No, it wasn't. Alright, ask him if he sees any way he can credibly commit to being a safe person to share things with and a pleasant person to be an ally to, maybe he'll have an idea.

And then it'll either work or we'll end up keeping things from them without being conflicted about it. Hopefully the first, and he does have all kinds of incentives to make it that one.

Yeah.

Sigh.

They don't wait very long to talk to the Fëanorians; Angband is just as visible to the other side as to them. 
The flight over is more tense than usual, with the potentially increasing number of observers. Once she's reached Maitimo and gotten down to business,

We have backup plans for this. They'd work better if we bring you in. That would involve telling you things that could easily work against us. Or even would by default. I'm not optimistic, but if you can think of a way we can trust you...

To want the Enemy dead?

To not frustrate our other goals afterward, or use the same tactic against us. If it were just about wanting the Enemy dead there'd be no problem there.

I can't make promises on that front without some sense of what the other goals are. 

Inconveniently, I'd much rather not say the goal I'm thinking of without being able to trust you to not exploit it.

We could separate it out, at least describe the plan that doesn't have that problem.

Go ahead.

It still has the problem where it's easily used against us.

I care about the people in your host. It is a far second to winning the war but I am trying as best I can with the resources I have to do right by them. I do not actually think there were courses of action available to me that made them safer or more capable than the one I've taken. 

And I'm not accusing you of planning an outright attack, but we both know your people working against us isn't impossible.

I didn't work against their host. I played you, personally, and I harmed Melian, who I do not think very highly of although it's a lovely kingdom she's got there, but I didn't hurt them except insofar as they have a blanket interest in having an edge on us.

The point being, if it ever comes up that you want to slow us down–or any of us personally, for that matter–we'd be handing you a way to do that.

I don't want that. I can't think of a situation where I'd want that and you wouldn't. I don't even particularly desire to leave the option open, my cousins are good and courageous and sensible people, but I'm not going to swear to future action on as little information as that. 

I'm not even sure it would work if you did. I've thought of ways around 'I swear that I would accept this oath,' and you've had more practice with oaths than me. It just seemed unfair to unilaterally move against the Enemy without at least giving you a chance to be impossibly convincing about it.

Does involving us affect the odds of success against the Enemy, or the timeline, or lower the risk of failure -

No to those, but more people would increase the effect if it works.

The fact that it's a trump card does mean we're less worried about keeping the magical edge on you, though. I brought mediocre Quenya translations of some books on elementalism...

Thank you. So resources committed by us means you don't have to commit all of your own?

More like it'd take more resources than we have but including yours could increase the size of the partial success.

And what resources do you need for a full success -

A lot more practitioners. We've been scaling up, like Findekáno told you, but that's where the bottleneck is going to stay for the near future.

So the question is whether we'll deploy a scarce and valuable resource so that you don't have to overextend yourselves using your supply of the same scarce and valuable resource and you're disinterested in sharing because we might use it against you? It seems very much to our advantage, were we in fact adversaries, to let the whole burden and risk land on you.

The other side is that if we don't tell you what we're doing, we can stop attacks by other means. Should we end up as adversaries.

The probability you can pull off an operation involving several hundred people without me knowing everything they know by the end of the month is negligible.