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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 thing you shot at them bounces off and they know something shot them and can destroy it."
"Would anything bounce off? Including, say, a bit of metal yea small travelling over four hundred metres per second?"
"Okay... How would we deal with that? Tech doesn't have solutions for sorcery, and I'm only nineteen and have only been doing magic since I was four. Properly, since I was five."
"I don't know how to break a ward either, he never deployed me for combat applications or infiltration or anything. It will disintegrate under enough - friction, is the usual term - so if you wore away at it with something they wouldn't notice somehow... anything stronger than a rainstorm will do it eventually."
"But if they're travelling from court to court under wards we wouldn't necessarily have that time, and trying and failing to disable them would show our hand. Are wards detectable?"
"Not directly. They affect how you have to fly - or do anything else - but if they're invisible then we can't look and see."
"You have to try to be more - compact, if you spread out it interferes."
"...okay, so there's some way to at least have a hunch that something's up. Friction, though, do you mean like physical friction?"
"That gives me some hope about bullets, then, though I might have to get creative about causing lots of friction on someone... If there's something we won't have it's time."
"I can do wards well enough for proof of concept, although mine won't be as good as once cast by a better sorcerer and he has those."
"Oh, good, that's much better than wild guessing. I take it the difference's only in how much 'friction' would be necessary to destroy them?"
"And whether there's a built in alarm or anything, I can't do those."
"...hm. Would this alarm be of the sort that makes sounds or that quietly lets Thorn or whoever know that the ward's been breached no matter the distance?"
"I'm not aware of alarms that work at the distance they'd have to if we get someone midway between courts. The Queen might have someone who can do that but I don't think Thorn does."
"But it would be the kind that would warn someone quietly in the background?"
"It could be, it could also be the loud kind, I'm saying the quiet warning kind won't reach half the distances between Thorn's courts."
"And you're sure enough of this that you don't think we ought to plan for the eventuality? Or, at least, sure enough that there's no way to plan for it that it'd be wasteful to?"
"I can't immediately think of a way to deal with an alarm that reached and I am pretty sure it wouldn't reach if we found a good ambush point."
"Okay." He breathes deeply. "So, assuming we've dealt with the wards and there was no alarm, how does this plan go wrong?"