"Oh, what'd she say?"

He spends a long time writing. 

You arrived unable to move very much and they thought you were very injured. She gave you something to drink and this created a horrific degree of entanglement, no one could figure out why, you couldn't talk, they tried an alphabet chart, they eventually gave up on that and decided to jettison her, you guys set out east together, she figured out how to enable you to write by directing you to do so, even though she was in your debt, which worked, and then at your direction saying that she had permission to speak, and then at your further direction saying she would 'rescind your orders'. At one point you got nervous and flew off, she attacked you, you magically restored yourself to perfect health, deafened yourself, and demanded her name. You had a long conversation, which she conveyed though saying she didn't well remember it, at the end of which you left and she could only offer that you hadn't yet done any stupid things, as she'd have been able to feel them.

There are more details in the letter but I'm not eliding them deliberately.

"...mm-hm."

She is also reportedly content and in good health and earning her keep without too many problems. 

"Well, that's good. Does this much complicate the diplomatic situation between that court and this one?"

It will do that tremendously if the two of you run up substantial debt, but neither court has been letting that happen and as long as we can sustain that it should be fine. 

"Okay. I have your list you gave me but it doesn't have anything I can attempt arithmetic on and it's pretty unintuitive so I suppose it's convenient you're incentivized to track it for me."

There are many competing number systems for describing debt. If you want me to pick one and try telling you what costs what I can do that but I agree you don't need to worry about it too much. We will put a lot of effort into keeping you even.

"It might be an interesting exercise but it's not important."

Nod.

I don't suppose I can convince you to put your ears back? I admit there's not much reason besides convenience but it'd be really really convenient. I'm not going to direct or permit anyone to give you food or orders, and she can't leave her court.

"How much confidence should I have in your direction and permission being all that's operative?"

Our orders don't work like yours, they're not binding, but there's no one here with a history of disobeying them, and fairies can't do violence against people not in their debt for longer than a few seconds and would need to to make you eat or drink something. Then they'd be very badly entangled with you and all of civilization would have nothing to do with them. Maybe that'd be worth it to someone if they knew about the magic, but only my father and I know of that.

"Everyone's seen the lights."

You can do a lot more than the lights. I don't think anyone would risk it for the lights. 

"It would hardly be unreasonable to guess that someone who can fly and make magic lights might have other powers. You guessed I was interesting off less than that."

That's fair, though to consider trying to use the other magic system to enslave you I would've wanted more than that. 

"Uh-huh."

I do not want that and I'm pretty invested in preventing it, though also pretty sure no one would try it.

"Why exactly don't you want it?"

I have a lot of different answers to that and I'm not sure which one is most complete or most indicative of how I normally make these decisions.

You'd hate me.

No person informed about the range of my typical behavior towards my allies could ever trust me again. 

It seems like a more unstable, more destructive, less flexible way to get something I'm pretty sure I can get anyway. 

It sounds awful. Usually, giving people orders is good for them, in a way, it's paying them back for something they wanted and putting them on a better footing next time they want something and they appreciate it and feel safer and they have a clear picture of the boundaries of what might happen and unless they've done something really terrible, nothing within those boundaries is frightening. This has none of those. It doesn't have bounds and it doesn't make things better and it doesn't correspond to past value created in any way and you can't predict it and you can't negotiate it and it's not what power is for.

For things to be good, people should be free, except when they enter into agreements they benefit from which partially but not wholly limit those freedoms for the sake of making the agreement workable, and they should have good alternatives to entering those agreements and good ways to exit them.

If you still won't give us magic once we're on the same page about everything, there might be a reason for that which is actually a good one, so I might get worse outcomes even according to my own priorities by trying to get it by force.

I don't think you'd do it to me.

Promise fixes her ears. This doesn't have a visible effect.

Then he's not in fact perceptive enough to guess at it. 

"You can stop writing."

"That means a lot to me."

"Was I going around incurring debt by inconveniencing people who wanted to talk to me all the time?"