It's very insistent.
She cannot bring herself to move. She tries - she does; intellectually she knows it's the smart thing to do - but - she can't. Cannot get up and go to him.
Etty curls up in a ball and weeps. The urgency is terrible, but it doesn't actually pick up her limbs for her, walk her around the lake - it's more like someone shouting into her ear that she must jump off the tower, she must, she must, and she can't, not now that she knows the crunching sound she makes when she hits the ground.
She's not even sure if this is better or worse, is the problem. If he beats her, if she drowns, if she's dropped a hundred times, well, now she knows it will all be gone by morning. What he did to her before was not gone after it was done.
But of course it's not an either-or choice. Probably. He does not seem likely to weary of commanding her to follow him. Perhaps she can just stall until she's a swan again?
If she spends all night, every night, defying him and being punished for it, she'll have no chance to write.
She splutters and coughs and gasps and manages to tread water.
Maybe if she's on the roof when she changes again she can just dive off of it in response to the next summons. He doesn't seem to prefer to rape her when she's badly hurt. Based on one sample, anyway.
She sits.
She isn't sure she wants to know what's happening, but any, any clues could get her out, away -
She uncovers the scroll and the writing supplies, and finds a moonbeam to sit in, and puts the flat rock on her lap, and she writes.
She deliberately affects terrible handwriting - it's not hard; her hand trembles now and it's dark - in lieu of any sophisticated cipher. She doesn't want her thoughts read.
Etty eats fruit and processes and makes sure she has her scroll and pen and ink away before sunrise. She goes swimming with the last few hours before light; it's more fun when one doesn't float so automatically. And she wants to confirm that she doesn't have a residual fear of drowning. (She doesn't.)
Etty nibbles her lip, flexes her hurt foot, puts it somewhere more comfortable. "If you can't - satisfy the curse - I don't see another chance. I'm going to turn into a swanbrained - thing - if I can't get out of here - my mind is going to go - and that's the worst part, the worst, even though the rest is -" She shudders. "I don't have long. A few years isn't long."
"But - I can't," she says, "I mean, if I don't know that you're really the person you are, if I can't know that you're okay when I think you're okay, if I don't know you then I can't love you forever because I wouldn't be loving you in the first place." She takes a deep breath. "So - promise," she says. "Promise you won't pretend like that."
"That's good. It's -" Etty tries to think of words. "Feels safe." Because Nona's not going to hurt her, Nona's not going to treat her like he does, Nona only wants to hold her and is so concerned about not doing things Etty doesn't like that she extracted a promise on the subject.