"You do things for me! Then we're even and I can send you home."

"Huh. What do you want done?"

"Well, Catherine made it sound like you're not very good in bed....do we need more books copied? Do we need any more sketches? Maybe you could help us with gathering food for the night. I can show you the boundaries of peoples' territory and as long as you stay out of those you can take what you see."

"I guess we need books copied."

"There we go, you can copy the books for us."

"Fine. Won't take very long, objectively."

"We'd better hope not, because I assume if you get declared missing again then you'll vacate this body and we'll have a very confused human on our hands like we did last time."

"Oh is that what happened! I thought you'd killed me without me realizing it, somehow."

"Nah, he was still alive. He politely asked where he was. Asked about his beloved family."

"Huh, I wouldn't have figured there'd be anything left."

"Can't say I spoke with him that much but he seemed normal enough, aside from having missed the last decade. Maybe a bit passive but the cage and the crowd and the strange languages and the wine will do that, you know."

"Yeah, I guess it will."

"Anyway I appreciate you leaving behind a live person for us. The crowd would've been disappointed if you hadn't."

They find a good campsite. He sets up the light he carries. "Don't go too far, I don't want to buy you back again."

"Yeah, that sounds inconvenient. I'll just catch up on sleep, I think."

...and he does that, or at least appears to, about where he is.

He pulls Catherine a pretty considerable distance away anyway. 

"That's a lot of debt. It might be a couple weeks before it's low enough I can kill him and still have it low enough afterwards he can't keep hurting us."

Nodnodnod.

"You okay?"

(She doesn't nod. Learned her lesson, there.)

"It's just - hard, sometimes, when he goes around - being like that, to people - to believe that people aren't all going to end up believing that I'm being a petulant child about whatever happened."

"If you want me to go kill him right now I can. If I hurt him badly enough first maybe the debt'd come out close, even."

Hug. 

"I think we can probably let him do some copying. But thank you."

"It's better to delay because it takes the night, to slow people down - specifically the night - and if we keep him in this body until night starts he can't slow down for a full additional day. ...of course if he knows that he'll probably try to run off, at sunset, but still. It seemed worth the shot. I'm never - I remember how you were when I met you."

Nodnodnod.

"Your son was telling the truth. About what he'd do if he ended up having the power to do it somehow."

"Yeah."

Hug?