At first it does not seem that there's anything different about this patch of forest. The trees are tall and healthy and wild and the flowers are springy and dewy and colorful and the grass is unbent like nothing has walked there.

(There is a faerie in the forest but he is not paying them any notice; they have been there the last thousand times he's been here, after all. They are features of the landscape. There's a song about them, written when they were ten paces farther away, not because there's anything about them particularly worthy of memorializing in song but because there are a lot of songs.)

He is here because in a few days there will be a bird here. The next few beats of its wings will take it into the right segment of the woods, and those wingbeats will take the better part of a week, and then for a few seconds it will flutter across this section of forest at an ordinary pace and he will kill it, if he can. No one else could. 

The humans are more distant than the bird, and not on a trajectory to pass through this bit of forest at all. Which is too bad; reportedly, humans can talk, and that means that unlike birds you do not have to kill them to keep them.

None of the humans notice anything out of the ordinary at all.

Ingolfr decides to leave the path and wander a ways into the woods. One of the other women calls to him, but he ignores them, and nobody else happens to be inclined to chase him down. Catherine follows him.

If they are looking very closely they might notice a bird in the sky ahead of them suddenly vanish.

They're not looking all that closely. Ingolfr continues on his present course.

And suddenly there is a person there in the forest in front of Ingolfr, or at least part of a person; you can see a head and a chest and hands and if you squint very carefully at the place between those where the rest of him must be, there's clearly something there, even if it's hard to look at. He is plucking feathers off a dead bird. He looks very delighted. 

"I thought you wouldn't come this way," he tells Ingolfr. "I haven't told anyone that you changed your course, though I expect that some people have guessed because I never wanted to learn the language of the humans before. - you do talk, right?"

Ingolfr frowns up at him. He is pretty sure that there wasn't a person here before, and also that that is not precisely what people are supposed to look like.

He sucks his thumb and does not say anything.

"Maybe you are not a human," he says thoughtfully. "Maybe you are a ...larval human, and turn into a human in ten thousand years? I don't know whether to expect you'd be faster at it if I kept you here. Birds can sing before they leave their nest, though, there's no sense in walking before you can talk if you're a talking sort of thing in the first place. But I don't know very much about humans. 

Would you like something to eat? I have a bird."

He tilts his head and blinks curiously at the bird.

The bird is dead and now featherless. He is deliberately and expertly turning it into little oily chunks of meat.

Ingolfr watches him silently for a while. At some point he turns around to see whether his mother is still a step behind him. He frowns at the fairy again when he realizes his mother isn't moving.

"I didn't do it. That wouldn't be fair, would it, you haven't done anything to me." He eats a bit of the bird, offers some. "She'll be here, though, she's only a step off, and she's not really still, just very slow. And she might go faster when she notices you're not where she expected you to be. I'm not sure about that. I don't know what it looks like to slow people when someone catches up, but they can't see us, so I think it stands to reason, doesn't it?"

Ingolfr nods. He regards the bit of bird with some suspicion.

"If you eat it then you can stay, see, instead of turning into a statue again. If you're a human. If you are a larval human I don't actually know if it'll work. 

It's very tasty. I knew a thousand years of it, and waited for a week."

He considers this and then holds out his hand for some.

Little bit of bird! He leans forward (the pattern of where he has skin changes) and watches closely.

He chews it thoughtfully and then makes a face. He spits out little bits of chewed-up meat onto his clothes.

"Tasteses wrong," Ingolfr informs him, still making a face.

"You are a talking human! Well if you don't like it then I suppose you can pretend you're busy whenever there's a feast and that's only a little bit rude and rude to Maitimo, who won't so much mind, will he? I thought humans ate meat."

"I eat meat."

"Do you?" He leans back and more of him vanishes into the folds of whatever he is wearing. 

"Our meat tasteses different."

"I wonder if that's because it's slow or some other reason."

He shrugs. He starts trying to wipe his mouth off with his hands.

He watches with fascination. The rest of the bird disappears away somewhere.

He is not actually able to get himself satisfactorily clean. Usually his mommy cleans him up, but his mommy is being very slow right now. He looks over to see if she's moved.

"Mommy?" he calls, a little tremulously.

"She'll be a while, see, she's got a whole step left. We'll sleep and wake and maybe sleep again, and then she'll be here." He eyes the woman more carefully. "I think we won't need to sleep twice, not if she's hurried once she can't see you."

"I don't wanna sleep without mommy."

"I guess you can run around not sleeping, if you'd like that better. I can't make her go any faster."

Ingolfr sucks his thumb and whimpers.

That's not a good idea but it's not really his job to explain that and the tiny human doesn't look of a mind to listen. 

"Well, I'm going to sleep."

"I can't sleep without a story," says Ingolfr, looking like he's about to cry.

"Well, if you'd care to owe me a story, I know some, but maybe our stories won't be any more to your taste than our meat, and where would we be then?"

Ingolfr flops down in the grass and sobs.

He considerately ignores this and pretends to sleep, though the crying is in fact too distracting for sleep. 

He sobs for several minutes and then passes out.

That's all right, then. 

He spends a while bending blades of grass into a more satisfactory pattern and then sleeps too.

Eventually Ingolfr wakes up.

He thinks about crying some more, and then decides to try pulling on his mother's hand to see if that helps.

It doesn't.

Well OK he's out of ideas now.

He cries.

He wakes up and sits up and watches him, holding his hands in his lap as if one is preventing the other from extending itself to do something useful. 

"It won't be very long now. I think she has noticed she doesn't see you, and is hurrying."

He quiets a little, and tries to calm down, and can't, and sobs some more.

Giving him a hug would be practically as bad as telling him a story, so he does neither, and after some reflection decides that he could sing himself a song, and does this, ignoring entirely whether it has any effects at all on the small child.

He cries for a bit and listens and eventually manages to quiet down. He shreds some grass between his fingers for a while, and then clings to one of his mother's legs, because this is sort of almost like a hug.

He's very hungry, but he isn't very good at noticing when he's hungry, so he doesn't say this.

And eventually his mother's stride interrupts some particular threshold and she's not slow, anymore, and can notice him, and notice the man in the clearing, and notice (if she thinks to look for them) the ring of mushrooms around the clearing.

Her first concern is really the fact that her child is visible again and looks like he is hanging onto his ordinarily bizarrely calm demeanor by a thread. She scoops him up. It's hard to scoop a baby and a toddler at the same time, but this is important, and she manages.

She notices the man. Notices the mushrooms. There are stories, both here and in Britain, of beings that are neither human nor angel nor demon, beings that create rings of mushrooms with their dances. Two seconds ago she would have said, if pressed, that she wasn't sure whether she believed in unseen spirits that meant neither good nor ill, but now she believes. The main point of uncertainty is whether such beings are more like elves, the powerful but almost benignly human creatures the Scandinavians speak of in well-lit feast halls, or more like fairies, the creatures she only knows from whispered dire warnings she heard as a child on the edge of sleep. Fairies, she remembers, are legalistic, vengeful, obsessed with politeness, and above all, impossible to predict, their values only dimly reminiscent of anything a human might consider caring about. You may try to protect yourself with medals or charms or clever words or iron swords, but the only way to ever be really safe from them is to avoid anywhere that fairies have ever thought to claim as their own. 

For the first time in years, maybe ever, she hopes the Scandinavians are right. She isn't counting on it.

She rocks her child back and forth. She doesn't say anything to the fairy, or the elf, or whatever he is. But she doesn't step out of the ring, either.

"He was a long way ahead of you," he says, "and didn't sleep for very much of it."

Well, if she isn't going to carry him right back out, then clearly she's going to end up talking to the fairies at least a little. This is a terrible idea, but you don't exactly meet a fairy every day, and it's been very boring, being locked in stone halls for the past twelve years.

"I don't know what that means."

He stands up, walks three steps across the clearing. He points at the people she was travelling with, the ones who didn't wander off their path in pursuit of a toddler. 

She looks at them. She notes that they're not moving.

"You didn't know? That's how humans are. They're slow. They can't see anyone else because nothing can possibly hold still long enough."

So fairies are very very fast. And that's why they can't be seen, the way you lose track of an arrow after someone lets it go. 

" - I don't know whether it's rude to ask questions."

" - it's not rude but I might answer them, right, and you don't know anything about me."

She narrows her eyes in puzzlement and silently laments that the British are always right about everything.

She spends a few moments trying to think how to get more information about what's happened to her without asking any questions, and then decides that she'd better just ask her son.

"Are you all right?"

     Nodnod.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

     Headshake.

"Anything?"

     Sniffle. "You freezed. He gave me some meat but it tasted funny. And you stayed freezeded for a whole day."

- oh, lovely. She's been in the fairy realm for half a minute and her son has already eaten their food, that's great. 

"Would you like some?"

"No. Thank you."

She's not sure whether saying 'thank you' is dangerous, it seems like the sort of thing that could be, but not thanking people for things sounds just as dangerous, when she puts it that way. Really she should just go, back to her party and back to the castle and back to the Emperor, as grim a fate as that is. Unless Ingolfr can't go back, in which case she has no idea what she should be doing but still feels like she should be suspicious of fairy food on principle.

He reaches into his clothes and pulls out a little chunk of raw meat and eats it, watching her thoughtfully.  "You didn't mean to come here."

"No, I didn't."

"I have heard more stories in which humans came here on purpose - needing something to happen faster, or wanting to see us, or wanting to flee something - but maybe more humans wander in by accident, on the whole, I wouldn't know."

"I've heard of both. 

"I'm not sure which group it tends to go better for."

"Hey, I didn't come here for you either. And I didn't tell him a story, even when he said he needed one."

She's not really sure what that means. Or, well, she knows what it means, but she doesn't know its significance.

She is very unsure what's going to happen if she steps out of the ring. Probably the only thing for it is to test it, but if she leaves and Ingolfr doesn't, then he'll have to go another day (or two, or more, who knows how time works in fairy) without food, and if that happens she's sure to lose him. Really he already needs something else to eat, unless fairy food lasts forever or something.

She sits down in the grass to breastfeed Ingolfr. She's been trying to focus on the baby, who, after all, can't eat anything else, but it's the only food she has with her. 

He seems fascinated. 

That's kind of weird but whatever. Maybe fairies grow on trees or something.

She sings to her child. Eventually she has two sleeping children in her arms, at which point she muses that she did not entirely think this plan through.

"If you're going to stay awhile we could go somewhere nicer."

"I'm trying to think how likely it is that he'll disappear again if I try to carry him out."

(She doesn't really believe that this doesn't count as a question. She just doesn't know what else to do.)

"He'll slow back down eventually if he doesn't eat anything else. But not right away. In a few days, maybe."

She holds him tight. 

"I'm not sure it's possible to feed them both for several days without eating anything myself. But if he's stuck, for the moment, then I suppose we all are."

This is terrifying. It is also something of a relief, no matter how sternly she tells herself that fairies are definitely a worse problem than any of her existing problems. Her existing problems are just bad in ways she already understands, and as long as she doesn't understand the fairies, there's always the vain hope that they might be less terrible than her current circumstances.

"Stuck?" He gestures at her still entourage, in the distance. "They're stuck. He's not. You're not, either, even if you want to be. I don't really see why most humans want to be. It seems like dying, but without any of the things that'd make dying entertaining."

"They don't feel slow. They feel like they're taking a hike on a lovely spring day. And if I don't go back with them at some point - well, maybe I'd be able to see my other children again, but I don't expect they'd be able to see me."

"Other children," he says thoughtfully. 

"You could leave them instructions. It'd be very expensive, I would imagine, but it wouldn't be impossible. You could tell them where to find you."

"I don't know that they'd come. Or be allowed to come, if they wanted to." Also she is not sure whether getting whisked away to fairyland is really in anybody's best interests.

"You conceived them, and bore them, and fed them?"

"Yes?"

"Then who on this earth has a claim to rival yours?"

"I don't know whether it would be inconsiderate to answer that with something resembling a story."

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."

- maybe she should be rethinking this, honestly, it's not, like, super obvious that trying to live by some insane system and living in fear that if she ever smoothes the truth down wrong she'll burst into flame is that much better than where she's at now.

"OK, so, I'm sure that sounds reassuring to you, but I don't know which things count as betrayals, and I don't have total certainty about which people I'm indebted to, and I don't have very much confidence that I'd always realize it if I had made a bargain with someone."

"- well, I don't go home more than once a century anyway, we can set up somewhere nice and out of the way and not take you around hostile people until you're very sure you've got it."

" - can I - ask why you're helping me?"

"I'm acquiring you. This is helpful to you mostly because you are currently the prisoner of an evil body-hopping king of humans who has some kind of human sort of claim to your kids."

Ohhhhh. A lot of things make more sense now. 

Well. She wasn't a lot more than a slave anyway, this doesn't necessarily change her calculus very much.

"Oh."

"And I'm not really very worried that you'll light yourself on fire, I think it takes - big things, if that makes any sense, dramatic moments, it'd be appropriate - but I don't know that with any certainty and it doesn't seem like it'd do you any good to spend all your time worrying about being on fire even if there's no real risk of it. So we'll stay clear of people until you're sure of yourself, if you ever are."

Nodnod.

"The other important thing is that you can bring misfortune down, not just on you, but on anyone you're indebted to, and anyone in your debt. More strongly the more indebtedness in your relationship."

"Okay. I'm not super clear on how I tell which things make me indebted to people or make people indebted to me. That's the thing about questions, right, I'm placing myself in your debt by asking for all of this information?"

"Lots of things cause debt but important information is one of the weightier ones. That's why I said it was no wonder that all of the humans were doomed, see - if they asked and got an answer then they'd given themselves up already, and if they didn't ask then they'd get something wrong sooner or later by accident. 

Fairies can tell. Both when thinking of actions and when thinking of relationships, you just know - some people more precisely than others - where you stand."

"Okay. I don't have any sense of that. Or - I can guess, I assume that a story is worth something but everything you've told me is worth a lot more than my story, but I don't know how those things weigh against each other. And there are a bunch of things you've said that I don't know whether they counted towards the total at all."

"Stories are important. Art, beauty, creation, inventiveness. If you watch people dance you will be in their debt, a little, if it's beautiful, if it defied your expectations. Your story was very good. Not worth an explanation of the whole of morality, quite, but a good half of it. 

Destroying things incurs debt. More so if they're difficult to replace, much moreso if they're irreplaceable. Violence incurs debt. The human king wouldn't do very well, I don't think, with his current tactics, he'd be running up debts to every place where he sent out his armies. Courts do conquer others but very very carefully and very rarely with much use of swords. Doing someone a favor, obviously, puts them in your debt. 

And children are indebted to their creators. That's the largest debt, for most people. It's nearly impossible even for thousands of years of service to erase it. I know someone who did draw it even, once, but he was the most talented person I've ever met, and his mother already dead. Repaying the father is much easier. Mostly everyone belongs to their family and if that makes them sad -"

Demonstrative shrug. 

Nodnod.

"And this is why it was a good thing that you didn't tell my son a story even though he asked. I'm indebted to you, but he's not?"

"I wouldn't say it was a good thing," he says, in fact looking startled at the idea. "It was indicative of my intentions. I didn't know that humans can't even tell when things indebt them but it was fairly obvious that he wasn't - evaluating what he could afford to ask of me. It would've been possible for me to give him a hug and a blanket and a story and a song, but I did not do that, and he's not in my debt."

Hm.

" - so you don't try to avoid being indebted to people?"

"Well, that depends what you want, doesn't it? In most interactions the polite thing is to avoid any debt either way. That means less for either family to worry about, right? And sometimes people are trying to get you in debt for some reason or trying to pretend they're incompetently avoiding debt while actually aiming for some, but mostly you'll do all right if you just try for interactions to work out so that everyone's still even.

And if someone is useful to be entangled with and not, by temperament, a bad person to be indebted to, then you might seek that out on purpose. Because entanglements with family of good fortune are good for you, they'll lift your fortune too."

Nodnod. This sounds potentially more complicated than that but that's probably enough to go on for now. 

"You won't have to worry about that one very much if we're living in the woods ignoring polite society."

"That makes sense."

"Some things about being in debt - violence against someone indebted to you isn't counted against you. And if someone in your debt refuses a reasonable request that counts as more debt. So you want to - I said earlier, not that you shouldn't ask me questions, but that you didn't know anything about me. It's not very hard to get hurt, if you're indebted to someone and no one's backing you. So you should either know who you're dealing with or have backers. Or preferably both."

Nodnod.

He collapses in the grass, apparently satisfied there. 

"I suppose if I'm going to stay here I'll have to eat something. At some point."

"I suppose so." He rolls over, stands up, crosses the rest of the difference between them. The bird reappears in his hands out of apparent nothingness again. 

He offers her some raw meat.

Mrrgh.

" - fairies don't cook things?"

"Don't what?"

"Um, where I come from we cook meat over fires before we eat it."

"What's a fire?"

- ah.

"Um, when you heat up dry wood or leaves enough, they sort of - burst into this very hot orange and yellow - thing, cloud, or something - and it burns like that, for a while, very hot, and you can cook foods over it or use it to keep yourself warm in the winter or to give light when it's dark. Everyone uses fire, where I come from it's - I don't know how we'd go about trying to live without it."

"Huh. I wouldn't know where to start with making it but you can if you'd like, it sounds interesting."

"I could try. I haven't really been in a position to cook anything in a long time, but I did know how once. It's dangerous, you have to keep fire contained so it doesn't spread and light up a whole forest. And I don't know whether anything will light at this speed."

"In that case it might be best not to try it right now. Destroying a whole forest would be very unwise."

"I imagine so."

She sighs and accepts the raw meat. It tastes awful, but she supposes that she can endure it if it keeps her milk running.

When she eats it, things look different. Not the fairy circle; that appears to be exactly what it looked like before. It's everything else that looks different. Like there are obvious paths through the woods that weren't obvious before, and that do not, for the most part, lead where you might expect paths to lead; this one here spirals up a tree, this one buries itself in a row of hedges, this one wavers back and forth across the air and vanishes over the treetops. There are hundreds of them; they all spiral or waver or spin or descend to the edges of the circle. 

" - oh wow."

She is not sure whether she's made a mistake, but whatever she's done, she's probably stuck with it. She kind of wants to cry. 

(She doesn't. She's good at not crying just because everything is completely overwhelming.)

"Since you can't notice anything else I wouldn't have expect you to notice not being slowed down anymore."

"I just - see the paths now."

"Huh."

She wants to ask whether there are other things she's not seeing, but she'll learn that soon enough anyway, won't she.

"What about the baby, if she can't eat solid foods yet, is she fast?"

"There're other ways, that's just the fastest. If she's old enough to talk, I can tell her a story, sing her a song, something like that."

"She can't talk yet. She's only a few months old."

"Well then she's not a person yet and can't track her own debts at all but you should be able to take her anywhere you can go."

"Well, that's - convenient, I guess."

"It's really better when kids are late to talk, if they've got a court that'll look after them. It means they're smarter when they do, and don't make as many mistakes."

Nodnod. She is silently grateful for basically everything about Ingolfr right now, compared to every other toddler she's ever met.

"If any of the paths look particularly nice to you, we should settle down somewhere near here and I'm not set on anywhere in particular."

"I'm not entirely sure how I'd follow most of them."

"You.... walk on them. With your feet."

"They just don't look - like, that one over there goes into the sky."

"Yes? It's probably not a great place for us to live long-term, there wouldn't be a good place to put the babies down."

"I think maybe you should pick the path."

"Okay." He looks around for a few minutes, leaning back and forth, his hands shaking at his side as if caught in a wind, even though it's very still. Then he heads off down one of the ones that spirals up a tree.

She holds her sleeping babies close and checks whether it's possible to follow him.

It is. It's a bit dizzying if you look away from the path - the light bends oddly, the perspective on everything shifts abruptly -- but if you just look at the path ahead of you, it's nice and solid and your feet land on it normally, even when it turns steeply up the tree truck, even when it detours around enormous knots in the wood.

Terrifying, but not exactly the most terrifying part of all of this.

She keeps her eyes on the path and follows him up.

The knots in the wood get larger as they go up. The path neatly weaves around them, staying flat and even as long as you don't look at anything else. And then it opens up on a spacious little valley, made of wood instead of grass, well-lit and mossy and with enormous trees growing out of it in all directions. 

He is lying on some moss, looking up at the sky.

"Well. I guess this goes some way in explaining why nobody's very sure where fairyland is."

"Where fairyland is," he says, amused. 

"Well it's not like we know you're faster than we are. And everything that lives has to live somewhere. It's just - hard to imagine how places might be layered on top of each other or connected in different ways if you haven't seen it."

"Even if you couldn't see the paths I should think you'd be able to see this place. But maybe not. I hadn't given humans any thought before you turned in this direction."

"I've never seen a place like this before. For humans all the lands are pointing the same way, and all of them have rock or dirt underneath them except the sea."

He still looks puzzled, but after a moment he drops it. "What sorts of things will the babies need, should they have beds? Should they be fenced so they don't wander?"

"Beds and some fencing would be good, though the girl's too small to crawl and the boy's usually good about not wandering too far, recent history notwithstanding. I suppose it won't be night for a very long time, so maybe no use thinking about warm clothes or blankets. Food and water, obviously. A place to pee and a place to wash soiled clothes."

"More food?"

"... eventually? Humans have to eat two or three times a day, though I suppose I don't know whether I should be counting sleeps or sunsets, those have always been the same thing before."

"I have to eat ,,,twenty or thirty times a sunset, I guess.  If you do too that'd be workable, out here, since there aren't many people around. If you have to eat several times between sleep then we will have to write to my court for food because we'll eat the whole area out in not long at all."

"I'll wait and see when I get hungry, then."

"It wouldn't be a very big problem. I've heard humans are expensive to keep even if I don't know if that's particularly how, and they'll supply us."

"I see."

She is honestly still kind of confused about what he's getting out of this, if she's worth more than all of the food in a forest. Wanting slaves is only so much of an explanation, and surely she can't be that pretty.

She does not ask for clarification on this point.

He is contemplating how to transform this patch of moss into beds for babies, and has produced a dagger out of nowhere for this purpose. "We could bring rocks up and build a fence, probably. Or sticks. Or dirt, that might be easiest and most difficult for them to hurt themselves with."

"I can carry some up if you think it's all right to set them down somewhere while they're sleeping."

"It should be fine. They'd have a ways to wander to the edge, and even if they did wander right there I've jumped off, before, it's not very dangerous." He gestures at one of the places where the valley does not slope up into enormous tree but instead down.

Nodnod. "Might be more dangerous for them." But she sets them down and goes back to the path to get some dirt from the forest.

When she comes back he is not immediately present, but he comes back a few minutes later, descending from one of the great horizontal trees. "There's plenty to drink there," he says cheerfully, and sets off to get some dirt himself.

Oh good. She'll go that way now, so she doesn't forget which way it is, and come back for more dirt later.

The tree stops being horizontal and branches upwards, eventually, and has enormous leaves. Dew clings to the undersides of the leaves, in impossibly large droplets, some of them larger than her. 

There are no streams or rivers or anything so probably this is what he was referring to.

This is honestly about what she expected, if they're, like, tiny and on a tree now. 

She drinks until she's not thirsty anymore.

The walls are much improved by the time she gets back. He is unsure how high walls need to be to keep toddlers in but he thinks three times the toddler's height will probably do it.

Yep, that should do it. If he doesn't look like he's done, she'll contribute more dirt. She can carry a fair amount of it if she uses her cloak.

He doesn't talk while he's working. He bounces around a lot. It takes several more trips back down to the ground for dirt but eventually the babies are all fenced.

Oh good.

She sits down in a patch of moss to consider what else she should be doing. Ingolfr will probably wake up soon and relieve her of having to think of anything else herself. 

"If you have to send for food, will I owe the people at your court, or will I owe you more and you'll owe them?"

"If I ask that's on me. Of course, they'd want to know why, and they won't want me to let you dig yourself in that far, but you can tell a lot of stories, or tell a lot of people that one story, and we can probably stay on top of it."

Nodnod. She does, in fact, know a lot of stories. It's kind of surprising that they have limits on how far they're willing to let people be indebted to them, but good to know, probably. 

"Should I tell you another story? Before the children wake up? I'm still not clear on - precisely when or how much it's appropriate to offer things, but you've told me so much - "

"I'd like a story." He pats the ground next to him.

She sits down next to him and thinks of a story she has time for. No good telling Beowulf if you haven't got time to finish even a third of it. She could tell her own, but she's still a little overwhelmed and doesn't know what happens if it lands wrong.

"Does it matter whether it's a true story?"

"Do you mean you're not sure if the person who told it to you told it rightly? You can just say that you're telling it how it was told to you."

"In human lands people sometimes make up stories, not to lie, just to entertain, or to illustrate something. And sometimes people tell stories that many people thought were true, but that don't make sense with other things we know, so we can assume that one must be false. But sometimes we keep on telling them, either because we like them or because there was some truth in it somewhere that it wouldn't be good to forget. It's just that you seem so careful about lying, and I wouldn't want you to think something was definitely true when it wasn't."

"Huh. 

I wouldn't invent your own - entertaining lies - but repeating another story without mentioning some reasons to doubt it isn't on you, if you're clear about where you got it."

"All right."

So she tells him about Persephone, and how she was stolen away to the underworld, and ate six pomegranate seeds there, and ended up going between the realm of Hades and the realm of her of her mother, every year, as near as she can remember to how it was told to her by another poet years ago.

He seems delighted with this.

Well, that's all right then. She has lots of classic poems and twenty-six years of earth life to hack up into new stories, she's not very worried about running out of material. Although possibly she should think a little bit about whether she'll be causing problems for herself if she gives other people the ability to tell most of her best ones to others before she does, if she's going to bet very much of her safety on this.

Kids still not awake?

She checks.

Ingolfr is sitting up and silently blinking at the dirt walls of his room. 

"Do you want to come out and look around?"

He nods. She opens the pen's makeshift door and lets him out. Ragna's awake, too, so Catherine sits down to nurse her. 

"Don't wander far. I can show you where there's water. Let me know if you're hungry."

He nods solemnly and looks around.

He wanders off up a tree branch.

Well.

She might get bored, eventually, with only one person besides her children to talk to or perform for, but it's still a nicer cage than the last one. Probably eventually she'll have to concern herself with gathering enough food for herself and her children, which will at least solve the problem of being unsure what to do with herself. She misses Frey and Vigdis very much, even when she tells herself she would have lost them shortly anyway. 

She sings to her baby and silently prays and watches Ingolfr as he wanders up and down the valley.

He eventually wanders back down the tree branch, still apparently in an excellent mood. 

She's kind of confused about why he's so happy, but it's probably not, like, a problem?

Eventually she checks whether she feels like she's growing hungrier at about the same rate as before.

She seems about as hungry as she'd expect to be.

Well.

"So I think that we're actually going to need to eat two or three times between each sleep, not each sunset."

"Well. Okay. That's going to be complicated but we'll probably come up with something. Do you know what kinds of things you can eat in the woods -"

"Nuts, fruits, blackberries, maybe other berries but I'm not sure I can tell which ones are poisonous, wild carrots, onions, meat, honey if we're very lucky and can get it without being stung by giant bees..."

"Insects?"

She makes a face. "Not sure. If we're desperate I can try them."

"There're probably nuts and seeds and berries around somewhere. - it's important to find them when you're small, otherwise we'll go through everything in the area in no time at all."

Nodnodnod.

"With a bit of practice you can see which paths are small ones, and how small. I don't know how to describe it, just go through a couple and you'll get a sense for it." He's frowning now. "You look - unhappy."

"It would just be - upsetting, to have come here to escape the Emperor and then to end up starving because there isn't enough food."

He steps forwards and pulls her into his arms, somewhat like he knows that people hug but not how they do it exactly. "It'll be all right. It might mean we have to travel a lot and spend a lot of time scavenging and lean on my court more than I'd like to, but forests have lots of food, really, and not many people with a claim to it, not out here."

Nodnodnod.

She's not sure anybody older than six has given her a proper hug since she was a child, so she's actually just going to cling for a bit.

What a good human. 

What a mess it's going to be to feed her. 

Eventually she gets ahold of herself and stops clinging.

"I don't really know whether it's customary to thank people for things, here. But... thank you."

"I wonder if humans have - verbal debt-acknowledgements - since they can't track it otherwise."

"Maybe so. I never thought of it that way before, but I suppose it makes sense."

He seems to consider this for a second, then shake himself. "Well, I'm going to go out looking for food."

"OK. I think I'm going to get some more water and then sleep pretty soon. If that's OK."

"Sounds good."

She takes her son to get some water, then tucks him in to his little moss bed underneath her cloak and tells him a story. She nurses Ragna down to sleep again, and then she closes the door to their little dirt room.

When she's done, she settles down in the moss a ways away and sleeps.

He goes looking for food. It's hard. There's a reason people don't usually bother. Actually he's not entirely sure that they ever bother, he can't think of any stories in which someone had a human and no other help. But then, most people are lazy, aren't they?

There's a blackberry bush with no good paths at it and another one with an annoying, circuitous path that he has to run over and over again to bring the berries back, and they're not even quite ripe, but they're probably still fine? He doesn't know much about human food needs. 

He's out when she wakes up but six blackberries, dented and red and taller than her, are there.

Well. That's - either a lot of food or none of it, she's not sure whether you can eat blackberries when they're red. She'll try eating them anyway.

They taste sour, but not, like, poisonous, though who knows if they'd taste poisonous.

...she'll just grimace a little and eat them, she's never heard of anybody dying of eating underripe blackberries.

He is back a while later soaking wet with a single sunflower seed. "Are the berries all right? There's no point in waiting until they change colors, it'll be a hundred years."

"I think I can eat them. If I get sick and throw up then, uh, we'll know I was wrong. But I don't think anything worse than that will happen."

"Okay." He drops the sunflower seed. "There's more where that came from but they're a pain to get to."

"If you show me where then I can go myself. Not sure how much I can carry back, but I suppose I can always eat it there."

She checks on her children and feeds them. She saves the sunflower seed for for Ingolfr, on the grounds that she is probably better at stomaching sour foods than he is.

"I can show you in a bit." First he naps.

Entirely reasonable. 

She watches her toddler and paces around the valley a little and imagines stories just for herself.

And eventually he is up and can show her an annoying and intricate series of paths down a tree and across a root (this can only possibly cover like two inches of ground, but it's steep and requires climbing and takes the better part of an hour) and across a small stream and a meadow to some sunflowers, which you can access while tiny if you go up this tree and take a path from there. 

Oh good. This should last them for quite some time, then. 

He dawdles by the stream skipping rocks and seeming pleased with himself.

"Probably should try to take it back for the kids, actually, I don't think they can make the climb."

She tests whether she can carry whole giant sunflower seeds at this size or whether that's, like, a fairy thing.

Extremely effortful but not impossible; they're bulky but don't really feel all that heavy.

Huh.

Maybe she'll, like, try breaking one in half and seeing if she can make the trip with that much.

When he sees her on her way, he picks up the other half and follows. It's not a difficult trip except the climbing-over-a-root bit, which is made much easier by having both of them.

Oh good. Then she can occupy herself for quite some time with exploring various paths and watching her children play and occasionally telling stories, and will probably not run into any problems feeding herself in the immediate future.

This won't really solve the problem for very long but he didn't get into this situation by thinking about long-term plans in the first place, did he. 

He is unsure what things humans think are private, or if they have the concept, but he waits until the children are both sleeping to pull her into his arms and give her a kiss.

- she doesn't try to free herself, she stopped having that reaction a long time ago, but she tenses up and freezes.

"-mm?"

It's not like she hasn't already accepted that this is probably one of the costs of living here. It's not like she hasn't let it happen a hundred times before. It's not like she even actually objects, she came here willingly and she knew what would happen, on this front, and this is how these things work.

It's just been so nice, forgetting that she has to keep doing this. And it's really kind of pathetic, to fall apart about it, but she wasn't expecting it at this specific second and hasn't had time to calm herself down about it.

She tries not to cry, and a moment later starts crying anyway.

- he checks worriedly to make sure he did not accidentally dislocate her arm or something. There aren't any signs of this but he doesn't know what human injuries look like. So he carefully releases her and sits there, at a bit of a loss. 

She sits and presses a hand to her mouth to quiet herself and manages to choke out a "sorry".

"Did I hurt you?"

Headshake. But she's crying a little harder now.

This is so concerning. He looks around for other plausible sources of injury and doesn't see any and that's...kind of the limits of his interpersonal problem-solving ability, actually? 

He should probably just...do something else? But something interruptible if she wants to explain herself?

He pulls out his knife and starts whittling a stick into a flute. Probably she'll explain later if she wants to.

That's - honestly pretty bizarre, but it's not really alarming, and in a minute or so she's calmed down a little.

"Sorry," she says, again, because she actually has no idea what else to say, she's really confused about what just happened.

So is he! 

"...here people usually do that if they're hurt. Or very upset."

Nodnod.

Well, she can be mysterious if she wants to. 

He carves, sullenly.

This is worrying. He looks upset. It is really important to her that he not be upset with her. 

"But I didn't mean - I understood that coming here probably meant I'd have to - "

She gestures vaguely and breaks off, frustrated with herself for not having all of her words back yet.

"I thought I hurt you."

"It's - important to you to not - ?"

"If I disliked you so much that I wanted you to get hurt then I would have just not stolen you in the first place!"

" - that is not how it was the last time someone stole me."

"Well, I guess everyone's different," he says after quite a long time because he can't think of anything else to say and can't explain why he's upset.

"I didn't - I don't mean to be ungrateful, if you tell me what you want me to do I can do it - "

"I'm confused about something and I think it's a human thing but I don't - know what exactly - 

Maybe you could just say that again in different words?"

"...I, uh, you've done a lot for me, and I appreciate it, and - I understand that part of the cost of that is probably - sleeping with you - and - and I'm not trying to get out of it, just, I hadn't - hadn't been focusing on how to not be upset about it, in that moment, and if I have some time I think I can not cry - except I'm really confused about - what you actually want, here, if it's also important to you not to hurt me - "

"I'm worried that you're ....double-counting things, or something?"

"You mean, like, because you're keeping track of debt, I shouldn't be grateful?"

This is a weird sticking point because it's not even actually relevant to the thought process, she doesn't have the right to refuse, but now she has something extra to be sad about.

"Maybe? Like, it seems like you think you did something bad by...having feelings? When you should have been having different ones?"

" - I just don't want you to think that I'm - I'm not acting like this because I'm trying to get out of something, I can do things even if they hurt me - "

"Okay."

She feels like she has not at all adequately explained herself, but she's not really sure what else to say.

Well he's not really helping.

" - do you want me to leave you alone right now, or - "

"Why? I'm not the one who's upset," he says, very obviously upset.

"I'm worried there's something I haven't explained right, I'm just - not really sure what it is - "

"You're, uh, unhappy, about being stolen by people who want you, because - I guess because it's a pretty horrible thing to have happen to you - and if you don't have time to remind yourself that you think you should feel appreciative then you feel scared and sad instead, but it speaks poorly of you in some odd human way that you would have these feelings so you'll be sad if reminded?"

"I - maybe? I don't - it's not that I think I can't be upset about it, I just - I chose this, I could have gone back, before I'd said very much to you and eaten your food, and I didn't, so - it makes sense that I have to -

" - I didn't expect you to stop, and you did, and I don't know why, and I'm worried I - I wasn't trying to communicate anything, with the crying, I just, I was scared and it happened - "

" - is there a human thing where, like, you're not supposed to acknowledge people are crying and you're just supposed to act like they're not, or it's rude?"

"I mean - I guess there are circumstances like that in specific situations, sometimes, but that's not what I - I don't understand why you care, beyond just being annoyed about it - "

" - well, if you were telling a story, and I started crying like that, would you - I don't know, have emotions about that?"

" - well yes, obviously, but stories are - if the audience panics in the middle of one it means I've done it wrong, I don't tell them just for myself."

"That seems even more true of kissing, really."

"That hasn't been my experience."

"Oh. Well, uh, maybe that's the whole confusion. As far as I know kissing is a two person activity. If you didn't want to kiss another person you could kiss a tree, or a rock, or your reflection, or a human or something."

"Uh, I mean a human who is slowed and being still, not a human who'd actually notice."

"Most human men want to kiss people but they don't, um, usually care if the people they kiss are - if this is something that makes them happy."

"Well I guess it makes sense that you wouldn't expect anyone to care about that then."

She hugs herself and nods.

"I don't actually know anything about how many people are like that but as far as I know all of the men I have kissed wanted the people they were kissing to be having fun, so it'd be surprising if it were most of them."

(She makes a face for half a second, and then reminds herself of everything the Scandinavians do, and then decides that, you know what, fairy, fairy who doesn't want to hurt her, this is not the moment to decide to be judgmental about other people's sexual norms, especially given that she clearly doesn't even understand the most basic aspects of them anyway.)

(Although you would expect it to be different if you were kissing men, since, well, men.)

"Sorry. I'm - not really good at that."

"Well, that's okay."

She does not really look like she believes this.

"If I cared a lot about it I guess I could've asked before I stole you? But that wouldn't make it your fault I didn't."

She doesn't look very cheered by this, but she nods.

It occurs to her to worry that he might not want to help her anymore. That's one kind of not caring, after all, a willingness to immediately cut your losses when you discover them. But she wouldn't know what question to ask about that even if she felt safe asking questions right now.

"Do you feel this way about everything or is it specific about kissing?"

"I don't think I usually panic about things that aren't about - sex or violence or someone trying to hurt or take away the children."

"Oh. Well, that's all right, then."

"Okay."

He pauses for another moment and then rolls over and apparently takes a nap.

Well, she feels terrible now and has absolutely no sense of how upset he is about any of what just happened. And she kind of wants a hug, but there isn't anyone else to get one from.

She decides to take a walk. Maybe she'll find some more dew to drink. Maybe one or both of them will be less upset when she comes back.

He is still asleep when she comes back.

Okay, well, fine. 

She'll just go to sleep a ways away, then. She has to do that at some point anyway.

He wakes up while she's sleeping and doesn't immediately remember why he feels useless and confused and then remembers. 

He finishes the flute and leaves it in the childbox for the children to play with and then goes off and bathes and sunbathes and comes back and lies down and watches her sleep.

Eventually she wakes up. She smiles contentedly, stretches a little, opens her eyes, sees him, and then remembers.

She stops smiling.

"Hi?"

"Hi.

I did that too."

"Did what?"

"Woke up and then -" he gestures glumly. "Do you want a hug?"

"Yes. Please."

Hug. Very much. 

Possibly excessively clingy hug.

"Didn't mean to make you sad."

"I just - I really liked the way you trusted me. I know you thought you shouldn't but it felt like you did."

"I did," she says, quietly. "I - don't know whether that's a terrible idea or not, but - you're nice. And you haven't hurt us even though you could."

"I don't know if it's a terrible idea either but I don't want you to stop."

Cling.

"I don't want you to - be disappointed, and leave - "

"Well, yeah, because then you'd probably die. I - didn't give my word because that's a really stupid thing to do even when you have a pretty good reason but I'm not planning on leaving even if I get mad, or bored, or - anything."

Nodnod.

"Thank you."

"I think I wish you had not been stolen by someone terrible so you did not expect being stolen to be terrible but - I would've had to be a lot crueler, to steal you, if you hadn't wanted to come."

"I think it's usually terrible, when humans steal each other. Maybe not usually as terrible as it was for me. Or maybe it's usually worse, at least I had - good food, and fine clothes, and a palace to live in. Though I don't for a moment regret trading it for underripe blackberries."

"It sounds pretty bad."

"I thought so."

"Do you think it's because of that that you don't like kissing or wouldn't you anyway?"

"I don't know.

" - may I tell you a story?"

"Yes."

So she tells him her story again, but with different pieces focused on, pieces that hurt too much and which were therefore elided in the first telling.

She tells him how she was raised to be virtuous, and good, and chaste, and to not let anybody kiss her or do anything more than kiss her until she was safely married to whoever her parents chose for her. And she meant to, she did, she was never once tempted to break this rule. But then she was captured. She told herself that if they'd marry her to someone then she would be able to stand it, she could live, bear her cross and submit to her husband and win him to goodness by her own good example. But they didn't marry her to anyone. She was given to the Emperor the spring she turned sixteen.

She'd been told that sex would hurt. She hadn't been told how much. She begged the Emperor to stop, the first few times, before collapsing into incoherent sobs. Never mattered, of course. Eventually she stopped screaming and learned to lie still. It still hurt, but it was over faster. 

She learned poetry. Epics, histories, Greek and Norse and Christian stories, collecting dozens of stories of heroes who were probably terrible, but might be less terrible than the monsters they saved their lovers from. She used to wish that someone would come and rescue her, and maybe they wouldn't be good, but maybe they would be better. 

And no one came, and no one came, and no one came, and she thought that no one would ever come.

And then she found a fairy ring. And there was a fairy in it, and he was kind to her, if maybe a little concerning and confused on some of the finer points of being human. And she wasn't very sure what she was supposed to do, really, but she had this hope, however ill-founded, that he might be less terrible than everything behind her. She knew, of course, the way girls pay for things in stories, but it would be better for her children, and she hadn't very much virtue left to lose, and it was so hard to care about being hurt when the hurt always came no matter what she did. So she decided she would go, even given the likely cost. And he was a much better person to belong to than the last one, or at least seemed to be, and for a while everything was good. 

And then one day he kissed her, and all she could think of was every time she'd been touched before, and everything that had come with it, and she panicked, and this upset him, and then she spent the better part of a day worrying that he wouldn't like her or help her or be kind to her ever again. And she doesn't really know what to do about any part of this situation, but she would like not that, please.

"Oh. 

Sex is not supposed to hurt.  I didn't think I was asking to hurt you. 's supposed to be nice and maybe a little bit frightening, like jumping off a treetop together. And you're not supposed to lie still. 

I guess I don't know anything about humans but that seems like a very terrible thing about humans, if that's how it is for them."

"I don't think for everyone. Or maybe usually only a little, after the first time. Think I'm just very unlucky."

Nod. 

"Well. If we stop getting along some sunsets from now or something and you still need a minder I can introduce you to someone who doesn't like sex with girls. Seems like it'd be less complicated than - trying to ask people how that story makes them feel. I think."

Nodnod.

"But I'm not - I liked you before, right? I still like you. I don't know if I'll like you in several sunsets because that's a long time not because it's - hard to like someone if you're not having sex with them. Or something."

"Okay.

" - do you still wanna hold me, it turns out being held is nice. When it's not mostly something else."

"Yeah." He would like to lie down on this moss pressed against her, warm and slightly less confused and sad.

That sounds really really good. She'll just keep clinging for a while, then. At least until she remembers that her children are probably awake now and she has parental responsibilities of some kind.

He bounds off to explore in a much better mood.

Oh good. She's in a much better mood for the rest of the day, too.

(Ingolfr plays with the flute, at some point. He can make it make noise, but can't move his fingers well enough to make different notes in succession.)

"I have a brother who learned the flute before he could talk, and got quite good at it, and when he could talk they had to take it away because he'd gotten good enough people'd get indebted listening."

"Aww! Your poor brother."

"Maybe you could tell him stories and he could play for you. Once you feel sure you can talk to people, I mean."

"I hope I get to tell stories to lots of people again. It was the only really good thing about living with the Emperor. I don't know how long it'll take me to learn to talk right, though, I've mostly been - not bothering to worry about it too much, with you."

"I could point out everything you do wrong but it'd probably be annoying. I think it takes people a while. Children don't usually talk to strangers until they're grown five times over, give or take."

"You could point out everything I do wrong sometimes, and if it got tiring I could ask you to stop for a while? Grown five times over is - I don't know that humans even live that long."

"Hmm?"

"Well, I mean, if you count us as grown at sixteen then that's - " she counts again, to herself " - eighty, right, and most people don't live that long."

" - what happens to them?"

"They die?"

"Right but like - how, of what?"

"Of being old. Of sickness, I guess, people get sicker when they get older, and then they die."

"Well that's kind of awful."

"That's - how things are. For people who aren't fairies."

"You're slow and you die. It's like - doubly unfair."

"I guess. - I don't know how fast it'll happen, here. It seems like it's probably happening on the same schedule that makes me get hungry, but I don't know that it is, it could be lots and lots of season cycles."

"It's stupid."

"Well. Sorry?"

Unhappy shrug.

"I don't think I really thought very much about what was going to happen to us after we came here. Just - hoped that it would be better than before."

"I knew that mostly when people take humans they die but I thought that probably that was - negligence. Not just that humans die no matter what you do with them."

"There are stories about humans becoming fairies and fairies becoming human. I don't know whether they're - reputable, at all, but I've heard some."

"I haven't heard stories like that and I can't think how it'd be possible but I don't know much about magic. I don't - There'd be people at my court who'd know for sure."

Nod. "I don't know whether I can talk to other fairies without making a mess, but..."

"Being safe when someone's trying to trip you up is probably hard if you don't know which things you shouldn't say, but being safe when they're not trying to trip you up isn't very hard. Probably we could just -" he glances up at the sky. "We could practice until it's nearly sunset and then travel then. I don't know where there's food along the route back to my court and I wouldn't want to scout for it at night."

Nod. "Of the children left behind, one of them is in the town near here - he'll want to come, eventually, if he can, I think - and two of them are in the next kingdom over. Just - so you know where things are."

"I don't really know where the delineations between human kingdoms are but I expect we can figure it out. How old is the kid who is near here, can he come on his own if you leave him a map..."

"Five. I'm - not really sure. Maybe."

"You could also leave someone else a map, or a map and a note, and money. Humans do things for money, right?"

"Humans do things for money, yes. Kidnapping princes is probably worth a lot of money, but yes."

"Well I don't know how much money we have but we could try that if he can't make it himself."

"It's very dangerous if you get caught, is why it would be so much. And I don't particularly want to get anyone else killed."

"Hmm. 

We can't move him ourselves, even if we're willing to go slow enough we don't hurt him. We can't interact with slow people, or with most things they make."

Nod.

"I can think of one person who would definitely help us and succeed at it, if it meant getting to meet a fairy, though I don't have any idea whether she'd want to stay. But she's in Norway."

"And Norway is - you know, we could just draw a map -"

He does this, in the dust. He knows the coastlines south of here quite well, and west of here; east they get vaguer, and north there's not much. 

She draws lines between the kingdoms. "This one is Norway. My two oldest children and niece will be here, in Akershus."

"Well, that's not too bad." He squints. "We could be there before sunset but probably not there, and back here for the baby, and down to my court, before sunset."

Nod.

"Nothing horrible will happen to them in the next two sunsets. We could come back for them when we know more."

"And once we've found somewhere with enough food to support more people, yeah."

Nod.

"I'd like to have something to call you. - not the name your parents gave you as a baby."