"Yeah. That makes sense."

He apparently can't think of anything to say after that.

"How long are they staying?"

"Couple of sleeps, probably."

"Oh, all right. Well, if they want any other stories, I'm here."

"I'll pass that along."

"I'm glad people like them so much."

"They're very interesting. I feel like I got very lucky. I didn't pick you for - any of this."

"Yes, you did have the good fortune to happen to entangle the official court poet of the Empire of Scandinavia. Did you just want any human, before?"

"I wasn't even particularly on the lookout to steal humans until I saw you were on a path to run into me and I thought, well, you can hardly pass that up."

"Makes sense. ...I feel like I got luckier than you did, though, I didn't even know that anyone was there. And if I had I couldn't have known anything about what they were like."

"You probably did, yeah. - you especially. I don't know if being a slave to fairies would be bad for most humans but it seems like given the experiences you'd already had - if someone'd just brought you straight to their court and been, like, perfectly reasonable but not particularly invested in how you felt about things -"

Nodnod. "Yeah. I'm - really very glad it was you."

HIs cousins stay four sleeps. He mostly doesn't leave the room, except with Catherine, who he directs to tell some more stories. He doesn't bring relationship conversations up unless she does.

She tells stories. She... doesn't really have the relationship stuff figured out, but it turns out she's a lot less sad when she's not wondering whether he cares about her, so that's something, probably.

That's good. The cousins leave. He tries observing while she and his father translate poetry but turns out to find this intolerable; he leaves after half an hour or so.

She doesn't really mind this. It's mostly important to her that he likes the stories themselves. And that she has someone pretty delightful to work on translation with.

Well he thought that being somewhere she could see him would help with the thing but maybe not? He's still confused about the thing.

He goes and paces the border.

She doesn't realize this is about that because gluing him to her had not remotely occured to her as a solution.

"I keep trying to think of things that would be sort of the right kind of commitment, and then remembering reasons they don't work," she tells him, later.

Squeeze. "I thought about whether you'd be safe if I got you out of debt somehow but I don't even think that does it. Not that I know how we'd get there, either."

Nod. "I don't know if you could really marry me as a fairy, or do anything really similar. Partly because people can just - make you do things, and partly because I don't know if I can sleep with you without it being horrible, but not mostly because of those things, mostly because - a lot of the promises that people make about it are - it's hard to tell, exactly, apart from the parts about sex, at what point they've been broken? And when humans who are in love do it they just sort of try to do their best with it, and if anybody stops keeping part of the promise then the other can point it out and they can come back around to trying, and - fairy promises aren't really like that at all. And - I don't know that there's anything I even need to know won't happen, specifically, awful things can always happen, I just - wish I could really know that you're going to really try, to take care of me. And won't stop trying in another sunset. But I wouldn't know how to put it in a promise."

"If - if you'd want to have sex if it wasn't horrible I can think of some things we could try, I was assuming that -

I'm really trying. I'm trying as much as I know how. And I would be really surprised if that changed in another sunset, and I don't want it to."

"I know you are, I know, I'm sorry, I didn't mean you weren't already, if you weren't we wouldn't be - talking about this, I don't think. I just - I never really thought about relationships that weren't marriages or affairs or - someone who mattered with someone who didn't. Or, well, I suppose the Emperor cared more about some of his concubines than about others, but - I think I was one of the ones he cared at all about, actually, just not in a way that made him not want to hurt me, so I'm not sure thinking of myself as that makes me feel very much better - "

"You don't - really want to be a slave that I like a lot."

Snuggle. "I don't know what I want to be. I - I want to matter. It's - wives make vows to obey their husbands, but it's - they're important."