Loki nods, at that.

It seems worth pointing out that a primary benefit of the entire mess, to the Enemy, is that the reaction to its perpetrators was so predictably fracturing.

And the primary benefit he gets from torturing people and depositing their shells at our doorstep, she says, um, no offense to present company or anything you seem very recovered, is that we will find it upsetting. I'm not sure we should stop finding torture upsetting so he can't manipulate us with it.

There's a difference between being upset and being manipulated. He took Vár and made sure I knew it so I'd do something stupid. The correct response was to make this a grievous misstep on his part, not to go and do something stupid. He sent me peaceful orcs with their babies to see if I'd overextend myself trying to safely harbor them. The correct response was to hoard my time and energy that he'd so kindly signaled he didn't want me to use on anything that got me closer to killing him. If the Enemy does something, and you can tell exactly what benefit he's hoping to draw from your reaction to it, if at all possible the correct response is to make a fool of him for thinking you'd be so easily played.

Yep. He went and announced where it was to the Fëanorians. They are doing their level best to make a fool out of him for it.

But the sooner he concludes that it's not working, the sooner he tries something else, probably something that gets people killed.

Oh, I'm not saying you should loudly proclaim that you have no grievances with any fellow opposition to the Enemy and the Silmarils should all be kept together by the House of Fëanor on their own turf. I'm not even convinced this isn't the best place for the Silmaril to be, which you can tell because it is still here. But you don't have to be predictably fractious about it.

This isn't the best place for the Silmaril to be, Maedhros says wearily, not if we were actually all collaborating and only making a pretense of disunity. They complement each other and are more powerful wielded together. But this is a perfectly fine place for it to be, and Doriath may be spared the Enemy's attention as long as he expects us to attack it and I don't know how good his intelligence is.

Well, we're not all collaborating and only making a pretense of disunity, Loki points out.

I had noticed. I just didn't want anyone thinking this was optimal for more than political expedience.

I know. It was explained to me.

I told them not to explain it to you.

They explained it to me anyway. Why didn't you want them to?

Under the circumstances explaining the strategic and humanitarian justifications for having them all in one place could have sounded like an explanation of why you could expect us to sneak this one out, and given that we'd decided not to sneak this one out it didn't seem like a good idea to explain how strong our incentives to do it were.

Well, how fortunate I didn't take it that way.

I suppose it would have, she replies likewise privately; and to both, No point to dwelling on them, but every now and then there's a way to mitigate those costs. I didn't think of any this time, but if there had been some opportunity I would have known that the Silmarils' effectiveness had this condition.

My apologies, he says. You should pick my father's brain about it, he is the only person who has I think a precise understanding of everything that can be done with them. Everyone, including us, is currently wielding them very clumsily, compared to what is possible in principle.

Will do. Since he's the person she can talk to while they're both running at threefold speed.

He's brilliant. And a good conversationalist, if you don't mind occasional linguistics digressions about your idiom use or grammatical register.