One of the brands disappears. She no longer detects evil. 

"I can use Lariel's sword, if that will help confirm my identity. But I'd rather not brandish a weapon without your agreement." 

"Do it."

If this is an overcomplicated trick, it won't stand up much longer anyway, but you don't let people skip out on hard to fake gestures just because they offer.

She pulls the sword. The light of Heaven washes over them all, soothing and strengthening. 

“The brands probably won’t fade on their own - even strong clerics and paladins have a hard time mustering the willpower to fight them off, and if they don’t they’re permanent. I can’t spare the spells to do it myself, so until you get them cleared you’re a liability if she returns. You three,” he gestures to a trio of paladins, “keep an eye on her. If she has any sense at all she’ll get herself somewhere she can’t do any damage until then, ideally a cell.”

The rest of the are also risks until they’re dispelled as well, since Lilitus aren’t usually known to need help mind controlling people, but he’s not going to say that out loud in case Minagho is stupid or arrogant enough to think he’d fall for a gambit that unoriginal.

If he doesn't know about the power she wielded against Minagho then Luzai isn't going to explain it in the context of why she expects to have resisted the brands. 

Every moment she doesn't see Joran Vhane itches. How long until he finds out what happened to his brother? 

But being impatient about it won't, in fact, help the situation. 

"Do you know if Seelah and Irabeth are okay?" she asks instead. 

“As of five minutes ago they were.”

If any listening demons don’t know about the miraculous empowerment that the Inheritor gave those two, he’s not going to be the one to tell them any sooner than they’d otherwise know, and the girl will presumably hear of it in her own time.

Good. 

--It occurs to her that the fact that she directed some of the power to Staunton pretty conclusively disproves the hypothesis that he was Dominated, if her brands do in fact wear off, which she expects them to. On the other hand, nobody but her knows that she directed some of the power to Staunton! So, you know, that's. Good. 

It does sort of beg the question of how elaborate a deception she's willing to craft to protect him, though. 

Maybe instead of trying to convince anyone on the crusaders' side he didn't turn of his own free will she should just ask Mom to kidnap him and turn him into a statue or something until everyone who wants him dead has forgotten he even exists. Food for thought. 

Anyway, she's basically willing to hang out here under the extremely annoying supervision of Hulrun and/or whichever paladins he assigned to give her the stinkeye until an hour has passed since she thought grabbing Minagho's tail was a good idea. 

Over the next hour, Luzai gets a front row seat to the hasty renovations the building is undergoing. In a rather ironic twist, a number of the demonic defenses are simply taken over wholesale; humans stopping demons from getting in and demons stopping humans getting in are rather similar tactical problems. Some of the defenses are rather less effective this way or proved useless just an hour earlier, and thus need to be rebuilt wholesale, and a lot of their effort is put to trying to ensure that the demons can't just come flying in through the now open-roof and retake the wardstone. There's no shortage of demons that can fly, and without Terendelev in the city it's a battlefield that they're inherently at a disadvantage in - especially once it gets dark. Hulrun himself heads off shortly, but the paladins follow his command and stick with her the whole time.

One of the brands vanishes at the turn of the hour, but despite her hopes the other two don't follow quickly after. There's still an angry red brand across her face, and one on her hands, that show no signs of vanishing.

...That's really fucking annoying. 

Also she's really regretting grabbing at Minagho's tail. If she was going to touch her she should have taken the opportunity to punch her in the face, at least. 

Do any of Hulrun's goon-paladins have any idea where Jhoran Vhane is and/or if he happens to have prepared Dispel Evil today. 

He's down on the ground floor, helping with the new defenses down there. None of her escorts are sure of what he prepared today but it's a fifth circle spell so it would have a lot of competition for his slots.

Yeah she figured. 

"Ember, would you go ask him?"

"I'll go see if he can help."

She wanders off downstairs, and is gone for about fifteen minutes before returning.

"He says he has a restoration, but depending on how many brands you have that much diamond dust might be expensive, and if you wanted to wait he could reserve a Harm for you tomorrow."

"Tell him I'll wait and also thank you." 

Ember smiles at her and heads off to do just that.

The paladins don't exactly stop keeping an eye on her, and aren't looking to sacrifice security, but insofar as it doesn't conflict with those goals they can try and make this as painless an experience as possible.

Yeah she appreciates that but she doesn't know them, she doesn't trust them--they take orders from Hulrun, so she actively doesn't trust them, not just she doesn't trust them because she doesn't know them--and she's not going to have delicate conversations in front of them, and she has a lot of delicate conversations to have right now. 

The Grey Garrison probably has spare paper somewhere though, right? Right. She finds paper and a reasonable desk and starts writing up her account of what happened in a basic keyword cipher. 

When she's done she hands it to Villibor and says, "Can you bring this to Anevia? And tell her how to decrypt it. It's a Z-17." 

"Sure." 

Okay. Anevia is presumably around somewhere. 

She is! And for once, it's even somewhere findable instead of an 'I'll find you' scenario.

"Hey, glad to see you're doing alright. How is Luzai holding up?"

“Minagho managed to brand her during the fight, which caused some awkwardness at first with the paladins who found us when she unexpectedly detected evil, but Hulrun got rid of one and one wore off on its own so the detecting evil problem is gone but she isn’t going to do much until tomorrow when Joran Vhane said he would prepare a Harm to get rid of the rest, because Hulrun set a couple of paladins presumably loyal to him to watch her and she, uh, does not trust anyone loyal to Hulrun very much. But she wrote up a report in cipher. I assume you’re familiar with keyword ciphers.”

"Woah, breathe. You assume correctly, just let me grab some paper to decode it on."

"Sorry. She's stressed out so I'm stressed out." 

And once she gets the keyword from Villibor and decrypts it, what does the message say?

Areelu Vorlesh (she says "Mom" but she is obviously not talking about the late Ruvina) gave her team a shortcut to the Wardstone, she took it, she touched the Nahyndrian crystal dagger (here is what Nahyndrian crystal is, here is what the Storyteller had to say about its ability to cleanse the Wardstone, here is what she saw inside the Wardstone/btw the Wardstone is made of angel volunteers). She tried talking down the corrupted angels, she tried drawing the corruption into the dagger; neither one really worked; she tried using the knife's power and her own skill with enchantment to put the corrupted angels to sleep and that worked. 

Then there was a whole bunch of backlash-power from the interaction between the dagger and the Wardstone! If Anevia noticed herself, Irabeth, and Seelah suddenly get stronger, Luzai tried to pour some of the power into them, and also the people she had with her, and that is how they beat up Minagho. 

...Unfortunately, Staunton helped Minagho escape. More unfortunately, Luzai thinks she also spilled some power into Staunton; he was a Person Luzai Was Thinking Of when she was distributing the power. She thinks Minagho may have Dominated Staunton and that even if that's not the case it's possible that if they promise Joran to treat it as though it were the case and not hurt Staunton they can keep him from running after his brother. Maybe not! She doesn't know Joran well enough to say for sure. But it seems like a possibility to explore. 

After everything settled down some it transpired that Minagho had managed to brand her, and Hulrun took one off and one wore off on its own but it would be REALLY GREAT if Joran could be prevented from learning that Staunton is gone until after he uses a Harm to take the last ones off her like he promised to do tomorrow. 

Also she lost control of the backlash-power before it could all go into people and that's why the Grey Garrison has a hole in the roof, sorry about that. 

(Also, the keyword--actually a keyphrase--is "cinnamon garlic jam")

That would explain why she was hit too, then - it's not like she doesn't pray to Iomedae, and in battles like these she reliably does, but Iomedae had a lot of paladins and clerics and inquisitors there and it would have been odd for her to choose Anevia over them. She'd been considering seeing if it was a sign that she should try and be a cleric, but if Luzai somehow pulled it off herself that would explain why Seelah as well. 

As for dominating Staunton... he was foolish enough to go off alone with her, and despite being a relatively powerful dwarven paladin he was never particularly wise or splendid. It's not an impossible story. But Anevia has done her research in the past few days, and she knows that when they have the chance Lilitu have a strong tendency to prefer to do their corruption the hard way, both as a sign of mastery and to make it harder for their rivals to poach their subordinates. Minagho had done just that the last time she got Staunton to do her bidding, even. It's not impossible that she was pressed enough to change things up, but Anevia wouldn't put money on it, and if she knows that there's a good chance Jhoran will as well. 

"Thank you. I'll look into it."

More than the powers, though, she's mostly glad that Areelu seems to have been legit about wanting Luzai to be able to fix the wardstone. They had a backup plan, sure, but it wasn't the kind of thing you would expect to actually work.

"You're welcome. Oh, also, Luzai didn't explicitly say this but I'm very good at reading her--is there anywhere she can spend the night that's, uh, reassuring in the hypothetical where Minagho could get at her through the brands, but not...a cell Hulrun controls."