I could hear the baby a hundred miles off probably but I don't know anybody here well enough to hear more than a couple miles away yet.

All three of them assume this is an underestimate but - she's answering at all, and she might never run into anything important enough to reveal her extra range for, and if she did she'd have to own up to lying, so Mora is optimistic that she wants to at least maintain the pretense of not trying to conquer them. He's going to pretend to buy it.

"In that case, you'll almost definitely be too far to hear me most of the time. We could send a messenger if we knew where to find you - at least to within a couple miles - so you should send someone to find us and let us know once you've gotten settled somewhere."

(Meanwhile Valan is alarmed but tucks that away to contemplate when he's several miles away and instead contemplates when plants have whorls versus spirals and what might happen if they did things some other way. Teru tries to figure out whether she can ascertain anything about the actual range from this and concludes that she can't be sure but it's probably finite.)

I really don't know it more exactly! I'm the only person of my species I've ever met and the other ones with osanwë are better at it and I don't know what parts of Angband are how far from other parts.

Mora doesn't think that's much evidence but it's important if she's telling the truth, and he's mostly outwardly engaging with the world where she's telling the truth right now, so he thinks about how they could test it. But he's stuck, a bit, on how normally he would worry about proposing tests in case it got in the way of someone's plausible deniability, and now he can't really avoid it...

Valan on the other hand stops puzzling over plant parts and starts trying to model the stranger's past and trying to figure out who she is. He tries to avoid examining his reasons for this in too much detail but he thinks whether she has ideals and if so what they are is the most important question they have any chance of answering today. "Is there more we should know about Angband and people where you come from?"

I don't think they're coming after me. A couple other people went in the monster and none of them are here, so it didn't send us all to the same place. So I'm not going to worry about that.

That's a very surprising answer. It suggests she doesn't think Angband has any technology, or any she knows how to make, that she hasn't already seen here. It suggests she doesn't think Angband has any social customs worth talking about, even though she can't possibly have seen much of Sesati society. And if she just missed it - if he imagines missing Sesat and getting involved in a war somewhere else, yeah, he wouldn't reminisce, but he'd probably say something more like it's not useful right now and not I'm not going to worry about that. So for being a complete non-answer that might be the single most revealing thing she's said.

(Valan thinks she's a former serf and most of his uncertainty is in how exactly her society is shaped and whether all the aspects of serfdom go together there. Mora isn't sure but wonders if she's secretly a slave. Teru is leaning toward thinking she's some kind of soldier, but she's not sure either.)

"As long as Sesat stands and you stand with us you'll be welcome here."

(Mora thinks this is an incredibly stupid thing to say, given they're literally right now fighting a war over runaways, but opts not to speak up about it.)

Thanks. She smooches her baby on the head.

The soldiers will head out. Teru will also head out, to get horses, and Beka can either wait here or follow her. Teru's preference is to be able to keep an eye on her on the way but she recognizes that the idea that she could actually keep Beka from doing anything she shouldn't is extremely optimistic.

Beka will go with Teru! She hums on the way.

Teru appreciates the humming. She's glad she doesn't have to interrupt it to say so. There are other things she could be thinking about but she's putting off panicking about all of this and running through all the things she wants to keep secret until later and it's good to have something else to focus on.

Some of the people they pass stare and wonder who Beka is and where she came from. Someone thinks it's really weird that wherever she's from they use tattoos to make people look better instead of worse.

A lot of the places they pass along the way were designed to at least try to appeal to sensibilities that at least resemble those of elves. The stables weren't, but at least no one was specifically trying to make them torturously ugly.

Beka likes it here for the most part. She listens to the tattoo-related thoughts curiously.

If she can pick up on the underlying assumptions behind the surface thoughts, or if she listens to other minds too, she can learn that usually tattoos are used to mark slaves, who - to oversimplify a little - are for forced labor and suffering and denied nice things insofar as that's possible here.

Teru gets them some horses and asks someone to look in on her cousins while she's gone. She - isn't sure what kind of help Beka might need, being new to riding, but her first instinct is to just try thinking through how it works and see if that's enough.

That will do the trick all right. Beka sits on the horse and holds the reins with one hand and the baby with the other.

Then - off they go. She tries to keep near the border, where more of the people in range of the mind-reading will be in Iral. Not just because she's trying to protect her people from having their minds read but because there's probably some chance Beka would bother to tell her if Iral were about to attack.

She's trying not to be afraid and not to think anything incriminating or interesting but she's starting to do a worse job of that, getting anxious and briefly entertaining the thought of convincing Beka to help her take over Sesat and getting more anxious because that's not something she wants Beka to hear her thinking, at least not yet...

Most of what's between them and the coast is farmland. Some of the people working in the fields have the sort of tattoos that mark them as slaves here.

Beka looks at her, sometimes, when she has thoughts about how she doesn't want Beka to hear her thoughts, but doesn't comment on them. She does say Whose slaves are those? once, about a batch of them picking vegetables.

She notices the looking and it makes the mind-reading even more salient and she starts thinking even more about how much she wishes this weren't happening.

The question about the slaves is a nice distraction. Or, really, it's a distraction, which makes it nice. Teru speculates about that based on who owns land around here - her mental map is a little vague, more so as they get farther out. One of the soldiers who'll be with Valan and Mora has an uncle who owns a lot of land around here, or there's Zatar's family. There are minor freeholders but this farm looks too big to be some nobody's. Of course, it's not certain the slaves belong here, they could be rented. Why do you ask?

Tattoos aren't a slave thing in Angband. Melkor's in charge of everything. But it seemed like different people had them here.

What are the slaves thinking.

One of them is worried that they're falling behind and going to be punished for it, one of them is ruminating on how her girlfriend slighted her, one of them (the girlfriend) is distracting herself from romantic drama by paying attention to the beauty of nature all around them, and one is just thinking I want to die over and over.

The claim about Melkor parses as a complete non-sequitur to Teru. She guesses Melkor is their king, or something, but lots of people listen to kings without being slaves, and she has no information on Melkor's tattoo opinions. Yeah, you're doing something totally different with yours. Do they commemorate things you're proud of?

No, they just cover up the scars some.

She's very curious and confused about several aspects of that but can't get all of it into well-articulated questions. Is that normal there?

It... kind of seems nicer, to only ever make people look nicer, instead of disfiguring them on purpose. Makes her sort of sad about Sesat.

Lots of people have tattoos. Usually not for scars, specifically, but because they want them.

She wonders what kind of tattoos she'd want if wanting tattoos were the done thing. She toys with some mental images - maybe a bird or a leopard? It feels weird to think about. She sort of hopes they're going to have a conversation about artistic tattoo designs because that would be a nice completely inconsequential distraction that wouldn't involve constructing plans for how someone with Beka's abilities could take over Sesat at all.

I don't especially want to take over Sesat?

That's very reassuring if it's true, and still a little reassuring as a lie to bother telling. Although... Teru cuts off a train of thought about whether it's also a bad thing if the Star-of-Stars hires Beka to read everyone's minds to keep order. I mostly believe you but I don't really understand not wanting that.

I don't know what I'd do with it. Also it sounds dangerous to try.