And they still have only your word that that's how it works.

Huan can confirm it.

'My friend, who is also a stranger to you, vouches for me,' is often not much more convincing than 'take my word for it.'

You haven't heard Huan speak. Trust me on this.

I'm still checking on them. Regardless of how much I or they trust you, I did promise.

Sure, okay. In the future it is probably a bad idea to commit yourself to time-consuming tasks that don't use magic and that you find upsetting.

I don't think scrying or boosted-osanweing someone every few weeks to make sure they're okay is time-consuming.

Your lookout. It is surprisingly easy to acquire a hundred responsibilities of that type and then they tend to be both time- and attention-consuming.

Thaaaat didn't occur to me. I will try to be more careful in the future.

In general promising specific outcomes or specific deliverables is more sustainable than promising continued attention, and the best way to promise continued attention is 'I will dedicate a trusted subordinate to this'.

I don't have trusted subordinates who can do the things I can do. Anyway I did not, in fact, promise to keep an eye on them, I promised to prevent any of your people from forcing them to do anything they didn't want. Maybe I could give them a way to get in touch if it looked like something was going to happen. Which it won't, almost certainly, but if it did I could do something about it without a significant time commitment otherwise...

Yeah, it's a shame they can't defend a palantir. I can ask my brothers to invent summoning-rocks that you can give to people that they can use to distress-call you.

Sounds useful.

Regrettably it may take a little while and there's no known means by which we can speed it up.

A little while by your species' standards or mine?

Don't know enough to say. Even if it's trivial as an engineering problem it'll be a month, magic item creation is just slow.

Makes sense.

Illia convinced me that giving someone osanwe isn't the kind of mind magic relevant to the Taboo but I'm still hesitant to hand it out to someone who lives in a society full of people who don't have it who I don't personally trust or I'd just do that and teach how to boost it.

Can you have Illia appoint someone your diplomatic representative in Estolad and then just make sure that person knows where the nearest palantir is and that they have leave to use it to contact you?

To the best of my knowledge there are a limited number of palantiri; are you suggesting we should have one in Beth Miqlat?

Yes, definitely.

How many are there, and how are they currently allocated?

Eight, and Eithel Sirion, Nargothrond, Brithombar, Tol Sirion, Dorthonion - that's the one I'd suggest Fingon give your sister - Himring, Thargelion, here.

I recognized all of those names except Tol Sirion and Thargelion.

Thargelion is where my brother Caranthir lives, it's near where you built a pass through the mountains. Tol Sirion is on the northern border of Findaráto's territory and manned by his nephew.

Findaráto?