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Confirmation reaches them in the spring that Elwing of Sirion has the Silmaril.
It takes as long as the spring only because they weren't looking. They can stretch the oath that far, they can be disinterested in knowing - but now they know, and so there it is. Elwing of Sirion is twenty-three. Half-man, so fully grown. Sirion is a city of refugees. Elves and Men and, since there are Men, children. Elwing herself has infant children.
They debate whether to send messengers. Debating is allowed, even protracted debating. The Oath, these days, is loud in their minds, and louder when they're pushing it like this, but they drag out the debate for a few months. Messengers will probably be shot on sight. The last time Elwing of Sirion received news of the House of Fëanor it would have been the news that her brothers, twins, aged seven, had not survived the sack of Menegroth.
They send messengers anyway. The messengers are shot on sight. They have good armor, Fëanorian armor, and return home injured but not lethally. Maglor's songs no longer stitch them together. War makes you worse at healing. Maglor's songs are more powerful than ever - he can knock back a wave of approaching enemies, he can make a blade's next touch deadly, he can make them faster and more impervious to danger, but he can no longer do healing.
Maedhros, when he thinks about this, thinks that perhaps there needs to be part of you that is not broken for healing spells to draw on. Or perhaps the Enemy is amused to strip that away first. Perhaps the Enemy finds it suited to the theme as the Oath tugs and yanks and twists them into violence against the lands they once defended and the peoples they once sheltered.
They send messengers to Sirion again. The messengers deliver a plea for the Silmaril, an offer of anything at all in exchange. The messengers do not return at all.
The Enemy is many many hundreds of miles from here but at night Maedhros can hear him in his head. Is it so implausible that I really let you go? the Enemy likes saying. You serve me better free than you ever would have willingly.
The Oath allows them to work slowly. They begin planning the sack of the refugee camp even more slowly than the Oath allows, so slowly that its currents are constantly tugging at them. Any slower and the currents would erode all the things they care about which are not the Oath, and it would be a disaster to go to Sirion once they've been stripped of their capacity to care about anything that is not the Silmaril. So they do not hold out forever. But they work as slowly as they can.
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"I bet."
"If you live quite literally forever, I would expect you to be rather old. Just at random. Of all the numbers, most of them are big. You act young but I thought that might be trauma or a thing about the way fairies are. I am much, much older than you, if our years have anything in common."
"Yes. Which makes sense, because by the standards of my people you are a child and were a very young child when you were taken prisoner by that monster."
"Childhood isn't really about size, it's about - inexperience. In this context. Our first people appeared fully formed but they were still - it would have been monstrous to do to them lots of things it's acceptable to do to adults, because they couldn't be informed in the relevant ways."
imeanforever
"...my experience with children is what you have told me, offhand mentions in Sirion, negligible conversation with the mortal I met fifty years ago, and the existence of breeder fairy children, where the most important feature of the state of childhood is that they don't come with names and so whoever runs their court names them with the obvious results. So I don't know what you're talking about."
"If no one has your name when you're born, how does anyone get it?
And - hmm, lots of interaction among people of my kind is about negotiation, I get something I want and you get something you want, and if the other person has far more information, they will out-negotiate you. So high-stakes sorts of negotiations - permanent agreements, agreements with far-reaching consequences, agreements over things of particular value, sex - it is somewhere between 'frowned-upon' and 'evil' to engage in with someone who has vastly less experience than you."
And - hmm, lots of interaction among people of my kind is about negotiation, I get something I want and you get something you want, and if the other person has far more information, they will out-negotiate you. So high-stakes sorts of negotiations - permanent agreements, agreements with far-reaching consequences, agreements over things of particular value, sex - it is somewhere between 'frowned-upon' and 'evil' to engage in with someone who has vastly less experience than you."
imeanforever
"I knew it when I started.
Nothing that happened to me was the consequence of information asymmetry, unless you count that I didn't know what would happen when I broke enough to say my name and he did."
Nothing that happened to me was the consequence of information asymmetry, unless you count that I didn't know what would happen when I broke enough to say my name and he did."
"Okay. Do you want to talk about this topic?"
"Thorn."
imeanforever
"I would rather not go into - episodic detail. Otherwise it's fine." She has a stack of drawings to prove it.
"I am not particularly curious, though if you want to talk I am probably a good audience. I'm assuming if there's things I need to know about apparently-harmless actions that'll cause psychological distress you'll say them, and that if there are things you won't say because you're worried they'd then occur to me and I'd be tempted you'll either ask for my oath not to or find someone else."
imeanforever
"I'm not really worried you're going to decide to torture me, since I can't think of any good reason for getting a Silmaril to require it. Unless you thought for some reason the Enemy would give you one if you did, I guess. As long as nobody touches me or says my name I don't think there's anything apparently harmless that would be very bad. Anything less bad than that I mean to handle through exposure as it comes up."
"If getting a Silmaril required torturing you I am entirely sure that my people would stop me." He shudders. "If the possibility causes you substantial distress we could - do another order -"
"No chance at all. If the Enemy offered I wouldn't trust him, because I am not an idiot."
imeanforever
"He can't do the oath thing? Or give the Silmarils to somebody who works for him who can?"
"He can, but we don't have to entertain a visit from them, and don't let them communicate with us, and would try to kill them on sight. With an enemy like this it's just good strategy. Also, if I can't so much as scratch you, how would I torture you? I don't think the Enemy would think demanding to read your mind counts."
"Do you want an order?"
"I'd sooner cut off a finger, maybe two, but probably not the whole hand."