"I think maybe you should pick the path."

"Okay." He looks around for a few minutes, leaning back and forth, his hands shaking at his side as if caught in a wind, even though it's very still. Then he heads off down one of the ones that spirals up a tree.

She holds her sleeping babies close and checks whether it's possible to follow him.

It is. It's a bit dizzying if you look away from the path - the light bends oddly, the perspective on everything shifts abruptly -- but if you just look at the path ahead of you, it's nice and solid and your feet land on it normally, even when it turns steeply up the tree truck, even when it detours around enormous knots in the wood.

Terrifying, but not exactly the most terrifying part of all of this.

She keeps her eyes on the path and follows him up.

The knots in the wood get larger as they go up. The path neatly weaves around them, staying flat and even as long as you don't look at anything else. And then it opens up on a spacious little valley, made of wood instead of grass, well-lit and mossy and with enormous trees growing out of it in all directions. 

He is lying on some moss, looking up at the sky.

"Well. I guess this goes some way in explaining why nobody's very sure where fairyland is."

"Where fairyland is," he says, amused. 

"Well it's not like we know you're faster than we are. And everything that lives has to live somewhere. It's just - hard to imagine how places might be layered on top of each other or connected in different ways if you haven't seen it."

"Even if you couldn't see the paths I should think you'd be able to see this place. But maybe not. I hadn't given humans any thought before you turned in this direction."

"I've never seen a place like this before. For humans all the lands are pointing the same way, and all of them have rock or dirt underneath them except the sea."

He still looks puzzled, but after a moment he drops it. "What sorts of things will the babies need, should they have beds? Should they be fenced so they don't wander?"

"Beds and some fencing would be good, though the girl's too small to crawl and the boy's usually good about not wandering too far, recent history notwithstanding. I suppose it won't be night for a very long time, so maybe no use thinking about warm clothes or blankets. Food and water, obviously. A place to pee and a place to wash soiled clothes."

"More food?"

"... eventually? Humans have to eat two or three times a day, though I suppose I don't know whether I should be counting sleeps or sunsets, those have always been the same thing before."

"I have to eat ,,,twenty or thirty times a sunset, I guess.  If you do too that'd be workable, out here, since there aren't many people around. If you have to eat several times between sleep then we will have to write to my court for food because we'll eat the whole area out in not long at all."

"I'll wait and see when I get hungry, then."

"It wouldn't be a very big problem. I've heard humans are expensive to keep even if I don't know if that's particularly how, and they'll supply us."

"I see."

She is honestly still kind of confused about what he's getting out of this, if she's worth more than all of the food in a forest. Wanting slaves is only so much of an explanation, and surely she can't be that pretty.

She does not ask for clarification on this point.

He is contemplating how to transform this patch of moss into beds for babies, and has produced a dagger out of nowhere for this purpose. "We could bring rocks up and build a fence, probably. Or sticks. Or dirt, that might be easiest and most difficult for them to hurt themselves with."

"I can carry some up if you think it's all right to set them down somewhere while they're sleeping."

"It should be fine. They'd have a ways to wander to the edge, and even if they did wander right there I've jumped off, before, it's not very dangerous." He gestures at one of the places where the valley does not slope up into enormous tree but instead down.

Nodnod. "Might be more dangerous for them." But she sets them down and goes back to the path to get some dirt from the forest.

When she comes back he is not immediately present, but he comes back a few minutes later, descending from one of the great horizontal trees. "There's plenty to drink there," he says cheerfully, and sets off to get some dirt himself.