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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.
"All of your miraculous mortal contrivances that made you think you could fetch her out of Thorn's court."
"Not by a long shot. I can list everything I can think of that could be remotely relevant to this project but that would take a long time, I'm tired enough that I'll surely forget some things, and besides I didn't actually have a plan yet other than 'collect enough information to make a plan,' but human technology is versatile and unexpected enough by fairies according to what I've been able to determine that even after you've told me what you have I'm still confident I'd be able to find a way to at least rescue her, though it might have been easier to just come up with a way to take over his court entirely."
Promise sighs. "Have you got a gate settling there?" she asks, gesturing at the place Sadde's been throwing rocks.
"Yes, though not to the same places my or my mother's gates lead to in case Thorn's vassals are waiting for me there. I don't know where her gate leads to, and she doesn't know where mine does."
"Will she be able to find you in the mortal world any way other than by knowing where to expect you to appear?"
"My place has traps to capture fairies that might appear but they're not prepared to deal with Thorn's vassals or my mother herself. She can't disable them without me, though."
"Motion detector, darts with fruit juice, to disable it we need to each type one half of the password into a digital lock but if we don't the worst that will happen to us is being very inconvenienced by several punctures. It's not perfect, it now occurs to me that if Thorn had decided to make her gate to our place while I was still there and had not activated this I'd've been royally screwed, but."
"He may well have tried but even he can't force an instant settle. Anyway, he can just send her first and have her spring the trap until it's out of ammunition."
"We always met in front of our door, scheduling to do so at the same time when returning from fairyland. I have a mobile phone—that's like a walkie talkie but works over longer distances and is uniquely identified—and I would try to call her upon reaching the mortal world and she would do the same, in case we got held up. We had some contingencies if we got held up long enough, and I was acting on one of them. It might be a good idea for me to make another gate that leads somewhere other than my place, I wasn't really thinking very well when I made," she gestures, "that one. Still not thinking very well, but—better. More—focused."
"We are in the middle of nowhere, probably days from Yellow's house at your speed, farther from my tree, and can't go to any locations your mother knows to check. All of us are going to need sleep. Sleeping out here leaves you ridiculously vulnerable to snuck food even if we take shifts." Promise is still, perhaps demonstratively, invisible. "Do you have any mortal miracles for dealing with that?"
"I have a motion detector thingy in my bag that would wake me up immediately if it detected anything passing in front of it, and I was planning to find a hidden enough nook and use the thingy to wake me up, until the gate had settled and I could return."
"Probably not. Unless invisible things aren't invisible in infrared. I didn't have anything like a heat detector but might've been useful, and we were both working on wards."
"So it's not good enough if someone who wants to sneak you food takes the precaution of being invisible."
"I've got most of my need to harangue you about that out of my system, I'm just working through the problem. You're currently kind of screwed even if you give up on going after Thorn at all."
"What happens when Thorn gets information on just the kinds of things human technology is capable of out of my mother? Like, say, completely obliterating a few square kilometres of pretty much everything?"