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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.
"The shrug was the answer. I dunno what they'll think, and whatever it is is probably better than revealing stuff about fairies—for now."
"I am more than ninety-nine percent certain they won't guess. Magic doesn't exist, fairies are made-up, there's no such thing as fairyland, and whatever hypotheses they come up with to explain why I'm asking them to say random things into a microphone won't include vassalisation magic."
"So, I'll hire someone to pour juice into darts and then say random things—from their perspective—into a microphone, and we'll use them to get names from Thorn's vassal and the man himself. For that matter, would he have given his vassals our names?"
"Yeah, sure, but I'll still need the other mortal to be the one to give the 'stop' order in the first place. And in Thorn's case 'say your name' probably takes precedence even over that."
"Just in case he has some, I don't know, automatic trap or ward that activates as soon as he's ordered, or something goes wrong, it's more important that you and I have his name than that he doesn't do anything."
"He probably has those, and I bet they prevent him from hearing further orders. I guess you could justify either first."
"If we stop him first and then he can't hear any more orders, we won't actually have him, only whoever we hire will. If he gives us his name, we'll have him, but he will be able to do whatever."
"Yeah. And if we have him but we can't further order him his other vassals will still know our names if they do, or if he tells them. He works through intermediaries anyway... If he expects you to come after him he may have something set up to kill your mother if anything happens."
"Works if we get it all out. We'd have to hope to get him while he's in a different site from the one holding your mother so we'd have time to interrupt the information."
"We don't need to hope for it if we make it so. We'll lay the trap in some specific court, we can choose our ground, I think."
"Puts more constraints on the plan and leaves potentially longer for the moles to be discovered, but yes."
"So there's at most a seventeen percent chance that the site we end up with will be the one that contains her even a priori, it's not that big a constraint."
"But it just occurred to me—how does plainspeak work with other languages? Like, could I cram a longer order into a shorter amount of time if I used words in other languages that translated relevant concepts?"