The month might have passed calmly for the kingdom, but Devaguea was busy plotting, planning and scheming. He spent a full day with Allison, talking about useful spells since she had recently researched the permanency spell, and then went about talking with a couple of advisors, seeing if they were interested in receiving the spell. His first choice was Talia, as the spymistress was rarely out of the city, making her the perfect choice to be the other end of a Telepathic Bond spell made permanent, was an elf so she would be around for a long while, and was easy to behold and spend time with. Even better, Talia had shown some interest when they had started, but nothing had ever really happened with it, though with him going from the size of a dog to bigger than a horse, he could understand a woman hesitating somewhat to commit. Serena was his second choice, and a distant one at that.<br/><br/>The other spells he was thinking of making permanent was See Invisibility for Sak'bas, and Arcane Sight for him. There were other possibilities, but they could wait.<br/><br/>The dragon duke met with his bodyguard to talk about the mercenaries, and immediately had Sarianna and Talia called in to talk about the Razmirans, though their constant preaching about serving a 'living god' was not helped by his paladin being visibly doubtful of them. He was leaning away from hiring them, but was willing to listen.<br/><br/>He did immediately accept the Swordlords, and after a moment the leshies, before dismissing the Galtians out of hand. The Galts were already going to get a theatre in his capital, he wasn't going to give them full and easy access to everywhere. The Swordlords would be told they would be on the northern border, yes, but he was moving them west to deal with Numarian raiding parties that were harassing that edge of his kingdom. The leshies he put as scouts in the forest, hunting for bandits camps, though he did expect lots of logger camps to be falsely reported. They were not required, or even asked, to engage, only to let his people know about camps so that the camps could be investigated.<br/><br/>If Talia and Sak'bas both agreed to the permanent spells, he sent Korima and Anke off to Restov to get the scrolls needed, along with a large sum of converted kingdom resources.