...which was one of the odder ones the Doctor had experienced. The Kilderkin had seemed a weak thing as it waddled through the field, and the Rex had looked as confident as a statue as it strode towards her, the cloth binding his body falling away to reveal the stony flesh underneath.

"That thing looks valuable on a great many worlds indeed!" said Lady Destange. "What a shame, to turn him to something as worthless as dust."

"Not likely!" said Thresu in a way that was meant to be menacing, "the Rex has killed horrors far worse than some swollen up old woman! Who has horrible breath," he added as he smelled her for the first time.

"Not that he'll be doing any killing now," said the Doctor, as she drew her sonic screwdriver from a little loop on her belt, "because that's not something I'm going to allow to happen."

Lady Destange burst out laughing.

"Allow?" she said. "You underestimate the strength of a Lady of the Kilderkin."

"She really doesn't," muttered Thresu to the bulging mass of the grape.

"Oh, the sweet opinions of a fruit," said Lady Destange, "as weak and anaemic as the vintage that flows through its veins!"

"I'm not a fruit!" said Thresu. "I'm a slave!"

"Then you understand that some of us are your betters," spat Lady Destange. "That there's a top to the chain, and a bottom to it. And in your case, dear," she smiled, "I'm afraid you're firmly at the lower end."

The Rex had been steady in his advance towards the grape, as she mocked the man who might have been his master. He drew his sword in as smooth a movement as if he'd still been flesh, ready to swipe down through the thin, red skin of the Kilderkin. But Lady Destange was laughing as the sword scratched off her pulp, and as no juice flowed from the wound that was barely there.

"Keep going!" said Thresu, with no idea if encouragement would work. "Slice her through!"

"Now, him have his fun!" laughed Lady Destange. "It's not much of a life, being made out of cold, dead stone. I bet a part of him misses it, the life that one has as a fruit. It'd be lovely, wouldn't it, to taste some of its pleasure again?"

A vine ripped out of Lady Destange's hand with surprising force, hitting the Rex's face with enough power to whip it back. A crack swept over the marble mouth of the statue, and the vine snaked into it to begin pumping wine through his body. His sword rose to strike the grape woman again, but as it did so it began to shake. There was a horrible, shuddering pause, before his grip grew slack as his body began to tinge pink.

"She's filling him up with wine!" said Thresu, but the Doctor was shaking her head.

"That's blood," she said. "Veins of marble themselves to arteries. She's making him human again."

Thresu stared at her. "And shouldn't you do something?"

"Why?" said the Doctor. "I didn't want anyone dead, and nobody's dying. It's just a shame when a child has to see, isn't it?" she said as the half-flesh statue started giggling. "When someone gets as drunk as your friend soon will."

Thresu stared harder. "You know?—"

"I didn't. But now I do."

"That was stupid of you," said the child in his mind, and Thresu thought wistfully of latrines once again. The Rex looked like he might need one soon himself: he was now bright red and fallen to the ground, fully human and completely unaware of it. The wine that flowed through the Kilderkin's veins had turned him into a man, but it had made him into a drunk as well. He was rolling around on the ploughed dirt in the field, and looked like he'd become extremely interested in everyone's shoes.

"That's the threatening one dealt with," said Destange, "so now we can have some fun. It doesn't do, when such lowly creatures go about calling themselves Lords of Time. I think we've a need, dearie—" she glowered at the Doctor "—to go putting you in your place."

"Don't worry," said Chris's voice in Thresu's head. "The Doctor's good at things like this. Which seem silly and scary, and which might end up killing you anyway. She'll make sure that you don't come to harm."

The Doctor was backing away with the expression of someone who'd always had an awkward relationship with alcohol, and Thresu thought the voice was being awfully optimistic.

"She looks terrified," he thought to whoever was speaking to him, and had a telepathic sense that they were getting very exasperated indeed.

"Then tell her what I said," said the voice in his mind like a sigh. "She likes that, I think. When she's given encouragement by a child."

"You can do it, Doctor," said Thresu through gritted teeth. "That child in my head says she just knows it."

The Doctor looked at him. "Did she really say that?" she said.

"Yes," said his own voice and the one in his head simultaneously.

The Doctor looked like someone who'd turned up to be guillotined and had a surprise party thrown for her instead. "It's just. Well. Everything's been less… child-friendly than I'd hoped, and I wasn't sure if she'd—"

She was cut off as a vine from the Kilderkin cracked the air.

"Right!" she said. "Not dying! Doing that, before we go about getting all maudlin." She took out her salt shaker again, twisting the top of it in a delicate and particular way. The salt that had been gently rising in it slammed its way to the top, the attractive power of the whale amplified by whatever the twisting had done. With her free hand, she whipped out her sonic screwdriver and pointed it directly at Lady Destange.

"You're right, you know," she said to her. "We're not so stately, us Time Lords. Play a big game talking up the rules, but when it comes down to it?" She grinned. "That just means we know how to break them."

The sound of the screwdriver was an argument to the universe, that the woman made out of a grape was also a great pile of salt. And there was a massive attractive force being created by the Doctor's tiny shaker, calling all the salt in the area towards the creature that was the biggest lump of all. The piece of the Kelest that had been floating around them wrapped round Thresu's arm to keep from blowing away, and tiny flecks on the ground were flying in one direction through the air. Lady Destange opened her mouth to say something, but before she could was barrelled back at a phenomenal speed, further and further backwards until she disappeared into the distance.

"She's gone!" said Thresu. "You got rid of her forever, just like that!"

"Not exactly," said the Doctor. "I've sent her back to the whale. She'll hit it at great speed; it'll take her out of commission for a while. But she'll be back to drink everyone, before too long."

"Then," said Thresu with a frown, "was there any point to anything we just did at all?"

"Buying time," she said. "Everything that happens here, you have to understand that. It's all about buying time."