And the door closes behind them. 

(Carissa will be able to tell, with her permanent Detect Magic, that the shielding on this room is incredibly, absurdly thorough, even compared to everything she's seen in the Palace so far.) 

Altarrin keeps holding on to her, in case she's actually unsteady on her feet, but he holds perfectly still and waits. 

(He doesn't have a Thoughtsenser to relay anymore, of course. He'll cope without it.) 

Okay in Cheliax literally no one would ever expect you to fall for flattery that obvious. That's not even straightforward romance, that's, like, twelve-year-old romance. There's got to be a deeper game. 

She hopes there's a deeper game, sleeping with someone this tediously straightforward is going to be really boring and injures her pride far more than just being taken by a powerful man who doesn't care all that much about his prisoners.

"My lord?" she says quietly, once the door's shut.

"Nobody is going to overhear us, here." His voice is suddenly very different - calm, flat, implacable. "You can - you should, probably - look at the shielding for yourself, to verify this."

"Once you are more sure of it, I do think that we need to talk." 

Pause. 

"...If you are in fact not sober enough for this, yet, and need some time, I apologize greatly for the show I needed to put on, and I can wait. And bring you water, if you wish." 

Oh thank god there is a game. She should prefer her life be uncomplicated but, it turns out, she doesn't. 

"I'm not that drunk. Who was watching?"

"I am not sure who exactly - I could give you a list of the top ten powerful nobles or other political figures who I am aware have tame mages and are likely to be watching me, but I am not sure which of them would have anyone watching - I have tried very hard to keep recent events as non-suspicious as possible - and also it is unlikely the names would mean anything to you." 

...He's going to walk her over to his bed and sit down, if only because it's late and he's had only a couple of short naps in the last 36 candlemarks and he's tired. 

"....I am actually very curious what you think of the histories we brought you. Though - if you are not going to be comfortable having original thoughts until you have checked the thoroughness of my shields, please do that first." 

She's not going to be comfortable even then! Probably it's unwise to say that. 

She'll examine the shields as commanded.

Altarrin suddenly has much less information on what she's thinking, due to his deeply inconvenient lack of the Mindspeech Gift in this body, and the separately inconvenient fact that he almost certainly cannot hide a Thoughtsenser behind an illusion without her magic-senses detecting it. 

He waits. 

The shields are very pretty. Carissa was told to admire them so she'll do it. 

The shields are so so so thorough and complex and detailed! They continue to look much more like Outsider-style magic than arcane (or divine) spells. But these ones in particular are very very heavily reinforced; the total power level here is substantially more than just a Forbiddance, if not quite exceeding the power of a 9th-circle spell. 

Right, she was supposed to be giving him opinions. And probably at this point he in fact wants signs she's smart. "The histories were interesting. Cheliax is structured differently. I don't think our succession wars are as ugly but we don't allow the publication of histories unflattering to the current monarch so if they were I might not know. I think your magic system allows for longer-lasting and more precise control of people. It's interesting that doesn't just make everything much better. I - suspect some people I know would say that it enforces an unnatural hierarchy, one not borne out by native ability and determination, and that's why it explodes as it does. I'm not sure if they're right. I genuinely wasn't involved in politics, at home."

Well. 

Altarrin is trying to hold himself so he looks calm and unthreatening and friendly and also definitely not sexually interested in Carissa right now, which is - actually a fairly difficult mix of signals to be trying to send, especially when he is sitting on his bed right next to her under dimmed mage-lights. 

(The last thing is fixable. He thinks a command at them and they brighten, not quite to a daylight-level.) 

There are still multiple other reasons why this is complicated to handle right just on an interpersonal level, which in Altarrin's opinion is still the most irritating kind of problem-complexity, if not the most difficult to solve.

"....I should probably acknowledge to you explicitly, at this point, that agents loyal to me - mostly loyal to me, at the very least not disloyal - have been reading your thoughts for as much of the last day as we could manage. 

"I am not reading your thoughts now, since I lack that Gift - not that I expect you to believe me on that front, until I have done more to establish why you ought trust me when I give my word - 

"- Anyway. I - we - know more than you have said out loud about how Cheliax is structured differently. I - have on many occasions wished I could tell you that the Empire is - more functional, and makes better use of its people. I am not sure it does, though - of course it makes an enormous difference that our world does not have known or legible afterlives..." 

I suspect some people I know would say that it enforces an unnatural hierarchy, one not borne out by native ability and determination

Altarrin is pretty sure he knows exactly who she means, and he's not exactly predisposed to agree, but he isn't going to bring that up yet. 

Instead he holds himself very still and very calm and waits for her response. Out loud, since he doesn't have access to a Thoughtsenser. 

" - sorry, you don't have known afterlives? - like - what happens if you - scry dead people -"

Did this really not manage to come up as an obvious inference from their earlier conversations - or from any of the books she read...

Obviously not. 

"Nothing. ...I mean, we do not have the exact-equivalent spell that your world does, but -" 

"- but I have been noting for some time that I think your gods are - at least engaging with mortals in more legible ways, even if some of those ways are undesirable. ....My current best understanding is that souls are not permanently destroyed, in our world, when a mortal dies, but - by default they end up in a place where they likely do not have ongoing experiences. It is possible that some of them are reincarnated into new bodies, but if so they retain sufficiently few of their memories that it is not self-evident." 

"I am so sorry. I - don't actually know how to fix it - I - I don't think it's impossible, but -"

"I think it is not impossible - for the very obvious reasons, I have been trying to think about solutions to this problem for...a long time -" 

He's not actually feeling ready to tell Carissa about exactly how old he is. 

"- I have some potential plans but - most of them are, were, relying on - obtaining a good working relationship with the local gods. Which I am - no longer feeling very hopeful about." 

(He is also not going to tell Carissa about the time when Vkandis Sunlord set him on fire and burned him to death when he showed up peacefully at the Iftel border and asked to talk. Because that would involve...explaining a number of things...that he does not, currently, feel ready to explain.) 

But he somehow finds himself wanting to tell her anyway. 

Just because she's the sort of person who grew up in a society ruled by the god of Hell and decided to fight Him - 

"None of the gods can be reasoned with? Is that - why they're banned here -"

"I am not certain -" yet "- that They cannot be reasoned with. Just that I cannot - could not - establish communication with Them." 

"....I meant to ask for this much later, once we had more thoroughly established any kind of trust, but - you said before, that one of the spells you were preparing was for mental enhancement. I suspect I would be more able to have this conversation, right now, if you were willing to cast it on me."