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.
Her auntie Cassie says some other people speak it, too. Also it is hard to be a self-respecting half-demon who doesn't know any non-human languages.
Quendi speak it but as far as he can determine Quendi suck, so who knows if any of them are worth talking to.
Anyway he can teach her fairy until they're even again.
He arranges for a couple researchers who study eleventh century English and Norwegian to come meet with Cecelia. They are not his father but they are quite enthusiastic.
They'll do. She is happy to speak with them and offer them about as many poems as they want. Some of them are alternate versions of stories that have been recorded elsewhere, and some of them have otherwise been entirely lost to history.
This is a great way to make some researchers incredibly, incredibly happy.
They've been told not to ask questions that aren't about the stories or the language, and they stick to this.
That's fine then. It should keep her passably occupied for a pretty long time.
A week passes.
We might actually wanna talk to the kids in Milliways, if that's feasible, given the number of language barriers involved here.
We're having to do all kinds of dimensional shenanigans with Milliways and its time-stopping thing but I'll attempt to put in a request and maybe someone'll figure out how to open a door to here.
Time is meaningless there and your family's immortal, right? It seems like that should make scheduling stuff a lot more painless than it would be otherwise. But if it doesn't work I guess we'll just have to pick between going through Cecelia a lot or making heavy use of osanwe.
No, I mean, while anyone from here is in there time can't pass, so since time is observably passing there must be no one from here in there right now, and probably they're in a different place for some reason which itself retains access to Milliways but possibly they're no longer in contact with Milliways, or something.
We can at least start by checking if the door's open.
It turns out that it is.
Then that's probably the place to have this conversation. And she and Alex and Sigrun and Tyr and Frey and Cecelia and presumably Rána can all get a room and talk this out.
Sounds good. Or likely to be stressful and unpleasant actually, but important.
"We want to speak to our father," says Sigrun, when they're all sitting down.
"Can't you get him the same way you got us?"
"So the problem, as I understand it, is that there's an undying demon of some kind who possesses, and seizes control of, the person running Scandinavia. I don't know how it does that. I don't know, if we bring it here, whether it'd instead possess and seize control of someone else, or whether we'd fail to grab it at all and find ourselves instead with the human he was possessing."
"Or whether it would work, and we could talk to him."
"We want to talk to him."
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