, well enough that only a little confused longing escapes.

The nature of the dream is even more confusing - yes, it makes sense for Vanyel to have it, but no sense at all for Leareth, so why would Someone have made it happen this way?  Karal's instinctive first guess is that one of the gods is on their Leareth's side after all, but Leareth seemed very confident this wasn't true.  Of course Leareth doesn't really remember why...

They really need to read the notes before they can think usefully about any of this.  He wonders how long it's going to take - how much it's even possible to remember from a hundred lifetimes, and how Leareth organizes it all to decide what to re-read every time...  There's some deeply complicated system, no doubt, and he also has no doubt that it works.

It's surprisingly difficult to intervene productively in wars between two other countries, even with a lot of resources, even when it seems like it really shouldn't be that complicated to improve the situation. Leareth...is not actually sure if he's carried out any indirect interventions in Valdemar's favor – he does anticipate that in terms of what benefits his own future plans, he wants Valdemar to win this war, and not lose any territory to Karse.

(It would also make things awkward if they took territory from Karse; his exact memories here are hazy as well, but the Valdemaran people are - surprisingly disinclined to worship gods in general, and have a surprisingly strong following of Astera of the Stars, who is non-interventionist to a degree that it's not absolutely clear to Leareth whether She exists. Leareth actually uses the temple order to Astera for various covert recordkeeping and message-relaying. He would be more inclined to think this indicated a friendly god if Astera had ever visibly done anything; as it is, it's not really informative one way or another. ...Anyway, Valdemar is probably disinclined to annex any Karsite territory even if they ended up in a position to do so, so that's not likely to come up.) 

...They really do need to read the notes and get caught up. And - probably Karal needs to get an explanation of the full plan, in order for the rest to make sense. Leareth is noticing that he feels a lot of reticence, and he suspects it's because his considerations on telling Vanyel have involved over a decade of ground-laying first. But it's - not really a comparable situation, and it seems like Karal being able to see all of Leareth's reasoning up close (and not being worried that Leareth might be lying about everything for arcane reasons of his own, which Vanyel is definitely worried about) might make it a lot easier. 

(It should be easier than in most wars, he thinks, because most of Karse doesn't want to be doing what it's doing, people resent the coup and are terrified of the priests and if all that collapsed he thinks they would stop... Or maybe they wouldn't and he's only letting himself assume the best of everyone, or Leareth is right that there are more complications regardless.  He probably is.  Karal just wants so badly for his country to be better than this.)

... Could Leareth be lying to him about everything for arcane reasons?  It doesn't feel at all like he is or like he's the sort of person who would, but he can do a rather incredible number of things, and when Karal thinks about it it doesn't seem entirely out of the question that he could do that too. 

He sends a note of apology - he's not really being mistrustful here, he's just... trying to be Leareth, a little?  If there's an important question, even a confusing and unlikely one, it seems good to spend a moment seriously considering it.  And if someone else ever asks him this, he'd like to have an answer and not just a feeling. 

So, what answers does he have?  Well, first, Karal doesn't see what it would gain him - it's not as if Leareth is getting much tangible help out of this arrangement, only Karal's view of things, which he expects would be much less useful if he was being lied to about everything.  Second, it does genuinely seem incredibly difficult, to look like you're holding your thoughts this open and still be consistently hiding something important.  Karal expects he'd notice something off, the mind's pattern being pulled out of balance by a weight that wasn't supposed to be there.  Leareth makes sense as a person, in his strange and complicated way, and Karal can't imagine someone who could pretend to be Leareth while in fact being someone else, or why they would not choose to pretend something easier.

Is there anything else he can do about this?  Hmm.  He has Empathy, and he doesn't know if he can turn it around on himself and see anything about Leareth that way, but he can try, and does, slowly and carefully.  It will be fascinating if it works - the question that prompted this aside, he's so curious about what an Empathy-feeling of Leareth's mind would be like.

He can totally do that! (With some effort and trying-different-mental-motions before it clicks; it's clearly not the most automatic or natural use of the Gift, and feels a little like trying to force his eyes to focus on his own nose rather than something at a more reasonable distance.) 

It's maybe not as informative as he would have hoped, though it does add to what he's getting just from Leareth holding his thoughts open; Leareth mostly seems to have quite muted affect, his emotions quiet and relatively "in the background." He's currently feeling faintly surprised and amused, and impressed - based on his thoughts, probably in reaction to Karal both thinking to try this and succeeding at it, though maybe some if it is lingering from "he's not really being mistrustful here, he's just trying to be Leareth". Leareth's mood feels generally fairly relaxed, not so much "unhurried" as "secure, and comfortable in it". There's a sense of distance from all of his emotions, as though he's not really quite taking and experiencing them at face value. 

...There's also a pervasive emotion throughout all of it, not flickering or changing like the more moment-to-moment reactions, and surprisingly hard to categorize. Determination, maybe, but it doesn't feel entirely captured by that. It has some of the flavor of impatience or dissatisfaction, but it's not unpleasant, or accompanied by any urgent need to resolve or escape it; there's an immovable-bedrock stability to it. 'A sense of driving purpose' might be the clearest description of it in words, though that doesn't quite capture it either. 

Karal is distracted enough, first by the tricky Empathy problem - it's not a physical exercise, but it almost feels like one, there's a tangible motion there and it's interesting to try to get it right and eventually feel it succeed - and then by the new view of Leareth's mind, that for a long moment he entirely forgets about the original question he wanted to answer.  He just watches with warm fascination - the calm and fluid surface emotions, like waves on the water on a pleasant day, and the stability underneath, different from the way other people are stable - more deliberate, more directed, not just Leareth's underlying nature as a person, but his goal and the way he's shaped himself to achieve it.  It's all lovely to watch, especially when he has the view of Leareth's thoughts as well, as if seeing underwater as well as above it, both the underlying detail and the blended flow.  And he can see how his own thoughts make the waves shift a little - which he knew, of course, their thoughts and mental emotions go back and forth like this all the time, but the Empathy view is something else.  He wants to watch like this all the time.

Can he look at himself like this, so Leareth can see too?  Oh, that's an even harder problem, he has to stop eating and focus on trying to-- not just twist the Gift around in a way it doesn't naturally go, but turn it inside-out entirely...  He thinks he could do it, with enough time, but it's complicated and keeps eluding him, like a new move with the sword that he can instinctively feel the mechanics of but can't guide his body through yet.  He wants to sit here and keep trying, but they did have other things to do...

... Such as, for example, the question he was trying to answer in the first place.  He stops trying to turn things inside-out and goes back to just watching Leareth, looking for discrepancies between what he's thinking and feeling.  Isn't at all surprised not to find any.  Mmm. You know, I'm not sure it would even show up in your emotions, if you were lying to me about everything and confident enough of not letting it show. Which is so very like you.  There's a warm smile in his mental tone as well as on his face, but he is, also, still watching, to see if Leareth thinking about that will show him something more.  It seems like there should be a way to - combine the two views, see both down through the calm surface of Leareth's mind and up from the independent viewpoint inside it in a way that makes it obvious that nothing is occluded.  He's not sure that's a real thing, but it feels like it should be, and it's such a natural goal for his mind to strive for that it barely feels like effort.  He can spend a little while trying, not at all forcefully even within himself, just letting his instincts shift between different angles to see if one of them makes everything go clear.

(None of this feels like adversarial action.  He really doesn't think Leareth is being anything but honest with him, he'd just like it if he could have clear proof, and he thinks Leareth wants him to have it, if he can figure out how.  Although of course if Leareth started thinking of it as adversarial, Karal would probably notice, and Leareth knows that... It's a very strange loop to be in, but as long as neither of them breaks it, it doesn't feel wrong.)

It's not adversarial, and that part does feel important. Leareth isn't sure he could do this at all if he didn't both trust that Karal wasn't going to try to hurt him, and - separately, it's not the more salient half now but he thinks it's important - believe with reasonable confidence that Karal couldn't hurt him even if he wanted to. And they're in a location where he feels in control - that's also important, Leareth thinks he would still endorse trusting Karal with this even if they were somewhere less safe, but he's not sure he could manage to be this open for it. He's...very paranoid, he suspects both by nature and by deeply-engrained habit, though maybe 'nature' in this case is also just the part of the deeply-engrained habit that goes back further than his records do. 

But it feels - not fundamental? Leareth would prefer a world where a person like himself was being unreasonably paranoid and careful, under circumstances where it couldn't possibly be justified. He wants to build that world, someday. And - here, now, he thinks it's not justified. And apparently can believe that on a deep enough level to feel it - which is almost more impressive, and probably relies a lot on Karal being...himself. 

Karal was trying to answer a question, right. Leareth isn't quite putting together what he means by combining the two views, but he - does feel like there's a sense in which he's a self-consistent person (he's worked very hard on this), and the self-consistent person he is, is moderately against lying in general and - since deception for tactical reasons is pretty much unavoidable in an adversarial world - particularly against lying and trying to conceal that fact, against scenarios where someone would consider deception a betrayal rather than an obvious and unsurprising thing for someone to do given their goals. He can try to unpack the reasoning behind that intuition, if it helps, though he thinks it's not an intuition that he got originally by reasoning it through, it's - a way that it felt right to be a person, that he spent a long time trying to understand and reconcile so he could, as much as possible, live that way in all the messiness and danger of reality. 

Karal is not really sure what specific thing Leareth would worry about even if he didn't trust him!  (If there is a way to hurt people with Empathy, he has not discovered or even considered it.)  If he found something he really wasn't expecting, he'd... mostly just want to have a conversation about it, and depending on the outcome of that conversation he might possibly decide he didn't want to live - but not more than that, when none of his commitments relied on Leareth promising to tell him the truth.  But of course having an instinctive resistance to this much vulnerability makes sense - although it hurts, that Leareth is someone who would want to be more open and lives in a world where he can't.  ...Perhaps he really can build a better one, someday.  (Long after Karal is dead from old age if nothing else, is the expectation implicit in the thought.)

It also makes sense that the thing Karal is trying to do isn't clear to Leareth - it isn't clear to Karal either, just a half-captured idea put together by instinct, and no doubt with no relationship at all to normal Empathy training.  But it's not the reasoning he wants, it's the-- yes, the feeling-right, just like that-- for a brief flash the emotion-surface of Leareth's mind goes something like transparent, and it's absolutely clear how his thoughts and the sense of him as a person match perfectly and there's nothing hidden or missing or wrong.

Of course there wasn't.  Karal isn't sure if he could have done - that, whatever it was - with anyone less self-consistent, let alone anyone who wasn't trying this hard to cooperate, and he is so glad that Leareth is the sort of person he could manage it with.  Thank you.  And - I feel like I should apologize for trying in the first place, except I could see you didn't mind, and you could see I didn't mean you harm.  Having his own mind visible continues to be wonderful.  At the moment it's full of appreciation for Leareth being the way he is.  The specific objection to betrayal rather than just deception is exactly right, and... it's good to know that not all of him is reasoning and math, that some of his principles are like Karal's own, things that felt right long before he could explain why, and that principles like that could survive the process of shaping himself for what needed to be done.

Also, Karal has a headache now - he's not sure whether from Gift overuse or just from doing deeply convoluted things with it.  Probably best to let go of the Empathy for now, in any case.

(Leareth doesn't have any specific threat model for how a version of Karal who wanted to hurt him could do that! It's just that "not being able to think of a way something could go wrong" is - really not protective enough against things going wrong, and if he didn't trust Karal there would have been vastly less reason to take that unknown-unknown risk.) 

He's glad Karal could check what he felt he needed to. And, yes, it's easier to strain a Gift if you're trying to trying to do something convoluted with it and now is probably a good time to stop. ...And for Leareth to take over and go speak to Nayoki, if that's all right with Karal? 

(That's not at all how Karal is used to thinking, but it makes sense.)

There was something else he meant to think about - ah, what prompted him to go on the entire experimental Empathy detour was Leareth feeling worried about explaining The Plan to him.  He wonders quietly if the new certainty of his trust helps, and if there's anything else he can do to help - but they can think about that once more urgent tasks are done with.

And yes, of course.  He completes the mental handshake of voluntarily giving up control, and then watches to see how quickly the various people in the room notice.

It would probably be pretty easy for them to notice if they were paying attention, since Leareth gets up immediately to put their empty breakfast plate away on the cart where dirty plates apparently go; he probably has noticeably different body language from Karal even if all he's doing is sitting and eating, but he definitely moves differently.

Rosta seems to have left while they were distracted, though, and the two mage-researchers having a math conversation are very immersed in it. One of them, the one not currently occupied in updating an illusion-diagram and with his back to them, does glance up on Leareth's return pass from the dish-cart, but whether he recognizes that it's Leareth in control or not, he doesn't seem to consider this to justify more than brief eye contact and a nod. 

...Leareth is running into the fact that he would normally have an instinctive habit of reaching out with Mindspeech to check what Nayoki is up to, and - cannot do that. He wonders if there's a way to do it with Empathy - there must be a way to at least check where she is if she's in range of Karal's Gift, which probably covers the entire facility except for the individually-shielded rooms, and he actually wouldn't be surprised if one can figure out a way to selectively project to someone, which wouldn't be as informative as Mindspeech but you could agree on some kind of signal for 'I'm available to meet now'... 

That's probably a yes - Karal is a complete stranger to the man, he'd warrant either less or more of a reaction, not something this absent-mindedly habitual.  But clearly Karal will have to observe more people reacting to both of them later to fully satisfy his curiosity.  Well, it's not as if he was going to stop paying attention to how everyone looks at them.

Hmm, can he find Nayoki?  He remembers her very well, for all that it was a brief meeting - partially for herself, and she's a very singular person, but mostly for how she reacted to Leareth and how Leareth in turn thought about her.  (Another task using the new Gift he enjoys so much, and the thought of another person he already likes, make him forget about his headache entirely.)  He can... reach out and see if he can find and recognize her?  She's warm and cheerful, almost oddly light for this place; she's obviously in command here and that should be a clear enough feature of a mind, although with some added confusion now that Leareth is back but not fully briefed to take over yet; she's no doubt wondering where Leareth is and how he's doing in the morning - unsatisfied curiosity and likely some loyalty-tinged worry as well... Can he find a mind like that?  Is there only one?  Where?  Assuming she's awake at all, and unshielded, none of which his has any idea about, but it's still worth trying.

He doesn't know her well enough to simply pick her out from all the other minds without thinking - he's pretty sure there is a way to do that, if you're familiar enough with someone, the way you hear your own name in a crowd without paying attention to all the other words (he thinks he could find Leareth instantly anywhere he could reach him, and he could have found Kadrich as well, but neither of those will ever come up...), but he doesn't know Nayoki well yet, so the process has to involve actually spending a moment looking at every mind he can reach in turn.  Which he will quite happily do even if he can identify none of them except Rosta - he can see where she's gone to and how she's feeling, maybe look for the little girl she mentioned, count everyone else and get a general impression of what they're doing, maybe see if the mage-researcher who just looked at them had enough of a reaction to their presence for it to be identifiable or if he's already lost in the confusing diagram together with his companion...  His headache gets slightly worse - only slightly, but enough to remind him that he should perhaps focus rather than trying to do everything at once.