"Nervous. Be good to get it over with."

"Yeah. 

He can't hurt you here."

"Yeah. I know."

"They'll figure out his magic and then destroy him and that'll be it."

"Yeah." Snuggle. She's safe and loved and going to be okay. 

Yep.

The Emperor gets off his horse and enters the fairy ring himself. He's not intending to go alone, but he's unambiguously the first to reach it.

"Ah. Hello, Catherine. Rather thought I'd find you here. And I suppose you must be the fairy."

"It's a pleasure," says the fairy.

"Same to you. Unfortunately you appear to have kidnapped the closest thing I have to an expert on fairies, so I suppose I'll just have to ask you what you want."

"Thank you for asking. I want to return you to my court so they can study how you achieved your strange mortal immortality, and then I want to kill you."

"I see. I'm afraid I take issue with that."

"Some of your children did, too."

"Aww. I'm touched. Why in particular do you want me dead, I don't know that I have any obvious guesses on that front."

"Well, first I ran into Catherine, and took her away with me, and decided that I liked her very much, and she hates you, you see."

"Ah, I see. Well, she's pretty, I'll grant you that."

"You should have seen her when I told her we could kill you now. I feel that I learned a valuable lesson about women."

He gestures for the other fairies to stop keeping their distance.

He draws his sword.

"You should go," he says to Catherine, and pulls his hood up.

Nod. She goes to head back up one of the paths.

Well that looks like it'll be kind of a mess. Better get her back before she makes it too far, or else he'll never find his children.

He stabs at the fairy he can still kind of see.

This connects, sort of, in a manner of speaking, and at the same time four different pairs of hands shove at him from different directions, and at the same time it feels like something squeezes him in the head very hard.

Shortly after that there are a lot of people sitting on him.

"Ouch," says the fairy he heard a minute ago. 

     "Stay away from swords," says a different fairy which is separating the emperor of Scandinavia from his right now. "I know someone who got stabbed once and it took three, four, sunrises to fully heal."

"Not that," says the first fairy. "We're entangled enough that I felt it when he did it. Don't let him do it again or he'll die. And I'll have a headache all evening."

Well apparently he's taking a short trip to fairyland. This is kind of annoying, especially since he liked this body, but if it gets annoying enough he can always kill himself, so that's all right. Although he really would like to see his children again.

He does not super feel like trying to fight anymore now that a bunch of invisible people are sitting on him.

They load him into an exquisitely pretty cage that's on a wagon and set off. The cage is covered with cloth so no one except him can appreciate how pretty it is. It's really an elaborate work of art.

He has a cut in his torso that goes through his clothes, which means that when he walks random bits of his torso appear in the air. It's bleeding at first, but it stops after a while. On a human it'd be a deep cut but he seems unbothered. "I do want to learn to use one of those someday. Could Tyr teach me?"

"He's studied it, so I suppose he could teach you the basics, yes. It doesn't hurt?"