"You can call me Lohtê."

       "Okay. I've been - Auda. As you heard."

"What can I do for you?"

       "I just want him to be free to leave when he wants to - I don't just want that. But I want that and it's the thing I want from getting to know faeries."

"As long as he's willing to settle up for you I'm happy to arrange that. Do you want to learn any arts? Music? Weaving? Embroidery? We know how to make very pretty things, I promise, we just haven't been waving them in front of you to avoid being rude."

      "-sure. And if he's not around to settle up -"

"We can run a little debt a little while, or you can tell us stories, or if we're entirely out of options and you've developed no discernible talents and we've no reason to think he'll come back, you can give people massages. I don't anticipate a way for things to get worse than that."

      " - okay. Is this your court?"

"My parents', but they like magic research and children and so they're often slow and I run it for them. How was the court you were in before structured?"

     "No one ever explained. Some people were more important than others but no one was allowed to give me standing orders except the queen. Is she - here?"

"Yes. A number of participants in the mess that brought you both here are imprisoned here now."

      "I only met her once, the time she explained about the standing orders."

"What were those?"

      "Not to leave, not to lie or make promises or share my name, not to physically resist anything, if I was having a hard time with that to tell them so they could tie me down or something, not to end up in a situation where people'd told me to do different things and, as part of that, to remind anyone who gave me standing instructions of this rule of hers. I assume you've said the same thing, to people."

"Something pretty similar, yeah. That was more than a day ago?"

       "Yes."

"That's impressive."

        "I didn't want to die. They didn't want me to die either."

"I hear death is not as bad as advertised." He glances at Cam. 

        "He said, yeah. I think I mostly don't want to die as a habit, now. But I still don't want to."

"We won't hurt you."

       "You would've."

"Yes. Does that bother you?"

       "I don't know. I don't know what people are supposed to feel about things. I guess I'd trust you more if you were different than you are."

"We wouldn't have done anything that'd hurt a fairy. But we should have thought that humans might be different."

       "He'd have been less mad at you," she says.

"Yes. That's not what I meant, though."

        "Oh. - are we even, right now?"

"We're pretty close. Do you want to be done?"

        "Yeah. I - this was good. But - maybe more tomorrow."

"Small doses," nods Cam, making a shooing motion at Lohtë. "Thank you for your time."

"Mmhmm." He leaves.

"Find the other one now or later?"

"Later, I think."

"Any time. You still have a day's worth of food, right?"

"Yeah."

"Good, because I've been doing almost nothing but meal planning for a while now. Did you like everything okay, I didn't carefully look up what plants have made it to Europe yet or anything when considering spice profiles but I did try to keep it all relatively accessible."

"Everything tasted wonderful."

"Oh good. You can be on a pretty much unrestricted diet at this point, assuming you aren't concealing any symptoms."

"I feel healthy. - might have a hard time if I had to do any work, because I haven't done any in so long, but other than that."

"That's most likely just lack of exercise. D'you wanna go for a walk?"

"What, just for fun?"

"Sure, do people not take walks to go look at scenery and stretch their legs in this year? Even if they're not performing farm labor and getting around in general on foot?"

"Not really? Sometimes you go visit people."

"You know what I should bring in to the ambient faery technology situation? Bicycles."

"What're those?"

He pulls up a picture of one for her to watch flicker. "These things. They require some materials that are currently inconvenient to source in the environment to work really well and won't be invented for some time, but you sit astride 'em like a horse, there's a learning curve on how to balance but there's variants with three wheels that are easier if less able to handle miscellaneous terrain, and you push the pedals there with your feet. Doesn't leave a lot of conspicuous infrastructure lying around, doesn't require fuel, goes at the speed of the rider unlike I'd imagine an airplane or something would."

" - huh. Women can't sit astride horses, though."

"Is that because you don't wear pants or do you have some other reason to imagine that's the case?"

"I just know women who ride horses have to sit on them sideways. I don't know why, I've never had a riding horse."

"It's the pants thing, as I understand it, and bicycles can be constructed so you can ride them in a skirt if you object strenuously to pants."

"Huh! - and I bet future people do not object to women wearing pants."

"Yup! Other way around takes longer though."

" - they do object to men wearing dresses?"