"I found her before anyone else. She was in Fairyland for a few weeks before we both got captured and tortured and I think she's probably dead now. I have lost track, certainly more than sixty and probably less than a hundred."

"… Years?"

"Yes."

"… I'm eighteen. And, wait, if Fairyland's infinite it's presumably not a planet, so it's not orbiting a sun – how do you have years, or is this just a plain speak thing?"

"When there is a consistent seasonal cycle, that's how long it takes. Not everywhere has a consistent seasonal cycle but places that do have that duration of one."

"Do you have a day cycle? Because I don't think there's necessarily a guarantee that the years thing matches up."

"Not everywhere has a consistent day cycle. Places that do all take the same amount of time."

"I don't actually know what fraction of a day I've been here for so far, so I don't know if that matches up, but a year is– 321 days? Excluding leap years, which I guess you probably don't have?"

"That's not the day/year ratio I remember, but I could have it wrong, I do think it was thereabouts."

He nods and keeps running– then it occurs to him to ask, "Do you know what I mean when I nod? I don't know if that counts as sign language or whatever."

"Yes, I know what you mean when you nod."

"Do you get it for grunting and nonword things, like 'mmhm'?"

"Not quite as clearly, necessarily, but yes."

"Do you hear it as a word or just a sound with a weird meaning attached? I mean, I'm assuming there's a distinction for you?"

"There... isn't really? I'm paying attention almost entirely to meanings when you speak, not how you're underlying them."

"Oh, right," he says. "I pay attention to the meanings but there's a difference between them. For me. Uh. How much of a name is needed for a claim?"

"Whole thing for a fairy, a syllable for a mortal."

"… Does my surname count as part of my name? Surname as in, family name thing – I didn't tell you it."

"Probably, but I don't know in specific."

He nods and keeps running.

How long until they're at the river?

Here it is!

He jumps over it, clearing it with relative ease, and then continues running on the other side.

And then soon enough they are at a fairly anonymous patch of trees, one of which is fairly climbable. "Up here," she says, "there's a hollow bit in the branches where I can put a gate, you can hide in the tree and check the gate now and then."

He's fairly good at climbing, so he manages to scale the tree quite easily, and then he takes some deep breaths because while he's good at running that was still– quite a lot of running.

He also recreates the diagram from before, in case she needs it again.

She does glance at it, and then she -

"That's weird."