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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.
"Some kinds can fly very quickly," she nods. "And there's kind magic to worry about, in addition to sorcery."
"Yeah, which can be pretty much anything. ...what's yours? And his?" he asks, gesturing at Yellow with his head.
"Leaflets are each immune to some very specific kind of sorcery, in my case name-learning magic. Yellow's a shore pixie and he can swim better than it looks like he ought to be able to."
"Thorn is a knifewing and I don't know what their thing is and Blossom's a dewflower and they heal fast."
He closes his eyes to think.
"Of course," he says, reaching for the food and offering it to her, his brows furrowed in thought.
Nom. Nom. Nom. (Still no contact with his fingers in the process.)
"Only thing I can come up with is armour, perhaps? Something to physically protect one's body from assault from darts or perhaps sorcery, although I expect sufficient sorcery to be able to deal."
"I don't think armor would interact with sorcery except maybe by making it harder to learn the target."
"Not bad, but I expect his sorcerers might be good enough to figure it out pretty quickly anyway?" he says, inflecting the sentence like a question.
"Mortals don't have magic on the mortal plane," he clarifies. "I've tried."
"Okay." She sighs. "I'm not seeing an obvious Thorn-proof plan with the described resources, which at least means whatever we come up with we'll have a decent chance of it being unexpected."
"Yeah. Okay, so, basic skeleton, we capture one of his vassals to get a first look at a web of master-vassal relationships, physical layout of his courts, wards, schedules, etc, then use that to get to Thorn?"
"One vassal won't know that much unless we get really lucky. I didn't know much even when I was actually in the court and even someone who's less of an attitude problem than me will know at most one site."