He sits down and rests his hands on his knees and his head on his hands, all attention.

So she tells him her story. Not in meter and rhyme; no one's ever asked her to tell her own story before, and master storyteller though she may be, she can't compose whole new poems on command. But she's a fine storyteller, even if she finds her own presentation lacking.

She tells him about the Emperor, as he began, a petty king who ruled a small chunk of Norway. How he turned to magic to preserve himself, ensuring that not only his dynasty, but he himself, would live to take over unprecedented swaths of northern Europe, all bowing before him as he jumped from his own body to the bodies of each of his heirs in turn. How he forgot his mortal origins and thought himself a living god. How he laid waste to towns and cities a thousand miles apart. The daughters of his own vassals competed for the honor of being declared his concubine, being allowed to bear children of the imperial line. But this was not enough for him; he thought it more impressive to take women by force, and to scour the entire world for the noblest and most capable women he could find, locking them in his palace like caged birds. In some of his more recent lifetimes, he sired a hundred children by dozens of captured princesses and other prisoners.

She tells him of herself, twelve years ago, a domestic servant scrubbing floors for an English court. She tells him of the siege she was captured in. No one had any interest in paying her ransom, and so she languished in a Scandinavian dungeon, awaiting her end at some pagan feast, where Christians were often sacrificed to gain the favor of the gods (or, more accurately, to impress the Emperor's pagan vassals). But she was not. She was too interesting, or too clever, when someone was sent to see if she could be taught anything of use. And the Emperor noticed her, and the Emperor wanted her, and so took her for his concubine. It was by his choice that she was forced to bear six children, five of which still live. The law gave her no say in this, nor in what became of her children once they existed. They were taken away, one by one, to be raised by pagan tutors who would teach them to see her as little more than an embarrassment, if a necessary one.

He listens. He looks utterly fascinated through the whole telling, if at no point exactly sympathetic.

"Well," he says when you're finished. "That one adores you, and I would not be pleased to be tasked with teaching him otherwise."

She can't think of anything remotely clever or useful to say to that. She laughs, a little sadly, and snuggles Ingolfr closer. 

"And I think that I ought to be flattered, that you think I might be worse."

"Well. I'm sure there are all sorts of worse things that I haven't happened to imagine yet."

"If that's so, I haven't imagined them either."

"You've been kinder than most people have been to me. I'm just terribly worried that this conversation is going to end with you demanding one of the very few things I have left."

"If I wanted the child he'd have been gone by the time you arrived here." He says this as though totally unconscious that it might come across as a threat; in fact as if he thinks it is probably very reassuring.

"I suppose he would have been," she says thoughtfully, after a moment. It seems fairies have no particular moral opposition to kidnapping children. But then, she knew that, they're fairies. "But perhaps other people where you come from have less convenient interests."

"Oh, they do. You did a dangerous thing, wandering here, and it could have worked out to be no better than your body-jumping emperor. Not worse, I think, unless you were very foolish, and you're not. But not assuredly better."

She looks over at the group of very, very slow-moving women, still on the path.

"Seems likely that all of the paths from here are ones that I'll regret taking."

"I don't know, right now, how we'd get your other children, if they did not want to come, or weren't allowed to. But we could give it a year of consideration before they'd notice you were gone, and another ten by the time they returned to their court. If there are words, or magics, or coincidences, that'd send them out to find you -

- and there always are, in my experience -"

There is no hope in Scandinavia. No way to get Sigrun and Tyr back, no way to keep them from snatching Frey and Ingolfr and Ragna from her arms, no way to prevent herself from bearing another half-dozen children who she will not be able to protect from hellfire. There is God, whatever his plans are. But surely God can reach her here as well as anywhere. There is Vigdis, who of course would tell her to choose the fairies. Not because it will work, but because it's better to meet your end in battle than in a dungeon whose walls you've already memorized.

"I don't know any of your rules. The only thing I know about them is that almost all the humans who try to navigate them fail."

"Well, no wonder, if they start out not knowing, because -"

He stops. Leans back, with his neckline writhing at the changes in how his clothing sits. Looks at her carefully. 

"You asked me to explain the rules to you, do you understand that? It doesn't matter - really - if you knew you were doing it, but I'd like you to know that you asked, and not have it dawn on you later."

She nods, slowly. This is a terrible idea, really, but grandmother could hardly have foreseen that she was going to be kidnapped by an immortal heathen rapist who was going to abduct all of her children, and if she's going to do something foolish and try to escape him via fairies, then she'll have to learn the rules, won't she, and better to learn them from someone who doesn't want to take away any of her children.

"I understand that I asked."

"I don't know exactly where to start, I've never met anyone who didn't just - know - so you talk about your children as individuals, you must have the concept that, like, people exist as distinct entities. Do you have the concept that a person can be - importantly the same as the person they were ten years earlier, or a thousand years earlier, even if their personality has changed -"

Nodnod.

"All right. And do you have the concept that there are some things where doing them incurs misfortune on you and your family -"

"Um. Maybe? I don't know if you're talking about - luck, as its own thing, or how some things people agree are wrong and people will treat you worse if you do them, or how some things just have predictably terrible consequences for reasons you can easily see - "

"I guess a combination of those? I mean, if you swear falsely, then maybe food will turn to ash in your mouth and you will starve and your spirit will cling to the site of your death forever unless someone gives it the chance to rectify the wrong?"

"Okay. That doesn't happen outside fairyland. But okay."

"Really? Huh. Well, it doesn't always happen here but usually whatever happens isn't better than that."

"Okay. I am worried that the rules of fairyland are - different than what I understand to be the rules of acting decently, and that I will try to do everything right and people will still take offense and I will be killed in some suitably dramatic way without understanding why this happened."

"There aren't very many things as bad as swearing falsely." He leans back and frowns at the sky and counts on his fingers. "Doing violence to someone you are indebted to, falsely naming someone else a traitor, or a liar, bearing false witness, betraying a family member, agreeing to a bargain and then failing to keep up your end of it... those are all of the things where I recall hearing of anyone turning to stone or bleeding through their skin until they died or catching fire on the spot or experiencing some misfortune of that magnitude over a single thing."