"How'd that work?"

"Well in small tribes, complicatedly in larger ones. We were nomadic. We're not anymore, and that complicates things."

"I was asking more after the mechanism than the efficacy. Most things are more complicated when there are more people involved, I find."

"The tribal elders debated any questions that came to their attention, and everyone was bound by the decision they reached. There were formalized procedures - I've written books on some of them, the Haladin still practice that way, and others are regrettably lost to history."

"Magic can do past-scrying."

"It can?" She looks enchanted. "Your historians must be the happiest people on Arda. Or not on Arda, I suppose. That's amazing. Never mind. How is that done? What specialization? Mine's Sympathy, looks like..."

"Sympathy's easiest, but you can do it with any of the three. How far back you can get depends on how good a mage you are, and there are some complicating factors, and it's also possible to fuzz a time and place to make it harder to look at--but you're the first person I've even mentioned the possibility to, so I'd be astonished if there was anyone here putting a baffle on anything that had happened."

"I can't wait. In that case I'll have a much more complete answer to your question someday. We lost most of our history and traditions and language on contact with the Elves."

"You lost your language? That's terrible, I'm so sorry. ...About the rest of it too."

"Some people still speak it. A little bit. There are still songs. But - Sindarin was more useful, and the Elves were eager to teach the children, and the Elves were better at everything."

"How much of it is left? ...I suppose it'll be necessary to do things in Sindarin anyway, if most people don't speak what you've got. It just sort of--" she makes a face. "There are good, practical reasons to use Sindarin, now, and there are good, principled reasons not to, and abandoning pragmatism in favor of making a point would be a terrible idea, but the point remains."

She nods. "We're working on preserving our own language, where we can. Preserving the history and customs is more important, if it lacks the symbolic punch."

She nods. "I've been writing down everything I can think of at home, so I don't lose my culture. That's also why I'm wearing a weird style of dress, actually, this is a popular cut back home."

"I thought it must be. The Elves don't give you a hard time about it? Or offer you extremely pretty Elven things it'd be rude to refuse? Or tell you it's inappropriate?"

She looks down at the dark green dress she's wearing. "The Elves made this for me, actually. I mentioned that I might want to figure out how to make more clothes like the ones from home and was told that my time was more valuable than whoever they got to do it for me. I've heard that if I didn't already wear my hair in a braid they might ask me to put it up, but I do, so it hasn't been directly relevant to me."

"Yes, to them that's like being naked. A shame. They have the softest hair and it's a delight to touch, like running your hands through the finest silk you've ever touched."

She turns bright red. "That sounds...very pleasant."

"Very little compares." She is grinning perhaps a little mischievously.

Go away, mental images, you are unhelpful and unwanted!

Unwanted? Really? But wouldn't it be nice if--

GO AWAY

"I'll have to take your word for it."

(The scarlet hasn't faded from her cheeks one bit.)

"You don't have to, even Elves can't get married from that. It would probably be very wise to take my word for it, though."

"Yes," she sighs. "I'm aware."

"Someone in particular?"

"I'm trying to pretend I don't have a crush until it goes away. I'm pretty sure I've managed not to let anyone else know. Except my sister, but she doesn't count, for relevant purposes." She sighs again. "But yes."

"They're - very everything."

"He has the prettiest smile I've ever seen and when he catches me working myself harder than I ought he tells me to get enough food and sleep and when I started singing something from back home he started harmonizing and--" she shakes her head. "I know it's a terrible idea, and I don't mean that the way people mean it when they say it and then go and do it anyway, and that doesn't make my ovaries calm the hell down."