## Chapter 464 — Late Lunch

Morning light reached the six new chairs and the scarred table.

Lethira stood with one hand on a chair back and read the earthworker's quotation again.

The price remained tied to the clean fill currently available and the smaller loads required by the mature-tree turn. Nothing in the figure demanded an immediate answer.

It was fair enough that Lethira could have accepted it alone. That was not the same as wanting to. The range was theirs, the money was theirs in the complicated practical sense their household had acquired, and Ian had been talking about learning to shoot beside her since before the first peg went into the ground. She folded the quotation and left it on the table.

The Guild supplied no reason to change her plans. The raised-grade charcoal-burner notice was still on the B board, still unresolved and still somebody else's problem unless she chose otherwise. Brannock's update on the Reed-Mauler repair was equally undramatic: the rebuilt section remained sound, the reed-side path remained closed, and everyone involved wanted one proper period of wet weather before calling the ground settled. Lethira left both where they belonged and went to the market.

She needed bread, cheese and smoked meat. She did not need onions, because the house already had onions, but the sight of a produce stall still made her stop and inspect them. Ian had learned exactly enough about onions to make them feel like a household category now. That was where Aelira's message found her.

Gold caught at the edge of her vision beside a basket of pale-skinned bulbs. Lethira took the sheet before it could settle against the produce, paid the startled seller for the onion already in her hand, and moved aside beneath the awning.

Aelira's first line was enough to remove any possibility that the message concerned lunch. She had told her father.

Not the court. Not Sairen, the council, the wider royal household, the High Elves, any human crown or a church. Her father, privately, with the evidence separated according to its source. The five builders. The things Aelira had witnessed herself with the Lifegiver, the Worldsmith and the Sun Father. Ian's account of the Demon Lord kept distinct from those direct encounters. Ian's external nature, his absurd capacity, the protections, the demonstrated effects on place and causality, and Lethira's absolute non-alteration rule.

The King was displeased that Aelira had waited so long to tell him. He was also, according to his daughter, being irritatingly reasonable about what followed.

There was no summons for Ian. No royal claim, no instruction to bring him before the crown and no suggestion that Lethira's relationship had become royal business merely because the man she loved could frighten kingdoms. The King regarded Ian as strategically dangerous. Aelira had written that phrase twice, once in the account of what her father said and once in her own hand beneath it: *He means the words. He does not mean that you belong to the strategy.*

Private relationships remained private unless somebody turned them into royal acts. The King wanted prior notice, where circumstances permitted, before Aelira deliberately entered another encounter with one of the builders. He had also asked what Mirelen and Vaelor thought of Ian.

Aelira's answer to that part was only: *They were useful.* The message ended by saying she was all right. Lethira read that line twice.

She folded the page and tucked it securely away. The onions remained onions. The King remained several days of road and royal inconvenience away. Nobody had acquired jurisdiction over her household while she was standing beneath a market awning.

On the walk home she invented two arguments with Aelira's father, won both, then called herself an idiot and stopped.

By the time she reached the house she had bought the bread, cheese, smoked meat, potatoes and, despite herself, another onion. Ian was there.

Late lunch became bread, cheese, sliced apple and the remainder of the smoked meat warmed with potatoes and onion. Lethira put the King's existence between them only after the first food was on the table.

“Aelira wrote,” she said. “Congratulations. Another king knows about you.”

Across the scarred table, Lethira gave him the message in full, keeping Aelira's source distinctions intact. Its practical edge was short: nobody else had been told; the King considered Ian strategically dangerous but had made no summons or claim; and Aelira was all right.

The message could remain exactly that size for the moment. Lethira pushed the cheese towards Ian.

“How was your morning?”

“It's been good. I met up with Thomas and Isha after they reached out; otherwise, I've been working in my reality. I can tell you about those two in a bit. What does the King knowing mean? Is he likely to attempt to control me like the Northern Kingdom did with Thomas? That won't end well.”

Lethira did not answer the last sentence first. “I have no evidence that he intends anything like Crownholt.” She rested her forearms against the table. “Her father is allowed to know that somebody with your capabilities exists and to think about what that means for his people.”

She remembered Crownholt well enough that the comparison still carried teeth. “The North decided Thomas being dangerous made him available for use. I do not see that here, so do not start fighting Aelira's father in your head because he used one accurate phrase. If that changes, I will have a problem with him before you need to demonstrate why it was foolish.”

“I hope he isn't like the North. I don't think he is, but I don't know him. I won't be used as some kind of weapon or tool, and unlike Thomas, I can't be made to.”

“That is the important difference.” Lethira picked up her cup, thought better of drinking while making the point, and set it down again. “Nobody can make you. If a king ever asks you to point yourself at an enemy, the answer can simply be no. You do not need to demonstrate what happens after no.” She took a piece of apple. “You are not his weapon, Aelira's or mine.”

“You said Thomas and Isha reached out.”

“They wanted a normal meeting, like normal people.”

Ian gave her the broad outline. Thomas and Isha had asked for an ordinary neutral meeting with no trip, demonstration or problem attached. They had chosen an empty self-service diner rather than populate the place with created people who existed only to serve them. There had been tea, coffee, Ian's strawberry milkshake, too many cakes and snacks, and a considerable quantity of conversation which began ordinary and periodically failed to remain so.

Thomas had missed him. Isha was still angry about things which deserved anger and had nevertheless chosen to invite him. Ian had admitted that he had been keeping some distance after the more difficult earlier meetings. They had talked about work, health, archery, Merrowford, the house, gods, the reality machine and several subjects which had no business sharing a table with fries.

Before leaving, Ian had asked them to tell Kanno that he would like a one-to-one conversation sometime if she wanted one. Her choice; he would wait for her to reach out.

“That sounds healthier than several of your earlier meetings with them,” Lethira said. “Mostly because the purpose appears to have been seeing one another.” Her mouth moved. “And cake.”

“Did it feel different?”

“Massively. I think I was quite upset after the last time, or the time before that, and I'd somewhat avoided them. I'm very glad they reached out, hence my leaping straight at it.”

Lethira leaned back in her chair. “I noticed the leaping.” She was quiet for a moment. “Giving them space made sense. I am glad they decided the silence had lasted long enough.”

“Did you tell them you'd been avoiding them?”

“Yeah, I tried not to turn it into therapy but gods made it hard.” Ian smiled at her.

Lethira laughed. “Blaming gods for conversational difficulty is becoming suspiciously convenient.” She broke another piece from the bread.

“I am glad you told them. Avoiding them mattered. What did you tell them about us?”

Ian's account of that part wandered through the house before it reached anything grander. He had told them he liked the ordinary life here, and that sometimes he wished his biological body could be here rather than only the projection. He had talked about Lethira teaching him onions, his maps, the future range and the badger job; about wanting to learn archery and cooking because being beside her while he was still genuinely inexperienced appealed to him. He had admitted that making Lethira laugh and seeing her happy mattered to him, that she made ordinary life unusually easy to inhabit, and that she was unusually easy for him to be open with. He had told them, simply, that he loved her.

He had also told them that he liked being kept. Lethira stopped with the bread halfway to her mouth.

“You told Isha that you like being kept.” She lowered the bread carefully. “I am impressed you survived the diner.”

The amusement was genuine, but Lethira knew enough of Thomas and Isha's history for the word to carry a second weight. Crownholt had turned Thomas's usefulness into an argument for custody. Isha had lived through people deciding that protecting, using and keeping him could all be made to resemble the same thing.

“What did she make of that?”

“She didn't pick up on it. I realised after saying it that it might hit differently for those two.”

“Yes.” Lethira's amusement softened. “It might. Thomas has rather particular reasons to hear more in that word than you put there.” She broke off another piece of bread. “But if neither of them challenged it, leave it alone. You meant what you meant.”

Her hand crossed the table and settled palm-up between them. “For the record, I still like keeping you.”

“And I love being kept.” Ian took her hand. “I'm so tired today, my sleep was not great. Not sure why.”

He yawned, as he had been doing for the last hour in his own reality.

“How was the rest of your morning?”

Lethira closed her fingers around his. “I know. If you are tired, you are tired. We now own six chairs. At least one of them can hold a sleepy human.”

She gave him the less royal parts of her morning. Nothing at the Guild had demanded her, a cheese seller had tried to justify a much larger price with a slightly larger piece, and Aelira's message had arrived while she was looking at onions.

“Then I walked home slowly while inventing arguments with her father,” Lethira said. “After the second one I realised I was arguing with a man who had not actually done anything and called myself an idiot.”

She picked up her cup at last. “Very productive morning.”

“I like cheese.”

“Yes. I had gathered that from the way you were eating it.” Lethira cut him another piece anyway and placed it beside his hand. “There. My provision of material support continues. Shelter, onions, cheese and professional badger supervision.”

“The list of my mortal debt continues to grow. Would you like to do anything with what remains of the day?”

Lethira gave him a flat look. “You are never going to repay the cheese.” Then she considered the actual question. “The stream. Blanket. Apples. No destination, no training and no useful purpose.” Her eyes travelled over him. “If you fall asleep, I promise not to interpret it as criticism.”

Ian smiled. “That sounds lovely.” He kissed her hand.

“Good.” Lethira gathered the blanket and a few apples. At the back door she waited with one hand on the latch.

Ian followed her out and put his arm inside hers.

“Do you think I should go meet the King, or just wait and see if he does anything?”

Lethira adjusted her pace to the lazy walk they had implicitly agreed upon. “Wait.” The answer did not require much thought. “If the King wants a formal conversation, Aelira knows how to reach us. Going to him now could look as though you are presenting yourself for judgement or reassurance because he has learned you exist. You do not owe him that. If you later want to meet him because he is Aelira's father, or because you are curious, ask Aelira.”

They followed the stream only a short distance from the house before the bank widened beneath two mature trees. The house disappeared behind enough leaves to feel private without becoming remote.

She looked across at him. “Do you actually want to meet him?”

“Only because he's a king. It sounds kinda interesting. Not because of the other stuff—or, at least, not enough to go out of my way to see him. I trust Aelira enough to let politics play out. I'm not worried.”

Lethira laughed as she spread the blanket beneath the trees. “That is the healthiest reason you have offered for meeting a king.” She sat and leaned back on one hand. “The Thomas I first knew would have been terrified of Aelira's father. He is a good king, which is inconveniently different from being an easy man, and an annoyingly good father when Aelira is trying to be First Princess instead of somebody's daughter.”

The stream moved quietly beside them, narrow enough that its stones remained visible through the water.

She took an apple from the fold of the blanket. “You have met enough important people by appearing uninvited.”

Ian squeezed her arm. “Only one truly important person.”

Lethira turned towards him. Pleasure reached her face before she could entirely hide it behind amusement. “That is a terrible thing to say immediately before meeting a king.” A beat passed. “Fortunately, I agree. Do not tell Aelira.”

“It shall be our secret.”

“Good.” Lethira bit into the apple and let silence take the next few minutes. Water slid over stone. Somewhere higher in the trees a small bird moved between branches. She settled closer until her shoulder rested against Ian's.

“This is better than a royal audience.”

Ian turned and kissed her cheek. “Very much so.”

“What is next on our epic domesticity quest? More furniture to come? Carpets?”

Lethira considered the question with the seriousness it plainly did not deserve. “Storage first. Shelves. I want some Wood Elf work in the house before we fill every room with human furniture merely because Merrowford is nearby.”

She counted the remaining work. The roof crew still had to open and repair the ageing south-west section when weather gave them the dry window they wanted. The range needed its bank. The bathhouse remained a future argument with drainage rules. The third upstairs room needed a purpose before it became permanent storage by neglect.

“Perhaps a rug,” she allowed. “Not carpet over the whole floor. I like knowing there is a floor.” Her head tilted. “You?”

“More time to enjoy it with you. And to fix the roof, chimney and whatever else needs making good. Beyond that, I'm not really sure. Having a go at archery sounds nice. Or cooking. Or maybe plaiting your hair.”

Lethira smiled. “The repairs are already somebody else's work, and the range can wait until we decide about the earth.”

She drew her ash-brown hair forward over one shoulder. “Cooking is sensible. One onion does not constitute a qualification.” Then she shifted to sit more squarely beside him and offered the length of her hair with considerably more trust than ceremony.

“And my hair is available for supervised experimentation. I should warn you that I will know when you are doing it badly.”

Ian leaned sleepily against her. “Then I shall try my utmost.”

“Do we need to do anything for the earth, the roof or the chimney? My brain is half asleep so not sure if we're waiting for them to come, or need to tell them to come?”

Lethira shifted enough to support him more comfortably. “The earthworker is waiting for our answer to yesterday's quote. The roof crew is booked for dry weather and will judge the chimney top when they open the roof; the chimney itself is clean and drawing properly. Nothing else needs arranging.” Her hand returned to Ian's arm. “So the only decision currently sleeping beside the stream is whether we accept the earthwork quote. I refuse to make a land-and-money decision with half of its owners barely conscious. It can survive until your brain returns.”

“You can have my remaining silver towards it.” Ian smiled at her. “Unless you think there's loads of other cheaper places we could find quickly, we should just get it sorted?”

Lethira looked down at him, then towards the stream. “Your one heavy silver can go towards it if you want. It is still your money until you spend it.”

She considered the contractor rather than the romance of contribution. “Could we find someone cheaper? Probably. If we spent several days asking every yard around Merrowford, somebody might undercut him.” Her enthusiasm for that process was limited. “He has already walked the ground, checked the cart turn, accepted that the old tree stays, rejected the soft route by the stream and priced smaller loads instead of making access our problem. I would rather pay a fair price to somebody who has actually looked.”

She gave his arm a small squeeze.

“So yes. I think we should accept it. Tomorrow, when you are awake enough to remember agreeing.”

Ian kissed whichever part of her was nearest. “Is fishing allowed here?” He considered the question, then gestured downstream. “I don't mean this reality, that would be silly. Down at the big river.”

Lethira followed the gesture. From where they sat, the main river was hidden beyond their southern parcel, the lower wet ground and the trees, but the stream knew perfectly well where it was going.

“I don't know.” She sounded mildly offended by the gap in her knowledge. “Our agreement lets us walk down there, maintain the path and put a movable seat near the river. It says nothing about fishing.” She turned the apple in her hand. “Which probably means fishing belongs to some other set of rules nobody thought relevant while we were buying access.” The prospect amused her more than it discouraged her. “We can ask in town. Civic office, Guild, somebody on the river. Eventually one of them will tell us which person we should have asked first.”

She looked sideways at Ian. “Do you fish?”

“Almost forty years ago, briefly.”

“Wait, you don't have monster fish, do you?”

Lethira laughed. “Not as a normal hazard of the Merrowford river, no. The town eats river fish and cargo boats use it. Fishing would be a very different profession if every line risked becoming a Guild contract.” She bit into her apple. “I am not promising that nothing unpleasant has ever lived in a river anywhere in this world. We can investigate fishing rights before we investigate fishing monsters.”

“This world has unusually developed public administration when I don't think it even has flushing toilets or sewage treatment.”

Lethira gave him a sideways look. “I do not know what your second thing is, and I suspect the first is a toilet which behaves with unnecessary sophistication.” The humour stayed for only a moment before the thought interested her properly. “But administration I understand. If three families use the same bridge, somebody eventually has to decide who repairs it. If a river floods, people argue about banks. If a mage can ruin a well by being careless, somebody writes rules about wells. If adventurers kill things for money, somebody keeps records so the wrong person is not paid twice.” She tossed the apple core lightly into her palm rather than the stream. “We have spent a great deal of our history developing better ways to survive one another.”

“I asked the reality machine to compare your world with the developmental history of my part of the world and similar places. It was quite interesting.”

Lethira turned that over. “I understood most of that sentence.” She settled her hand over his where they rested together on the blanket. “I would not expect our world to be following yours along one road. We have Elves who remember centuries, dwarves who build things most humans cannot reproduce, towns that regulate water more carefully than some rulers regulate soldiers, and ancient works nobody alive knows how to make.” Her gaze went briefly to the stream. “But comparing what different societies became good at first sounds interesting. Merrowford can record land ownership, access, water rights and an adventurer's competence with considerable seriousness while people still empty chamber pots.”

She smiled faintly. “I can see why that amused you. What surprised you most?”

“It wasn't just ‘it is approximately two hundred years behind.’ It was more subtle, varying from seven hundred years behind at one extreme to around one hundred and seventy at another. Magic was one major factor: no point developing medicine and treatments when you can just will someone better. But that still probably explains the smaller population.”

Lethira picked at a loose thread near the edge of the blanket. “The first part sounds plausible.” She glanced towards him. “The second is too easy.”

Most people could not will another person well. Thomas had made impossible healing look deceptively available because Thomas was Thomas. Even ordinary good healers were valuable partly because they were not everywhere; distance, cost, time and the limits of the healer still existed.

“Magic may make some kinds of medicine less urgent to develop,” she said. “I can believe that. It may also make people depend on a specialist who cannot be copied as easily as a tool or a written method.” The population claim bothered her for a different reason. “Disease, childbirth, monsters, war, winter, bad harvests, distance from help. There are many ways to die. And I do not think either of us knows how many people live in this world well enough to blame one of them.” She let the thread go. “Crooked rather than behind makes more sense to me.”

“War as well, magic, and stronger races than the humans, mean less effort put into machines of war. Still lots of war though. We made a lot of devices of increasing destructive power.”

“That part I can believe too, though I would not give humans here too much credit for restraint.” Lethira shifted the apple core to the blanket beside her. “A powerful mage can do work which would otherwise require many soldiers. An Elf or dwarf may have advantages a human does not. That can make an army organise around exceptional people rather than finding a way to give the same destructive capacity to every ordinary person.”

She had seen enough fortifications to know the world had hardly ignored war as an engineering problem. Siege engines, armour, suppression tools and roads made for moving soldiers existed perfectly well. “Perhaps your people kept asking how to make the weapon itself stronger because there was no mage standing beside it who could already throw fire through a gate.”

She watched Ian. “How destructive did your machines become?”

“Two were used in war, both against cities. One of them killed somewhere around a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand people, depending on how and when the deaths were counted. Those bombs were small compared with many built later. None have been used in war since. If one exploded in the centre of Merrowford, we'd be dead almost instantly.”

Lethira went still. Her eyes moved south as if the intervening trees might become transparent: the hidden river, the town beyond it, the market streets and Guild hall, people working quays or carrying food home or arguing over prices. “One weapon.” It was not quite a question. “And small only compared with what your people learned to make afterwards.”

Her fingers closed more firmly over Ian's hand. She had seen magic kill quickly. She had seen what happened when somebody powerful stopped caring what stood behind a target. A mage, though, still had to be present. A person could be exhausted, frightened, persuaded, killed or simply fail to arrive.

“A thing that can be built, stored and handed to somebody else is different.” She looked back at him. “How many?”

“Thousands. Ten or twelve thousand, I think, spread across all the countries that have them. Some smaller than the first ones, many larger. Enough that if a lot were used, I don't know whether our civilisation would survive. People say they could wipe out life on the planet, but I don't know how literal that is.”

Lethira stared at him. “Ten thousand.” She said the number slowly, checking it against itself.

A single weapon capable of erasing Merrowford had been difficult enough to fit inside useful thought. Thousands became less like an army than a civilisation choosing to live beside its own catastrophe.

“I am beginning to understand why your world did not require battle mages.” The final claim caught her. “But every living thing—is that something your people actually know, or the way people describe how unimaginably bad it could become?”

“The second one, I think. I overstated it. Humans might survive; our civilisation might not. If you imagine a circle with Merrowford at the centre, reaching out perhaps a quarter of the way to your home village, one of the larger weapons could mostly destroy it. It could also leave a much wider area dangerous in a way that is closest to poison, although it isn't really poison.” Ian paused. “There was a term between the two most powerful countries at one point—mutually assured destruction.”

Lethira's eyes narrowed at the phrase. “Mutually assured.” The words themselves seemed to offend her. “So each side kept enough of these weapons that attacking the other meant being destroyed in return.” She watched the stream for several breaths. “That is not peace. But I can see how it might produce something which looked like peace from a distance.”

She looked back at him. “Was that genuinely the plan?”

“I'm not sure. I was a child during the last part of it, when adults still talked as though obliteration was a real possibility. Humans are very good at war.” Ian looked away from her a little. “I think you know that, though.”

“I do.” Lethira did not turn his face back towards her. Her hand stayed around his. “I have seen humans become extremely inventive when frightened of other humans. Or Elves. Or anything else they decide might come over a border.” She let the silence hold for a moment. “Elves have managed plenty of war as well. Longer lives do not cure that particular talent.” The stream curled around a half-submerged stone. “What is strange about your weapons is not that people wanted enough power to kill their enemies. I understand that very easily. It is that your people became capable of killing themselves with them, understood that, and then kept thousands ready anyway.” She leaned more fully against him. “I think I prefer our ridiculous paperwork.”

“Yes, administration is good. I've thought about whether my knowledge of the ‘future’ would help your world, but an entire genre of entertainment—like the anime, but with real actors too—is about why that rarely works out well.”

Lethira made a quiet sound of agreement. “Knowing that something can exist helps. It does not give you the materials, tools or institutions needed to make it useful.”

She plucked a blade of grass and rolled it between her fingers.

“A better plough changes who can farm how much land. A better weapon changes who can threaten whom. A medicine nobody else can reproduce might make the person who knows it valuable in ways they did not want.” Her expression sharpened with amusement. “And if you arrive at the Wood Elf court announcing that your world discovered the correct way to organise civilisation, I will personally throw you in the river.” The grass blade went back to the ground. “But useful knowledge is still useful. I would rather know that a problem has been solved somewhere than believe it cannot be solved at all.”

She looked at him. “What sort of thing have you been tempted to tell us?”

Ian said a word to see if it translated. “Bacteria.”

Lethira blinked as the translation did not offer her an Elven word. It carried the sound across almost intact, shaped just enough to be pronounceable and no more useful for that. Her interest sharpened. “That did not translate. I heard a name for something I do not know.” She waited. “What are bacteria?”

Ian produced a clear glass, went to the stream and filled it, then brought it back and sat down. He held it up to the light to see how clear, or not, it looked.

At first glance the water looked clean. Sunlight passed through it easily. A few tiny suspended flecks appeared when the angle caught them, but there was no obvious mud or clouding.

Lethira watched the glass rather than the stream. “You are about to tell me that clear water contains something alive that I cannot see, aren't you?”

“Have you been talking to the reality machine?” Ian asked her suspiciously, but not seriously.

Lethira turned a very slow look on him. “No.” She gave the single word enough dignity to make the accusation appear more serious than either of them believed it was. “I have been talking to you. You said a word I did not know, then produced a clear glass, filled it from the stream and held it up to the light.” Her mouth began to curve. “I am a Warden, Ian. Occasionally I can follow tracks even when they are extremely difficult.” She glanced back at the glass. “You were talking about knowledge your world developed differently from ours. Something too small to see living in apparently clean water seemed a reasonable guess.” The grin finally escaped. “So. Have I been secretly conspiring with your reality machine, or am I merely very clever?”

“Bloody elves and their high intelligence.”

Lethira looked unbearably pleased with herself. “Yes.” She let the answer sit before settling against him again. “Now explain the invisible things in my drinking water.”

“Do you want to see them?”

Her expression changed at once. “Yes. If you can show me what is actually in that water without changing what was already there, I very much want to see it.”

Ian placed the glass on the ground, took Lethira's hand and stood next to it.

“Stand up.”

Lethira looked from him to the entirely ordinary glass at their feet, then stood. “This is becoming suspiciously elaborate for something too small to see.” She kept hold of his hand and waited.

“Don't be alarmed at the next bit, I'm going to shrink us.”

Her fingers tightened around his. “That sentence has not achieved its stated purpose.” Lethira glanced at the glass again. “All right. Provided I come back exactly the same size and shape afterward.” Her eyes narrowed. “How small?”

“Very.”

Ian and Lethira began to shrink. The change ignored the laws of physics rather than compressing either of them within those laws. No atoms were squashed together. Everything about them scaled with them, down to the local constants required for their little pocket of experience to keep behaving normally. They could still talk, breathe and see as if shrinking were an ordinary thing bodies could do. Beyond the intended change of scale, there were no consequences for either of them. Everything else simply became larger.

Grass rose into green columns. The folds of the blanket opened into ridges and valleys. The clear glass became a curved transparent wall catching the afternoon light, then a tower, then a world. Its contents enlarged with it until what had seemed like clear water could no longer hide its population. As they looked up, shapes moved above them.

Some darted. Some turned slowly. Some drifted like translucent seeds while finer motes moved among them in numbers Lethira could not readily count. Tiny scraps and fragments which had vanished at human scale now hung in the water like debris in a vast sea. The organisms were not fish made small. Their unfamiliar forms had been exposed by the impossible change of scale.

Lethira's grip on his hand became hard for one startled moment. She did not let go. When the shrinking stopped she deliberately eased her fingers and stared upwards into the column of water.

“That,” she said quietly, “is in the stream?”

“Yeah. Some of them can make you ill. The fragments could include waste from animals—or people, if there are people upstream—but I can't tell which merely by looking.”

Lethira's face changed. “Human waste.” Her voice went flat.

She looked up again at the drifting bodies, then beyond the glass towards the stream which had supplied them.

“We drink from streams.”

“I have drunk from streams beside roads.” A pause. “I have drunk from streams below villages.”

Her fingers tightened around Ian's again, less from fear than offended comprehension.

“How does your world make water safe?”

“We try to stop people putting bad stuff into rivers. A small amount in an ocean gets spread so thin that it is less likely to make anyone ill, but that doesn't mean it never matters—especially near where people take water.”

Lethira kept watching the magnified water.

“We then take the waste away through underground, man-made… rivers, or streams… to places where the water is cleaned or treated before being put back in the river.”

That earned a slow turn of her head.

“I am not an expert on this, so I'm not sure exactly what the process is or what would be achievable here, but I could find out.”

“It's not very glamorous, but a few hundred years of advancement would save a lot of people's lives, I think, and probably not hurt anyone. Maybe even make some jobs.” Ian shrugged.

“Maybe something I can offer the Elf King that isn't my power.” Ian flexed his arm jokingly.

Lethira looked at it. “Yes. Your other terrifying advantage.” Her attention returned to the water.

“If you pursue this, find out what you actually know before offering anybody a solution. Knowing that invisible living things can make people ill is useful. Knowing that waste can be moved and treated may be useful. Building underground rivers beneath settlements is a different question involving ground, water, labour, maintenance and people who will object to paying for all of those things.” Her mouth twitched. “And I would start with Aelira before presenting her father with a proposal involving everyone's shit. If it genuinely prevents people dying without requiring the right healer to be standing nearby, it is important enough to do properly.”

“Shall we return to our normal size?”

Lethira answered immediately. “Yes. I have learned enough about drinking water while being smaller than grass.”

“Oh, one thing. Let me change this to bottled mineral water from my world. It won't prove what is safe, but it should give us a cleaner comparison.”

Ian did that. The towering contents changed. “See?”

Lethira looked up. The difference was immediate. Minute specks remained here and there, and whatever was dissolved in the water did not become visible simply because Ian had altered scale. The crowded moving world of the stream sample was gone; the few things visible within it made the surrounding absence more obvious.

“That is considerably less disgusting.” She compared it with the memory of the first glass. “And people can make water like this reliably? Not with a healer standing beside it. Not because one particular mage happens to be available. As an ordinary thing a settlement can provide? That may be more immediately useful than beginning with your underground rivers.”

“Some natural springs are probably cleaner than open streams. The fewer people and animals upstream, the less chance of waste getting into them. That still doesn't make every clear spring safe. Is there a spring or something like that near your home? Not a stream, just a hill or something where water simply comes out of the ground?”

“If you mean the settlement where I grew up, yes. There are springs in the Woods.”

Lethira thought of several without difficulty: water emerging from a bank, from beneath roots, between stone. Some were used regularly by wardens or households. Others were simply useful things one remembered while travelling.

“But I could not tell you which are truly deep water and which are merely water moving through the hill. And apparently I can no longer use *clear* as confidently as I did this morning.”

Her gaze returned to the glass.

“Think of each spring, then the water here will change to be that. Maybe we can find the cleanest and ask your people to favour that for drinking?” Ian smiled.

Lethira looked at him, then at the impossible glass. “All of them would take a while.” The line of her face settled into field concentration. “But I know which ones people actually use.”

She brought the first spring to mind deliberately. The water changed.

At their scale the difference was visible. The sample was not empty. Tiny organisms moved within it and minute suspended fragments remained, but the crowded profusion of the stream was absent.

Lethira chose another spring. The glass changed again. More life this time, though still less than the stream. A third appeared cleaner than either. A fourth, one she remembered as cold and particularly clear, proved distinctly busier.

Lethira stared at it with personal offence. “I liked that one.”

She continued through the handful she knew well enough to identify without ambiguity. None matched Ian's mineral water exactly. One, however, showed far less suspended material and far fewer moving organisms than the others in this impossible first look.

“That one is close enough to the settlement that people already use it sometimes.”

“I would not tell everyone to drink from it tomorrow because tiny versions of us looked at one impossible sample. Rain might change it. Seasons might. More people using the source might make it worse.” She glanced towards Ian, smiling now. “But we can collect real samples at different times. Compare the springs people already use. If the same ones keep being cleaner, then we have something useful before anybody digs one of your underground shit-rivers.” She squeezed his hand. “That I would happily take to Aelira.”

“I feel like I've done something good, at least.”

Ian kissed her as they returned to normal size. The grass lowered, the blanket became cloth again and the glass reduced from a transparent world to something that could sit in one hand.

“Hmm, I normally do get a bit bigger when kissing you.”

Ian smiled with the most dramatic innuendo perhaps the world had ever seen. Lethira stared at him, then covered her face with one hand. “Ian.” Her shoulders began to shake.

“You just showed me an invisible world of disease, waste and a possible way to stop people getting sick, and somehow this is where you chose to take it.”

She lowered her hand enough to look at him, helplessly amused.

“I am beginning to think the reality machine's greatest limitation is that it cannot save me from you.”

“It was your world that was pretty filthy already.”

Lethira lowered her hand completely and gave him a flat look. “My world had the decency to keep most of that invisible.” She glanced towards the stream, whose clear surface looked offensively innocent again. “You brought evidence.” Amusement betrayed her before she could maintain the accusation. “And then made a joke about your penis while we were still standing beside it.” She shook her head and sat back down on the blanket. “I am blaming you for at least half of this.”

Ian laughed. “I've never heard you say penis before. I think our relationship has achieved a new high.”

Lethira considered him with grave seriousness for almost two seconds.

“I have known the word for considerably longer than I have known you.”

The seriousness broke. She leaned against him laughing and pressed her forehead briefly to his shoulder.

“I simply had not previously encountered a situation where it was the most precise criticism available.”

She settled beside him again. “So yes. Congratulations. Another domestic milestone.”

“Would it be wrong to alter Aelira's next report to the King to add that milestone to it?”

“That was a joke, of course.” Ian kissed her.

Lethira accepted the kiss and stayed close when it ended. “It would be extremely wrong.” Her eyes were bright with amusement. “Not because the King must be protected from knowing the word *penis*. I am confident he has encountered one before.” She paused. “But Aelira would find out who added it.”

That needed no further threat. Lethira liked Aelira, and the imagined consequences were already entertaining her.

“Shall we take a slow walk into town, browse for things we might never buy, then get some dinner?”

Lethira's smile came easily. “Yes. That sounds exactly strenuous enough for the remainder of your brain.” She glanced once at the stream. “And I think we have done enough accidental civilisation-changing for one day.”

She rose and shook out the blanket before folding it over one arm. The remaining apples went into the other.

“We can wander the market roads, inspect furniture that will not fit in the house, discover at least three things one of us insists we do not need, and eat whenever we become hungry enough to stop pretending we are merely browsing.” She held out her free hand. “Slowly.”

“And I will talk to Aelira about the water thing, you can come with me and help.”

Lethira nodded. “Gladly.”

“Just not right now.” Ian took her hand.

“Especially not right now.”

Lethira squeezed his fingers and started them back towards the house at the same deliberately unhurried pace she had promised. The blanket went inside, the apples with it. The extraordinary glass was left ordinary again before they set out for Merrowford.

The walk into town took close to an hour because neither of them made any effort to improve on that. Afternoon light stretched between the trees and across the road. A few carts passed, leaving them the verge. Lethira interrupted herself twice to inspect things growing beside the track and, in a rare act of restraint, did not turn either observation into useful work.

By the time the west gate came into view, browsing had acquired rules. They were not buying another table. They were not buying a cabinet merely because it had an interesting hinge. They were certainly not buying a carved chair with arms shaped like swans, regardless of how confidently the seller described it as distinguished. Lethira spent an unreasonable amount of time examining it anyway.

The market was thinning from its busiest hours but remained comfortably alive. They wandered without a list. A rug seller supplied several possibilities for the house and no decisions. A potter had a deep green serving bowl Lethira liked but not enough to carry home. There were lamps, storage boxes, baskets, hooks, carved spoons, an aggressively decorative bed cover and a narrow writing desk which might have fitted upstairs if either of them had possessed the slightest need for it.

Nothing was bought, which seemed to be part of the pleasure.

Evening had settled properly by the time they reached the Reed and Wheel. Caswick gave them the unsurprised recognition reserved for former residents who had become ordinary returning customers, found them a table and left them to dinner without demanding an account of the day.

Lethira ate with the appetite of somebody who had walked enough to justify it and no more. There was no deed beside the plate, no Guild report waiting to be explained, no god requiring interpretation and no household decision more urgent than whether the remaining bread should collect the last of the sauce.

Outside, Merrowford moved towards evening. Lethira rested one foot lightly against Ian's beneath the table.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we can arrange the earthwork. And sometime after that, we can tell a princess that invisible creatures may be living in everyone's drinking water.” Her expression softened. “But today we went for a walk and failed to buy a swan chair.” She lifted her cup. “A successful afternoon.”