Nope, it's the face of a confused-looking stranger!

Aliveth realizes with no small amount of alarm exactly what was in that bottle. It's quite obvious by the single minded eternally devoted depthless and rather obsessive adoration. For this very confused-looking stranger. She thought love potions had long gone extinct, where did he even find one?! She'd have to figure out where and prevent it from ever happening again, they were a monstrosity.

Faintly she notices that someone's shouting, and realizes abruptly that she was staring in utter bewilderment at the object of her magic-fueled affections for an extended period of time. She glances around.

Oh, she's not even out of the castle. She's just back in the courtyard. Wonderful.

"You couldn't have gotten me farther out?" she mutters out loud, dismayed. She gets an apology from her magic. It doesn't really help.

"What? Who couldn't have - what? Where am I? What language am I speaking?!"

"Those are all some very fantastic questions," says Aliveth faintly, feeling very small and very lost. She's been hit with a love potion, the idiot tried to - well actually he succeeded dosing her, but he failed to get her attached to him. Her head is currently dancing circles around some stranger she's just met. She's not even somewhere safe to freak out, she's in the middle of -

"But I'm afraid," she continues, taking a deep breath and putting her imminent meltdown on hold, "that for right now, we really need to run."

Because of course, she's not leaving him. Not - well, probably not ever, really, but especially not here. They could try to silence him for being a witness to this debacle, or, if Rithan realizes the object of his very unwanted affections attached to him, he'd probably be killed out of petty jealousy. And even if they don't jump from kidnapping and attempted sexual assault to murder, she really, really doesn't want him to have to interact with these people. From what she could tell of Rithan, he was really quite a terrible conversationalist.

They don't know where she is, again - she'll put off flying off for now to capitalize on their likely confusion. She still glows in the dark with her wings out, and they could very well have archers. The idiot might be the type to think 'if I can't have you, no one can!' and have her turned into a pincushion. Maybe her defenses could deflect the arrows if she kept them close and didn't shield her charge as well, but, well. She's not going to not protect him. That would just be insane.

"Come with me, please?" She offers him her hand. He'll be easier to shield if she keeps him close, and this is the easiest way to be sure of that, and there are definitely zero ulterior motives to this arrangement.

He clearly still has no fucking idea what's happening, but he's watching her face while she shuts down her imminent panic and thinks through the situation, and when she offers her hand he takes it.

Good, good, that makes her job easier.

She pulls him after her, trying to fill in the blanks on her mental map of the place. The front gate will be guarded, and if she wants to relinquish her attempt at stealth she has better options than rushing to where they'll be watching for her. No, if she wants to escape without lighting up the night sky, she'll need to find another exit. She glances at her surroundings to try to find one, and notices something interesting. Before, she'd been calling this place a castle, but now that she stopped to study it, it didn't have the defenses. The layout was all wrong - no arrow slits to use to fire upon the courtyard, no choke points to take advantage of. The cramped rooms and narrow hallways weren't a result of a focus on tactics, but a result of poor planning and outdated engineering. This wasn't a place built for war, it was just old and badly decorated. An estate, then.

This seems like interesting trivia, but it belies information she can use. If this were a castle, there would be one entrance and exit: the well-guarded front gate. A castle's meant to fall under siege, meant to give the enemy a single deadly option of entry and exit. But if this was an estate, then the concern wouldn't be tactical efficiency, but logistical efficiency. Funneling all required resources through a single point got very annoying, very quickly, especially if the lord of the place didn't appreciate servants transporting goods to the larder constantly underfoot. That meant that there could be a side entrance. It'd be near the kitchens, but she didn't know where those were, and wandering the interior of the estate didn't strike her as a particularly good idea.

She begins working backwards. This place is old, she'd estimate that it outdated the ones she was more familiar with by several centuries. Which meant it predated the road system in a similar manner. There'd been roads back then, certainly, but nothing as centralized and well paved and most importantly protected. So the provisions would be arriving either from a nearby town, or a nearby river. If she were the betting type, she'd say a river. This place was clearly not where the pompous idiot spent most of his time; he didn't seem the type to fail to put on a show, and the entire reason she'd mistaken the place for a castle was its utilitarian frame and lack of decoration. The only reason to do that would be to teleport her somewhere out of the way - if there was a town, it was small, but she surmised he'd try to avoid a town entirely if he could. So she'd look for a servant's entrance near where the river was, then.

During her very brief flight from the window, she hadn't seen a river, but the courtyard lacked a well, and really, she'd only seen the inside of this estate. Perhaps her hunch was wrong, it was a bit flimsy and based far too much on conjecture, but it was certainly worth a shot. She doesn't have a better idea. If there were a river, it would be downhill, and she couldn't help but notice the subtle tilt of the courtyard's earth towards the east. Could be nothing, just a very old building settling strangely. But she didn't have a better idea, and it was an improvement on a directionless sprint or losing her element of stealth.

She changes direction to pull the stranger downhill, praying that maybe this would be one of those times when ridiculous conjecture would nonetheless be correct, and - and there was the door. The grass stopped in front of it, trod into dirt from use. If her crazy desperate hunch was right, then this would lead to it. Surely the servants would prefer to scurry from place to place through the courtyard instead of through the twisting cramped hallways - but perhaps that was more desperate conjecture. Regardless, it was something to try. If it didn't look like it'd lead to an exit very quickly, she could be in a lot of trouble. Even if she was trying to avoid flying to keep them chasing their own tails for as long as possible, it was her best way to retreat. Trapping herself indoors would - well, it would end poorly.

But she feels very sure of this hunch of hers, and she didn't quite want to let it go. She holds a finger to her lips to ask silence of the poor man dropped in the middle of this debacle, and then carefully eases open the door.

He can be quiet. He can absolutely be quiet. Look how quiet he can be. He doesn't even ask what she's thinking, he just trusts her.

She'll have to thank him later for that. In a way that isn't the first thing that comes to mind of how to thank him, because - uh. Now is really not the time for anything of that nature.

It certainly looks like the kitchens. Which is something, she successfully found the less important half of her desperate slightly baseless conjecture. If it was right, it would be here. That door looked like it led to the rest of the estate, that one looked like it led to the larder, and from the sounds drifting from around that corner over there, that was where the actual cooking took place, the servant's exit would be -

She breathes a soft and triumphant, "Ha!" and pulls the man with the pretty grey eyes behind her, silently closing the door after him. As she slips down the hallway to the exit, she indulges in a smug smirk. Despite her triumph, she is not going to get cocky. She stops with an ear to the door, listening for anyone outside. It seemed quiet, but if guards were stationed outside they might not be very loud -

There's a soft gasp from behind her, and Aliveth whirls around. Oh, wonderful, someone needed to fetch something from the larder, and that someone is staring wide eyed at the two of them, too shocked to start screaming. He looks like - well, like he probably had the habit of quietly eating leftovers to have any meals in him at all. Like someone without a lot of options. Right, okay, this is a solvable problem. With only minimal reluctance, she releases the hand and starts pulling off her bracelet. It matched nicely with her earrings, but had never been a favorite of hers. She had exactly zero problem with parting with it to buy silence. She holds it up so the gold glinted invitingly in the minimal light, and smiles a winning smile, raising her eyebrows slightly.

The malnourished servant considers very briefly, then edges over to take the offered gold.

"Which way to Kivenne's border?" she asks quietly. She's certainly not in her country, otherwise this would have been much easier.

".... Follow the river south. I can tell you where you can find a boat for that necklace."

She considers briefly, then hands that over too. It earns her a brief description of where to find a boat and a confirmation that no one's watching this exit. She thanks him, and retrieves the quiet stranger's hand to definitely make sure that he's still within range of her protection, and not for ulterior motives that don't exist. Out they go.

The boat turns out to be relatively easy to find. The necklace was probably superfluous. But Aliveth doesn't mind its loss very much, jewelry is replaceable, she is not. Maybe the extra trinket kept the servant from immediately calling for the guards once she was out of eyeshot. Aliveth motions for her quiet pretty eyed stranger to get into the boat, and soon enough, they're off. She'll row, unless he obviously wants to.

...The quiet pretty-eyed stranger is content to let her row, although he watches her at it, perhaps judging whether they'd be better off with him set to the task. Apparently her rowing is adequate; he doesn't ask to take over.

Then she can row them down the river, heading south. They're going with the flow of it, luckily, so it's not particularly difficult. She notes that there is also no town here, but doesn't linger on the thought to gloat. She's much too busy watching for anyone that might spot them.

When the estate is a speck in the distance and she feels that they have well and truly slipped away, and there's nothing left to procrastinate with, she pulls in the oar to let them float and fidgets with an earring.

"So, hello," she says, an absurd trace of shy.

"Hi," he says. "Um. So. Where are we?"

"Um. North of Kivenne? I'm not quite sure which river this is, either the Milardes or the Jassim from the size of it, but." She shrugs. "I don't know enough about either to really say for sure."

"Yeah, I was afraid of that... if I tell you that right before I appeared in front of you I was passing by the Interplanar Studies building at Magisterius University in the Imperium, you're not going to have heard of those places any more than I've heard of Kivenne, are you?"

"No, I'm afraid not. Sorry."

"Right then," he says, oddly cheerful. "What's your name?"

Why does she want to melt into the boat and hide from his very pretty eyes, that is entirely an absurd thing to want to do.

"I'm -" Does she introduce herself as a princess? She clearly is one, but it doesn't seem the proper way to introduce oneself to, to. To the stranger who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. "Aliveth Vaslinue," she finishes, a little awkwardly.

"Milan Kosorin. Who are we running from?"

She makes a face, looking in the direction of the estate with a look of contempt and disgust.

"Lord Rithan." Does she need to expand on that? She probably needs to expand on that. "I don't recommend attempting to turn around to bid him a proper goodbye."

"Wasn't planning on it. And why are we running from him?"

Aliveth doesn't have an immediate answer to that. For a few seconds she inspects the water pensively.

"He seemed to be under the impression that I would appreciate being teleported out of my home and tied to a chair," she decides upon. "I disagreed."

"Very reasonable of you."

"Quite. He was a terrible conversationalist."

"Those types so often are!"

"Yes," she agrees, but the phrase 'those types' reminds her of what sort of category of person he was, and then for some reason she feels a bit of pain in her hands from how she was clenching them. She notices as she carefully pries them open that she's also shaking.

"A-are," she begins, but her voice catches in an odd way and she has to stop and start again. "Are there any other questions I can answer for you right now?"

"If you're somehow incapacitated and I have to get us where we're going without the ability to ask you further questions as they come up, where am I trying to take us and how do you recommend I get us there?"