"...he..."

"I'm pretty sure he didn't go around raping anyone else."

Iobel squeezes Mitros's hand.

He squeezes it back.

"Anyway, I landed in this enchanted forest -"

Even with people who cannot read her mind of their own accord Elspeth is a very vivid storyteller, complete with pictures.

"...that entire world sounds like a disaster and I am really glad they found it. Wow. What a mess. Is there going to be a trial?"

"There's going to be a decade of him putting his country in order so it doesn't need him so badly and then Maedhros kept talking about killing him but probably by then someone will have thought of something else."

"...did he just rig the country to collapse if anything happened to him so no one'd try it, because 'ten years to have the place in a functional state to avoid a succession crisis' is extraordinarily bad even for Elves."

"That's how long Delight gave him, I don't know if he actually needs that long."

"You should suggest a trial just in case it didn't occur to them because they're Elves and don't have a crime rate to speak of."

"I can, but I'm not sure what that would actually add. The events aren't in question."

"Some semblance of procedure for wrongdoing? If I personally arbitrated every criminal case here I'd be better at it than the courts but the country'd still be worse off, because there'd be so much more uncertainty about which factors would be weighed, which tactics they could expect to be precluded against them, which punishments civilized society regards as acceptable...it's not good to have a system that demands tremendous personal trust in the people running it and makes no substantive effort to make them predictable to the people subject to it."

"...it couldn't have been predictable that he'd be subject to it. Everybody proposing subjecting him to anything is an alien from another world."

"Right, but now you're giving him ten years to sit around and think about it. Rape is a crime. Torture is a crime. I don't see why you'd complicate it by doing a solution-by-committee. He's not special. All the Iobels and all the mes do not get together to try to figure out how to redeem your rank-and-file rapist or torturer. They have a trial."

"Isn't it kind of complicated to try monarchs even without interdimensional shenanigans? We don't have a war crimes treaty or anything."

"Perhaps we should design one and, when we arrive, drop it and say 'if you sign it and confess all wrongdoings in this area so we can immediately correct them you get amnesty on past mistakes'. I just - can't imagine the mindset of an evil me anyway, but saying 'work on this for ten years while we consider what to do with you' seems likely to get interestingly desperate results."

"Yeah, 'interestingly desperate' does seem like the kind of thing he'd do."

"Just be careful."

"Of what?"

"Leaving an evil me unsupervised for a decade with a threat hanging over his head and no cooperative-with-you avenue open to him to make things work out?"

"Fair enough. You could go check up on him yourself, you know."

"And say what? 'I favor executing you but I was at least going to be procedurally clear about it, instead of just letting you loose to wonder?"

"Or not. I do think they're planning to spy on him some."

"Oh, well, in that case I'm sure they'd catch anything he tried."

"Do you have a productive suggestion for how he could be supervised, Mitros."