"Armies have many uses, and it is a rare person who sincerely cannot find uses for them once she has one. If you are such a person, I commend you; I don't think there's anything you could say that will convince me you are."

"Armies," she says, "are high-maintenance. I'm sure I could think of something for one to do if I had one I could not dissolve for some reason, so admittedly I exaggerated; I still don't want one."

"If you want to have mixed training without any worry you're cultivating a personal following you could just let Irissë and Tyelcormo beat each other nearly to death every day; I'm sure they'd both enjoy it, and perhaps it would soothe hearts on both sides."

"Would it really? I suppose I know friendships formed in roughly this way, but I've never understood the mindset."

"It does not appeal to me personally, which is why I did not volunteer."

"Well, perhaps I'll ask them, if I decide I want to purse the idea of training people in combat instead of focusing more on magic at all."

"If it is in any respect possible for other people to attain expertise in your magic system and aid you in advancing it, I'd expect that to be the sort of thing my family is uniquely good at."

"I have the same impression, but I honestly don't know if it is or not. Anyone can learn sorcery in the usual way, but I do it - backwards. If we think of my two hundred nine symbols as an alphabet, I'm inventing languages and writing librariesful of meaning with them and ordinary sorcerers make literary allusions and compose found poetry. It may be impossible to do it the way I do without receiving the same gift from the same dangerous artifact."

"Don't say 'may be impossible' around my father, then nothing will deter him from attempting it."

"I would be interested to make the experiment, honestly, but finding it to be a dead end could take decades or centuries with nothing to show for them. Best saved for a calmer time."

"Yes. Is this about as much as you can carry?" He holds up a package he's been carefully wrapping.

"I could take a little more. Some starter seeds, maybe, they mentioned seeds."

"Seeds are most useful in significant quantities; I don't know how appreciative they'd be of two pounds of them, especially when we had relatively low yields in the first three iterations - we have greenhouses, we've been trying different growing conditions...anything else they mentioned specifically?"

"I know more seeds than that will be needed eventually, but they may make some blunder in their first attempt at irrigation or planting without divine intervention leaning over their shoulders and could benefit from an initial trial of some crop that isn't too dear. And I'm not sure how to reckon the season when the sun is a novelty; perhaps it is about to be winter, perhaps you're going to have monsoons, a sun is a rather major factor in the weather on most planets."

"The natives said that before the Sun there was a wet season and a cold dry season, for whatever that's worth. I can give you two, maybe three pounds of this: it's a grain that grew in northern mining communities, in Valinor, so one of the most resilient ones we have."

"Thank you."

"It's not as if we have any desire for them to be cold or hungry."

"...I am tempted to relay those exact words."

"Please don't. If they think we're wracked with guilt they'll ask for more, and my father will decide to set them straight by doing something to communicate exactly how little guilt he wants them to believe he feels, and then everything will be much worse. I would, if it were in my power, have every one of them healed, safe, secure and well-fed, but not if they'd know I did it, or wanted it."

"I suspected something like that. I won't mention your remark."

"How long have you been traveling with them?"

"I appeared quite near their host five days ago, the night before the sun appeared."

"Not long, for them to have entrusted you with so much complicated family history."

"It may have helped that I mentioned I would not be astonished to learn that I am here because my mother was trying to kill me or at least exile me under false pretenses. It is more likely something else but could be that."

"I'm sorry. That sounds like an unpleasant situation. Thus the question of whether to learn more magic or help with the war?"