When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
"If I answer questions then that's - we'll have to even it out, after, but - if fairy is counting it up then you can't hurt me."
"Well, that's good, I don't want to hurt you. That means that you're okay with me asking questions?"
"Fairies are - they're like humans, but they move very fast, faster than people can see, and they have a debt system that - tracks how much they've done for people, and how much people have done for them, and if they do something that fairy thinks is horrible, like lie, then they and everyone who they owe or who owes them will suffer for it. And if someone is in your debt you can hurt them, and if you're in someone else's debt and you try to hurt them then fairy will punish you, maybe kill you for it. And they don't die except by violence, and they don't need to eat anything besides dew, and they can follow paths that make them very small sometimes, and they don't understand what evil is. And you should not interact with them unless you are desperate."
"Wow. Okay.
And you were desperate and - made a deal with fairies?"
"God. I'm sorry.
If you could have your kids and have your deal with fairy undone, do you know what you would want?"
" - I don't want to go back, either. I don't regret it." She regrets not realizing sooner that he didn't care very much about her, but she really doesn't want to talk about that.
"...okay. I guess I would feel better about you deciding that if you'd seen more...options... but I don't know how to show them to you and a lot of them might require learning a new language. But you can decide that, if you want to.
Are your children also slaves?"
"I don't think so. He's been careful about that. The baby can't be, they don't think she's a person yet."
"Not a person until you start gaining debt. Can't gain debt until you can talk."
"So," he waves his hands helplessly. "When I meet someone who is incredibly traumatized and a slave and pretty sure this is the best she can hope to do, the thing I assume is that she's being competently abused, not that she's being treated okay.
That wasn't a question, sorry, I meant to turn it into one but - is saying things bad if they're not questions?"
"I don't - I don't think so, as long as it's not - if you give me information that I asked for then it counts against me, see, and I can't always tell what counts as asking."
"Well that sounds awful.
And the food counts as something bad?"
"Food is - how I got stuck in fairy in the first place, if you eat food they give you then you can't leave until you've paid it off. And it's very expensive."
"Well, Milliways has lots of really valuable stuff. You could use that to pay off the fairies and get out of slavery, maybe, depending how it all interacts."
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