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Elaine had first debated whether a carefully-phrased text message might not get the job done. And perhaps it would have, but it felt oddly like a coy and ridiculous game, so she had - as she so rarely did - deployed the signet ring instead, to ask Nis a very simple question: could she, Joy, at some point ask her some questions, as she'd once offered to answer for her, if she ever needed them?

Being invited to not only ask but to join Nis on her Wonder to do so was a pleasant and unforeseen surprise. Joy had developed a taste for magical tourism, fed by Pendour's spectacular beauty.

She arrived at the designated liaison spot, and had forgotten until the moment that she did that enough had happened since her only encounter with Nis as Joy - despite being not that long ago - that she was arriving now as a sort of equal, looking as much like the queen that she was trying to convince herself she was as she did like a knight in the truest, most earthly sense of the word. It had slipped her mind entirely until she felt the energy signature approaching and realized - vaguely startled - that it was similar to her own, now.

Joy was not in general a person inclined to imposter syndrome. But she felt a moment of wretched uncertainty, convinced that the Code had clothed her in a new and majestic uniform as some sort of horrible joke at her expense. But if that was the case, all she could do was rob the joke of a punchline, and attempt to carry herself with a queenly self-confidence that befitted the look - which she usually did anyway - as Elaine at least - and so at least came naturally.

"I always bring drinks," said Joy with a broad and beaming smile, although the lack of any similar bag suggested that maybe she just kept her subspace stocked like a bar - which, in fact, she did.

She extended a hand towards her, adding: "The dog's great. And I got a new dog," she added, thinking somewhat mischievously of Pal. "I'll show her to you later, if you want. Beam me up," she said, as eager as Nis.

Joy was scoring high on Wonders with water as a central focus, which was always pleasant to her. She didn't even think twice, then, to abruptly power down - a relief to be able to do that safely - into cut-off sweatpant shorts and an even more cut-off T-shirt, which certainly seemed better suited to the landscape than the bulky gown.

She did not say aloud what she was thinking, but didn't need to - there was an evident pleasure on her face as she took in the surroundings, admiring, especially, Nis's little touches. She suddenly laughed, turning halfway from where she was approaching the water.

"And to think," she said, "I was going to superhero you into not stealing those lamps." But the expression faded, her nose wrinkling, as she was reminded of the purpose for her visit. "Urgh. I don't even know where to start, really. I keep thinking of it and everything goes in circles. How much do you know about the ghosts on other Wonders?"

This, with a touch of reserve. She did not forget that Nis had had some unflattering things to say about them.

One of the inconvenient things about spending so much of her life attempting to be the one steering was that she sometimes forgot that other people might have to steer occasionally. That she could have neglected to consider this when she had in fact invited the conversation seemed a little ludicrous to her now, but she hadn't, right up until Nis began asking very reasonable questions.

She was unprepared, therefore, to give voice to the crowded and messy ideas that had led her - half but not wholly under the influence of wine and White Claws - to initiate the discussion in the first place, and she hesitated, and at the silent invitation to sit she shook her head, gesturing at the water as if to indicate that she was too much enjoying walking through the water’s edge to leave off just yet.

“I guess,” she said at last, “that I just don't know what they are, exactly. I read a book once -Watership Down, you know? - where a character explains that a ghost is just an echo trapped in a place. Not real, just a recording playing over and over. And I never really knew if I went in for ghosts but I figured that's what they were - not really there. But he's not like that.” She paused, sorting out her ideas once more and only half succeeding. “He's there. I can talk to him; he reacts to things. He can even sort of - I've seen him sit down - but I think only where he could have, maybe, back then? I'm not sure.”

She dragged a toe absently through the water, eyes fixed on the ripples in a distracted way. “But he's dead,” she said bluntly. “I've seen his body - what's left of it. But he isn't dead, either. When the - the Hollow -” she left the sentence dangling, assuming a need for no further clarification. “There was one of those storms on the Garde, and he was real, for a second. But if he was standing there, where was his other body? And why could he - could he be real for a second, and then never again? Up until that moment I figured - everything coming back to life around him but not him must be a starseed thing. Now I don't know.”

Despite her evident confusion, she spoke without too much emotion, as if her motives were simple curiosity.

“I thought maybe you'd know what he is, really.”

She was uncharacteristically subdued as Nis answered, her forehead gently wrinkled as she listened and internalized, and here and there made a mental note to go back and address something said - particularly on the topic of how much he could interact with the dead parts of the Wonder.

But the last couple of sentences chased it away and had an effect on her so violent that it would, later, surprise even herself. By the time she had finished talking, Joy was having to fight down a tide of what was almost hysterical repugnance, inwardly recoiling again and again from the idea being offered.

“No,” she said, more aggressively than she'd meant to, almost accusatory. “No, no. Not that. The Garde without him - no -” she shook her head. “Never,” she said, and as soon as she did she regretted it. It felt like both a weakness and a cruelty.

But she could be cruel, when she wanted to. She was still turned away from Nis, but the emotion when she continued, if it was angry, seemed at least to be directed somewhere away from her. “He wouldn't leave me like that. He wouldn't want to.” She spoke with too much confidence - in the way of someone ascribing to a loved one their own feelings, unwilling to entertain the alternative. “That's not why I'm here. I want to know - where he is. What a horrible ******** existence,” she said abruptly, with sudden violent emotion. “And then for a stupid storm to come around and give you a minute like hope that you didn't ask for.”

She had long been hung up on the idea that the existence of the ghosts of Wonders was an unfathomable cruelty. But the idea that something like euthanasia was in her power turned all that cruelty back into the hands of her selfishness, and made it hers.

“Where is he?” She repeated. “Is he in the cauldron or out of it?”

She submitted to the hug as much without complaint as without any evident pleasure, following up Nis's remarks with a long silence that culminated, at last, in her blowing a raspberry and leaning her head back against Nis's shoulder, as if to childishly encapsulate her feelings about the whole thing.

"I think that's why I can't let it go," she said after a pause, her voice once again flat. She had told Myth, once, that she wasn't much of a romantic, and sure enough, she seemed to have returned to a level footing already, although maybe that was just resignation. "Because I know what you mean. I feel this need to fix the ******** place - like - you know that old trope - that a kingdom is a reflection of its ruler?" Normally, she'd have fallen back on E. A. Robinson here; instead, she opted for something more universal: "Scar takes over and the Pridelands fall apart. Whatever. It feels like I got handed this little kingdom and if it's supposed to be a reflection of me then it had better ******** thrive if it knows what's good for it." This, with dire sternness. "And it feels like a sick ******** joke against me that there's a dead guy haunting the place and I can't do a thing about it. Like the Code is just dangling my own futility in front of me all the time. Like it's telling me good luck finding that answer because it knows I can't."

This probably would have been a good place to stop. But she groaned, annoyed, and felt compelled to continue, gently disentangling herself from Nis's arms to go and flop down on the earlier-indicated spot on the sand. "You remember - you told me I didn't seem like a little yappy dog type? And I told you I wasn't, but Petitcru sort of fell in my lap. And I love her, don't get me wrong. But I didn't ask for that. I didn't ask for - all her vet bills and having to buy little sweaters and keep my apartment five degrees hotter than I like it and having to manage an existential crisis every time she needs her nails trimmed."

And here, perhaps, Joy gave a little window that even she was unaware of, into why, maybe, the Code had looked at her, and had seen in her the qualities of an Earthly Knight.

"But what can you do, you know? You get handed it - no one else can do it - what do you do? You can't just put her back under the dumpster. So there's you and me. No one else can fix this place, or the Garde. And I don't think Nail would appreciate being compared to a shaky rat dog with digestive problems," she finished drily, "but it really ******** feels like it, sometimes. He's got no one else to be nice to him. So here I ******** am, and I don't know how to be nice to a dead man."

And then, at last, she put words around something that she had long felt but avoided acknowledging: "He trusts me too, but I don't have any way to remember how to be worth that."

That fresh-faced kid she had met had made a similar error to what Nis now fell into, mistaking her bland observation that she had no power to be a general statement rather than one that applied very specifically to the topic at hand. This was, of course, Joy's own fault - her tendency to assume that her general power or worthiness or what-have-you was so manifestly obvious that it didn't need clarification sometimes led her into those kinds of conversational traps.

It wasn't worth it to make the correction. What difference did it make, if she felt worthy in general or worthy of this particular task? Having one didn't make her any closer to having the other. Besides, asserting your own self-esteem had a tendency to either disgust people or invoke skepticism - a thing that she had never understood, being a person who firmly believed that everyone else ought to be as full of themselves as she was of herself.

So she let it go. She had, apparently, spent whatever of emotional display she had in her to spend, returned to her usual state of undemonstrative, slightly sarcastic calm, although it was not without a trace of exhaustion in it.

"If he existed in a way where hitting him with the spear was a possibility I don't think I'd be having this conversation," she observed drily. "I know it's a shitty way to think of a human being, but I feel like I wanna - like when a dog's dying, and you feed them a bunch of ice cream and take them to the lake? He would never forgive me if he heard me say this," she added flatly, "but then again I wouldn't either, in his shoes. Anyway. It doesn't matter. I was hoping, I guess, that you had some insight into how I could - do that. After the Hollow, you know. But I think I already knew I couldn't. I just needed to hear it."

She paused. When she spoke again it was still matter-of-fact, unemotional. "I put the seagulls up for him, but I'm still aiming for the real thing." She had never explained why she wanted the seagulls, but it felt obvious enough. "It's the only promise I've made to him out loud that I'm not sure I can keep, but a nightingale came. So maybe. And it was a joke, anyway." She turned her eyes to the lake, waving a hand at it vaguely. "You've had stuff come back too, right? But if you tell me it's something with an eye bigger than I am I am not getting back into that water, and I do in fact have a swimsuit in subspace."

"I would rather you be callous and flippant," said Joy - Elaine - "than be touchy-feely about it and overly cautious."

Oh, God. A horrific moment of self-awareness washed over her, about why it was that Gouvernail's temper was often at its shortest when she was walking around on tip-toe around his feelings. She pushed past it.

"But I don't think you're being either. I promise. I don't lie to people," she added flatly. "Neither does he, so he'd - maybe? He doesn't talk much to anyone I bring over. But he talked to Viatrix - a Mauvian I mean - so maybe. But he doesn't remember a lot of things about the end. Everything gets sort of washed out, after some point. But about the Academy - that kind of thing - he would probably feel obligated to share, if you asked. He likes to help people," she added, with a thin smile, as if this was a reluctant compliment. "He's certainly someone I'd trust to help anyone way more than I'd trust the ******** Code. I'll ask him, next time I'm there. Or if you want, I can tell you what he's told me - most of it - it's a lot. And despite what he thinks, I do listen, mostly. So fire away, and I can try."

As she spoke, she began reaching into subspace to procure not just a bikini, but a tightly rolled-up towel, and she let her hair down from its haphazard clip, to start putting it into a tidier topknot.

"As to giving him the mantle - I didn't want the mantle," she said, muffled by her work and by the bobby pins (also procured from subspace) she held in her teeth. "Knighthood isn't a gift to me. It wasn't a gift to him either, but he's more willing to take it than I am, and maybe this time he'd bother actually trying to live his life instead of being a weapon for a cause he didn't even give a s**t about by the end. There's no downside for anyone in your hypothetical." She flipped her head back, voice freed up as she tucked the last pin into her hair and gave Nis a flat look. "So yeah. I'd give this up for him. I'd give it up for someone with a half-functioning moral compass and ten bucks. But that's not why I asked. The exchange didn't even occur to me. I don't know why I'm asking," she finished bluntly. "I just feel like I need to."