"That makes sense. Sorry."

"Sounds like we shouldn't," she says to the fairy.

The fairy looks up at the sky.

Nets fall on them. They're made of something shimmery and obviously magical and they're heavy, enough it's very hard to stand up under them. 

"I think you should eat the raspberry," the fairy says.

Well.

She looks at Connor again.

Connor looks so confused and horrified! "That was completely unnecessary! Cut it out!"

      "We're not sending you home," the fairy says, "not when we haven't properly met yet. Don't be childish about it. Eat the raspberry."

"I'm Whispering," she says, very very quietly, lips not even moving very much. "Not eating this thing until you decide whether that's worse than being stuck in the net."

He does not eat his raspberry.

The fairies start singing. 

Now that she can sense debt she can sense what that does. It creates connections, a whole web of them - between her and all the fairies, Zana and all the fairies, Connor and all the fairies. It tugs in the opposite direction from her connection with Connor.

"...well that gets rid of most of my ideas for getting out of this," she says, still Whispering.

"Stop that!"

      The fairy reaches into the net and tousles his hair. "We've got to get you back home with us somehow, you know."

"This is ridiculous and unnecessary and - I don't understand why you're doing it -"

     "Yes, you seem a little dense."

Connor snarls at him. 

The fairies in the treetops climb down. They start dragging the nets.

Zana whimpers a little.

Karen holds her close. She does not give her the raspberry.

The fairies drag them for a while. They get smaller, and walk under the root of a tree. They get bigger again, and wind through a field of flowers. They come to a big, hollow tree. They're dragged in.

The interior is full of elaborate carved stairways up the inside of the tree, with doors in the walls of the wood. There are little magical lights. There's a stunningly pretty banquet hall (looking at the ceiling incurs debt) and a table, set with food and drinks. They're brought there. The doors are closed.

There are a lot of people here. They're mostly staring curiously. 

"Are you going to behave yourself and do what you're told?" a fairy asks her.

"I imagine that depends what you tell me to do."

"Why, we want you to have something to eat and to tell us the story of how you ended up entangled with this strange slow fairy of yours."

"Fine."

They pull the net away. They pull out a chair for her. Someone touches her hair, curiously, and says something to another one, and then several more of them want to touch her hair.

It doesn't really seem like the best time to object, but she fairly obviously Does Not Like This.

They fairly obviously don't care. 

People bring her food and drink. 

Fairies suck.

She takes a couple bites of her food and one sip of her drink.

"If you want the story to be any good you should probably stop touching me."

There's some discussion about this in an unfamiliar language. 

They give her a little bit of space. 

They gather around for the story.

Okay. Gotta make this good.

One year ago, before the summer and the spring and the winter and last fall, she came to live in a town very far away from here, where there were many strange things. Odd howling could be heard on the night of the full moon. When people died, they sometimes became ghosts, odd shimmery transparent people who could speak but who could not touch anything else in the world. Her sister became one of these ghosts, when she died, and she was left the oldest person in her house, the only person who could take care of her sister's children. So she went to the cemetery, the patch of land where the humans laid their dead to rest, and asked for a job, and was given just enough money to keep herself and her sister's children from starving or losing their home. And so she spent her days at school, or shelving books at the library, the building that houses books for the entire town, and spent her evenings laying the dead to rest, and spent her nights doing household chores and sleeping fitfully in the living room, not on a bed, and she grew very tired.

It was at the cemetery that she met the fairy. She did not know he was a fairy; she only knew that he, too, lay the dead to rest, and that he was easier to talk to than everyone else. They got along. Then one night, when they were working in the tunnels under the cemetery, she saw one of the dead stir, a twisted, hungry corpse that did not reflect the person it once had been. It attacked her friend, lunging for him. She did not have time to think. She bashed its skull in with a spiked club, and killed it, and in doing so saved her friend's life. 

She did not know, then, that fairies thought this was important, that fairies thought this was the sort of thing that produced debt. He asked her what she wanted from him, and she told him that she wanted nothing in particular. Later, his father came to her, and offered her a very great sum of money, so much money that it would have solved all of her problems, and she would not have had to work her very dangerous job anymore. But she refused, because she did not think that saving a person's life should make her entitled to so much wealth. And so his father came to her a second time, at her house, and told her that as she had refused other compensation, she must be given the life she had saved. And this is how she came to have a fairy.

(She eyes the debt, considering whether to tell them any more.)

The debt has been patiently unspooling in her direction through the whole story. She is still in debt to some of the fairies - the ones she accepted food from, the one who got debt when she looked at the ceiling - but the rest of them are in her debt, by now, just a little.

Mrrr. Better see if she can get a little further out.

So, uh - 

She didn't know how to have a fairy, at first. She didn't even realize that the debt was magical, because she didn't yet know he was a fairy, for humans don't know so very much about fairies, and in most cases certainly don't know that they really exist. This is another curious thing about humans - they tell false stories to each other all the time, to confuse each other or to entertain themselves, and sometimes they forget which of their stories were true and which of them were false. She assumed that the stories about fairies that she had heard as a child were all false, and so she assumed that her friend could not be one. 

So she asked her friend what he and his father needed in order for him to be allowed to return to his house, thinking she had better play along with whatever ceremonial duties they thought the situation required. And her friend - her slave, although she did not know he was, not then - told her that she should tell him how he might be of service to her, and that if he did this for a very long time, then after a long term of service he might be free of her before her life was over.

She was not used to thinking about what other people could do for her. No one had ever particularly prioritized this, as far as she could tell. But eventually she decided that he could watch her niece, and that he could do some chores around the house, and after enough of this service he might be free of her and able to return home to his father.

(Does it look like she can dig herself all the way out if she goes on long enough....?)

Maybe, but they don't seem to intend to let her. 

"Thank you," someone says. "That was a lovely story. More to drink? Or eat?"

"No thank you."