"What happens if they're under magic compulsion and get captured by other orcs and taken back, do you know?"

"I don't know. No more than one person has mind magic at a time, my world, it seems to work differently per prime - and neither us nor the soul magic primes have ever used it enough for a conflict between the two to come up in recorded history, so I don't have even a loose idea of how it stands up to conflict from other users of mental stuff. My blocks might win, new oaths might take precedence, he might come up with a way to route around it... I don't know."

"Perhaps there's an ethical test - you can mind-block an Elf not to, say, say the phrase 'purple pineapple ' and then they can swear to obey orders for an hour and we can see what gets precedence."

"I guess the fact that I didn't accidentally mindwipe an orc suggests that this is not a staggeringly unsafe test if someone really wants to try it."

"Is that a possible failure mode?"

"I don't know my great aunt told everybody she could only detect lies and I've been really timid."

"Did she know you'd get it next?"

"I was the obvious next candidate - right family, right personality, right random blessing - but she was not expecting to die when I was eight and hadn't troubled to prep me for it at all. The torz prime took me as a cautionary tale and started involving his obvious-next-candidate granddaughter more in advance but I was on my own."

"I'm impressed you resisted the urge to experiment. I suppose there's no Valar to undo deadly errors."

"I woke up in the middle of the night because my bed was on fire and if I got near anybody I could feel everything they were thinking, it freaked me out, I experimented with the fire but making a mistake in somebody's head was not acceptable, I went a long time before I was confident any of my family members were really comfortable enough that it was okay for them to hug me -"

"I am very sorry. That sounds awful."

"Getting it wrong would have been worse," she sighs. "But eventually I made a friend who didn't think anything of being in my range and Aleko got jealous -" She shrugs. "And our little brother got used to it, and our parents got used to it, although I let them close the distance for me. And the other primes were fairly relaxed about it, though one of the ones now still has reservations." The one she has a crush on. Alas. Not that this is going to come up anytime soon around here.

"There are five? All pretty new to the jobs?"

"I've been prime for nine years and as of recently I've had the job longer than any of the others. The last Dochenza got herself killed trying to fly and she hadn't had the job long, I overlapped with her predecessor until he died of old age; Alser Frothen died of old age too; and the Serlast and Lalindar primes were both younger and healthier but had hated each other for years and decided to do so more violently one day; mercifully it didn't escalate into a family feud."

"It sounds like your magic is a very destabilizing force, honestly."

"What do you mean?"

" Giving five people extraordinarily powerful magic and then switching who every century - I'm honestly astonished monarchy works at all in a world where people die routinely - it's a miracle you are not constantly at war."

"Well, the monarchy only sort of works, our current king is lousy, but at least we'll be rid of him sooner or later and Prince Isten can take over, he's going to do a better job. Primes also tend not to use our magic very much and since it does vary person to person it's likely I got an unusually powerful dose of sweela magic."

"Ah, that makes sense. Otherwise the person with your power and less restraint would very quickly wind up ruling. If the current prince is good we can just make him immortal, would that do?"

"It also helps that the primes ratify the monarchs as they step up and the process renders them immune to our magic; I'm worried Isten will have trouble assuming the throne with me missing if his father dies before I get back. But immortalizing him sounds fine to me as long as nothing dreadful happens in the interim."

"I don't know how long the interim will be; we don't know much about the capabilities of the Enemy."

"And he's still very young and might have a different personality as an adult," she shrugs.

"That is part of why a monarchy of mortals seems so hazardous."

"Well, an anything of mortals has a similar problem."

"So we'll cure mortality, and then you can find something best suited."