"Person-devouring vortexes are not at all the sort of magic I'd want in my world if I could choose."

"Well, this has been interesting so far, but I'd like a nice gate with a sign."

"What - instead of the person-devouring vortex? 'Kingdom of Night this way, come see the unnaturally petal-retaining flowers'? Wouldn't that be something."

"The flowers are probably not the first thing I'd advertise. The talking owls, maybe."

"Do you not have owls - or are they not people, where you're from—?"

"Not people. Only humans are, but we have nonperson owls and foxes and I wouldn't have particularly expected to find a place where those were people any more than I would have expected to find a place where rabbits or moths were."

"How odd that must be, to have only one kind of people."

"We're used to it. It makes things easier to standardize."

"I suppose it would, at that."

"I'm having a hard time how you arrange for a spider to be able to read books or an owl to be able to open doors, which maybe explains why you prefer to live out in the open."

"Oh, Snowfall doesn't have any trouble turning pages - less than I do, certainly, I have to worry about damaging them," says Button. "But yes, some days when I think about all the work that goes into a place like Silver Falls I can't imagine why anyone ever bothers to put up a building. Except then I remember what Silver Falls looks like and it seems much more understandable."

"So it's set up to work for everyone? That must have been a staggering hassle but I'm really curious."

"As nearly as possible! I can hardly think of what to mention - I suppose you'll see when we get there."

"I suppose I will."

"And I'm sure the people who put all that work into Silver Falls will be terribly embarrassed if it turns out they didn't think about what would happen if someone had to roll around the city in a wheeled contraption," she says with a laugh that rumbles up through her fur.

"I don't have to, unless it's icy."

"Then I don't think you'll need to worry."

"Good."

Onward.

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."