Ha.

Beyond your skills?

Getting them to agree to have Macalaurë come sing? Probably doable. There's no chance at all I could have Findekáno over without it getting back to our respective fathers.

How would yours find out?

We have contacts in the Nolofinwean camp who report to me, except since I'm currently occupied they report to Macalaurë.

...Do the Nolofinwëans know about that? Do they have spies with your people too?

You'll recall they have twenty of them who tutor your Men. They know about ours in the sense of knowing I'd do that but not in the sense of knowing who they are.

Those twenty didn't live with your faction before; I meant longer term.

I assume still yes, but I haven't asked. They didn't seem startled by the bomb, did they?

I wasn't there when it landed, I was with you. And they had inklings it was a possibility from me.

If I'd been present with my family and my resources earlier, I could have told them when the assassination attempt occurred that the culprit wasn't obeying the standard Nolofinwean scouting procedures, what their orders if confronted were, things like that. It's broadly to everyone's advantage to communicate more; if I did find they had spies I wouldn't expel them.

One procedure for finding spies - especially if the spies don't know they've been found - is to feed them tailored information.

Had a project like that going, was hard to justify as a current priority, given how little capacity my cousins have to actually harm us.

Makes sense.

I think what would happen is Nolofinwë would find out and arrest Findekáno and my family would at first get a dozen different and confused accounts of this and panic and try to come up within range of here and talk with me or within range of there and talk with our people there. I'm actually not sure what my father'd do at that point.

Arrest him. Ugh.

If my father wouldn't arrest me it'd only be because he wouldn't be entirely confident he had the power, and also he'd at least be given pause by the thought it would traumatize me. He'd probably try anyway, very gently. Stay in your room with one of your brothers at the door while we sort this out, Maedhros, why don't you? The reason I'm in doubt about what he'd do is that I'm here and he needs me here and he'd need you to get me out.

Well, Celebrimbor could do it but it'd be provocative.

They might ignore me until I bring the Silmaril home, but I'd find it upsetting to arrive home and notice everyone who answers directly to me has been replaced.

Nod.

I can talk my way out of it but again not remotely.

When we interpreted your stance on not sharing your magic as a stance that it was, in general, better for us to die than for us to have scary amounts of power, we got sulky but we kept working on all your plans, didn't we? This war was more important than whatever you intended to do with us afterwards.

Ah, that. Yes, very sulky. It was annoying.

It was frightening and confronting you about it didn't seem likely to be productive. If we'd known more about the astonishingly powerful things already present in your galaxy, maybe.