There is a line that Ortus may walk in a kind of uncollapsed ignorance. He spoke of the Beasts openly, and he was not rebuked by the Lord. His Lady has not spoken to anyone, so far as he can ascertain, about her knowledge of what occurred within the bubble.

He raises only a surprised eyebrow at the creaking of her upon the bench, but has the grace to look embarrassed at himself. It is not as if he does not tend to do the same to furniture, broad and tall as he is.

"A cavalier is not called upon to know much of necromantic theorems," Ortus says, which is strictly true, while saying nothing of what a cavalier - or historian-poet - might choose to learn, if inclined, "But you have answered your own question in its asking. There is nothing that lives in the River. One must assume the Beast, then, is a dead thing."

"I shudder to imagine what it might have been when it was not," he continues, glancing away towards the earth as well alongside her. "I have dreamed of it since. I do not remember what it looked like, and yet I wake weeping for its hideousness."

Perhaps more than he intended to say, or knew that he might.