"I hope they like it here."

"Yeah."

Hug?

Yeah. Hugs sound good.

...kiss?

...yeah, okay.

A few days later Rána's father, satisfied for the moment with the new set of data he's extracted for his research, decides that he wants to teach her and her son Quenya to see how they both learn it.

Okay! This sounds like a great use of time.

He agrees! There's a toddler-proofed area of his house from when he had toddlers, quite recently; he sits on its floor and alternates his attention between her and her son, delighted when they get things right and fascinated when they get them wrong. He's a good teacher.

She is delighted to learn from him. And it's a lot, learning an entire language; it helps her feel like she isn't wasting time. Some days she almost isn't sad to be stuck here.

Rána seems sad to be stuck here, or at least a fair bit mopier than he is out in the wild. He takes her out on walks at night with a fairy light. He knows their territory by heart and she's getting there. He makes a little calendar counting off the days until daylight. There are hundreds of little dots on it. 

People ask her to tell them more stories.

"Maybe we could work on a translation into Quenya together."

"All right!"

Then she can help translate her stories into Quenya! She enjoys this a lot. She doesn't stop looking forward to figuring out how to see her other children and her niece again, or to traveling the world with Rána someday, or to not having to worry what anybody's plotting or thinking about her, but she thinks she will maybe not regret having spent this much time here, once the sun rises. 

And one day someone comes by looking for Rána, and gets waved away in annoyance by Rána's father - "we're doing important work here, go bother someone else" and lingers.

        "There's a diplomatic party passing through the area and it's somewhat urgent we figure out where he is."

"Probably wandering the border, right, that's where he usually is?"

      "We checked that, we checked Sunflower's place -"

"I don't even know that name."

       The stranger looks annoyed. "The girl he's sleeping with. Your friendly son said he was there sometimes in the day."

Rána's father glances at Catherine.

       "The other one - this is beside the point."

"Yes, it is," Rána's father says, "so stop bothering us."

- it takes her a moment to be sure that she has all of that right, but no, she understood it, there isn't any real room for error.

She feels her throat constrict. It's probably trying to be friendly to her, she thinks, keeping her from saying anything foolish.

She folds her hands in her lap very tightly and doesn't do anything, except to think how blindingly, colossally stupid she is.

Well he's annoyed to have been interrupted and wants to get back to this passage they were working on.

She tries to think about anything else and - can't.

"I think I actually need to take a break for a bit, I'm sorry," she says, a few moments later, when she and her throat have figured out a momentary ceasefire.

"All right," he says cheerfully enough and goes back to teaching Ingolfr.

Nod.

She leaves the house, and for a moment automatically walks towards Rána's, before it occurs to her that this is probably also very stupid; just because he isn't there now doesn't mean he won't be later, and she can't go around crying in front of him when she hasn't even been wronged.

And she hasn't been, of course. They're not married. She's a concubine, except without the sex and without bearing children for him, which makes her really much less than a concubine, actually, what's even left without that, love? But he has not told her he loves her, even if she has been stupid enough to imagine it. He has said only that he wants her to be happy, and that she is his, and that he is glad she is his.

He is not hers. She could live with that, she thinks, if she had to; men are never as tightly bound to women as women are to men, except very occasionally, and then only in stories. Certainly she cannot reasonably have expected him not to sleep with other people when she isn't sleeping with him herself. But to let her her trust him, only to discover that she doesn't truly matter to him - that she matters so little that he can sleep with someone else and not even hide it from people, not even feel the need to pretend in public that she matters - 

It shouldn't be surprising. He has not hidden from her that she is a slave. If she thought she was something else, she was making up stories for herself. That can't be anyone's fault but hers.

Her heart finds this line of argument unpersuasive. Didn't he help her, knowing she'd die before paying him off? Didn't he care when she was in pain, didn't he stop when she was afraid of his touch, didn't he kiss her sweetly and gently and not push for more, didn't he worry for her when he thought she might be in trouble? Didn't he care for her children, even when he didn't want to? Why do all that, and then sleep with someone else? Why do all that and not care?

She tells her heart to hush. He cares, of course, as one cares for an exotic pet. She is a momentary curiosity. A songbird in a cage. No one thinks anything of having lots of songbirds, because no one thinks very much about songbirds at all, not even those who are kind to them and are sad when their favorites die. It changes nothing, having a songbird, no matter how beautiful her songs.

He is not her husband. He has made no commitments. He does not love her. None of this is going to change. But she, fool that she is, hadn't noticed it, and hadn't noticed how utterly idiotic it would be for her to fall in love with him.

She wanders out a ways away from the houses, alone in the darkness, and sobs, brokenly.

In an hour or two, when she thinks she's accepted it enough not to cry the first time she sees him, she returns to his home.

He's back, and wearing clothes that are actually visible (barely, just the slightest ghost of them) and flopped on the leaf whittling something. 

"Hey."

"Hey."

"My cousins're in town - are you all right?"

Nod.

- he shivers, and stands right up, and looks around as if expecting the walls to fall in on them, which they don't.

" - sorry."