May asks smalltalky questions about their families and what other species there are and if they have a ballpark idea of how big the world is and how the kingdoms were founded and such.

Button's family lives in the mountains and was mildly surprised when she went off to join the army. Charm's family lives by a river and fishes a lot, and she can describe an amazing variety of delicious-sounding fish, although she maintains that her heart belongs to wild-caught roast crickets fresh from the fire. There are rats and stoats and beehives and, as mentioned, the occasional frog, and lots and lots and lots of kinds of fey. At their next forage break Starlight is happy to perch near her and put a serious effort into translating units of distance, whereupon it transpires that the world is approximately the size of Australia plus several miles of ocean. Nobody has any idea how the kingdoms were founded.

"I'm not sure the Kingdoms are the sort of thing that has a beginning," says Starlight.

"What would they have instead?" murmurs Reflect.

"Wouldn't have been much of a world without a Sun or a Moon," says Ebb. "Maybe it all happened at once, the King and the Queen and the Kingdoms and the people and the war."

"I think a world is too complicated a thing to happen all at once," says Snowfall. "Something must have started it. But I can't imagine a world without the Queen..."

Beehives are people one per hive?

"My world doesn't have the Queen," she reminds them.

One per hive, yes. They're one of the few sorts of people who live on both sides of the border in substantial numbers, although Charm happens to know that there are different species in each Kingdom. Southern bees are fuzzier.

"Can't imagine this world without her," Snowfall corrects herself. "I suppose I have trouble imagining your world too but it's a different sort of trouble."

"Is 'Queen' a species or are she and the King the same thing or what?"

"I'm not sure if it's a species when there's just one of it," muses Snowfall.

"They have some things in common but I wouldn't call them the same," says Charm. "They both sleep as statues, her in the day and him at night. They're both very tall. I suppose they're sort of fey-ish, more fey-ish than anything-else-ish anyway."

"How would you know the King's very tall, I hardly think you've met him," says Ebb.

"I talk to folk in the borderlands!" says Charm. "Sometimes I learn things! It sounded like he was just about the same height as the Queen."

"What do the borderlands types make of the war?"

"Mostly they wish we'd have it somewhere else," says Charm.

"Seems difficult, that," says Ebb.

"Do you have any kind of diplomatic channel with the south? Ceasefires and stuff?"

"Mostly not," says Button.

"The borderfolk pass things along sometimes," says Charm. "And - the way it shifts with the seasons - when everyone knows Day's going to keep the upper hand all summer, you don't try as hard, and neither do they, so we just sort of scuffle all season until autumn when Night makes a push, and then in winter it's the same thing backwards."

"Maybe this makes more sense to people who are from here."

"Could be," says Charm. "Does it not make sense to you?"

"It really doesn't."

"Well, what about it?"

"Maybe you're calling a 'war' what I'd call something else, but I think wars are very bad and you need an extraordinary reason to have one - even the ones that are had over economic stuff on Earth are at least about economic stuff that affects a ton of people - it sounds to me like everyone would be best served if the Queen issued a conditional surrender at the end of fall and everyone just stopped doing the thing."

"...but you couldn't just - then we'd be surrendered to Day and they'd probably want us all to, to, live in buildings and fill out forms," says Charm.

"I said a conditional surrender, you could insist that the Queen get to keep ruling you and not demand forms or at least not very many of them. The timing would be so if it didn't go over well you wouldn't be in much trouble if you they made a fuss about the conditions and you preferred to keep fighting."

"Well that wouldn't really be a surrender, then, would it? It'd just be a - a 'go away and stop bothering us'," says Charm.

"Exactly. But they'd probably be more likely to go away and stop bothering you if they got to say they won, right? And all the important things like not having to fill out forms would still be here for you and you would have fooled them."

"...well, maybe," Charm says dubiously.

"And what's to stop them from nodding along and then coming back next spring?" wonders Ebb.

"Oh, you'd probably want to guard the border for the next year or so to make sure. If you wanted to be really sure, you could propose that there could be immigration between the countries and then you could have spies there and hostages here if they violated the terms."

"We'll see what the Queen thinks, I suppose," says Ebb.

"I don't wanna surrender to Day," says Charm.

"Maybe the war is much less bad than I am imagining and is not at all what happened to Starlight's eye and nobody ever dies in it."

Starlight shuffles.

"Oh, people do die in it," says Ebb.

"I don't wanna surrender to Day either," says Starlight.

Sigh.