“I’m asking the wrong person.” Mizu turned to Milo. “Have you managed to explain to Arthur why what he did was wrong?”


    It was a pivotal moment, as post-catapult moments went. If Milo revealed Arthur had forgotten about the issue entirely and hadn’t thought about things at all, Arthur would be toast. Mizu would be firm-nice in pushing whatever lesson he was supposed to be getting out of this, but it would take a while in any case. If she found out Arthur had forgotten, that entire time would have her making fun of him too.


    “I told him to stop,” Milo said, somehow managing to avoid gleaming with holy, heroic auras as he covered for his friend. “I didn’t want him to get too far off track before you got to him.”


    “Good,” Mizu said. She reached out her hand to Arthur, who took it. “We are going on a walk. That’s where you do important talks. Not in catapults. You are not allowed to multitask fears, Arthur, unless you have a very good reason. Besides, it’s a nice night for a walk.”


    —


    The System had a bit of rope in its hands, more or less. When it wasn’t working on some specific project, like understanding Arthur’s tea or keeping the majicka flows stable and helpful, it almost always did. It wasn’t really a rope, of course. She imagined if one of her children tried to understand what it was, they’d see some kind of cloud made of colors and the sounds numbers made, or something of that nature.


    But to her, it was a rope. She had worked on it for centuries, and by now she was sure that the not-an-object she had in her hands meant all the same things to her that rope meant to demons in the physical world. It served all the same purposes. Today, those purposes were as normal as they came, by her standards. She had centuries’ worth of hours spent on rope alone, and most of those hours were wrapped up in using it just this way.


    If anyone watching could have understood what she was doing, they would have seen that she was slowly and methodically tying knots, then using just as much care as she untied them. And she was pretty good at both those things.


    Knots were of special interest to the System. Demons had invented them, and her first understanding of knots had come as she tried to figure out how to help them tie them better, faster, and more securely. Once they had knots, they could have boats. And once they had boats, they could fish, which needed even more knots. And once they had fish, they wanted more, which meant nets, which were almost entirely knots.


    Somehow, in a way that even the system had trouble tracking, this also eventually led to shoelaces, which needed decorative knots. And then to clothing ties, which were often only decorative and had no use at all.


    Of course, it had also led to ways to keep prisoners imprisoned, or to secure some parts of particularly nasty weapons to their handles. The system didn’t like to think about that, but it had to. Because understanding knots meant understanding how demons thought about knots too. And not every aspect of that was good.


    —


    “So,” Arthur said, after a minute or so of getting distance from the crowd. “I think my clothes are mostly dry now.”


    “They are good clothes. I’m glad you have them.” Mizu leaned up toward’s Arthur’s face, putting her mouth close enough to his ear that her breath tickled his skin as she whispered. “But stop stalling.”


    Arthur winced. “I don’t know that it’s that long of a conversation. And I can tell it’s going to get me in trouble.”


    “Oh, really?”


    “Yeah. I’ve got weak sense for it now. I just don’t see any way around talking about it.” Arthur squeezed Mizu’s hand a bit harder, more for his reassurance than hers. She was stronger than him in most ways. She always had been. “It’s about the council meeting. I don’t think it’s looking very good.”


    “In what way?”


    “I’m not sure. It’s just how it feels. I kept my tea-sense on the entire time, but it doesn’t work very well on people like them. It’s something about them not knowing me very well, and being at a high level. But I got bits and pieces, I think. And they were stressed and sad.”


    “Which means?”


    “I think they are going to send me away. Or keep me here, I guess. But I’ll be away from home. From Coldbrook. Maybe forever.”The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.


    —


    The System nodded. There, if she had to explain it, was the bad form of knot-work. Or more accurately, the bad forms. The forms that bound things that didn’t want to be bound. Mizu’s people had a whole line of apology-greetings that were aimed at making up for just that kind of thing. And even though everyone handwaved them, the System was glad they kept apologizing all the same. Being tied up in a wrong way was a terrible thing.


    Arthur was bound to a lot of things he shouldn’t be. He was bound to his ideas of duty from his old world, which were nice in their own way but didn’t and would never quite fit in the Demon World. His world, for reasons she didn’t understand, had weaponized duty. People you didn’t like and who didn’t like you could use it to hurt you, there, by convincing you that doing the wrong thing was right.


    Over generations of conscious effort, people in her world had ground that kind of bad-duty-knot-tying down to a gentler, positive form. It would have been hard to explain to people in Arthur’s world that duty was supposed to run both ways.


    Arthur understood that, on some level. But he hadn’t ever really adopted it fully, which meant that at least some of the work the System had done in making a world where being nice almost always felt good eventually was lost on him. A demon would look at a situation where they knew something was wrong for them, and would jerk back from it like a very bad smell.


    Arthur was on a track to be a little sad, forever. He was going to tie himself to going in a slightly wrong direction, thinking that he had to. He was knotted together with a weight of ideas and ways of thinking his old world had given him, and it was about to drag him down deep into waters he’d never escape from.


    But he always had been tied up in that way, at least as long as the System had known him. It had been the work of years now trying to loosen those knots.


    —


    “And how do you feel about that?” Mizu asked, in a way that she understood but Arthur didn’t. Neither of them caught the mismatch in communication. “Is that right? Is it okay?”


    “I mean, it’s for other people. For the Demon World. And I’ve got a lot from the Demon World. I feel that debt,” Arthur said, lingering on each word just long enough to give them additional weight. “I don’t want to leave Coldbrook at all. It’s home. But I think there are just a lot of reasons why I shouldn’t say no.”


    “If that’s what you think.” Mizu nodded, missing the point. “Then you’ll stay? If they ask you?”


    “I think so. Which means we sort of need to talk.”


    “Uh-oh.” Mizu smiled. “You look serious.”


    “I am.”


    —


    The first trick with loosening someone’s knots was understanding what kind of knot you were dealing with. You had to know that or you’d never find the ends. Once you found the end, you could work the string backwards, slipping it through each step of its own self-built labyrinth until it was back to being straight and usable again. But if you couldn’t find where the knot ended and the string began, you ran the risk of just trying stuff up worse.


    Demons understood that offworlders came loaded with potential, but they’d never know what it looked like. For Arthur and the bear, it had looked like a knot. The bear’s knot had been easy to untie. It wasn’t a complex thing, after all. The bear had been afraid of people yelling at it, and hurting it. The fact that it was very afraid of these things didn’t make the knot any harder to untie. The system just had to be nice to him for a bit, then give him a few moments of real peace to think.


    He hadn’t had either of those things before, really. When he had them, the knot slipped loose almost immediately, and the bear was flooded with the power of being free of that. In Arthur’s world, the most dangerous chemicals were reactive ones. There were some that would blow up just from being dunked in water, just because the changes they went through when they encountered something new and pure were so intense that they released all the power at once.


    The bear was like that. And he had gone on to use that power in just as simple of a way.


    Arthur was different. His world had stories about a knot so complex that nobody could untie it, and when the system looked at the jumble of things he had brought with him, she was reminded of that story. It had taken her a good portion of her free time since he got there to find the ends of that massive lump of rope, and then another chunk to gently work it until there was just the slightest bit of slack.


    And it was looser now, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still bind. In some sense, it was like Arthur’s hand was inside the lump. He could get it out, maybe, but only if he flattened it out, relaxed, and let himself know he was free. He’d never get it if his hand was balled up into a fist. And for better or worse, it still was. He was stuck.


    If she was going to have the slack she needed to really take the knot apart entirely, Arthur was going to have to relax the hand for the long years it would take to unravel all the ideas and fears he had dragged from his world to hers.


    And he’d never do that if he lived in the wrong way, or in the wrong place. He was so close to seeing that. She knew it. If he’d just take a close look with the right kind of feelings in his heart, he’d know.


    —


    Arthur scratched his head, nervously. It was getting to the part of the conversation where he said the thing he felt was right but hoped he was wrong. Or at least he hoped so. Because being right would be terrible. It might be correct. It might be good for people. But he could feel his stomach tying itself up like an escape artist even thinking about it.


    Arthur bit the bullet and just dove in. “I think that you should stay in Coldbrook.”


    Mizu froze. She had been amused up until now, but in that instant all the liquid fluidity of her seemed to bunch up into a single block of ice. This was wrong. It wasn’t even wrong in the usual way, where he knew he had messed up. This was something he had never seen in her. He felt her hand go tense, then shake loose from his as she took a half step back and looked up at him.


    And somehow, in the dark, he knew she was crying.


    “Arthur.” Mizu’s voice was wavering a bit. “Explain.”