"I think so. And has moneyed friends."

"Huh."

"Giving him money might be valuable. Though - not if this happens again -"

"- that having what effect on his budget -"

"Sweden is pretty relaxed. There are lots of countries that would have devolved into a war over something smaller than an entire governing session getting untraceably eaten."

"With who? And it's already an issue, now, if Elio's entire office were defunded or for that matter also eaten how would that help anything -"

"Internally. And if it happens again then we need to reprioritize on stopping it, a Statute repeal isn't the sort of thing we can hope to push through a world dealing with multiple civil wars and an unknown politician vanishing problem."

"Are we sure it was even about the Statute and not just a collective assassination."

"No. But if it happened again then we could probably be pretty sure."

"Yeah."

"Sweden's community's even smaller than ours, everyone knows at least three dead people. If you had the means to carry out an assassination -"

"Oh, it'd be a lousy method."

Sigh. 

They can return their attention to happier and more Christmasy topics, that one seeming to be a dead end.

Yep! Though it sort of comes up in the exchange of presents. Michael's tinkered his little Protean-charm voiceboxes into small ones you can wear discreetly and which record the things you hear - "presumably to a dictation quill in your attic, otherwise there are privacy issues -"

Theodore gets them all fingernail polish that detects poison.

Aaron gets everybody money.

Miranda gets Aaron money!

Karen gets him money too!

He appreciates it so much and with total sincerity! He is cornering a couple of industries (he got them quite a lot of money) and would be happy to give Elio money too and wishes them both well at finishing up school.

It's so exciting!

Minor gets Cricket an array of exotic kinds of fish that are recommended as cat foods - "and a couple that aren't, in case it turns out by 'recommended as cat foods' they meant 'cheaper or less tasty', if you like the human ones better that's fine -" and Miranda a pair of stunning mahogany bookshelves that fill the whole room, shrink down to the size of a book themselves, and allow you to use Timothy's searching and indexing spells on all the books on the shelves at once.  

Cricket does not get anybody any things unless a pinprick of a scratch to Timothy's ankle and lots of purring for Minor count.

Miranda loves her bookshelves. She has made Minor a magic multilingual dictionary - he will have to fill it in himself past what she's done of English and Igbo but it will when filled in do etymology webs and a thesaurus function and multiple suggested translations of words and transliteration for things with sufficiently regular spelling and multilingual homophones and homonyms and similar fun stuff.

Minor loves it. He bounces. He kisses her. He kisses her again. And he squirrels up in the corner to spend the rest of Christmas filling it out.

Timothy got Karen lots of expensive jewelry and some rare wand materials. 

These are nice things! The Demiguise sinew will be perfect for this one order!