"That's sweet."

"I liked seeing all the prettiest parts of the world again."

"It's amazing how many of them there are!"

He laughs. "It's a big world."

"I think I'm starting to get the idea...it's almost sad, how many people never get to see more than the tiny piece of it where they live. If things had been different I'd never have known anything but forest."

He nods. "Yes... it would be nice if more people could see the world like that."

"Yeah.

I'm really glad the Valley lets me in." She shivers slightly. That is not the biggest reason she is glad the Valley let her in.

"So am I."

"Yeah. It's good that you don't have to be alone...at least for the next handful of decades," she sighs. "I'm not immortal. But something's better than nothing."

"The valley made me immortal; I certainly didn't start that way. It might do the same for you," he says.

"Maybe! But it didn't turn me into a dragonperson, so who knows."

He laughs.

"It'd be nice, anyway," she says. "I found some words in these books I don't know, could you explain them to me if I tell you what they are?"

Shrug. "I don't see why not."

She lists a modest number of words, including a handful of noble titles, some expensive objects people in forest villages would have no reason to have heard of, a handful of euphemisms (for bastardry, homosexuality, and promiscuity, not that she knows this), and "concubine."

"Asking what the weather was like when someone was born is a coy way of suggesting they're a bastard," he says. "Calling a woman a honeybee means she sleeps with other women. Comparing a woman to a bridge means she sleeps with men, but lots of them. A concubine might mean a rich man's mistress or a slave he keeps for sex, depending when and where the story takes place."

"...Are those things that happen a lot?"

"...Which?"

"...Well, until just now I didn't know that women sleeping with other women was a thing--how would that even work? I don't--I'm not married, I've never--I have only the vaguest idea of what sex is supposed to entail, but it involves a man putting his thing in a woman's thing, that much I know..."

...he giggles.

"I can suggest some other books you could read if you wanted to have a better idea of how that all works," he offers.

"Okay. And what's a mistress?"

"When a man is married to one woman and secretly sleeping with another woman, the second one is his mistress."

"Oh. Huh. I think that happened once, with the smith and the miller's sister. People thought it was happening, anyway, dunno if it actually was. They called it an affair."

"Yes, that too."

"Most of what I know about sex is that it's supposed to be what a husband and wife do but sometimes people do it even when they're not married, I didn't know it happened a lot."