"Don't what?"

"Um, where I come from we cook meat over fires before we eat it."

"What's a fire?"

- ah.

"Um, when you heat up dry wood or leaves enough, they sort of - burst into this very hot orange and yellow - thing, cloud, or something - and it burns like that, for a while, very hot, and you can cook foods over it or use it to keep yourself warm in the winter or to give light when it's dark. Everyone uses fire, where I come from it's - I don't know how we'd go about trying to live without it."

"Huh. I wouldn't know where to start with making it but you can if you'd like, it sounds interesting."

"I could try. I haven't really been in a position to cook anything in a long time, but I did know how once. It's dangerous, you have to keep fire contained so it doesn't spread and light up a whole forest. And I don't know whether anything will light at this speed."

"In that case it might be best not to try it right now. Destroying a whole forest would be very unwise."

"I imagine so."

She sighs and accepts the raw meat. It tastes awful, but she supposes that she can endure it if it keeps her milk running.

When she eats it, things look different. Not the fairy circle; that appears to be exactly what it looked like before. It's everything else that looks different. Like there are obvious paths through the woods that weren't obvious before, and that do not, for the most part, lead where you might expect paths to lead; this one here spirals up a tree, this one buries itself in a row of hedges, this one wavers back and forth across the air and vanishes over the treetops. There are hundreds of them; they all spiral or waver or spin or descend to the edges of the circle. 

" - oh wow."

She is not sure whether she's made a mistake, but whatever she's done, she's probably stuck with it. She kind of wants to cry. 

(She doesn't. She's good at not crying just because everything is completely overwhelming.)

"Since you can't notice anything else I wouldn't have expect you to notice not being slowed down anymore."

"I just - see the paths now."

"Huh."

She wants to ask whether there are other things she's not seeing, but she'll learn that soon enough anyway, won't she.

"What about the baby, if she can't eat solid foods yet, is she fast?"

"There're other ways, that's just the fastest. If she's old enough to talk, I can tell her a story, sing her a song, something like that."

"She can't talk yet. She's only a few months old."

"Well then she's not a person yet and can't track her own debts at all but you should be able to take her anywhere you can go."

"Well, that's - convenient, I guess."

"It's really better when kids are late to talk, if they've got a court that'll look after them. It means they're smarter when they do, and don't make as many mistakes."

Nodnod. She is silently grateful for basically everything about Ingolfr right now, compared to every other toddler she's ever met.

"If any of the paths look particularly nice to you, we should settle down somewhere near here and I'm not set on anywhere in particular."

"I'm not entirely sure how I'd follow most of them."

"You.... walk on them. With your feet."

"They just don't look - like, that one over there goes into the sky."

"Yes? It's probably not a great place for us to live long-term, there wouldn't be a good place to put the babies down."