"Ah. Yes it does."

He smiles. He takes her hands. They dissolve into the wind, and it carries them to the mountain.

It is a beautiful castle. Huge, ancient, exquisitely well-maintained, surrounded by beautiful gardens and a beautiful forest and a beautiful moon-silvered lake. They circle it on the wind, and then land atop the tallest tower, with a breathtaking view down the mountain all the way to the city of Oroshe.

"Wow."

Lord Tanaikon grins at her. "Your appreciation is just as delightful as I thought it would be."

She considers this. "I'm glad," she decides after a few moments.

He leans on the parapet and looks at her consideringly.

"I like you," he says. "You're interesting."

"I'm not surprised, if you normally kidnap your girls from the capital. Everyone there was deadly dull."

...He bursts into very undignified giggles.

"And they probably act even less interesting than they are, what with the gibbering terror of torture."

After a moment, he recovers enough to say, "Oh, terror can be interesting in its own way."

"If you didn't feel that way I'm sure you wouldn't have said whatever that was to that poor man at the party. But if everyone acts terrified of you, it probably makes me more interesting that I don't."

He laughs. "You're right about that."

"So what now?"

"I'm not sure," he says. "I liked dancing with you. I liked showing you my castle. I'm thinking of telling you where I fall on the scale between rescuer and demon, but I'm not sure you'll believe me if I do."

"I didn't actually personally need rescuing, in case I was accidentally misleading about that."

"I didn't expect you to."

"Okay. So--when I said I didn't appreciate people playing silly buggers with me you rephrased the question to one I could believe mattered, you told me you hadn't decided what to do with me, and not like a threat. I can't promise to believe you exactly, but I can promise to take what you say seriously."

He smiles. "All right," he says.

"I do kidnap girls and rape and torture them. Not for millennia, though, they get about a century and a half each. And I'm not a demon, just a man with a lot of powerful magic. Anyone could have what I have if they knew how to get it and were willing to spend three thousand years torturing people near-daily. I honestly do like you, and I like the look on your face when I show you something beautiful, and I think I'd rather make you happy than torture you."

"So, I would...need to know you better, but...the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. If the magic needs 'pain' and not 'suffering'."

...he looks thoughtfully at her.

"You just get better and better, don't you," he says. "Pain and not suffering, yes."

"Obviously my ability to experiment with this in the past has been limited, but from what I already know--sharp good, burning bad, physical impact okay on my limbs and torso except the stomach and definitely not on my head, choking bad, tension like from pulled hair or overextended limbs good."

"I think I could work with that," he says. "Although I'm used to girls I can't kill by accident..."

"How do you do that?"

"It's part of how I keep all this magic going - it's not without problems, though. I can't cut someone loose from the magic once they're in it, and after a while it starts burning out their minds, and the easiest way to make them last longer was to add a transformation that turns them into swans whenever the sun's up, so now they get a hundred years before they start to go and about fifty more before there's nothing left."

"That doesn't sound terribly appealing. Does someone have to be in that bit of magic for torturing them to be magically helpful?"