She's felt it before, of course, she has Fox's Cunning and uses it sometimes when she's stuck on a spell structure, or on how to get an enchantment to lay nicely. It's wonderful, it feels like the difference between being groggily half-awake and being properly awake except on top of awakeness. It feels like the sort of conversation you have with another person where each of you sees exactly where the other is going so you get three words into a sentence and the other person says eagerly 'yes' and you can move on to the next piece, having placed a conceptual pointer, except with just one person.
Right now it's mostly just making it harder to refocus her attention away from the Queen's threat to petrify her. Which is silly. The threat made sense: Carissa is glad to live in a country where Queens issue such threats, because contemplating their overthrow really is a very grave crime and if there were no penalty more seriously than more quickly meeting Asmodeus then more people would do it, and that wouldn't do. Carissa understood this incentive problem to mostly be solved with a very, very protracted death but she can appreciate why the Queen would have assessed Carissa's own incentives as being different. And very simple.
And she's not going to overthrow the Queen, because she isn't an idiot, so it's fine. Except that it seems like there are actually a lot of ways that Carissa could fail, from here, in ways that made people very angry at her, and -
- it's always been true that she'll go to Hell no matter what.
- digression, why does Maillol think that the Queen might want to have sex with her? Why would the Queen want that? Should Carissa want the Queen to want that? She leans no, because being around the Queen more feels like it makes it more likely one ends up a statue underground. Maybe if she has succeeded tremendously at her project and built dath ilan but evil and better. If that happens probably she will not end up a statue underground.
(The Queen could be bluffing. Asmodeus has chosen Carissa, perhaps He wouldn't tolerate that. There was no hint of it in her voice or manner but then, there wouldn't be.)
Okay, setting that aside with more mental effort than it ought to take but not more than she has on hand.
The Queen implied that Asmodeus instructed Cheliax to let Keltham go, when he leaves. Which makes sense of why Contessa Lrilatha was willing to concede that in contract negotiations; it was commanded already. Why did Asmodeus give those instructions? The Queen's right, that Keltham isn't a relative advantage for Cheliax at all if no one can learn his teachings without ending up a heretic. That seems really important to understand. She's not coming up with anything but it's standing out now in her memory as a question, along with 'why isn't Abadar talking to Keltham' and 'is Otolmens right to think Keltham might end the world' and 'how badly do I have to screw up to get turned into a statue' -
Queen's present before she gives the Taldor briefing, or after? ....Carissa kind of wants to be in a lot of pain right now, so that settles that.
"Thank you," she says perfunctorily to Maillol, and goes off to the torture chamber.