"Not to mention--" she cuts herself off. "I could stand here all day and rant about this, so I should just. Not."

"It doesn't seem like a priority. I appreciate the strength of your feelings on the topic."

"...Conversations are weird. It's a little surprising that we managed to get organically from 'why the hell does Illia know three alphabets' to 'Illia Does Not Rant about the god of the dead."

"You won't have to deal with him anyway. Men don't go to Mandos."

"Yeah, to be honest if that weren't the case my reaction to that whole thing would have been less ticked off and more panicky."

"You prefer a unknowable fate?"

"Not necessarily, but I've had a lot more time to get used to it."

"And I'm rather accustomed to the thought I'll have a great deal to answer for in mine."

"Odette is a much more appealing alternative."

He smiles. "Right. That solves a lot of dilemmas, now doesn't it?"

"This is going to go so far to her head if I don't step in every now and then," she predicts.

"Then we're fortunate to have you. ...What would that look like, exactly? If it went to her head?"

"Mouthing off to people when it would be better for everyone's sakes to pretend you can stand them, is I think the most relevant concern."

"Not making extraordinary demands in exchange for her services? Or withholding them over petty grudges, so people hesitate to disagree with her?"

"Nnno? I mean I guess it depends on how you define petty, I think it's entirely plausible that once Morgoth's dealt with and nobody's life is at stake she might withhold services from the linguistic blackmail people until and unless they let up on that, but I don't think that's the kind of thing you meant."

"That would worry me a lot, actually, but it's not really what I feared."

"I can talk her out of it," she assures him. "Anyway, Odette's...she was nervous, yesterday, around your dad. Worried she was going to make some kind of horrible diplomatic misstep. She's really not the 'making demands for the sake of it' type."

"It is very hard to offend my father. Though I suppose she wouldn't have known that. ...She's considering herself an emissary for my cousins, isn't she?"

"Not exactly, but...sort of? An emissary for the idea of bringing Feanor back from the dead for sure."

He shakes his head. "Well. She's lovely and it was a pleasure meeting her."

"She doesn't want to take sides. That's why she was nervous around your father, was that she was worried that he would corner her into either not doing what she meant to do or taking sides."

"Trust me, the last thing my father wants to do is to push her into declaring herself for the house of Fëanor."

"If it helps, she's much more interested in making sure that they don't feel the need to do anything stupid than in helping them do stupid things if they decide to do them anyway."

"Which is the correct way of managing them, it just sometimes ...frays, and you choose whether to let their stupid choices kill them or not."

"And at that point it probably depends on what exactly the stupid choices are."