"I don't actually think so? But Lhindir took on Morgoth and walked away, he would actually be an asset in a war -"

"We're part-Maia too."

"Smaller part. No Morgoth-toppling track record."

"Are the Valar likely to let fourteen-year-olds enlist - it's already silly that they're involving an incarnate army, but -"

"They'd probably let us enlist."

"They probably would - doesn't make it a good idea -"

"And we haven't, that I'm aware, learned anything new about what happens if half-Elves die."

"Impressing the Valar is also a good way to get a good result there."

"I'll mention it when I de-oath orcs."

"The war might last our whole lives."

"Then you'll get to fight in it when you're older."

"How long was it last time?"

"Centuries, but hopefully they learned something from the first one."

"Oof. Hopefully."

"Or the Dwarves'll figure something out and you'll all be immortal regardless."

"Well, there are reasons to hope it even aside from that."

"Yeah." Squeeze. And to the girls - "study magic for a decade, get really good at it, study diplomacy as well, get really good at that, and then we'll see if we can learn enough about what's happening in the war -"

"That's a really long time."

"At your age, yeah, probably is."

Annie agrees with Rirosseth and says so.

And child soldiers are persuaded to instead train intensively, which they throw themselves into. They're good, both of them. Everyone except Rirosseth seems to think Rirosseth is the natural tutor on diplomacy; Rirosseth tries to disqualify herself or dissuade them by giving a sixteen-hour lecture on trade negotations that happened three hundred years ago, and they both listen raptly.

Annie has too much work to do to attend the entire thing, alas!

"Also it was boring, I can't imagine why you'd have wanted to be there."

"You're never boring."

"You're biased."