"Well, fuck that."

"Is there - something we should tell them that's more reassuring than just -"

"I don't know. I want them to be - raised away from that place, somewhere their father can't decide what they should be or believe, but - he's an emperor. And I'm an invisible woman living in a forest who will be dead before the month is over."

"Maybe not."

"Yeah. Maybe not. They'll probably be less uncomfortable with your court than I was, anyway, if we check in with your father at some point, although of course we're very inconvenient visitors."

"It'd be complicated but if one or two of them wanted to go live in a fairy court I think we could supply them once the younger ones get better at walking. Starting in daytime makes it a lot easier."

Nod. "They might like that, yes. Although I suppose they might not like being - in Akershus they're royalty. I imagine it's harder to go from being royalty to being - whatever I am, than it was for me."

"I don't think I know much about what being a human is like for other people."

"Well most people are farmers. Have to grow their own food, and it takes all year but it grows fast enough for us that that's doable. My parents are farmers. I probably would have become one if I hadn't been kidnapped, and maybe learned to do something else in winter. Not poetry, probably, parents were more practical than that. Sewing, maybe. Never would have learned to read, most people can't. You work on a farm for - basically as long as it's light, and on Sundays you rest and go to Mass, and - you grow up, you marry someone, you have four or six or twelve kids, who knows, and probably at least half of them survive to have children of their own someday. You get old, you tell stories to your grandchildren, you do your best to look after the people you're committed to, and - at some point you get sick or injured and you die. And you have a lord, but you never see him, so he doesn't matter very much, except for when his servants take some of your crops, or if. he calls your men to war in defense of their lands. And it's not - great, or wonderful, or anything, but it's all right.

"But that's the peasantry. For nobility everything is about status and power, navigating relationships that leave your land defended and give everyone precisely the right impression of you. And you have food, and fine clothes, and money, and maybe a horse and a garden and servants, but you're never really - everything is always about politics and etiquette, and more about them the more powerful you are. 

"That's what my oldest son wants. Power, land, armies. He's eight, though, I can't say what he'll be like when he grows up. Oldest daughter just wants - what all girls want, I suppose."

"What do all girls want?"

"To marry well."

"Huh."

" - slightly less so in Scandinavia, I suppose, noblewomen have a few more options here than in some places. But it determines - a lot, about how your life goes and whether you're provided for."

“I think fairies have fewer differences between what men want and what women do.”

"Human women are mostly concerned with raising children. Of course we do do other things, but that's the important one. And if you're raising children you can't exactly provide entirely for yourself, can you. Everything else is - men are stronger, smarter, more capable in general, and have most of the responsibilities you'd expect to go along with that. But they can't give birth to more people, so I suppose they need us anyway."

"I don't really pay enough attention to people to be sure what the differences are - you know who you should ask - uh, most of the oldest most powerful courts are run by women, because they can build the deepest debts. I've heard people say that women are more careful, better longer-term thinkers, more risk-averse, more dangerous. Most people who leave their courts for another one are men, so lots of newer and farther-flung courts have a man that founded them. Most people who do scouting and guarding are men, too. Uh... when women rule courts they're less likely to have two consorts? Or maybe that's properly just a subset of how men and women like different things in sex, when they're the one choosing."

Nod.

"Women never have more than one - well, there's nowhere where they're allowed to have sex with more than one person, of course in practice there are always people who break the law. In Scandinavia men can have about as many women as they can feed.

"I think it's - better, when people are committed to just the one person. Especially for the women. But I guess fairies don't really have all of the same kinds of commitments anyway."

"If I - ran into another you - and I could feed both of you - I wouldn't want you to be sad but I wouldn't want to send the other one off to someone who'd treat her worse, either."

"I - yeah. That makes sense. I wouldn't want them to get hurt, I just - "

"You'd be scared all the time. I know. I can't feed two anyway, please don't worry about it -"

Nod.

"Maybe it'll turn out it's not impossible, someday, turning into a fairy. Then I wouldn't have to eat so much. ...I really wish everyone could have people who were as good to them as you are to me, I just - really don't want to have to share you."

"Yeah.

If someone else in my court had taken you I'd have been very very upset. Even if it just meant we were sharing, even if you really had made a mistake and let them get you - even if you didn't mind - maybe especially if you didn't mind -"

Nod.

"Don't want anyone else."

"Not even my father? He offered, after a fashion."

"Your father is... he's very good. I like him a lot, I'm grateful to him, I hope I get to see him again someday. I do not want to belong to him."