"Yes, sounds good to me."

Well, then everything is probably fine. Maybe they can snuggle and she can continue ignoring the box that continues to creep her out for no reason.

They can absolutely do that.

Oh good.

In the morning she can introduce Sigrun and Tyr and Frey to his father.

"You can see which ones are oldest by how tall they are," he says delightedly. "That's so interesting - your mother said you speak Arabic, is that right?"

"I'm the best at it," says Sigrun, matter-of-factly, and nobody else contradicts her.

Well then he has a barrage of Arabic questions, mostly for her.

She can answer most of them. She is not as excited to do this as her mother was, but she is mostly cooperative. She also knows a couple other languages somewhat less well. Mostly different ones than her mother. Would he like to hear what she knows about Greek.

Yes, he definitely would.

Well, she can tell him that, then.

Meanwhile the means to transport a presumably-uncooperative emperor to court are arranged. 

That seems good. She's not really like a kidnapping expert or anything so she's mostly going to focus on getting her children settled in and then whenever Rána says to go she can go.

He's eager to get out of here so that'll be as soon as the kids are ready.

"Do you know your emperor's name? Not his birth name in this body, I'd expect it'd be the first one he had."

"...I have a pretty good guess. Not entirely certain. But probably, yeah."

"I'd much rather get him some other way since that gives him a lot of leverage to hurt us but if he's walking away -"

Nod. "You want me to call after him if he does? And then if I'm right you'll know it."

Nod.

"All right. Hopefully it doesn't come to that."

"Yeah."

Hug. 

They head north with four other people. They have a jeweled cage. It's astoundingly pretty. 

As long as it holds him.

They will probably want just her and Rána in the fairy circle, partly because more people will alarm him and partly because it is not unlikely that he will call her by name if he sees her.

When they reach Sweden again the Emperor and his party have entered the forest.

Convenient. They can find a place for the rest of the party to stay and then - kill time, he guesses. 

Yep. Sounds about right.

"You all right?"