The monitor was under the impression that Tantara is incredibly mad at Ma'ar for - well, kind of a lot of things, but especially the fear-artifact that took the palace, even though in her opinion it's pretty obvious that it meant much lower casualties in the operation. She's pretty sure that Tantara is going to want Ma'ar removed from power, which nobody in Predain is going to be very on board with, and...she isn't actually sure how countries that were at war and then stopped being at war via a negotiated peace treaty rather than via one of them eventually conquering the other tend to deal with disputes like that? 

- it's fair enough to guess that in this case the answer is 'what Iomedae thinks should happen, happens', but she's not intending to be heavy-handed with the peace talks; the two nations are going to have to live next to each other and do diplomacy themselves in the future, after all. It seems like Ma'ar is very important to Predain and they're unlikely to be willing to concede to his stepping down from power, and while Iomedae has her reservations about the man she doesn't think he's a danger to the peace if it's achieved. And she'll tell Urtho that Tantara having started the war has less grounds for the complaint that Predain then waged it. Both sides can agree on not using fear artifacts in the future, if they decide they collectively would rather such weapons be barred.

She's not big on vengeance, really. It is an understandable human impulse but not one that's safe to indulge, if you're as powerful as she is, and so not one she experiences much anymore. 

(The concept of two countries agreeing on banning weapons and then actually not using those weapons is very alien to the monitor. Does that ever work. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should work.) 

She should probably know what sort of timeline Iomedae is thinking on - at some point they'll presumably have to move from 'extending the ceasefire' to actually having various people meet for peace talks but she has no idea how long that sort of process usually takes? Is it more like days or more like months before Iomedae expects them to get to 'officially definitely not at war anymore'? 

It would also be nice to know how optimistic she is on, for example, Tantara being willing to send Predain food once they've retreated from the occupied areas, many of which have crops in them right now that Predain was relying on harvesting in order to avoid a lot of people starving this winter. 

She is hoping to hurry, days not months. War is bad and ceasefires are fragile; the sooner it can end, the better. She hasn't yet spoken with Urtho about Tantara sending Predain food, but Ma'ar mentioned it as a concern and she'll try to get it done.

Nations do, sometimes, make agreements and then keep them. Not if it's overwhelmingly against their self-interest, usually, but self-interest is complicated and things can be lastingly better than they'd be if no one was playing by the rules. A paladin like Iomedae would be stripped of her powers by her god if she gave her word and broke it, which paladins all appreciate since it means they can more credibly promise things. 

Ma'ar would keep his word, if he gave it. Countries...don't really seem like the kind of thing that can give their word or keep it? But it would be neat if it could work. 

She thinks that's all of her urgent questions. Presumably Iomedae has plans for staying in contact with Ma'ar, who is likely to have a much larger number of much more specific questions? 

Yes, she's planning to send this letter with the monitor which includes a bunch of proposals for better lines of communication. 

She is grateful, for the monitor's service; she suspects that it saved many lives, and she hopes it will help speed the war to an end.

That's good. 

(The monitor is kind of intensely running out of energy for speaking, at this point.) 

Then she'll leave her be, with the letter, and go worry about superweapon security some more. (Why are wizards. Seriously. Iomedae is genuinely unsure if she'd be like that if she was a wizard and this is part of why she isn't.)

Back in Predain, Ma'ar is alternating between obsessively checking in with the mages he's put on scrying and communication-spell duty to make sure they're in continuous contact with all the camps on or near the front and will find out instantaneously if something goes wrong with the ceasefire – and Gating between those camps, to talk to his commanders face to face. He leaned on them very hard, yesterday, wrangling everyone into agreeing to the ceasefire at all. Now he has to convince them it's still a good idea and things are actually going fine and well even though Iomedae just murdered a bunch of their people. 

Predain, as Iomedae has already noted, is not a high trust culture. It's not a culture where, even internally - even among respected leaders who work closely together - it's generally possible to come to a negotiated agreement on, for example, banning a certain kind of dangerous magic, because obviously you can just use the dangerous magic anyway and will if it's in your interest and the only way to realistically prevent that is by force. It's a culture where more often than not, disagreements are mediated by means of public duels. Someone deciding to, instead, deal with a disagreement by threatening their counterparty's family is being relatively subtle. 

The process of causing anything to happen in an orderly way does not look very much like normal diplomacy. 

Ma'ar doesn't exactly have a single strategy here. He knows all of the people who work under him, and they're not all going to be persuaded by the same arguments – and basically none of them will consider his character assessment of Iomedae to be a compelling argument. Iomedae will obviously do whatever Iomedae feels like doing, and historically when very powerful people had a chance to do that, it has not usually gone well for Predain. 

So he's, instead, leaning on the argument that Tantara knew they were losing and it was only a matter of time - not even very much time - and really, 'prewar borders' is hardly sacrificing anything that matters to Predain. It's not like they were the ones deciding to conquer Tantara for the extra land. It's not even clear it would be net good to hold onto the occupied regions; it's a completely different case from previous occupations, because the people of Tantara, one, don't speak Predaini or understand anything about how Predain works, and two, don't want to be ruled by their conquerors, which means they'll cause problems. Occupying a bunch of Tantara was an inconvenient cost toward their actual goal, of getting into a position of enough leverage that they could demand...exactly what Urtho is offering them right now for free. 

(They'll probably have to avoid any expansion on other borders even if that doesn't make it into the official treaty, but they don't exactly have the capacity for expansion right now anyway. Give it five years to rebuild, and that's plenty of time to negotiate on that point.) 

And he thinks he can get them better terms than that, even. It's in Tantara's interest to send food, because otherwise there will be desperate starving farmers turning to banditry, and Tantara is weirdly terrible at many aspects of war, which will probably also translate to struggling a lot with border security if pressed. Predain is used to this, their people are tough and prepared; Tantara has no idea what they're doing. 

Iomedae does know what she's doing, of course, but her loyalties are to her foreign distant god, not to Urtho. Ma'ar doesn't see much reason for her foreign distant god to want to help Predain, but also not much reason for them to want to harm Predain if Predain is minding its own business. Which is all they wanted in the first place. 

These are the explicit arguments. The implicit case – which might actually be the more important part – is that Ma'ar is calm and relaxed and has all the relevant information at his fingertips and is very clearly in control. He goes from camp to camp, sharing a drink with the commanders (and discreetly not drinking most of it) and demonstrating, in every way he can, that the (current) situation is still stable and they're not (currently) in danger. 

Ma'ar's commander along the empty river bed deep inside Tantara is not among those most satisfied with the proposal that they give up all of the land they've conquered at such cost. It's theirs now; if the Tantarans don't like it, they can run south to within the new borders of Tantara. If Predain has better farmland, it'll be richer and stronger next time Tantara decides to pick a fight for some stupid reason.

He trusts Ma'ar, and he trusts that Ma'ar is in control, but he thinks Ma'ar was always too conciliatory with Tantara, and that if Tantara doesn't learn a lesson it'll do this again as soon as the god-woman wanders off to do something else.

Ma'ar agrees that they need to ensure the eventual peace terms are such that Tantara will badly regret picking this fight, and refusing to give back the land would definitely accomplish that, but so would plenty of other things. They have other leverage – for example, the literally thousands of Tantarans they're holding prisoner, many of them mages. Tantara is already going to have some very bad problems just in terms of their treasury; Ma'ar certainly has no intention of paying back any of what they looted from the palace and capital city to pay their own war expenses, and if anything thinks he can make a case that Tantara owes Predain recompenses for their war expenses and infrastructure damage – they probably can't get it paid out immediately, but leaving Tantara in a position of having to pay it in the future also weakens their ability to quickly rebuild their military strength. 

There are a few things that will make Predain much better able to protect itself even if Tantara weren't badly weakened, which it will be (and of course Predain is also suffering, but their people were always better at enduring and rebuilding, and he is confident that they'll recover faster.)

The main point he wants to negotiate hard on is that Tantara does not, as part of the peace treaty negotiations, get to demand that they rewrite their laws on the use of compulsions. They probably will offer to stop using blood-magic at least temporarily – a good idea anyway, there were a lot of war casualties and they need to be rebuilding their population, not killing a bunch of it. But if Predain can imprison mages, and Tantara can't, then that's a much more significant advantage than having some poorly-integrated farmland currently inhabited by peasants who hate them, that would seriously strain their resources to integrate more fully. 

- well, that doesn't sound too bad. The god-woman doesn't care about the compulsions? 

The god-woman isn't fond of compulsions but is amenable to arguments that, given what the Ceej Empire gets up to, Predain's tightly enforced laws aren't exactly crossing a line, even if they would be in her homeland, which has different laws and practices around mind control. 

Also she is definitely amenable to the pragmatic arguments; she clearly hates the fact that she doesn't have a way to hold mages captive or prevent them from Final Striking her, and compulsions are a way to achieve that and in fact the only realistic way to achieve that. She didn't like it better that Tantara just...didn't take mages alive. 

He doesn't see why the god-woman is even helping Tantara instead of Predain, the country that was invaded here, and he doesn't trust her to be reasonable about things instead of to push more whenever she sees weakness, such as them withdrawing from Tantara because she said so.

Ma'ar doesn't actually think it makes sense to frame this as a situation where she's helping Tantara instead of Predain. Tantara was the side losing the war, and obviously benefits from instead coming to a negotiated ceasefire, but Predain was the side that didn't want to have the war; they weren't the ones who had to be pressured into agreeing to a ceasefire.

Tantara wanted a lot more than they're getting, as part of said ceasefire agreement; Predain will probably make more concessions later as part of the actual peace talks, but so far the only actual concession, aside from agreeing not to cross the lines on the map, is avoiding blood-magic – which they don't need to use anyway if they're not under attack, and if they are under attack then that would mean Tantara violated the ceasefire and all agreements made as part of it are off. Given that Tantara got their hands on her first, and started out telling their side of the story first, this should have given them pretty good chances of getting what they wanted, if she were in fact more sympathetic to them than to Predain. 

...Also, Ma'ar is not going to go around announcing this, because Tantarans are crazy about this sort of thing, but Iomedae - who is not crazy about this sort of thing - thinks he could probably kill her, if he wanted, and Ma'ar is pretty sure she's right. He does not currently want to, because Predain is getting a pretty good deal. But it is, in fact, something both of them are aware of, what his options are if it stops being the case that Predain is getting a good deal. 

Well. That's all right, then.

(It's not hard to believe Ma'ar could kill even a god-woman. He's Ma'ar.)

Ma'ar is glad they're on the same page! 

He of course wants to know immediately if Tantara does anything that looks even sort of like violating the ceasefire. He doesn't want them to actually engage unless Tantara is very clearly actually attacking and their people are actually going to die or get hurt if they don't defend themselves – but if, say, gryphons are doing fancy aerial maneuvers only five thousand paces from the line, he definitely intends to test Iomedae's willingness to be scrupulously consistent at enforcing the lines for both Predain and Tantara. He currently expects she will. If she didn't, that would...also be very good to know. 

And then he'll move on to the next camp. 

Certain concerns come up over and over. His commanders are worried that any de-escalation will parse as weakness, that Tantara will be tempted to press; Ma'ar repeats over and over how Tantara, from their side, is probably not feeling at all in a position of strength. He brings up the fact that Predain still has a lot of options to ruin Tantara's day, which can be very quickly executed if Tantara breaks the ceasefire. 

They're worried that Iomedae is taking Tantara's side. He repeatedly clarifies that he doesn't think that's a very accurate way of looking at it, and includes - in the hushed-aside tones of sharing a secret - that he's pretty sure Iomedae thinks Urtho is an idiot with incredibly unrealistic expectations around war. Also the fact that he could kill her, if she screwed them over badly enough to warrant that. 

They're worried that Urtho doesn't have good control of his troops and in particular the gryphons, and cannot actually promise that they'll behave themselves. Ma'ar repeats over and over that this may well be true, but Iomedae is entirely capable of keeping gryphons in line, and his current impression is that she'll be just as furious with Tantara as with Predain for violations; if he ends up asking her to enforce the lines and she doesn't, that too will of course be very good to know and Predain will react accordingly. 

Their use of magic behind the lines isn't restricted. Ma'ar can buy significant goodwill by arranging for Gates with supply deliveries and extra Healers and such – it's a somewhat unsustainable pace, their stores of food are in fact very low and the number of mages who can Gate is limited, but he does want all the camps on the front at peak readiness in case anything goes wrong – and it's a pace he can sustain for a week, and meanwhile conveys that he's confident and not worried about Predain's resources. 

He returns to the capital with his reports, and has a differently frustrating meeting with the King. It's very late by the time he finally sits down to draft a letter for Iomedae. 

In his letter to Iomedae: here are some of Predain's hard requirements, and a separate list of Predain's more negotiable preferences, on locations for initial peace talks. Here are people he would consider sending, under various different criteria, for example if Tantara wants to restrict initial meetings to only include un-Gifted people. Here are the security precautions he wants his people to be permitted to take; here are some proposals for how Tantara can verify that Predain's delegation is doing that and no more. 

He sends the letter off with a messenger, and drags himself to his private rooms, and tries to sleep. 

He's exhausted and his head hurts and he feels half out of his body, as though he's nothing but a set of clothes and a theatre mask over hollow air thrumming with a levinbolt waiting to be flung. He's been pouring all of his strength into appearing to be in perfect control of the situation, and he doesn't feel in control at all. 

There's something incredibly surreal about being stabbed, healed, questioned at swordpoint, and then wandering into a conversation with implications that feel like they should change everything. He hasn't really had a chance to think about what those implications are; it all happened in such a short number of minutes, and then he was thrown right back into the metaphorical battlefield of convincing his angry and terrified people that Tantara is probably going to stick to the ceasefire and Iomedae is probably going to punish Tantara's violations just as sternly as Predain's.

He's in fact a lot more sure than that, that Iomedae will try incredibly hard to get Predain a fair deal – that she wants their kingdom to flourish just as much as she wants Tantara to, and given their different starting points, this is going to end up benefiting Predain more. But that's not a motive that makes sense, to most of his people, and he's not even sure it makes sense to him. He feels incredibly confused, which is almost worse than being scared. 

He doesn't sleep well. 

She doesn't sleep well but that's fine, she doesn't need much sleep. She is overseeing superweapon relocation and deconstruction and writing up her own list of suggestions for locations for the peace talks and for lines of communication,plus telling off gryphons about near-misses with respect to the treaty rules, which will put Tantara in a worse negotiating position for the peace talks by making them look untrustworthy and incompetent. She'll send the proposals and Tantara's summary of the previous ceasefire violation with the Predain monitor back to Predain in the morning. 

(The gryphons mostly think that she's being very annoying, and that the aerial-activity restriction was a stupid rule to begin with.) 

By morning, Urtho is doing much better – he's still very weak, but no longer actively hallucinating, and he can hold a normal conversation. He's available to meet with Iomedae whenever is convenient for her. 

He mostly wants to know her current impression of Ma'ar. He was too out of it yesterday to even think to ask, but she ended up meeting him face to face, and must have gotten a much better sense of - where he's at, right now, and how he's thinking about the war. 

She feels more optimistic than before she met him. She is very confused by the night's events but her best guess is that he Gated in to tell his people to surrender, and she's not sure that was a sane or reasonable thing to do from his perspective but it's a decent one, it's a strong sign he cares about his soldiers and is not the type to conveniently whatever his internal motivations only do things that serve his personal power. They didn't have a very in-depth conversation under the circumstances, but he claimed to approve of the idea that she cared about people everywhere, and she thinks she believes him, based on his letters.

Her current assessment of him is that he is from an intensely paranoid low-trust culture and what conceptions of honor or decency he possesses he had to build himself, which makes him unpredictable in contexts where she'd like to have someone predictable but is very different from having deliberately decided to discard Law because it restrained him from things he felt like doing. She thinks she trusts him to conduct a peace negotiation in something resembling good faith so long as events don't conspire to put a lot of pressure on him at home, which is actually a lot to ask of a person; peace negotiations are painful and frustrating and call on virtues that war has often actively trained out of people. She thinks he wants a peace. She expects that if Tantara is willing to feed Predain this winter then they can reasonably hope for pre-war borders and a moratorium on blood magic, though of course there will be lots of bumps along the way. 

He shouldn't have had to build all of that himself, because whatever his childhood was like, he did spend years in Tantara, surrounded by people who do know about honor and decency. Urtho - remembers initially thinking that Ma'ar had understood that, because for all his paranoia and lack of trust in anyone else, he did seem...thirsty for it, eagerly drinking in all the ways that a place could be better than Predain. And then, later on, it maybe seemed like that had been just a pretense, and he understood but never actually cared or was driven by it. Iomedae...sounds like she thinks some third more complicated thing that Urtho doesn't really understand yet?

And it seems important to understand, because even though Ma'ar is not the ruler of his kingdom, he is in an important sense its real leader, and - to the extent he trusts anyone in Tantara, that person is Urtho, and so regardless of whether the talks are actually conducted by the two of them meeting face to face, it's ultimately still between the two of them. 

- her guess is that Tantara's conceptions of honor and decency are conceptions for a high-trust society, rules that make sense to live by if the people around you do, and broadly don't function well as rules about how to behave when the people around you don't share them, and therefore were not a complete answer for Ma'ar to the question of how he should act in Predain. One shouldn't sink to the level of whoever is around them, of course, but honor and decency have two parts, how you understand yourself and how you are understood. If Iomedae abides by the rules she abided by at home, which were considered honorable and predictable at home, in a place where they made her terrifying and unpredictable to the locals, then that wouldn't be doing the right thing. 

Urtho still feels pretty confused, but...maybe less than before? And Iomedae's last point is making him wonder if, given that he knows Predain is a place that works very differently from Tantara but doesn't himself feel like he understands how they're different, if there are any specific things Iomedae expects that Tantarans might do in good faith but would come across as terrifying and unpredictable to Predain?