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The party is on the ride to Maelport through the forest, John on an old placid horse he's been pushed onto because the Weswarans insist the *aelvs* ride. He neither needs the horse nor knows how to use it properly, but his nanites make him slower on foot than the locals are on theirs, so he agrees.

To distract himself from the assault waiting at the end of the road, he pulls a pad of paper and a pencil out of his saddlebag — a *glorious pencil* — and shows Sefawynn how he draws. Shapes and shadows, perspective, the eyes and lips that make a face into a person. He sketches her quickly, his hand-stabilizers correcting for the horse's gait, and she breathes *craeft* at it. He hands her the pencil. She tries shapes, then a face, then — to her own surprise — wants to write. She stops herself in time. Woden forbids it. Ealstan, walking past, says Woden laughs at them and wants them weak. Sefawynn insists he tests them. Ealstan asks why Woden favours the Hordamen then; she says it is because the Weswarans sacrifice more, and he loves sacrifice. Thokk rides past and mutters *fool* at her without slowing, and Sefawynn looks down ashamed, and admits she only talks like a skop in those moments — pretending the moral authority of someone who has truly earned the title. John gets down off the horse and walks beside her so she doesn't have to look up, and she wraps her arm around his.

Up ahead Ryan keeps doubling back to check on the lagging tail of the column — somehow looking regal in cloak and hat with a signature-locked rifle on his back. Ealstan asks whether it can kill others of their kind; Ryan confirms it can, but no one else can fire it. Ealstan recognises the principle: it is the same of Ulric's weapons. Sefawynn places it in story alongside the Black Bear's sword. Ryan presses John to get back on the horse. John declines and goes for his *carp diem* joke. Ryan groans through the dissection — *carp* means *fish*; *carpe dime* would at least mean *seize the money*; nobody knows the Latin phrase anyway — and rides forward, exasperated.

Sefawynn asks why Ryan calls him *Johnny* instead of *Runian*. *Because his name is Johnny*, Ryan says. She ignores him and asks *Runian* what his world is like. Ealstan gravely backs her, refusing to drop the chosen name. The thing it does to John is small and important. He has always introduced himself as *John*, never *Johnny*, and the friend who has known him since boyhood has never noticed. The two people who actually call him what he asked may, he thinks, actually care about him.

He starts to draw his world for them as they walk. Lightning made to glow in glass globes, switches, wheeled boats powered by lightning — no sails — a fridge, a microwave, a room in a skyscraper. He sketches Seattle in postcard form, the Space Needle and the bay and his own skyscraper one shadow among many, and points out that each window of each tower is a room and each room a life. *Gods*, Sefawynn breathes. *It's so —* peaceful, she finishes. So many people together and not at war. Ealstan does not call it weak. To live without killing, he says, is the mark of a strong society; if his own world were strong by that test, his lands would not be withering like crops in drought. John watches him and gives him five stars, privately, for documentary narration.

Drawing them his cities makes him think. The handbook he bought sold him *pastoral simplicity* and *natural connection*. The actual world is brutal and beautiful at once. The people are cleaner, friendlier, cleverer than he had imagined — but he can't help wondering whether Sefawynn would die in childbirth here, whether Ealstan would survive countless battles only to die of a cut finger gone septic. He wants to give them vaccines and antibiotics and switches. He cannot, without poisoning their wights and their wyrd off the face of their world. Both things can't be true at once. Something else is starting to nag at him along the same lines, something he can't quite —

Sefawynn touches his leg. She tells him, holding his sketches, that he left all of this to come help them against evil men. He warns her he will do something extreme if she gets reverent again — that he will insult Woden, that he will tell Ealstan bows are better than axes. *Heresy is one thing,* Ealstan cuts in from the other side of the horse, *but insulting Rowena is something else.* Sefawynn catches the joke. *You named your axe?* Ealstan says yes, for his wife, on the perfectly reasonable principle that he likes both. Sefawynn giggles. The custom is not a Weswaran thing. *Wyrdo,* she fixes John's *weirdo* with a *y* in the middle — *one with a strange wyrd* — and pronounces it as if she had found a new toy.

When Ryan doubles back impatient again, Sefawynn hauls herself into the saddle in front of John and takes the reins. *He doesn't know how to ride properly.* He wraps his arms around her waist; she asks *tighter*, and he obliges. Ryan shakes his head and rides ahead. Ealstan keeps pace and tells them, intensely: do not be ashamed of joy. It is why he fights. It is why his sons bled. John thinks he has never in his life been as purely happy as he is in that moment — holding her, hearing Ealstan's blessing, marching toward something he believes in instead of away from things he fears. And underneath it, the worry from the drawings keeps sinking deeper, like a knife at his kidney. He cannot stay here. His very presence is poison to this world's wights. The thing he has finally found, after years of looking, is the one thing he cannot keep — not without ruining it.

*The End of Part Three.*