"I'm really confident there would turn out to be some nuance to the situation of which I am unaware."

"I guess."

"Fairies seem bad at modeling how weird the debt thing and all its implications are from the outside. This is probably hard on any humans you pick up."

"I'd expect so. I think a lot of things about relations with humans are hard on humans. They need food frequently, they don't live all that long even if you're careful with them, they often show up in desperate straits in the first place..."

"Which can't possibly help, but if the thing were simpler or if it were easier to make accommodations around how batshit insane it seems to a novice..."

"It's not that hard to keep a reasonably cooperative person neutral if you're trying, even if they have no idea what they're doing. - I guess not if they were so ignorant as to immediately give you their name or something."

"I'm not finding it particularly onerous to take cues on which way I need to jump around here, but it took some doing to find someone who was willing to settle for 'reasonably cooperative'."

"You don't last forever as a court if you take a lot of chances, even if they're individually small ones."

"That concept I'm familiar with."

"So if you don't know whether someone's reasonable or cooperative it's better just to have nothing to do with them. Especially if they can fly."

"Is flying special in this regard?"

"Yeah. If a fairy shows up here and - I don't know, does something really unpredictable, tells someone their name  - they're not leaving. We can take them down and bring them in and make sure we know what's going on. You could, in principle, show up, give your name, and leave, and then we're just - eventually screwed, with nothing we can do. And if people aren't clear whether you can be provoked into that, best just to move you on as soon as safely possible."

"Well. I'm certainly glad it didn't come to that."

"So are we."

"Because I can't imagine myself arranging to make keeping me prisoner a good idea if you made any mistakes and I believe you would have, not knowing how I work."

"You don't need to be worried."

"That's good." Pause. "I do think I will go ask about the net though."

She goes Lohte-finding.

"Harmony!"

"Lohte! It's occurred to me to ask why you decided to have me caught in a net. I'm assuming that was you, anyway."

"So as to make sure the guards wouldn't be entangled with you if you decided to flee and had the means to, and so as to learn whether you had the means to, which was pretty important to what options we had."

"You'd heard touching me was expensive?"

"I'd heard a lot of things and suspected some of them of being nonsense, but yes."

"- what else did you hear?"

"That you could entangle people without doing anything and had done that, that you were faster than us except when you slowed down to eat, that you were one of the lost ancient powers of rumor..."

"There are lost ancient powers of rumor?"