"So maybe someone who is not under your oath could swear to hand an entrusted Silmaril over to you on request, and not to reverse-engineer or distribute my spell system unless I die or there's interdimensional access, and they could learn to teleport."

"I don't like it either but unless you have a better idea..."

"Right then. Do you want the spell text by osanwë or in writing?"

He's already wearing a necklace. "Osanwë's faster."

"This is going to be ludicrously tedious," she warns, and then she hands over two hundred and nine elemental concepts and then starts going through the current snapped-together full cargo tactical teleportation spell.

He does not look bored. Unhappy, but not bored. Fallout cloud Morgoth streams off to their south.

The text comes faster than two symbols a second - it can be chunked into words, paragraphs even - but it's still books and books worth of stuff. "For this purpose you don't need full cargo and passenger transit, although I can give you that too, it'll just take longer."

"How much longer? If you died it'd be very good to have."

"A little more than half again as long. As long as we have this regrettable arrangement I'm willing to make it worth your while with whatever spells you want, just bear in mind the tradeoff against my invention time."

"Invention time is precisely what we're trying to buy you."

"I know. But as long as we're doing this, the better you can pick up where I left off if I die the better. You probably don't need my grace, you could do without the bird spell, you might want healing and the full extant teleportation, maybe the illusions - though the illusions are the longest by far."

"Healing, maybe. Thank you."

And he stands there, fixed, absorbing it, while some kind of murmured argument is going on around them.

Loki is curious about that, but not enough to interrupt herself.

It has ended before they're done. She can ask someone later if she's sufficiently curious.

Hmm? Maedhros, who was definitely muttering, says with as much innocence as anyone could possibly put into the syllable.

You didn't have to stand in the room with me while you muttered if you didn't want me to notice.

You weren't the intended audience.

Did I fuck up the conditions of the transfer in some way? Are you 'being Fëanorian at me' because you cannot count on me to put Silmarils ahead of all else and that's a going concern now? Do I need to go ask Fingon?

No. My father coerced someone into an oath in broad daylight in public and I needed to challenge him on that. But he had a good reason and may even have been right so I needed to not call to have him arrested or something else I'd have been entirely within my rights to do at that point. You weren't part of any of that except incidentally, and I don't object to discussing it with you, and your priorities are entirely reasonable and shared by me anyway.

Coerced? It looked - unenthusiastic, but I didn't think coerced -