Hug.

Hug.

"Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"Took the egg summons. Came back. There were eggs right there next to my summoner. Checked in glass - yep, the summoners' species hatched from them - checked how many daeva they'd summoned - dozens of them - wrote Cam - took a circle - 

- it was to Vienna, the dad of one of the people who daevafied after watching my show. I tried to gesture that I urgently needed to go home. He threw a brick at my head and left."

Nod.

"Didn't come back. And I tried to think - you would probably notice I was gone and send somebody, a soul Elf if there was one around, but Milliways, didn't know how long to expect it to take, and it wasn't the sort of thing where if I waited for three hours and no one had come, that meant you were probably going to be there soon, after three hours if you hadn't come I would be in the exact same position except three hours would have passed, so I should make up my mind right away, either way.

I figured they'd summon another couple people while I was waiting to get the message to you. And the people they'd already have summoned would talk to more people. I thought worst case you'd just have a goldmage jump - but can't be sure of that, could be that one randomly jumped recently in Godspring for some silly unrelated reason -"

"Mm."

"So. Trying to let him to let me go would scare him but stood a decent chance of being the difference between someone writing the curators of Hell to say 'hey, have you got the winged people world yet'? and not. So I went invisible, drew his attention, thought he'd dismiss me when he saw I wasn't in the circle."

"It sounds like that was a reasonable guess even in hindsight."

"I don't think I guessed badly with the information I had, no. Maybe I could've inferred from the fact I didn't get literacy and the circle was in sand that it was just one person doing it, but even so I think there's a significant chance someone'll write the library asking about this world. Could've told Cam 'pause Hell' instead of telling him to get me, I should've just done that and hoped you'd piece it together -"

Hug.

"Invisibility just made him read the binding more carefully. So I paralyzed him and dragged him into the circle and glared at him - I honestly thought that'd do it -"

"I would have expected that too."

"Waited ten minutes. It wouldn't - wouldn't have been okay if he'd been in the middle of trying and - 

- at ten minutes if it was worth it at all there was no reason to let more time pass first -"

Nod.

"And then I wrote Cam again and came home and we paused Hell and it doesn't look like anyone'd written the curators. Yet."

"But every minute still might count." Hug.

Hug. "I wondered if he did it on purpose - they pressed the charges in the first place, I got acquitted, when he still wouldn't let me go I wondered if he thought being a daeva was a fair trade for the chance to get me locked up for thirty years -"

"Do you suppose you'll ask, once time's moving again?"

"I really doubt he wants to see me again, whatever his reason was. Cam says they worked something out so I probably won't spend forever in jail...I knew I might, though, I wasn't going to - if I thought it was worth it to kill someone only if I didn't get in trouble for it that'd be a way of thinking to be suspicious of. Either it was worth it for the minutes or it wasn't."

"Yes."

"Don't know if it was. Don't think it turns on whether someone writes the curators in the next five minutes either, that part's - that part's just luck..."

"It turns on a lot of things you didn't know and couldn't have known."

"What would you have done?"

"I would have been slightly more willing to commit correspondence about the people from Beach - we're calling it Beach - to recorded form, but I probably would have been more confident that I could do it sufficiently obscurely and still be understood by the recipient. Failing that, though - I might have leaned harder on pleading than intimidation but I do think that's stylistic, no way to really guess which would work best on a particular person short of being a Maitimo with a chance to get a read."