"...okay. Have a good evening."

And Mordred finishes making dinner alone, and eats alone, and leaves food out for when Agravaine gets back, and writes.

Meanwhile:

Lev holds Oswald's hand. "It's okay to miss her."

"They keep -- they keep saying that she misses me too."

He sighs.

"I don't know if I want her to or not. But I'm here right now. I'm not-- I'm here."

"She probably does. But that doesn't mean it's-- safe, to be with her."

"Yeah. And there would be more people who miss me. If I did."

"I would miss you.

Tereza would miss you."

"I'd better stay home then. How would you two ever hold down the fort without me."

His smile is small but objectively dopey. Good thing his face is shoved against Lev's shoulder so he cannot see this.

There's a lot less they can get away with, with a lonely 8-year-old sharing their space. It's worth it. You can't be sad with a kid demanding your attention, you can't sink into a pit of despair, you are needed for something, and for once the thing that's needed from him is to be happy and present and supportive. He is willing to trade in a large number of the intense and hurried moments of passion for quiet nights together talking about books. (Sometimes Lev has facts to add to his occult research and sometimes he has opinions and many of those opinions are wrong. What a terrible and marvelous discovery.) And he keeps on crying on him at 3am over the same things he's spent the last half a year crying over. It still helps.

And in the middle of it all it turns out Lev is great with kids, or at least great with Tereza, which is in fact the most important quality anyone could ever have. So. So that's cool. (It's really great.)

All his latent self-awareness about his increasingly unhinged emotional state and how stopgaplike a month with Lev and Tereza might be was unfounded. Playing happy families is fantastic.

Meanwhile--

Montgomery said she'd call when she reached land; Mordred is wildly unclear on how long to expect that to take but he makes a point of spending more time than usual where he'd hear the phone if it rang.

"Good evening."

"Hi! Good evening. I'd ask how you're doing but that question only has so many answers and they're all kind of terrible, you don't have to answer it unless you want to."

"I have my daughter. There is a limit to how awful things can be."

"Good." He's incredibly sincere. "That's-- really good."

"It is," she says, "much easier to live on a boat if you are a sorcerer. There are very well-documented spells which attract fish."

"...of course there are. I love people."

"I believe they were given to humans by a species which lives under the water. That's the suggestion of my research from the Revelations of Dagon, at any rate."

"Okay but people are still so good!

--more seriously I did mean it when I said I didn't want to get you back involved in. All of the everything."

"If you tried I would kill you but-- I don't know who is going to pick up my books now."

"Probably Savitree. Brooks is incompetent and Captain Walker has never struck me as a man for reading."

"Probably." Hopefully, at any rate. He'd given Mariam advance warning and everything. "And-- that's fair."

Honestly it's kind of reassuring to hear; threatening to kill him is not entirely unlike setting boundaries around her cult involvement.

"My daughter is... recovering.

She swam for a bit yesterday. About twenty minutes before she became too tired."

"Oh good for her--" and Mordred can express more interest in that vein, what Lela likes reading and doing and so on, until and unless Montgomery has a different topic in mind.

Montgomery sounds genuinely happy when she talks about her daughter.

It's not an emotion he's heard her have before.

!!!Good!!!

"I worry about what's going to happen to her. Raised on the sea by a sorcerer does not precisely prepare a girl to get married."

"...admittedly I have no idea what does or doesn't prepare people to get married, I'm a queer who ran off to be a journalist instead. But it's... important, I think, that kids get to be weird, and it sounds like she has that."

"I doubt I would be able to let her be normal."