"I don't mean you can't tell them apart, I mean sharing the exact same under-blood."

"Underblood?" Someone rushes in with armor and sandwiches; he takes one.

"You know how people usually look like their parents, and we call that kind of thing bloodlines? Well, it's not literally blood that does it--you could swap all the blood in your body with someone else's, and if it didn't kill one or both of you you wouldn't start to look more like each other. We call the stuff that does it underblood."

"Ah. Then, yes, they're the same in that way."

"So I should be able to build him a new body out of that--I don't quite know if it would be better to do that first in the hopes that that would make it easier to draw the soul, or see if I can get anywhere with the soul first so you don't have an extra corpse lying around if this goes wrong."

"I'm also not sure his soul will be amused. But we'll have to give it a try."

"Yeah." She takes a sandwich and starts putting on the armor, mostly by magic so she can eat at the same time with her hands. "I'm not sure what circumstances would lead to my being able to apologize for an unsuccessful attempt, but they should probably be avoided," she gets out around a bite of sandwich.

"You expect you wouldn't be able to apologize if it doesn't work?"

"I don't particularly expect to be able to communicate with him during the attempt. When you do Sympathy magic to a person, a lot of it sounds like you're trying to coax the person, but you're really trying to coax the underlying reality of the person."

"Well. I think he'll want to come, he'll miss us. And being alive is more reversible than the, ah, reverse. What specifically did your sister say about my father?"

"That if he were around it would likely cause complicated political problems that would make it harder to effectively fight the Enemy."

"Did she seem to be regarding herself as delivering a threat or a warning?"

"Warning."

He frowns.

"I'll see you after the spiders are contained."

"...She is, presumably, only hearing one side of the story. I am not irretrievably prejudiced against reviving your father. I will want to be careful, but that doesn't mean automatically no. Anyway I'd want to do the twin first even if I had an unambiguous go-ahead unless you happened to have your father's corpse handy."

"His manner of death didn't leave a body, no. I'm just very confident that his soul would be over here immediately if that has any bearing on the difficulty of the task."

"How he would personally feel about it...might or might not turn out to be relevant. Anyway I can try to knock figuring that out up my priority list a few paces but I have a lot on my list right now."

"I gathered. And - my cousin Fingon is the crown prince and general commander of the forces of this realm. If he says that there will be political complications if my father is alive, then that's effectively true by definition."

"Maybe I could get better information if I got Illia in on this conversation. What's the range on osanwe?"

"It can be as much as a couple hundred miles if you know someone intimately."

"Alright then..." and she reaches out...and out...

Illia?

He waits and watches.

Hi, Odette, I've been worried about you. Thanks for not getting yourself captured.

I've been worried too, although in my case I was more concerned that you hadn't come at all and had been murdered by our ex-teacher.

Ugh. That would be terrible. Luckily, I did not. I showed these guys how to make a printing press!