"Fine. You want an escort up to Himring or you want me to tell him from here?"

"Elspeth and the baby need to sleep. And I do want to talk to him in person, or expect he'll want to talk to Elspeth, anyway. I have some conditions on his present."

"...careful, okay?"

"Trust me, I have a very good sense of what your brother is like."

Having drained this deer of all its blood, Elspeth is now very sleepy. Yawn.

You're safe here, ah, Elspeth, was it? No wars starting overnight or anything.

It's Elspeth, she agrees. That's good.

And she flops on the ground and sleeps.

You sure -

...that I don't want everyone in the city murdered? Yeah. It'd be satisfying but she'd be upset and she's super powerful and also I get why she'd be upset, it's not like most of them could have done anything. Sweet of you, though.

Wish I'd found out sooner.

Would've been nice. It's okay.

And they spend the night talking through what she missed, and singing, and worrying about the fatherless baby.

Elspeth wakes up early in the morning.

We're getting escorted off to talk to the King, that okay?

Yeah.

Need more deer or anything?

I don't really need an entire deer every time. I should have something at some point today but it doesn't matter exactly when. I could just eat some of the deer now.

That'd probably be most convenient. 

So Elspeth eats some raw deer, and then follows where the Elves lead.

The Elves lead north, through some populated valleys, across a river, and then the terrain gets drier and sparser and hillier and there's a foreboding fortress on the horizon.

This whole place is so low-tech. It's weird. She isn't sure she likes these people enough to unpack any memories of how to make anything they don't have. In her own right she doesn't know the engineering for anything much.

Yeah, it might help against the Enemy and that'd be really good but I wouldn't expect the King to stop at that. 

Elspeth's a terrible repository for secrets but she doesn't have to sift through Aro's payload for inventors and physicists and scholars he ate once, executed long ago. So she doesn't. She thinks about swords with her sword.

And she tries to be totally calm about this and assume that the King's too careful to just seize Lomion and then laugh at the idea she meant to negotiate with him.

And they approach the foreboding fortress.

Do you want me to hold him?