"And then you came over here and it was suddenly a war -"

"Yeah. And a - horrible war. Orcs aren't - I don't think they're even bad, deep down, but if the Enemy thought we'd hesitate to kill them he could flood us with millions..."

Nod.

"We were so naive - I was so naive -"

Annie doesn't really know what to say to that. She has been adopting a policy of saying "I love you" exactly zero of the times it occurs to her to do that.

"Sorry."

"You don't have to apologize."

"I might in fact be the person with the most to apologize for in all of written history, if the Enemy doesn't count."

"...well, you don't have to apologize to me."

"Okay." 

I love you I love you I love you -

silence.

The girls take to sword-fighting. Not surprisingly. They're part Maia, they're strong. They do not stab their tutors, not that their tutors were really afraid of that. 

Annie reads. She's gotten through a sizable chunk of the library by now. She writes - she has no shortage of feelings to process no matter how much she writes. She soaks up all the snuggles she is allowed. She can't really do anything very useful because Elves sing all the time and she is less useful to Elves than singing is, so it would be counterproductive for her to try to learn to use the local kitchen equipment or whatever. She kills time.

And at some point she says "maybe we head way southeast to one of the remaining Dwarven kingdoms, if we can convince them to let in the girls..."

"There's remaining Dwarven kingdoms? I thought we were out of civilizations for Silmarils to be hypothetically dropped on."

"Dwarves aren't stupid - and also we wouldn't stand a chance, we might even not-stand-a-chance enough we didn't have to try...."

"There's a lot of them or something?"

"Tumunzahar had a population of a few hundred thousand, but also, they're in the mountains with one entrance that's enchanted to be very very hard to force. They can if necessary just seal themselves down there for a century or so."

"...what do they eat?"

"These scorpion-things, lichen, they have magic lighting and can grow some plants - they don't normally seal themselves in, mind, in peacetime they trade for food, but at need they could hold out a long time and if the ones elsewhere are anything like the ones in Tumunzahar were they will have anticipated they might need to."

"Okay."

"Don't know if they'd let us in but it might be better than waiting here, and you could offer to pay our way with the healing..."

"Sure."

"In the spring, maybe."

"What's nicer about it there...?"