" - well, all right, then!"

Promise can sort of twitch her hand, but not very much.

The woman observes this incredulously for a minute. 

"I think," she says slowly as if talking to someone incredibly dense, "you should write in the dirt the word that I'm supposed to say to make you talk."

Twitch! Twitch!!!

"Oh, come the fuck on, you useless little lump, you said you could write it, write it!" And then she flinches.

Promise jabs her hand into the dirt and writes TELL ME I MAY SPEAK

She takes a while deciphering this because she's not good at reading but eventually she says, incredulously, "you...may speak?"

"Thank you! How did that take so long?! Why are you so averse to giving usable instructions that you don't think of it for days on end when desperate?"

"I'm in your debt right now! Because of all the stupid questions they made me ask  - and carrying you into the court was expensive - carrying you was bizarrely expensive - nothing with you costs what it should and I have no idea what it does cost and you can't just - you don't just - give people instructions with no idea what you'll be paying for them, that's stupid!"

"I don't know how any of this works but if that adds up to you wanting to do me a favor try saying I rescind your orders."

"I rescind your orders," she says, and then makes a face like she's had the wind knocked out of her - "I really hate you."

Promise, meanwhile, relaxes. "I assume that did a different thing neither of us could predict in your maniacal debt system."

"It's only you that I can't predict," she says miserably. "Everything works fine with everyone else. I've met a human once and it worked fine for the human, too."

"Does this system let you tell me how it works or were you just withholding that information for fun?"

"I can tell you, it's just expensive. For you."

"If I'm going to think of anything that solves that problem, and I'm clearly the only one of us who's going to, I need to know what I'm working with."

"Fairies can tell how much debt people are in, and how much debt results from actions, when we do them. We can usually anticipate the costs of things pretty reliably in advance but you don't do what I'd predict, at all. It's usually the right direction but everything else is off. Debt is one source of entanglement. The other source of entanglement that I'm familiar with is knowing someone's name. I've heard stories about magic that can do entanglement, too, but I don't know how confident to be in them. I don't know why giving you a drink caused entanglement, but it did, a lot of it, like - nearly as much as knowing someone's name? I don't know anyone's names so I can't compare directly -"

"And debt and entanglement do... something."

"They mean that any misfortune incurred by one of us, the other will suffer too. Moreso the more entangled we are."

"You got kicked out of your court and nothing in particular happened to me," Promise points out.

"Not that kind of - I mean, like, if you tell a lie, I'll get very sick, or have bad luck for a long time."

"Why not that kind of misfortune? Why is telling a lie lumped in with misfortune?"

"Other people deciding to do something that's in their interests and not in yours isn't misfortune. If you had remarkably good fortune it might cause their plans to go awry in some unexpected way but it'd be some unexpected way like... the patrol being a few minutes delayed so it runs into them when they're sneaking around, or having no particular appetite for the food they'd arranged to sneak you, or walking by them and overhearing something. Or a storm keeping you in one night.

Fortune isn't any of the things that a person deliberately controls towards an end, it's - everything that no one is perfectly causing."

"...and how does lying come in to it?"

"It's one of the things that incurs misfortune. Like disobeying someone you're indebted to, except that's only a little misfortune and lying is a lot, or like betraying an oath, which is lots of misfortune, or doing violence to someone you're indebted to, or destroying their things -"