"Right, but I'm not," he says. "Although I suppose you also have the healing. Okay. At some point in the next hour I promise to attack you unexpectedly - or at least slightly more unexpectedly than it'd be right now - with a sword."

"Okay." She turns visible again. "This should make it easier than guessing by my footprints."

"Once we get out of the snow it'll be a more impressive ability. Is there anything at all that I could say that would persuade you that 'make someone invisible, suffocate Fëanor in his sleep' is the safest course of action?"

"Probably not."

"You seem angrier with the Valar for punishing the Kinslaying than with him for the Kinslaying, and angrier with the Valar that there's no safe passage out of Valinor than you are with him that he stranded us without one."

"I am generally angrier at people with more options for choosing badly than at people with fewer. Power - political, magical, whatever - is a form of having options."

"That's very principled. But if you went to Alqualondë, the harbor where we killed those people, and you said to them "don't you realize that they didn't have any options? They weren't powerful, not really - they did this because they were so powerless!' I think they'd be justified in feeling quite annoyed with you. The murder of your loved ones isn't an easy thing to abstract away from in favor of some big compassionate picture - especially not when we're not even speaking of forgiveness, which they haven't even asked for!"

"I didn't say 'being trapped justifies whatever you might care to do'. Given my current understanding of the situation in Valinor I probably would have prepared a series of stern lectures for the Valar about how to not be such colossal failures as deities, rather than trying to escape, let alone killing anyone. Certainly I wouldn't tell someone acting in self-defense that this would be the perfect time for them to develop empathy with their attackers."

"But you're asking exactly that of us! We should send the civilians separately, try to make it easier for Fëanor to murder just us. We can't learn to fight, that'd be you taking a side. You're unwilling to even discuss how to protect the kids, lest you give us an edge in a fight with them, because you want us to forgive and forget and you seem to think we are silly not to want that ourselves."

"...I was not suggesting sending the civilians elsewhere to make it easier for Fëanor to murder you, because I was not assuming you favored the tactic of using noncombatants as shields. That was my idea for keeping the children protected, it turned out to have unacceptable drawbacks, and I dropped it."

"You did. Quite reasonably. But you said the reason you hadn't been discussing this, and didn't want to keep doing so, was because you didn't want to help us win if there's a fight with them."

"Do they have no children? No noncombatants? If I had landed on them instead of you would you want me to be so quick to take the first story I hear as my guiding truth?"

"....No."

"It is most likely purest chance that I met you first, if it's not chance it's because someone wanted me to freeze or starve and not because of your personal virtue, and I think my conservatism is where it ought to be. I will heal your people; if you need me as some sort of neutral intermediary I will do this to the limits of my ambassadorial ability; if I meet the Enemy and he has as few redeeming qualities as it sounds I will do my utmost to cripple or kill him; and if I am very fortunate one day I will reinvent the Bifrost and you and your rivals can live on separate planets and never have to interact again."

"And they get away with everything they did to us."

"And if I had my way the assassins who nearly killed my father and instead managed to ruin my life would live in contented luxury provided in so living they had no further power to harm!"

He stops walking. "Really??"

"Yes! I didn't have that option, I handed them over to the guards and I assume they're in prison or executed by now, the one Thor hammered upside the head may have died in the moment, I was too occupied to look into it - but what good would it do me if I ran them through? What harm would it do my father if the way in which he is safe from them involves distance, lost motivation, insufficient assassinatory resources - and not the I remind you permanent loss of their lives?"

"I don't really want my cousins dead. I certainly wouldn't if it were permanent. But I want what they did to us to matter to them. I don't want them to go through the rest of the Ages of the world as if it never happened at all."

"And what sort of penance exactly do you wish to impose? For how long?"

"Well, I suppose that's not particularly unreasonable. Lacking this power?"

"We tried for centuries to take the higher ground whenever they wronged us. We're done. Anything but that."

"Going to see if the low ground works better?"

"Why on earth would he not murder us the moment it's convenient, if he knows that should he succeed he's rid of us and should he fail we'll patiently say 'regrettable how that happened, we don't believe in retaliation, I hope you won't get into that kind of mood again'? I want to ensure that he never again has the power to hurt my family."