"I hope I have not slowed you down by presenting something unfamiliar that needs investigation right in the path you were hoping to traverse?"

"Our travel speed is mostly set by the wagons and the children, so you're all right there. I think I could have gone the whole way in a month, travelling with the right supplies and the right people, but then I'd just have gotten killed on the other side, so -"

"Hostility in both directions? Why?"

"I see." And sense understatement. "Is your plan to meet the hostility with more of the same given strength in numbers when you finish crossing...?"

"Yes." That's going to sound bad. There's no way to make it sound better without giving away too much. For some reason he's more uneasy with being thought a violent troublemaker by this stranger than with accidentally sharing critical information, but that's a ridiculous impulse. He ends up just blinking at her sheepishly.

"All hope for diplomacy is lost? Your options are be slaughtered at one end or the other or starve here or meet your chosen neighbors with drawn blades?"

"You sound like my mother," he says. "She turned back. The Valar - they won't kill her. They'll forgive everyone who sincerely repents, probably."

"Will you tell me what there is to repent of...?"

"We killed a lot of people," he says flatly. "It was an accident and we didn't intend it to happen and we thought we were defending ourselves and that doesn't actually matter, because they're dead."

"The children you mentioned surely did nothing of the kind?"

"Their sentence was on us and our bloodlines, for all the rest of time."

"We killed people."

"Your children did not, if they are any sort of child I have ever heard of. If my speech is failing me and by 'child' you mean some sort of toothy monster by all means correct me!"

"Well. In the absence of an objective and undoubtable source of context on the circumstances of your departure I can have few absolute opinions, but one of those I can have is that children ought not to be held responsible for the behavior of their parents."

"What a mess," she says, shaking her head.

"You don't say. My father knows the name of every person, on all sides, who has died since it started, and he says them to himself over and over, under his breath. I don't think it's healthy but on the other hand - blaming yourself for things is still a way of feeling like you're in control of them, you know?"

"Not a coping mechanism I have chosen to employ, but perhaps I have less to cope with."

"Right," he says, "what brings you here?"

"I am not sure. It is possible that the artifice which sends people between realms has broken, and that is why I am here, alone, instead of on Midgard, with my companion; it is also possible that my mother had a rare fit of cowardice and decided to have me killed in this oblique way under the pretense of sending me away while she decided what to do next."

"I don't think it very likely. If she wanted me dead it'd be more likely that I would, in fact, be dead, and would have been able to see this coming at the point of a spear. But it crossed my mind, because it is rather unheard of for the Bifrost to break. Perhaps some third thing I have not thought of occurred."