## Chapter 433 - Enough Time to Be Bored

The morning after the Waykeeper was almost aggressively normal. Merrowford began before either of the things waiting for Ian and Lethira did. Vale had an inspection note to write. The intermediary had a records office to visit once he received it. Somewhere west of the walls, the pale-grey house remained exactly as they had left it: roof still needing work, chimney still dirty, stream still moving beyond the trees. None of those facts became more urgent because two people in an inn room wanted the deed finished.

Lethira allowed the clerks to have their morning. The Reed and Wheel supplied breakfast, hot water and the familiar noises of a building moving into its working day. They ate downstairs rather than inventing another Guild contract to fill the empty hours. Ian's unranked aide status survived breakfast without further achievement. Lethira's restored B tag remained equally unimpressed by the absence of work.

The Waykeeper did not return. That absence had weight, although not enough to make Lethira spend the morning staring at places where a goddess might appear. The Waykeeper had chosen the road. Whatever happened along it belonged first to the woman walking backwards through her own decisions. If she came back, there would be questions. If she took longer, there would still be questions. Lethira had no useful way to hurry either outcome.

The house required even less from her. Vale had said morning for the written note. The intermediary had said he could take the remaining checks to the records office that day. The deed was more likely tomorrow than today. Lethira had heard all of that while standing in the yard and had meant what she said about not hovering over the process.

So she did not hover. Their travelling things were put back into reasonable order after the previous day. Clothes and equipment lost the small disorder acquired through Guild work, property inspection and meeting a builder-god. The remaining divine apples stayed where Lethira could see them. By late morning the room had acquired the particular untidiness of two people actually living in it for several days rather than merely passing through: boots that belonged by the wall, papers that mattered on the table, small possessions whose locations had become obvious through repetition.

The first of the afternoons Lethira had offered Isha and Kanno waited on the other side of noon. Whether Earth could safely meet it was not something she intended to solve by guessing. Isha and Kanno had their own lives, Aelira had hers, and Ian had already made the problem of mismatched clocks sufficiently alarming that Lethira was content to let him say when a route was possible. Until then, the meeting remained what it had been when she signed the missive: something she wanted, with time deliberately left around it.

For once, that left the morning free.

---

Monday, 24 April 2028, began in flat 202 with Isha discovering that sleep had not made her dislike Coach 1. It had merely made her willing to think about it again.

Thomas was already dressed for work when she came into the LDK. He had left toast beneath a cloth and tea in the pot rather than deciding whether she wanted breakfast before she was awake enough to object. Isha sat at the dining table, poured tea and remained there for several minutes before noticing the Coach 1 bag beside the bedroom door.

Thomas followed her gaze while closing his work bag. He said nothing.

Isha drank some tea. "The answer is not no."

He paused with one hand on the zip. "To another course?"

"Eventually. Perhaps." She looked at the closed bag again. "Not this week."

"I wasn't going to ask this week."

Isha raised her eyes to him. Thomas amended, "I was going to try very hard not to ask this week." That was close enough to truth that she let him keep it.

By the time he left for the university, Isha had eaten two pieces of toast, moved the course bag fully into the bedroom and decided that she was not opening it again that morning. Wednesday was her only ordinary climbing-centre shift. Monday belonged to her unless she chose to give part of it to something else.

At eight forty-six, her phone vibrated. Kanno's message contained no photograph, proof complaint or client insult.

**Have you slept?**

Isha looked at the question, then at the time.

**Yes.**

Three dots appeared almost immediately, followed by another message.

**Enough to discuss four people's calendars and one person's refusal to explain time properly?**

Isha smiled despite herself.

**Probably.**

Kanno replied that she had checked her week. She could make Monday afternoon free if they actually wanted to offer it, Tuesday afternoon was easier, and Thursday also worked. Wednesday was absent from the list before Isha needed to mention her shift.

A second message followed.

**I can come over at ten. I would rather decide in person than turn this into forty messages.**

Isha agreed, and the hour before Kanno arrived became preparation almost by accident.

Isha showered and dressed, then changed her top once because the first one felt too much like something chosen for an important meeting. The second was a soft dark-green knit she wore often with fitted black trousers and low boots. Nothing about it belonged to Wood Elf court dress, climbing work or ceremony. Her wedding band and sapphire ring remained on her hand because she had no reason to remove them.

She stood in front of the bedroom mirror for longer than the clothes justified. March had been different. March had been reunion, family, years of absence and the impossible fact of faces she had believed she would never see again. She had not needed to wonder what seeing Aelira or Lethira meant then. The answer had filled the room before anyone spoke.

This afternoon, if it became this afternoon, was supposed to be smaller. Isha looked at herself once more, tucked a loose section of pale hair behind one ear that was no longer pointed, and left the mirror alone.

At nine fifty-eight the buzzer sounded. Kanno arrived in plain work trousers, a cream blouse and light jacket, with her black shoulder bag and no camera case. The absence was noticeable precisely because the camera had accompanied so much of her recent life.

Isha looked once at the bag. "It is not in there," Kanno said while removing her shoes.

"I didn't ask."

"You looked."

"I confirmed."

Kanno accepted the distinction and came through to the LDK. The returned missives were still in the shallow dining-table drawer beside the unused sheets and Ian's implausibly elegant fountain pen. Isha brought them out while Kanno made tea. Neither woman needed the letters to remember the answers, but having Aelira's and Lethira's handwriting physically on the table made the scheduling problem feel less like arranging an imaginary event.

Kanno sat opposite Isha and opened her calendar. "Today first," she said. "Because if we don't actually want today, there is no reason to pretend it is an option."

Isha looked at her own calendar. "I am free."

"I know. I am asking whether you want to be."

That changed the question. Isha rested one hand beside Lethira's returned sheet. The course weekend was finished. She was tired in the ordinary aftermath of concentrated work, but not depleted. Her reluctance had nothing to do with needing another recovery day.

"Yes," she said. "I am nervous. That does not make today a bad day."

Kanno's expression shifted by a degree. "Good. I am nervous too."

Isha looked up. "You have seen both of them alone."

"That is part of why I am nervous."

Kanno did not expand immediately. She turned Aelira's page so the reply faced her and reread the last lines. *Please do not arrange anything ceremonial on my account.*

"Lethira and I found one conversation," she said eventually. "Aelira and I found another. You already have histories with both of them. Putting all of that in one place may be easy. It may also be very strange."

"Probably both."

"Yes."

That answer seemed to help. They moved to the practical problem. Kanno could clear the period from one-thirty until six that afternoon by shifting two pieces of non-client layout work into Tuesday. Tuesday from one until six was easier and required almost no movement. Thursday from two until six gave them a third option. Kanno refused to offer an after-work evening simply because it preserved more office hours.

She tapped Aelira's reply. "She asked for enough time to be bored. I don't want to arrive after work at seven and spend the first hour knowing I should leave by ten."

Isha agreed. "And Lethira said she didn't want to leave when the conversation became interesting."

"Both of them are demanding inefficient scheduling."

"They are elves."

Kanno looked at her. Isha kept her face straight for perhaps two seconds.

"That was unfair," she admitted.

"You are also an elf when it benefits your argument."

"Formerly."

"Conveniently."

The humour passed without needing to become more than that. Isha entered the three windows into a note on her phone. Wednesday remained excluded because of work. Friday was possible for Isha but uncertain for Kanno and unnecessary if one of the earlier choices could work.

The harder part was deciding what else they were actually preparing. Kanno opened her bag and took out her wallet, phone, keys and a small packet of tissues. She placed each on the table as if performing an inventory.

"No camera," she said.

"Already agreed."

"No print. No copy of *Until Replaced* for Aelira just because Lethira has one."

Isha nodded. Kanno's gift to Lethira belonged to the meeting in which she had given it. Turning this gathering into a chance to equalise possessions between two friends would change it before it began.

Kanno put the ordinary objects back into her bag. "No notebook unless I need to write down something practical."

"You usually carry one."

"Carrying it is different from interviewing people."

Isha's mouth twitched. "Aelira would notice."

"So would Lethira."

"Yes."

Kanno closed the bag. Isha looked towards the kitchen. "Tea?"

"The request already says tea."

"I mean should we bring any."

Kanno considered the cupboards, then the problem of carrying Earth tea into a neutral construct for two women from another world when Ian could apparently create a place between both worlds. "No. Unless we want the first fifteen minutes to be a discussion about which reality the teapot belongs to."

Isha thought that sounded exactly like a discussion Lethira might enjoy. She nevertheless agreed.

They had almost nothing left to prepare. That should have made the meeting easier. Instead it removed the useful disguise of logistics.

Kanno picked up Lethira's reply again. "Do you want to tell me anything before we go? About them together, I mean."

Isha's first instinct produced several answers at once. Aelira's habit of letting silence run longer when she wanted somebody else to fill it. Lethira's ability to turn teasing into a weapon or a kindness depending on who needed which. The way the two of them had worked around each other in court, on the road, in rooms where everyone knew Aelira was a princess and Lethira refused to become furniture because of it.

She stopped before choosing any of them. "Do you want me to?"

Kanno thought about that. "No."

Isha nodded. "I wanted to know whether I wanted you to," Kanno said. "Apparently I don't. I've met each of them without a briefing. I don't want a briefing now because there will be two of them."

"Good."

"You sounded relieved."

"I had already begun deciding what order to explain things in."

Kanno stared at her, and Isha accepted the criticism without requiring it to be spoken.

The tea had cooled enough to drink quickly. Outside the balcony doors, late-April light lay across the neighbouring roofs and the fresh green beginning to thicken on the trees beyond them. The crooked paper hanging Isha had left unfinished before Coach 1 moved slightly whenever air passed through the room. Nobody corrected it.

Kanno checked the three windows again. "Today is the one you want?"

Isha looked at the returned letters. Lethira had offered two afternoons. Aelira could make the first and preferred the second. Neither reply could tell them which local afternoon existed now, because Earth had continued through a training weekend while the other world followed its own sequence.

"Today is the one I want if it is safe and convenient for them," Isha said. "If Ian says tomorrow matches better, then tomorrow. I don't want *today* enough to make him solve the clocks around us."

Kanno nodded. "Same."

She unlocked the nameless group chat. The previous exchange still sat above the text field: Ian's warning about temporal problems, the promise of missives, the later arrangement that they would come back only when they had Earth times they genuinely wanted. Kanno read the last few messages again before beginning to type.

Her first draft was too short.

**We are free today. Can it work?**

She deleted it. The second sounded like she was asking Ian to produce the meeting regardless of what was happening on the other side, so she deleted that too.

Isha moved her chair around the corner of the table so they could both see the screen. Kanno typed more slowly.

**Ian. We have finally compared Earth availability after Coach 1. We can both be free today, Monday 24 April, from 13:30 to 18:00 Sendai time. Tuesday 13:00 to 18:00 also works, and Thursday 14:00 to 18:00 is our fallback. Today would be our preference, but only if it safely matches one of the afternoons Aelira and Lethira offered. We do not want you forcing either world's timing to make our first choice work.**

She stopped and looked at Isha.

Isha pointed at the screen. "Say to check them again before opening anything. They agreed to the meeting. They have not agreed to a clock time yet."

Kanno added the line.

**If one of those windows can work, please check that Aelira and Lethira are still happy with the actual time before enabling any route. The other conditions are unchanged: one neutral meeting, somewhere belonging to neither world, trees, room to walk and sit, enough time that nobody has to rush away, tea, no camera and nothing ceremonial.**

Kanno reread the whole message. Isha did the same.

There was one thing missing. Kanno added a final sentence.

**Which of those windows, if any, can you safely match?**

She turned the phone towards Isha. Isha read the final version once more and nodded. Kanno pressed send.

The reply came before either woman had found another useful task.

"That's fine, do you want to use the missives I left to check with the others? Lethira is with me and free so just Aelira to check with, unless there's anything specific you need to check with Lethira."

Isha read the message over Kanno's shoulder. The fact that Lethira was already with Ian simplified one side of the problem considerably. It also produced, briefly, the image of the two of them somewhere in Merrowford waiting while Earth attempted to organise an afternoon across realities.

Kanno looked towards the shallow drawer.

"Missive."

"Yes."

"And nothing else for Lethira?"

Isha considered it properly. Their conditions had not changed since Friday. Lethira had agreed to the four-person meeting, agreed to trees and walking, and specifically wanted enough time that nobody had to leave as soon as the conversation became interesting. Ian had now said she was with him and free. Asking her to reconfirm every part of an arrangement she had already made would add ceremony to a meeting whose participants had collectively spent considerable effort avoiding it.

"Nothing else," Isha said. "If she is free and still wants to come, that is enough."

Kanno typed a short reply.

**We'll use a missive for Aelira. Nothing additional for Lethira if she's still happy with what we already agreed.**

She sent it, then opened the dining-table drawer.

The surviving stack of pale sheets had remained undisturbed since Friday. The fountain pen lay beside them with the same absurd air of having been chosen for a historical drama by somebody who had not checked when fountain pens were invented.

Kanno took both out. "He was right about one thing."

Isha glanced at her.

"This is better than doing it in the group chat."

Isha smiled. "I told you that on Friday."

"You said you preferred it."

"Which was correct."

Kanno uncapped the pen before Isha could claim it again. There was no need for another long letter. Aelira had already offered two afternoons; they merely needed to know whether the first one was still real now that Ian believed it could be matched to Earth.

Kanno wrote slowly enough for Isha to read beside her.

**Aelira. We have finally compared our Earth schedules after Isha's course. Ian says Lethira is available on your side, and he thinks our preferred Earth time may be workable. Is the first afternoon you offered us still possible for you? We can both be free for several hours. If today has become inconvenient, please say so; we still have other Earth times and there is no need to rearrange your day for ours. Kanno.**

She signed and slid the page towards Isha.

Isha read it once. "Several hours."

"You wanted an afternoon."

"Aelira wanted enough time to become bored."

"Several hours gives her an opportunity."

Isha took the pen.

Beneath Kanno's paragraph she added only:

**I would be glad to use that afternoon if it still suits you. Isha.**

She signed.

The sheet disappeared from beneath her hand.

Kanno stared at the empty place for a moment. "Still unpleasant."

"Less than the first time."

"I don't think useful magic becomes less disturbing just because you've developed stationery habits."

Isha capped the fountain pen. "You went to Mercury last week."

"That was disturbing in an entirely different category."

The answer was difficult to dispute.

They put the remaining missives away and found themselves with nothing practical left to do except wait.

It was not yet eleven. If Aelira agreed and Ian's clocks cooperated, they had more than two hours before their preferred Earth window began. Kanno had arrived expecting calendar work and perhaps an afternoon arrangement; she had not brought anything that required her to return home first. Her camera was already absent by design. Her phone charger, wallet and keys were in her shoulder bag. Isha had no work equipment to collect and no course bag she intended to look at again.

The resulting lack of preparation bothered both of them slightly.

Kanno went through her bag anyway.

Isha watched from the kitchen while filling the kettle. "You already did that."

"I am confirming."

"You mocked me for confirming my Coach 1 bag."

"I mocked the fourth confirmation."

"That distinction appears convenient."

Kanno found nothing new in the bag and closed it. "I also learned from observing you."

Isha made fresh tea.

Their conversation wandered while they waited. Coach 1 returned briefly, now that Isha had slept enough to describe parts of it without treating each exercise as an examination she might still fail. Kanno wanted to know whether the participant who had disliked Isha's first intervention had eventually forgiven her. Isha objected to the word *forgiven*, then admitted that by Sunday afternoon they had worked together comfortably enough.

Kanno listened with interest until she realised Isha was beginning to explain the coaching problem again in enough detail to reconstruct the exercise.

"You are doing the course to me."

Isha stopped.

"I am not."

"You have just moved my teacup to demonstrate where someone's foot was."

Isha looked at the cup, which had indeed migrated nearly thirty centimetres across the table.

She returned it to Kanno.

"That proves nothing."

Kanno accepted her tea without argument.

The missive returned while Isha was deciding whether there was any sensible reason to make an early lunch before half past eleven. One moment the table held two mugs, Kanno's phone and the closed drawer. The next, a familiar sheet rested beside the phone with writing visible on its reverse.

Both women looked at it.

Kanno reached first, then stopped with her fingers just above the paper and looked at Isha. "Together?"

Isha pulled her chair closer.

Kanno turned the sheet over.

Aelira's reply was shorter than either of them had expected.

**Isha, Kanno. Yes. The first afternoon I offered is still possible, and I can keep it free. Please use it if Ian says your time can meet it safely. I would rather have the afternoon we actually have than rearrange everyone in pursuit of a theoretically better one. I am still content with the conditions we agreed. Aelira Caelithen.**

Below that, after a small gap, she had added:

**I remain opposed to ceremonial tea.**

Kanno read the final line twice.

Isha's smile arrived first.

"She considered that important enough to clarify."

"Apparently this was the condition she thought might have changed."

Kanno handed the page across. Isha read the whole reply for herself, lingering over Aelira's signature as she had on Friday. This time the handwriting did not carry the uncertainty of an invitation still being assembled. Aelira had made the afternoon free. Lethira was already available. On Earth, Isha and Kanno had cleared their own time.

For the first time, the scheduling problem had become almost small.

Almost.

Kanno opened the nameless group chat again. Their earlier message sat above Ian's reply. She checked the Earth window once more, although neither calendar had changed in the last hour.

"Thirteen-thirty?"

Isha nodded. "We should be ready before then."

"I mean as the time we give him."

"Yes."

Kanno began typing, then turned the phone enough that Isha could follow the words as they appeared.

**Aelira has replied. The first afternoon she offered is still free and she is happy with the conditions already agreed. If Lethira is still free with you, then all four of us want this window. Isha and I can be ready before 13:30 Sendai time and are free until 18:00. Can you safely match that to their afternoon and set up the neutral meeting under the conditions we already agreed?**

Isha read it carefully.

"Yes."

Kanno pressed send.

The reply arrived with enough information to turn planning into an afternoon.

"Yes. I have prepared a construct based on Golden Acre Park, from near where I live. The day will be perfect and it should fit your needs. It is now ready, intentional door use will work either way at anytime until the last person leaves, as before. Tea, coffee and scones will be provided. I can probably stretch to sandwiches as well, if you get more hungry. It is ready, I'll let you let Aelira know and I shall tell Lethira. Send both a missive when you are ready before Lethira gets lost exploring the trees before you join."

Isha reached the final sentence and closed her eyes briefly.

Kanno looked sideways at her. "Accurate?"

"Very possibly."

"That sounded like experience."

"It sounded like Lethira."

Isha took the fountain pen before Kanno could. The first message needed little beyond confirmation.

**Aelira. Everything is arranged and the place is ready. Ian says deliberate use of your door will take you there and will bring you back whenever you choose to leave. Kanno and I are about to enter from our side. Please come when you are ready. Isha.**

Kanno added her name beneath it. The sheet vanished.

The second page took slightly longer, mostly because Isha stared at the blank paper with a small, dangerous smile.

Kanno saw it forming. "You are going to include the trees."

"Of course."

She wrote:

**Lethira. We are ready and Ian says the place is open. We are coming through shortly. He specifically told us to send this before you became lost exploring the trees. I assume this warning was necessary. Isha.**

Kanno read it, added **I have been given no evidence that it was unnecessary. Kanno.**, and slid the page back across the table.

Isha laughed as the missive disappeared.

There was no longer anything to organise.

They had planned for half past one because an Earth clock required some point around which two people could arrange their day. At thirteen twenty-three, both women were standing in the flexible room with their shoes on and their small bags ready. Isha had her phone, wallet, keys and the few things she would have carried for an ordinary afternoon out. Kanno had much the same.

No camera.

Kanno noticed the absence again when she looked down at herself. Her shoulder bag sat differently without one. She had been permitted to bring it. That had made leaving it behind a choice instead of a restriction, which somehow made the empty space more noticeable.

Isha rested her hand on the flexible-room door handle.

"Ready?"

Kanno looked once around flat 202. Familiar walls. Folded bedding stored away. The closed door ahead of them looking exactly as it had yesterday, when it had led to another room in the same apartment.

"Yes."

Isha opened it deliberately.

Spring waited on the other side.

The first thing Kanno saw was water.

A broad lake lay beyond a gently descending lawn, bright beneath a pale blue sky. Mature trees stood around it in great irregular groups: some close enough to cast broad islands of shade, others separated by grass, paths and planted beds. A paved path curved away beside the water and disappeared behind trees whose leaves moved lightly in a breeze Kanno could already feel through the doorway.

The second thing she noticed was the light.

Ian had apparently taken *perfect day* seriously while resisting the temptation to make it theatrical. The sun was warm rather than hot. High, soft clouds moved slowly enough to change the brightness across the lake. The air looked washed clean without acquiring the impossible crystalline quality some of his more deliberate places had possessed.

Isha stepped through first. Kanno followed.

Dry ground accepted their shoes.

Behind them the doorway closed as an ordinary door should. The route itself remained available under the terms Ian had given them; deliberate use would take them back when either chose to leave. Kanno looked once at the closed door because experience had taught her to check an exit even when she had been told it was safe. That was sufficient.

The park stretched farther than she had expected.

Ian had said *construct based on Golden Acre Park*. Kanno had pictured a representative portion: lake, trees, perhaps a path and somewhere to sit. Instead, the landscape continued around bends and behind woodland as though he had copied a whole public park into a private afternoon. There were benches at sensible intervals, bins that nobody would need, a broad grassy area suited to picnics and narrower paths disappearing among trees. Farther around the lake she could see beds and structures suggesting more deliberately cultivated gardens.

No buildings crowded the water. No city showed beyond the trees.

No people occupied the benches.

No dog ran along the path.

No bird crossed the sky.

Kanno listened.

Water moved against the bank. Leaves stirred. Somewhere a branch rubbed softly against another. Wind passed through grass tall enough to bend.

Nothing called back.

Isha had noticed too. Her gaze travelled automatically into the upper branches before returning to the lake.

"No animals."

"He said little bubble reality."

"I know." Isha watched a patch of water where ripples widened beneath the breeze. "It is strange."

"Bad strange?"

Isha considered the landscape for another few seconds. "No. Merely quiet in a way a place with this many trees would never be."

They began along the path.

The oddness diminished once they were moving. The trees had texture and age rather than the repeated perfection of scenery generated from an idea of woodland. Bark split differently on every trunk. Moss occupied shaded stone. Fallen leaves had gathered where wind and edging would naturally collect them, though none had turned the paths slippery. Beside the lake, the ground was firm and dry even where ordinary spring weather would probably have produced mud.

Kanno stopped once to look back across the water.

Her right hand moved by habit towards the place where a camera should have been.

It found only the strap of her bag.

Isha noticed.

Kanno let her hand fall. "I know."

"I said nothing."

"You looked."

"I confirmed."

Kanno turned towards her.

Isha's composure lasted barely longer than it had that morning.

They had walked perhaps another hundred metres when a figure appeared ahead between two groups of trees.

Lethira Dawnleaf was standing just off the path beneath a broad-canopied tree, one hand resting against its bark.

She had come in her Merrowford road clothes. The restored B-rank tag hung where she had worn it through the previous days, unmistakably part of a working traveller rather than court dress. Her long pale hair caught the filtered sunlight whenever the leaves above shifted.

She was looking upwards.

Not lost.

Probably.

Isha stopped.

Kanno looked from Lethira to her.

"You are not allowed to say anything."

"I have said nothing."

Ahead of them, Lethira's ears moved.

Then she turned.

Recognition crossed her face so quickly that whatever interest the tree had held lost immediately. Her smile widened as she stepped back onto the path.

"I heard that."

Isha began walking again. "Then you also heard that I defended you."

"You did nothing of the sort."

"I did not accuse you of being lost."

"You were thinking it."

Kanno stayed beside Isha. "Ian accused you before either of us arrived."

Lethira's expression changed.

"He did what?"

Kanno had the satisfaction of watching her reconstruct the missive.

Isha reached her first. The embrace happened with none of the hesitation of March. Lethira wrapped both arms around her old friend and Isha returned it firmly, their difference in bodies still visible and still irrelevant to the familiarity of the movement. They separated after several seconds.

Lethira looked Isha over with the shameless thoroughness of somebody who had known several versions of her.

"You look rested."

"I slept."

"I am glad. Your letter made the course sound tiring."

"It was."

"Useful?"

Isha's answer took longer. "Yes."

Lethira accepted that for now and turned to Kanno.

Their greeting was quieter but no longer uncertain. Kanno had spent two hours alone with her earlier in the month; the first-meeting calculation was gone. Lethira held out both hands rather than choosing court formality, and Kanno took them.

"You came."

"We spent most of the morning arranging it."

"Then I am pleased the clerks of Earth eventually approved."

"They remain difficult."

"I have met clerks."

That established sufficient shared suffering.

Lethira released her hands and looked past them along the path. "Have you seen the lake?"

"We entered beside it."

"Have you seen the gardens beyond it?"

"No."

"There are several kinds."

Isha looked at her.

Lethira's face became innocent.

"I was exploring. I was never lost."

"Of course."

"One path loops."

"Yes."

"I established that deliberately."

Kanno decided not to contribute. She had known Lethira long enough now to understand that assistance would only shorten something enjoyable.

A second route announced itself through movement rather than sound.

Farther along the path, beside a wooden structure set among shrubs, a door that should not have opened into another world completed its work. Aelira Caelithen stepped out and let it close behind her.

She paused.

Her attention moved first across the landscape, then found the three women waiting beside the lake.

Unlike Lethira, Aelira did not immediately abandon the place for the people in it. She took several seconds to look properly. The lake. The tree line. The dry paths. The absence of other visitors.

Then she approached.

Kanno had met her only five days earlier, yet the setting changed the first impression considerably. In the smaller neutral garden Aelira's presence had occupied much of the available social space. Here the park was too large to be occupied by anybody. She was still unmistakably herself, still carrying the composure that had survived courts, war and decades of people watching for what a First Princess would decide, but she was walking along a public-park path beneath trees from another reality.

Lethira waited until Aelira was close enough.

"I was not lost."

Aelira stopped.

"I did not ask."

"Ian has been spreading misinformation."

"Has he."

"Kanno and Isha were encouraged to believe I would disappear into the trees."

Aelira looked past Lethira towards the path from which she had emerged.

"How long were you here before them?"

Lethira's ears shifted.

Kanno folded her arms.

Isha looked towards the lake with suspicious concentration.

Aelira's mouth curved. "I see."

"You see nothing."

"Apparently."

The exchange had survived a century or more before Kanno existed. She watched it with the peculiar satisfaction of seeing something she had previously encountered only in fragments: Aelira alone with her had been dry, patient and careful; Lethira alone with her had been warmer, quicker and more visibly mischievous. Together, neither required explanation from the other before beginning.

Aelira's attention came to Isha.

For a moment the humour softened.

"Isha."

"Aelira."

They embraced.

There was less shock in it than there had been in March and more history. Isha's human arms closed around the Wood Elf princess who had once been part of the same world, and Aelira's hands settled firmly against her back. When they separated, Aelira studied her face in much the same way Lethira had.

"Kanno told me you were about to spend a weekend learning how to teach people to climb walls."

"I survived."

"I had assumed you would."

"Kanno did not."

Kanno turned. "That is false."

"You asked whether I had slept."

"Because you looked exhausted yesterday."

Lethira's interest sharpened immediately. "Yesterday?"

"Earth yesterday," Isha said. "Do not attach it to this afternoon."

Lethira nodded. "Good correction."

Crossing realities had apparently made temporal disclaimers an ordinary part of arranging tea.

Aelira glanced at Kanno next.

Her gaze travelled down once, then returned to Kanno's face.

"The camera stayed behind."

"Yes."

"You were allowed to bring it."

"I know."

Aelira waited.

Kanno looked across the lake before answering. "I wanted this to be four people meeting. I didn't want to spend the first hour deciding whether I was looking because I cared about the conversation or because I was constructing photographs."

Lethira considered her with open interest. Aelira's reaction was smaller.

"I am glad I gave you the choice, then."

"So am I."

That was all the subject required.

Isha looked down the path. "Ian promised tea, coffee and scones."

Lethira brightened. "I was wondering where those were."

Aelira turned towards her. "You have been here long enough to investigate several gardens, and you did not find the food."

"I was looking at trees."

Kanno said, "This is becoming evidence."

Lethira pointed at her. "You have become too comfortable."

Their search lasted less than five minutes.

The provision had been placed where a real park might plausibly invite people to stop: beside a broad lawn overlooking the lake, where two picnic tables stood beneath mature trees and several benches faced the water. One table carried a tea service, coffee, cups and a covered basket. Nothing floated, appeared or announced itself when they approached. The objects were simply there.

Lethira lifted the cloth over the basket.

"Scones."

She pronounced the unfamiliar word experimentally through the language mechanism, then looked at Isha. "What are they?"

"Food from his country."

"That description is dangerously broad."

"I have learned."

Aelira examined the tea service. "Is this ceremonial?"

Kanno looked at her.

Isha looked at her.

Lethira looked at her.

Aelira remained perfectly composed. "I was promised it would not be."

Kanno sat down. "Then we should avoid arranging ourselves by rank."

"Excellent."

Lethira chose the bench beside Kanno and immediately turned partly sideways so she could see everyone rather than face the table squarely. Isha sat opposite. Aelira took the remaining place.

No servant poured.

No host welcomed them.

The tea was hot when Isha tested the pot. Coffee waited beside it. Four women who had spent part of the morning negotiating how not to turn an afternoon into an appointment served themselves.

Lethira broke open a scone and examined the inside.

"Do I put something on this?"

Kanno searched the table. Small dishes had been provided after all: butter, jam and cream, arranged with enough restraint that they looked like picnic food rather than a demonstration.

"There are arguments about the correct order," she said.

Lethira's hand stopped halfway towards the jam.

"Political?"

"Worse."

Aelira looked interested despite herself.

Isha spread jam first, cream second, and took a bite before either elf could ask for doctrine.

"Ian is not here," she said after swallowing. "We can offend his country privately."

Lethira followed her example at once.

Aelira watched both of them, then chose cream first.

Kanno noticed.

Aelira noticed her noticing.

"Do not."

"I said nothing."

Across the table, Isha's eyes narrowed in amusement.

For several minutes the meeting succeeded at being almost offensively mundane.

The scones were good. The coffee was recognisably British in the sense that Kanno suspected Ian had made a special effort not to reproduce the coffee from her previous neutral meeting. Lethira preferred tea after one cautious taste of coffee. Aelira tried both before settling on tea. The lake continued moving beyond them while wind shifted through branches overhead.

Nobody hurried towards the reason they had arranged the afternoon.

Eventually Aelira looked at Isha.

"So. The wall-teaching course."

Isha set down her cup. "Coach 1."

"Kanno said you had colour-coded your preparation according to suspicion."

Lethira turned immediately.

Isha looked at Kanno.

Kanno drank coffee.

"I told her you were preparing carefully."

"You told her about the colours."

"It was memorable."

Aelira's expression was entirely unrepentant. "One colour meant things you distrusted."

"That was not exactly what the colour meant."

Kanno looked into her cup.

Isha stared at her.

Lethira began smiling.

"Fine," Isha said. "It meant things I wanted to examine more carefully because I suspected the course was simplifying them."

"That is much less entertaining," Lethira said.

"It is also true."

Aelira rested one hand around her cup. "And after two days?"

Isha considered the answer while looking out towards the lake. Coach 1 already felt farther away here, though Earth Monday morning remained only a doorway behind her if she chose to leave.

"Some things were simplified because beginners need somewhere to begin. Some things I disliked were more useful when people actually practised them. I was corrected several times."

Lethira's eyebrows rose. "You enjoyed that?"

"Sometimes."

"That was not my question."

Isha looked back at her, and for a moment Aelira's smile became visible because Lethira had used her own trick against someone else.

"I enjoyed learning," Isha said. "I did not enjoy every correction."

"Better."

Kanno added, "She moved my teacup this morning to explain someone's foot position."

All three women looked at Isha.

"It was convenient."

"It was tea."

"It was empty."

"It became empty because you moved it away from me."

Lethira leaned towards Aelira. "Earth has changed her."

Aelira nodded gravely. "She steals tea now."

Isha picked up her own cup. "I can leave."

"No," Lethira said, far too quickly to support the threat. "You have information."

The laughter came easily.

After it passed, nobody rushed to replace it. They finished the first scones. Lethira asked Kanno about work because she knew *Until Replaced* and cared what had happened after Small Works. Aelira knew enough from her own meeting to follow without requiring Kanno to repeat her history. Kanno described the unfinished wall series as still unfinished. Neither elf offered the convenient reassurance that this was secretly a success.

Aelira merely asked whether Kanno still wanted to make it.

"Yes."

"Then it is not finished."

"No."

Lethira brushed crumbs from her fingers. "That seems straightforward."

"It is when neither of you is a client."

The wind changed and brought cooler air off the lake.

After a while Lethira stood.

"I want to walk."

Aelira looked at the remaining food. "You want to inspect more trees."

"That can happen while walking."

Isha rose as well. Kanno closed the food basket against the breeze, and Aelira finally surrendered her seat.

They followed the lakeside path with no particular destination.

At first the four stayed together. Then the width of the path and the habits of conversation altered the shape naturally. Lethira and Kanno moved half a pace ahead while Lethira pointed out a tree whose growth had been deliberately opened around a path rather than allowed to close over it. Behind them, Aelira asked Isha something quieter about Thomas's work, because Kanno had told her five days earlier that he was proud of not volunteering to rewrite everybody else's instructions.

The groups changed again at the next bend.

Nobody announced it.

Kanno found herself beside Aelira while Isha and Lethira walked ahead. A few minutes later Lethira dropped back to ask Kanno whether Mercury truly had been worth forty-one photographs, leaving Isha and Aelira alone at the front.

The afternoon had acquired what Aelira had asked for before it began: space in which nobody needed the entire group for every sentence.

Eventually the path climbed gently away from the lake and entered thicker trees. The canopy deepened, sunlight breaking into moving patches across a dry path scattered with last year's leaves.

Lethira stopped.

All three women looked at her.

She spread her hands.

"I am not lost."

Kanno laughed first.

Lethira waited for it to finish with the expression of someone whose dignity had been attacked by poor evidence.

"The path curved."

"It did," Isha said.

"And there are several paths."

"Also true."

"I was aware of my location."

Aelira walked past her. "Then we needn't discuss it further."

That was considerably worse than disagreement. Lethira fell into step beside her, still objecting under her breath while Kanno and Isha followed.

The denser woodland lasted only a few minutes before opening around a smaller path bordered by shrubs and low planting. A wooden bench stood where the ground dropped gently towards a narrow arm of water connected to the larger lake. Nothing about the place appeared designed for four people from two realities to discuss their private lives. That helped.

Aelira sat first. Kanno took the other end, leaving enough room between them that Isha could lean against the low rail beside the path rather than forcing four bodies onto a bench built for three. Lethira remained standing.

Aelira looked at the B-rank tag hanging from her travelling clothes.

"Did my attestation work?"

Lethira's indignation about the path vanished.

"Very well."

Aelira's eyebrows lifted slightly.

"The clerk called it better than most noble attestations."

"Naturally."

"Because you said what you didn't know."

Aelira's satisfaction became less theatrical. "Good."

Kanno looked between them. "What attestation?"

That was enough invitation for Lethira.

She explained the problem Ian had anticipated before they tried to buy anything: in his own world, ownership expected a documented identity beneath the name. In Merrowford, identity could be established through a less centralised chain, but Ian had still arrived without a birthplace, lineage, local household or state record anyone could verify. Aelira had written under her seal that he was a living human she personally knew through repeated direct contact, while carefully refusing to invent anything she could not attest.

"The land office then witnessed his signature and checked it against the Guild's new aide record," Lethira finished. "So the town has successfully established that Ian is a person."

Kanno considered this.

"Was there doubt?"

"Administratively."

"That is different."

"Apparently."

Isha had been listening with growing suspicion. "You said *buy*."

Lethira looked at her.

Isha straightened from the rail. "Your letter said you might look for land."

"We looked."

Aelira's attention moved to Lethira too.

"I specifically told you not to accidentally acquire an estate before supper."

"It is not an estate."

"Lethira."

"We did not acquire it before supper."

Kanno looked towards Isha. "How much did you know?"

"That they might look."

"Good. I was told exactly two facts about this relationship, and neither involved property."

Lethira laughed. "Which two?"

Kanno glanced at Isha before answering, making the provenance visible rather than assuming it.

"That you were together. That you had told each other you loved each other."

"That was all I shared from your letter," Isha said.

Lethira's expression softened. "Thank you."

The distinction mattered even though Ian had already made clear to Lethira that he had no privacy objection to her sharing whatever she wished about their relationship this afternoon. What to tell these women remained Lethira's choice.

"So," Kanno said. "Property."

Lethira gave them the house.

Not literally. Ian had apparently reserved that category of absurdity for other occasions.

She described pale-grey stone west of Merrowford, mature trees around it and a stream close enough to hear from upstairs. The house had been empty long enough to require attention but not long enough to become a ruin. One roof section needed proper repair rather than optimistic patching. The chimney needed cleaning and a specialist inspection. There was a small amount of mortar work, a timber sill to watch and some local damp which the inspector considered manageable rather than structural.

"And an outbuilding," Lethira said.

"Collapsed," Aelira guessed.

"Mostly."

"And you want it."

"The footing may be reusable."

"For what?"

Lethira's smile arrived before she answered.

"A bathhouse."

Aelira closed her eyes briefly.

Kanno looked at Isha. "Is that significant?"

"Yes."

Lethira pointed at her. "Do not begin."

"I said one word."

"You were preparing others."

Isha's face remained controlled enough that only people who knew her would have noticed the satisfaction underneath it.

Lethira returned to the actual house. Their offer had been accepted provisionally before the inspection. Vale had found nothing serious enough to change their minds. His written note was due that morning in Merrowford, after which the intermediary intended to take the remaining title and access checks to the records office. If those were clean, the final transfer should follow.

"So you are buying it together," Kanno said.

"If the clerks finish what they are doing without discovering that the stream legally belongs to a dead duke or the road was promised to three villages two hundred years ago."

Aelira nodded. "A sensible qualification."

"They have both our names."

That sentence changed Lethira's voice by very little, but Isha heard it.

A house was not remarkable by itself. Lethira had had places to sleep, rooms attached to work, family spaces, settlement spaces and enough roads between them that ownership had never been the only form of belonging. This was different because she and Ian had looked at a leaking roof, bad chimney and muddy access together and decided they still wanted the place.

Isha came away from the rail.

"You really want it."

"Yes."

Not *perhaps*. Not *if Ian wants it*. Not even *I think so*.

Lethira looked through the trees towards the strip of water.

"I didn't know I was looking for a house until we found one. That is probably a dangerous sentence."

"Very," Aelira said.

"But I don't mean that Ian showed me a house and suddenly I wanted a life I had never considered. I mean I saw it and could imagine returning there. Leaving from there. Complaining about the roof from there. Going home to the Woods and still knowing it would be waiting near Merrowford."

She glanced at Isha.

"And I could imagine him there."

The quiet that followed was comfortable enough not to require rescue.

Kanno broke it eventually.

"You said I was missing facts."

"I said no such thing."

"You implied there were more."

Lethira smiled. "There are always more facts."

Aelira gave her a warning look which had been polished across centuries and was therefore completely ineffective in private.

Lethira ignored it.

"Ian and I became lovers in the more literal sense the day before yesterday."

Kanno stared at her.

Isha's mouth opened slightly.

Aelira turned her head with deliberate slowness.

Lethira's ears coloured.

There it was.

Kanno recovered first. "Three facts."

Lethira laughed hard enough to have to look away.

"You are terrible."

"I am keeping accurate records."

"I regret encouraging your interest in evidence."

Isha had acquired the particular expression Lethira remembered from much older conversations: affectionate, interested and trying very hard not to appear delighted by somebody else's embarrassment.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

That removed the joke without making the subject heavier than it needed to be.

"Very."

Lethira did not lower her voice.

"We had been close before. You know some of that, Aelira. We had stopped before because one of us wasn't ready, then later because we wanted the choice to belong to what we actually wanted rather than to an important evening becoming more important because it was supposed to. Then we made the offer on the house, went back to the inn, and..."

She paused.

Kanno waited.

Aelira waited.

Isha definitely waited.

Lethira narrowed her eyes at all three of them.

"And then we chose differently."

Aelira's composure weakened first.

"That is all you receive."

"I did not ask for more."

"You were about to."

"I have learned from previous mistakes."

Isha looked at Aelira. "Previous?"

"No," Lethira said.

Kanno looked between the two elves. "That sounds like another private record."

"It is."

Kanno accepted the boundary immediately.

The laughter faded more slowly than the embarrassment.

Isha was still looking at Lethira.

Not at the colour lingering in her ears now, nor with the pleased curiosity that had followed the admission. Something else had remained behind when the humour passed. Lethira noticed it and waited.

Isha had asked whether she was happy. Lethira had answered. That should have been enough for the question itself.

It was not quite enough for Isha.

"I am happy for you," she said.

Lethira's expression softened. "I know."

"I need to say that first."

Kanno's attention moved from Lethira to Isha.

Aelira did not move at all.

Lethira sat back properly against the bench. "All right."

Isha looked past her for a moment, towards the water between the trees. The lake surface had broken into small shifting pieces beneath the breeze. There was no birdcall above it. No distant conversation approaching around the path. Ian had given them privacy so complete that a silence could remain a silence until somebody chose to end it.

"When I met Ian on the train," Isha said, "the fact that he was attracted to me was one of the easier parts."

Lethira's face did not change much. She listened.

"He told me he had a crush. I told him he was allowed to have it and I was not going to return it."

Kanno knew that much. Aelira's eyes narrowed slightly, though whether at Ian or at the bluntness of Isha's answer was less clear.

"I wasn't confused about that," Isha continued. "Thomas was not a question. Ian knew that. I knew that. Once he said it plainly, there was almost nothing to solve."

Her thumb moved once over the edge of her wedding band.

"The harder part came later."

The train had become easier to remember with time and no less strange. Ian opposite her in a carriage that refused to deliver her home until she deliberately chose to leave. Tessa's arrow in her hands. A green ribbon. Sereth's food. Photographs of people who should have been inaccessible. Ian knowing too much, apologising badly in places, answering something she had not spoken and then looking more frightened of what that meant than triumphant.

And, near the end, a photograph of an ordinary garden.

Isha had thought about that photograph more often than some of the impossible objects.

"He asked whether he could remain part of my life," she said. "From where he was. He knew I did not want him appearing beside me. He knew I did not want him treating affection as permission. He still asked whether there could be some place for him."

Lethira's hands had gone still.

Isha did not repeat every boundary. They belonged to a conversation she had already lived and did not need to reconstruct for an audience.

"I said yes."

"I know you still speak to him," Aelira said quietly.

"Yes. But that answer came before most of what exists now. Before the group chat. Before any of you met him. Before Kanno went anywhere with him. Before he could sit in a café with Thomas and me and ask what friendship actually meant when he already knew more about us than most friends ever could."

Kanno looked down briefly.

Isha continued more slowly.

"At the time, I gave him a narrow place because I wanted to. He wanted connection very badly. Too badly, sometimes."

Lethira heard the change.

"What happened?"

Isha's gaze returned to her.

There were easier ways to answer. She could have said that Ian had made mistakes. Lethira already knew that. She could have described the thought access, or gifts that had arrived without ordinary provenance, or the way spectacular solutions sometimes appeared before Ian had asked whether anyone wanted the problem solved.

Those were not the reason this conversation had become heavier.

"There was something he didn't tell me on the train."

Kanno became very still.

Isha noticed. Kanno had received enough of the later account to know where this was going. She did not intervene.

Aelira's attention sharpened.

Isha said, "The bridge where I died."

Lethira did not move.

Aelira did.

Only slightly, but Isha saw recognition. Aelira had been permitted to read that part of the old story later: the bridge, the death, Thomas's attempt to save Isha and what came after. She knew the event.

She had not known this.

"Ian chose it," Isha said.

The breeze moved a strand of pale hair across Lethira's cheek. She did not lift a hand to move it.

"He chose for that to happen because he wanted pressure on Thomas. He wanted the story to push him towards becoming the Hero."

Aelira's face emptied of nearly everything.

Lethira's did not. Her expression tightened instead, thought following too quickly for surprise to hold it still.

"He told you that later."

"Yes."

"After you had already told him he could remain in your life."

"Yes."

Lethira looked away.

Isha gave her the next part before she had to ask.

"He knew when we were on the train. He could have told me then. He didn't."

"Why?"

"Because he was afraid I would tell him to leave."

This time Lethira's eyes closed briefly.

Kanno watched her rather than Isha.

Nothing in Lethira's posture suggested she wanted the conversation stopped. When she opened her eyes again, she looked directly at Isha.

"What did you do?"

"I became angry."

The inadequacy of the sentence almost made Isha smile, but there was no humour in her when it failed to arrive.

"I told him he should have told me before asking me to decide whether he could stay connected to me. I told him it changed how much I trusted him."

"And did you tell him to leave?"

"No."

Lethira waited.

Isha could remember the mistake in her own phrasing as clearly as the anger behind it. *It does not change my answer to no.* Then the immediate recognition that she had said the opposite of what she meant.

"My answer was still yes," she said. "Under the same limits. I was angrier than when I gave it. I trusted him less. I still wanted the connection."

Aelira looked at her. "Why?"

It was not accusatory.

Isha thought before answering anyway.

"Because I did."

That was the simplest part.

She folded her hands loosely in front of her.

"I didn't need the anger to choose for me. He had done something terrible in our past. Then he had hidden the truth because he was frightened of losing something he wanted from me. I wasn't going to pretend either of those things was smaller because he regretted them."

Lethira's gaze remained fixed on her.

"But when I asked myself whether I wanted him gone, the answer was still no."

The quiet deepened.

Isha had once explained that to Ian while the anger was new. Months had passed since then. Meetings. Messages. Mistakes in other directions. Corrections he had accepted and corrections he had needed more than once. His awkward attempt to understand whether knowing someone's story could ever become actual friendship. Their families making their own decisions about him. Mars. Kanno's travels. The absurdity of being able to complain to somebody outside the world because his joke had accidentally sounded like an itinerary.

The connection had accumulated history after she permitted it.

"I still don't know what exact word I would use for him," she said. "He wanted friendship before we had earned enough of it for the word to mean the same thing on both sides. I told him that I wasn't going to promise friendship because he wanted it."

Lethira's mouth moved faintly.

"That sounds like you."

"It was."

"And now?"

Isha considered.

"We know him better."

That was enough for several seconds.

"He knows us differently too. Not only from whatever he read before we knew he existed. He knows what happens when Kanno tells him no. He knows Thomas will ask him what exactly he thinks he has permission to do. He knows I will correct him if he decides something and disguises it as a joke."

Kanno's eyes lifted.

"He is learning to have history with us instead of only knowledge about us," Isha said. "I think that matters."

Lethira looked down at her own hands.

Isha had reached the part she had been circling without wanting to turn it into a speech.

"When you said you loved him, I thought about that train."

Lethira looked up again.

"Not the crush," Isha said.

The distinction came easily because there was nothing uncertain inside it.

"I never wanted that from him. I still don't. There has never been a space beside Thomas waiting for Ian to occupy."

Aelira's eyes flicked briefly towards Kanno, then back.

Isha continued.

"I thought about the way he asked whether he was allowed to have any place at all."

Lethira's face changed.

Very little.

Enough.

"And now you're telling me that you've found a house."

The pale-grey stone house did not exist here, but Isha could see it well enough from Lethira's description: trees, stream, roof needing work, chimney needing someone competent, two names moving slowly through Merrowford's paperwork.

"He once showed me a picture of his garden because he wanted me to understand something ordinary about where he was," Isha said. "He wanted to look outside and be able to think Thomas and I were happy somewhere he couldn't reach in the ordinary way."

She drew a slow breath.

"Now you are telling me that the two of you have somewhere you want to go back to together."

Lethira said nothing.

Isha's throat had tightened slightly. She disliked it, which did not make it go away.

"I didn't expect those two things to touch each other in my head."

Kanno's expression softened.

"It makes me glad," Isha said. "And it hurts a little."

Lethira moved then.

Not towards Isha. She shifted on the bench until she faced her more fully, giving the words her complete attention.

Isha understood the question before Lethira asked it.

"Not because I want him."

"I know."

"I know you know. I still needed to say it."

"All right."

Isha looked towards the lake again.

"He was lonely."

That was closer.

"He tried very hard not to make that my responsibility. Sometimes he failed in other ways because he wanted connection too much. But I saw it. Thomas saw it. Kanno saw another version of it."

Kanno did not look away.

"And I could give him boundaries. I could give him some contact. I could tell him he wasn't forbidden from wanting friendship." Isha paused. "I could not give him what you are describing."

Lethira's eyes were bright now, though not with tears.

"I don't think he asked you to."

"No."

"Then you didn't fail him."

"I know."

The answer came quickly enough that Lethira believed it.

Isha was not grieving a duty she had refused. That would have been much simpler and much more insulting to Thomas, to Lethira and to herself.

"It is more like..." She stopped, irritated by the absence of a clean comparison. "I knew somebody who was standing outside a house. I told him he was allowed to sit on my step sometimes. Now I've discovered he has built a home with someone I love."

Lethira's breath caught.

Isha frowned slightly. "That sounds more sentimental than I intended."

"No," Lethira said.

Aelira looked towards the water and gave them the courtesy of pretending to study it.

Lethira's voice lowered.

"Don't improve it."

Isha's eyes returned to her.

There were many answers Lethira could have given. She chose none immediately.

What Isha had told her about the bridge remained among them too. Happiness did not remove it. A house did not answer it. Neither did sex or love.

Eventually Lethira said, "Thank you for telling me the rest."

Isha knew what she meant.

"I wasn't sure whether I should."

"I am."

Lethira looked down the path for a moment, then back.

"I know he has done things I would hate if someone did them to me. I know his fear can make him stupid. I knew those as categories." Her mouth tightened. "I did not know he had hidden *that* from you because he thought honesty might cost him you."

"No."

"That matters."

Isha waited.

Lethira did not defend him.

That mattered too.

"I love him," Lethira said. "That hasn't changed in the last five minutes."

"I wasn't trying to change it."

"I know."

"But what you told me changes what I know about him. I don't want to make that smaller to prove I love him properly."

Isha's shoulders eased.

Lethira rested her forearms across her knees.

"If Ian ever hides something from me because he believes I might leave if I knew it, I cannot promise him in advance what I will do when I learn it."

"Good."

The word came from Isha before she softened it.

Lethira almost smiled.

"I thought you might approve."

"I do."

"I can promise that I would rather know."

Isha nodded.

Lethira's gaze dropped briefly to the B-rank tag against her clothes, then returned.

"And I am not with him because he needed someone to be."

Isha held her eyes.

"The first time he kissed me mattered because I wanted him to. The house matters because I want the house. I like travelling with him. I like teaching him things he could learn instantly another way and watching him choose not to. I like waking up and finding him there."

Her voice became quieter.

"I like him when there is nothing impossible happening."

Isha smiled then.

Small, but immediate.

"That is reassuring."

"It should be."

"He makes impossible things very easily."

"He is far more work when nothing is exploding."

Aelira made a small sound through her nose but did not interrupt.

Lethira went on before humour could take the conversation away.

"I am not filling the place you refused. I don't feel as though there is a shape in him labelled *Isha* and I happened to fit inside it."

Isha had not realised until then that some small part of her had needed to hear precisely that.

Not because she believed Ian was doing it.

Because people were not always aware of the shapes they tried to fill.

Lethira saw the answer in her face.

"Good," she said.

Isha nodded once.

"Good."

For a little while none of them spoke.

Then Kanno shifted.

It was almost nothing. Her hands changed position around one knee. Her gaze moved from the path to the strip of water beyond the trees.

Isha saw it because she knew where to look.

Kanno had been very careful through the conversation. She had not reacted when Isha described Ian's loneliness as though it belonged to her. She had not offered the private things Ian had told her. She had not touched the card whose contents were not physically with her and nevertheless seemed suddenly much nearer.

Lethira noticed the silence for a different reason.

"Kanno?"

Kanno looked at her.

There was no useful joke available.

That, more than anything, told Isha how seriously she was taking the answer.

"I am glad for you," Kanno said.

Lethira waited.

"I mean that before I say something less simple as well."

Isha's mouth moved faintly at the borrowed construction. Kanno noticed and ignored her.

"There are parts of my relationship with Ian that are private because they belong to conversations between us. Some of them I have permission to tell Isha. That is not permission to tell everybody."

Lethira nodded immediately. "Then don't."

Kanno's shoulders lowered a fraction.

"But my part is mine."

"Yes."

Kanno looked out towards the lake.

"I like him."

The words were quiet.

Isha had heard versions of them before. This one existed in a different room.

"I like speaking to him. I have wanted to spend time with him again after spending time with him before. Venus was good. Berlin became good after I made him put my things back and ask properly."

Lethira's eyebrows rose slightly.

"Another story."

"Yes."

"For another time?"

"Perhaps."

Lethira accepted it.

Kanno continued.

"I used Mercury without him. That was good too."

Aelira watched her carefully now.

"There are questions about Ian that I have deliberately not answered because I didn't know the answer and because I didn't need one immediately."

Kanno's fingers tightened once and released.

"Hearing you say you love him did not answer them."

Lethira remained very still.

"It made me notice that they are still questions."

Isha said nothing.

She would not tell Lethira what the card said. She would not rescue Kanno from choosing how much of herself belonged in the conversation merely because she knew more.

Kanno looked at Lethira again.

"I don't know if that is unfair to tell you."

"No."

Lethira's answer came with enough certainty to stop her.

"It would be unfair if you expected me to solve it."

"I don't."

"Or if you wanted me to become less happy so you didn't have to feel whatever you're feeling."

"I don't."

"Then I would rather you tell me the truth you actually own."

Kanno studied her for several seconds.

"All right."

Aelira's gaze moved between them.

"Do you know what you are feeling?"

Kanno considered the question without resenting it.

"Not entirely."

Aelira nodded, apparently satisfied.

Kanno's eyes returned to Lethira.

"There was a moment when you said the house had both your names and I felt something I wasn't expecting."

"What?"

"I don't know."

Lethira accepted that too.

"Not anger," Kanno said. "Not exactly sadness. Perhaps the feeling of discovering that a door you hadn't decided whether you wanted to open has become a different door while you were still looking at it."

Isha listened.

Kanno frowned at her own analogy.

"That is imprecise."

"It is allowed," Aelira said.

Kanno looked mildly offended by the permission.

Lethira did not smile.

"Does it make you wish I hadn't told you?"

"No."

"Does it make you wish I wasn't with him?"

Kanno looked directly at her.

"No."

This answer had no hesitation at all.

"I like you too."

Lethira's expression softened.

"That is inconvenient."

"Very."

The humour appeared and stopped there, too small to break the mood.

Kanno breathed out.

"I don't want whatever I haven't decided about Ian to become something you have to manage."

"It won't."

"And I don't want to pretend there was no reaction because that would make this easier."

"Good."

Kanno nodded.

"I am glad you're happy."

"I believe you."

That seemed to matter.

Isha looked between them and realised there was something unexpectedly relieving in not having to organise anyone's feelings into a conclusion.

Kanno could care about Ian in a way she had not named.

Lethira could love him.

Isha could carry a connection with him built partly from anger, permission, history and the possibility of friendship.

None of them needed to resolve the others.

Aelira, who had been silent long enough to make her next words carry more weight, looked at Lethira.

"I have one question."

Lethira turned to her.

"Are you ever frightened of how much power he has over the circumstances around you?"

The question was different from Isha's.

Lethira did not answer quickly.

"Yes."

Isha's gaze sharpened.

"Not constantly. And not because I think he is waiting for an excuse to hurt me." Lethira looked down at the path beneath her boots. "But I would be a fool if I forgot what he can do merely because I love him."

Aelira nodded once.

Lethira's eyes came back to Isha.

"That is why what you just told me matters."

She touched two fingers lightly against her own knee.

"He can be frightened. He can want something enough to make a bad decision. He can persuade himself that delaying honesty is kinder than risking an answer he doesn't want."

Isha said nothing.

Lethira had understood.

"I don't need you to tell me whether I should love him," she continued. "But I do need people who know sides of him I haven't seen to tell me when those sides matter."

Isha felt something in her chest loosen that she had not known was tight.

"Then I will."

Lethira nodded.

"And I will tell you when you are being unfair to him."

"I expected that."

"Good."

Kanno looked at Aelira. "Is this what old friendship looks like?"

Aelira considered.

"Sometimes. Mostly it involves being told things you would have preferred to discover after lunch."

Lethira's mouth twitched.

The heaviness did not disappear. It simply stopped needing the whole space.

Isha looked at Lethira again.

There would be other conversations. Ian and Lethira would have their own. Aelira had already said she wanted the fuller account of the gods later. Kanno still had questions she had not named even to herself. Isha's connection with Ian would continue to be whatever the choices after this afternoon made it.

None of that needed completion beside this particular stretch of water.

Lethira looked down at her hands.

For the first time since admitting what had happened between her and Ian, the embarrassment had gone entirely. What replaced it was quieter and, to Isha, more convincing.

The next thing Lethira chose to say belonged less to the night itself than to what had happened when morning came.

"The stranger part isn't the sex," Lethira said after a moment. "It's waking up afterward and discovering that nothing became more complicated."

Isha understood before Kanno did.

"The next morning."

"Yes. We woke up. We were still ourselves. We were still going to the Guild. The roof still needed inspecting. I still wanted him there. He still annoyed me."

Aelira's expression softened.

"I think I expected some part of me to feel that we'd crossed a boundary which required everything on the other side to become larger. Instead we had breakfast."

Kanno looked towards the trees. "That sounds healthier than a revelation."

"I thought so."

"And the house?"

"Still a house."

Aelira looked at her.

Lethira caught it immediately. "Do not."

"I said nothing."

"You remembered his phrase."

"What phrase?" Kanno asked.

"No."

Aelira's mouth curved.

Isha looked from one to the other. "Now I want to know."

"That is your problem."

For once, Aelira rescued her.

"The relevant part is that Lethira has not mistaken a house for a solution to every practical problem created by loving someone from outside her world."

"Thank you."

"I am still keeping the other phrase."

"Traitor."

The path remained empty around them. Wind moved through branches with enough variation that the absence of birds no longer intruded every minute.

Isha looked at Lethira more carefully.

"What are the practical problems?"

Lethira could have answered with several impossible ones. Instead she began with the ordinary.

"I still have a home in the Woods. Work. People. Ian has a life where he comes from. Neither of us knows what the clocks between any of our worlds are doing. The fact that he can reach me doesn't mean I should turn every day into one long visit, and owning a house near Merrowford doesn't make the rest disappear."

She thought of the previous evening's crossroads.

"That was actually part of why the Waykeeper became interesting."

Aelira's attention changed immediately.

Kanno noticed. "You met her."

"Yesterday."

Kanno stared.

Lethira smiled faintly. "You went to Mercury."

"That is not a defence."

"It felt relevant."

Isha looked at Aelira. "You knew?"

"I knew they intended to. I helped them choose which one to approach first."

That required another explanation.

Lethira gave Isha and Kanno the smallest complete version she could manage. There were five builder-gods rather than one external Demon Lord and several unrelated religions. The Demon Lord had once been one of those five. The other four were beings Ian's machine described through broad domains which mortal cultures had apparently encountered under different names or masks: Sun Father, Worldsmith, Lifegiver and Waykeeper were useful labels, not proof that every religion had understood the being behind it correctly.

Isha went very still at the first part.

"The Demon Lord was one of them."

"Yes."

"One of the creators."

"Apparently."

Aelira supplied the evidential boundary before the statement could harden into theology.

"Ian's machine gave us that account. The Waykeeper later corroborated that there were five and called the Demon Lord her brother. That does not make every detail either source gives us complete."

Isha nodded slowly.

Thomas had spent years learning that an ancient system calling something by a name did not necessarily mean the name carried the interpretation people later attached to it. She did not need reminding of that principle.

"Where is he now?" Kanno asked.

"Still on Pocket Island," Lethira said.

Isha's gaze snapped to her.

"Still?"

"Yes. Ian visited him first."

This time nobody mistook Kanno's silence for lack of interest.

Lethira described only what mattered. Thomas's prison remained intact. The island remained Thomas's small, pleasant refuge turned into a destination with no outward road. The Demon Lord had been able to corrupt even that place from inside—blackening the sea, imposing silence, erasing small living things because he could.

Ian had restored what he damaged.

Then he had removed the Demon Lord's power.

Isha did not speak for several seconds.

The woodland around them continued doing nothing extraordinary.

"Removed it."

"Yes."

"All of it?"

"As far as Ian could tell, yes. He left whatever the Demon Lord naturally is. If he was ageless, he remains ageless. If he would live forever, Ian didn't change that. He remembers everything. He is still imprisoned where Thomas put him. He simply cannot do what he did before."

Lethira hesitated, then added the detail which had stayed with her.

"He has to pick the fruit himself now."

Kanno's eyes moved to her.

"I know that sounds ridiculous after everything else."

"No," Isha said.

Her voice was quiet.

"It doesn't."

She looked down the path rather than at any of them.

Thomas had chosen a destination, not torture. He had spent the last of what he could do ensuring that the thing trying to enter their world went somewhere else and could not come back. Ian had not replaced that choice with a crueller prison because cruelty felt proportionate.

"He left Thomas's island as Thomas made it."

"Yes."

"And the Demon Lord cannot hurt even the animals there now."

"Yes."

Isha breathed out.

"I don't know what justice means for something like him."

Neither Lethira nor Aelira interrupted.

"I know what he did to us. I know what he did to other people. I know what Thomas had to become for a few minutes because stopping him required it." Her fingers moved once against her palm. "I don't need him to suffer for me. I am glad he cannot reach anyone."

That was enough.

Kanno did not ask Isha for more.

Aelira waited until Isha looked back towards them before saying, "The more complicated problem is the four who still have power."

"Yes," Isha said.

"And that is why I want the full account from both Ian and Lethira separately from this afternoon," Aelira added. "I don't intend to turn this into council because we happened to put four women beside a lake."

Lethira looked grateful.

Kanno said, "But you did meet one."

"The Waykeeper."

"How bad?"

Lethira considered the question.

"More reasonable than I wanted."

That made Kanno frown.

"Which was worse."

"I understand."

Lethira began walking again, and the others followed. The path through the trees gave them somewhere to put the account besides the bench.

The Waykeeper had not behaved like the Demon Lord. She had listened. She had answered questions. She could recognise some of her own failures and even admit that mortals had reasonable grounds to call some of her actions manipulation.

That did not mean she stopped doing them.

"She believes choice can become less free when powerful people announce themselves," Lethira said. "So sometimes she doesn't announce herself."

Kanno's attention sharpened.

"Meaning?"

"She might make sure information reaches someone. Delay a journey. Open a road somebody meant to keep closed. Arrange that two people meet. Put a person somewhere another option becomes visible."

"And then leaves the decision to them."

"That is how she describes it."

Kanno walked several paces before answering.

"She edits the circumstances and calls the remaining decision untouched."

Lethira looked at her. "Yes."

"Does she change minds?"

"She said no. Compulsion received a less clean answer, but her preferred method seems to be arranging what becomes possible."

Isha's expression had become thoughtful rather than alarmed.

"That can still save someone."

"Yes," Lethira said. "That is why she is difficult."

A governor closing a road to trap people. A message deliberately intercepted. A child walking towards a broken bridge. A village below a mountain that would fall. The Waykeeper's principle had examples where Lethira would have wanted intervention too.

The problem came when a god extended the same entitlement into ordinary dissatisfaction, love, home or commitment and decided that someone ought to see another road.

"She thinks attachment can become a cage people praise as belonging," Lethira said. "She's not wrong."

Aelira nodded.

"She is wrong if she assumes the possibility of a cage gives her standing permission to loosen every bond."

"Exactly."

Isha glanced at Lethira. "And you had just bought a house."

"Provisionally."

"Of course."

"Yes. So we argued."

Kanno almost smiled. "About property."

"About whether staying somewhere you love can itself be a choice."

The house had given the argument an irritatingly concrete shape. Lethira told them what she had told the goddess: a home could change without being abandoned. Love could change. A person could leave later if they chose. None of that made remaining a temporary failure to pursue another possibility.

Isha listened with more personal attention now.

She had crossed a world and become human. She lived in Sendai with Thomas, worked at a climbing centre, made paper hangings badly enough to remake individual loops, and had chosen an ordinary marriage after a life in which ordinary had become nearly impossible. Staying was not an abstraction for her either.

"What did she say?"

"Eventually? That everything changes."

"True."

"Yes. She had several true things."

Lethira's mouth twisted.

"That was part of the problem."

Aelira gave Kanno and Isha the part she already knew from the preparation. The Waykeeper's corruption, as Ian's machine described it, was not simply lying about freedom. It was an inability to value commitment as something other than a road not yet abandoned. A god could tell the truth about change and still use that truth to make stability seem morally suspect.

"And what did you get from her?" Aelira asked.

The question was carefully narrow. Not *tell me everything*. Not *what did Ian do*. Just the outcome Lethira could choose to share here.

Lethira told them about the boundary.

The Waykeeper had agreed not deliberately to create, conceal or favour opportunities in Lethira's personal life for the purpose of pulling her away from a home, lover, profession or chosen commitment merely because the goddess believed another road would be better. The agreement did not forbid intervention in immediate danger, coercion or situations where someone else had deliberately closed all choice.

Kanno looked at her.

"She agreed?"

"After arguing."

"Do you trust her to keep it?"

Lethira thought of the woman beneath the old tree and the road she had eventually chosen to walk.

"I trust that she understood what she agreed to. I don't know her well enough to turn that into anything larger."

Aelira approved visibly.

"And then Ian did something," she said.

Lethira looked at her.

"I know him."

That was fair.

Lethira's smile returned.

"He gave her a road."

Aelira stopped walking.

Kanno and Isha stopped because she had.

"What kind of road?" Aelira asked.

"This is the part I want to tell you properly with him there."

"Agreed."

"But the short version is that he didn't change her past. He didn't remove anything she did or replace her with a kinder version."

That distinction mattered enough that Lethira slowed her explanation.

Ian had created a route through the Waykeeper's own history: the choices she had actually made and the alternatives she had not taken. The path allowed her to encounter those old forks again without rewriting the history which followed from them. She could walk. Stop. Turn around. Continue. Whatever she learned from it remained hers.

Aelira's expression became difficult to read.

"He gave the goddess of roads a road through her own roads."

"Yes."

"Without changing what happened."

"Yes."

"And she chose to enter it."

"Yes."

Kanno looked towards Isha. "That sounds extremely Ian."

Isha considered it. "Yes."

Lethira laughed quietly.

"The Waykeeper took apples."

Aelira looked at her.

"That sentence requires context."

"It will receive context later."

"What kind of apples?"

"Very good ones."

Aelira stared.

Kanno said, "This is why councils take hours."

"No, councils take hours because people insist the apples aren't relevant until three hours later when they discover the orchard controls a border."

Aelira looked at her with renewed respect.

"Exactly."

The absurdity took enough pressure out of the divine subject for Lethira to add one final piece.

"Then Ian hugged her."

Aelira closed her eyes.

Kanno nodded. "Of course."

Isha's mouth curved.

"She was confused," Lethira said.

"I imagine."

"We may have discovered a diplomatic method."

"You have not," Aelira said.

"I haven't ruled it out."

Aelira resumed walking.

For perhaps a minute the only subject was the path.

Then Lethira said, "There was one thing from the meeting I actually do want all of you to know."

The change in her voice brought their attention back without alarm.

She had told Aelira before about the standing rule around her: the absolute refusal Ian had asked his machine to establish against changing Lethira's mind, memory, personality, identity, feelings, values, choices or past, directly or indirectly. Isha and Kanno had not been given that private detail.

Lethira chose to give it now.

She did not recite every clause. She explained the scope: Ian could not alter her into loving him, trusting him, forgiving him, agreeing with him or becoming dependent upon him. He could not go backwards and manufacture circumstances for that purpose either. Natural events, information, conversation and ordinary consequences were all that remained available.

Kanno listened without interrupting.

Isha's face became very still.

"I wanted that rule," Lethira said. "He proposed making it broader than I had asked. I saw the machine accept it."

"And yesterday?" Kanno asked.

"Yesterday proved something new."

During the Waykeeper meeting Ian had wanted to tell Lethira something privately. His first attempt had been to put the thought directly into her mind.

The rule refused.

Nothing entered.

Instead, the communication had been forced into external text at the edge of Lethira's sight, visible to her but not placed inside her thoughts.

Kanno stopped.

"The important part," she said after a moment, "is that it refused before he decided whether the shortcut was acceptable."

Lethira nodded.

"Exactly."

Aelira had heard the original safeguard but not yet that result. Her attention sharpened.

"He actually attempted it."

"Yes."

"And the machine redirected the act rather than allowing it."

"Yes."

Aelira looked pleased in a way that had nothing to do with Ian having made the attempt.

"Good."

Isha understood too.

A promise depended on the person remembering the promise at every relevant moment. A structural refusal was not proof of character, and it did not make every use of Ian's power safe, but it removed one particularly catastrophic kind of convenient mistake.

"How did you feel?" Isha asked.

"Relieved."

Lethira smiled.

"Quite a lot. I trust him to care about the boundary. I like knowing the boundary doesn't need him to be perfect."

Kanno's gaze stayed on her.

"And you're telling us because..."

"Because you know enough about what he can do that I don't want you privately imagining I am trusting only a promise. And because I wanted to."

That was sufficient.

Nobody turned the disclosure into an examination of the relationship.

The path descended again and eventually delivered them back to the lake by another route. Lethira was, to Kanno's visible disappointment, able to identify where they had emerged.

"I knew exactly where we were."

"We have returned to a lake approximately the size of the lake we left."

"The same lake."

"Probably."

Lethira threatened her with a look and nothing more.

They followed the water towards the picnic area. Their earlier cups and covered basket were still where they had left them. The tea had cooled. The scones remained scones. Nothing new had appeared merely because they had walked far enough to become hungry again.

That normal failure to anticipate them was oddly welcome.

Isha poured the remaining tea anyway. Kanno took coffee. Lethira inspected another scone while Aelira sat on the bench facing the water.

"Now," Lethira said, "Mercury."

Kanno stopped halfway through lifting her cup.

Aelira looked towards the lake.

Isha's expression suggested she had been waiting for this.

Kanno set the cup down. "What about it?"

"You went there."

"Yes."

"To the world closest to your Sun."

"Planet."

"The distinction is not helping."

Kanno considered correcting several astronomical details, decided none would improve the conversation, and began again.

"It was a photography trip."

Lethira stared at her.

"I understand each of those words separately."

Aelira intervened. "She took forty-one photographs."

"You knew?"

"Kanno told me."

Lethira turned back. "Forty-one."

"Yes."

"Of Mercury."

"Yes."

"Alone."

"Yes."

Lethira looked at Isha as though asking whether Earth had collectively become unreasonable while she was away.

Isha said, "Thomas and I went to Mars that day."

Lethira became completely still.

Aelira's composure failed.

Kanno looked down into her coffee.

"I see," Lethira said eventually. "I have spent several days walking to Merrowford like a responsible person and apparently everyone on Earth has become impossible."

"We used doors," Isha said.

"That does not improve it."

"You flew to the Great Peak."

"That was local."

"Relative to Mercury."

Lethira considered this and gave up.

The conversation became easier after that.

Kanno described Mercury the way she described photographs rather than astronomy. Hard light. Shadows which became almost absolute. Ground that initially offered too many possible frames because there was no obvious human-made object telling her where attention belonged. Reduced gravity required adaptation, but she had not gone there to perform movement for its own sake. She had photographed, adjusted and photographed again.

"Forty-one is not many," Lethira said.

"For me, there, it was enough."

"Are they good?"

"Some."

Aelira smiled faintly. She had heard the answer before.

Kanno explained that eight had become proof prints, then three had survived the next conversation at flat 202. The harder question was not technical quality but what the photographs could become in public. Calling an image *Mercury, 2028* asked a viewer to believe a factual claim Kanno could not support without disclosing Ian and everything attached to him. Calling it fictional would be false. Omitting the location changed the work in another way.

"So you haven't decided," Lethira said.

"No."

"You seem comfortable with that."

"More than I was."

Lethira looked at her for a moment.

"I think I like that."

Kanno accepted the statement without asking whether it was praise.

Aelira glanced at the empty place beside Kanno where a camera might have rested.

"And today?"

"I have wanted it several times."

"But?"

"But I am glad I didn't bring it."

Lethira looked around at the lake, empty benches and quiet paths.

"What would you photograph?"

Kanno's answer took time.

"The spaces where people should be."

That made all three women look at the park differently.

The benches were too clean without becoming unused. Paths curved around water without a walker appearing from behind the trees. A picnic table held four cups because four people had put them there, while every other table remained empty. Wind moved things. Water moved. Nothing inhabited the landscape except them.

"I would probably regret not having the camera," Kanno said. "Then I would regret having it because I would spend part of the afternoon making work instead of being here."

Aelira nodded.

Her previous permission remained exactly what it had been: Kanno could bring the camera to a future meeting with her. No portrait permission had been granted. Neither woman needed to restate the contract simply because the object was absent.

Lethira broke open the scone.

"Then I am pleased to exist undocumented."

"Temporarily."

Lethira looked up.

Kanno drank her coffee.

Aelira turned towards the lake before either could become worse.

It was Isha who returned them to something more ordinary.

"Lethira, you said you worked yesterday."

"Tracking."

"What happened?"

The story of the damaged grain shed occupied far less moral territory than gods and planets.

That recommended it immediately.

Lethira explained the signs: disturbed boards, marks where something had forced its way through, coarse hair, prints, the problem of deciding whether the damage represented an animal passing through or one likely to return. Ian had wanted to learn rather than have his machine supply the answer, so Lethira made him look.

Kanno said, "You taught the man who can alter reality to identify footprints."

"I did."

"Successfully?"

"Eventually."

Lethira described the track leading towards an established badger sett occupied by an adult female and two nearly grown juveniles. No monster. No magical predator. No reason to remove them. The job had ended with evidence, advice about securing the grain better and payment for correctly identifying a problem rather than manufacturing a more exciting one.

Isha's interest had become professional before she noticed.

"How did you teach him?"

Lethira glanced at her.

"By making him tell me what he could actually see before telling him what it meant."

Isha nodded immediately.

"If you give the interpretation too early, they learn the answer rather than the evidence."

"Exactly."

Kanno looked between them.

"Oh no."

Isha frowned. "What?"

"The course has spread."

"It is a reasonable teaching principle."

"Yesterday you moved my teacup."

"That was also reasonable."

Lethira looked interested. "Why?"

Kanno explained the foot-position demonstration.

Lethira became enthusiastic enough that Isha regretted the subject.

Within minutes they were comparing the difficulty of teaching a physical skill which the teacher performed automatically. Isha's Coach 1 weekend had spent considerable time forcing experienced climbers to separate what *they* did from what a particular learner could perceive or execute. Lethira had discovered the same problem with tracks Ian could not yet distinguish from ordinary disturbed ground.

Aelira listened while eating half a scone.

"You have taught wardens before," she said to Lethira.

"Yes."

"You are speaking as though this surprised you."

"Young wardens already know what a hoof print is."

"So Ian's incompetence improved your pedagogy."

Lethira considered that.

"I will tell him that."

Aelira looked towards her.

Lethira smiled. "Eventually."

No message was sent. No missive appeared. The sentence remained an intention for some later conversation.

Kanno leaned back against the bench.

"This may be the first useful thing I've learned about divine power today."

"What?"

"It doesn't identify badger tracks unless you ask it."

Lethira laughed.

"His didn't. Deliberately."

That mattered more than the joke. Ian had possessed an answer and chosen for a few hours to inhabit the much smaller question of whether he could learn something from Lethira without bypassing the learning itself.

Isha looked at her old friend.

"You like teaching him."

"Yes."

The answer was immediate enough that Lethira noticed.

She smiled.

"Yes. I do."

There were other reasons she loved him. Attraction. Ridiculous dates. The fact that he had made the Great Peak possible without making the approach meaningless. His worry. His power. His restraint around some uses of it and dangerous casualness around others. The strange intimacy of sharing a projected body with a human whose true existence remained somewhere beyond her world.

But teaching him how to read an animal track belonged to a different category.

"He can show me things I could never reach," she said. "Then the next morning I can show him that the mark beside a broken board is not a claw because claws don't move sideways like that."

Isha understood.

"Thomas used to do that to me with cooking."

Lethira smiled. "And you did it to him with the bow."

"Yes."

Aelira's gaze moved between them.

"Perhaps this is the real danger of relationships. Eventually everyone becomes somebody's beginner."

Kanno said, "That sounds survivable."

"Usually."

The afternoon had begun stretching in the way Aelira had wanted.

Nobody checked a clock.

They finished the second round of drinks and remained by the lake after the cups were empty. Subjects arrived without requiring a reason. Isha told Lethira more about Coach 1, not the formal content but the strange experience of being deliberately made less expert by having to explain instead of simply perform. Kanno told Aelira that the Mercury ticket still physically existed and that she had refused to test whether persistence meant reuse because she did not yet know what she would do with a yes.

Lethira asked what an Earth Monday looked like after spending a weekend learning to coach climbing. Isha described Thomas leaving for the university, toast beneath a cloth, her decision not to open the course bag again that morning, and the cream paper loop she had remade the previous week because it had annoyed her.

"Paper loop," Lethira repeated.

"I am making a hanging."

"What does it do?"

"Nothing."

Lethira looked delighted.

"It hangs."

"Yes."

"Excellent."

Isha narrowed her eyes. "You are mocking me."

"No. I genuinely like that."

Aelira did too, though she was less obvious about it.

The fact that Isha made something whose function was simply to be looked at, adjusted and eventually declared finished—or not—seemed to please both elves more than the subject deserved. Perhaps because so much of what they remembered doing together had required utility. Roads had destinations. Warden work had reasons. Guild contracts ended with someone paid because a problem had been solved.

Kanno understood the attraction for a different reason.

"Have you finished it?"

"No."

"Good."

Isha looked at her.

"I knew you would say that."

"Then stop asking people whose work remains unfinished."

"I did not ask."

"Your expression did."

Lethira turned towards Aelira. "This is apparently an Earth conversational technique."

"I've noticed."

Something else changed quietly during those exchanges.

Kanno no longer felt like the person sitting between two sets of old friends.

She had worried about that before arranging the afternoon. Isha, Aelira and Lethira carried histories which predated her by lifetimes in one case and by an entire reality in another. Each elf had met Kanno separately, but those conversations might have become side chambers attached to a larger structure she did not share.

Instead, differences remained visible without becoming hierarchy.

Isha and Lethira could refer to Merrowford forty years ago and then stop to explain a name when Kanno did not know it. Aelira and Kanno could refer to something from their private meeting without giving the other two its contents. Kanno could mention Mercury and discover Aelira already knew while Lethira did not. No one treated the mismatch as a failure which needed repairing.

Eventually Kanno said part of that aloud.

"I was worried I might become useful in the wrong way."

Lethira looked at her.

"As a messenger."

Isha understood immediately.

Kanno rested her empty cup between both hands.

"I know things from each of you because you've told me. I know things from Ian. I know things from Isha. It would be very easy to become the person who fills gaps because I happen to have them."

Aelira's expression was attentive now.

"I don't want that."

"Neither do I," Isha said.

Lethira nodded. "Good."

The answer came so simply that Kanno looked at her.

"If I want Isha to know something, I can tell Isha. I just demonstrated that with a letter."

"You did."

"If I want you to know something, I can tell you."

Kanno nodded.

"And if you ask me something while we're sitting together, I can decide whether I want to answer."

"Yes."

Aelira added, "The existence of a route does not create an obligation to use it."

That sentence could have belonged to the Waykeeper conversation. Here it meant only friendship.

Kanno looked at Isha.

"I do sometimes want details."

"I know."

"That doesn't mean I'm asking you to obtain them."

"I know that too."

Lethira smiled. "You can ask me for details."

Kanno looked at her.

"I may refuse."

"That seems fair."

"I may also answer far more than you expected."

"That seems less safe."

"Correct."

Isha folded her arms. "I have experience."

"Unfairly acquired experience."

"You wrote the postscript."

Kanno's attention moved between them.

Lethira pointed at Isha.

"No."

Kanno said nothing.

Aelira looked interested.

"No," Lethira repeated.

The three other women respected this boundary by making absolutely no attempt to conceal that they now wanted to know what the postscript contained.

Lethira endured it for several seconds.

Then she stood.

"We are walking again."

Kanno laughed.

They left the picnic table and followed another path towards the open lawns.

The landscape widened. Sunlight reached them without much interference from the canopy, and the lake became visible almost end to end. Somewhere in a real Golden Acre Park there would have been families, dogs, children near the water, people carrying coffee, someone running badly, someone running much too seriously, birds treating picnic remains as public property.

Here there were four women.

That absence no longer felt eerie.

Perhaps they had simply occupied the place enough.

Aelira walked beside Lethira for a while without speaking. Then, quietly enough that the question did not pull the others into a briefing, she said, "Later. The Waykeeper."

"Yes."

"Both of you."

"Yes."

"I want what she said about the others. Exactly enough that we don't turn a sibling's criticism into fact merely because it is useful."

Lethira nodded.

"And what Ian's road actually did."

"Yes."

That was all.

Aelira let the subject go and moved ahead to where Kanno had stopped beside a planting bed.

Isha remained with Lethira.

For several paces neither spoke.

Then Isha said, "You really are happy."

Lethira looked at her.

Isha had asked before and received the answer. This was not the same question.

Lethira smiled.

"Embarrassingly."

"Good."

"He is also exhausting."

"Thomas is occasionally exhausting."

"Occasionally?"

Isha looked at her.

Lethira lifted both hands. "Marriage has softened you."

"No."

"It has."

"I can still push you into the lake."

Lethira looked towards the water. Then at Isha's current human body.

Her expression became unbearably thoughtful.

Isha saw the calculation.

"Do not."

"I didn't say anything."

"You were estimating."

"I would never."

Ahead of them, Kanno turned around.

"What are you doing?"

"Nothing," Isha said.

"Considering hydrodynamics," Lethira said.

Aelira kept walking.

The afternoon still had hours in it.

For once, none of them needed to decide what those hours were for.