"I can't say I gave it much thought, but if you had asked me to guess I would have come up with something like 'people disagreed on who would do the job better,' not 'they force-marched you over tundra'!"

"People also disagreed on who'd do the job better. That's, uh, a part of why they disagreed."

"I can imagine. Why the hell did they force-march you over tundra."

"You know, one advantage to bringing him back is that I could ask him."

"I don't even have as much context as you do, I'm assuming that he's not some kind of Nero who decided to march family members across ice and snow for the hell of it but I don't have any information to support that assumption."

"And I lack the context to know who Nero is, but I don't think he derived any particular satisfaction from our suffering."

"Nero was a really terrible king a very long time ago who is supposed to have burned a chunk of his own capital down for kicks."

"I think my uncle's motives were, very broadly, grief, anger, betrayal and paranoia."

"Was this the Enemy's fault? I'm legitimately horrified by a lot of what I've seen and heard here but I have to admit it's convenient that I don't have to spend the emotional energy to hate more than one person."

"Much of it was, yes. Much of it was his own fault, though I'm not sure it's ever worth wasting energy hating the dead. I tried it for a while. Didn't save anyone on the Ice, didn't help later when we had to somehow forgive them and get along again."

"Odette's better at hating people than I am but if she likes his kids she probably won't bother hating him."

"Some of them are more likeable than others. None of them will mention the Ice."

"How far does osanwe reach?"

"A couple hundred miles if you know the person very well. I could actually talk to my friend from here, but he prefers I not do that."

"Do you prefer I not ask which one he is? Anyway I'm mostly asking because Odette is sure to try it sooner or later, and I wanted to know if she was likely to succeed or if I was going to have to do the thing again if I wanted to tell her anything."

"She is likely to succeed, you two sound close emotionally. Though knowing where specifically the other person is also extends the range."

"We're very close. There was a reason her reaction to 'telepathy magic exists' was 'let's try this thing!' even thought it was Conquest."

"Can most things only be done with one kind of magic?"

"Some things can. This...probably wasn't one of them, but the way she found out of doing it was Conquest, and she was too excited to try to translate it first, and after, well, we didn't have any reason to thing a Sympathy or Effort version would be less advanced."

"Whereas copying osanwë is straightforward. Shall I leave so you can get a massage?"

"Yeah, that's probably for the best."

"I may go check if the printing press has been completed, and if so start printing the first sheet of the instructions you wrote."

"Ooh, let me know how that goes."

"Certainly." And he leaves.

Illia?