...she can steal Promise's bag. She is absolutely allowed to steal Promise's bag.
A sunshine tepal gets the Princess.
"What's going on? Help Nap," she adds, snapping her fingers; tepals swarm over Promise and hold her down. "Nap. Explain."
Nap the creekpearl says, "She was talking to Maria and called her Secret and I think she's behaving very suspiciously and I don't want to go with her, Princess, please."
The princess frowns at this tableau.
"Slipknot," she tells a sunshine tepal, "go get me a sunflower seed."
Slipknot flits away. Promise struggles, Nap's hand over her mouth. Something catches fire. A sunshine tepal puts it out.
And meanwhile Secret rummages furiously in Promise's bag, and comes up with a handful of berries, and eats them.
Nap flinches and Promise manages to say, "HELP!"
She grabs Nap and hauls him off of Promise and throws him away.
Promise wrestles sunshine tepals.
"WHERE IS MY SUNFLOW-" screeches the Princess.
And then she is abruptly inaudible.
Promise has a tepal hauling on her wing; this looks very uncomfortable but she can't reach him.
"I rescind," pants Promise, "ow, your orders, ow ow ow get off me -" This last is directed at the tepal, not Secret.
Secret grabs the tepal and throws him away too. Entirely of her own will. It's so nice to want to do things and then be able to.
"Do you think," Promise gasps, "we could carry her together, so she doesn't find a sorcerer and -" A tepal tries to rush her; there is fire in this tepal's way. "Get away from all these and think?"
Promise seizes one of the Princess's arms. She has to kick a tepal.
She lifts off, trailing wing-dust.
The Princess is not cooperative with this endeavor, but they manage to haul her. "I heard her telling some tepals to make sure everyone knew the new court borders. I don't think we'll be followed if we go beyond them," she says.
Eventually they find a spot beyond the Princess's current borders. The Princess is crying in perfect silence.
(Princess tries to escape. Princess now has a lot of earth mounded up around her feet. This is inconvenient.)
"The secret is: if you would be my vassal you're no one's vassal, ever, even if you were before. And I don't have a name."
"So we can't order her to stay put. I could make my own gate, but she might wind up somewhere close enough to her original gate to use it, or someplace too far away from what she's used to to find food and shelter and die. Do you happen to know how comprehensively her court is ordered to look out for her interests in cases like this?"
"The tepals like her better than they like their patriarch. She's nicer. But nobody's a huge fan."