"Great! We're walking to Norway." And he heads out.

Then off they go.

He observes to see if not the emperor is going to be really annoying and make them regret not killing him.

He is not really annoying. He is kind of confused and kind of probably grieving having lost the past twelve years, and occasionally he has more questions for Catherine about various things, but mostly he is quiet and fairly cooperative about this ridiculous situation that he has found himself in.

Sure, that's fine. 

And how's Catherine?

Hanging in there. Glad to be away from court. Kind of confused about what her relationship to the not-emperor is but at least nothing that happened is either his fault or something that he, like, remembers at all. Not super clear on what the plan ultimately is at this point.

"Honestly my plan was just to get out of court. But I guess we can go see what the emperor's up to? Do we - need to do anything? Won't he get evicted from bodies one after another?"

"Honestly yeah? But the bodies don't owe anything, so they'll drop back - which I guess is better than everyone dying and still means that the empire is going to be literally one hundred percent of the time operating without an accepted head of state, so it should fracture pretty easily within a few years. Unless he thinks of some clever way to drop back into being slow, or maintain control while fast. I suppose with the latter he'd still chew through bodies quickly enough to wipe out his whole line within five years or so."

"He can slow down if he pays me back but it's hard to pay back debt without cooperation and I don't think he knows this anyway - he could slow himself the other way but only with time and help from some fairies - I guess if he knew that existed he'd probably try it."

"Yeah. I'm not sure how long it would take him but it seems unlikely that he won't think to try finding more before his empire collapses."

"And he might be able to offer them quite a lot, really - things brought to fairy circles -"

"Yeah."

"So we do have to keep tracking his bodies down and impeding them, probably."

"I suppose so. What a mess. - I'm not actually going to outlive him unless I slow. Or I guess unless we track down and personally murder him a thousand times and thereby force him to keep jumping early, but that seems unlikely to keep working. I guess eventually he'll probably get stuck in Iceland or something."

"We could stop. Go south to Greece. It'll be a long time even if he figures it out and there are a lot of things that can go wrong for him, negotiating with fairies without knowing anything about them."

"Yeah. I guess we could."

"I don't really like leaving things undone but I don't want to leave your life undone, either."

"Yeah." Snuggle. "Wanna be - done with everything else, and with the kids all okay and safe and grown, and then - get to just focus on being okay, and with you, and happy."

"How, uh, vindictive is the emperor, is he gonna go burn down all of Germany in an attempt to inconvenience my family? If he does figure out a way to command his armies while fast or to slow them down?"

"Well, northern Germany belongs to him, so probably not that specifically."

"I guess I am also concerned about things in that genre which are not that specifically."

"He'll be significantly more concerned with maintaining control of his empire, although given that we've made that terribly inconvenient I suppose he might not consider himself to have anything better to do. He's not - personally very vindictive, exactly, he does things that are convenient for him. But we are trying to kill him, last he heard, so he does have some reason to want us dead or very inconvenienced."

"Then at minimum I think we gotta keep an eye on him and see if he's doing that. Or someone has to, I suppose it needn't specifically be us and my court might be happier if, once we've found him, we just take the kids to Greece and the burden of feeding them off the court and then they can spy on him themselves."

Nod.

"I know killing him would have been more fun."