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She's a four-year-old girl, and people (especially her Dad) insist she's a boy.
Not that she isn't sometimes. She is. But not today! Today she's a girl. And Dad keeps saying that's not true, that God made her body perfect and she shouldn't second-guess God's plan for her. God made her a boy, so she's supposed to be a boy. And on the one hand that kinda makes sense. God doesn't make mistakes, right? So if she were really a girl sometimes, then she'd... what? Her body would change, she guesses. But on the other hand, she knows she's a girl. She's a girl with a peepee, that's obvious. She'd prefer not having a peepee when she's a girl, but it's not the worst thing ever. And if God doesn't make mistakes, God also didn't make her feel like a girl sometimes on accident, right? It must be part of His (because God is always a He, even though God made everyone, boys and girls, in His image, he's always a He, Dad says) plan.
She tells Dad that, today, and Dad gets angry, and yells at her, and she doesn't know why he's yelling. It makes sense to her! But he won't explain why she's wrong, he's just yelling, Dad's so mean, she hates him, and she's not crying, shut up, you're crying!
And now Mum's coming and she's talking to Dad, and that usually makes Dad stop yelling and go away but he won't stop now and Sadde's angry and afraid and hurt and she's running away. A part of her thinks that it doesn't make much sense to run away, the park is pretty open and she can't really hide anywhere, and she'll have to go back because she'll get hungry (not now, though, she just ate a sandwich).
So she runs until she finds some bushes where she can hide, and she hides there, and she doesn't cry, and she spends a long time not crying. Mum and Dad don't come after her, though, and after she's done not crying she doesn't wipe her eyes and her nose, and she comes out the other way of the bushes she was hiding in.
And she's pretty sure that's not the park.
"You don't know what I'd do if I were free and you're not going to find out while you're holding me down under a stop order and a whitelist."
"If you have to be told you don't really not want to keep me, do you?"
"I want a lot of things! I want my mother to not be tortured to death, I want sadistic fairies to not hold courts, I want the Queen to be replaced by someone less terrible, I want to make all humans immortal and to make no one who doesn't want to be a vassal be one and that includes the two of you and I have to prioritise. And even though I care about my mother more than I care about you, that's not enough to motivate me to even consider risking your wellbeing around him because both of you have made me terrified of him and I'm terrified of fairies in general, and morally you're not any less relevant than she is. But it is enough for me to want to keep you for the short time needed to get enough information that I can start designing a plan to try to rescue her. So, I want my mother well and healthy and alive more than I don't want to take the few hours of your life I'd need to get the information I'd need for that, but not more than I don't want to keep you any longer than that because even keeping you this long makes me want to hurl."
"Well," says Promise, "look. Yellow ordered you not to lie to us. So you believe what you're saying. But every minute I lie paralyzed on the ground because you're playing with power you can't handle convinces me that you're just flat out wrong about how you tick. You're not that nice, you're not that principled, you're literally not thinking clearly enough to be prioritizing like you say you are even if you'd normally be disposed to sort of try. And the more convinced I am of that the less chance you have of getting any use out of me at all, because you are not good enough to bootstrap your way into wielding me effectively while I'm wishing Yellow had just fucking caught you outright and too nice to feed you enough information to go get yourself inducted into Thorn's court. You can't use me. You're trying anyway. What does that make you?"
"Desperate." She shuts her eyes and says, "Yellow, don't order Promise or me unless we ask you to. I rescind all of both of your orders except for the one I just gave Yellow. Please don't tell anyone else about me." That last one isn't enforced. After that, she curls up into a ball, lies on the grass, and turns her back to them.
And then Promise's voice says, "Stop."
Sadde barely gets to know what that feels like before Promise continues in a rush, "You may breathe. Do not communicate my name at any level of reversible obfuscation or indirection. Do not reveal to anyone by any mechanism that you have ever had opportunity to learn my name or provoke curiosity in such a way as to make it more likely that they will take actions that will lead to you revealing my name. Avoid triggering any contingencies that might inconvenience me according to your up-to-date best understanding of my preferences. You may, except as delimited, slowly adjust your position. You may, except as delimited and without enforcing orders or asking Yellow to issue any, speak."
She winces (and tries to keep track of the phrasing—seriously, those fictional heroes of fairy books don't hold a candle to that). "I meant every word I said," she whispers, without moving.
"Oh, I know you meant it. But you weren't thinking nearly enough for what you meant to be worth squat," Promise says. "Thorn had me. Fucking think about that." It's not enforced, but it is spat.
"I can't form much more than a vague impression of just how terrible a fairy would have to be to be called sadistic by other fairies, so I don't know what exactly you went through. I'm thinking quite a lot about it, though, because my very fragile, very mortal mother is now going through similar. She won't regenerate, or respawn, or whatever, every second—" She cuts herself off.
"And that means that somebody of his might slip and it might be over. You think it takes us seconds to heal? You think healing spells won't work on a mortal if he wants her alive? You think he doesn't have anybody else besides her, right now, hasn't had them for centuries?"
"Over!" She turns around, slowly, to look at Promise in complete horror. "I can't—I—What should I have done?"
"You. Should. Have. Thought. I don't mean it's bad if it's over, I mean that otherwise his collection of pet sorcerers can keep her there for as many thousand fucking years as it amuses Thorn to possess her de-aging her on some leisurely schedule, she's lucky she's mortal, there. He is too smart and he has too many people and the resources present are not going to - Tell him to land," she adds, glancing over her shoulder at Yellow, "and to whisper his name to me when I approach."
She orders him so. "It is bad if it's over, she won't exist, anymore, what could possibly be worse than that?"
Promise collects Yellow's name and tells him some things. He sits down. She turns back to Sadde. "I think I've had enough flashbacks today, so I'm really glad you can't make me tell you on the basis that you don't think it matters how many I have if it suits your worse-than-suicidal plan."
"I have no other vassals except another mortal also swallowed up into Thorn's court, long enough ago that if she's been allowed to die of old age that's been and gone. Yellow has no other vassals. You have no other vassals. Your mother's probably under orders that if she sees you she has to kill you, how she has to do it probably depends on what mood he's in, that'll be half for psychological effect and half genuine security and you'd be lucky to make it that far, and you're a mortal so you can't rescind her orders yourself however fast you talk so you have to have been even stupider than it looked or you were planning to bring a fairy with you who has no hope of accidental death if they're caught. A non-volunteer fairy, I presume, since where the fuck would you find a volunteer and your search procedure didn't look optimized to locate one. With what overwhelming force were you planning to make this work?"
"Human-created technology. I don't expect you to object to this," she says as she starts moving to reach into her backpack.
"It's a walkie-talkie, it can transmit my voice very far away, no knowledge of sorcery or kind magic is necessary to make it work, and I expect orders work through them but haven't tested it."
"You may display but not until further notice use the walkie-talkie."
She does so: the pair is small and black and on the higher end of what's commercially available when it comes to design and quality.
"You need to talk into one to be heard through the other. I did not presume to use this in specific in any plans, I'm showing you it as proof of concept of remote sound transmission."