Your grandmother. You remember her as she was, unbidden: tall and unbent, unbowing. Watch the thread as it runs between her fingers. She is always working this magic in one form or another. She changes things from one form to another: flax to thread, thread to cloth, cloth to wonderful things. She does not tell you her secrets; you learn them through observation, with red fingers and long afternoons without words. She changes other things, too: beneath her house is a cellar, and not everything in the barrels came from the wood and the fen. Your grandmother! The sudden blue of her eyes, like the sky after a storm; the heavy curls of her golden hair; the set of her lips like the fold in stone. If she were here, she would be treating with this man as an equal, reputation or no.

But what you learned of the sword, you learned in the shapes of the silences.

"...your disguise is excellent," you say, and you cannot entirely hide the flush of embarrassment. "I come all this way to look for you, and here you are by the side of the road. And Cath..." Your eyes flick to the innocent-looking cat, licking one paw as if it is the most natural thing in the world to be doing. Ah. Now here's a beast of legend indeed. "Well. Well! Go on, get up," you say, your childhood accent slipping into the words, lilting light. "We have things to [i]talk[/i] about, you and I. Kings and crowns and visions."