She frowns thoughtfully. "Did they send you to help us or did you think of it yourself?"

"It was Maedhros' idea to get you away from Dorthonion. I didn't know you were there. It was my idea to show up again after that."

"Thank you for coming."

"I felt really bad for scaring you. And, you know, I've been teaching a lot of people magic."

It's obvious Odette would be more comfortable with more casual conversation but it's hard to break the habit of caution and circumspection around, well, those eyes. Maybe she should try harder, in the interests of setting now the standards of the Queen's new court. "How are you choosing priorities? Where are you staying while you do?"

"I have a rotation--kill orcs, run around human settlements teaching and healing and so on, check on the giant spiders, multiply peoples' food stores, some other things--I weigh them according to the immediate benefit of the action, the long-term benefit of the action, and how much the action helps my magic grow. Up to this point I've mostly been sleeping and eating in various Feanorian fortresses, mostly the one held by Celegorm and Curufin."

"Who don't insist on titles, or do you have some kind of principled objection to them?"

"Theeeey probably have titles. I'm not sure I ever learned their titles, to be honest."

"I'm not asking because I care, I'm asking because I've never met anyone who didn't and it certainly is most easily interpreted as quite the political statement."

"Didn't insist on titles or didn't care? Anyway, I don't, I was thinking of picking up 'Princess' since my sister's probably going to use Queen but if using titles is more political than we realized...well, I suppose it would probably be harder to get acknowledgement if we didn't at least occasionally pretend to care about that kind of thing."

"It would be much harder. No one minds addressing people with titles, not that I've noticed. I suppose some of them are probably internally political but no one but Elves has time for that. Even now that we're all immortal."

"Yeah." Sigh. "Politics. If people are more likely to take my sister seriously if she puts 'Queen' in front of her name--well, it's not really a sacrifice. But--enh, I feel weird about the idea of doing it because of how they'd see us."

"If your sister's a queen, she should call herself one. Not calling herself one isn't going to suggest an unassuming humble queen, it's going to suggest someone who doesn't think she is."

"Most countries back home are more than one city large so it feels kind of presumptuous. But, yeah."

"The convention here is that the rulers of cities mostly call themselves Kings if their city is unusually independent and wants to emphasize it, or if they have a lot of other cities or other territory under their control. The King of Nargothrond is the latter, the King of Gondolin the former. And the Feanorians can't call themselves Kings despite controlling lots of territory, because they had a claim to the high kingship and it'd seem a reference to that."

"That actually did come up when someone mentioned the king of Gondolin and I was confused. Back home if you have to answer to anybody--you don't get kings and a High King, you get--princes and dukes and counts and stuff, and a King."

"I, uh, think the Elves have a much more flexible command structure than they pretend. I think in most monarchies you get in trouble if you just ignore the King, yet everyone seems to do it."

"I think most monarchies have less drama than this one."

"Really? It seems inherent to the structure, to me."

"Most monarchies probably have some drama, but they have less time to accumulate the stuff."

"We'll see what mortal monarchies are like, now that death does not even all old scores."

"So we will. At least--well, hopefully--mortal monarchies will only have to deal with naturally-occurring drama, and not also Morgoth deliberately sowing the stuff."

"Morgoth did a lot of deliberately sowing discord among Men, too."

"Right. Well. Morgoth isn't an inherent feature of monarchies, and he it is I'm finding a way of abolishing the institution altogether."

"I think I'd favor that. Men were communally governed before we met the Elves."