Having never been called upon to build a glacier, I don't have my design choices finalized, but I expect I'd go for a variety. No mammoths, though, not unless I went overboard and decided to take thousands of years to construct an entire planet with a carefully crafted biological and geological history. Fake frozen mammoths in my artificially produced glaciers just feels so inauthentic otherwise.

Being a demon does not make me immune to accidentally inhaling orange juice I will have you know.

I apologize. Well, I apologize while cackling gleefully, but the apology is nevertheless sincere.

If you would find it convenient to visit Only Technically Nonrandom Rural Location, Canada, you could do that and we could have an actual date modulo the possibility that I will suddenly freak out upon being confronted with your seventeenness in person.

I have been a thane of Thule and therefore in all respects a legal adult for a year and a half, but I understand that that logic may not be operative in your reaction to my seventeenness, particularly since in your benighted country I wouldn't even be allowed to drink alcohol for another four fucking years. I would be happy to visit your technically nonrandom rural location.

I didn't drink alcohol even once it was legal, and, be fair, that's an irregular age requirement even in the States, virtually everything else is eighteen or younger. I felt very mature at seventeen and do not in retrospect think I was in error, but I'm pushing chronological thirty for all that I still look twenty-two, and even twenty-two would be kinda sketchy.

Oh, sure, I don't deny that it's reasonable to be worried in your position, it's just - not even that I think I'm a stunningly mature seventeen-year-old so much as that I took the þainneið on my sixteenth birthday and therefore as far as my country is concerned I have been not only an adult for the past year and a half but specifically someone who upholds a personal responsibility to make the world around me a better place in whatever ways I am capable of.

The age of majority in Thule for most purposes is eighteen; sixteen is just the earliest you can take the þainneið, and once you do that it's sort of stupid to keep considering you a child in any respect, so we don't. Most sixteen-year-olds do not choose to take on the responsibility of thanehood, and many wouldn't be accepted if they tried, but I did and I was and now I am a thane. I can officiate marriages, I can issue emergency orders to members of the military, and if I break the law I'm tried more leniently but sentenced more harshly because the assumption is that I probably had a good reason but if I didn't I sure as hell should've known better.

Who accepts or doesn't accept you?

Also, in case it was ambiguous given that I suggested a date after you proposed marriage, please don't officiate anything while you are here.

The Grand Duchess of Thule or duly appointed representative.

I am certainly not going to marry you until you explicitly accept my proposal. Marrying people who don't want to be married is the sort of thing a thane should know better than to do. Marrying them to oneself even more so.

Just checking. In case 'come have a date with me! In Canada!' seemed a little too acceptance-shaped.

Ah. No, it sounded date-shaped, but I can see why you would have wanted to clarify.

When's good?

Saturday afternoon? Around one o'clock, your local time?

Sure. Show up hungry, I do good food.

Will do!

Should I plan on anything more elaborate than dinner?

Oh, I don't know. Feel free to surprise me.

I feel like this would be an awkward place for a glacier.

I'm sure you'll think of something.

Suppose you are disappointed and I am uncreative and bad at guessing?

If you cannot think of any interesting gifts, set pieces, geographical features, exotic potted plants, lost wonders of the world, or other miscellanea to add to our date, I will be very surprised indeed.

We shall see.

Indeed.

When Sindri shows up the gazebo is decorated with interesting demonic artwork and there is unfamiliar baroque music playing.

He arrives by fairy, and when he waves to her she zips off.

"Nice," he says of the setup.