He smiles. "She is."

"I've noticed," she says, smiling back. "Hence the gloating."

He laughs, a little. "- So apart from gloating. What do you mean to do now you're alive again?"

"I believe somebody floated the idea of Bella hiring me as imperial personnel officer. Sounds like a nice job."

"Quite possibly. There are a lot of personnel, and it's been handled per department, so far."

"Reasonable. But not the most efficient it could possibly be. I like efficiency," she says.

He nods. "Are you liable to carry on being human? That would make you the only one working for the Coven in any significant capacity."

"I don't have any plans to change my species anytime soon."

"How much of a history lesson have you gotten so far?" he wonders, looking back out the window. They're in Norway right now; it shows a forest.

"Kind of a patchy one," she says.

"In 2005, when Elspeth was very, very young, the Volturi caught me. It was standard procedure, at the time, for Chelsea, or Addy copying her power, to destroy all the magically unprotected relationships of a captured witch. So that in the event we ran away, we'd be less likely to find old covenmates, and spread the story. Chelsea couldn't affect mate bonds. That was it."

Well, that's... upsetting.

"Bella's immune. Of course. And we've had time to - rebuild, since."

"That's good," she says.

"Yes. It is a rebuilding, though, not a - restoration. The initial instinctive things - are gone. For Elspeth too, for that matter. She could remove artificial add-ons but not replace things taken."

"It's handy that Bella killed Chelsea already," she says. "Saves me the trouble."

"Yes. She was just - incandescently furious."

Personally, she doesn't run to the incandescent. She is very room-temperature about it. But Chelsea is an intolerable threat and needs to be erased as thoroughly as possible. So it's nice that Bella took care of that for her. She is a good empress and can have a cookie.

"She doesn't eat cookies, anymore," Edward says, smiling slightly.

"A metaphorical cookie. A bronze cookie on a plaque to hang on her wall."

Edward glances at the wall. "I don't think it would improve the decor, much. Perhaps she'd disagree."