"You can make them small. People mostly don't because for most other purposes it's useful for them to be big enough to handle and hard to lose, but you could do tiny ones if you needed a shelf of dozens."

Yeah, I'm imagining wanting them really tiny so I could carry them all around in a mount of some kind with cameras watching them for opacity changes.

"If it can be done at all that can be done, yeah."

Cool.

"And if there are any particular visitors you're concerned with I can find some pretext to shoo them off."

I don't have that kind of detail. I'm broadly more concerned by anybody showing up to commit rape and torture than by people showing up to, say, gloat harmlessly.

"Visitors aren't allowed to leave with the prisoners in their debt, which really constrains how much you could hurt them. I guess my brother could go sing to them all day and then beat them when he's finished but he doesn't do this, most people aren't him, and - I expect you'll find this unconvincing but - if I were in prison I'd prefer it to spending the day bored, it doesn't take that much pain to settle a lot of debt."

I'm definitely interested in ways to make them less bored. Without the last part.

"If we could figure out some way to make prisoners useful that'd make imprisonment much better. It doesn't take a lot of useful work every day to pay for very comfortable conditions."

Well, what's stopping that being the default?

"There's not a lot for them to do? Most people can't write or they could copy books. You can't let them out to do chores around the court. People who are capable of magic do get slowed down to do that. We used to let prisoners pay with sex for better conditions but we have now prohibited that."

There's probably a way to structure that which would be fine. I suppose they won't let you teach them to write up front for some reason?

"We could try to get someone to sell them on it and I bet we'd succeed eventually but it's not typical and so it'll be met with some suspicion. People know what to expect, right, and as long as things are about what they'd expect they're mostly cooperative, and when things aren't what they'd expect they're looking for the catch."

Is this court unusually literate for some reason, that scribe services aren't common for prisoners in general?

"This court is very unusually literate. It was a priority from my parents and once you have a lot of literacy then you develop habits that depend on it, right, like we have written instructions in various places and books available for entertainment."

Doesn't that serve as an adequate explanation for why you'd have them do scribe stuff?

"The problem is that it's not actually advantageous to be useful, might get you imprisoned longer."

Ah. Can you just say that's not your policy?

"Yes. - it's not universally not our policy but we can commit to it in this case."

" - that one I actually thought you'd been told about. We brought most of the useful people from your summoner's court here, and the rest of them are remaining where they were, lightly supervised."

I do not always pick up on every implication of everything I hear. My mental image was like the other court effectively lending you those people to more efficiently pay down what they collectively owed.

"I mean, more or less? But on the individual level they're more inconvenienced precisely because they're skilled."

True. But not because they accepted training once already captured. Actually, if you were training prisoners you could stop preferentially taking prisoners who already knew stuff quite as much.

"I'll give it a try."