"Well that's the thing to do with it, I guess."

"Well, there are lots of fun things to do with it, we've just got to get this done first."

"...thank you for the visit. You should go now, though."

"But I'm not gonna be able to get them into the palace again."

"It was very clever but I think we're better off not pushing our luck."

"I can go invisible," Amoli says, doing that; it includes her clothes. "And inaudible but then I don't think I'd be a very good guest, really."

"Niiice."

"I just - I don't think it's wise to go over the emperor's head."

She turns visible again. "He prohibits you guests?"

" - no, not under all circumstances." Ugh, ugh, ugh, the longer this goes on - she's probably already passed the point where this isn't going to in any way obviously affect diplomatic ties with these people. Lovely.

"I don't want to cause you any trouble. Sofia thought I should perhaps talk to you because my husband beat me and when we made contact I ran away with our children to a Vanda Nossëo planet."

"...I see."

"We had four. Our oldest is twelve now. She wants to study animals in the ocean when she's all grown up. This summer she went on a trip through the jungle to track a herd of migratory dolphins."

"Uh. She sounds very talented."

"You're really bad at this whole escaping thing."

" - even if we assumed, for the sake of argument, that these people could get you and me and Ragna and Ingolfr and Frey and Tyr and Sigrun somewhere else without the emperor preventing it, one, we would then have to accept the consequences of kidnapping three of the emperor's heirs, which is likely to lead to countless diplomatic complications that will harm far more than just our family. And two, I do not, actually, believe that Tyr has any desire to forfeit his claim to a jarldom, and I doubt we can prevent him from returning here for it. I have no idea what Ingolfr or Frey will choose when they're old enough to have the capacity for meaningful choices. I understand that you wish for this to be simple, and if you want to go yourself then godspeed, Vigdis, but forgive me for having to think about it."

"There's no hurry. I can visit again next week, if you'd like." She will likely have this conversation two hundred more times in the meantime.

"No hurry unless he finds out you contacted the wizards and murders you for it, anyway. I guess the wizards could bring you back but I hear getting murdered sucks."

"You're welcome to leave, Vigdis."

"You're being really - selfish, that's what you are. And dumb. And you don't even care about fixing anything if it means you have to give up one single thing you want."

"...well that sure is an interesting read of refusing to kidnap the emperor's children."

"So - there are a lot of worlds, right? And there are - a lot of men like him, and a lot of women like you. And something I think about - all the time, it's what I do - is which ones should stay. Lots of them do. I don't think I know any who told me later 'I'm glad I did, it was the right call', but maybe they wouldn't need to say it. There are billions of them. You could talk with them, instead of with me, if you'd like."

"No, there are no men like the emperor," she says, laughing. "And you must know a truly fascinating selection of women if you believe that any one of them would, with the benefit of hindsight, choose to abandon some number of children and to perhaps irreversibly poison relations between two incredibly powerful nations for the sake of her own personal relief."

"It is remarkable. I think it shakes out like that because people know all the things about staying, and almost none of the things about leaving, and so all of the information they'll learn in the future is going to land on one side of the scale."

"Obviously there are better circumstances one could be in! I simply doubt that there is any personal circumstance so glorious that it's worth abandoning a child for, or worth triggering - I suppose he won't go to war, not with you. But the emperor will forever see you as the power that stole his children from him, and he does not forgive easily. The people of Scandinavia do not forgive easily."