"So if someone murdered your father, would you just go 'oh, well. That's tough'?"

"If someone murdered my father, I might kill them in anger. I'm not perfect. But I hope I would know better. I hope I would look for a better way, and kill them only if there was no better way available - only if they were going to kill more people and I couldn't stop them otherwise, or if they were trying to kill me too and I had to kill them in self-defense."

"We're not killing them. We're here, and I came alone, today, and I didn't shoot anyone, even if I'd love to. But you don't have to shake the murderer's hand, either, do you? They did this to us, and they're not even sorry."

"If a Komarran killed my father, I'd do almost anything to make that not turn into another horrible cycle of revenge like my father had to deal with in his time. Shake their hand? I'd become their best friend, if I could and it helped."

"And if you were their best friend before? Do you think you could - go back to seeing them that way?"

"Not easily. But I've done a lot of difficult things in my life already."

"All right. Fair enough. Now, about those rocks."

"Why rocks?"

"Uh, leaves and sticks won't really do any damage, using pure iron would be absurdly wasteful, rocks are plentiful -"

"I killed a Balrog. Do you imagine I dropped a rock on it?"

(Standing in his armour, its internal temperature perfectly comfortable despite the heat of the Balrog's charge melting the rocks under its feet, firing plasma bolt after barely-helpful plasma bolt until it's finally in range of his nerve disruptor, feeling the silence in his command helmet like a constant lonely ache that he cannot allow to overtake his thoughts and throw off his aim—)

"From high enough, yes, I expect that would do it -" she pauses as she gets the whole story. "Wow. Uh, thanks. Okay, lightning squeezers are also an acceptable way to take down Angband. We'll leave it to the expert, I guess. Men.

Uh, technically I'm here to say that our resources are also at your disposal for as long as we share a foe, and we don't have much because we're starving and they stole everything but still, you know, our pleasure, and Tyelcormo Turkafinwë is a worthless fucking liar but it's fine for you to work with him as long as you know. So. With that said, I think I'll head back before they worry about what the cousins are doing to me. That was a hell of a story, Vorkosigan. Thank you. Good luck with everything."

"Oh, you got that? I don't actually have any control or direct knowledge of which of my thoughts are audible to Elves. Anyway, you're welcome. Good luck to you too. If I can, I'll see about solving your starvation problem in between all the other problems I'm solving."

She doesn't climb down; she jumps, lands about forty feet away, and then walks away. Maglor watches her go for a few seconds before he turns around. "May I request your presence, Miles? We have breakfast and more questions and I think it'll be bad for morale in the long term if anyone who wishes to speak with you has to climb into your home."

Shrug. "Yes, of course."

He leaves the shuttle closed when he departs it; this seems like best practice.

"Curufin hasn't surfaced for air all day, which means that you must have been very useful to him. I appreciate it. You have a better sense of your capabilities than we do, so perhaps also a better sense of what our priorities should be - I want the site scan for mineable iron, but I'll take your word for it if there's something more urgent."

"My shuttle has a finite supply of the fuel it uses to fly, and making more would be yet another enormously difficult engineering problem on top of the uncounted enormously difficult engineering problems already facing us. I did think to do some scans from the air on my way here, but I'm reluctant to take it up again without a clear plan of exactly what I'm going to do while I'm up there. I can show you the map of nearby metals I found over breakfast, and if none of those turn out to be useful to you, 'scan for iron' can be the first thing to go on the list of tasks for my next flight."

"The shuttle will eventually lose flying capabilities. Okay. How many hours do we have? Are there activities that burn more than others? If we can't create this fuel, we should save it for the assault on Angband." He's taking notes.

"It has about four twelves of hours of fast high flight left in it, less than that if I want to go very fast. If I stay very close to the ground and fly in a differerent, slower way, I can use up a different resource which I do think you can create here, but that would make it much more difficult to survey for metals. It's also possible to teach someone how to use the surveying tools and send them out on horseback, but obviously that's slower and may be more dangerous than looking from the air."

"What resource is this? If you have books, you know, I can just set people to studying them, Curufinwë says that you have an appallingly bad script for writing but he wrote out a couple pages of instructions for it anyway. And we've been doing surveying on the ground. We don't lose people often, but - sometimes. What other resources are you going to run out of?"

"I have enough food for myself for three of twelve-twelves of twelve-twelves days... I do have books, but only six readers. What I mean to do today is learn about the tactical situation for the assault on Angband, maybe teach someone how to use some of my weapons, maybe teach someone how to safely take them apart to study them, and get someone started on making electricity - the same phenomenon as lightning but in a more controlled form. Nearly all of my devices use it."

"In that case I"ll leave you to it. Ah, unless you have any questions for me - you talked to my cousin..."

"...I'm curious why she believes you are all liars." Pause. "I am also curious how much of our conversation was overheard by the entire camp."

"Wherever she said 'my cousins', you can assume she really meant 'Tyelcormo', and was saying it mostly for his benefit. And I think a great many people heard you. Which was for the better. You had some interesting things to say." 

"Horrible cycles of revenge are bad. I believe this very strongly. Should I not ask what Irissë has against Tyelcormo?"

"Well, better to ask me than him. We were close with our cousins before the political tensions intensified. Irissë and Tyelcormo were close for a while after that - insulated, a little bit, by their shared dislike for politics. I think they'd promised each other they wouldn't let things get -" he waves a hand. "For what it's worth, I don't think Tyelcormo broke that commitment intentionally. They both just eroded things, convinced they weren't crushing it to rubble quite as fast as the other person was and so weren't to blame, and then woke up one day and -"