He is not totally sure what to say to that that neither a) makes it obvious that he is not, in fact, a cultist nor b) makes it sound like he didn't mean it.

"It's true," is what he settles on, "I am very bad at this business where you don't tell people when you like them."

Inaaya is fearless of her safety, very tiny, and unbothered by people seeing her underwear, and so can climb higher in this tree than one might expect.

"Me too. I like you."

Smile. "I like you too."

"Who is Shakespeare?"

Blink blink.

"...was. He was a playwright in the late fifteen hundreds, there's debate about whether he was the greatest writer in the English language or just one of them."

"Oh! What sort of things did he write?"

(Lev thinks this is hilarious.)

That's very fair of Lev but this is an ex-Best Thing that Mordred has never had a chance to explain to someone who didn't already know it before. In his explanation of what sort of things Shakespeare wrote there is so much bouncing.

Inaaya has so many questions! Can Mordred recite the monologues, since he tells her the monologues are very good?

Some of them! He has these two from Hamlet and this one from Othello and this one from Lear and this one from Henry IV part 1 and --

Inaaya has very insightful questions which occasionally show a complete lack of familiarity with British history, the kind of insightful where you are very smart but you know absolutely nothing about the topic. Also she wants to know what all the words mean.

Valid to be completely unfamiliar with British history; he explains the context as well as he can and defines all the words and is not toning down his heart eyes even a little bit.

Gosh!!! Mordred likes her!!! That is not really a thing she is very used to happening!!!

Oh for fuck's sake.

Lev is not jealous, because Mordred is very cute, but he is not really looking forward to explaining to Mordred that he is less of a fairy than previously believed.

"You should join me in the tree."

"Sure! Fair warning I'm not as good at this as you are," but he can make a solid attempt.

"I'm not going to climb a tree," Lev announces into the air. "I will fall out and bash my head and die."

"Or, uh, not die. But in a very painful way."

"Has it occurred to anyone that invulnerability should come with being immune to pain."

"You're invulnerable?"

He spreads his hands. "Apparently? Something weird happened in 1924."

"That would involve magic being friendly and unambiguously helpful, and obviously we can't have that."

Mordred has managed to get into the tree. Not as high as Inaaya has, because he is both larger and less confident in his safety while climbing than she is, but he's there.

"My magic is unambiguously helpful as long as I don't try to talk to dead people."

"I stand corrected. That would involve magic other than Inaaya's being friendly and unambiguously helpful."

"I guess the part before I figured out how to get the dead people to stop talking to me was pretty unhelpful. Both because it was terrifying and because of, you know, the exorcisms. Not effective ones." She considers. "Or at least not ones that are effective if your problem is that you're talking to dead people, I don't know if they're effective in general."

"Don't look at me," Lev says. "I'm an anthropologist but that doesn't mean I know what's real."

"It's a very difficult problem," Inaaya agrees. "Eventually I learned to pretend I couldn't hear anything. And then later I figured out how to get them to shut up."