"So it was definitely Fëanor, then. Anyway, I have from him an oath, the exact words of which I wrote down -" She pulls her notebook from her pocket and reads it to Findekáno.

"He's literally never going to learn, is he? You let him do that?"

"Let him do what? He didn't pause to solicit permission."

"Oaths. Are a really really bad idea in general, but particularly if you have an enemy. All I'd have to do, should I wish him ill, is figure out how to orchestrate a situation where he has no choice but to kill us but we're not technically doing things in those three categories - for example, let's say I'm going to murder a random child who isn't one of Fëanor's people. I'm not the Enemy, threatening him, or going after the bloody jewelry, so he's sworn not to harm me; he's also sworn to protect the kid if there's a way for him to do so that doesn't threaten his life. Boom, broken Oath, horrible fate. Giving your sworn word is giving people strings to play you by. He knows that. That's reckless even for him."

"Well. Then it does not speak of good judgment on his part, but it may well serve your less malicious purposes as well as your hypothetical child-murdering ones. If you are that certain he'll abide by the oath you should feel quite safe settling away from his people and ignoring them and concentrating on defending against orcs and building up your own infrastructure, shouldn't you?"

"I like the fabric of the universe and wish he'd stop calling on it to bind him, even to bind him to bother me less. But yes, it does mean we can settle and ignore them. No luck on getting our stolen property back?"

"Seemed impolitic at the time but if you name specific articles maybe I can trade him an Asgardian dictionary; I did say I would go back."

"The major concern is the horses. Cavalry make a war like this a lot easier, and even a few of them would mean we could communicate reasonably quickly across significant distances. There're also precision tools for crafting - hard to make unless you already have them - a few strains of grain and legumes from Valinor that I doubt grow here, and sentimental items - tapestries and so forth."

Nod. "I can probably only offer to go through a dictionary and translate all of the words in it into Asgardian the once, so something more itemized might have ideal results - I have the impression he would prefer to pretend the entire trade is a matter of my personally wishing to carry off some items and not have to guess what you would want. ...On the fabric of the universe, I hope but do not expect you spoke hyperbolically? Oaths do not do that at home."

"He'd probably be equally interested in the illusions, for what that's worth. Though if he figures out how to duplicate them that has genuine combat applications, while the language is of purely academic interest. Until you build your Bifrost."

"Actually, the more I think about it the more design flaws I detect in the Bifrost's basic concept. I will probably just learn to teleport."

"Even better. In the sense that it puts a limit on the scope of my uncle's ambitious - though I don't think he is ambitious, exactly, not in the sense of being a threat to other worlds. There are people I'd accuse of that, but they're less impulsive."

"Anyway, learning Asgardian is almost completely practically useless because Allspeak is customary for everyone in the speaking population, so I'm not sure even a Bifrost would make it more than academically useful for anyone. Anyway. The oaths? The fabric of the universe?"

"Oaths chain the will of the speaker, they don't just commit him. And since we don't have free will in the first place - we're Eru's creations, we're designed to play our part in his song - chaining our will isn't robbing our later selves of their free choice, it's pulling on the threads, sort of, of the fated arc of history. I think that's precisely why he does it." He hesitates. "That's how the Doom acts, as well."

"I should hope I have! Anyway, if some of the people of the world have free will and some of you haven't how can the fates of the latter be decided? Mightn't someone with the commodity walk by and change it all?"

"Maybe. I think our fates are mostly too large and broadly drawn for Men to change - they have very short lives, like rabbits. Even if rabbits had free will it wouldn't change the world much, would it?"

"It would depend very much on the ambitions of the rabbit. How long do they live?"

"Men? Fifty, sixty years, a century on the long end."

"Oh, like Midgardians."

"Do they? So they're having the unwanted children while still children themselves?"

"They are considered adults somewhere between the ages of twelve and twenty, depending on the culture, and grow accordingly."

"But there's just - no matter how quickly you grow, you can't be an adult at twelve or at twenty. You haven't had time to learn enough, you haven't had time to develop enough understanding of people, you don't have enough practice with coping -"

"Well, there were immature adult Midgardians, to be sure. But we have seen that there are immature adult elves as well, and Asgardians too. To be sure, the Midgardians skip a lot of things. Most of them are not very well-rounded and those who aren't highborn are more likely to be illiterate than not and so on."