Élie can't believe they actually pulled it off. He hasn't thought the Chelish security forces were infallible for almost ten years, now – after all, he's still alive – but the whole thing went off so smoothly it doesn't seems real. Probably the governor will talk or some soldier on leave from the House of Oblivion will have recognized them skulking around the embassy or the clingy devil boyfriend will show up, who knows, this is a problem for Future Élie. Present Élie has work to do. 

He's making on two headbands, for one thing: mental prowess for Naima, vast intelligence for him. He hadn't expected magic item creation to be interesting, just lucrative, so he's surprised at how much he likes it. It's like solving a puzzle – holding the spell in place, shaping it to the material, finding efficiencies. So it's a little repetitive after the first few weeks, but he doesn't mind. He's motivated. When he's not working on the headbands, he spends most of his time with Naima, watching her, writing down what herbs she uses and how much and where she finds them and how she administers them. Bafflingly, she never makes measurements herself. She just knows. Whatever she's doing doesn't look like magic – and he's casting detect magic just about every minute – but it doesn't look like any kind of mundane medicine he's ever heard of. If they could just understand what she's doing, they'd have the secret to true arcane healing. He's sure of it. If he was just a little bit smarter – 

Well, if he was just a little bit smarter, maybe he'd have known what to say to her during that one very awkward conversation. 

She'll probably have to think about the conversation again at some point - it's not like she can go on indefinitely ignoring the fact that she doesn't have a husband, and is not particularly sure how to make progress on fixing this, but at the moment she's working. 

"No disease," she says, after checking in on a patient who yesterday's remedies did nothing for. "I guess there's nothing I can do for that. I wish I knew what it meant for something that's obviously causing an illness not to be a poison or a disease. Obviously some people are born put together wrong, but like - cancer. I have no idea what cancer is."

"Maybe the rest of the symptoms are caused by the tumors and the tumors are technically some sort of injury? But that doesn't explain why your remedies can treat pain or exhaustion or fever when they're caused by things that are technically classifiable as diseases but not when they're caused by cancer. Do the remedies only have any effect at all on things that register to Diagnose Disease? I wonder if there's some kind of natural category there, it'd point to them being magical." 

"If it were a poison I would have a chance, I can handle poisoning most of the time. And I can treat some miscellaneous complaints, even if the person in question has tumors. Can't seem to do anything to stop them from dying when the growths get big enough, though, and it's really a waste to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make someone less tired for a little while when you could instead be working on - you know." She gestures vaguely at the other sick people.

"I still think there has to be some underlying logic to it. Maybe we'll know more when I get around to building a working magnifier. I was going to find a lens-grinder, but – " He gestures back at the other sick people. "I'll try and do that tomorrow." 

"That'd be really good. I think we'll be able to learn a lot more if we can see more of what we're doing."

Élie honestly isn't sure he can replicate the magnifying device Naima saw in Axis. He doesn't have any experience crafting purely mundane objects, but, hey, he can imbue a scrap of fabric with his instantiated will so it can't possibly be that difficult. 

"I know! There's so much here we obviously don't understand – " 

He can get very exercised on the subject of things we don't understand. 

Naima very much appreciates people discussing how little we understand and how hard we should be working on understanding more.

There are a lot of sick people in Sothis. On the rare occasions that one of the large temples runs out of sick people hoping for help, there are always more at another one. Relatedly, Naima works somewhat ridiculous hours. She is happy for the company, but doesn't necessarily expect Élie to continue taking notes until she's ready to call it for the day and head home. Until then, she can answer questions about the many different things she's doing.

He should probably head home. He has his own projects to work on, and he's still supposed to talk to that woman from the planar collegium, and while he technically doesn't need more than two hours of sleep a night he does still like it. But he likes talking to Naima, too. 

That's good. She was mildly worried about that, given recent sort of awkward events. But he should definitely go work on his own projects, too.

She'll stay at the temple until just before sundown, or maybe until a point during sundown where you can still say 'I'm on my way home, officer,' if any city guards inform you that women are not to be out at night without a male relative. That gives her a couple hours to play with play with her two-year-old, who is getting so much bigger than anybody ever expected him to. And once he's down she has a few more hours to read her very large stack of books.

She heads out again at the earliest sign of something that you can argue counts as dawn. The curfew will probably be somewhat  more annoying in winter, if she hasn't figured something out by then, but it's Desnus, now, so she's trying not to be too upset about it. And maybe she won't have to worry about it by Kuthona. Élie said he wanted her to spend six months looking, which Is admittedly getting on toward winter, and also she doesn't actually have any idea how to go about having adequately looked, but - maybe she can figure that out in a bit. After she's done with work for the day.

She reaches the temple just as the sun is really starting to come up, and settles in to check on the people who she treated yesterday. She figures Élie will be in later in the morning.

He's not. 

...okay, well, weird, she would have expected him to say something if he wasn't going to be in at all, since he does come in pretty much every day, but if he's not, then - well, that's up to him, isn't it.

She leaves the temple a little early, so that she can visit the place where he's rented a room and knock on the door and make extra sure that nothing important has come up. She's not entirely sure what she's thinking might have happened, and people have a perfect right not to show up for things they aren't even earning any money at, but - well, they did just assassinate the Chelish ambassador to Thuvia, and he would probably check in on her if she had failed to come in. Which is not a perfect comparison, since it would be much more out of character for her to skip out on a chance to practice medicine and earn money, but - whatever. At worst he'll tell her that nothing is wrong, and she can leave immediately.

Nobody answers. 

Probably he's just out. Men can be out at this hour.

But she knocks at the door, again, and calls from outside that it's her, and then turns into a dragonfly and flits in through the window to look around. If he's angry about that then she will look very stupid, but less stupid than she would look if they had not just assassinated someone.

He's not there. The bed doesn't look like it's been slept in. 

She's probably worrying about nothing. Probably something came up with his work, or he learned about something interesting that he wanted to research, or maybe she said something stupid yesterday, and didn't realize, and made him annoyed about the fact that she asked if he wanted to marry her, and now he doesn't want to talk. Maybe he thinks she's gotten foolishly attached to him, and is trying to cure her of it, and will be very concerned when it turns out that she's so excessively attached to him that she's willing to break into his house when he doesn't show up to see her for one single day. All of those things are possible and all of them are at least as likely as retaliation from infernal forces.

She's going to feel even more stupid if something's happened and she ignores it, though. She could scry him. She can do that, now. She even has it prepared. She's been doing that, lately, getting ahead of herself, just in case something comes up and she needs it. She would need a mirror. A very big, very expensive mirror. Besides that, it'll take her an hour, and that'll probably put her past sunset.

She falls out of dragonfly form while she's thinking about this.

She supposes she might as well look around for any evidence that he's been in here since yesterday. That's kind of insane, but not that much more insane than scrying someone, and anyway it's less expensive.

She can't find his spellbook. There are a few cups of coffee lying around in varying states of emptiness, but who's to say how long he leaves those lying around. The desk is covered in papers. One of them – at the top of the pile – isn't in his handwriting. 

....she is getting steadily more intrusive by the minute, but if something has happened, then - 

She reads it and tells herself she's skimming.

It's a letter. 

"Julien –– 

You will, no doubt, be surprised to hear from me. I am no less surprised to find myself writing to you. I will not insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that all is forgiven, or that we can ever be what we once where to each other. Nevertheless, I will be blunt: I need your help. I told myself many times that I would die rather than ask it of you. And I would, gladly – but not at the hands of the Chelish. I have been living here, in Sothis, under an assumed name, for almost a two years now. I foolishly assumed that the diabolists had lost interest in picking us off after we threw off their yoke, but I underestimated their pettiness. If their agents here have identified me, I am in grave danger. Naturally, you have every reason to doubt my motives. In your place I would do the same. I have no proof to offer you. I can only hope that when you spoke to me of your faith in the human spirit, you did not lie – and that you are content with the blood of Gérard and Eugénie. 

Yours, in memory of better days, 

Charles-Alexandre Altan de Tarne-Morgayn." 

Well that doesn't sound good. But it's not very much evidence that something's happened - she can feel herself making up possible stories about what could have happened, but they all feel stupid, making extra connections between things that don't deserve to be glued together. He's probably fine. 

...he almost always comes to the temple, though. And she doesn't think he's entirely skipped a day since she started practicing without noting beforehand that he was going to do that.

It is possible that Élie tried to help an old friend - an old enemy? - and in doing so attracted the attention of whatever Chelish forces were after the friend. It is possible that the old friend is more an enemy than he claims. And it is possible that the letter is unrelated, but that someone has connected him to the disappearance of the Chelish ambassador to Thuvia, and in that case - none of these is very likely, perhaps, but they might be too likely to ignore - she would feel awful if something had happened and she ignored it, especially with the rest of the party dispersed on their own errands like they are now -

She bites her lip and glances out at the sun. It's low. She has enough time to make it to her own house. She does not think she has enough time to make it much of anywhere else. But if something has happened, and she leaves it for an entire night - if he's dead, and someone plans to go to an effort to spoil the body, or captured, and being read or tortured for information about who he was working with - this is her imagining far worse than whatever's really happening, almost certainly, but the general point holds. If something really has happened to him then it might not be safe to leave the situation all night. 

She can hear Tariq in her head, noting that she seemed chaotic now. She'd argued with him. She hadn't argued very insistently. She's not chaotic, not yet, she knows what her alignment is, but she doesn't think there's anything in particular stopping her from ending up there. As she rifles through Élie's closet and changes into ill-fitting men's clothes, she silently grants her late husband the point. She stuffs her own clothes and the letter in her pack, and then walks out of the room, trying very very hard not to call attention to herself. No one stops her. She's not sure whether that's because they haven't happened to look very closely.

She arrives at the Temple of the All-Seeing Eye just as the sun is sinking out of view. There are still wizards around; mid-circle wizards keep long hours. She asks around about whether there's a scrying mirror that someone might let her use for an hour, for a fee. She hopes her voice isn't too obviously feminine, and also hopes that no one thinks about how weird it is for a man young enough to have her voice to also be powerful enough to cast fourth-circle spells. They do, in fact, have a mirror that isn't in use, so she pays the temple staff and then tries very hard to calm herself down enough to complete the casting of the spell.

(Élie has a good will save. It might not work. But it seems like the thing to try, if she isn't very sure what sort of thing might have gone wrong.)

Élie has a good will save. He also has Detect Scrying. 

His head's still fuzzy when it hits him. There's a brief mental wrestling match – which he wins, he thinks, and his vision opens up to an image of Naima, pacing over a mirror, and a vague pull to the south and east. When the scry resolves half a moment later, he lets it. 

He's alone in a small, dark room. The walls and the floor and the ceiling are made of overlapping wooden slats, there's an unstrung hammock and a coil of rope in one corner and the whole affair seems to be bobbing up and down. A ship, maybe. He's been gagged. It's hard to make out details – there's really almost no light – but the way his arms are twisted behind his back doesn't look especially natural. 

- well, she feels a lot less stupid now, but it turns out that actually that is absolutely no comfort at all in this situation. 

Most scries aren't high-quality enough to send messages through, but she figures she has to try.

"This is Naima," she whispers. "Do you know where you are?"

His eyes get a little wider.

He starts to nod – pauses – because he's an idiot and she can obviously see that he's on a boat. A boat headed north and west of Sothis. He nodes again, more cautiously. 

He doesn't know where he is, exactly, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out where he's going. 

Gaaah she wishes she could do something. Can't help him until she knows more about what's going on. "Do you know who kidnapped you?"

Nods. Maybe she searched his rooms. Maybe she found the letter. Maybe there's a better way to communicate, this is ridiculous, next time he gets kidnapped he's going to invent some kind of code with nodding and blinking.

She pulls the letter out of her pack. "Was it Charles-Alexandre Altan de Tarne-Morgayn?"

(Gonna feel stupid if the letter was entirely unrelated but that is not the point right now.)

Nodnodnod. 

"Okay. Um. - cardinal directions." If he knows where he is then she can ask if it's north of Sothis, and then whether it's east, and then if it's not east - "Is the ship bound for Cheliax?"

shiver. nod. 

"Okay." It is not really okay. Think. Probably not possible to catch the ship - perhaps if there were some spell that could turn her into a bird for hours, but she's not going to figure something like that out before the ship has made it to its destination - and she still doesn't know where that destination is, Cheliax is big - she would need to find information about what ship it was - or maybe figure out where they are once they get there, but by then it'll be in Cheliax, and at that point there's very little to stop them from maledictioning him, those are the stakes here -

"Do you know - do you know when the ship left Osirion." If he does she can follow up and determine whether it was yesterday or earlier today, and whether it was morning, midday, evening, or late at night.

Well. He knows when he was kidnapped. Early evening.  He isn't sure how long he was unconscious, or if the ship had already left he woke up there – 

Think. This is a big ship – at least it's big enough to hide him. They wouldn't want to stand out. And ships don't typically leave port after dark if it can possibly be avoided. They'd have waited for the tide to go out, not that he has any idea when that is, maybe Naima does, but sometime this morning anyway.

Nod. 

Well, if the ship left this morning that's something to go on, anyway. "It can't be very far away. We have a little bit of time to figure something out. I can go to the church and see if they have shipping records that they're willing to disclose. Probably Shawil can help." If she can find Shawil. They haven't been in contact for the past few weeks. And it's night, now, and she's wearing men's clothes, and even if the relevant temple is open at this hour, going there in men's clothes is a great way to get herself detained and make sure nobody is willing to listen to her afterward - 

"We'll figure something out, okay? I'll get the others and we'll figure out how to get you out of there before you get to Cheliax."

Nod. 

You can't teleport to a moving target. Overland Flight is a fifth circle spell, and even then it'd take a day and a night just to catch up. They might be able to charter a faster ship but he can't imagine what captain would be willing to risk his vessel against some unknown number of diabolists. If they can find out if the ship is bound for Westcrown or Corentyn or Ostenso – it probably still wouldn't be worth it to rescue him from his own stupid mistake. 

"Well."

If she were him she would probably want - more reassurances that things are going to be okay.

She is not very good at giving reassurances that things are going to be okay.

"Do you want me to keep talking until the scry runs out?"

Nod. 

"Okay.

"We're going to figure something out. I don't think the Church of Abadar is likely to be very helpful until morning," in large part because she's a woman, "but I'm at the temple of the All-Seeing Eye right now, and - it's possible that someone here has some ideas for how one might catch a moving ship? I'm not thinking of anything obvious on twenty seconds of thought, but there are a lot of things I haven't heard of. It's not like this is likely to be a problem that nobody's ever had before. I'm trying to think whether there's a way to leverage talking to animals - there probably is, if I can find ones smart enough to execute a plan - and we have time to catch up, if I can think of something before you get much further out - "

Sigh. This is probably not comforting at all.

"I will figure something out. We are not going to let you go to Hell. Okay?"

The Nethysite priests might be able to think of something, but he's not optimistic. If there was a convenient way for a wizard to catch a moving ship they'd have figured it out ten years ago and naval warfare would look very different. Malediction is fourth circle. It's cheap. It's the obvious thing to do. Naima is telling him a white lie because she doesn't want him to be afraid. He has no reason to believe her. 

But somehow, to his own surprise, he finds that he does. 

She would probably be more uncertain about whether she could pull this off if she didn't expect uncertainty to get in the way, but failure is unacceptable, and she is not willing to do anything that might make it harder to succeed.

"Are you hurt?" she asks, even though there is nothing she can do about it and it is not really relevant to any plan she could possibly come up with. She can't really think of anything else to say. And she wants to know.

He ...honestly had not thought about it. Too much else on his mind. Now that it's salient, sure, one of his arms feels out of joint and he thinks his wrists are bleeding. Nothing serious. He shakes his head, because, absurdly, given the givens, he doesn't want her to worry. 

" - good. That's good. I assume you're not very comfortable, but - just hang on for a few days." She doesn't actually know how long it takes to get to Westcrown or Corentyn or Ostenso. She should be planning as if it's Ostenso. But it's still - she's got to have at least a few days.

"We'll get there as soon as we can."

He knows she will. He doesn't need to say that that could easily be too late. 

The scry cuts out. She stares at her blank scrying mirror for a few seconds.

The ship left between eight and fifteen hours ago. That is close enough to catch, perhaps, if a fast enough method of transit can be found. It may very well not be close enough to catch in the morning, if the destination is Ostenso. Ostenso is not so very far away. Four days, maybe. Could be five. That doesn't leave very much time to catch up, and the distance she would have to make up is increasing every minute.

She needs a sending. Two sendings. Needs to get the rest of the group together. Needs to think, needs to come up with a method  that might work, the priests of Nethys will not respect her enough to help if she can't even demonstrate having thoughts. She will need to buy a scroll of teleport. The hard part is going to be getting close enough to Élie to teleport him back to Sothis. She can't just teleport onto the ship, because it's moving, and there is a very great chance that the spell will simply fail, even if she's scrying the place she wants to go at the same time. She will have to find another way.

She could try to talk some dolphins into catching up to the ship, and then tell the dolphins to stop just ahead, and scry one of the dolphins, and teleport to the dolphins, at which point she can turn into a dragonfly and fly to where Élie is. - this is not going to work, because even if she could convince dolphins to help her, and even if they were fast enough, they wouldn't know what direction to go in; dolphins don't understand human things like which of the many settlements on the Inner Sea she means when she talks about Ostenso. It might not even be Ostenso, and if she gets stuck in the middle of the ocean with no ship to catch, then she and Élie are dead, and that's no help to anyone at all.

She could buy a cloak of the manta ray, if one exists in this city, although she'd probably have to pawn her headband for a heartbreaking price to make it work, especially if the Church of Abadar won't let her take that much out of her accounts without Shawil, and especially if they refuse to do business with her at night. She has no idea whether manta rays are faster than dolphins (perhaps she could catch up if she didn't sleep? but ships don't sleep, it's still a question of relative speeds - ), and also no idea why she would think herself better at directions than the dolphins would be. If she ends up off course by even a little bit, then she might not be able to find the ship before it reaches Cheliax, and then what is she going to do - 

She might be able to scry Felix. It is possible that Felix followed - he certainly didn't come get her, although of course it's also possible that Felix did not escape at all and is now dead - and it is possible that he can be communicated with, and it is possible that he can be convinced to stand still long enough for her to teleport to him, although Felix is not a water bird and she's not even sure if he can rest on the surface of the water like a duck. Maybe he would immediately drown, and you can't scry a drowned bird, now, can you.

She wonders whether that's enough ideas to demonstrate to a priest of Nethys that she isn't a complete idiot. 

She could ask Nefreti Clepati for input. Nefreti Clepati is very old and very powerful and presumably very busy, but people say that she knows almost everything, and there can't be very much harm in asking, can there, it's not like 'I'm trying to keep my adventuring companion from unjustly going to Hell via Chelish execution' is a laughably petty reason -

She considers whether she should change clothes first, and ultimately decides that it is more respectful to break the law openly, because you think that you have a very good reason, than to break the law in a way that suggests you think yourself clever enough to get away with it. (The clerics of Nethys are, in any case, presumably somewhat less likely to immediately hand her over to the authorities than the clerics of Abadar would be, at least as long as she can demonstrate that she has a difficult problem to solve and is looking to solve it with creative application of magic.) She finds a closet and changes back into her own clothes, then circles around to the other side of the temple to ask for help, in case any of the wizards on the first side immediately recognize and report her.

She would like to know whether anybody here has two sendings left, and also whether it is true that Nefreti Clepati knows almost everything, and if so, how much it costs to have two minutes of her time within the next hour.

They'll have two Sendings at dawn but the person at the entrance doesn't know if they have them now, it being the middle of the night. They do have scrolls if she wants those, at the usual price which is 900.

It is true that Nefreti Clepati knows almost everything. She might be doing magic research or magic item design right now and therefore not interruptible but if she's not it is a thousand gold in a donation to the temple, typically.

She can't pay for scrolls and an audience with the money she has on her. Is there a way to determine whether anyone in the temple has a Sending left. Can she be pointed in the direction of the people who might have those. Also is there any way to make this happen faster, her adventuring companion has been kidnapped and she is trying to get to him before his kidnappers have the means to hit him with a Malediction spell.

He looks sympathetic but also like he thinks that's kind of how adventuring goes. "I'll ask around. Wait here, please."

He is probably right that that's how adventuring goes, but you are supposed to also have people who will try to get you back.

She can wait. Impatiently. She can console herself about the wasted time by thinking about what she's going to do if she fails to catch the ship. (Teleport to whatever port they're going to? But she's never seen any of the Chelish cities and doesn't know anybody in them who she could scry - and even if she could get to one she'd have to find Élie, and they're not going to keep him alive for very long, and even if she could get to the port ahead of time she'd need to - maybe if she could determine what ship it was before they unloaded things - and somehow avoid being spotted by the Chelish authorities at the same time, although she supposes there are probably people in Cheliax who look about like her, if she could fix her clothing - )

He isn't gone all that long. "Nefreti'll see you, come back and pay later, it's up the stairs."

Oh, thank - Nethys, she supposes. She can pay almost anything if she has time. She nods and thanks him and heads up the stairs.

It is several hundred steps, winding elaborately around the whole interior of the dome of the temple, up to an imposing set of double doors, done in glass and gold but utterly opaque.

"That's her," the assistant says, and escapes back down the stairs.

- well, no sense putting it off. She tells herself that paying customers are not impositions, and she is going to pay, so she is not being an imposition. If she were not welcome the price would be higher.

She pushes through the double doors and kneels as soon as she's clear of them. 

"I thought you were in a hurry? Come on, come on, what should the Sending say -"

She takes half a second to laugh in something between stress and relief. "'Elie kidnapped by Chelish agents. Kidnappers' ship left Sothis for Cheliax this morning. Danger of malediction. Come immediately. Meet Naima at the All-Seeing Eye.' One to Inquisitor Shawil of the Church of Abadar, and one to Catherine Marianne Euphemia Aspexia de Litran."

It's a ten minute casting time; she starts spinning it up between her fingers. "Was that all?"

"I - am not immediately thinking of ways to reach the ship before it reaches Cheliax. I was also wondering if you had - ideas. It would have left between eight and fifteen hours ago. I thought of some things but none of them seemed likely to work, and much less likely to work in the morning - "

"You could turn into a kraken and capsize it! You could, hmmm, open a Gate at the bow and swallow the whole ship with it, if it were a small ship. You could turn a big chunk of the Inner Sea into rock. If you do not know where in the sea the ship was, you could turn the whole sea into rock, but that would be rude, the pharaoh would come and say, Nefreti, put it back, people were using that, now they will starve, and you would say, Aroden did it, and he would say, not the whole thing! And how well did that turn out, anyway, mmmmm. I guess if you did it he would say Naima put it back, not Nefreti put it back. You could ride in on a flying carpet, singing a song. You could ask a genie for a Wish - goes well with the carpet, actually -"

Wow all of those are utterly worthless. She's torn between being delighted by the list and feeling guilty for being delighted because she should be focusing on what to do.

"Do you have any ideas that a fourth-circle arcane caster with about ten thousand gold to spend on assistance might be capable of pulling off in the next three days. I was thinking a dolphin or a manta ray might be fast enough to catch the ship, but I don't know that they can tell directions effectively enough, even if I knew which port they were sailing to, and catching up to the ship at all becomes less plausible every hour. I was thinking that if I were lucky enough that his familiar had followed him, then maybe I could convince the bird to sit still in the water, and I could use a scroll to teleport to the bird, but it's not a water bird, and I'm concerned that the bird would drown immediately and then I wouldn't be able to scry it. I suppose I could teleport directly to the port, if I could find someone who had ever been to Corentyn or Westcrown or Ostenso or wherever they're taking him, and then lie in wait for the ship while trying to avoid detection by the Chelish authorities, and turn into a dragonfly when it lands and sneak on board and hopefully turn back into a person who can teleport him out before they bring out whoever they plan to have kill him - ?"

"You say, Nefreti, I can't do those things, I say you can do those things, who is probably right? I don't see how to do small things that barely leave a ripple. If they don't leave a ripple how would I see them?"

"I - suppose that makes sense. I'm not - entirely sure what you mean about me being able to do those things. I suppose I could use a scroll for some of them, but I'm not actually any good with scrolls, and I'm not sure I've even heard of the spells that would be necessary for half of those anyway - "

Probably it is hopelessly arrogant to argue with Nefreti Clepati, whoops. Maybe this is like the Irorite thing where if you were strong enough you could do anything and then you wouldn't have any problems anymore, and if you're not strong enough yet then that can't possibly be anybody's fault but yours.

" - but, um, thank you."

"It is possible that you cannot do those things right now," she agrees, "and would need it to stop being right now, so you could do them. And you are very accustomed to it being right now and haven't tried it being some other time at all."

She finishes the Sending. "Elie kidnapped by Chelish agents. Kidnappers' ship left Sothis for Cheliax this morning. Danger of malediction. Come immediately. Meet Naima at the All-Seeing Eye," she says solemnly, and the magic slips out of each hand like smoke.

She bows. "Thank you." Pause. " - did it get a response - ?"

"It got two responses, since there were multiple recipients."

"That is - very impressive. May I hear what they were."

"The girl said 'On ship bound for Cassomir, won't land for three days, will look for teleport there, update me then but don't wait for me, no time'. The boy said 'acknowledged, will try'." 

" - oh. Okay. That's - not ideal, at all, but a very good thing to know when planning." She'll have to figure something out alone. Somehow. "Thank you for your time."

Wave. "I'll see you when you have learned more things. You'll pay the temple by the first of Neth."

"Yes ma'am, I will."

She can let herself out, then. And - think. She feels like she did in fact learn something, but like whatever she learned was probably not relevant to rescuing Elie at all. If she'd had to pay up front she might be upset with herself about that, but she didn't, so it's fine, really. She'll make it all up in a week or two, if she survives whatever plan she comes up with.

She turns it over and over in her head. She can't think of a way to navigate the ocean effectively enough to catch the ship, no matter what method of catching up she tries, and she probably won't be able to tell what port the ship is going to until morning, at which point catching up will be a lost cause. Catherine almost definitely can't make it in time, and whatever is going on with Shawil right now, he certainly can't be relied on. So - 

She has to determine what port it is. It will not be safe to do this until morning, if she doesn't want to get arrested (and she doesn't know exactly how she would go about ceasing to be arrested, not having any available male family members who can interface with the legal system for her). That means - she should refine the plan in which she teleports to the relevant port city, finds Elie before he can be unloaded and executed, and then teleports out. She will need to find someone who can teleport to the city in question. She will need to think of a way to avoid detection while she's there. Maybe she can get some Chelish clothes and sit and watch the docks while looking like an old woman? That sounds risky, but she doesn't have a better idea. And then when the ship comes in she can turn into a dragonfly and fly out to meet it, and search for Elie while she's still a bug, and hopefully find him before the ship even lands, and then as soon as she falls out of dragonfly form she should be able to teleport both of them back to Sothis.

Hopefully.

She hopes she's able to get into her accounts. She's never tried to withdraw money without Shawil there, and it's a lot of money, and - well, she has to try. 

She feels kind of bad about leaving Rahim with the church all night. She doesn't think anything bad will happen to him, but it's - not being a good mother. But sometimes other things are more important than being a perfect mother. She'll come get him after. She also feels kind of bad about leaving Wishbone alone all night, but Wishbone will understand, probably.

She spends the night at the temple, praying to Nethys and thinking about refinements to her plan. Shawil does not show up. At first light she heads home, prepares her spells, and then heads off to the temple of Abadar, where she will wait in line and then ask the person at the desk whether they know where she would be able to get records of which ships have left the harbor in the past day.

The priest on duty seems confused by not overtly hostile. "...is your husband a merchant?" 

"I believe a member of my adventuring party has been kidnapped. We have in the past worked with Inquisitor Shawil, and were responsible for bringing back evidence of Lamasara's attack on the western border. Ordinarily I would go through the Inquisitor for matters relating to the Church, but I believe he is on official business and cannot return to Sothis at this time."

The priest looks a little dazed. The war with Thuvia was big news even in Sothis. And he certainly doesn't want to give an Inquisitor any reason to believe he's inconvenienced one of his associates. 

"Our shipping records are for insurance purposes. They're not chronological, they're organized by destination and cargo type, but they should have dates of departure and expected return. If you'll follow me – ?" 

"Thank you." And she can follow. Probably there are a lot of ships, and relatedly a lot of records, but she can narrow it down to a handful of ports. One ship left for Ostenso yesterday. She checks the Westcrown and Corentyn piles, too, just in case, but no ships left for those places yesterday, and she doesn't think he's at all likely to be going past Corentyn. The kidnappers' ship will reach Ostenso in approximately three days, but it could be slower or faster depending on the weather, so if she wants to reach Elie before he leaves the ship, she should be expecting that she has about two. She jots down the name and distinguishing features. 

It's almost easy, apart from taking the entire morning. Now she just needs enough money to buy - two teleport scrolls and two teleports, ideally, because she has to pay someone to take her to Ostenso, and she doesn't want to risk buying one scroll and messing it up badly enough that the teleport doesn't work at all, under these conditions, even if the risk of that is relatively small.

She returns to the priest and asks him if she can make a withdrawal from her account.

The lady adventurer with the Inquisitor friend can absolutely make a withdrawal from her account. He's certainly not going to stop her. 

Excellent. She'll be taking all but a thousand of it out, now. (The last thousand can stay for taking care of Rahim, in case - well.) This should just barely cover the expenses of this operation.

She spends the afternoon looking for someone to teleport her to Ostenso, figuring that a wizard is going to need at least a day of advance warning, and that she needs a lot less lead time to pick up the scrolls. She doesn't find a wizard who's been to Ostenso, but she does get an address of one who might have been there, once. She can follow up on him in the morning and hope that he's willing to help her with this. 

With about an hour and a half left before sunset, she starts working on scrying Elie again, hoping that she can communicate the plan to him. She doesn't want him to panic when he nears land. And - if she were him she'd want to hear a friendly voice.

He hasn't moved at all, really, since the last scry. If he can sense her, he's not reacting. 

Well, that's - kind of to be expected, under the circumstances.

"This is Naima. Can you hear me?"

No response. 

Darn. 

Well. She doesn't have enough money to pay for a Sending, but she does have one more day to try contacting him. Maybe it'll work.

She checks the scrolls at the temple of the All-Seeing Eye before she leaves. They have exactly one teleport. They also have a scroll of Merge with Familiar, which it occurs to her she might need, if she doesn't have a better idea for getting onto the ship than sneaking on as a dragonfly. She doesn't technically need to bring her familiar at all, but if something weird happens and she gets stuck in Cheliax, she would very much like to have the theoretical ability to prepare more spells. She buys it, and heads home, and spends half the night doing the bizarre ritual where she burns the scroll and feeds the ashes to her dog. 

She goes to sleep. She can't even halfheartedly pretend that she's trying not to worry.

He's thinking about Naima. He hopes she comes. He hopes she doesn't. Ostenso isn't safe. If she tries to rescue him, they could easily both be damned, and that's not a risk anyone should run, least of all for him. He walked right into this. He should have known the letter was a trap. Charles-Alexandre would never turn to him for help – still blames him for his brother and sister – not that he doesn't blame himself. He barely remembers the day Gérard and Eugénie were tried – there were so many trials that last terrible year in Galt, and all of them almost exactly the same. He's sure he wouldn't have spoken against them if he hadn't sincerely believed them to be Chelish agents. He has no idea what he believes, now.  

He might as well be brutally honest (he's had very little else to do for the past twenty-four hours). He'd known he was walking into a trap. He could have done responsible thing and burned the letter, or given it to Shawil to investigate. But Gérard and Eugénie are dead, and can't be resurrected, and he'd been frightened of himself when he learned how easily he could forget about the people he'd killed, and he felt he owed something to their brother. 

And that brings him back to Naima, because this is really between him and Charles-Alexandre, and whatever happens, he should be willing to face it on his own. He doesn't want her to risk her immortal soul just because he's been a blind sentimental idiot. He doesn't want to die. 

She starts counting up the days again as soon as she wakes up. It's four days to Ostenso, and today will be the third day, which means - she'll very probably make it there first, if she leaves first thing tomorrow, but she doesn't know how precisele the four day number is, or whether sometimes it's just under that, whether the ship might arrive at night, if the winds carry it just so.

She knocks on the wizard's door at dawn, without having prepared her own spells. She acknowledges to his staff that she's aware that it's terribly rude to come at this hour, but she needs to see the wizard immediately. She is insistent. She might come off as slightly hysterical. It takes a little while to be let in to see him.

He keeps slightly different hours than she does, and has already finished preparing his own spells. No teleports. He has some hesitations about teleporting her to Ostenso - it's a dangerous place, after all, and most people don't want to be involved in a criminal plot in Cheliax - but eventually she convinces him that a member of her adventuring party is depending on her, and, well, he must have had adventuring companions in his own youth, before he decided to settle down and live off of the occasional teleport. He agrees to take her first thing in the morning, for the price of two teleports.

She spends the rest of the day looking through every magic shop in the city for a second teleport scroll. There happen not to be any. You can do the job with one, of course, but it's riskier, and she hates to take any risks, under these conditions. Asking wizards to make one is useless, now; teleport is a fifth-circle spell, and it takes two days of work to make a scroll of it. There is not time. She doesn't like her odds, here, but - she told Elie that she would come for him. That's what you do, when adventuring companions get taken by some threat. Even at risk to yourself.

She tries again to scry him. Once again, she isn't able to send messages. She hates that - he's going to notice the ship approaching shore and not know that she's working on coming for him - but she wasn't scrupulous about making it home by sunset, specifically because she wanted to scry him, and she is not in a position to try other temples for an unused Sending.

She goes home and sleeps. She wakes up at midnight and prepares her spells. And a few minutes after dawn, the wizard teleports her just outside of Ostenso. He is gone in another moment. She is alone in Cheliax with her familiar. She takes her headscarf down, spells herself to look like an old woman, and walks up the beach to the docks, where she checks the ships that are already here. None of them are his. He is not here yet. She is not too late.

She sits down on the shore and looks out at the water, waiting with one hand on her spell component pouch, hoping that nobody notices her.

He can feel it when the ship drops anchor. 

He wishes, not for the first time, that he could have been a martyr. Dying bravely for the revolution is one thing; dying stupidly for an aristocrat's revenge is quite another. What's really galling is that Charles-Alexandre isn't even wrong to blame him. He'd always imagined himself going bravely to his execution, head held high and spitting defiance. He can't even feel superior about this. It's a shame. 

He feels very small. It's not necessarily a bad thing. He is proud, bitter, mildly annoyed that in the grand scheme of things his death won't even matter. Soon – and in the grand scheme of things, a century or five or six is soon – his soul will be ground up into nothing recognizable. There's no point worrying about that distant other being just because it has some continuity with him. He thinks there's nothing in him that Asmodeus could use; he's always been proud of that, at least. 

He is – calmer than he expected, really. After four days – he thinks – with no sense of time, with the same thoughts turning over and over and over in his brain, it's a relief to have anything happen at all. Besides, there's a kind of clarity that comes with knowing that at any moment one might be damned to hell. One could live like that for years – he'd done it, and done some his best writing that way. It's the certainty of purpose, the conviction that accretes and strengthens when at every moment one is forced to consider that there is something greater than one's immortal soul. 

They come down, and blindfold him, and lead him to the deck. 

It's taken her longer than she had hoped to determine that the ship coming up towards shore is definitely the one she's waiting for. When she's sure, it's already closer than she wanted it to be, and she wonders whether she has enough time to get Elie out before the ship makes it to shore.

There's no time to come up with another plan, though. She merges with Wishbone (doesn't need to call him; he's seen the ship and come to her on his own). She looks around for a moment, doesn't see anyone immediately and obviously looking at her, and then turns herself into a dragonfly.

The spell lasts seven minutes. She doesn't know how to dismiss it before that; she'll have to wait it out and hope that seven minutes is not too late (or too early). She flits out over the ocean towards the ship.

Dragonflies can see incredibly well, for insects, but they're not as good at making out the specifics of faces. She figures that she can probably still recognize a man who's tied up. And she does, eventually, after a few minutes of searching the ship. But by the time she notices him, he isn't alone; someone has come in to move him.

Seven minutes. Maybe two or three left. She is so tempted to fly up to him and so afraid that that will get her noticed by someone else. She hangs back and follows them up to the deck. She'll be instantly exposed to everyone up here as soon as her transformation wears off. She'll want to be very close to him, she supposes, and ready to teleport right away.

She flits forward and lands on Elie's hand, the first time she thinks she can do it without his guards noticing. She doesn't know whether he'll have any idea what this means. But at least she'll be right where she needs to be when the spell wears off, in - it could happen any second now, really -

he does not let himself dare hope 

She wishes she could count down and prepare for it and she can't, she just has to hope that nobody notices her and wait as the seconds drag on and on and on and on and the ship makes noises that her dragonfly senses can't interpret but that she imagines must have something to do with being at their destination and all but ready to disembark -

- she tries her best to take inventory of how many people are how close to her, so that at least she doesn't have to spend a precious half a second figuring that out when she's herself again - 

He can't see. There are two men holding him and he thinks he can feel a knife at his throat, which is smart, that's how he'd do it, and then someone else reaches out and touches him and speaks a phrase he recognizes from a dozen public executions and he's not sure if he suddenly feels filthy because that's what Malediction does or if it's all in his head or if that's even a meaningful distinction for a spell which acts directly on the soul – 

And the dragonfly on his hand transforms into a person, which hopefully startles the person with the knife more than it startles her.

She doesn't stop to ask questions. She takes half a step to position herself so that she can get both the man with the knife and the man with a pentagram tunic, behind him, and then she runs a lighting bolt through both.

Well, he's gawping like a dead fish, which is probably insulting and she should get ahold of himself, of course she came, and he's just standing here like a useless lump – 

Stop. Think. Malediction lasts for one minute (and isn't it remarkable how much thinking you can get done under that kind of pressure), presumably Naima has some kind of an exit strategy, all he has to do is not get himself killed for about fifty-six seconds – 

One of the men behind him is still standing. He kicks as hard as he can – it's an awkward angle – and dives in the general direction the lightning seems to be coming from. 

The guy with the knife has crumpled, which leaves the one Elie kicked and the one who she's pretty sure just cast malediction, which makes him - at least as powerful as she is, and she can't say which of them is better prepared for this. 

The other guy is going for his unholy symbol. Because he's a cleric. An evil cleric who can channel negative energy. Right. Okay. She is suddenly pretty sure that she's not the one better prepared for this. 

She lightning bolts him again, in the hope that she can stop him before he presents his unholy symbol. This does not actually stop him, and in the next second she's both out of lighting bolts and very, very, very tired, like the life is being drained out of her. Which - is what's happening, actually.

The guy Elie kicked falls over. He is quite possibly dead.

There's nobody holding him – he stumbles, blindly, into a person he hopes past hope is Naima – 

She's pulling out the scroll and in the middle of casting teleport, because she can see the cleric working on channeling energy again, and she's not at all sure she'll survive it, and much much much less sure that Elie will - 

- she reaches out for him, because she is not expecting to be tackled, which is what actually happens - and she would be kind of embarrassed about that, if every other element of this situation weren't infinitely more important - 

- she tries to hold Sothis very firmly in her mind, and tries to keep her balance, and can't -

When they both hit the ground there are trees above them. Rainforest trees, with brightly colored birds sitting in them.

She is so tired.

She can't really think of any great things to say about this situation. It's not a great situation. After a moment, she sits him up as gently as she can, and undoes the gag and then the blindfold.

He's not dead and this doesn't look like Cheliax. He'll take it. 

He needs to concentrate – his spellbook is in the ethereal plane, where he left it, he needs it now – but he can't seem to string two thoughts together. 

Well. She supposes she should heal him. Probably won't take care of all of the negative energy damage, but she can get him most of the way better. Physically, anyway. She reaches out and does that.

"I'm sorry that took so long. I tried to contact you about how it was going to have to be at Ostenso, but - " This is probably a stupid thing to be babbling about. "I don't - I think this must be the Mwangi Expanse. Probably."

"Don't – you have nothing to apologize for. I was an idiot and you would have been well within your rights to leave me to face the very predictable consequences of my actions." 

and, after a moment – 

"Thank you for saving me anyway." 

- nod. "Of course. Uh. You're welcome.

"I have to say that this is not looking like a particularly great rescue attempt right now, though. I guess - it's not Hell. So."

"It's not hell and you are seriously underselling yourself."

- well that makes her feel a little bit better, even if they are still stuck in the Mwangi Expanse and probably going to die horribly within the week.

"Well. I suppose that's at least a partial success. But I don't actually have another teleport. - I guess I should see if I can get those cuffs off."

"Right, that – " He'd forgotten about them, actually, not being in hell is still really exciting"– I don't know the first thing about picking locks. Do these even have a lock? I can't see. They're nearly impossible to break, though, I've tried." If they can't get the shackles off he might have to get out of the Mwangi expanse on foot with no magic, and under ordinary circumstances he'd be more worried about that, but, hey, if they get killed by dinosaurs or lions of the gorilla king or whatever else they've got here he won't be going to hell so it's hard to get too worked up. 

"They have a lock, yeah. Probably not an easy one, but - we'll see what we can do." And she can start fiddling with that, and hoping they don't explode.

"Have they fed you in the last four days - "

Naima is wonderful. Of course Naima can pick locks. He doesn't understand why Naima seems so concerned, everything is perfect, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, the birds are probably weird flesh-eating Mwangi expanse birds with teeth, isn't that fascinating, he's so lucky to be alive. 

"Yes, I definitely remember eating something at some point." 

"Well, that's good, anyway, I have a little food, but not a lot - I guess we can always detect poison on things, which probably makes gathering somewhat easier."

She's trying very hard to keep her voice steady. She doesn't want to look upset right now. There are lots of ways in which this situation is a much much better one than the one they were in a minute ago. It doesn't really make any sense to be upset that she didn't get the most ideal possible outcome. It's not like she regrets this choice. It was the right choice. Even if it kills them.

She takes a momentary break from fiddling with the lock to wipe her eyes, and vaguely hopes that Elie doesn't notice.

Oh, no, Naima seems sad. He doesn't want her to be sad. He doesn't want anyone in the world to be sad right now but it seems especially tragic if it's Naima. 

"You know, I've always wanted to visit the Mwangi expanse and just never got around to it. Once I have my spellbook I can get us phantom steeds, and then we just need to figure out which way is east. It can't be far – the wizard you brought the teleport scroll from, what circle was he?" 

"East is easy enough, you just figure out which way the sun is going. I think it's the basic fifth-circle version - which I guess means we must be pretty far to the north of the Expanse, there isn't that much of it that's within nine hundred miles of Ostenso. I don't think - it's surrounded by the Barrier Wall, right, so I'm not sure it's possible to hike straight east - I guess maybe we could fly over, but I bet they're too wide to fly over in one day, and I don't know if there's any food in them.

"I guess if we can't take the mountains we'd go south. Take the Ndele Gap into Nex, Nex is - fundamentally civilized territory, right - "

"We've been to Quantium, and everyone there was hospitable enough. The rest of it – well, all we need to do is find the river, what's it called, there's bound to be a town where we can charter a boat. I'm not worried about Nex."

He is a little worried about getting out of the Mwangi expanse, but it can't be half as hard as everything else they've done today. Mostly Naima; he sort of just flailed. 

" - right. Okay. So if we can find the Barrier Wall, which has gotta be east of here, and follow it south until we find the gap, that should eventually lead us to the Elemion, and we can follow that east until we come out at Quantium, and - easy enough to pay for passage back to Sothis, then. That's a plan. And all we have to do is not starve or get eaten or die of some kind of rare tropical disease before we can manage it.

"I'm sorry this is taking so long," she says, going back to messing with the handcuffs.

"It's alright. I'm sure they're very fancy and expensive. We can probably sell them in Quantium, actually, make a neat profit." 

"Pff. Yeah. I guess you wouldn't make a set of shackles with a bunch of fancy magic enchantments on them and then put a lousy mundane lock on them."

She can't think of much to say for the next few minutes. And then, eventually, when she feels like she's taken kind of a ridiculous amount of time to admit this to herself -

"I'm - not actually sure that I can get these off."

"Oh."

"....that's alright. You should break my hands." 

" - I'm not that sure. ...yet."

"Well, take your time with it. We're not in any hurry. And if worst comes to worst we have the option. ....Should probably wait until tomorrow, though, so you can heal me after." 

" - yeah, I guess that should help. But I'm not actually certain what the limits of cure spells are, I know they can't do broken bones - I guess it's possible that other than that the only thing that matters is that all the flesh be there, although - that's not quite right, if you ruin an organ badly enough then you need a regenerate to fix it, and - I guess if we get back to civilization then we can always buy you a regenerate? But I'm not sure - I can't predict exactly how badly they'd be mangled, while we're out here, whether you'd be able to cast anything with them - "

"We can probably get away with dislocating most of the joints. I don't mind paying for a regenerate, and even if my hands are unusable for the next few days, I can always prepare my spells as still spells, that only costs me a circle – and my dimensions don't have a somatic component at all, it'd be worth it for that alone."  

Nervous half-laugh. "I guess. If that's what you'd rather. We can try it tomorrow when I have my healing back. And - see if we can think of anything else in the meantime."

Right now she is busy thinking about how if he were her brother she would hug him, probably for a long time. Probably for however long it took her to calm down about having been half a second away from failing to keep him from going to hell, and about being stuck hundreds of miles from any kind of real civilization. But they are hundreds of miles from civilization, which is about as alone as two people can possibly be, and she is uncomfortably aware that he is really really really not her brother. When they return to civilization she will probably have to be able to give an account of every kind of contact that happened between them, and if she wants anyone else to consider her - which she's not sure she does, but he seemed to think she should, so - she will have to be able to make that account sound as responsible as humanly possible.

This feels much more unfair than it usually does, right now. But it's the sort of situation where sloppiness is least tolerable, so she supposes that she'll just have to be very quietly grumpy about it.

Well. "I'm glad you're - safe seems like a very large exaggeration right now, but - "

"Infinitely safer than I was this morning, and you say that like it isn't all thanks to you." It's getting darker, and it's so uncomfortable to sleep with one's hands tied behind one's back. Ah, well, he's had infinitely bigger problems. "We should get some rest. We only need two hours each, and I think we should both be awake for whatever happens around here during the night." 

" - yeah." She looks up at the trees. "I guess shelter might be too much to figure out, right now. At least the jungle shouldn't get as cold at night as the desert does. Do you need anything else first? Food? Water?"

"No, thank you, I'm alright. Right now I just want to get these off. Do you want me to take the first watch?" 

" - uh, if you'd rather. I am, uh, not entirely sure that I can sleep under these conditions at this level of tiredness? Given the birds and the humidity and the lack of anything resembling a bed." And the trying and failing not to have any particular feelings about being alone with Elie. "But I can try. I'm sure it'll work at some point."

"Or I'll take the second watch, I'm pretty tired already – I'm an idiot. They took my ring. I'm going to need a full night's rest." He seems vaguely insulted by this. "I'm sorry, I know it's not ideal. I don't like the idea of leaving you alone that long."

"Ah. I mean, it's not ideal - especially since if I have to wake you up you'll lose your spells - but I guess we just have to do the best we can with it. Maybe I should take - we don't know what condition you're gonna be in, I think, and if it'll be at least eight hours for you then it's probably better for me to have all of my spells back so I have a better chance of responding to anything that comes by?"

"Yeah. It's alright, I'll wait up. See if I can get some kind of a shelter together." 

Nod.

Well. She can try to sleep, then. It's too damp, and too dirty, and Elie is right over there having who knows what thoughts about this entire situation, but it's very important that she get to sleep if she can. She tries to think about herself being petrified, so she has to stay still, and tries her best not to think about what effect all of this is going to have on Elie's interest or lack thereof in marrying her. Maybe she will think about how many plants she can name that might live around here. That's a better line of thought.

It takes what seems like an unbearably long amount of time, but eventually she drifts off.

He makes a half-hearted attempt at putting together a lean-to, but without free hands it's pretty obviously futile, so after about half an hour he sits down and listens to the jungle and tries to stay awake. 

It's a good time to take stock. He's bone tired, now that he's actually thinking about it, sort of euphoric, sort of scared of what the others will think when they find out what happened. If the journey to Quantium doesn't kill him, Catherine might: she knew Charles-Alexandre, probably better than he did; she'd never have fallen for such an obvious trick. Shawil probably thinks it's no better than he deserves for rebelling against a lawfully appointed monarch. And Naima – 

Naima, who risked her life, traveled to Cheliax, paid gods know how much for a teleport scroll on short notice, and is now stuck in the Mwangi expanse with all sorts of dinosaurs and gorilla-kings and a useless wizard who can't even do magic, has more right to be furious with him than either of them. She doesn't seem angry now, but it might take them days to find their way out of this mess. Days where he's a drag at best and useless dead weight at worst. 

He doesn't like being weak. It's not something he likes about himself – one of the remnants of a Chelish upbringing he hasn't suppressed quite ruthlessly enough. He knows that sound, healthy, normal people don't keep a constant mental ledger of outstanding debts and unexploited weaknesses. He's pretty sure she doesn't. If he were a better person, he'd be able to silence that voice in his head, but he isn't, and he can't, and part of his brain is busy thinking of how to protect himself, settle the score, keep the tables balanced. 

She'd asked him to marry her. He'd pushed her away because he didn't want her to tie herself to the very first slightly acceptable option, the person least likely to beat her or take all her money or neglect her child. But when he thinks of the courage and resolve it must have taken to do what she did today – the idea that she might be frightened of her husband seems insane. 

He's free. He's (relatively) safe. She's probably disgusted with him, now. And as the darkness settles, that last thing seems to weigh more heavily than it should. 

When she wakes up she startles, because this is a very different place than where she last remembers being. The memories of the last couple days come back to her in the next few seconds. She's stuck in the Mwangi Expanse. She's stuck in the Mwangi Expanse with Elie. She's trying not to think about that part except insofar as it's relevant for making sure that she's - scrupulous about things. Because he might not have thought about this and she doesn't want him to feel bad about it. She doesn't have a very good sense of how far it is to the nearest gap in the mountains, but probably something like a couple hundred miles. She's not at all sure that she got enough sleep to replenish her spells, but she only needs two hours and she thinks she woke up on her own (though it's hard to tell, this place is so much noisier than little desert towns, and even noisier than Sothis is, at least at night).

Elie is going to need sleep more than she did, so she ought to have plenty of time to figure out their next few moves.

"Hey."

He looks a bit startled. "Hey. Did you get any rest?"

"Some. Anyone's guess whether it's enough to have replenished anything. I had some spells left over anyway, so we shouldn't be totally sunk either way."

"That's good. ...I think we should try to get the cuffs off now. There's no point letting me sleep a full eight hours if I won't even be able to prepare my spells at the end of it." 

She looks up at the sky, which beneath this many trees is totally devoid of information other than the fact that it's dark right now. "I don't know whether it's been long enough. Hexes reset with the day cycle, not with whether I've slept. It should work if it's after midnight, I think."

"Huh. That's fascinating – I wonder if it's midnight for all witches, the way clerics get their spells at dawn. Except I doubt all the entities capable of empowering witches are capable of making a pact about it the way the gods have, there are probably so many more of them. Does casting a hex feel different from casting a normal spell? I wonder if it's somehow more similar to divine magic – " 

He looks just about dead on his feet. 

Weak smile. "Yeah, it feels like a different sort of thing. Feels less like anything sometimes, like it's a - more naive action, or something, like how you have to learn to talk but once you know how you don't really have to try?

" - I think you should try to get a full eight hours now. We'll probably figure out how to get you out of them in the morning. And even if we don't - you'll be able to walk farther if you're not about to fall over."

"Yeah, that – that sounds like a good idea. I'll do my best. Don't want to slow you down tomorrow." 

"Mhmm. You wanna let me do the sleep hex? Because it's, uh, hard. To get to sleep here."

"I can imagine. Very loud and ...damp. Loud and damp. You know, I've never been particularly good at falling asleep, terrible thing in a wizard, used to have all kinds of trouble about it. ...I mean, yes, you should hex me." 

"Okay." Then when he's gotten as comfortable as possible, which she's very sure isn't saying much, she can hex him.

And he can sleep. 

Well.

She's tempted to spend the next eight hours moping, but not very tempted, because they're stuck in the jungle with not more than two days of full rations for a single person. She doesn't actually need to eat anymore - she'd forgotten this, momentarily, in the shock of being stuck here, since she's so used to eating anyway - but Elie does, and she needs to keep Elie alive because - she doesn't feel like she should have to have a reason for that. She is very aware that if you don't eat for long enough, you die, and that eking a living out of an unfamiliar wilderness presumably requires even more work than supporting yourself via farming does. Maybe it'll be easier if they can find any sort of decent-sized animal to kill and cook, but if they go looking for one then they might find any number of other things. 

She un-merges with Wishbone (who also needs to eat) and spends an hour getting her spells back. She lights up the forest with a cantrip, hoping that this won't draw the attention of anything she can't handle. She explores the immediate area for anything that looks food-like, and then heads a little further out, in ever-widening circles, tasking Wishbone with sitting right next to Elie and alerting her if something is wrong. She finds a lot of insects. She supposes they could probably eat insects if they had to. If she could climb, she could probably find some fruit somewhere, but the first branches are too high up and she doesn't want to waste a fly spell on it. 

It takes her a while to circle back around to thinking about what she's going to do. The first order of business is to get the handcuffs off. She tries to picture the sort of dislocation necessary for something like that, and isn't at all sure that it can be done without damaging the bones themselves. The wrist has a lot of bones in it; she will probably need to dislocate several to get them through, and the widest part of the hand is above that, which means she also has to dislocate several of his fingers, and fingers are so easy to break if they get hit with enough force, and she doesn't even know whether she's capable of applying the necessary force -

It's really very unfair that she can't just not touch him. Not touching him would be, comparatively speaking, very easy. But she has to do this stupid complex procedure that she's never done before, as quickly as possible, while also trying not to cause additional damage, and she has to hold his hands to do it, and it's stupid and she hates it and she wishes she were home. Wishes that they could go back to their previous level of awkwardly ignoring what she'd asked of him, under circumstances where she was actually able to control how much contact she had and didn't have to continuously monitor her emotions for whether they were going to make him feel guilty and powerless and horrible.

She wishes he'd said yes. But he didn't. And if he's judging her now for - pursuing what she wants even though she doesn't have the wisdom and experience necessary to make difficult or important decisions at this stage in her life, then, well, he won't be the first. And maybe he's right, maybe she does need more experience to make this decision. She definitely doesn't feel like she's thinking entirely clearly. It's - hard, to think clearly, in this situation, given all of the guard rails that are missing from it. But she will have to do her best.

When Elie wakes up, she's roasting mushrooms over a little contained fire. They're not poisonous. It's anyone's guess how much nutritional value they have. 

He's groggy and hungry and really, really done with his shoulders being stuck in this one position. 

"Morning. ....is it morning?" 

She glances at the canopy above them. "Early morning, but yeah. Should have been long enough to get your spells back, once the cuffs are off."

"Okay. Is there anything else we want to try before we go through with this?"

Sigh. "I prepared reduce person, if you wanted to try that, but I don't think it'll work."

"Yeah, there's no reason to believe they're resistant to magical effects." 

She tries it. It doesn't work. Now there is a small Élie and a dainty little set of anti-magic shackles. 

Sigh. She dismisses it.

"I don't actually know how to do this safely. This is not really something that I have ever worked with at all. Just - so we're clear. I guess you should probably have something to bite."

"Don't worry about that, there's nothing I'd be using my hands for that an unseen servant can't do and I can always get a regenerate in Quantium." He's trying to be as resolutely up-beat about this as possible without actually crossing the line into chipper because that would be disturbing. "If you use a heavy rock or something it'll be quick. Of course, I'm probably more resilient now – best to find a very heavy rock." 

"That - do you think that's the best way to do it?" She guesses that it sounds easier than trying to individually dislocate bones, but it also sounds like it'll make it totally impossible for him to use his hands in any capacity until they get to Quantium.

"I don't see how else you could. Bones are strong, it's very hard to just break them manually – I tried. On the ship. And I think I'd rather you do it all at once than breaking them one at a time."

"I guess that makes sense."

Well. She can look around for the heaviest-looking rock she saw when she was looking for food. It should be big enough to smash things pretty thoroughly.

She kind of feels like she would have a much better idea what to do if she knew more about - surgery, maybe, a surgeon would be good here - but she doesn't, and this is what Elie wants her to do, and - it's cruel of her to keep asking him how okay he is with this, really, when he is probably not very okay with it, and shouldn't have to be.

She gives him a leather strap to bite, and uses some oil from her herbalism pouch, in case that makes it easier to get his hands out after, and then - 

(Can't afford to be squeamish. Women and children are - not even that, children and Osirian women can afford to be squeamish. Adventurers and doctors cannot be.)

- she brings the rock down as hard as she can.

that hurts just about as much as you'd expect.

Yeah.

She pulls the handcuffs off - which probably hurts a lot more, since the whole point of this is being able to force his hands ways that they're absolutely not supposed to be able to go - and then she can heal him and try to figure out where they're at on the damage front.

His hands ache, and when he tries to make a fist there's a sharp, queasy pain as the shards of bone slide against each other.

He awkwardly holds out his hands. "Do you think you could help me splint them?"

"Yeah, of course."

She had somehow kind of forgotten that this was an obvious element of this plan, but it's fine, it's fine, it's fine, she knows how to splint broken bones, even if she doesn't know how to break them cleanly and has never tried to put bones back together when they're in quite this many pieces. 

She'll just... very insistently pretend to herself that they are someone else's hands. There. That's much easier to deal with.

It's a slow process, checking each bone for breaks and making splints for all of them. She doesn't say anything while she works, other than repeatedly asking whether things hurt or feel off. Easier not to have to think about talking at the same time.

This is ...it's not nice. He's in pain and it's about a hundred degrees and humid and the air is full of biting insects and they're hundreds of miles away from civilization. So he's had better days. But at the same time, it's – good, to have someone just take care of him like this. There's still the loathsome little voice in his head nagging him to find out what she really wants and how she's going to use it against him, but it's getting quieter and quieter as Naima fastens his fingers to the splints. It's painstaking, delicate work. He needs to concentrate, so he can get his spellbook, but it's hard to think straight when his bones keep stabbing him like that. His thoughts feel jumbled. He realizes that she has never, actually, touched him. He closes his eyes and thinks about a late nigh at the hospital in Sothis, going over their research notes, and what it would feel like if she reached out and took his hands. 

She is trying really really hard not to think about this being the same kind of thing as any other kind of touching, because if it were the same thing she might have to have feelings about it, and she does not feel like having feelings would be very good for her ability to focus on splinting things.

When she's done she lets go just a little bit suspiciously suddenly, because she really really really doesn't want to accidentally cross over into accidentally doing the sort of handholding that she would probably have to have some kind of feelings about.

"I think that should hold them. You'll want to avoid using them as much as you can, of course. I can try healing them again tomorrow. I'm not sure it'll do anything for the bones, but maybe we can at least keep the swelling down."

"Okay. Then – I'm going to try recalling my spellbook now."

He holds very still and tries to concentrate until he can block out the heat and the bugs and Naima sitting right there in front of him until the outline of a book appears in his lap and slowly solidifies. 

"....I'm going to need your help turning the pages." 

"...right, no unseen servant until you've prepared it. I can do that."

"Thanks." It feels strangely intimate to have someone else handling his spellbook – as if she could reach past his skin and touch his own material soul. Not – bad, exactly, but not comfortable either. He's hyperaware of her movements. 

"We should go through and see what's on your list –  they took my spell component pouch." 

"Right. I don't write mine down, but - you can tell me what you have and I can tell you which of them I have. If that works for you."

She expects that preparing spells is something that takes a certain amount of concentration, and that you'd therefore want anyone helping you with it to be calm and quiet and as little of a distraction as possible, so she tries to be that. It's a little uncomfortable - everything about this situation is already a little uncomfortable, honestly - but it's somewhat less difficult to be calm and quiet when she's doing it for a good reason. She thinks.

"Okay, uh – most of my cantrips don't have material components but I'd have to prepare them as first-level spells, so it's probably not worth it. I can prepare Endure Heat, Feather Fall, Magic Missile – Mage Armor takes a piece of leather and I have that on my person. Unseen Servant, of course – I don't suppose you have Alarm or Color Spray? Those might be useful. The summonses all take a candle, if you happen to have any on you." 

"Sorry, no Alarm and no Color Spray. I do have some candles."

"Oh, that's very good. Alarm would be nice but we can get by without it, the summons are much more important. What else? I've got Obscuring Mist, Blur, Scorching Ray – Web just takes a spider web and I'm sure we can find one of those. Invisibility requires acacia gum; if you don't have it we could look for some – I know gum trees are native to central Garund, but that's about it. Gaseous Form and Fly might be good to have. I know you have Lightning Bolt. And Phantom Steed doesn't take a material component, thank gods. 

...I won't be able to prepare any fourth circle spells, except Dimension Door. So that's everything that seems relevant right now." 

"I have Fly. I don't have Gaseous Form, but I do have some gauze in my pack for injuries, so that should work. No acacia gum. I don't have a spiderweb on me, but yeah, there's probably one around here somewhere. Although I'm not sure it wouldn't be better to focus on moving instead of gathering materials first."

"Yeah. I should get us the horses first, we can pick up a spiderweb if we notice one on the way. 

I'm sorry. This is going to take some time." 

"I know how long it takes to - " Oh that sounds really combative now that she's saying it out loud. Uh. " - it's fine."

Then he is going to concentrate, dammit because in just another hour he can be useful again – and it's easier than he feared, as he sinks into the familiar ritual, building up his spells, letting the complicated shapes come together in his mind and settle there, ready to spill out into the world. When he's done, he lets the book fade out in his hands. He feels just a little bit more human. 

"I'm ready." 

There is a sense in which spending an hour sitting still and not moving except to turn pages as directed is really easy, because if you work at it it's not like you're going to fail, and also a sense in which it's really hard, not actually because it would normally be hard, but because it means she has to sit very close to Elie and pay attention to what's happening without actually having much of anything to do, other than try to keep her thoughts away from anything that might make it difficult to remain composed, which it turns out is actually much harder when you don't have anything demanding more of your mind than turning pages does. She is tireder than she feels she should be at the end of the hour. But she thinks she did okay.

"Okay. East is - that way, I guess."

And there are two phantom steeds standing in front of them. 

...it's actually pretty awkward to try and climb on a horse without any hands. 

"Do you, uh. Need help. Not that I'm entirely sure how to give it, but, uh - "

He's currently trying to scramble on top of the horse mostly using his elbows while the unseen servant hauls him up by his shirt collar, so, uh, not his most dignified moment. 

"I'm fine, I've got it. ...I'll get it. Just a second." He is, at this point, very technically on top of his horse. 

"Okay. Just - so long as you've got it figured out." 

At least this makes it pretty impossible to be embarrassed about not being the best at handling horses. Phantom Steeds are supposed to be easy anyway, though. She can pull herself up onto hers and, uh, awkwardly wait for him to be mostly done with what he's doing.

And then they can head east.

It's hard to say how much headway they're making. The phantom steeds are slowed down significantly by the forest, both by the trees and by the scattered patches of mud that suck at their hooves, but at least they're probably much less tired than if they'd had to do their own walking. It's still pretty miserable. She's used to heat, but not used to the air around her being wet, a blanket of water that keeps the sweat stuck to her face and failing to do her much good. Mosquitoes have identified her as a ready source of blood. She swats at them occasionally, but doesn't really have much hope that this will keep her from being thoroughly bitten up by nightfall. She's not very sure whether being fully clothed is helping or hurting her, from a survival standpoint, but the thought of trying to combat the heat by shedding layers makes her feel kind of sick, in this situation, so she keeps herself thoroughly wrapped up and tries to ignore the oppressive dampness. She focuses on the plants. They have so many beautiful plants here. It's great. Most of them are probably poisonous.

The steeds run out after seven hours. They can keep walking a ways after that, but eventually they'll have to rest.

She hands Élie her whole bag of rations when they decide they're done walking. "It's only enough for a couple days, but - no sense in me carrying it, really. Might as well decide yourself what pace you want to go through it."

"Oh – yes. Thank you." 

Now that she mentions it, he does feel hungry. He tries to dig out a bit of stale bread, fumbles, and settles for awkwardly gnawing while the unseen servant holds it in midair. Humiliating. He wishes he could ask Naima not to look. Why spend year mastering the fundamental forces of reality if one's still going to have embarrassing physical needs at the end of it? 

On that note, he'd like nothing in the world so much as a long, cool bath. He'd thought Osirion was hot, but the desert is nothing next to riding for hours in what feels like a bath of his own sweat. Actually – 

"Naima – do we have a way of finding clean water?" 

Good question. "Um - well, it's a rain forest, right, so I assume there must be some way to - oh! Oh, I'm an idiot. Ice spears. It should just - make a pillar of ice." Wow, that sounds really good right now. "And I have it prepared, I didn't want to be shooting off lightning bolts where they might cause a forest fire."

She considers also trying to use it for hunting - Wishbone will need to eat some kind of meat very soon, he's already miserably hungry - but the thought of waiting to make ice, now that she's thought of it, is nearly unbearable. She can probably kill some animal by screaming at it later, anyway.

She focuses, and whispers, and waves her hands, and then they have a large, sharp pillar of ice. It'll melt in a matter of hours, but right now it's here, and it is quite possibly the most beautiful thing she's seen all day. She spends a few moments with her forehead pressed against it, cooling off, and then she pulls out her dagger and begins collecting ice shavings into a bottle.

"Here. Try this."

Oh, that's wonderful. Naima is wonderful. What would he do without her. He lets the chunks of ice melt slowly on his tongue and feels just a little bit more than a human being. 

"You should rest. I'll take the first watch." 

He's not sure he can fall asleep just yet, anyway. He's too uncomfortably aware of the sweat sticking his clothes to his skin and the insect bites and the ache in this hands. Give it a couple hours. How far can they be from the edge of the jungle by phantom steed? 

She supposes that's probably the next step in this little misadventure. She has very little desire to sleep. She's tired, but not exactly the kind of tired that goes very well with being able to fall asleep. She considers arguing, but she doesn't really know what else she could spend time doing, other than maybe collecting food, and she doesn't want to do that right now and also doesn't really feel like arguing.

She nods. She fills another bottle partway full of ice shavings so that she'll have some water in the morning, and then she curls up with her back to him and tries to get to sleep. At least by now she's so miserable about the conditions her body is operating under that she has less time to think about the fact that she's alone with Elie in the jungle. She presses her bottle of ice against her forehead and tries not to think about anything complicated.

She sleeps for longer than two hours.

Well, he's not going to wake her. Even with a ring of sustenance, it's not surprising she'd need a little extra rest. 

He has the servant clear the brush a little, until it gives out, and then there's nothing to do but sit and stare out into the jungle. It's humid and still and dark, oppressively dark, darker than he's ever seen anywhere above ground. Tomorrow he'll remember to prepare a silent Light. He listens to the birds and the monkeys and the things crawling around in the undergrowth and wonders vaguely what dinosaurs sound like. 

She wakes up with a splitting headache and some nausea. 

The headache she can actually think of plenty of explanations for - it's possible she hasn't had enough water to make up for all of this sweating, or that the humidity itself causes it, or any number of things. She's occasionally gotten headaches after reading too long in dim light. The nausea is more worrying. She hasn't eaten anything in two days, so it's not something she ate, and she's never been particularly prone to random bouts of nausea. 

"I think," she says, when she's thought for several minutes about whether to tell Elie what she realized in moments, "that I am probably sick."

shit – what do you do for sick people – he is not the party expert on this – he remembers that soup is usually involved? – rest, fluids, who knows what kinds of strange horrible illnesses people get in the jungle – what if he has to start identifying herbs, he doesn't know the first thing about herbs – shit shit shit – 

"Alright. You should get some more rest. I'll try and find some more water for you, those big round leaves look like they collect it. Do you need anything else?"

She waits for a moment with her eyes closed, thinking.

"I'm trying to decide whether we should move on as quickly as possible towards the edge of the jungle. If it's serious it will probably get worse before it gets better, but we might have time before - but I suppose you have to sleep, still."

He hates it, but – "...yes. I'm pretty useless as things are. But – " not panicking, not panicking "– there's really no reason to worry just yet. Can you prepare spells? You have remove disease." 

"Right." She should have thought of that immediately, it's worrying that she didn't. She's taking a better inventory of how she feels, now, and - the headache's strong and sharp, it's not the sort of thing you'd get without something seriously wrong with you. She feels very weak, and very hot, and has sweat through her clothes in several places, although a lot of that seems to just be how existing in the jungle is, it's not necessarily a symptom of anything. She wonders idly whether there's a point at which her ring of sustenance will have difficulty keeping pace with it.

"I'll prepare spells. That should fix this. You should - do you think you should start sleeping while I do?"

"I – I don't want to leave you like this." 

"I suppose one hour won't make much difference," she says, after a bit, and then begins communing with her dog.

It's always kind of a surreal experience, not being able to prepare spells. When it fails it fails all together, even the easy ones whose forms she knows inside and out. She can shape them properly, if she's very careful and slow, but she can't make the magic flow through them right. She hasn't gotten enough rest, at least not in whatever sense matters for spell preparation.

Within fifteen minutes she's sure it's not going to work. She leans back against the nearest tree and stares miserably up into the canopy.

"I can't do it. I didn't sleep well enough."

"Alright. That's fine. We'll both take a nap together until we're rested. Can you cast slumber on yourself?" 

"Probably. Depends on the hour. But someone needs to keep watch. Or maybe they don't, I don't know. I guess Wishbone's here."

"Well, if a dinosaur came to eat us in the night, what exactly could we do about it right now?" 

If Naima dies because she was trying to rescue him he doesn't know how he's going to live with himself – though of course in that case he'll certainly be dead too. One must be grateful for small comforts. 

"Slumber it. For one minute. And I have a lightning bolt from yesterday, although then we might just have a forest fire on our hands."

"I don't know, this whole forest seems fairly ...damp. But I do think we need to risk sleeping – if you like, I could stay up for a while longer?" 

She presses a hand to her face. Mostly this is a futile attempt to press the shooting pain out of her head.

"It's probably more important for you to get your spells back in a timely manner than for me to. If you don't sleep we can't get the phantom steeds back."

"...Are you sure? You look like you're in pain." 

"I am in pain!" she says sharply, and she has enough presence of mind to be dimly aware that this is unideal in some way but not really enough presence of mind to begin to think how she would avoid it. "That's - not material."

Right. Right, he's an idiot, he's been treating Naima like a child when she's really more qualified to deal with this situation than he is, and if she thinks it's best to stay up so he can sleep and prepare his spells than he had better just get to sleep and get them both out of here faster in the morning. Stupid, stupid, stupid. 

....But he doesn't like to think of going to sleep and leaving her alone. Without quite thinking about it, he reaches up and puts his hand on her forehead. 

"You're warm. Promise ...promise you'll wake me if you start to feel worse." 

She breathes a tiny bit faster. She feels - she doesn't know how she feels about that. It's a normal thing to do to check her condition. She's done it to lots of people. It's exactly the same sort of thing as when she splinted his hands up this morning. So there's no call to have feelings about it. But she's alone, and scared, and hurting, and wants the contact, and is also terrified of what happens when you want contact and you're alone and the only other person around is someone who knows that you want to marry them and who doesn't want to marry you.

She should stop thinking about this because it's stupid. It's hard to focus very well on things that are not stupid. She has to make decisions and it is not at all obvious to her what the right decisions to make are.

"If I wake you you won't get your spells back."

Naima is right. He is just so unutterably godsdammed stupid, and Naima is right, and the last thing in the world he wants is to argue about this right now, but it's wet and full of dinosaurs and they're stuck a thousand miles from home and both of his hands are broken and he's exhausted through to his bones and Naima looks like she might actually start crying and that seems more unbearable than any of this rest of it. "That doesn't matter if you're not well enough to ride. Please, Naima. If you need me – " 

"I don't know how to fix this," she says, miserably, and there's a panicky note in her voice that she hates. "I don't know many of the plants here and I don't know how to find the ones I'd need even if I did, and I think that my spells are not coming back because I am sick, and I'm not sure they'll come back if I sleep again, and - if I don't know how to heal myself then the only way to stop it is to get someplace where they can, right, otherwise we just - if we get to the point where all we can do is ride it out then I can't control it, if I can't treat the illness I'm not any more invulnerable to diseases than any other adventurer - "

Well, she's not wrong. 

"Adventurer is doing a lot of work there. You're more durable – even if whatever you have would kill an ordinary person – and we don't know that – there's every chance you'll make it through. The only thing I know right now is that at least one of us needs to sleep. Me first, if you insist." He may be exhausted, but he's a little keyed up, now. "Slumber me? Once I've rested, I'll get us some phantom steeds. We can ride through the night. We'll get out of here. I – " he can't promise "– I'll be right here." 

"Okay," she says, weakly, and feels like she should feel relieved that they're going with her plan, except she doesn't, actually, because unlike most situations like this she is not actually sure that her plan is better than any other.

She slumbers him.

A few minutes later she feels incredibly stupid, because now she needs to stay up and keep watch, and she's not actually remotely in a state of mind to keep watch for two hours, let alone eight, and if she had any other patient with these symptoms and didn't have herbs for remedies on hand, sleep would be just about the second thing she'd tell them to get as much as possible of, after water. She's not very clear on whether she still needs lots of water and sleep when she has a ring of sustenance. She'd weakly guess that it's still the best possible course of action. Except that she's supposed to be watching for dinosaurs. This was stupid. She's an idiot. Probably her blood is cooking off right now, or something, and this is probably not doing her any favors on the intelligence front.

She stares up into the inky blackness above her and wonders what kind of animal she will be stuck as forever if she dies and gets sent to Nirvana. She wonders if she's ever going to see her son again. She wonders who'll raise him. Shawil, probably, which really means the church with Shawil occasionally looking in for reasons that Rahim won't understand and Shawil won't explain. She wonders what they'll tell him about his mother. Maybe nothing. Be so easy to let him assume he was dropped off by a random prostitute one day. 

She wishes Élie were awake again. She dimly wishes he would touch her again, partly out of some idea that it might anchor her but mostly, probably, because slowly cooking off makes it harder to remember why people should not be stupid. She wishes she could send him to get water. She tries sending Wishbone, when this occurs to her, and she manages to get back a cup of lukewarm water with an insect in it. She drinks it. She's tempted to spread some water across her forehead, too, but the fact is that she's already very thoroughly bathing in her own sweat, and it doesn't seem likely that more dampness will help.

She doesn't make it the full eight hours. When Élie wakes up she's asleep again, breathing more shallowly than she ought to be.

Oh, no. He doesn't want to wake her. He summons his spellbook from the etherial plane – and gets a painful but predictable surprise when it falls on his useless hands. Ouch. So that's going to have to wait. He notices that some of Naima's hair is stuck to her forehead with sweat and spends what feels like hours trying to decide if he should push it back, up, out of her eyes. 

She stirs slightly but doesn't wake. She's actually stirring pretty frequently, quiet sounds and small changes in position, not usually related to anything that seems to be happening to her. She's just not capable of truly restful sleep right now.

Whatever else it's doing, the ring of sustenance is at least causing her to slip into unconsciousness for less time than she normally would. Eventually she opens her eyes. She's feverish and achey and the shooting pain in her head has only gotten worse. She can't remember what was happening before she fell asleep. Élie was sleeping, maybe? Right. She must have failed at keeping watch until he woke up. She would be embarrassed, but she's not sure she can stand, right now, which seems like it's probably the more pressing problem. She needs to think how to fix it, but it's hard when the pain is crowding all of the other thoughts out of her head.

"I guess nothing ate us." It's not meant to be a whisper, but it comes out not much louder than one.

Oh, no. She sounds so weak. Élie takes a couple of moments just to breathe, because somebody needs their wits about them if they're going to get out of this forest fast, fast, fast. He wonders if endure heat does anything for fever. Worth a try, at least. He can summon his horses – but Naima doesn't look well enough to ride, not for any length of time. He could conjure a carriage, but there aren't any roads out here in the middle of Mwangi expanse. He can – get her some water. That seems important. Just as soon as he has hands. 

"I heard a few things go bump in the night, but it looks like they had tastier options. How are you feeling?" 

"Bad." She should probably be thinking of something more responsible to say but the thing where you have to think about what you say and whether saying it is a good idea is stupid and her head hurts. "Worse. Probably going to keep getting worse until something does eat us. - I realize this is not a helpful thing to say and I wish I could be helpful but I am currently too busy thinking about how all of this is stupid and terrible and I hate it, and probably a reasonable person would be able to ignore this in favor of figuring out what needs to be done, but I guess I'm not cut out for this. Or something."

"That's alright – I mean, it wouldn't be alright if something ate us, but I don't think anything will, we'll get out of here, and even if we don't Catherine or Shawil will scry us when they notice we're missing and get a teleport. So we just have to focus on staying alive right now. We can do that. Could you" – he holds out the spellbook, helplessly – "I'm trying to keep it open. Just here, so I can get my unseen servant. I thought I might try preparing endure heat, see if it does anything about your fever. Or at least the – this." He gestures in the hot, soupy air. 

Seems kind of unlikely that it'll help with heat coming from inside a creature. Spells draw distinctions along those lines a lot. But it's so hot. She has no idea how much of the pain is related to the heat, but it kind of feels all mixed together, the heat and the dampness and the pain. It's hard to think between it all. But she can probably hold a book open, if that's what they're doing now. Easier than coming up with her own plan. Hard enough to think about breathing and not crying or making enough noise to attract unwanted company.

"I think I can do that. Long enough to get one spell out of it."

"That's good. Thank you. One spell is all I need." 

He is really regretting his broken hands right about now. If he could just access his fourth circle spells, maybe he could – what? Summon a hound archon and see if it could sniff their way out of here? No point worrying about it now. The important thing is getting Naima back to civilization, as fast as he can, any way that he can. Her hands are shaking.

"There now. All done." 

And he can cast his unseen servant, and prepare the rest of his spells. He's never been especially religious, but he offers up a quick prayer to Nethys to help him see a way to get them safely home. 

She goes back to curling up on the ground and trying not to be too obvious about the labored breathing, or otherwise interfere with his focus until he's clearly done.

"I don't know if I can ride." It comes out a whimper. "Genuinely uncertain." 

"That's alright. I can – " tie her to the horse? Absolutely not. Make some kind of sledge? Wait here until Naima feels better or the dinosaurs come and get them? If only phantom steeds could carry two people. 

...He's an idiot. "I can just use Mount. Ordinary horses are slower, but –  I can hold you, so you don't fall." 

Oh hey. Obviously. She's going to try not to fault herself for not thinking of that around all the pain and the heat. It sounds a little terrifying but she's pretty sure this is the sort of situation where you go with whatever seems likeliest to keep you all alive. " - I guess that might work. You're - sure you can do that?"

Well, he doesn't see why not, but – oh. Of course. He's a man, she's a woman, she's Osirian, he's a moron. "I mean, if you're alright with that." 

She is mostly referring to the fact that his hands are broken. Not that riding on the same horse isn't kind of - well, something she is going to have feelings about, not that she's very capable of determining what those feelings are right now - but they're already alone together hundreds of miles from civilization, which is already pretty uncomfortable, and also she's trying to focus on not dying. So.

"I think I'd rather try anything that sounds it might - lead to not dying. Even if it might not work. So - yeah."

"Alright." So he summons a horse. Now they've got a horse. 

...Now he's got to get both of them on the horse. Shit. Fuck. Are horses normally this tall? 

Yeah that's kind of a problem.

"Not very sure I can get onto it. Actually. I guess I should try." But she's not very good at hauling herself up things even at the best of times, and this is definitely not the best of times.

The starts munching on some leaves and doesn't help them even a little bit. 

Well. 

"Can you - ugh. Okay. I don't really have any clever ideas here so I guess I should just - do you think you should try first, or should I."

They're going to die. They're going to die out here in the middle of this godsforsaken jungle who knows how many hundred miles from home because neither of them can get on a fucking horse. 

"...maybe we could convince it to bend down?" 

" - I'm an idiot," she says, with feeling, and then makes a sound that sounds very much like it came from another horse. 

The horse kneels down.

"Okay. That's - something." And now she can try very hard to stand, very unsteadily.

Well, it's not the most graceful thing either of them have ever done, but they do – eventually – both end up on the horse. Elie manages to sort of support Naima with his elbows, and she only crushes his broken fingers against the horse a tiny little bit, and at one point the servant has to stop him from keeling over, but they're on and the horse is up and they're definitely making progress in what he's certain is some kind of a direction. So that's good. 

He is trying very very very hard to keep Naima steady in a way that's absolutely professional but this is sort of difficult when you're on a moving animal. 

She's feeling - kind of miserable about being sick and boiling alive, and kind of reassured despite herself about the fact that Élie is holding her now, and kind of really upset with herself for having any positive feelings about it because it's not really the sort of thing that ought to be happening, and - kind of depressed that he turned her down back in Sothis, honestly, because if he hadn't it would be a lot less ridiculous to be thinking about this, but he did, so in fact this is really a pretty ridiculous thing to be thinking about.

She's very weak. She tries to sit up, for a while, but she's not very good at it, and over time she ends up doing quite a bit more leaning. Probably if this is making it difficult to stay on the horse he will say something, or something.

"Hey Élie. D'you have - a plan for if I die in the night. Or something."

Well, he's been trying very hard not to think about that possibility. 

"If you – I'd get out of here and have you resurrected, of course. I think I could make it on my own, I can open a spellbook if I take enough time with it. ...Whatever happens, I promise you'll be alright in the end." 

"Okay.

"I can't pay for it anymore. Spent it all. I guess I'd earn it back."

"What? Of course I would pay for it. I still can. And I can sell the handcuffs in Quantium, they're worth more than you lost. You don't have to worry about this, Naima. I won't let you stay dead." 

"Okay.

"Thanks.

"I keep thinking that I have to think about what's going to happen to Rahim if I don't make it, and then realizing that there is absolutely nothing I can do about that."

"You don't have to worry about Rahim, if you die – which you won't – I'll take care of him. I might have to fight Shawil for it but I'm guessing you'd rather have me."

She laughs a little. More a breath than anything else. 

"I'm not even imagining what that would look like, right now."

"I don't know how it would go, there are probably Osirian laws about this sort of thing and he'd know them better than I do – but worst case scenario I  kidnap the baby and steal away to Absalom in the dead of night, so that's not a problem." 

Another small laugh, and then she's quiet for a while.

"I told Tariq I'd raise him to be lawful."

"Then I'll have to petition the courts. Or maybe we should share custody. And, of course, we can't leave Catherine out, and she's lawful too. I could tell them – " 

That we were married in secret, which makes him my son – thankfully, he has the sense the gods gave a turnip to shut up before that one makes it out of his mouth. 

"I could tell them it was what you wanted." 

Same small laugh sound, again, and then more silence.

"I guess it was."

"And I'd teach him to be a wizard, of course. I'm sure he's a genius, you can tell already, I've never met a child who learned how to get into into my bags so quickly." 

Tiny laugh.

"Tariq was so concerned about me. When I talked to him. Talking about how I seemed like I might be really lawless now, and was I being a good mother to our child. And I was all, no, I'm fine, I can do this. And then a week later I broke into your apartment, and stole your clothes, and broke curfew dressed as a man, and got stuck in the Mwangi expanse with you without even making adequate arrangements for what to do with my son if I didn't come back, and honestly I think maybe he was just right. And I don't know how I feel about that."

"...You know what I think of lawfullness. It's all very well for people who don't want to think too hard about the the way they live or their impact on the world, but, ultimately, it's just the value of living your life in accordance with some unchanging set of rules that won't ever be complete enough to describe all the situations we actually experience – they couldn't be, can you imagine, you'd never get out the door. I think it's better to be smart and wise and clear-headed about your values and let the law fall where it may.

I do understand why it's important to you, though. At least I'm trying." 

"Yeah.

"I don't think all that's right. But I don't really know what is. Probably I should think about it when I'm not boiling."

"It's pretty terrible weather for thinking." 

And they can ride for a while in silence. 

Yeah. That sounds easy.

The forest is not a quiet place, so she doesn't notice the sound of heavy footsteps until one of them snaps something that sounds more like a log than a twig. 

"What is that - "

GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH

Fuck. 

She makes a panicked horse-sound to get the mount to move, then aims her hand unsteadily at the dinosaur and throws the only lightning bolt she has at it.

GRAAAAAAAAAGH? 

GRAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

("Back off.")

Élie has no idea what is going on but cannot imagine it's good. He could try a fireball – but that might make it angrier, and Naima seems to be trying to talk to it – he wishes he could teleport – he could – 

oh. 

He grabs Naima and uses his dimension steps to pull them both about a hundred feet behind the dinosaur. 

GRAAAAAAAAAARGH!? 

("The fuck?") 

It bends down to sniff the ground. 

She's trembling and terrified and going to try to stay very very still and very very silent and - try to slumber it...?

It drops. 

Well that gives them 42 seconds. 

"I don't know if I can run - "

"Okay, Okay, we'll just be very still – it probably doesn't want us anyway – " 

He starts a summon and six seconds later he's got a couple of sheep, which can start running away, very far away, that's it, that has to look like a better meal than the scrawny bipeds with the lightning bolts and the suddenly vanishing – 

.....graaaaaaaaaaaaargh? 

Very very still very very quiet.

Is it going for the sheep? He can't see from where he is, and he's certainly not about to go find out. 

Well she's not going to look. She will... listen. To whether there are footsteps and whether they sound like they're getting closer or further away.

Faaaaaaaarther? It's hard to tell – just how many seconds has it been – 

A fainter graaaaaaaargh. 

Okay. She waits until she thinks it's a bit further off.

Elie's summons don't last very long either.

"We should leave before it circles back around," she whispers. This entire situation has honestly left her more exhausted than previously, although the clarity that comes from being in a life or death situation is maybe helping. "Can I lean on you - "

"Yes – of course – this way – " 

Now that the sheer blind panic has worn off, he's noticing just how hard it is to move through a jungle without the use of one's hands. There are roots and hanging vines and a hundred other obstructions to compensate for. Naima leaning against him helps, surprisingly. The counterweight makes it just a little bit easier to keep his balance. 

Everything hurts. Every piece of her body is screaming that she's killing it, that the thing it needs her to do is sit still and rest and give it a prayer of knitting itself back together, but there's a dinosaur behind them and it's huge and it could circle around at any time, really, and her body is just going to have to trust her that she's managed to identify an even greater threat to its continued well-being than whatever is already trying to kill it from the inside out.

When they've made it a ways off - far enough that the pain is starting to win against the panic anyway - she trips over a branch and falls down, badly. She manages to make it back to a sitting position, but instead of forcing herself the last bit up, she just gives up and starts crying.

It's stupid and humiliating and ridiculous and none of this is able to make her care enough to stop.

Oh no.

Élie tries to think of something helpful to say. It's going to be alright? – Idiotic, they're lost in a jungle with a dinosaur chasing them and Naima has some unidentified tropical disease, he can't promise her that. I promise I'll raise your son the way you would have wanted? – Ugh, no, too morbid. I – care for your? No, no, no, no need to make this more awkward than it is, nope. 

So he just settles for sitting down next to her and gently rubbing her back. If she wants him to stop, she'll let him know. 

Instead of doing that she leans on him again and keeps crying. 

She feels like she has developed a very personal appreciation for why women really shouldn't be adventurers, over the last few days, and also all of the ways in which she has utterly abandoned every other thing she could have been to instead be this thing, which she isn't even meant to be, but she's poured so much into being this thing anyway that she's not sure it's possible to go back and be anything else. She doesn't even think they're going to die. She's just going to be stuck being this ill-fitting thing forever.

"You have terrible taste in friends," she murmurs, when the crying has quieted down a little bit.

"I – Naima, if it wasn't for you I'd be in Hell right now." 

"Yeah, well. Don't try to prevent that and you're not much of a friend at all, are you."

"Most of the friends I've had wouldn't have dared." 

"Yeah, well, see point A. Not that I've done any better. - which is gonna sound like an insult to you, now, right, because I don't know how to talk. Ugh. You know you're allowed to just ignore the fever rambling, if it gets tiresome."

"Not really. I mean – I'm not tired." 

"Really.

"Do you have another Mount, or am I not even inconveniencing us by collapsing here."

"I don't,  but I left a few spell slots empty this morning, just in case. ...We can sit for a little longer, if you like. I don't know that it'll make much more of a difference." 

"Yeah. I guess I probably won't be any less exhausted any time soon.

"I guess I feel a little better, though. Very marginally."

"That's good. I'm glad. I'll start preparing the spell now, then." 

Then she can wait for the spell, and they can get back on the horse and head out. All she has to do is stay on the horse. She thinks she can manage that.

They're not far from the edge of the forest. In a few more hours the trees open up at the mountains, and then it's just a matter of heading south until they come out at the mountain pass into Nex.

"Let's camp here and try the pass in the morning. You should get some sleep." 

Not that Élie isn't dead on his feet, but he doesn't want to give Naima the chance to push back. He doesn't have the energy to think about watches. For all he cares, Felix can do it. If another dinosaur comes for them in the night that's just how it's going to be. 

Yeah, she's not even going to try arguing anything. Her brain is barely working, so right now Élie is going to need to do the thinking for both of them.

If they're still alive in the morning, they can try making it through the mountains. She drifts in and out of consciousness. There are mountains, and then there are fields, and then there are people; she thinks she might move on and off of the horse, at some point, but she doesn't remember any of it very well.

When she next wakes up and stays up, she's in a bed. A real one. Still feels terrible, but she thinks the fever might have broken.

She goes looking for Élie.

He's in the other room, entertaining a gaggle of children with some minor illusions. 

...awwwww. How is he always so cute with kids.

She feels kind of weird interrupting that. She'll... wave, and he'll see her at some point.

He's in the middle of a Galtan fairy tale about a clever orphan and an a wicked ogre who lived in a floating castle made of clouds when he notices Naima walk in. He waves back and turns the gesture into some illusory sparkles, to general delight, peasant children are delightfully easy to please. 

When he's done, he walks over to her. "Are you feeling better?"  

"Well, I - still feel like I got run over by a horse recently, actually, but - yeah. Not boiling anymore, which in my professional opinion is a good sign. Thank you for - you know."

"Don't mention it. Maybe in a hundred years or so, we'll be even." 

Right, she probably wants to know where they are – 

"This village is called Kisumu. I don't think they get many wizards out here, they were happy to host us in exchange for some general mending and such. I did tell Mr. Nazari – that's him out there, it's his house we're staying in – that you could look in on his youngest daughter who has measles. When you were up and about." 

"Yeah, I can do that. How bad is it, should I be looking in now?"

"I'm no expert – I don't think she's in immediate mortal danger, but you never know, she's little and these things come on fast. She's over there" – he gestures at a little straw bed in a corner. "Have you cast remove disease on yourself yet?" 

"No, I haven't actually tried preparing spells at all yet. I don't think I need them for the girl. I have stuff in my pack for measles, I see it more often than whatever kind of jungle fever this is. - are your hands any better?"

Eeeeeeeeyeh. 

"They're hurting less." 

She taps the back of one - gently - and hexes him.

"We'll get a regenerate in Quantium. Just to be sure they've healed right."

"That's alright. At this point I'm almost used to it." 

Naima's right – the little girl turned out to be an easy case. He tries not to be too obvious about watching her while she works. She's so good with children. Most people aren't, especially the ones who think they are. Naima doesn't bother with condescension or baby talk – she treats them like people, which of course they are. She's so patient. He's always known that, of course, he's seen her with Rahim, but it's different, watching her with an older child. He wonders, suddenly, if he'll ever have any children of his own. 

She wants to take a few more days in Kisumu, partly to sleep off a little more of her illness and partly to check whether she really has cured the little girl. She has. After that, she's well enough to ride a phantom steed again, and getting to Quantium is - well, not pleasant, but hardly life-threatening in any particular dimension. She thinks a lot, while she's riding, now that she can think again. She doesn't particularly make conversation. She's too worried that she's going to mention one of the things she's been thinking about, and it wouldn't be right, diving into conversations about - them, the future, whatever she's learned from this experience - while he's still any amount of dependent on her.

When they make it to Quantium they can sell the cuffs (probably even for an appreciable fraction of their actual value, given that Quantium is one of the best places in the Inner Sea Region for magic items and therefore has some number of people who have any idea what they'd do with them). And then they can buy a regenerate, and Élie can have his hands again.

"So. Is that better, then?"

"I feel like a new man!" 

"I think you're probably about the same man you were before this whole mess happened." 

- oh wait that sounds wrong in some way. Hm. She's not very sure how to make it sound right.

"So, we - catch a ship back to Sothis, I guess? Chew out Catherine and Shawil for being useless?"

"I wouldn't mind spending a few more days in Quantium, as long as we're here, there are all sorts of people I didn't get a chance to talk to the last time we were here – but I'm being thoughtless. Of course you want to see Rahim." 

They could travel separately, but somehow that feels unthinkable. 

"Yeah, I - kind of do.

"Um - I guess if we're planning to go back, then - I have been thinking. About what you said. Before all this happened, I mean, back in Sothis. And - knowing me I might mess it up horribly, definitely always a live possibility whenever I try to talk about anything, so I figure now is probably the most considerate time to say some of what I have been thinking, before you're stuck on a ship with me for however many weeks back it is. If you don't have any reasons I haven't thought of why revisiting the topic in light of additional thought is a terrible idea."

It has been a very busy couple of weeks and it takes him a moment to remember what it is she's talking about. 

"...Oh. Go ahead." 

"Okay. As far as I can remember, your conclusion at the end of our previous conversation was that I haven't met enough people outside of Osirion - maybe even inside Osirion - to say whether I genuinely prefer you to any of the other people I'd be likely to meet if I spent more time in Avistan. Which makes sense, as a concern to have, I think - I thought you might be right, at first - but I've been thinking about it more, and now I think you're wrong.

"My question is - how many people have you trusted, in your life. Entirely trusted, with your life and with your ambitions, not just in one arena but in general. And of that set, how many of those people were not mistakes, were people who had genuinely earned and who deserved the trust you placed in them. Because for me the list is not very long."

Well, that's a lot to take in, but all he can think to say is – 

"Naima – I – do you want to marry me or not?" 

" - well, yeah, I thought that part had been established."

"Yes – I know – I mean – do you want to marry me, or do you want to get married and I'm the least worst option?" 

"Um. Hm.

"Both?"

"What am I supposed to do with that?" 

"Well I don't know! I don't know what you're looking for! And while we're at it I'm also very unclear on whether your objection is actually that you think I don't want to marry you, or whether it's in fact that you don't want to marry me, because those are very different situations and I probably only want to argue out of one of them. But - ugh, look, I'm just going to say the thing I was going to say before you asked me a completely different question instead of answering the question I asked you, okay, because I don't think I have a great handle on what you're asking but I know what I was trying to say before.

"I trust you. Not because you're Avistani, which if anything is sort of a mark against people on the trustworthiness front. And not even because you just saved my life, although that's an excellent example of the sort of behavior that leads me to believe that you're worth trusting. And I think that you ought to trust me, because - I acknowledge that I am kind of a disaster who might run out of time at any point and be called on to do horrible things for my patron, because magic doesn't come free unless you're a sorcerer. There is some level on which I am not the sort of person that anyone should trust, not to entwine their life with and commit themselves to even in the case where I am being controlled by forces beyond our understanding. But - you can at least know that I am the sort of friend who will, if I think you are in danger of being dragged to hell, drop everything to prevent it.

"I think that this sort of relationship is rare, between people. I won't claim that it's so rare as to be actually alien to most people, but it's not the sort of relationship that is trivial to create, or that a given person can expect to fall into many times in their life. It's not the sort of relationship that you create by going on first dates with lots of people. I think that it is valuable, and perhaps even one of the most important possible elements of a marriage, if it is something that you can possibly have within your marriage.

"I also think that it is more difficult for some people to achieve this sort of relationship than for others. I'm pretty bad at forging relationships of any kind at the best of times, but more importantly than that, I'm a witch, and on some level I don't think that I'm the sort of person that anyone should trust, not except under very specific circumstances or unless a truly unusual amount of trust has been forged over the course of many individual dangerous encounters. At this point I don't know how I could possibly build up a comparable level of trust with someone who I had not adventured with, and I don't actually want to adventure with anyone I don't already trust at all, so I'm not sure how such a thing would happen. 

"I - suppose that you may be right, that if I were not a witch and were instead an ordinary person, I probably shouldn't marry you, and should instead explore my options. But if I weren't a witch I would just want to marry Tariq again, although I suppose I probably wouldn't have the money to do that and would be stuck in the situation I was when I left Mut, having considered and rejected everyone else who was interested in me, because I was in love with someone I couldn't have, and I couldn't respect anyone else while I was comparing them to him. And I think that is not entirely unlike the situation I find myself in now. I doubt that I would be able to respect anyone who was willing to marry me without having relied on me in a series of incredibly desperate situations, and I doubt that I would be able to respect anyone who wanted to marry me while I felt this way about one of my adventuring companions, not with all of the very good reasons why most people shouldn't want to marry me. At least not unless they had some other extremely compelling reason to want to join forces with me in particular regardless of my attitude towards them or likeliness to turn evil and randomly do horrible things, like if they were a really obsessive doctor, or something, and if such a person existed I would probably already have met them in Alkenstar. Which I didn't.

"So I don't actually think there's any point in going out of my way to evaluate anyone else, not unless you're genuinely opposed to you-marrying-me and not just me-marrying-you, and can explain why in words I can understand. Because otherwise I already know that I won't respect them, and I've been putting off marrying someone I don't respect for almost two years, now, and I like to think I'm still not desperate enough to give up on it, at least not until I've thoroughly exhausted attempts at having someone who I do."

...

...

"Naima. I – I thought you just wanted to marry someone – anyone – so your father wouldn't have the legal rights to all your property, and I was the man you knew who was least likely to beat you or squander your money on drink. Which I wouldn't! That should go without saying! But – I didn't want to be unfair to you. I thought that you deserved better than a marriage of convenience. You deserve a husband who respects you, and admires you for everything you're trying to do for the world, and cares about your research, and wants to raise your son, and, alright, maybe he's a little bit afraid of whatever's coming for you, but he wants learn everything about it, so that you can face it together, before whatever happened to all of the others – " 

He's breathing rather heavily, by now. 

" - well, yeah. I mean. I don't actually know whether I deserve that, but I figured if it were on offer I might as well go for it. Since. You know. It's not really the sort of thing that's easy for someone to pass up."

She - might be kind of blushing because this is a very important conversation and she's definitely going to mess it up somehow but also that sounds like she might not be messing it up??

"I've never really thought much about getting married. When I was younger I always assumed I'd be executed before I could get around to it, and then I wasn't, but I was in Mut, and I never, uh, stopped to reevaluate. But – if I could get married – I mean, if I was alive, and kept being alive, which, unbelievably, appears to be happening, thank you for that – I can't think of anyone else I'd want to – " 

He's so bad at this. He's really incredibly remarkably terrible at it. Is this a proposal? Is he proposing? Because if so he's only going to do it once gods willing and should at least try not to make such an awful hash of it. He looks around, a bit desperately, for any stray tyrannosauruses who might be about to save him but of course there aren't any. Nex is a civilized country and he's going to have to use his words to say what he means.

She is, for once in her life, actually going to try not to interrupt him, because he listened to her thing and she feels like probably she should listen to his. She is instead just going to kind of look at him hopefully and wait and see where the words are going to go.

"Ah. What I meant to say is – before we make an irrevocable decisions, we should talk about what marriage means. Is. Since in all probability we have two fairly different understandings of it. I wouldn't – I think you know that I wouldn't be much of a traditional Osirian husband." 

" - yeah. I do figure that. But - you'd want to talk about that?"

"I ...yes. I very much would." 

"Oh good."

".....so, hm, I guess at the most basic level marriage is an agreement between a man and a woman to form a household and a family, with the woman promising to be faithful and - logistically? supportive, and the man agreeing to provide economic support and protection. Although I guess being fairly unusual people it's reasonable to expect each of us to provide economic support and protection. The structure so created is permanent and does not bow before other considerations, barring the death of its members. I'm sure there are other things that are necessary or to be expected, but that's my first thought off the top of my head."

"Well, this is where I admit I don't have a good idea of the kind of marriage I'd particularly want for myself. My parents, I guess – they cared for each other. If one of them said something, or did something, the kind of thing you were supposed to report, I don't think the other would have said anything. That's the first thing I think of. Loyalty. Not informing." 

"I think I generally assume we already have that. - I guess that's not entirely true. If you marry me I'll be expecting that to encompass a promise to help me with whatever ultimately comes of being bound to my patron. Right now I don't necessarily expect that, not if it happens a long time from now and circumstances change significantly in the meantime. But that's - one of the more practical reasons I want it to be you, right, I trust you more than other people to safeguard my most important interests even if I'm under the influence of something that means that I myself can't do that."

He realizes that – well, he's known, intellectually, that Naima's predecessors had changed quite significantly over the course of their lives. That could be perfectly normal, of course. Most people would have different priorities as 8th or 9th circle casters. And if they tended towards evil, well, who's to say they didn't have their reasons. He's been avoiding thinking about the possibility that one day Naima might in some sense cease to be herself. He can't imagine being as calm about it as she is. He's not that strong. 

At least he can keep his fears from being her problem. 

"Then we should talk about those interests are, and how you expect you might change, and what kinds of change you'd endorse and which you wouldn't." 

"Yeah, that seems true. I don't really off the top of my head know how I expect to change, or what things I want to bind myself into not changing my mind about? Other than, like, obviously if I marry you I am fine being bound by that. I guess the other thing is that I worry about ultimately becoming a danger to Rahim, that seems like exactly the sort of poetic price of power you can expect witch patrons to go in for. And I'm not particularly inclined to pay it, given that he was the reason I made this deal in the first place."

"Keeping Rahim safe seems pretty straightforward. At least philosophically. I have no idea which of us would win in a fight and hopefully we'll never find out." 

"Yeah, possibly we should make some kind of plan for that situation and that includes more than just us having a magical duel? - actually probably you should make some kind of plan and not tell me what it is. Just in case."

"Yeah. Fortunately, Rahim has lots of friends." 

"Yes. He's very good at that."

" - so I think I'm going to have to get back to you on a specific list of other things that I consider to constitute 'Naima has gone mad and is plotting evil plots and must be stopped', but I would think that the specifics don't particularly change the calculus in terms of whether and what kind of marriage we'd expect to have? So I think before that we were on - you were saying that the thing that's most important to you is knowing that your spouse will be loyal, in the sense of not handing you over to tyrannical secret police. Which I think I can manage."

"You do seem like you'd be good at that."

"I do try. But I assume that's, uh - not a complete picture of what you'd expect marriage to consist of?"

Oh, no, he's going to have to come up with an answer, isn't he? 

"I –  I suppose I want a partner. Someone who can share my work, and my values, and who will help me raise – not Good children, but children who are prepared to follow the dictates of their conscience. Someone I can always be honest with. And who doesn't mind that the only thing I can cook is lentils, that's important, I went to boarding school and then I was a professional revolutionary and I'm not really any use at all domestically and now that I'm saying this of course we can just have servants but I'm not used to thinking of myself as the sort of person who can just have servants, and – " 

Gods. He's babbling. 

"....who won't be too disappointed in me when I come short." 

"I think I can manage that. I - also do know how to cook, although, yeah, I'm not actually entirely sure that it's going to be the most, uh, efficient thing to spend time on going forward. I guess. But I do know how."

(It's honestly very relieving that she isn't the only one who obviously doesn't know how to have this particular kind of conversation.)

"That's. good." He's. an. idiot. "I don't know if I'll be a particularly good husband. I've never done it before" – idiot!! – "but – I will try. I can try very hard, when I put my mind to it."

And when exactly in this conversation did he start thinking of marrying Naima as something he will do, not something he might do? He's not sure. But he's also not sure he minds. 

"...yeah. I know you can. I think that's - a lot of what it takes, honestly, just being very sure that you're going to try your best to make it work no matter what happens."

It is not fair that people can be so cute while you still really probably shouldn't touch them any more than you absolutely have to.

Oh no. Oh no. She's smiling. Did he say something right? He must have. Or maybe he's just endearingly pathetic, like three-legged dogs or Felix after a rainstorm. Good news either way either way, he hopes, and tries to sound more confident than he feels. 

"Well, then. Shall we order the wedding breakfast?" 

She blinks at him, trying to figure out what specifically a wedding breakfast is, which is hard because she's mostly distracted by the fact that it sounds like something you only do if you're saying there's going to be a wedding. "I'm not sure I know what that is? But - does that mean yes?"

"It's a traditional thing in Galt, you have a small ceremony, and then the next morning you invite everyone you know over" – and then he hears the second part of what she said. 

"And – yes. yes."

"Oh good. Then - we should get back to Osirion, so we can get my father's permission and then tell everyone. Which I guess gives us lots of time to discuss specifics like that. But - I actually might need to take a break and be happy before barreling ahead to any logistics conversations. I think."

So he's slow on the uptake. So it hasn't really hit him until just now that Naima really, truly, in her heart of hearts wants to be married to him. Because he makes her happy. He knows that's not what she cares about most in a marriage – it's a little  bit of self-indulgence, after the protecting and providing and committing to safeguard her children against sudden and dramatic personality changes. He'll take it all the same. 

And then, suddenly, it occurs to him – deep breaths, now – 

"....may I kiss you? It's perfectly respectable, for engaged couples. In Galt. I don't know if it's different in Osirion, of course if it would make you uncomfortable – " 

AUGH, this is why you're supposed to have chaperones when you talk about these things, so that you don't get all carried away in having enormous amounts of feelings that you really did not expect to have so many of and then rush headlong into something before you are actually married and it is actually okay.

"Um - so I definitely don't want to give you the impression that I don't want to do that, because I do, and I very much expect and look forward to that being an element of being married, but, uh, I don't actually know how it is in the cities but in Mut people don't really kiss in public even after they're married, it's, uh, it's kind of - private?"

Augh.

"........but if you wanted to, uh - sometimes people kiss on the hand, right, is that a thing? I think that would be - sufficiently proper. Probably. Not any more improper than spending a week alone in the jungle, anyway."

No the most suave moment of his life, but he does have his pride as a Galtan. 

"I would be honored." 

And he bends down, takes her hand, and slowly lifts it to his lips. 

Eeeeeee. 

She's not entirely sure she always makes the best decisions. But this? This is one of the better ones.