Then she should be able - once she has given them a decorous amount of time to consider breeding in captivity in case she needs more than four - to start harvesting the wings and attaching them to monkeys. Monkeys which already have human posture, since she wants to make sure that all works together neatly.

The eagles, inconveniently, don't seem very inclined to breed. 

Then she'll have to get this right at least three of four times to have a not hopelessly inbred winged monkey population. Ideally all four. She wings monkeys.

(The eagle-catching team can get her another pair if not, although they would prefer not to cut down the eagle population in the region too much, since eagles usually take longer to breed and increase their numbers than smaller birds.) 

She has had a lot of experience in this and the winging goes fairly smoothly. One of the monkeys has a complication with a tendon detaching when it investigates and pulls on its new wing too vigorously, but Leareth helps her set it right. 

Good. If the monkeys don't like each other in maximally convenient combinations for genetic diversity, well, she's a Healer-Fetcher and can make it happen anyway for the next generation.

The lab assistants helped pick out monkeys who seemed to get along all right, and one pair ends up conveniently enamoured in not too long. Monkey pregnancies are a lot longer than mouse ones, though, so it'll be a wait before she knows if the hereditary aspect came through. 

She has two males and two females with wings and plans to arrange for them to have children in both combinations, at least a son and a daughter per and then mostly favoring daughters. But this will have to be reasonably patient.

A couple of months in - monkey pregnancies last six months so her results are still a ways off - Leareth wanders down to check on her progress. He does this reasonably often, but this time he looks kind of worried. 

"Is everything all right?" she asks.

"More difficulties with the Council in Valdemar. Complaints about Randi lacking an heir. It is unclear to me what is prompting it now, so that is...confusing." 

"Might be he's getting sicker?"

"I mean, yes, but I think not very visibly? Also that is still not made public with the Council, and if someone had learned it I think we would be hearing rumours of that first and foremost." 

"I guess we could ask Van next time we see him if that would be a... politer... route than going through your diplomats."

"I suspect it will be more informative as well? This does not seem spectacularly urgent yet, so I think we can wait for a dream." 

"Hopefully he knows."

"If he does not know, I suppose I will ask my diplomatic team to do some prodding. It does feel awkward, especially since we have not shared anything new from our side in months and I do not really wish the Heralds to prod my diplomats on that." 

"Are they meeting outside of Haven now?"

"I believe so, yes. Not all the way north, but in a town some distance out of Haven." 

"Well, what will trigger telling them more?"

"...I am not sure, other than 'something time-sensitive comes up', and should probably have an answer to that question. The diplomatic team did bring up Heartstones in the abstract after we talked about that. It went fine but has not really gone anywhere, due to being very hypothetical and non-specific." 

"Maybe you could do something sort of like how I came up with 'blowing up the moon' as a placeholder except give a bunch of made up things and also sneak in the real one to get their reactions and tell them that some or all of the things are imaginary but you expect them to shed useful light."

“I suppose that might be worth trying. I will have to come up with a list of hypotheticals where “power source” does not stand out, but - I can attempt that.”

"You could need things done at precise moments coordinated over a wide area or something, that'd explain needing a territory and wanting Valdemar particularly."

"That makes sense, although it is not as - weird and extreme, I suppose, as the god example. I think neither are most of the other hypotheticals that I could crib from my actual past projects. I am not sure if that would cause them to take the god hypothetical more or less seriously..." Sigh. "I wish I could just talk to one person. Vanyel in particular, I am fairly sure I could go through it with him in an order that would at least have him taking the arguments seriously, even if he was very horrified." 

"You could suggest that you could tell him confidentially with their advance permission to have him keep it that way till you say otherwise. If they've come around to trusting him again they might prefer that to nobody on their end knowing what's going on."