"Turn me into a sparrow," says Thorn detachedly.

She shakes her head and sighs. "I wish you weren't a terrible person."

Cut the feed and bury her face in her hands.

"Should we go through the trouble of finding a sorcerer to sparrow them, or should we go through the trouble of trapping them somewhere in the mortal world?" she asks without raising her head from her hands.

"How long will it take to secure them in the mortal world?"

"It will have to be in one of my safe houses or equivalent, probably, and actually fully automatic food delivery systems would require me to throw a fairly large sum of money at them and I'm not sure it's worth it. If we order them to stay in the house and collect food at regular intervals that we'd have delivered, that probably could be made tight enough to actually work, but regardless of what we do they'll probably need to be watched fairly constantly."

"Sorcerer to turn them into sparrows, then, it won't take that long and won't be that hard to maintain."

"Yeah," she sighs. "Won't that sorcerer be a liability? Also, can anyone other than that sorcerer turn them into something other than a sparrow?"

"A small liability. And no, it's like gates."

"Let's hope said sorcerer doesn't have a pang of conscience and one day decides to undo their job, then, I suppose."

"We don't have to keep them anywhere easily accessible."

She finally raises her head. "Yeah. I suppose your tree is pretty inaccessible?"

"Yeah. I can plant one just for them."

"Could leave a small gate from within it to one of my safe houses for if we ever need to remove them there in a hurry for any reason. Not that it's likely to come up, but..."

"They'll turn back from being sparrows if they go through."

"Yeah but if they're ordered not to go through we'll only have them to that if something worse than them not being sparrows happens, or if we really really need a very very skilled sorceress very very fast."

"I'll need to put some thought into it being airtight that they not go through, but yeah."

"How do we find a sorcerer willing to do this?"

"Ad at the library."

"...really? And someone would just, like, show up to turn someone else into a sparrow, no questions asked, no being horrified by the moral implications of it?"

"I don't know about no questions asked."

"Alright, I suppose. What do you pay them with?"

"Vassals are customary but we can probably find some interesting harmless mortal doodad."

"Ooh, interesting harmless mortal doodad, yes, that's a good idea. We have lots of those. I need to show you those."

"...okay."