"Hmm? No, that's entirely on me. One is not supposed to ask six questions you care about very much in rapid succession because you're awfully curious, even children know that. It's not - unfriendly, even in the broader conceptions of what that means, to answer them."

"If you say so. Sounds rough."

Shrug. "It really doesn't bother me to need to pay for things, just to be unable to."

"Inconveniently I have already taken nearly all your money." Sigh.

"In hindsight I should've been planning my acquisitions more carefully with the possibility of a magical person with the ability to create arbitrary things and a thousand years' more science knowledge showing up."

"You couldn't have reasonably anticipated me."

"We could have gone in really hard on acquiring humans and in that manner learned about summoning and had something to trade you."

"Summoning knowledge is really uncommon this year and I bet you people who know how to do it don't tend to resort to walking into faery circles and also if you'd gone really hard on acquiring humans perhaps we would not get along so well."

"Yes, that seems possible. If I were to do that I'd go east and claim a lot of land some place where the humans are having a war and I think they'd be safer and happier and better off, though plausibly not in a way that reflected well on my character."

"Ones who could summon could just leave the war. Or win it."

"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."