"I am not something merely of great value; I am something that is necessary for your long journey.  I do not, realistically, think that you could find another pair of shoes like myself."

He shrugs. "So?"

"There are things you discard the first time they seem troublesome to you; a merchant with valuable goods but who does not seem to treat you respectfully enough for your taste, or who asks you for pay in an unfamiliar coin.  There are things you cannot discard, like your shoes upon a long journey.  If your shoes could speak, it would be well to make compact with them before you set out."

"Look," Fe-Anar says, "I spend a lot of time around mysterious powerful people who are omniscient or are uncannily perfect at guessing exactly what to say to you, or are arguably gods, or some combination of those. They're lovely people, sometimes. There are some of them I wouldn't strangle even if I could. But one picks up some habits, when there are all kinds of powerful things that know too much around speaking vague prophecy instead of handing you a contract they want you to sign, and the main thing you learn is that you can actually just not let them do that and spitefully die in a fire instead.

Maybe that's what you'd call the thing-you-spend-when-you-get-wiser, where you replace that simple and eminently workable rule with whatever gods do among each other. Maybe it's something you have no comprehension of. I don't know. I don't care. I have said I'll pay you; I meant it. If I give my word, I'll keep it. But I will happily die in a fire rather than acknowledge some vague unbounded obligation to excessively powerful things that want to push me around. If I can only have my trip conditional on knuckling under to such beings, that trip is of no value to me; there are no gains from trade to peaceably split.

I would, in fact, take off my shoes, walking across the Worldwound, if my shoes started telling me what to do, because I just don't care that much about dying and I do care a lot about not being easy to manipulate.

If you want to make a deal, offer one. If your deal sounds worse than dying in a fire -- and many, many, many things sound worse than dying in a fire, when they're offered by smug entities that know too much -- then I'll die in a fire instead. If your advice is to make a compact, tell me what you're offering and what you want to be paid for so that we can write the godsdamned contract."

The old woman nods.  "As you now speak more plainly to me, I'll speak more plainly to you.  I was a farrier's daughter before I was a mysterious powerful anything, and I'm afraid to simply appoint you captain of the voyage and obey you because you strike me as in some ways incautious.  You offered insult to the mysterious powerful thing, saying, 'It must be difficult being prideful and unable to assuage your pride merely by actually achieving things.'  That's the sort of rashness that a farrier's daughter watches men die for."

"I also know more than that, but it's knowledge that I received under contract and that I don't want to use because that imposes additional terms on me unless I could have succeeded otherwise.  I'm telling you that because it's something you disclose to somebody with whom you want to build a firm relationship; the sort where you aren't simply wearing your magic items hidden, to manipulate them; the sort where you worry they'd resent the hiding afterward, if they learned.  I am being more cautious around you than you are being cautious around myself, and on the proposed voyage we would have to be cautious around things from the Far Tapestry."

"The task we've set ourselves isn't one cautious people set themselves. But if you have advice on not being manipulated by beings from the Far Tapestry then that is among the advice I'd pay you for and follow, if it was any good."

"My husband is wealthy enough that mortal coin means nothing to me.  The pay I seek is a healthy working relationship, in which we either have terms of alliance, or I don't expect to die if I submit to all your orders."

"But I can give you two pieces of advice like that, to be repaid in the coin of real respect, or even a down payment toward compromise.  I won't set the price in advance, only ask you to be fair, once you've determined the goods' worth."

"I'm listening."

"First, this:  To the things from the Far Tapestry you are a sort of mechanical contrivance whose levers they are prodding, looking for triggers.  To bind them on a level where their words bear any relation to reality, rather than being pure manipulations, is only the first step with trading with them; after that they will be looking for truths that fix reality, true things they can say that move you; and they have more freedom in it than you imagine, because what they say affects what is true.  It bears some resemblance to the art of self-fulfilling prophecy, which the young oracle beside you has barely begun to explore."

"From the perspective of the Far Tapestry, anything resembling a swift emotional reaction is an alien - to them - shortcut through your mind's pathways, which they will try to exploit towards self-fulfillment.  Had I wished to ruin you, using the arts that they would use, I would have - without warning, and with a carefully established previous frame of insufficiently-concealed contempt - prophesied to you that your pride would be your flaw and your downfall, that you would hold yourself too great to heed the counsel of wise elder beings like myself that could have saved you.  I am not using the exact words I'd have used, if I were trying that myself; but with the right choice of wordings, intonations, contexts, I could have spoken those words and thereby made them true.  I could tell you that your reluctance to compromise would destroy you, in a way that made it sound like I was sincerely contemptuous about the fact but maybe also didn't know as much about you as I thought; and you'd think 'hah, I'll show her, then' and refuse to compromise and so seal the truth I'd predicted."

"Dealing with creatures like that is, in fact, unpleasant, and I would recommend leaving such negotiations to my husband."

"I do realize that, and I'm not so easily played, but I'm happy to leave it to your husband, had I any reason to think I could trust him or you."

"You're less easily played when you're in a mood to carefully reflect on things, perhaps.  I can already predict about you that you are not always in a mood like that, and see some of how I'd steer you to not be in that mood at the key moment when you heard my words.  To be a kind of thing that has changeable, responsive moods makes you, from their perspective, a strangely vulnerable sort of thought process; they can consider how to attack every kind of mood you can be prodded to enter, rather than you being in one constant mental state with a more limited set of self-fulfilling claims."

" - sure. And thank you, I guess, for not doing that, if you're in fact not doing that, and if that's what you're fishing for. I notice we're not talking about why I should trust you."

"We cannot yet form the bonds of trust as trust should be, until you know more about me than it's to my own advantage to reveal now.  And you will become smarter than this, and later wiser.  If you came to trust me too quickly now, you would notice then.  That would be an ill start to the voyage."

"Well, then, I'm not sure we have much more to say to one another."

"You know more about me than at the start of this conversation; and I know more about you that I am allowed to take into account. That the process does not complete immediately does not mean there has been no progress."

"But I'll move on, then, to my second advice, which is more of a tangible offer."

"I would guess that Nefreti Clepati has seen you in alternate possibilities, and has seen some of your possible fates.  Learning of those might enable you to break free of them, rather than others using them to move you about.  I will give this oracle girl a private message to bear to Clepati, though it cannot yet come to your own ears, by which I mean to motivate Clepati to tell you what she has withheld.  That is my next offering to you in this relationship."

"Well, I won't turn that down."

The old woman turns then her head toward Ione, and speaks apparently in plain Taldane, though it is also evident that Fe-Anar does not hear.

"Brace yourself and show no reaction to my words."

Oh that's not a good sign.

"I'm braced."

"You made an error, in opposing my interests here, in seeking to warn that man against me."

"It's not to my interest to let Creation be threatened, if I don't think I have a chance to escape Creation.  Having learned this much, in this way, if I failed to come to alliance terms with this man, I would eliminate the threat to Creation after I'd investigated it.  There would be no constraints on how I used that knowledge, which I'd have learned regardless."

Ione Sala shows no outward reaction.  Her heart is hammering inside her, though, for she's finally thinking and yes, that should have occurred to her, and even more it's occurring to her that Fe-Anar himself would be ecstatic if this being did exactly that.

"Understood," Ione says.

"I'd know from having seen him for only two minutes that his pride is his fatal flaw.  He is not ready to lead a voyage out of Creation.  He is not ready to hear how unready he is."

"There is something in the nature of Creation or perhaps what lies beyond it, that makes mortals to matter in it at all, as we wouldn't otherwise expect to be true.  For that reason I consider it a running concern that perhaps a voyage like this one can only succeed if it's a mortal to begin it and drive it, a mortal who hasn't been turned into a full hand-puppet of gods along the way.  But he is unequal, at present, even to the simpler requisite of coming to reasonable terms with me about my aid.  He wants to be sole captain of the voyage and rule it alone, and it is possible to put him into a mood where he does not want to hear from his advisors.  I would not, at present, want to go with him, as he is.  So Nethys's gamble ends here and poorly, unless Nefreti Clepati tells this man everything pertinent she knows about his fates and his dooms, and that enables him to grow beyond those."

"Understood."

"My price for my aid to Nethys in this matter, is that Nefreti Clepati tells me anything she's glimpsed in other possibilities about a power that can control space, or make portals of a vast scale; any such tale, however distant from us, might give me a hint about where to look for a power like that somewhere in Creation.  Success there would also make this a more promising voyage.  And you need me to decide, in the end, that I'll gamble on this being the right moment to go into a greater exile."

"I'll convey that, though I can't speak for my master.  How is Nefreti to contact You?"

"She knows me.  So will you, as soon as I decide the matter is no longer a secret from you.  And that's also a helpful act toward him, for it's better that people begin by seeing me as I am, for good or ill, and only afterward consider the distorted stories of me."

The old woman turns back to Fe-Anar, speaking this time again to be heard by both.  "I will be waiting here in Fire where you found me, if you later become more desiring of my aid.  I'd offer to send some small minion with you, for your convenience, but I don't expect you want that."