I will be sure to have all of the fun for you.

Enjoy!

He whistles to Huan and bounds off.

Kib reports to Maitimo that birds and one or more baby dinosaurs are on their way.

Oh, dinosaurs! That's a very Tyelcormo idea, I hope it works out.

Me too. Also apparently my magpie really does love me after all!

I never understood how he does it but I'm sure he's right.

It's pretty weird that there is this clearly magic, entirely one-off thing that is him talking to animals.

Very weird. I can't think of other things like it, and I expect I'd know of them.

Yeah, I'd expect that too. Weird.

The dinos will probably take a few months, they're all the way down south. Birds hopefully by the next time someone tries to bring a young child through.

Hopefully. I didn't want to make it sound urgent.

My brothers are trustworthy. Not that caution isn't reasonable.

Yes, but I assumed if they ought to be told outright you would have mentioned that, and while I had a sort of tenuous explanation for wanting some birds I didn't have anything resembling a reason to be in a tearing hurry to have them.

I haven't yet decided who ought to be told outright. Possibly my parents, in case anyone bothers Lári, possibly the King if I am very very sure of his reaction. Findekáno of course.

Yeah. It seems unlikely that someone would go to this much trouble to collect babies and then go after one as likely to be missed as Lári. Cargo-age babies are too young to be specific babies as opposed to just an assortment.

They did work very very hard on subtlety, didn't they. It makes me almost more nervous than the actual missing children.

Yeah. You don't do that unless you think someone who won't like what you're doing will find out otherwise, and it simply isn't the case that my planet needs and wants literally all of its babies and wouldn't donate some without batting an eye - to a good cause.

Or even something easily glossed as one.

Optimistically, whoever it is is hiding from the Valar alone and fears only some Stupid Valar Tricks. Like, maybe they want to raise a bunch of humans here because they heard Lári ages slowly and think this is a humanitarian mission and they're not far wrong and they expect the Valar to be unamused. That is the most charitable possible thing I can come up with.

And the evillest possible thing you can come up with -

Evilest with respect to the fate of the kids or the fate of everybody else?

Everyone else, I've got no shortage of bad things that could happen to kids.

Wants 'em for servantmaking. I mentioned to Tyelcormo that I could tell dinosaurs to do what other people said, too, and he warned me to hand 'em out with safeties because only Huan could handle a rampaging dinosaur... That's not even the upper limit. Are the programming books and all their copies accounted for?

Think so. But anyone who's bribing people to smuggle babies could also just buy them at a bookstore in your world, yes?