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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
feel-so-free
"Okay," says Secret when she's done eating, "look at me, I ate breakfast, if you tell me your name I'll totally notice."
infinitely-stranger
"Sierulyperinon," he says. "For my peace of mind, Promise, would you mind testing...?"
imeanforever
"Which is fairly helpful for my own peace of mind, too, even considering."
imeanforever
"One of a kind. Secret, how do you feel about overthrowing the Queen?"
feel-so-free
"Well, if we don't she'll stick me in a box forever or something, won't she? So we'd better," she says pragmatically.
infinitely-stranger
"A very well-guarded and probably sorcerously sealed box. After having a berrybush or two feed you and tell you to do nothing," Arcane predicts. "Let's avoid that."
imeanforever
"Do you want to be involved in the planning and/or the execution, or just stay somewhere receiving names occasionally?"
feel-so-free
"I don't care much," she says. "If you can find a use for me besides telling me names, I'll do whatever."
infinitely-stranger
"We of course cannot risk the Queen catching sight of Secret before we have captured her," says Arcane.
imeanforever
"Can littlesingers narrow the target of their long-distance talking? If Spellwhip's range is good - we need to get Spellwhip early on anyway, and if he can sing names to Secret from far away without alerting everyone for miles around that might be useful."
imeanforever
"And Spellwhip's a sorcerer. Can he do it on his own? Would he be able to target Secret without meeting her or knowing exactly where she was?"
infinitely-stranger
"He would need to know either the target person or the target location reasonably well, and he couldn't do it from a continent away."
imeanforever
"Maybe if we took a satellite court first and parked Secret there?" muses Promise. "Spellwhip probably knows where those are and we definitely have to neutralize Cirrus somehow, from the one direction or the other."
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