But it no longer feels like there's nothing there; it feels like it's behind a wall which she is terrified of scaling, because, of course, 'probably not' isn't 'definitely not' and it's not, exactly, like she has nothing to lose.
Be a fucking ilani for once. It's not the right tool for every situation, but it's the right tool for when it's very very important to figure out what's happening around you when you don't have knockdown arguments, just uncertainties that add up either to less or more uncertainty than they began with.
The seventh-circle wizard on staff is almost certainly there to mindread her and make sure she isn't about to defect. A seventh-circle wizard can read her frequently, if it's their only job; maybe a quarter of the time. So she could go around with a presumption on 3:1 odds against being mindread at any given moment.
However, a seventh-circle wizard specialized in divinations should be able to mindread her without her noticing only about 2/3rds of the time. She felt it once, while she was interrogating Maillol. That breaks down into some chance that it was a lie that he's seventh-circle, that the wizard is much more powerful than that, or that they're a seventh circle wizard with an uncanny knack for subtle spells. Or that they weren't, in fact, following her around mindreading her all the time, and did it a few times at particularly key moments, probably 3 or 4 times, listened for half an hour on each occasion, and was satisfied.
She can feel part of her flinching away from this calculation. What's up with that. Oh, it's that that part of her feels that thinking is only allowed if she is ABSOLUTELY SURE she is not being mindread, and that no numbers that come out of a process like this will be ABSOLUTE SURITY so they may as well stop now.
Well, she can do the math and then decide not to scale the wall, but - but there's kind of a lot at stake, right, there's whatever Cayden Cailean is playing at and whatever Keltham is playing at and whatever Asmodia is playing at and a very real possibility, she hasn't thought about numbers, that Cheliax is going to be annihilated, and, if she won't risk anything to scale the wall, then she's risking missing whatever's on the other side - things you don't think about can still destroy you - so she has to keep trying -
Before the observation, with Keltham in her head saying that only Keepers can say 'before the observation' and mean it, how likely would she have considered it, that this wizard had some kind of secret technique for reading people without being noticed -
- vanishingly unlikely because if Cheliax had that capability they would have used it on Keltham instead of dragging the Queen and the Most High here personally.
How likely would she have considered it that the wizard had only mindread her three or four times, for the fifteen to thirty minutes a caster of their level can do?
Reasonably probable, if they didn't have instructions to do nothing at all but mindread her. Three or four times a day is a lot of mindreading, by the standard of any non-Project-Lawful project she's ever heard of, and it must have crossed the wizard's mind that Carissa Sevar might get annoyed with them.
And besides, she was doing so well. She was so Asmodean.
(There are definitely feelings, on the other side of the wall, about that.)
Call it 20:1 in favor of 'I can notice them the approximately predictable amount' over 'they're stealthy and I can almost never notice them'.
Is the stealthy version of this wizard who has instructions to read her as much as possible mindreading her now? Even that wizard can't actually get 24 hour coverage, and might choose to sleep themself, and prepare spells, while Carissa Sevar is in bed tossing and turning and being boring. In fact she probably seriously inconvenienced that wizard, what with not sleeping last night. Maybe 2:1 against, for the worst case scenario wizard. Nearly all the chance she's being mindread comes from the worst case scenario wizard; the wizard who mindread her approximately four times yesterday is something like 20:1 not reading her having boring insomnia in the dead of night.
- no, actually, wait - could they have started mindreading her when they cast the Owl's Wisdom?
Only if someone saw it; and she's unscryable by strategic necessity and Alarmed her surroundings and is (10:1, maybe?) alone in the room; she can see invisible people, unless they went to some considerable lengths, her Alarm would ping unless they went to even more considerable ones, and she doesn't think any Security other than the seventh circle assigned to Carissa-observation would have the nerve, tonight, to creep into Carissa Sevar's bedroom around her Alarm.
They probably would mindread her, though, if they did notice that; she has a higher chance, more like 50%, of noticing them with Owl's Wisdom up.
So two possibilities point towards the most worlds where she's currently being mindread: wizard with special skill at being sneaky and reading her near continously, which she pegged at a fortieth of worlds, and normal wizard who just got alerted she cast Owl's Wisdom, which is about a twentieth of worlds.
The math isn't the answer, Keltham says, but it focuses your attention. But her gut agrees with the math. It's unlikely. It is not vanishingly unlikely.
Is that good enough?
The Owl's Wisdom only lasts eight minutes. She thinks fast, with the headband on, much faster than other people; she can read books faster, hang spells faster, follow lines of speculation through her head faster. But eight minutes isn't very long, really, if you might possibly have a vey big problem on your hands.
She's lost fully one of them already to not understanding herself, and then one of them to calculating whether she's being mindread; six to go. There is no point in wasting some of them on agonizing over a decision; she may as well make it right this second. Say there are twenty Carissae sitting in twenty rooms; how should they choose so the most of them survive not just this decision but the war that is about to come?
She is, actually, with a vague lurching sense this is risking more than she's ever risked, willing to condemn one Carissa so all the other ones can scale that wall.