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The stranger comes to staring at his captors on what he briefly takes for the ceiling, then reorients: he has been strung up by the wrists from a beam, hands tied behind him, ankles bound. There is no chair, only a rope and a beam, which strikes him as inefficient as interrogation techniques go. His nanites have taken the edge off the plank-to-face concussion; the rest of him is intact. Across the room stand the woman in the embroidered white dress — Sefawynn, he will pick up — and the small blond youth she calls Wyrm, whom the stranger downgrades twice as he gets a better look at him.

He tries the only card he has: bluster. He is a powerful being, they have angered him, fire and destruction are imminent. Wyrm hisses to Sefawynn that the inversion does not seem to be doing anything, since the captive still has his powers; Sefawynn checks the boy's continued lack of being eaten and concludes the inversion is, in fact, working as intended. She raises both hands in front of her, thumbs together, and recites a paired alliterative half-line — a skop's boast — and then a stronger one, naming a beast of Bastion's Barrow she claims to have banished. The stranger does not flinch at either. Wyrm reads this as a bad sign; Sefawynn, who has never loosed an aelv before, sends the boy to quietly fetch the lord — out of earshot of the visitors — and refuses to be talked out of staying alone with their captive.

Hanging upside down, the stranger tries small talk and gets nothing back. He fishes for what Sefawynn means by "eelev"; he wonders aloud whether she is the lord's daughter and Wyrm her brother, which would explain her dress and her ease with the lord. Sefawynn ignores all of it. Left to himself, he turns inward, hunting for his own augments. Platings, that's the word — microfilament mesh under the skin, structural nanites and bone reinforcement behind it, force redistribution as a bonus, grip strength as another. A visual overlay he didn't know he had snaps up at the thought, and he reads it like a HUD: arm plating from fingertip to shoulder and across the back, leg plating from thigh to foot — all functional. Head and chest plating present, but listed as nonfunctional, which matches the lump on his head and the conviction that he never paid for any of this himself. He flexes hopefully against the ropes and confirms his chest is untouched; the knots, in any case, are good.

The door opens and the lord — Ealstan — enters with Wyrm in tow. He is a thick-boned, grey-streaked man in his forties, a hand or so taller than the stranger had been picturing his medieval English peasants. Sefawynn admits she has never seen a captive quite like this one. Together she and the lord catalogue him with a folklorist's eye: not a landswight, since he is fully visible; clean-shaven, with short hair, soft hands, an unimpressive build, pale skin, fine features, intact teeth and clean nails — by every credential in the lore, an aelv. Not a god, the lord notes, with some relief. Plenty dangerous, Sefawynn corrects him; perhaps more so. A god would want something natural of you. An aelv wants something stranger. Wyrm adds the damning detail that the captive made for the written word among the offerings rather than the food or drink.

The lord steps closer, addressing him directly: did he bring the written word into their realm, or did its arrival draw him; and what, in any case, will appease and loose him? The stranger demands to be cut down and apologized to, and gets laughed at — Ealstan has heard a ballad before. He pivots to a comic shopping list — a sunless berry, two stones polished by a frog, a leaf of nightshade — and the lord, glancing at Sefawynn and getting a shrug, agrees to see what can be done. Then the stranger tries the rescue angle: surely the lord can simply hand him over to the messengers looking for him? Ealstan, amused, replies that since the captive is neither red-haired nor a foreigner by feature, the messengers obviously do not want him. He excuses himself to keep his visitors from noticing his absence and leaves the stranger in Sefawynn's keeping, taking Wyrm as messenger for any further oddity.

The stranger files the new information. The men were not looking for him. The lord's deference to Sefawynn is far thinner than he had expected — she barely bows, and is barely addressed as a lady — yet another piece of his expectations of the past that wants discarding. Sefawynn keeps watching him in steady silence. He is bracing for another round of one-sided conversation when she breaks it herself, and tells him to stop the lies: she knows what he really is.