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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
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. How does she originate all the colourful dust, by the way?"
imeanforever
"Her wings sort of constantly disintegrate and re-form. It looks really uncomfortable but she never seems bothered, she even leans on things."
infinitely-stranger
"Certainly. One of my first assignments with the Queenscourt was to catch one. This was a long time ago, and she'd been eluding capture for longer than that - she could step into an ocean, disappear, and step out of the other side an instant later. Or the same with a lake or a river or a bank of clouds. Finding her was legitimately difficult."
infinitely-stranger
"I invented fast-flight. And traced every rumour I could find, and snuck up on her invisibly, and she still got away from me twice before I managed to come close enough to say 'Hold' before she vanished. Now she serves the Queen as a decorative fountain in one of the prettier courts. I'm sure she does not have any personal loyalty to speak of, although I'm not sure she doesn't still resent me for catching her. She went by 'Nuisance' for several centuries afterward; now it's 'Shimmer'."
imeanforever
"How many of the Queen's vassals did you personally catch? This might be an obstacle if some of them are unclear on the concept and resent you personally."
infinitely-stranger
"...some," he admits. "Many, even. All the difficult cases since I joined the Queenscourt. Sometimes with help, but I'm somewhat uniquely qualified to find people who don't want to be found."
imeanforever
"Yeah. Well, presumably those are among the ones you have names for, we don't have to introduce them to Secret right away if they'd foul everything up blaming you for things you were under orders about."
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. So. Time to chart the structure of the Queenscourt?"
imeanforever
"Yep. Good thing I have a lot of paper."
She has a lot of paper. Look how much paper she has.
She has a lot of paper. Look how much paper she has.
infinitely-stranger
"The court structure has several main branches, which aren't quite officially named, but for simplicity's sake I will call the most prominent ones Security, Domestic, and Art. Security divides further into Defense and Punishment."
He starts writing down nicknames and delineating branch affiliations and vassal relationships.
"Spellwhip leads Security, and therefore has everyone's name in that branch. Nighteyes leads Defense; Flay leads Punishment. I don't have any of those three names, although I have plenty of their subordinates. Spellwhip has my name; the only other Queenscourt fairy with this distinction is Cirrus, who leads a small branch I might call Backup. His job is to come in from outside and restore everyone's orders if someone manages to infiltrate the main court and get enough of us that Security can't correct the problem alone. I don't have Cirrus's name either. Cirrus's name is very closely guarded for obvious reasons; as far as I can tell, no one has it but the Queen and that is why he has that job."
More branches.
"Hazelnut heads Domestic; I have her name. Mirror heads Art; I don't have his. Hazelnut's job is to see to the material needs and comforts of every member of the Queenscourt, and make sure we never run out of food or paper. She's very good at it. Mirror is in charge of decorating things and arranging performances and so forth. He has Shimmer's name, for example, to direct her in her decorative fountaining. And then there are the smaller pieces..."
He adds himself into the chart, with two affiliated subgroups.
"The Red Flight is the team I bring when I'm told to capture a court. The Diamond Nine had that job before it became obvious I would be better at it. I have all sixteen names in the Flight, but only Veracity in the Nine. She's their current leader and has the names of the other eight. If I had any assistants at the moment I'd put them under my branch separately from the capture teams, but I don't."
He starts writing down nicknames and delineating branch affiliations and vassal relationships.
"Spellwhip leads Security, and therefore has everyone's name in that branch. Nighteyes leads Defense; Flay leads Punishment. I don't have any of those three names, although I have plenty of their subordinates. Spellwhip has my name; the only other Queenscourt fairy with this distinction is Cirrus, who leads a small branch I might call Backup. His job is to come in from outside and restore everyone's orders if someone manages to infiltrate the main court and get enough of us that Security can't correct the problem alone. I don't have Cirrus's name either. Cirrus's name is very closely guarded for obvious reasons; as far as I can tell, no one has it but the Queen and that is why he has that job."
More branches.
"Hazelnut heads Domestic; I have her name. Mirror heads Art; I don't have his. Hazelnut's job is to see to the material needs and comforts of every member of the Queenscourt, and make sure we never run out of food or paper. She's very good at it. Mirror is in charge of decorating things and arranging performances and so forth. He has Shimmer's name, for example, to direct her in her decorative fountaining. And then there are the smaller pieces..."
He adds himself into the chart, with two affiliated subgroups.
"The Red Flight is the team I bring when I'm told to capture a court. The Diamond Nine had that job before it became obvious I would be better at it. I have all sixteen names in the Flight, but only Veracity in the Nine. She's their current leader and has the names of the other eight. If I had any assistants at the moment I'd put them under my branch separately from the capture teams, but I don't."
imeanforever
"Okay. So Cirrus is not only a problem for the plan but expressly designed, in terms of what constraints he operates under and probably in his personal feelings about it too, to be a problem for plans of this nature. If we can't figure out how to crack that then it might be better to call the rest of your leave a good head start."
infinitely-stranger
"I'm sure we could make at least as good a showing as Shimmer if we decided to flee, but I don't expect us to be able to keep ahead of the Queen's pursuers literally forever. And the fate of an enemy of the Queen who cannot be made anyone's vassal is unlikely to be pleasant. If we can't come up with a plan that seems likely to work, I might prefer to go back and see how long I can pretend to still be under orders. At least I'd still retain some chance of accomplishing the takeover that way, whereas 'openly on the run from the Queen' is one of the worst possible positions from which to try to overthrow her."
infinitely-stranger
"Cirrus plus six or seven other fairies," he starts writing those down, "not all of whose identities I know, never mind their names. We can assume that they are all personally loyal to the Queen and under well-designed orders, and that no one outside the group has been allowed to learn any of their names but some of them may have each other's. I know where to find Cirrus and I have good guesses about the rest, but I don't think there's any way to verify for sure that we've found the last one until they stop coming for us or we capture the Queen."
imeanforever
"The entire conceit of the backup branch falls apart if everyone they'd ordinarily round up is Secreted before the backups appear to try to salvage the situation, but that's a tall order and requires the unordered cooperativeness or controllability of any significant threats we'd be Secreting."
infinitely-stranger
"Yes. While we're on the subject of likely inconveniences, there are a number of decoy Queens around - currently four. I can tell them apart from the original with trivial effort, but the flaws in their disguises are not usually obvious and might not be apparent to, for example, you."
imeanforever
"Which could be inconvenient especially if we go with a plan that requires me to pretend to obey the Queen and not a decoy who wouldn't have my name."
infinitely-stranger
"Situations of that type are reasonably rare, both because it is generally customary to do what the Queen says even if she is not enforcing an order, and because if the decoy Queens were in the habit of regularly giving people noticeably unenforced orders they would not make very good decoys. But yes, it's a concern."
imeanforever
"Do the decoys have many names in their possession or do people around them just have the order to do what they say outside of carefully defined emergencies?"
infinitely-stranger
"The latter. They have to be so heavily selected for body type that there's no room to ensure loyalty, so they can't be given any important names."
imeanforever
Nod nod. "So in a plan where for some reason a non-you participant needs to hunt down the Queen and hitting a decoy instead is costly, we have a problem, but if the plan does not call for that they're almost ignorable if we don't want to use them, but suborning one would be useful if we try for subtlety and can successfully make it look like not-an-emergency... Loosely we could go for stealth or a magical assault with the understanding that you know most of the opposing sorcerers' names or, uh, mass Secrecy. It might matter that I have fey-efficacious food. I don't think it will always, guaranteed work, mind, it worked for Secret but I'm not a berrybush."
infinitely-stranger
"I was indeed thinking about your fey-efficacious food," he says. "If we could Secret Hazelnut, and she could successfully pretend it hadn't happened, we could easily get your berries out to nearly everyone including the Queen. Of course, that relies on securing Hazelnut's loyalty for ourselves, and while I have an inkling that she might come down on our side if she thought we had a good chance, an inkling is by no means the same as a guarantee."