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Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.
When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.
She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.
Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.
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imeanforever
imeanforever
"I have room in my tree if you'd like to stay there to start out while you think of something. You're a little tall for the layout but if you duck it should work."
imeanforever
Promise's tree is pretty far away. When they get there, Promise shows the various amenities to Secret and then writes a letter to the Princess's former court, and asks one of her neighbors if he wouldn't mind dropping it off in exchange for a little sorcerous climate control, and he agrees and takes the letter away. Hopefully it will clarify the situation for all those confused fairies. Promise comes back to her tree to have some dinner and go to bed.
feel-so-free
Secret is indeed a little tall for the tree's interior, but she manages. It is a nice tree. The tree is cute. She likes the tree.
imeanforever
She is welcome to live in it. Promise is very nice to her and doesn't tell her to do anything except in unenforced suggestion format.
feel-so-free
Promise is so nice! Secret likes Promise. Secret volunteers her help with household tasks. She's a really good cook.
imeanforever
Then this is convenient. Although Promise does ask if Secret has any plans to find her own place.
feel-so-free
"I don't know," she says. "I don't really know how. I haven't ever done anything except be somebody's vassal and live with you."
imeanforever
"The thing is, at some point Arcane is going to visit," says Promise. "And he's really smart, and he works for the Queen, and I think he'll know something is up if you're living here then, possibly before I can give him berries and rescind his no doubt very thorough Queenscourt orders."
imeanforever
"The Queen tries to neutralize you. You are impossibly dangerous to the Queen and she is much smarter than the mortals who had you before."
imeanforever
"Just until Arcane comes here. Once I've got him out from under the Queen's orders he'll probably want to tell you his name. You don't have to go far, but you should probably go north and not have a house that's very visible from the air or he's more likely to notice you coming in. Maybe a sort of cabin in the dense forest twenty minutes from here?"
imeanforever
"If you'd rather sleep in the open you can do that but I find it convenient to have a home base."
imeanforever
"We can pick a place for me to leave you a note if I can't find you when Arcane visits."
imeanforever
So they select such a place and then Promise goes home alone to wait for her friend.
feel-so-free
(Secret just kind of flops on the forest floor. She doesn't know what she wants to do, so she doesn't do anything. She doesn't have to do anything. That part's nice.)
imeanforever
Promise sometimes comes by to leave little parcels of food at the note spot with a note saying not yet. She wouldn't want Secret to think that she has been forgotten about altogether and lose track of her.