Oh good. She'll go that way now, so she doesn't forget which way it is, and come back for more dirt later.

The tree stops being horizontal and branches upwards, eventually, and has enormous leaves. Dew clings to the undersides of the leaves, in impossibly large droplets, some of them larger than her. 

There are no streams or rivers or anything so probably this is what he was referring to.

This is honestly about what she expected, if they're, like, tiny and on a tree now. 

She drinks until she's not thirsty anymore.

The walls are much improved by the time she gets back. He is unsure how high walls need to be to keep toddlers in but he thinks three times the toddler's height will probably do it.

Yep, that should do it. If he doesn't look like he's done, she'll contribute more dirt. She can carry a fair amount of it if she uses her cloak.

He doesn't talk while he's working. He bounces around a lot. It takes several more trips back down to the ground for dirt but eventually the babies are all fenced.

Oh good.

She sits down in a patch of moss to consider what else she should be doing. Ingolfr will probably wake up soon and relieve her of having to think of anything else herself. 

"If you have to send for food, will I owe the people at your court, or will I owe you more and you'll owe them?"

"If I ask that's on me. Of course, they'd want to know why, and they won't want me to let you dig yourself in that far, but you can tell a lot of stories, or tell a lot of people that one story, and we can probably stay on top of it."

Nodnod. She does, in fact, know a lot of stories. It's kind of surprising that they have limits on how far they're willing to let people be indebted to them, but good to know, probably. 

"Should I tell you another story? Before the children wake up? I'm still not clear on - precisely when or how much it's appropriate to offer things, but you've told me so much - "

"I'd like a story." He pats the ground next to him.

She sits down next to him and thinks of a story she has time for. No good telling Beowulf if you haven't got time to finish even a third of it. She could tell her own, but she's still a little overwhelmed and doesn't know what happens if it lands wrong.

"Does it matter whether it's a true story?"

"Do you mean you're not sure if the person who told it to you told it rightly? You can just say that you're telling it how it was told to you."

"In human lands people sometimes make up stories, not to lie, just to entertain, or to illustrate something. And sometimes people tell stories that many people thought were true, but that don't make sense with other things we know, so we can assume that one must be false. But sometimes we keep on telling them, either because we like them or because there was some truth in it somewhere that it wouldn't be good to forget. It's just that you seem so careful about lying, and I wouldn't want you to think something was definitely true when it wasn't."

"Huh. 

I wouldn't invent your own - entertaining lies - but repeating another story without mentioning some reasons to doubt it isn't on you, if you're clear about where you got it."

"All right."

So she tells him about Persephone, and how she was stolen away to the underworld, and ate six pomegranate seeds there, and ended up going between the realm of Hades and the realm of her of her mother, every year, as near as she can remember to how it was told to her by another poet years ago.

He seems delighted with this.

Well, that's all right then. She has lots of classic poems and twenty-six years of earth life to hack up into new stories, she's not very worried about running out of material. Although possibly she should think a little bit about whether she'll be causing problems for herself if she gives other people the ability to tell most of her best ones to others before she does, if she's going to bet very much of her safety on this.

Kids still not awake?

She checks.

Ingolfr is sitting up and silently blinking at the dirt walls of his room. 

"Do you want to come out and look around?"

He nods. She opens the pen's makeshift door and lets him out. Ragna's awake, too, so Catherine sits down to nurse her. 

"Don't wander far. I can show you where there's water. Let me know if you're hungry."

He nods solemnly and looks around.

He wanders off up a tree branch.

Well.

She might get bored, eventually, with only one person besides her children to talk to or perform for, but it's still a nicer cage than the last one. Probably eventually she'll have to concern herself with gathering enough food for herself and her children, which will at least solve the problem of being unsure what to do with herself. She misses Frey and Vigdis very much, even when she tells herself she would have lost them shortly anyway. 

She sings to her baby and silently prays and watches Ingolfr as he wanders up and down the valley.

He eventually wanders back down the tree branch, still apparently in an excellent mood. 

She's kind of confused about why he's so happy, but it's probably not, like, a problem?

Eventually she checks whether she feels like she's growing hungrier at about the same rate as before.

She seems about as hungry as she'd expect to be.

Well.

"So I think that we're actually going to need to eat two or three times between each sleep, not each sunset."