"That really, really doesn't sound like it would work. But you're the one with Balrog-killing weapons."

"It requires a different mindset. There's some room for singular genius among Men, but for the most part it's larger numbers of less brilliant people working together. Anyway, now you know how these weapons work and can help me teach it to whoever else wants to know. I have about two hundred of each of these. Would you rather pass the knowledge on to more people, or learn about explosives and other non-reusable dangerous things?"

"...let's go teach 200 people. I've been worried that the Enemy will attack - he must be off balance, what with the new lights, but he has to realize how valuable you and your things are. Also, we could use the stunners if the cousins attacked, so we didn't have to kill them. Though I don't know what we'd do afterwards."

"Sounds good to me," he says, declining to comment on what one does with unconscious cousins. "I think the mass teaching should be done somewhere that it will be safe to demonstrate the weapons in use; any ideas about location? Suggested students? I don't know anyone here outside your family yet."

"I can pick out two hundred people for you. We're using all the flat spaces for crops - we could test over the lake, but the cousins will think we're shooting at them. We could head farther afield, I suppose. With two hundred of these weapons we could win any fight we'd run into."

"I expect so. Well, let's take two hundred people to the nearest flat space not otherwise in use. I'll get my armour on, if we're going to be travelling."

He goes and gets his armour on, a very quick process, and then pulls several large floating crates out of a storage area at the back of the shuttle.

"How easily is the armor destroyed?"

"Not easily. And I have the means to make some simple repairs if it's slightly damaged."

"Do you have more than one of those?"

"Unfortunately no."

He lowers his voice to barely anything. "Can you hear me?"

Apparently not.

Well. That won't work, then. This conversation needs to happen out of Maglor's earshot, but it's probably best if Miles doesn't realize that's what he's trying for, both because Miles might object to subverting Maglor's authority (though it doesn't seem especially likely) or think poorly of them for having a situation where Celegorm is trying to subvert Maglor's authority (how is Barrayar run, anyway?). 

Miles seems oblivious to this plotting.

"Anyway, even if I did they would all be Man-sized. Elves are tall."

"I thought you weren't fully grown yet? There are seats in your shuttle that seem designed for Men taller than you, and I don't know if the conversions I did off your thoughts are precise but they suggested you were not yet thirty."

"Men are fully grown at twenty. I'm just short."

"A tall Man would be the height of a short Elf. Can we create the armor?"

"Creating the armor goes on the long, long list of enormously difficult engineering problems. Sometime after I've got someone making electricity I'll sit down and put that list in some kind of sensible order and then start solving it with someone. Apparently Curufinwë will be working on the biological decay problem exclusively for the next ten years, so not him."

"Our father's body crumbled to ash in our arms. We don't know why. That's not typical. I think our father tried holding it together through sheer force of will, long after it was dead, and that's why. But - in Valinor, a dead Elf can return to their body once it's fixed. Here that can't happen, because of decay. I think you might have inadvertently stumbled on something very emotionally important to my brother."

"That... makes a lot of sense."

"It's also what the Silmarils were for. They prevent decay, make it possible for us to live in this world indefinitely instead of slowly losing the strength we had in Aman."

"They sound very... magic."

"Yes. My father said he put his soul into them, and I think he might have meant it literally. They're alive, in a way. But if he put his soul into them, it was a part of it he never knew how to express in life. The Silmarils are some kind of distilled essence of joy and potential and growth and strength and healing. You hold them and the first thing you think is 'oh, I'm all right, I'm enough.' and then the next thing you think is 'there is so much I can do; I am capable enough, I am strong enough, I'm allowed...'

I love my father. But, uh, "you're good enough" is not something he was good at saying, or conveying."

"I've... had a few moments like that with my own father."

(Seventeen years old, having just failed the entrance examination for the Imperial Service Academy, hearing every reassurance as a lack of faith in his potential, as a judgment that he'd never been going to amount to anything anyway...)

"Different situations, though, I think."

For one thing, the sons of Fëanáro Curufinwë might one day see him again... no, let's not go down that road.

"We only see him again if we fail. If we die."