"All right. I'll let our benefactors know in the morning. Regill, if you've got the numbers you went over with Dorgelinda, I'd like to look over them and decide what we're doing first."

"Other than that - it's late. Get some rest, guys, I'll try not to have any emergencies in the night."

It is, in fact, late. She's not going to go to bed about it. She looks over the list, and runs numbers that reflect different amounts of underpaying neathers, or officers, or mercenaries whose contracts were already quite generous to her, and eventually decides that really, probably, the right thing to do with this much unexpected money is try to pay the money that everyone is owed, and use what's left over for some of the other stuff on Regill's list. Because that's, you know, fair. The normal kind of fair, and not the fancy Iomedae kind of fair. The kind where you said that you would give someone something for their work, and then they did the work, and now you owe them, and if you don't get the money to them at some point then eventually everyone will be rightly pissed off at you and never believe anything you say again.

Technically it's a different kind of fair if you include the neather soldiers, who nobody has agreed to pay anything, and who haven't negotiated for it because they don't in fact know what money is, and are used to living in horrifying conditions. But - they do the same work as other people, and ought to get the same pay for it.

Anyway.

She goes out and tries to cast an extended version of Arazni's endure elements on the outgoing patrols, to see if she can. It fizzles, and doesn't come out anything at all. It doesn't actually make any sense to be disappointed that you can't do something that only Arazni and Iomedae can do. She's not sure that means that she isn't.

It's almost midnight, at this point, and she probably ought to go to bed. But Daeran is up on the roof of the command center, for some reason, and instead she finds herself climbing up the stairs again. 

"Knight commander!" He has a mostly empty bottle of wine in one hand. "Fancy meeting you here."

"This is my house," she says, tiredly, and eyes the bottle suspiciously. "Do you need any help getting back to yours?"

"Oh, I drank less than half of this," he says, gesturing dismissively. "The other half I poured on Captain Harmattan's head."

"...why."

"Well, I was hoping for Lady Konomi, but Harmattan is the only one I've caught walking past. Anyone my cousin sent deserves it, I'm sure. Why, have you been up to anything much more riveting today without inviting me?"

"I always invite you to riveting things. You complain about it sometimes. But no, today I had a bunch of meetings, had to interrogate and then release a demon, and talked to Marit's former boss about - the church of Abadar thinking that she should compensate me for, uh, having been able to facilitate trade, I think."

It occurs to her, for a moment, to wonder whether the Other is the kind of being who might be inclined to do anything very dangerous with interworld transit. But there's nothing to be done about that, and it hasn't, as far as she knows, ever done much of anything besides murder people who got too close to it. She dismisses the thought without pausing to examine it.

"Other than that it was mostly paperwork, which I figured I'd spare you."

"An absolutely criminal waste of a day, for both of us. But I do have a better idea, now that you're here." The bottle disappears into a bag of holding, and instead he pulls out a scroll. He offers it to her; it's a scroll of fly. 

"I had it commissioned weeks ago, just in case I ever ran out of better ideas."

"Daeran, you have wings."

He smirks. "But you don't."

"I can fly! I fly all the time!"

"You fly when you're working. You've been working all day. Iomedae herself couldn't begrudge you a few minutes of selfish fun, and if she did I would pour wine on her head, too."

She sighs, and spends a moment just reading the spellwork. It's sort of beautiful, seeing it all written out like this. She doesn't often look at written spellwork, anymore.

"If you're giving me the scroll, I would rather save it for something useful."

He takes it out of her hands, then. "Absolutely not. I won't allow it."

"I don't think that's how giving people things is supposed to work?"

"Sure it is. The scroll is my personal property. I'll give you the spell, on the condition that you use it absolutely frivolously."

"Daeran, this is sweet," she says, quiet and serious, as she very rarely is with him. "Thank you. I appreciate it. But I also will, actually, be distracted from flying if I know it cost enough to clothe half the kids in Drezen."

"I forgot to use my second kenning today, can I trade you?"

"Of course," he says, eyes lighting up. "In that case, the scroll is yours if you can take it."

And then he leaps off the wall, wings fully extended, and just barely gathers enough lift to soar up into the night sky without hitting the ground below.

She spends her second kenning, minutes before midnight, and takes off after him.

Flying is fun, actually. This kind of flying is almost like airborne dancing - or, more accurately, almost like what she imagines that friendly and non-terrifying dancing might be like, because Korva has never actually danced with someone without trying to extricate herself from the situation as quickly as possible. She spent the last party that featured it trying to distract Daeran from noticing the inquisition dredging up the secrets of his childhood home, but even if she hadn't been otherwise occupied, she wouldn't have wanted to dance with anyone, least of all Daeran himself. They'd been through less together, back then. She was a lot more nervous about the occasional flirting before she decided that he was not actually going to escalate to something that was terrifying in its own right, rather than as a sign of something that he might do in the future.

Anyway, flying is fun.

She dances around Daeran without managing to take the scroll - her flight method is a lot more maneuverable than his is, but he doesn't let go the first time she pulls on it, and she doesn't want to tear the paper. So she flies away, invisibles herself, flies back, silently replaces the scroll with another piece of paper, and then peels off and returns, visibly, from above.

At which point she spends another ten minutes alternately playing at stealing the paper she planted on him, and swooping around tracing patterns in the air.

It's lucky that fly spells fail at least somewhat gracefully. She's high up, when the spell starts cutting out. Technically, she probably has enough time to mimic a feather fall, but she'd be so angy with herself if she actually lost a spell kenning to forgetting the time - and it isn't what she thinks to do anyway, because usually if she's falling she can't mimic feather fall fast enough for it to matter anyway. 

She just yells, and hopes that Daeran doesn't decide that this is fucking hilarious.

He does, actually, think that this is pretty hilarious - but the kind where he's going to laugh while he catches her, not the kind where he's going to let her fall.

He cannot, actually, remain suspended in the air for any length of time at all while carrying another person, but the landing isn't a bad one, especially if you consider that he's only had his wings for a couple months.

"I do believe that means I win."

"You wish," she says, when she's extricated herself. She waves her scroll of fly at him.

He blinks at her, and then looks at his own piece of paper. "When did you -?"

"Oh, that would be telling. Goodnight, Daeran."

She'll sleep for two hours, like she's supposed to, and then work on the remaining preparations for the new deployment plan. When it's still early morning, she can hop over to Iomedae's world and tell her staff that she would, in fact, like the money for the spell as an advance.