"Huh. Do they do that? Are most wars decided by secret summoners?"

"No, the information is really rare and I think lost a few times and only recovered by written record afterwards for most of human history."

Nod.

"I should think of things I want to ask you or something but I'm drawing a complete blank, how much of an emergency is this?"

"In a court people run debts much bigger than this all the time without any problems. We were only trying to keep this one small in case you or someone you're entangled with decides you are not friendly after all. So - probably not very much of one? If you decide to be at war with us maybe ask me questions first."

"I'll bear that in mind. I am generally anti-war."

"Me too. They're often destructive."

"Only often?"

"Sometimes there's a hostile merger in which no identifiable value is destroyed beyond peoples' scheduled patrols getting rescheduled, which is a loss of value but seems different from a more paradigmatic war."

"- what makes it hostile, then?"

"Well, a friendly merger is if both courts agree they should merge. If they don't, but one holds enough debt from the other to insist, that's a hostile one even if no swords are drawn. - the thing that's going to happen this evening will destroy a fair bit more value than that and still likely won't involve any swords."

"Kind of seems like a dumb move to force a merge on people who don't want it."

"Yeah. Sometimes some people want it, just not the ones in charge, and sometimes it's just a dumb move."

"What tends to be desirable about merging? I'm mostly coming up with pressures towards having courts be small."

"If you have close relationships with people in another court it's nice to merge since then you can run debt internally without it causing enormous problems. A lot of chores, like patrolling and negotiating passage agreements with neighbors, don't scale with how many people you have. Some specialties are nice to have in a court but hard to justify in a small one, or are interestingly distinct when done with larger groups, like people who perform theatre with a large cast or people who play music together."

"Suppose," allows Cam. "How big do courts get?"

"It's rumored that the really famous old ones in the Misty Isles reach a thousand but I don't know that I've heard that from anyone who's been to one."

"And around here?"

"No one's above three hundred. And that's rare, and not spectacularly stable."

"Oh, what happens to them when they destabilize?"

"They get bad fortune. Anyone who can cut themself loose does. They sell other people off for favors to try to manage the bad fortune. Eventually they either get a handle on it or collapse."

"About what fraction of people get sold at some point in their lives?"

"At some point? Most things that can happen will happen at some point."

"If I meet a randomly selected faery how likely is it that they have been sold at some point in their life?"

"Probably not very high. One in twenty? Maybe one in ten?"