"They live in Valinor. It's west, not even that far, but your boat would probably sink if you tried."

"Even the god of the dead?"

"Yes. The Halls of Mandos are in Valinor."

"It's generally accepted that the reason mages can't resurrect anyone who's been dead for more than a few minutes to an hour is that if there's an afterlife it's in an alternate plane of existence our magic can't reach."

"Oh. So you...might be able to do it?"

"I...maybe. I don't know. I can try. If I can't, maybe Odette could do it..."

"How much do you need to know about the person? Do you need their body? Can you create a new body for them?"

"If you have any corpses lying around the first thing I would try would be repairing one of those and trying to call the soul back into it. If you don't or that fails I can try something else."

"My sister was buried in a secret location, it's not immediately accessible. We haven't had any deaths in recent engagements-"

"No Elven deaths," says the Lady Hareth.

"Yes," he says, "I apologize and stand corrected, but it's only Elves that go to Mandos, and she's already said she can't return Men from the dead."

"You have a confirmed afterlife and humans don't go there?"

"We don't know anything of the fate of Men. The Halls of Mandos are specifically for judging, punishing, and reembodying Elves, who aren't supposed to die in the first place."

"I see." Well, that makes a certain amount of sense. Most of it isn't even horrible. It does give her a bit less patience with the "humans are supposed to die of old age" viewpoint but no one's actually claimed to advocate that standpoint so making a fuss about it would probably be a bad idea--especially if it was the result of a misunderstanding like the sex thing.

"If you were to try reembodying an Elf without the body, how would you go about it?"

"Well, I would want to sit down and think about it for a while before I tried anything else, but off the top of my head I could try reconstructing the body, preferably using the person's blood relatives as a point of comparison."

"That's not urgent, and might be a project better saved for after the war, but it is very encouraging to know that it could someday be possible. Thank you."

"If it's not urgent then it should probably be Odette who does it. Most of what I've been describing would have to be Sympathy, and even if she weren't a stronger mage in general than me she's a Sympathy specialist and I'm not."

"We hardly need more reason to hope she's safe and well." He and his father are staring at each other intently. The King is frowning.

That's...probably none of her business. "Quite." She turns to Lady Hareth. "I'm sorry we can't do anything about our own species' deaths."

"It's unfortunate," she says. "But if it can still be done if they're found quickly enough, and no one ages, you could get - not what Elves have, but something close. I'm surprised that most people die in your world. Maybe because there aren't Elves, so no one sees what mass immortality actually looks like?"

"I think there must be more reasons than that, but I don't know what they all are."

She shrugs. "Perhaps if they can bring back their dead they'll ask their own people to play infantry in their wars."

"Perhaps."

"I feel that this is an important lesson to mention all of the things we're assuming are misunderstandings or cultural differences explicitly, in case actually they're fundamental differences in the functioning of the world."

"...Well, I don't know if you've told everyone here that humans can have sex without getting married?"

"I hadn't," he says, smiling. "That clarified a great deal for me. In particular I've occasionally gotten reports from baffled members of my forces that they were offered the opportunity to pay money to marry a mortal, and with context I think the situation has a clearer interpretation. And the laws about chaperoning. And the question about state funding for mothers in desperate situations. Really, someone should have explained that sooner."