"I can probably help with gardening. I'll have to see what reagents I can find that can be used for thaumaturgy, but I'm sure I can come up with something to help plants." Were he not held in Promise's arms, he would likely be bouncing. Problems to be solved by magic! So many of them! Making a life together with a pretty fairy woman in a snowy expanse in the middle of nowhere!

"Excellent."

Continued flying?

"Sure. I can go without food for a good while. Ooh, maybe I can plant a frostberry thicket! They make really nice pie. And liquor. And candy. You can do a lot of things with frostberries."

"You have the seeds?"

"Well, I've got the berries. They've got pips in them, so I think you can plant 'em. And if not, we will have one last glorious frostberry pie before leaving them in a forgotten world."

"Planting them's probably a better idea. If they're unique, we can trade them with other fairies."

"Ooh, there's an idea. Glorious trade empire of the frostberries. I'm pretty sure you won't have them growing naturally, the species is pretty firmly rooted in faerie culture. There's an extremely long and involved story that culminates in Queen Mab inventing them to reward her daughter for... slaying a dragon, I think? And it's probably true, so I don't think they'd show up without her."

"Noted. I've never heard of the berries before so that's another point in our likely favor. Speaking of... cross-pollination... you are the only person I have ever heard of turning up here from anywhere other than the usual, non-magical mortal world, so I'm not sure if we should expect it to happen again. What did happen?"

"I have absolutely no idea. I was in a frostberry thicket, I took a right turn, and suddenly there was no snow on the ground and there wasn't a briar to be seen. Tried to open a portal back to the mortal world - my mortal world, where magic still works - and got the magical equivalent of a comical slide trombone noise. Then berries, then Fairy Creep, etcetera and so on."

"His nickname is Yellow, if that's ever useful. Not very creative, but a lot of fairies aren't. Eating the berries would have been safe where you came from?"

"I can call him Tacky Creep to separate him from other creepy fairies, if need be. And it would've been, you can only get in trouble by giving out your true name or accepting a gift from a faerie's hand. I checked them for poison and curses, but not ownership. Because that would be absurd. Because they were growing wild in the middle of a forest." Fairy property rights have become something of a pet peeve for Ari in the past 24 hours.

"Eating things growing in the middle of forests is often safe. If he hadn't noticed, or hadn't been able to catch you to give you any orders, or had forgotten the bush was his and didn't try commanding you just in case, you would have been fine - well, not necessarily fine, he could potentially still have captured you, but not so easily. And it works much less well on fairies. He probably couldn't have gotten me that way, although it might depend on how recently he planted the bush. Which is why I'm going to have to do the foraging and feed you."

"Yeah, yeah. It was still a cheap trick. I'm used to being tricked out of my will, not just being commanded by some hollow-boned little jerk because I stole his Lucky Charms." An astute observer might notice Ari pouting. They would be wrong, because Ari does not pout. He is a grown man; he broods. There's a difference.

"You realize most of your references are totally lost on me."

"Sorry. It's a kind of... food, by a generous definition. There's a joke about it. It's got marshmallows."

"So you were whatever passes for a vassal under some other variety of fairy before you even came here?"

"Oh, yeah. I'm not sure how long, the Nevernever doesn't always have a day/night cycle, but there was a period of between five and ten years after Belinda died where I was trapped in the Nevernever and I kept ending up oathbound to some faerie bastard or other. Then I escaped to the mortal realm."

"How'd you get away from your masters there?"

"Back home there's only so long you can keep somebody enthralled if they've just accepted a gift from you. And you can't command them to give you their name, so it's a real limit. You can keep them accidentally accepting gifts, though, one clever ogre had me bound ten times over that way. Also, I had ways of indirectly getting rid of the ones who were sloppy with their conditions. There was this goblin who thought she was safe just by ordering me not to kill her!" Ari chuckles at an obviously fond memory. "I didn't kill her, but the tripwire that dropped five hundred pounds of granite on her head sure did."

Promise snickers. "You're apparently very good at mental convolutions."

"Oh, yes. It helps that back home the only thing keeping you from attacking the oath-holder was the strength of their own order, and legend has it the whole system was consciously designed to be as vulnerable to loopholes as physically possible. I don't know about the protection on someone who knows your name here, it might be tighter."

"It's pretty tight. I haven't been able to confidently conclude anything about the exact definition, but I never found a gap. I'm lousy at self-deception but good at other loophole-finding mechanisms, so..." She shrugs. "Consciously designed? Yours was designed?"

"Legend has it. The faeries have been around for a very long time, but they weren't always around, and they exist for a reason. Belinda told me this as... well, ironically, as fairy tales, and she never told me what that reason was, but she did tell me that the faeries were created by something, and that the oaths and the war between Summer and Winter were designed to trip them up." He shrugs. "On the other hand, maybe she was just the faerie equivalent of a nutty conspiracy theorist. Or maybe they really were just children's stories. Couldn't say."