"It's a long hike. I can make it faster than you, if you'd prefer to fly?"

"Sure." She gets air under her and follows him.

Is it a match for what the prisoner showed her?

Nod, nod.

He shoves some brush out of the way. Draws the bow. Fires it. "There - oh, wait, you probably can't see from here. Your dot has a fatal injury. I could probably take out three more before the little dots learn to take cover."

The Quendi-looking orcs are clumsily departing camp. There's an arrow sticking out of the dot. Very nearly dead center.

And it looks like it was fired out of a bow from about the right angle, not stabbed into the door by someone closer to it or anything like that?

If someone stabbed it in from closer, they used a lot of force. Angle looks right.

She flies back to Tyelcormo. "Forensic archery supports your story; I imagine I'm going to be told that you're an exceptional shot but I don't have a good way to evaluate how good she is without a major conflict of interest and this is the place she told me she was when you grabbed her. Thanks for the demonstration."

"I am, but thus the small target; you really wouldn't haveto be. You could ask people who know her. That's probably worth doing for other reasons, come to think of it. Should we keep collecting orcs?"

"Might make sense to relocate orc-catching efforts closer to where they're going to be, especially since there's only one of Vár and I'm starting to acquire more far-flung places to be and may want to scale back my scheduling here. If you do happen to find it convenient to catch orcs I'll certainly heal them and give them the spiel whenever I happen to be by but maybe don't set out specifically to do it, at least until they're done traveling and Vár could maybe come back to be a full-time missionary."

"Done. Once you have a permanent place to be, if it's safe we can also set you up with a palantir."

"I'm not sure I'm likely to permanently settle anywhere for the foreseeable future, although I might get to the point where I can park in Doriath for a month amusing children with illusions and working on my spell, especially if I did have a palantir. Is there anybody who already should have one? Círdan comes to mind."

"I'll send it south when we have a real shipment of food and accordingly greater numbers. Don't want to give the Enemy reason to notice your friends, and I expect he's paying close attention to those. Nolofinwë should obviously have one once they've built themselves some walls, so we don't have to mediate things either with confrontations or with you. Should Elwë?"

"I was thinking that sometime I'm planning a straight shot from here to a proposed palantir destination - that is, not today - I could just carry it; it won't even be stealable while I'm a bird, any more than you could take my shoes off like that. If Elwë had one it would make it more convenient for him to consider himself actively managing you. If you wanted to try it out and see if it's annoying, you could 'give me one' but ask me to store it in Doriath for safekeeping while I'm zipping around, and I could let him 'borrow' it while I'm doing that?"

"Sure. It's less than he'll be annoying, more that he'd either fail to keep it safe - which sounds unlikely - or take offense if we decided there was a strategic reason to have it closer to the action. Borrowing sounds like it fixes that. Drop in next time you're headed that way."

"Will do. I think this is everything I had to cover here, unless you can think of something?"

"Nah. Uh, send Nelyo our regards if he seems amenable to hearing them, tell him we handled the assassination attempt very responsibly and he could hardly have done better and he doesn't need to worry about us if you tell him about it at all, fly safe."

They've built some kind of wall around their settlement, and finished the houses and guard platforms. She can see Findekáno and Irissë in the same place they were last time, sitting around with their niece and laughing at something.

What about Nolofinwë, will she have to chase off any children to discuss serious things with him?

He's talking with some people, but none of them are children.