Everyone lived there for a time, then the King moved our people north and the High King moved his people west and now it's just those who didn't want to go.

But nothing about how to delicately ask after suspected half-elven children.

Oh no. The Elves are - they have laws about that sort of thing, usually - the Men won't take the question as as much of an insult. Unless the person is married, obviously. There's not enough food, people mostly wouldn't try having a child alone...

Well, up here there isn't a lot of official contact, so there weren't laws. There are now.

Good. The Elves are remarkably law-abiding, that'll work better than you're probably expecting. I'd join the family for a meal, compliment the children's wit and strength and health and so forth, see if there's an opening to ask if the family's doing all right financially, don't bother saying that the Elves will pay for the child because I can't imagine they don't know that and they might have a good reason for not having tried.

Celegorm says that anyone who finds out that they've gotten a human pregnant is going to try to marry the mother. I have no idea if that is in any way a good idea.

Bad idea. Though I guess in some ways less of one now that Men won't die. Still, eternal marriage to someone who you didn't want to marry sounds - not good.

One of the Feanorians is married to a dwarf and they don't have the soul thing.

Ah, Elf parents living with the mortal parents of their children for the children's lifetimes is probably a good idea.

Well, except for the part where human doesn't mean inevitably going to die in a handful of decades anymore.

Yeah. The Elves would probably be fine with eternal commitment, they're, uh, weird that way. I'd sort of expect that if I drunkenly slept with an Elf in the morning they'd have composed a mournful song about how we're now bound forever but they wouldn't try to get out of it. The Men, maybe not.

I'll talk to the mothers, she mentally sighs, and work something out from there.

She locates an appropriate extra-healthy unusually smol child and ask if she can talk to their mother.

Sure, she does laundry for a living and is probably doing that now.

Okay, great.

"Hi, can I talk to you privately? Not necessarily right now," she says when the mother has been located.

"Yeah, sure, it'll have to wait for this evening when the kids are down," she says. There are quite a few people at the shore doing laundry.

"I can wait," she says agreeably, then goes to see if she can find a mother-of-probably-half-elf-child who isn't busy at the moment.

Most people are in fact working during the day, including all single mothers, which appears to be most of the mothers of probable-half-Elves.

Yeah okay fair enough. ...Only most? Not exactly surprising, but...

Celegorm? Not that I condone trying to marry human women who don't want to turn an unplanned pregnancy into an indelible commitment to the other parent, but how much does it complicate everything that children with noticeably elfy traits exist and not all of their mothers refrained from marrying other humans, after.

Oh, for fuck's sake - why people can't just find someone of the same gender - it's good that the kids have two parents. I think maybe better to let ones be. Are we sure it was after?

I haven't asked, no I'm not sure, I'm giving people the benefit of the doubt--anyway some of us just aren't attracted to the same gender at all, but that doesn't actually stop you from doing the things that don't result in pregnancy--no one ever got pregnant from oral sex regardless of the respective genders of the participants. Anyway. I am completely in favor of seeing to it that people can have relationships with their children but trying to pressure the moms into marriage if they're not interested isn't cool. Do you have any ideas for handling this that seem unlikely to have us regretting our life choices horribly later on.

We can just issue a decree to that effect.

Okay. Um, I have issued a general invitation to these people concerning my sister's city. If any of the relevant moms say yes and the relevant dads don't alienate them then--I mean I guess I should ask Illia first but I don't see any reason she'd say no--they could come with. As opposed to just being sent south or whatever. It's supposed to be a human city but it doesn't have to be, like, perfectly homogeneous, species-wise.

We can give people leave to go live there, we're not going to make them Illia's subjects.

Right. I mean, I think there's a reasonable expectation that they'd help out with some things while they were there, but there's also a reasonable expectation that if Illia ends up with a meaningfully mobile military force it's going to be helping your uncle and Illia's sure as hell not swearing fealty to him.

I expect they'd be happy to help and quite an asset, we're a hardworking people.