“As I remember it,” Sunny said, “the old command is ‘Do no harm.’ It doesn’t say anything about ‘mean.’” Watching her, I thought it was better that the elf had turned his back. She didn’t show any signs of being in a forgiving mood.

And if Sunny didn’t forgive him, it suddenly occured to me to wonder, what were we going to do with the bastard? We couldn’t take him to the copshop in the sidecar with Sunny in his lap, for God’s sake. I wasn’t even sure we could take him to a cop shop at all, given there was a cop involved; how chummy were the various stations around town?

“The harm was none of my doing. How can you presume to judge me, who are not of my kind? I would have given you the means to raise yourselves, but you are too weak, too weak.”

“I don’t presume to judge you,” Sunny said. “I only presume to bring you in. The judging part is somebody else’s job. But I wouldn’t advise you to give me too much crap about it, because my best friend has the virus and is looking pretty bad, and I’d hate to find I was unduly influenced by that.”

He looked over his shoulder at her, open-mouthed. “Your best friend is…”

“Some of us are more broad-minded than others. Now, you have a couple of choices to make. I can tie you up and leave you here, so I can find you in a hurry. Or you can tell me where you live, and swear on the stars of the four quarters and the moon in their net to go home and stay there until I come and get you, and not speak to anybody in the meantime.”

I stared at her, shocked; but then, so did the elf. “May that oath burn your lips! No human should speak of such.”

“I warn you, I meant it when I said don’t give me trouble. You’d rather be tied up?”

He thrust his fingers into his poet’s curls and yanked on them. “I don’t—”

“Remember,” Sunny told him, sounding a little less implacable, “I’m willing to believe that whatever else may have happened, you aren’t an oathbreaker. If you prove that I wasn’t wrong, it’ll weigh in on your side with the people who hear your case.” She looked toward the dark window, which meant that I had a better view of her face than he did. I thought she might be speculating on something—it was a gambler’s look. “And I’d need to know that you wouldn’t try to escape across the Border.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then he said, in a small voice, “I cannot… go again into the true lands.”

Sunny nodded briskly. “I’ll hear your oath, then.”