I guess "no one gets the Silmaril" is technically a win.

It seems like by far the best outcome.

If I got to pick it'd be the Feanorians, with the Enemy thinking Doriath had it.

Why? 

So Melian gets what she wants, your cousins don't have to attack anyone, and we don't have the uncertainty from having misplaced a dragon.

And someone else can steal it from them and the whole mess starts again.

If they know they have to keep it secret, keep it safe, you don't think they could pull it off?

—I just realized. I could easily have pretended I destroyed it, that once it turned into the dragon there wasn't a Silmaril anymore.

...would have been useful.

Maitimo might've been able to tell anyway.

Maybe. I still wish I had thought of it in time.

We should do more planning for sudden-escalation scenarios.

Probably. This one might even have come up.

We only have one bigger option for escalation, and it's not a sudden one.
In retrospect this might have gone better if some of us had read up on diabolism. We could have opposed Ungoliant as a demon instead of just an Other.

What would that change? Or is the point that we don't know?

I don't know. I bet there are defenses against whatever classification of demon she is, something more effective than the baseline use of opposites.

Then the question is whether we can read them without my cousins reading over our shoulder.

Do the palantiri have a maximum range?

...no idea. They might. Did they know what was going on before we crossed the Ice?

Yes. They figured out we were doing it sooner than was supposed to be possible, and that probably wasn't just Maitimo guessing.

So the range is at least that.

They didn't know about the gravity elementals, so it doesn't reach all the way. Or they couldn't figure it out from watching us. Or did know and hid it, of course.

I expect they'd have been too tempted to get some themselves.

Yeah. So, we could fly out to the ends of the earth and it'd probably be safe.

...or on second thought we could just do it in someone's demesne. That ought to beat a palantir.

Let's do that, then.

Definitely. We should probably have relocated the entire library as soon as there was a safer place–

Well, we can do it right away now -

First thing when we're back. Privacy isn't even a hard project, it practically comes with the concept of a demesne–