She considers.
She raises a hand and picks Yellow up several feet in the air.
"Or if I do this."
His wings beat. He glances in Promise's direction. Promise has gotten up out of her chair, wincing. The sleeve on Callida's raised arm is now on fire.
Callida looks at it, then looks at Promise, then at Yellow. She's mostly fireproof, this isn't really a big deal.
"What, exactly," hisses Callida, "have you done to her to make her do that. She obviously doesn't want to."
Promise is not doing anything obvious, but she is looking at Callida with some urgency in her eyes.
"Is there an obvious way for me to free you from whatever, thing he has on you?" Pause. "And does it have anything to do with food or names?"
"Okay. I doubt he's going to tell me his name unless I get mean, so twitch if I'm close - I don't know, do I. Destroy the food in the house, force feed it to him, force feed him my food, feed you the candied dewdrop..."
She gets a ration bar from her pack, breaks off a piece, and gets to force feeding him.
"I cut him off from saying something to you. Does that have something to do with it?"
"Tell him to rescind all my orders or I'm going to have to turn you into a sparrow, I picked that to stall," Promise says quickly.
"Rescind all her orders," says Callida, because really, that seems the best thing to do. "And then don't give her any others."
Promise relaxes. "Thank you."
"He has my name; you fed him; that means that you're his master and he's mine. If he'd fed you instead he'd have you too. I would've been allowed to talk as soon as it wouldn't be interfering with a capture attempt and we could have maybe gotten away by cooperating because he's not very smart, but this is better. You can tell him to do whatever you want."
"Right, okay. Thank you. Uh, Yellow, always tell me the truth, and tell me in an obvious way if Promise lies to me, or has lied to me since she started talking." She looks back at Promise. "High stakes, paranoia, I'm not a monster but I need to be sure I won't have a master, I hope you understand."
Yellow is silent.