"Well, he could. And why not, if he'd end up in his heir right away?"

"How'd he do it, if he didn't understand the fairy rules? - usually you cut out someone's tongue, if they might be trouble like that, but with a human I'd wonder if you even needed to."

"I don't know. I imagine he could starve himself and be home within a day of leaving, as far as anyone else was concerned."

"Huh."

"I don't know what he would do. But it's not as if he's terribly easy to depose. Or to hold onto, if he's unhappy enough with where he ends up."

"Normally what you do with someone with such powerful magic you can't hold them or kill them is slow them. Preferably over the ocean. They'll come back some day, but, you know, many winters from now, and who can think that far ahead."

"Well. That's what he is now."

"Yeah. So I don't know what I'd do. Maybe there could be a magic knife that kills him specifically, I think normal ones wouldn't do it."

"Might want more information about whatever magic he used in the first place, see however the two might interact."

"Yeah."

"I won't mind never seeing him again. But if you did decide to do anything involving him, and I was still alive whenever you did - I think I'd want to know."

"Okay. I just don't want you to think you'd ever be in his reach again."

Nodnodnod.

"Thank you."

Hug?

Yeah. Hugs are good. 

Kiss?

...yeah.

Kisses are a little less unambiguously good, but they're still good, mostly. And she is maybe getting slightly less passive about them.

This makes him feel very proud of himself despite objectively probably having nothing to do with him.

Well, it probably has more than nothing to do with him. He is the first person she's ever wanted to kiss, after all.

Ragna learns to walk, ends up eating mostly solid foods, and picks up exactly two clearly recognizable words (Norwegian for "mother" and Quenya for "no"). Ingolfr is approaching full fluency, and is much more capable at all sorts of things than he was; she can't remember whether he's still three or whether he's just turned four. Catherine's a ways behind him in terms of the language, but she's mostly conversant, and has, with assistance, translated dozens of poems into Quenya.

The sky starts lightening, just a little bit, before the sunrise.

"Will they let us go?" she asks Rána, eventually. "With however much unpaid debt there is?"

"Wouldn't help to keep us. They'd have to keep feeding you."

"Oh. I suppose so, yes."

"They won't be happy about it but they can pretty much kill us or let us go and if they were gonna kill us they could've done it back before they emptied all their stores for us."

Nod.

"I guess we... ask your father for a note? I'm not entirely sure what it should say, unless you happen to know where any fairy rings around Akershus are."