No one really knows how the parties get to yes

Yeah, if it's as you've described I wouldn't either.

You suggested helping them across the Ice, earlier. Is that even possible from here?

Two different avenues. The way to get my father to be helpful on something like that is to present it as an engineering problem, incidentally. One is that Macalaure's been composing a song for better local control of the elements, have they shown you how those work? My brother is better at them. His will do a lot more. But I'm not sure if humans can even learn our music and anyway the reason Macalaure's better than anyone else is that he has much better musical precision and his songs accordingly require more of it so even if you can learn the typical magic song that we teach children you may not be able to learn this one.

The second avenue is magic artifacts. In making those we're constrained by time - the process is very slow - and by materials, we have little metal and little fuel for forges here. Since you first arrived my father has been working on developing a reproducible design for rings for protection from the elements. It'll take even him a month and then we could set twenty thousand people to producing twenty thousand of them, though I want to be clear that the cost to us of twenty thousand person-months of magic work is extraordinary and that we'd be doing this so they don't war with us not because it's really a sensible set of strategic priorities.

To know whether to work on the second plan I need to know the carrying capacity of your unreasonably fast transit and when they're planning to cross and whether they'd even be willing to delay six weeks.

When I tried joining in some of the weather songs I didn't notice much difference. I did sound pretty pathetic even compared to singers who aren't Macalaure, so it could have been ineffective because humans can't do it or because I didn't sing well enough or it did and I just didn't compare closely enough.

When they're planning to cross, I don't think that's secret but the King has a habit of running through more possible plans than I'd think of. Me telling you might disrupt something I don't know about. Don't start spending twenty thousand person-months of magic on artifacts.

I'd have made sure to be better informed on this stuff if I were here as their ambassador instead of just trying to convince you to stay out of the trap.

Fair. You can bring someone who can learn from Macalaure, if you don't expect you'll be able to get anywhere. I appreciate you trying to convince me to stay out of the trap but if you weren't trying to exploit your comparative non-Doomedness and didn't have any information I don't I am confused as to how you were so confident I was making the wrong call.

It's not because I'm personally not doomed, just– my world literally has a mechanism for ensuring that what can go wrong will. Even if the plan is a good one on average, if thirty possible Maitimos die and one singlehandedly wins the war, the last one can just not happen. Math stops applying.

I see. That's annoying and I appreciate your coming over to communicate it. We're - not going to avoid thinking in terms of large numbers, with a war like this that'd be very deeply unwise, but we'll take care to adjust for it.

You can communicate to my cousins my regards in any form you think they'd actually appreciate the sentiment, which might be 'not at all'. I have a letter for Findekano if you unconditionally-promise not to read it or try to learn its contents or make known to anyone but him that you have it.

I promise. I'm guessing you won't want that one out loud.

Before I leave, I should tell you the rules the spirits expect. They barely apply to you, but it can start to add up over just a few decades.

Our strategic plan for the war has it ending in four hundred years. Do go on. He produces a letter.

She accepts the letter without looking closely at any external details.

If these seem arbitrary and disconnected, they do to me too.

Lying you know about. You can also gain karma from keeping promises or succeeding at tasks you've announced you'll attempt. This is almost never worth trying; it only works if there's a good chance of failing.

Attacking an enemy without warning is frowned upon, but if you believe you're fairly retaliating for something they did, that's encouraged. This has the obvious effect with promoting feuds. You can get karma from acting an assigned role. That works even if it's self-assigned. Think of it as an implicit promise. It is possible to inherit karma, usually but not necessarily going to the oldest child when someone dies. Oldest child regardless of gender; magic is very gender-neutral nearly all of the time. Discriminating between them would be seen as weird, and they spirits prefer statuses quo.
It is very important, especially if Men ever turn up and start becoming practitioners, that you not just think of individuals as interchangeable "latest scion of the house of whatever." That happened on my world, and now the basic unit of practitioner society is the bloodline or equivalent.

If you have a visitor, you offer food and drink because if you don't they might starve before they reach the next house. Almost never true, by the way, but it was when the rule caught on—and if you're a guest you don't abuse that or you might be killing the next person. That offer is also a truce of sorts. Even if the visitor is an enemy who you'd stab in the back and have the spirits side with you, you don't betray hospitality.

People are responsible for their own actions, Spirits are usually not very willing to accept coercion as a defense, but in extreme enough cases it's someone else's action done by your hand. Most possible actions don't have specific rules about that situation in particular—doing something is good is if it helps or harms people by those people's own lights. Not very clearly defined, but it probably can't be. It's worth having all practitioners run that in the back of their mind all the time.
People matter, and everything else in the universe is useful scenery.

Could be worse. Not - not good, but for something non-sentient trying to do morality...

Now that you trust me a little more do you want anything to eat or drink or deflect arrows?

The deflecting arrows I should probably accept. Getting killed by a stray shot would be anticlimactic. I don't know how limited the deflectors are, would it mean taking one away from someone who faces arrows more often than I do?

Yes, but someone probably less catastrophic to lose. None of us can do whatever you did with that valarauka and I take it you're not teaching. He opens his drawers again, shuffles, pulls out a ring - won't help you at close enough range.

The limitation on that is closer to equipment than information, but you're substantially right.

She accepts the ring and slides it on.

Thank you. I'll try to make sure that me being a bit safer works out to be worth someone else being a lot less so.

I know you will or I wouldn't have offered. If you have the means to keep a forge hot - we're stuck using singing and charcoal at the moment, there are no readily available dense fuel sources - there'd be more rings for everyone.

I might be able to help a bit, make it reliably take less charcoal or something if I'm lucky, but forge temperatures are way beyond me for the near future.

Fair enough. We were not expecting magical assistance in any flavor, and if that's non-trivial for you then whatever you do to valaraukar is a more urgent project.

The limiting factor in both cases is the thing analogous to equipment. The weapon is going to be hard to get more of.

Do you keep your forges running continuously? And are they the hottest fires in the area?

Yes and yes by a long shot.

They're probably the best available place to look for "materials" for heat magic. Can I see them?

I have not had time to come up with a sufficiently good explanation that everyone will drop their things and leave, if you can't have eyewitnesses. You can certainly take a look. He stands.

She follows him.

Looking will be worth a lot.

If it's powered by singing, privacy might be impossible. I don't know yet if the magic would need it to be actively heated or just to have recently been hot.

It's wood-fired, with singing just helping to mean we use slightly less absurd quantities of wood. I don't know how much you know about metalworking, but know the difference between the temperature water freezes at and boils at? You need that difference, nine times over, to get metal-forging temperature. We're going to cut down all the local forests.

Trees aren't all that renewable, and I definitely don't see local forests lasting four hundred years. Do you know what you're doing next?

Coal, once we can find it, if the Outer Lands have it. If they don't we're going to have to stop depending on metal, songs alone can't get anywhere close.