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.
It is indeed not the park! It's a thicket very unlike the park, from one of whose bushes Sadde just emerged.
But she won't, of course. She just found a magic portal, what kind of person finds a magic portal and doesn't go exploring?
(The answer is the kind of person she is not. She is the kind of person who does go exploring.)
He does not make his presence known, and watches the small mortal from afar.
She finds a bush with some strange berries she's never seen before on it. She isn't hungry, but they sure look tasty, and she didn't get dessert-
"I wouldn't eat those if I were you," the blue person calls, emerging from his hiding spot.
"Why not?" she asks, looking up at where the sound came from startled.
"Mortals shouldn't eat fey food," he explains, flying down closer to her (but not within arm's reach—his or hers) and peering. "I'd always thought mortals were bigger."
She finally notices the little man and blinks at him. "Are you an angel?"
"I'm a what?" he asks, scratching his head.
"An angel," she repeats. "Dad says they're God's messengers, but—he never said they were blue."
"I don't know who that is," he says. "I'm a fairy."
"Fairies don't exist."
"...yes, we do."
"Oh," she says. Apparently that was convincing enough evidence as far as she's concerned. "Are all fairies blue?"
"No, only some. My kind of fairy is, and some others."
"How many kinds are there?"
The fairy finally lands, sitting cross-legged on the grass.
"There's a queen?" she asks, doing likewise.
"Yes. She knows everyone's names." He looks at her. "Well, maybe not yours."
"Why not?"
"You're not a fairy."
"Oh. How does she know everyone's names?"
"It's her magic. Do all mortals ask this many questions?"
"I don't think so, Dad says I ask too many questions for my own good. And adults don't like to answer all my questions. You're nice. What's your name?"
"I can't tell you my name!"
"Why not?"
"I don't want to be your vassal."
"What's a 'vassal'?"
He looks at her like she's an alien—well, like she's an alien who has never heard of vassals. "You don't know?" Pause. "What's your name?"
"I don't want to be a vassal!" she giggles.
"So you do know what it is!" he says, looking irritated.
"No, but I think it must be something bad."
He looks—completely bewildered.
She giggles.
"Are all mortals this confusing?"
"I'm not confusing!" she insists. "I just don't know all things. But I can't know all things if people won't tell me. It's why I ask questions."
"So... you really don't know what a vassal is? Don't mortals get each other's names?"
"Of course. How else would they call each other?"
"...with nicknames. Every fairy picks one. I'm Briar."
"Oh. I don't have a nickname. My name's really short."
"Well, I can't pick one for you."
"Why not?"
He folds his arms. He's becoming very frustrated with this mortal.
"I'm no good at nicknames, though."
"Well I'm not picking a nickname for you."
"Okay, then I won't have one."
"You can't not have one!"
"Can too!"
He sighs. "Mortals are very strange."
"No. I am strange. I'm weeeeird!"
...he snorts, and shakes his head. "That could be your nickname. Weird."
"Hmmaaaybe. I still don't know why I need one."
He scratches his head. "If someone has your name," he tries, slowly, "they can tell you to do things, and you have to do them."
"Why do I have to do them?"
"I don't know. You just do. You can't not do them."
"Well, Dad knows my name and he told me not to run away and I did it anyway."
He cocks his head. "Are you sure he knows your true name?"
"Of course he does, he was there when Mum chose it!"
"Chose—oh, right, I think I read that somewhere. All humans are breeders, right?"
"What are breeders?"
"Breeders are fairies that come from other fairies."
"But humans aren't fairies," she points out.
"But you come from other humans!"
"Yes. When a man and a woman love each other very much, and they are married, they pray to God and He makes the baby appear in the woman's belly where it grows until it can leave."
He makes a disgusted face. "That sounds very gruesome. What happens if a woman loves another woman very much? Or a man and another man? And what's being married?"
She pauses, clearly never having considered those possibilities before. She slowly explains what a marriage is while she thinks: "A marriage is when two people who love each other very much promise to God they will be together forever. And I don't know what happens when two men or two women love each other like that," she admits.
"Forever? Really? That's a very long time. Who is this god person everyone has to promise things to and ask things from?"
She once again finds herself faced with a question she's never asked. She crosses her arms and thinks. "Dad says God created everything and everyone, and He loves everyone very much and wants us to be happy and love Him a lot and be good," she finally says, satisfied with her answer.
"Really? I've never heard of him. Did he create fairyland too?"
She blinks and her eyes widen in sudden realisation. "We're in fairyland?"
"We're obviously not in the mortal world!" he retorts.
"Wow! That's so cool!"
"I know," he says, smugly. "But anyway. Did he?"
"Did who what?"
"Did god create fairyland?" he repeats patiently.
"Oh. I dunno."
"Oh."
"I could go back and ask Dad."
"Could you?"
"Yeah!" she says, jumping to her feet. "I'll be right back. Stay here!"
"Okay."
"Daaaad!" she calls, running back towards the playground.
Tobias is, indeed, nowhere in sight.
"I was in fairyland! I met a small blue fairy who didn't tell me his name because he didn't want to become my vassal and I didn't know what that was and he said that a vassal has to do everything the other person says and that would be bad so I didn't tell him my name and he said his nickname was Briar and I said I didn't have a nickname and he said I have to have over and I said I didn't and he asked where babies came from and I explained and does that mean some fairies don't have babies? And he asked if God made fairyland and I said I didn't know and I'd ask Dad."
"Fairyland doesn't exist," he says, coldly, "and inventing lies to evade blame does not become you, Sadde."
"Tobias—" Laura starts.
"Don't."
"It does too exist! And there was a fairy with blue skin and pointy ears and eight wings! I counted them!"
Laura sighs and squeezes Sadde.
"But Dad! Briar is waiting for me! I promised him I'd come back and tell him!"
"You're grounded," he says.
"But Dad!"
"No buts, we're going home."
Two weeks later, when Tobias isn't angry about it anymore, Sadde asks to go to the park again, and this time she brings a book—an illustrated version of Sleeping Beauty. She asks for paper and pencil and promises their parents she'll be right back. She brings them all to fairyland, and goes to the spot where she talked to the fairy.
"Briar?" she calls. "Briiiiaaaar!"
Silence. Not even birds.
She leaves the book on the ground, and writes a note on the paper, saying the book is for him and that a nasty curse will befall (she loves that word) anyone who isn't he that touches the book.
She puts a rock on the note so it won't fly away, and then goes back to the mortal world.
And a few days later, Briar passes by and notices the book and the note. He hmms, then returns home, where he finds a book (sadly lacking in pictures), and he leaves said book on the same spot Sadde left hers.
"Briar?" the boy tries.
Silence still.
He returns to the mortal world with his new book, sits down, and starts reading it.
Laura does.
Sadde seems very absorbed.
"What're you reading, baby?"
He looks up at her then down at his book again. "It's a book. It has lots of difficult words in it."
"Oh? What book is it? I don't recognise it."
"A friend gave it to me."
"What friend?"
"Bri..." He looks up at her again from the corner of his eye. "...an."
Tobias notices them taking and looks at them, interested.
"...here."
"I don't remember any Brians," she says, softly. "Is he here?"
"...no. He left the book for me."
"Sadde," she says, her tone turning serious. "Is this Brian an adult?"
He pauses and thinks. He looked like an adult, but he was very small. "I don't know," he admits.
"...you don't know?"
"No. He's very small?" he tries.
"Are you lying again, son?" Tobias asks.
"I'm not lying!" he insists. "It's just a book, you can look at it if you want!"
Laura takes it and reads some of it. She frowns, then asks, "Can you show me the place where you found this book?"
"Yes!" he says immediately. She'll believe him if she sees fairyland herself!
—doesn't come out the other way.
She tries following him-
"Welcome to fairyland!" he says, beaming, his arms spread out.
She looks around and—sits down. "Oh my God," she breathes.
"I told you it was real! And I bet we can find some fairies if we look."
"Sadde—" She looks around, standing up and dusting herself off in a daze.
"Ssshh! Don't say my name!" He looks around, scanning the dense thicket for fairies. "I'm... I'm... Mortal! And you're Mum."
Pause. "Okay," she says. "Where are we?"
"Fairyland!"
She sighs. "Okay. And we can go back the same way we came?"
"Yeah."
She takes Sadde's hand and starts walking.
The thicket becomes sparser and sparser, and suddenly it's dawn, and they can see a river with what appears to be an upside-down waterfall, the river going up rather than down. Farther away, a giant tower of crystal with colours shifting like flames. It is stunning.
And somewhat closer at hand—still about a twenty-minute hike on a grassy field—is a large five-story building with what appears from this distance to be the buzz of activity in and around it.
"Ooh, there must be fairies there! We should go check it out!"
"If what you told me is true, they may not be as friendly as your Briar," she says, recalling a lot of fiction and mythology involving fairies she has read about here and there and some fairly unsettling points in common amongst them.
"But they're fairies. Fairies are nice!"
"Not all of them."
"Oh. Why not?"
"Because not all people are nice, and fairies are people."
He continues shuffling towards the building, where the buzz of activity starts becoming clearer.
And eventually they are close enough that most of the fairies who can have noticed them.
"Mortals!"
"Two of them!"
"What are you doing here?"
"Are you lost?"
"What are your names?"
"Would you like some berries?"
"Would you like a candied dewdrop?"
"He's so tiny! I'd thought mortals were all big!"
So... many of them. Not that many, but they overwhelm, and maybe it's the way Laura's hand squeezes his but he suddenly looks scared and doesn't respond.
Until, that is, he spots someone he knows over there in front of the building. "Briar! Hi!"
Laura looks at her son and then at the direction he's looking at—
—only to see a small blue fairy startled by this, flying back into the building via a window.
Sadde lowers the hand he'd raised in a wave, frowning.
Until a soft, low voice, almost whispered, coming from the front of the building, asks, "What's this?" The fairies all fall silent, fluttering in a more subdued fashion, letting one other fairy have line of sight.
She's not old—no fairies are, physically—but that's not immediately obvious. Easily the tallest of them all, at almost six feet with short white hair and a thin, austere face that looks like it should be decorated by spectacles, and large wings shaped like a butterfly's but more leathery in texture, resembling white parchment. She is, in other words, what you would expect the stereotype of a librarian to be if given fairy form.
"Oh, mortals," she sighs as she flies towards them with a curious look on her face.
Laura meets the fairy halfway and they take the measure of each other. She feels—completely out of her depth, if she's honest. The only reason she didn't turn around and leave the moment the fairies noticed them was that she's pretty sure that'd actually be worse.
The fairy lands and peers at them, her gaze resting on Sadde's face. "Hmm."
Sadde wilts a bit and lowers his face, then blinks and looks up at her, defiantly. He's not scared!
The fairy smiles with the corner of her mouth and asks, "And what might your names be?"
No time to think of anything more elaborate than that.
The fairy's half-smile widens a bit. "No, they're not."
"They're not," Laura agrees mildly.
"Fairyland is not a good place for mortals." Her eyes turn a bit cruel. "Or at least, not for very long."
The other fairies titter.
"All in all, this is one of the better parts of it for you to be lost in."
"Interesting you should assume we're lost."
The fairy purses her lips, eyes glinting with amusement. "Be welcome to my library. Why don't you come in? I can offer you something to eat, to drink?"
Sadde perks up at the mention of a library.
"We've just eaten."
The fairy notices Sadde's interest. "You could have full access to the books here. Forever." For as long as you last. "Books about faraway places, stories, books about magic. All I want is your name."
"I don't want to be a vassal," he mumbles weakly, because he still doesn't really know what a vassal is and this nice fairy lady is offering him books. About magic.
"Baby," she warns.
The fairy disregards Laura completely. "You would see everything... know everything... All from here. You could learn much and more—"
"Did you know the Sun is a huge ball of fire?" he interrupts.
That completely breaks her stride. "What?" she asks, bewildered.
"Not really fire. Hydrogen. It's a tiny tiny element, the smallest of them all, and there's nu... nu..."
"...nuclear fusion?" she guesses.
"That! There's nuclear fusion going on all the time, and the hydrogen gets... like all together with other hydrogens and becomes all sorts of other elements!"
The fairy's interested despite herself, but hides it and says, "You're just making that up."
"I'm not!" he insists. "I saw it in a book! There was even a picture!"
"Books can lie to you," the fairy says, now completely failing to conceal her interest. The other fairies seem—surprised and quite interested by this turn of events. "And besides, what good would a picture of the sun do you? It's just a circle of light."
"No, it's not, but that's not in your books, is it?"
She furrows her brows and opens her mouth—
"But it is in ours."
She closes her mouth and cocks her head.
"And I'm sure we could reach an arrangement about that. We don't have books about magic, you don't have books about physics, so we'll trade."
"Sorcery doesn't work in the mortal world," she says. "What would you even want it for?"
She shrugs.
She starts circling them, weighing them with more seriousness and interest than before. "But why settle for only one thing? You could have it all. You could have your books there, and our books here, and you could be with us. All I would need is your name." She flies closer to Laura and holds her chin. "You're young, but I could keep you that way forever. I could make you look however you want."
"You must not want it very much," she says softly, "if you're willing to risk not getting it like that. You do not, of course, believe your orders would survive our trip back to the mortal world, and then, we'll have very little incentive to come back here, won't we?"
And Sadde will just stand there looking cute and proud of his Mum.
The fairy regards Laura coolly and doesn't say anything.
And without waiting for a response, she turns around and starts walking away, without looking over her shoulder, trying to exude a confidence she's not feeling.
The fairies will observe this in silence.
Laura won't look over her shoulder until they have reached the thicket, and then she will see they have not been followed and sag a bit.
"...Mum?"
She kneels by him and hugs him. "I will never," she promises, "let you get anywhere near them again."
He hugs her back, bewildered. "But... how am I gonna get books...?"
"I will get them for you," she promises.
"Okay... but why?"
"Let's just... go back to our world. I'll explain it when we're safe."
"Okay."
And she spends the evening and well into the night reading the book Sadde brought, confirming a few suspicions and fears and assuaging some others. Not many.
She returns there with a book on basic astronomy—no reason to go all out with anything very complex yet—and dodges various requests for her name and offerings of food. She brings her own, and throws out berries planted in her bag. A couple of fairies try following her to the gate after she has her book on sorcery, but she scares them with some vague but plausible-sounding threat about her safeguards on the mortal world. She and Sadde read the book, and don't practice any sorcery yet. They have a few things to do.
The next time she goes to fairyland, she has a water gun, a few syringes, and a spray bottle all loaded with fruit juice. She and Sadde spend the afternoon working on magic. Sadde gets distracted early, but they're four, it's understandable. There are admittedly not very many results at first.
This becomes a habit. The first thing Laura wants to learn to do is transmutation, because material scarcity is still a good source of wealth in the real world. Transmuting gold or precious stones and using them to leverage a profit seems like a reasonable starting point, even if it's somewhat far into the future.
Tobias' frustration with Sadde's genderfluidity mounts over time, and it soon becomes obvious that that won't be going away. Tobias becomes physically abusive of Sadde, at which point Laura gives up and divorces him. She's not entirely sure why she even married him, at this point—she feels like it's cliché to say "he's not the man I married," because she's pretty sure he still is, but she didn't know the man she married well enough to predict his reaction to having a queer kid.
She didn't know herself enough to predict her reaction to having a queer kid. It's unconditional love and support, it's learning and understanding. She cannot imagine ever abandoning her child, she cannot imagine not loving them completely, she cannot imagine her life without them, and they become as close to each other as possible, with implicit trust and complete openness about everything. Even as Tobias, well-positioned within their community, poisons their social well, they have each other, and Knutsford may be small but it's not that small.
Besides, they can't move anywhere, with the gate right there. Not until they learn how to create new gates.
They continue studying magic.
And eventually, after several years, Laura learns how to gate. She does it only a few weeks before Sadde does, but when that happens they move to London and create a gate to there, from somewhere else, more secluded and hidden. The next thing to learn is wards. That will take much longer, but what they've learnt of sorcery seems to imply that immortality is nowhere near impossible. This is just fine for both of them.
Laura still doesn't let Sadde go to the library or meet other fairies. She tells them everything she sees, and about what the fairies do and her interactions with them, and Sadde complains about not being let near them but agrees that minimising their exposure is a good idea. Sadde sees themself as an ace in Laura's sleeve, so to speak, and that's just fine by them. These visits are rare, anyway—they don't need to go until they've thoroughly exhausted whatever book they're using, and while by then they can use sorcery to effectively subsist without work, they decide not to spend literally all their free time in fairyland, even after Sadde argues their mother into letting them drop out of school.
And one day, Laura doesn't return from a trip to the library.
Her backpack has various tools she might need, and her belt does, too. She grabs the fingerless gloves with the rather ingenious device hidden in it, the dartblower, the small crossbow, and of course a couple of good old handguns.
And she goes through the gate out into the familiar field of changing flowers. Today they seem to be lillies, and it's dusk. She makes the trek to the library, which she hasn't done in years, but she has the map.
Fairyland as a whole seems quite oblivious to having eaten Sadde's mother.
She passes the solid lake, the rainbow rocks, the dry ice fountain, reaches the thicket, and then it's the library.
The fairies don't recognise her.
But they'll surely know about the mortal woman who comes by sometimes, and have they by any chance seen her?
- yeah, I saw her, says one.
"Where? D'you know where she went?"
"Yes," he says unhelpfully.
And of course her mother's been captured by someone. There's no other reason she wouldn't come back, and it's why Sadde came this prepared. "Where?"
"What's in it for me to tell you?" wonders the fairy.
"You offered the information, so you must have something in mind."
"I'd take your name for it."
"Why don't you give me yours so we're even?"
"I'm Yellow," says the yellow-haired fairy. Isn't he creative.
Naturally. "I'm Mortal," she retorts, using the equally uncreative one she made up fifteen years ago.
"Come on, your real name. We can tell the difference."
"How do I know you even have the information? You could just be fishing for an easy name."
"Suit yourself," shrugs Yellow. "Figure I didn't see the blonde with the funny bag and the blue pants, move on with your life."
"Okay, but how do I know you didn't take her, or, or you're just leading me on and won't actually tell?" She injects some hurt into her voice, time to look lost and broken and easy to convince...
Yellow smiles. "Does she know your name?"
"Of course—" Pause. "Okay, good point. But you still could be stringing me on," she says, trying to sound like she very dearly hopes he will convince her otherwise, come on, she wants to believe...
"If you don't think I know where she is then you don't have any reason to be scared if I go tell that person where you are," trills Yellow.
"Okay. ...do I have your word you'll tell me where she is after I give you my name?"
"Of course."
"...shake on it?" she asks, extending a hand.
"What does that mean?" he asks.
"It's a mortal thing. We shake hands, to indicate trust. You can't break an oath you shook on," she fibs.
"Huh," says Yellow, and he clasps hands with her.
"Stop."
He stops.
And she leaves the library.
She gets wary looks. Nobody bothers her.
"Warn me if anyone follows me or if there's anything you honestly believe I should know which will be relevant in the next five minutes," she says, and reaches inside her backpack for recharges for her cunning little device.
He's silent.
She walks in silence until they reach the edge of the thicket and starts looking around the place, gathering details. "Answer all my questions honestly with any and all details you think I might want. Do you know who took my mother?"
"Yes, it was one of Thorn's vassals, you're not getting her back," says Yellow.
"That's for me to decide. Who's Thorn, and why do you think I'm not getting her back?"
"Thorn is the master of a large court and he won't let an interesting mortal go."
"Hmm. What did you want to do with me when you had my name?"
"Didn't know yet. Figured you'd be good for something."
Sigh. "Is Thorn's court nearby?"
"Yes. About three hours' flight to the nearest satellite."
"...you have a funny definition of nearby but alright. What information can you give me about Thorn and his court?"
Yellow can give her lots of information about Thorn and his court! Thorn is a knifewing. He has the following high-ranking vassals. He trades vassals away sometimes and that's how Yellow has one but she wasn't an important vassal. He's pretty torturey. He collects sorcerers.
...she won't remember all of this, but it's interesting that Yellow has a vassal Thorn used to have. "Where is your vassal?"
"In my house."
"Lead me to your house, doing your best to fool your vassal into believing you captured me instead of the other way around, except when this includes anything you think I wouldn't approve of. If you have doubts about what I'd approve of, ask. I would not approve of you flying away from me to try to escape, for the record. If you have any more information you think I will find relevant about anything, tell me it."
"She's too smart to think I captured you under those constraints," he says, lifting off and flying slowly ahead of her.
"What do you suggest I do to fool her into thinking you captured me?"
"Don't make me ask you if you'd approve of something."
"Don't ask me if I'd approve of something in her presence, but if there's anything you predict you'd want to ask in her presence in the previous wording of this order, ask it now."
"May I have your name to tell her so she can command you subordinate to me?" asks Yellow sarcastically.
"...don't ever enforce any orders for me. My name's Sadde. What's her name?"
"Alisyrrabel."
"Duly noted. My current plan is to pretend to be your vassal to get to know her and see if she's..." She looks at Yellow with a raised eyebrow. "Terrible," she completes. "Anything else you can think of you might want to ask me or inform me of with that plan in mind?"
Yellow doesn't want to inform her of anything!
Ugh. "Anything else you think I would want you to ask or inform me of with that plan in mind?"
"She's a sorcerer. She's called Promise. She's pretty well-behaved."
"Thank you. Any other ways you can think of for my plan to fail?"
"When she has your name she can take complete control of the situation immediately if you don't give yourself away."
"Hmm. Why would she not have taken complete control of the situation immediately if you had in fact captured me?"
"She behaves better for me than Thorn. But I still think she'll notice you've got me."
"Why do you think so?"
"Because you're not very good at this."
"Yeah," she admits, because, well, she isn't. "But how is my not being very good at this going to influence the plan if it depends on you yourself acting as if you'd captured me?"
"I didn't have a plan for capturing you and now I haven't captured you so I have to pretend and it'll look weird."
...she sighs and shakes her head. "Alright, nevermind that plan, don't pretend you've captured me, I'm just gonna be honest and such."
No reply.
She considers letting him order her to be honest with him so they can have a conversation but—not a good idea. Nope. She'll be silent and be led.
It's a really fucking long walk. At one point they have to go around a wide lake.
"How much longer will it take?"
"I don't know, I don't walk this route."
"How long would it have taken flying, and can you carry me, and if so how long do you expect it to take that way?"
"Four and a half hours, no."
She looks around for somewhere secluded where she could stay mostly hidden.
Yellow can't lead her if she's not following; he lands.
"You don't need to lead me anymore, by the way, just help me find a good place nearby for me to stay mostly hidden."
He looks. Inefficiently.
She finds a little nook a ways from a small stream and shows it to Yellow. "What's the best way to get your vassal—Promise here?" she asks, taking in as much detail of her surrounding as she can: temperature, wind, light, time of day...
"I can fly there and order her here."
"Before performing these orders, listen to them all and then tell me how you expect this to fail, taking into account Promise's mentioned ingenuity, and wait for me to patch any holes needed. Fly there and order her here, taking no actions you do not honestly believe I would fully approve of, and come with her. If I'm not here when you return, wait with her until I'm back, once again taking no actions you do not honestly believe I would fully approve of, and extending that restriction to Promise herself. In particular, do not give Promise my name nor attempt to become her vassal by any means or to make her into my master in any way you might know how or she might devise, and do your best to respect the spirit of these orders as you honestly understand it, including preventing Promise from breaking it."
Maybe he doesn't expect it to fail.
She decides there's no such thing as too much paranoia. "Do you not see a way for this to fail, or did I unwittingly phrase this in such a way as to allow you to not tell me if you had?"
"I don't see a way for it to fail."
"In that case, perform the actions as described."
He flies away.
They'll be back in approximately nine hours, and she's quite sure something will go wrong, because of course it will. So she starts studying the harmonics of the area to see if she can make a gate to her place.
The harmonics are pretty bog standard for Fairyland.
And then: book, and throwing small things through the location of the gate every half hour until it settles or eight hours pass, whichever happens first, with pauses for nomming on the food she brought.
Yellow's estimate of his travel time was either not quite accurate or the other fairy is slower.
But eventually Yellow comes back. Looks like he's alone.
Her voice, however, comes from a somewhat hidden corner over there: "Stop!"
Yellow falls out of the air. There is a soft thumping noise.
She doesn't come out from wherever she's hiding, even though the sound may make it very obvious where she is.
Yellow does not answer her. Maybe it's because he was told to stop and the only order he's received since then was permission to breathe.
"I am not good at this, answer all my questions honestly and with all details you believe I might find relevant, where's Promise?"
"Here I think -"
"Here and invisible and if you're incompetent I strongly recommend for your own long-term benefit you let me go now. If you rescind my orders immediately I won't try to take Yellow or come after you later."
"My own long-term benefit is not what's at stake here, I take it Yellow didn't tell you anything, I rescind all orders given to you by any masters other than me, he told me you were Thorn's vassal, do you have any advice for trying to rescue someone else from him?"
"Wait for Thorn to get bored and get rid of them. Failing that, if it's a mortal, plan to sneak in, kill them, and then kill yourself."
By then she has reached the spot where they are, and she slumps onto the ground. "That's not an acceptable solution." She shakes her head and—" You've guessed, I suppose, but I have your name," she sighs. "I meant to pretend I'd been captured by Yellow to try to figure you out because I need help and he said you were too smart to be fooled by that so I asked him to bring you here." She hugs her legs and buries her face in her knees.
This isn't a question, so Promise can't answer it.
She recovers a little and says, "You may speak freely, but don't lie to me," without raising her head.
"You suck at this. Yellow's mediocre. I'm good but I hate you and you're not good enough to use me. Thorn's better, if he took a mortal friend of yours he probably already has your name, and if I were a fraction as sadistic as he is I would trade you all the intel I've got for my freedom but instead I'm telling you stay the fuck away."
"He didn't take my friend he took my mother, not that a fairy would even know what that means." Sigh. "Order me not to lie to you. Either of you."
"I can't order you," Promise says at the same time as Yellow says, "Don't lie to us."
"Okay, maybe now we can establish some measure of—of trust." She shakes her head. "My mother was captured by Thorn. We had plans, they involved me learning how to do this, how to craft good orders—later, but that was probably not a good idea in hindsight. I guess I was cocky, thought I'd be able to make this work on my own, but I am demonstrably not as good as I'd thought." She shakes her head again. "I don't wanna keep you, I don't wanna keep anyone, this system is terrible and I want to burn it to the ground, but you're a fairy and apparently good enough at this that you'd be useful. And I need to learn."
"Thorn caught me," says Promise. "I'm good because I learned from the best. If you don't want to keep me don't keep me. Don't enslave a stranger because you think she might be useful."
"And the alternative is, what? Let my mother be tortured to death by a sadistic fairy?" She grabs a small rock and throws it through the spot where the gate is, it's been a couple of hours.
No settle.
"...no. No I don't. But I think she'd rather he not have her, either, and I'm—" She shakes her head yet again. "I'm tired. I'm upset. I'm not in the best headspace to craft orders, I should've figured that out from the start and—waited. I dunno, maybe not, I wouldn't know where she was if I had waited." Sigh.
"You don't have to act like an evil fairy. Even fairies don't have to do that. If you don't want to keep me, don't keep me."
She winces. "But then I'll have nothing. Not even information. I don't wanna—I don't want to do anything, with either of you, I just want information, enough of it that I can—do it alone, somehow. It wouldn't be right of me to ask either of you to, to go up against Thorn. So I won't. All I want is enough information that I can—use my comparative advantage, I guess."
"You have already done something with us."
"Anything else, then. Because if I just rescind your orders—or, maybe, ask you how to best phrase that so that Yellow can't take you again—you'll fly away and I'll be alone here and have no way of saving my mother."
"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."
"...what will you do when I release you, then?"
"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."
"It matters," she mutters. "I'm sorry about your flashbacks."
"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.
"Tell me first anyway. I'm not in the mood for surprises."
"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.
"Why do you have two of it?"
"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."
"All right. Is that all you've got?"
"All of what?"
"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?"
"...yes."
"Well, that sounds inconvenient, then, doesn't it."
"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."
"Oh? How so?"
"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."
"Yes. Yes, he can."
"How will your mother find you if you go through your gate?"
"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."
"...And it can see invisible things?"
"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."
"No. I am terribly underprepared and terrible at this, I get it."
"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."
"Kinda, yeah. Which only means I can't give up."
"That's not what that means."
"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?"
"He plays things pretty conservatively on an intercourt level and doesn't have a history of operating in the mortal world. I can't think of any square kilometers he'd want to obliterate."
"I was just trying to give you a sense of scale. It's a treasure trove for any fairy that knows how to use it, even if somehow no fairy figured it out so far. Not to mention that the element of surprise would be completely gone, he'd become immune to what's basically the only shot I have at making this world a little bit less horrible."
Promise sighs.
"Did you do anything smart like, oh, have places to go set up in several distant locations in the mortal world that your mother doesn't know about?"
"Depends on how many you'd call 'several.' I have two."
"I was thinking, enough to spam gates so at least one of them will settle quick. Two is not that."
"No. Not that. Although, I mean, I could just pick a lot of places I don't personally own, the Earth is pretty big and has lots of those."
"Though then you've got gates standing open to a bunch of places..."
"Yes. But in any case the biggest hazard is informational, not material."
"Explain?"
"All the stuff we know about technology, the little things we developed or use like that and other traps or the dart blowers or guns or motion detectors or heat detectors, trackers and small cameras and earbuds and microphones, and we went out of our way not to actually plan anything yet with exactly this eventuality in mind but we weren't—paranoid—enough."
"I assure you fairies have heard of darts. The other things may be more of a factor."
"Not motion—and heat-activated dart-blowing traps they haven't, at least not as far as I've been able to determine. Which may admittedly not have been much."
"It seems disingenuous to call a thing motion-activated if it is in fact activated by only the sight of motion. I think Thorn has automatic dart traps but that's not how he got me, I'm piecing things together."
"Humans can't become invisible, normally. And does invisibility even hold up in the mortal realm? It might also be possible to use radars, can sorcery make one transparent to air?"
"Sorcery in general shreds in the mortal realm. And that sounds like it would make it hard to breathe."
"Then radars would probably work." She tries to raise her hand to wipe her eyes and realises she can only do that slowly, then asks, "Can you relax my orders a bit?"
"You may, in ways I am unlikely to find surprising or inconvenient, minding that I would find being touched inconvenient, move."
"I wouldn't," she says, wiping her face with her shirt (her gloves still containing hidden sharp bits). "I've—I'm not running on sheer panic anymore. Maybe I'm too tired for or of panic, or you served as an effective enough way to arrest my ill-advised momentum. Probably both."
"You wouldn't what?"
"Try to surprise or inconvenience you. For whatever unfathomable fairy reasons you're actually helping me instead of doing—whatever it is non-Thorn fairies do to their mortal vassals."
"Thorn's definitely worse than average but it is usually not very nice. And you had a lapse of judgment that lasted a few hours, it's not like Yellow who's had me, what, twenty years, and who if necessary I will handle much less politely than you."
"...thanks, I guess. What will you do with me? Not that there's even much point in my asking, I suppose."
"I'm trying to figure out how costly it is to help you."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? If it's just going to wind up with all of us in Thorn's court biting through our tongues and brute-forcing cube routes in our heads every time we have a disloyal thought I'm not going to do it, it's worth the risk assessment."
"No, why are you trying to help me. Why are you not, I don't know, flying away forever from the ter—from Thorn, turning me into a sparrow or a statue or—what's your angle? You didn't seem to think he'd use the kind of power getting access to human tech would give him."
"He might use some of it, I just don't think he'll obliterate several kilometers. You can't hurt me or oblige me to go about it stupidly so I may as well see if there's any hope to be had within the time window before he hears from someone that you caught Yellow. Anyway, I can't turn you into a sparrow, you have my name. I'm not sure that would even change if you wished to be a sparrow, it might still count."
"I wasn't gonna oblige you to do literally anything other than give me info which, well, it didn't occur to me that that might give you flashbacks, I'm sorry about that. And we don't actually have that much information yet, even, we need more."
"Look, do you want me to just step down your orders and leave you be? You seemed to have other priorities but I'm not holding you for my amusement."
She closes her eyes, trying to find words. "I've told you what I want, I'm trying to figure out what exactly I have so I can use it to get that. And at the same time I have to second-guess everything because you're still a member of a species of sadists. So I'm having a really hard time knowing how to begin explaining, because I don't know if I can even make you understand."
"We're not all the same."
She doesn't open her eyes, just hugs her knees and rests her face on them. "Fine. Here's where I'm coming from: species of sadists, member of." She gestures at Promise with one hand then hugs her knees again. "You've proven crafty enough that I am still more than half certain this is just some ploy, and I'm too physically and emotionally exhausted to even begin to guess what it could be, so of course that's very little evidence either way. And to you, a hundred years is a blink. I don't mean to dismiss what you've gone through, but in a thousand years it'll be little more than a half-remembered nightmare. In a thousand years I'll be dead if I'm lucky, way things are going. If I'm not, I'll be some fairy's pet, suffering some fate worse than death, without even the comforting thought that a thousand years after that it'll all be a memory. What's a temporary setback to a fairy is game over to me."
"I'm not even a hundred yet, probably. We don't start old. And a day is still a day."
"But after every one of your days there's another day." She raises her head, resting her chin on her knees now. "What's confusing you, here? I've outlined my goals—I'm still under orders not to lie, which I'd remind you you're not—and I'm not the kind of person who will just lie on my back and give up just because something's impossible. You're offering help? I'll take it, and worry about how that'll bite me in the arse when it does, because right now the alternative seems worse."
"Something seems to be confusing you; you asked 'why' and didn't seem to find my answers satisfactory and I'm not sure what me being immortal has to do with anything."
"It's not just your immortality, but that's part of it. The thing is that I still don't understand why you would help, or why you're—not Yellow, and I still expect something to give at some point. And I was trying to explain why I don't understand that and why I have the priorities I do."
"...Do I give the impression of being someone who wants Thorn to keep doing what he does forever? You think you might have an advantage that enables shutting him down. If you do I want to find out and since someone you care about is already caught I assumed you'd volunteer to help if we could come up with a real plan and then I wouldn't have to work alone or rely on slave labor except possibly a little of Yellow."
"You give me the impression that you want me to believe that you object to him and to slave labour, and this could be because you do but when it comes to fairies the background assumption is 'terrible' so I hope you'll excuse me if I don't fully trust we share the basic trait of altruism. That said, I am yes willing to help for the reasons you described, but the plan that comes to mind requires a little bit more of slave labour."
Promise sighs. "What plan comes to mind?"
"Subversion from the inside. In case orders actually work remotely via microphones and what-have-you, it sounds like the best idea, so that no one that doesn't already have access to his court needs to sneak in."
"So, suborn a court member, send them home before they're missed with airtight orders and hope Thorn doesn't notice... and from there?"
"Don't just release them. If orders do in fact work remotely, you can give them earbuds—little boxes this small that fit in ears and can transmit sound sent from somewhere else—and small microphones and cameras—which transmit image and sound to us—and we can use them to control vassals in Thorn's court without ever setting foot in it."
"If Thorn figures out we're doing that he can order us through the microphones."
"We don't strictly need them, then. We can even tell whoever that we're using microphones but keep them deactivated, to mislead. Or only one of us wears the feed and if the other notices the one was ordered they can countermand it immediately. Or we keep Yellow chanting 'I rescind all orders' in the background."
"Some combination of those strategies would likely do it. No one in the court has Thorn's name, even as a protective backup, as far as I know, so a mole only gets us so far."
"Then we apply more technology and mortal food," she says, turning her right palm up and using her left index and middle fingers to press the button there and reveal the hidden needle. "Or technology, sorcery, and mortal food. I'm hoping it will be possible to make it so cameras, microphones, and earbuds are all invisible and in the case of earbuds soundless past a certain distance. If we weave a wide enough web of moles, we can reach him and, and..." Pause. "Something. I don't know, I'm too tired to think, this is an old plan and would need to be adjusted for his resources."
"Food at one remove isn't very effective and every in-court attempt to subvert a new mole would be potentially very conspicuous. Mortal food probably works better under those conditions than fairy food would, even strongly claimed fairy food, but it's not a guarantee. We need to figure out a safe place or way to sleep, more immediately."
"I could try to open twenty gates to cities and find us a hotel room in one of them, I have my credit cards and my mother doesn't have access to my accounts," she says, momentarily forgetting she's talking to a fairy.
"What is a hotel room and what is a credit card?"
"...right. Hotels are buildings with lots of rooms whose owners let other people spend some time in them in exchange for money. Money is what humans use to trade instead of trading things for other things, basically a numeric value for things, and credit cards are one of the ways of transferring these numeric values to other people in exchange for goods and services."
"I've heard of money," Promise says. "This does leave a bunch of gates open but I'm not sure there's a way around that. Can you aim for somewhere sufficiently inconspicuous? I won't be invisible any more as soon as I step through."
"I... could aim for a few alleys I personally know in London, I don't know if 'an alley in Edinburgh' would work given that I've never actually been to Edinburgh even though I have a good mental image of where Edinburgh is and what alleys are like."
"And that's private enough that no one will notice me and Yellow there, or between there and the hotel?"
"Dark enough alleys at this time of night in that timezone, yes for the former, not necessarily for the latter but I could get like a coat or something. ...a roof might be a better idea still for the former, but not that much for the latter."
"My wings roll up under a coat all right, Yellow would have a harder time but it could still work."
"...I'm not sure where I'd get one, though. Might be useful for me to try to open a few gates in the USA, too, it's still early enough there that there are stores open."
"Okay. This is probably an anonymous enough location for gate spamming. If you think you can get us all to a safe place to sleep you may open as many gates as necessary to do that, though I recommend testing each before opening the next to avoid excess."
First pass: London and New York.
New York settles, London doesn't.
And: another alley in London?
"Which purpose does New York serve?"
"Coats. It's daytime there, much harder to hide you two."
"Treat Yellow's name with the same caution as mine and retain all orders regarding that caution for my name. If you intend to abandon the attempt to work with me, give me at least one hour's notice. Under the assumption that my priorities are to remain free, to oppose Thorn insofar as this does not interfere with remaining free, and to retain access to my resources except, if you decide to abandon the attempt to work with me, you, avoid sabotaging my goals. Do not touch me. If you have not given me notice about abandoning the attempt to work with me do not pursue any plan I have not had a leisurely opportunity to comment on or, in the case of an emergency situation, that seems in your best sincere judgment likely to optimize for my goals. With these constraints you may act."
"...I don't have Yellow's name. And I don't want it, unless you have a very compelling reason for me to get it. And anyway all of those things were things I was already going to do." She sighs and shakes her head and—has the second London gate settled yet? How about the first? "In any case I presume, then, that this is you suggesting I go to New York before trying another ten gates in various dark alleys and rooftops in London? And do you want to add an honesty order in there, to make sure I'm not lying to you? I'm not going to, but this is the one good use I can see out of this terrible system, is guaranteeing this kind of trust."
No more settlings have occurred.
"If you'd like me to be assured of your honesty you can come up with a wording for me to use, but I don't require it as a basic safety condition right now. Oh - what's your nickname?"
"I didn't, having his name wouldn't make him more my vassal than he already was and knowing it would make him a potential victim if I was captured. About the honesty order, it just sounds—productive, in a setting where two parties may not fully trust each other, to have this kind of order up. I'm not intending to lie or omit, it'd just be a token of good faith. And I've been going by Mortal." Which was originally due to lack of creativity but now has symbolic value—she is not a fairy, she is a mortal with everything that implies.
No settle.
Fourth alley? London's big and she knows many alleys but she's kinda running out of them, and in any case she'll need to, like, find a hotel or a hostel or something.
"All right. Do not lie to me unless intending the lie for an audience other than me, in which case clarify the lie to me privately at the earliest safe opportunity; do not tell me things in ways intended to get me to come to false or saliently incomplete conclusions, applying the same exception."
"Okay. Can I order you same? And gates settled, by the way, so I guess I'm gonna go get coats—any preferences? I don't know how tall you are by the way, you're still invisible—and this could take as long as an hour."
"I come up to your shoulder. And I'll think about it."
"...right. I'll go get coats, then."
"We'll wait."
Off she goes for coats, then, one for each fairy. Good thing she has an international credit card. Well, three.
Fairies wait. Promise sends Yellow foraging. They eat.
Sadde returns with two large enough coats a bit shy of an hour later.
"You should close that gate and any others that have settled," Promise says. It's not enforced.
She closes that one and—have any others settled?
One more London one.
Both are about equally close to small hotels, so she closes that and says, "Let's go to the mortal world, then?"
"Which coat is mine?"
She takes one from the plastic bag and hands it to—the air.
Yellow comes forward for the other.
"I should probably go first and book a room somewhere before coming to get you. ...I wonder if the walkie-talkie works through the gate."
"You didn't test that?"
"No, no one to test it with, the walkie-talkie has a maximum range and my mother's not supposed to know where my gate is and this'd be relevant information."
"Worth checking now, then," yawns Promise's voice.
She rescues the walkie-talkies from her backpack again, puts one on the floor, goes through the gate—no one there, dark and late, good—and tries speaking through it: "One two three testing." Then back again to fairyland.
"It spoke," Promise says.
"Good, that's even better than I'd expected, here, you speak to it by holding this button down and talking into these holes," she says, demonstrating as she speaks. "I'm gonna go through the gate, holding mine with my right hand, can you try to order me through it to come back holding it with my left hand?"
And once Mortal is through, "With the walkie-talkie in your left hand, return here."
"This is the best possible result," she says, waking up a little bit in excitement.
"It's encouraging," Promise agrees. "How long will it take you to get a hotel?"
"No more than another hour, probably more like half, I picked an alley reasonably close to this small cosy one near a park."
"Okay. I can stay awake that long."
"Good, I'll be right back." Off she goes, and she's back in less than forty minutes. "We're good to go, I got us two rooms with two beds each for a week."
"Thank you. Please, lead the way."
So she does. She closes any of the other two gates that may have settled and goes through the one. On the other side there's a not particularly clean alley that would be dark during the day—at three in the AM it's almost pitch black.
She looks exhausted, frazzled, timid, and like if any of those things try to interfere with her she will bite them.
(Yellow follows.)
She leads them to a small five-story building with for rooms per floor and a bored and sleepy receptionist on the ground floor.
Promise and Yellow do not attempt to interact with the receptionist.
Mortal leads them to the lift and presses the button to call it, and the doors open immediately. She steps into it.
Promise falls over when the elevator rises.
The lift opens to the third floor, and Mortal steps out.
Fairies follow her to the rooms.
They are next to each other, and are equipped with two beds, two bedside tables, a desk, a closet, a TV, and a medium-sized bathroom each. "Do you know how to operate the bathroom?"
Promise looks at it. "No," she concludes. "Also, do you have a strong preference about whether I put Yellow with you or me?"
She looks at him. "I feel very terrible about him being—like that—but you have twenty years' experience with him, you probably don't want him around and he probably deserves it." Assuming she's acting in good faith. "You can leave him with me. Anyway, that is a shower and that is a bath, you turn these things to produce water and you plug this hole to fill the bath with water, you can use that to wash yourself. This is shampoo, you can use it on your hair to clean it, and this is regular soap which you use elsewhere. That's a sink, you turn that thing to produce more water to wash your hands, that's a toilet, you probably won't need that."
"Thank you. Yellow gave me your name of his own will, if that makes you feel any better."
"It... makes me feel something. I don't know if the word I'd use is 'better.'"
And she goes to bed next door.
And she locks her own door and, likewise, crashes on the other bed. It takes a while for her to actually fall asleep, but then she's out, hoping nothing urgent will come up.
She will probably be up before Promise is.
He ignores Yellow and goes to the bathroom to take a shower and pick a change of clothes from his backpack and feel in general not as terrible as the previous day.
As long as he doesn't think much about it.
Then he returns to the room. Is Yellow up?
Yellow's awake and sitting up and reading the room service menu quizzically.
...he's not sure what he's supposed to do with the sadist in his room. But he won't go to Promise's room because she might be asleep and there aren't any emergencies around. Also he doesn't want to see her.
"It would be safe for us to eat this mortal food if you fed it to us," Yellow mentions.
"Do you want anything in particular from that menu?"
"I don't recognize any of the pictures. The plants are probably fine to eat."
"Everything there's, er, 'fine to eat.' I'm pretty sure."
"For mortals. I don't even know what some of these things could possibly be but the fruit looks like fruit."
He walks over to Yellow and offers a hand for the menu.
Yellow hands it over. Seems like his general not-very-interesting behavior has more to do with him not being very interesting than with him being under snug orders.
Mortal orders fruits and a salad and a fruit salad on the phone.
Yellow hides behind the bed when room service comes along. Room service provides plant foods.
Mortal accepts, thanking the person, and pulls up a chair, putting the food on the desk.
There's a knock on the door.
He takes Yellow's food then feeds Yellow it before opening the door.
It's Promise, in her coat, looking freshly showered and quite alert. "Hello. Oh, there's food."
He hadn't noticed she was hot. And of course that matters not at all, she's still a fairy and potentially made of evil, but. She's hot.
(And he knows a bit more about yesterday's feeling. He's not entirely sure he likes it.)
"So," she says, "now that I can run on something other than stress, do you want my help or do you want me to command you to give me a head start and then you can go back to doing whatever you were going to do sans me or Yellow?"
"I want all the help I can get," he says, offering her some food.
She bites a cherry tomato out of his hand neatly; no lip-to-finger contact. Chews. Does not seem impressed with the tomato's quality. Finds a hotel notepad and a pen on the nightstand, flutters over to it, picks them up. "So you have - walkie-talkies, needle gloves. Do you have or would you need to obtain microphones, earbuds, and cameras? What am I forgetting?"
"I have none of those in appropriately small, wireless, and discreet versions, I'd need to buy them. Darts, other ways of injecting fairies with fruit juice? Do sprays or gases work? Custom-design bullets with embedded food, or made of food, though that'd be lower distance. Er, bullets are these," he says, reaching inside his backpack for a handgun and removing its cartridge. "D'you know how guns work?"
"Inhalations mostly don't work. You would need to worry around a pollencloud; I'm not aware of any gases mortals produce that are sufficient. I do not know how guns work."
"They're like crossbows, only a hundred, maybe a thousand times faster, and they shoot these little metal things. Pretty guaranteed to disable a fairy for a while, I'm certain, depending on where it lands, and with the right design of gun and bullet it could inject them with food by splintering on contact. Bit flashy, though, I'm not sure sorcery could make them not hurt and the fairy'd notice the sheer momentum."
"Doesn't seem to offer much advantage over an invisible dart, does it?"
"Range and speed. It's a possible way to pick up a Thorn vassal, shoot them from enough of a distance that they can't notice it or react, then order them. Although I'm not sure how to order them, could sorcery make a speaker harder to destroy?"
"Probably, but I'm only a good sorcerer for my age, not particularly in general."
"And I'm nineteen. Still, if not for vassalisation, it's a pretty sure-fire way to disable a fairy for a few days, if shot through the head, probably. Grenades are a possibility, too, they're generally-short-range explosives, can provoke quite a lot of area of effect damage and also possibly vassalise multiple people at a time."
"Earlier it sounded like you were planning on infiltration, not a shooting war."
"I am, but I'm listing everything we have that might be relevant. The way this might be relevant would be if we already had enough moles that we only needed Thorn himself, that's a way to get him."
"Of the three of us the only one who can injure Thorn is Yellow, maybe."
"Yeah, I know." Pause. "How many levels of remove would it take to count as injuring Thorn, though? Would we be unable to leave or order someone to leave a hidden time bomb, or remote-activated bomb? Could one of those work if Yellow was the one activating it? Or some random mortal we asked?"
"As long as there's someone who isn't Thorn's vassal, or the vassal of anyone else in the line of fire, taking the last active step, it will work."
"Then it's a possibility."
"Will random mortals just activate bombs on your say-so?"
"Probably not, but if I hire someone to press a button somewhere without telling them what it does, maybe. And for more money I could do it even telling them what it does. And fifteen years with access to even very basic sorcery is enough to get a fair amount of money."
"I suppose you'd know what mortals would do." Write write.
"When it comes to darts, I think humans have made blowers that are much faster and more precise than fairies have. And it's possible to order some custom ones, though that might take time. Can sorcery make them not hurt? And more specifically, can you?"
"I can't."
"Hmm, okay, but you said Thorn collects sorcerers? Maybe one of them can. Are there any ways we're not thinking of of introducing foreign materials into fairies' bodies? Grenades, guns, darts, force-feeding, needles..."
"Snuck food, juice over the crops or in the prep stages."
"Snuck food, yeah, after we have some moles that might work. Not so sure about juice over the crops, wouldn't people notice? And wouldn't that take a bit too long? Although I suppose it wouldn't hurt if we did it and I got some unwitting vassals in case everything else goes wrong..."
"I don't know his food-checking procedures but it's possible anything could be noticed. What were you going to do with his court if you succeeded in taking it?"
"Save my Mum, rescue anyone currently being tortured in it, figure out a way to make him never torture anyone anymore, figure out what his vassals actually want out of life, I'd probably not be fit to actually rule a court and I'd be feeling absurdly terrible all the time, but on the other hand if I don't torture people and don't make them do things they would very strongly object to having a court is a good resource when it comes to getting rid of the Queen."
"What did you have in mind for getting rid of the Queen?"
"I didn't, yet. My mother and I made a point of not actually making any plans before we knew a lot more so that if we got captured we wouldn't immediately make their defences that much stronger. That said, I have entertained the idea of a mind virus for a while."
"A mind virus?"
"Some order phrased in such a way that people who heard it would feel compelled to make more people hear it and such that new fairies without it wouldn't be able to exploit their lack of masters, and whose content went something like 'don't order anyone who doesn't want to be ordered.'"
"That wouldn't do anything about the Queen unless you vassalized her."
"Right, that would be after I vassalised her. As for how to vassalise her, I don't know nearly enough about her defences and how her court's set up. The subversion from the inside thing still sounds like a solid meta-strategy, though."
"Maybe. Taking over Queenscourt is probably harder than taking Thorn's but might have less horrifying consequences for failure."
"Yeah. Anyway, any more good ideas for feeding people?"
"You don't need a thousand ideas, you need one which will work."
"Yes, but contingency plans are useful, he probably has lots of safeguards and the more alternatives we have the less likely we are to actually fail. Put another way, we don't actually know which one will work, and no plan survives contact with the enemy."
"All of these ideas will require prep, keeping things straight in our heads, and sneaking further equipment and supplies into the monitored areas."
"I'm not saying we should actually implement them all, but if we know what's at our disposal we'll be able to better choose what to actually deploy. For instance, I think we should probably if possible try to do the juice on crops thing regardless of what else we do because it passively gives us more resources."
"It's hard to verify, there's a lot of turnaround time, and if it's noticed he'll have his guard up. If he's nervous he's more than smart enough to switch to eating only berries straight off Sugar's antlers and stop personally going outside until he's found us."
"...point, so it's not an immediate yes. But still, my point is just, we gather the ideas we have until they stop coming easy and then only revisit them if it turns out the ones we do have can't make a workable plan."
"There are a few fairies in the court who will also have names, so if we get them we don't have to feed as many others. The torturers between them probably know almost everyone apart from Blossom and a couple of the other higher-ups who invariably get Thorn's personal attention if they make mistakes."
"Oh, yes, of course. If we could map out a web of master-vassal relationships we could use that to get all the way up to Thorn minimising the number of actual moles we need to manage..."
She flips a page on the notepad. "I don't know all of it, and some of this is guesswork, and it's been a while." Scribble scribble.
"Ideally we'd capture someone high enough that they'd have a more thorough view of that and who could disappear for long enough to give it to us. ...also wards and physical disposition of the court is a good idea, perhaps a logistical disposition as well, who usually goes where when and stuff."
"I don't have much about schedules and they'll have changed in twenty years. Nobody can disappear without being noticed within a few hours, though."
"One hour should probably be enough for a rough web of relationships, map, and a first mole, I think. What do you know? Outdated information is still better than what I have, at least to start. Like, do you know where exactly his court is? Something about the physical layout, where his vassals are likely to be... What were they even doing in that library, Yellow said it was three hours away from his court," he says, looking at Yellow at that last part.
"He has several sites, and I know where one of them is and how it's laid out, and have guesses about some more locations. Three hours is perfectly convenient transit time for a library; I don't know how many libraries you think there are. I assume they were there to borrow a book or renew their collateral or something."
"Several sites. Of course." He sighs and shakes his head. "Anyway, it sounds like quite a coincidence for one of his vassals to just happen to be visiting the library at the same time as my mother was, prepared to vassalise her. She only really used to visit the library once every several months, after we'd exhausted everything a book had to teach, and she wouldn't just give them her name, they'd have to force-feed her or dart her or what-have-you."
"It's possible he laid a trap for her but not that implausible that there would be a coincidence and an attack of opportunity. His sorcerers would be better than her and know the territory better, it wouldn't have to be a dart, any fairy food out of their hand would work."
"I will be really annoyed if I find out it was a coincidence."
"...Why is that worse?"
"It's not worse on any objective scale, it's just, emotionally, a coincidence is just pointless." He shakes his head again. "Never mind."
"It's more likely to have been a coincidence or they'd have caught you too, unless you reacted very quickly to her capture and they didn't know you existed."
"The only time I visited the library was fifteen years ago, when I was yea small, and I never visited fairyland when she was going to the library."
"Sure, but she knows you exist. You found Yellow and not one of Thorn's court."
"Yeah. I mean, I arrived there half an hour before she was supposed to be back. And if it had been a trap they wouldn't necessarily know to ask something that would reveal my existence immediately."
"Thorn is a big fan of questions like 'tell me what you're hoping I won't think to ask about'."
"And his vassals are, too?"
"One learns from him. One can't help it, and the vassals with permission to do things like go to the library in particular wouldn't try to help it."
Sigh. "But then wouldn't that have made them be waiting at the library regardless of whether it was a trap or coincidence? I mean, my mother doesn't actually know how long I'd wait until I went looking for her, that's one of the things we didn't tell each other, but..."
"There are reasons to be at a library that don't involve setting traps for anyone. They can and do make perfectly innocent excursions for books."
"Right but I mean, after they captured her, wouldn't they ask her about what she was hoping they didn't ask about, and then hear about me, and then wait for me? Although I guess it may not be obvious that she doesn't want them to ask about me because it's plausible that I go to fairyland..."
"They might've taken her back to the court before thoroughly questioning her - it'd be a mistake but mistakes happen - or she might have managed to prevent herself from speaking in some way that they couldn't reverse right there, or they decided not to commit resources to getting you until they had her more secure and there was only one of them present at the library then."
"The first two could've happened regardless of whether it was a trap—and I'm not sure this is a productive discussion."
"It's probably not. Regardless, they know about you and have her best estimate of what resources you'll be able to command getting her back and how likely you are to do that."
"...which means we should move fast. Very fast."
"No. They have more brains on the problem than we do and already know everything they want to know. Rushing does not improve our odds. Thinking long enough to come up with something your mother would not normally think of does."
"I don't know what my mother would normally think of, we never actually did discuss any plans, like I said. Which, well, is probably an advantage, but she might be able to reconstruct any plans I'd come up with. She has certainly thought of walkie-talkies and the like, maybe not moles with remote microphones and cameras in specific but it's not unimaginable she might."
"So you tell me more about what resources there are and I come up with something."
"Okay. Erm, microphones, almost arbitrarily small, same for cameras and earbuds or other kinds of speakers. Those might be a bit hard to find but throwing enough money at most problems tends to solve them here, so remote communication for any purpose is probably a nonissue. Humans are also really good at destroying things so anything that causes or requires anything to be destroyed should be easy to use. Vehicles, we have very fast vehicles, computers are probably not useful..."
"How fast? What's a computer?"
"Cars can get as fast as... I think three hundred kilometres per hour? Maybe more? They're usually not built for uneven terrain like fairyland's, cars built for that might not be very fast. Planes can fly at thousands of kilometres per hour but they can't actually stay still in the air, the have to be moving all the time. Helicopters can but they're conversely not very fast, not sure how fast exactly but I can look it up. Computers are machines that store and process information much better and faster than people do, if not as autonomously or complicatedly, and they can also be connected to each other and be used to communicate or share knowledge."
"Are mortals good at selectively destroying things? I assume you wouldn't have needed help - at least not from multiple fairies - if you could just obliterate everything but her. Maybe you'd need help finding her, and you'd need her orders rescinded."
"Selectively destroying, kinda, selectively not destroying, not very. Sniper rifles, for example, are a kind of incredibly precise gun with an incredibly long range. And people are working on computers and artificial intelligence that can do that better autonomously, like drones, but it'll still be a while before there's anything really useful. For that matter, drones, even non-autonomous ones, are a thing. They're machines that can be remotely controlled and fly and have cameras and microphones and sometimes speakers and could also be used to shoot things."
"Are these things all as simple to use as the walkie-talkie?"
"No. Guns require very good aim and training to use, especially specialised guns like sniper rifles, and those are also hard to get legally. Remotely controlled robots... are varyingly complex, the more things it can do and the better it can do them the harder and fiddlier they are to operate. But not necessarily too hard to learn fairly quickly, especially if we don't want military-grade stuff. Er, military's the branch of the government that deals with warfare."
"Is it hard to get things illegally?"
"Yes, but once again that's a problem that goes away if I throw enough money at it. I'd need some time to figure out just where to throw that money, though."
"Should I be assuming here money is an unlimited resource or just an abundant one?"
"...abundant. Let's go with abundant. Normally I'd say unlimited but we might be getting several things that start pushing said limit depending on what the plan turns out to be."
"Okay. The mole plan is not bad but I don't want to rely on extended inattention from Thorn, and any mole who is suspected of erratic behavior can be taken down even if we're constantly chanting in their ears - it takes a while to utter a sentence, whereas someone can burst their eardrums and convey written orders if they guess anything approaching the truth... Moles will not be able to deploy any destructive power up-hierarchy..."
"Destructive power up-hierachy?"
"You can't command someone to harm their master."
"Ah, right. Well, we don't need to rely on any mole extensively, we could keep one only until they gave us access to the next one on the web up to Thorn. Ideally we'd do this in the least pattern-changing way possible."
"What do you mean to do when you cease to 'keep one'? I don't even know mental sorcery, let alone know anybody there well enough to make them forget things."
"I mean, cease to actually order them to do things. We keep track of them, but if they're ordered well enough they can just return to their previous activities without any problems. Unless Thorn or someone else routinely orders them to tell if they've been vassalised by other people recently."
"Not in those words, no, but everyone's asked if there's anything he'd want to know and a lot of his vassals are psychologically loyal and would just tell."
"'Ordered well enough' ought to include 'do not tell Thorn,' but hmm, if he asks this all the time, whatever plan we come up with might need to itself succeed very fast once it starts."
"What? What'd I do?" asks Yellow.
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Actually, how did he get you, even?"
"Thorn or Yellow?"
"Yellow."
"Designed a hybrid plant," Yellow says.
"A hybrid plant."
"...could I trade something for my mother?"
"It took Thorn something like fifty years to be tired of trying to get me to cooperate with him. And he doesn't have that problem often."
Sigh. "Too good to hope for, I guess."
"Sometimes he works very fast. You should be prepared for the possibility that even acting freely your mother winds up on his side."
"...like, loyal to him?"
"Yes. Because he will ask, and when the answer is 'no, I hate you', then the result is unpleasant, and lying is not an option."
He nods curtly. "We will worry about that later. He needs to be stopped whether he has my mother or not."
Nod.
"Anyway, resources... It's kinda difficult to come up with things fairyland doesn't have which might be useful, I'm used to them. Anything related to spying people or detecting undetectable things is possible, I suppose. I mentioned motion detectors, there are heat detectors, and radars which work by emitting a very high frequency sound and analysing the sound that comes back. Radiation detectors exist but are probably not as useful."
"What's radiation?"
"Right. Er, it's this invisible thing that causes general damage and basically makes places unlivable. That bomb I mentioned that could obliterate a very large area also turns it inhabitable because of the high quantities of radiation released."
"Unlivable because...?"
"Because of the general damage. Might not be the case with fairies because you're all immortal and regenerate from anything, but radiation damages mortals' DNA, which is the thing inside our bodies that tells them how they should function, so they end up not functioning very well, with uncontrollable growth and internal tissue damage and stuff."
"Might or might not work on fairies, shouldn't rely on it."
"No, probably not, and in any case it'd kill my mother, and even more than that I don't want to hurt all those fairies and then possibly make Thorn respawn somewhere far away, I want to get him to stop doing the things he does and help his prisoners."
"Your mother is presumably in only one court site. But if it's that hard to control even more reason not to use it."
"It's impossible to control, like I said, mortals can do selective damage but not selective nondamage, the bomb will affect everyone within its radius."
"I'm not sure what distinction you're drawing between selective damage and selective nondamage."
"I can use something like a sniper rifle to pick out a single individual from a crowd, I cannot easily hurt everyone in a crowd with the exception of a single individual."
"Oh, are you a good shot?"
"...it was a generalised 'I,' I meant 'humans.' I'm a good enough shot with a handgun or a regular hunting rifle, Mum made sure I got training as soon as I turned eighteen, but I never used a sniper. And they're illegal."
"What does being eighteen have to do with anything?"
"It's the arbitrary age past which according to the law you are an adult and therefore allowed to make choices."
"Oh. Anyway, it would be conspicuous if someone fell over with a gunshot wound suddenly, people are seldom alone outside in the court."
"Yeah. I'm definitely not a good enough shot to take multiple fairies down after the first one warned them."
"It takes a while?"
"Need to aim, after taking one down I'd need to get the second one and they'd be moving about really fast, probably."
"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."
Sigh. "What's Thorn's? And—Blossom's, I think it was?"
"Thorn is a knifewing and I don't know what their thing is and Blossom's a dewflower and they heal fast."
"A knifewing. Named Thorn. He's basically Mr. Sadist McBadguy."
"It would be more incongruous if he were a patient mossy, yes."
"Yeah. Anyway, what other kind of thing might we need or find useful?"
"Not a useful search space," she says.
He closes his eyes to think.
"Can I have more food, please?"
"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.
"Yeah, the high-ranked ones are fast."
"Yeah then I think I'm all out of magical mortal resources."
"Magical?"
"It was hyperbole, mortals don't actually have magic."
"You made gates."
"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."
"That's why first look, so we'll know more about who to vassalise next..." Thoughtful pause. "I wonder if hypnosis works on fairies. And more importantly, if it's possible to order someone well enough that they can be suggestible to it."
"...Is this some kind of mental sorcery type thing...?"
"Nnnnoooot exactly. It's regular psychology, er, at least mortal psychology. A therapist or someone with appropriate training can make someone become very strongly suggestible, to the point that they can hallucinate vividly or believe something is hot that isn't or, relevantly, completely block off certain memories and believe other things instead."
"Do you know how to do that?"
"No. I don't know how much training's necessary, even, maybe not a lot but. What I know of it, though, is that it requires, or at least is vastly easier, with... trust? It's usually used for mental illness treatment, and the patient's supposed to want to be hypnotised, or at least be able to just let themself be guided by the hypnotist, and I'm not sure how much ordering someone can overcome their internal resistance to it."
"Orders cannot generate trust, or mental relaxation, although they can force people to attempt techniques that can generate those things."
"There are books about it, and perhaps better a Wikipedia page about it that might give us enough information on whether it's worth pursuing or not. Wikipedia is a sort of encyclopedia you can access using a computer."
"...Cool," is her opinion on Wikipedia.
"Very! And it's—" Pause. "I can nerd about Wikipedia and how great it is later. If we could make a Thorn vassal forget..." he trails off, reaching inside his backpack for a mortal contraption with a screen and various buttons.
"It'd be very promising, although they'd have to forget really thoroughly."
"I'm not sure how much of what I heard is true or fiction, but supposedly you can make someone completely block off a memory until a certain condition is met, like a word spoken or something. It's also supposed to be powerful enough to give the hypnotist master-like ordering abilities with absolutely zero magic." He starts typing into his contraption.
"Then why wouldn't fairies have heard of it? Is it new?"
He looks distracted by whatever's on his contraption, and takes a second to answer: "By fairy standards, maybe. Humans discovered it about a hundred years ago, apparently, and humans have more standardised ways of discovering things than fairies do."
"Yeah, that might be new enough, especially if it's rare and difficult. If it does rely on subject cooperation, though, we shouldn't count on it helping at all."
"It..." He reads some more. "May not rely on intrinsic subject cooperation? The techniques described here speak of focusing on stuff, relaxing muscles, paying strict attention to what someone's saying, stuff that's at least theoretically orderable?"
"Those things are orderable as long as the muscles are ones people have volitional control over."
"Yeah, it does say here one needs to be, like, relaxed and completely focused on the task at hand and not thinking about anything else... Which may not be a state of mind we could induce with orders."
"One can make someone think about, but not not think about, a subject with orders."
"But if they're ordered to focus exclusively on something? Or, suppose they were ordered to try to, to the best of their ability, cooperate with the hypnosis? Even in very stressful situations spending a while breathing deeply and such ought to calm people down, no?"
"Yeah, that might work, I don't know if it would work well enough. Thorn was good at filling up somebody's mind with only one thing, he liked to make us brute-force cube roots of large numbers, but there was usually a little ability to think around it... Most people can't actually volitionally concentrate wholly on a single thing very well."
He scrolls through the page some more and sighs. "Yeah, this kinda works best in a state that's almost like sleeping. There's a bunch of theories on how it works, and some people are more suggestible than others, but yeah, the idea's kinda just letting your mind follow the voice of the hypnotist until it leads you somewhere. I'm not sure if there's a safe way to test it."
"I doubt Yellow's a good example of a resistant mind and I didn't cave after some fifty years with Thorn so I'm probably an outlier in the wrong direction and neither of us knows how to do it so even if we assume fairy and mortal baseline is the same..."
"Not knowing how to do it may not be a strict problem because we could hire someone else, but yeah, this is probably not a resource worth looking into. It does say, here, that it never found military applications."
"And this is after a fashion the same rigor requirement."
"Yeah," he sighs. "So we can't count on having our vassals forget they've been captured, and each mole we plant will need to be watched reasonably constantly. Ideally we'd try to get someone high enough that they'd give us enough information for us to get a reasonable first-look at the web."
"Unfortunately, he collects sorcerers, and skill is correlated with how high up they are."
"Are the master-vassal relationships acyclic, do you think? That would make this severely harder."
"What do you mean by acyclic?"
"Like, if you start out with someone, then find out who their vassals are, and then who their vassals' vassals are, etc, you never get back to the person you started with. Or, if all people of a given rank know the names of some people of ranks below theirs but no people of ranks above theirs."
"The second thing is trivially true - nobody has Thorn's name, I am almost certain he doesn't even trust a backup somewhere for rescue orders; I think only he has Blossom; the other tiers have small cycles but probably nothing big, at least not that I know about."
"I mean, I don't need all people of a given rank to know some name from a rank above theirs, as long as some do, otherwise there'll have to be a lot more forceful vassalisation to do. The less force-feeding and darting and what-have-you we need to do, the better."
"The ranks aren't quite neat. There's Thorn, there's Blossom, there's a handful of best sorcerers, there's people with a lot of control over their site but none over other sites and people who move around..."
"So it may not be as hopeless, then." He stands up, stretches, and walks over to the window. "This plan, whatever-it-is, will need a lot of thinking on our feet and reacting to unexpected things so let's make sure to expect them as hard as we can." He turns around and leans against the all. "I think there are two questions we need to answer: how will we capture our first vassal, and once we've got moles high enough in his power structure how will we deal with Blossom and Thorn themselves?"
"Getting a name is ruled out both by court standard orders and by the fact that it normally requires already having someone's master or torture. So, food, delivered ideally to someone alone, vassalizing them to you and then promptly turned into a name for me and if we're using him Yellow. Because Thorn doesn't keep a backup to rescind his orders, as soon as we have him Blossom shouldn't present any further problem. Blossom will be incredibly difficult to control; if I'm good because I had fifty years in his court, she's had centuries as his most favored, and she adores him. We shouldn't try to go through her if we can possibly get him direct."
"...adores him. How does he even inspire loyalty? Is torturing everyone who works for you a very effective strategy for getting love amongst fairies?"
"Well, I don't adore him, but he makes it work a surprising fraction of the time. He can make you tell him how you feel, and he can make hating him hurt. ...It's also possible Blossom in particular's just a masochist."
A plan starts to slowly take shape. If no one has Thorn's name, the only avenue for vassalasing him is force-feeding, and given the sheer numbers and power on his side, that won't be happening easily. Which leaves them two avenues: overpowering him, or attacking him from an oblique angle. Overpowering him... is possible, but would require quite a lot of bootstrapping and more than anything quite a lot of time. So oblique angle it is. In practice, that means a trap.
(Mortal orders lunch and feeds Yellow and Promise.)
Thorn never leaves his court unescorted—that much Promise knows. And escorted, it's much harder to actually reach him and do anything, especially if he's on his guard, which he probably is. The situation his guard'll be lowest will be, in all likelihood, inside his courts, where his various wards and vassals would cause him to believe himself safe. No one can get in without his permission, so the basic skeleton of the plan will be to coordinate enough vassals that they'll be able to plant a trap somewhere Thorn won't be expecting. And this will all, naturally, have to be done remotely.
"...that raises an interesting few questions, I think."
"Such as?"
"Well the main one is 'how to avoid being ordered if someone finds out what we're up to' but what branches off from that is figuring out how exactly ordering interacts with technology. And not even just technology, what if an order is written or mimed or mouthed?"
"Written works if you watch it being written, right then, but not afterwards even if you saw it when it was. You can order people to respond to gestures or their best guess at what you're not quite saying, but that counts as enacting the order to interpret that way, not as being newly enforced when you mime something."
"Hmm, what about sign language? Do you know sign language? Does sign language work with plain speak? I don't know sign language, this is probably not relevant..."
"We can understand sign but producing plain sign is - awkward, and uncommon even when it would be a good idea to be quiet and you have line of sight, it feels weird."
"Is it something Thorn might think of, to order us while we're monitoring?"
"Yes."
"Okay. Okay. Erm. We need to figure out ways in which this interacts with our monitoring equipment. First of all, can you plain sign at me? Or better, plain sign order me, two birds with one stone."
She makes a face, but signs at him. Turn 360º.
(Also feeling ~something~ at one other thing. He shouldn't be feeling that at one other thing. That other thing is not a thing he should be feeling things about. He would quite like his body to stop that, thank you very much.)
"Okay. It works," he says, keeping his voice steady. "Now..." He grabs his phone again, points its camera at Promise, then closes his eyes. "Can you sign-order me again? Or, sign-order my phone, I want to see if video recordings work."
Clap your hands once.
(Is Mortal starting to get a bit less glum and worried? He certainly seems to be enjoying this more than the previous twenty-four hours...)
Pat your head.
(He is not smiling. He is not. This is serious, scientific inquiry.)
"Again, now recording...?"
Tell me how many times you expect to need me to sign things.
"None here and now, we've tested what I've thought to test, but there might be a few more tests I'd like to run once we have access to more sophisticated tools," he answers instantly and completely, not even thinking about it. "Okay... so it's not about recording or not recording per se, and I suppose we could've guessed this from the fact that watching someone write on paper works. But on the other hand it's not about the literal source of the order either, since using a phone like a camera is equivalent to recording the order and then immediately displaying it. What is it about?"
"It being vanishingly unlikely in principle that the signal would be interrupted by any agent other than the master."
"Oh. That makes a lot of sense. Are you speculating, or is that really how it works?"
"As far as I know that's really how it works."
"So this suggests... a lot of stuff. What counts as vanishingly unlikely? Would a great distance count? Would this take relativistic effects into account? Perhaps having a computer actually record an order and then play it back? Or a delay? Maybe adding a middleperson..." He starts writing down these ideas on another page of the notepad where he's been sketching the plan.
"I don't know how unlikely because we don't have all this technology to muddy the waters in Fairyland. Distance doesn't do it, fairies with very good hearing or who can project their voices work at the appropriate ranges in the appropriate directions. I don't know what a relativistic effect is."
"Never mind, I'll explain it at some point if you want me to but it won't actually be relevant to our purposes. What about a great enough distance that the sound takes, say, five seconds to arrive there, for instance?"
"I don't know; I didn't know sound could take that long to travel."
"Sound travels at three hundred and forty metres per second—and I'm getting distracted again. Okay, so, maybe a delay could work, but I don't have the hardware to test it right now. But, hmmm... What if the means of communication is under someone's constant control? Like, say, suppose you were speaking an order into a walkie-talkie and Yellow were holding the button?"
"Then Yellow could cut me off, but he couldn't spoof my voice. Unless you did not mention a very important walkie-talkie feature. I'd expect it to work fine."
"He cannot spoof your voice with this walkie-talkie, but that's not impossible to do with other bits of tech. But didn't you say it was about it being vanishingly unlikely that the signal would be interrupted? If Yellow were holding the button he could interrupt it at any time."
"Interrupted meaning transformed by the interruption. Merely stopping an order just means it only takes effect up to the point where you stopped hearing it. With writing, for instance, if you watch it written and then you stop someone's hand before they finish a word it just won't work, and if you read something someone wrote and meant to enforce but it was a while ago, it won't work; but if you watch and they finish a verb you're bound by it. ...This is for writing in use as orders qua orders, not in use as an extension of 'obey writing in my hand' or something."
"Ah, I see. That... may or may not mean relativity doesn't affect it, but it seems like an artificial delay or it being recorded and then played back shortly after would work."
"Probably. Do you have the setup to test that?"
"Not to test the recording hypothesis with fine enough precision but the delay itself... hmm... I have an idea that'll take about half an hour to test, I'll need to go elsewhere to do it and you'll need to stay here with my phone, if that's okay? ...and your order means I need to explain it all in detail, erm, the idea is my using a computer elsewhere and then creating a videoconference with you so we can communicate remotely and then I'll artificially route it through a server in another continent so there's a delay."
"You may in general invite me to decline prolonged explanations of things if you think I will not particularly benefit from them." She hands over the keycard to the second room.
...you stop that at once.
"What d'you want me to do with that?" he asks, about the keycard.
"You said I needed to stay here with the phone and you needed to be somewhere else. Is the other room not far enough?"
"Oh. It is, but I don't have a computer with me, too heavy and wouldn't fit in my backpack, it'd slow me down. I'm gonna go to a cyber café and use a computer there. And anyway, I need to show you how to accept the call on the phone here."
"Oh." She takes the keycard back and looks attentively at the phone.
He opens the appropriate application and shows her how to navigate on it and where the call will appear and what she'll have to do to accept it.
Nod.
"Okay, so, er... I guess we'll talk again in a bit." And off he goes into the dangerous wilderness of mortal cities.
Fairies wait.
And after about twenty minutes the thing Mortal said would appear on the phone does, in fact, appear.
And Promise performs the sequence of phone actions.
"Hi! First test, not routing through anything, just regular millisecond transmission delay, let's try?"
"What things would be inconspicuous where you are?"
"Erm, anything that doesn't involve me leaving a two square metres cubicle and doesn't cause too much noise or destruction of property should be fine."
"Tap your nose."
"Okay, lemme see, I'll route this through Egypt, should give us something between a point one and point three seconds delay."
"Let me know when." Not enforced.
"Okay, let's try it now?"
She's running out of creative innocuous orders. "Tap your nose."
"Alright... Half a second, gonna route through Brazil."
He hangs up once more, then about two minutes later calls again.
And she tells him to tap his nose again.
"Okay, half a second seems to do it."
"Okay. So we can route our incoming transmissions through... Brazil... and they'll come slow enough that orders won't affect us and we won't have to cross our fingers and use Yellow for all of that."
"At the worst case yes, but this was a quick-and-dirty proof-of-concept, I can get order transmission artificially delayed using software once we've set up our headquarters with the monitoring equipment."
"We're setting up a headquarters. Okay. Where? How?"
"We are, I don't want to half-butt this. Also, talking with a half-second delay is annoying, I'm coming back to the hotel."
"Okay."
"Okay, so, headquarters, yes, we'll need a private place for the surveillance equipment, we don't know how many people we'll be vassalising and might need several monitors at the same time, though we should work to minimise this. I'm not sure whether it's best to headquarter in fairyland or here, though..."
"In fairyland we can use sorcery, but here we won't be bothered by extraneous fairies and you can - buy - things. Saves foraging time, probably also other time expenditures."
"Buying things is pretty good, yep, not to mention having internet access. But we'll also need to have gates open to a couple of points within fairyland, and if anyone finds these gates and decides to come after us, it might be best if we're in fairyland so we can close them instead of sitting ducks here. Maybe we could have a bidimensional HQ."
"That helps if we're found on the mortal world side but not if we're found on the Fairyland side, and we have much more limited mobility there than here because we have to travel through all the intervening space and you have to walk. Likely easier to track down if they're looking hard."
"Actually I'm thinking our fairyland version of HQ should be far, far away. I'm not going to be able to have everything we need for this plan for at least another month, and I think you could probably cover a lot of ground in that time, and it'd be very unlikely for them to find us then."
"Oh, if I'm going off to scout a Fairyland site and we have a month maybe I can get a cutting of my tree, that would be pretty safe."
"Your tree? I mean, sure, if you want, but what for?"
"People can't get into my tree if I don't want them to. If my tree's still there, I can grow another one somewhere else, and then they'd have to find it and be confident it was mine and that I was worth recapturing and burn it down, and that would give us warning to get a ways away in the mortal world."
"Reasonable," he agrees. "So, your tree will be the fairyland side of HQ, I'll find a place here to be the mortal world side of HQ, and we'll have gates open from your tree to other places here and from places here to appropriate places near Thorn's court for fast transportation."
"Okay. We might wind up needing Yellow, since Thorn probably doesn't have his name, but he's not really helpful to either of our immediate projects; do you want to keep him or should I bring him with me?"
It only occurs to him that he's maybe not completely opposed to this whole vassal business in principle after he's finished speaking, so it wasn't a lie when he said it, and he very very much does not want to tell Promise about this little exception in his brain.
"I can be rational about Yellow in a way I'd need a lot more work and time to get to be about Thorn or some of his court. I'm just wondering who he'll practically inconvenience more. Probably you; he's faster in the air than I am, won't actually slow me down."
"Again, up to you. Really. I don't mind either way."
"I'll take him," she says. "Where am I gating to once I have my new tree growing?"
"...good question. I don't know. If I don't have a place by the time you go off to do that you can just gate to the same place you arrived at."
"How am I supposed to know from there whether you have the place or not?"
"I should probably buy you a phone and teach you how to call me."
"That'll work even if I'm far away from the open gates?"
"I think in fairyland it won't work at all, except right next to open gates and even then not so sure, but the idea would be you stepping through and calling me there, I'll pick up no matter what time it is."
"This came up in response to the question about where I'm gating to once I have a new tree."
"Right, you'll have a phone, you'll gate to the same place we arrived here, you'll call me, I'll pick you up to show you the new place."
"Okay."
"Anyway, this was a detour from planning. We were talking about trapping his place—and for that matter, I'll probably have to hire a mortal to be Thorn's first master."
"You don't just already know plenty of mortals?"
"Er, yeah, why?"
"I'm just confused about why you're hiring one instead of picking a trustworthy one. Unless your mother already knows all the names of people you might pick."
"My mother doesn't, but I'd probably need to hire someone anyway, once we've got a trap set up we'll need to order Thorn as soon as he's darted and that could happen any time, so whoever will need to be around twenty-four-seven waiting for the right moment to call 'Say your name!' and most people won't just do that out of the goodness of their hearts. Especially if I don't tell them about the whole fairy business."
"If you say so. I wasn't clear that you could realistically avoid telling them about the whole fairy business."
"The less I tell people the more I'd have to pay them, probably, depending on how I set this up, but I can totally pay someone to stay around somewhere watching TV and browsing the internet all day while they wait for me to buzz them and ask them to say the order into a microphone."
"What are they going to think you're doing?"
Shrug. "The beauty of money is that I can totally ask people to do absolutely insane things from their point of view if I give them enough of it."
"...That doesn't answer my question."
"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."
"So you don't think they'll guess."
"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."
"Okay."
"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?"
"Some of them. Not all."
"Hmm, but probably better not to gamble anyway."
"You can mix juice."
"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."
"Whyso?"
"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."
"'Say your name then stop'?"
"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."
"I mean, she's in one specific court, and he has, how many?"
"I don't know exactly, more than five."
"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."
Nod.
"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?"
"...I have no idea how mortal languages work. They seem like a lot of bother, really."
"I have no idea how plain speak works, either," he shrugs. "Mortal languages string sounds together to form words, which have particular meanings. And some languages have single, short words for meanings that other languages need multiple words for. For instance, I wouldn't be surprised if there was some language out there that had a single, short word for the concept of 'lying convincingly' or something like that. And same thing for 'say your name' which in English is three words."
"I mean, I'm sure you could just hire someone who talks fast, that would have the same effect."
"Not the literal same effect, 'sayyournameandstop' takes a minimum amount of time to be comprehensibly said."
"...By all means find the mortal who can say that the fastest, however they go about doing it. And you can drop the 'and'."
"Wouldn't that allow him to stop before he said his name?"
"- I was imagining cutting in with 'stop' right when he finished saying his name but I guess you wouldn't know exactly when it ended automatically, let alone whoever you hire. 'And' is probably better though. Or 'then'."
"Yeah, 'sayyournamethenstop' is probably best. I wonder what he'd do if he got a stop order and then whatever precautions he has kicked in, if he doesn't have anyone to unorder him. That'd probably be pretty unpleasant."
"Not sure. He might have a backup and just do a really good job of seeming like he doesn't."
"What would happen to his court if he really didn't, though? If he were completely removed from the picture like that?"
"I'd expect it to fragment; Blossom could take substantial parts of it but not necessarily all of it before others made off with the rest. This assumes they're not well-ordered to fetch him back and reinstall him, though, which they probably are."
"No, I mean, if he were ordered to stop and then could hear no further orders. Presumably if we succeed we won't just remove him, his vassals would probably be only marginally better and the point is to eliminate horrible torture not just decentralise it."
"If he were just sort of stopped indefinitely I think Blossom would try to get him to safety and run the court for him until she could get a berrybush besides Sugar, or a mortal besides you or your mother. More likely the latter."
"...yyyeah I think the stop order should come after getting his name."
"It's possible we won't be able to hear his reply if he triggers something to make it hard to transmit orders."
"If you hear it you'll automatically know it's his name, right?"
"Yes. But only if I hear it. And for a fairy you need the whole thing, not just a syllable like can work for mortals."
"That's kinda ridiculously unfair," he comments. "But anyway, if we set up good microphones around the trap, there's software that can filter noise. More than one microphone, placed in different locations, will help with that, so even if we can't hear it then, we might be able to get it from a processed recording afterwards."
"I didn't invent the system," says Promise. "How does it filter noise?"
"Not totally sure, but I think the idea involves rejecting sound frequency bands, and finding certain patterns that correspond to speech, and matching them between the different sound sources."
"What makes you think plain speech sounds like what it looks for?"
"...well, theoretically the same thing works for all human languages and they vary a lot, but hmm, good point, we should test this. And actually if it sounds nothing at all like human speech that might make it easier to pick out, depending on how it goes."
"I don't know what it would sound like to a device, which presumably is neither a plain speaker nor a speaker of a mortal language in the right sense."
"No, it's not. And for that matter, it's kinda weird that it even works when recorded, I mean, did your magic speech also enchant my phone?"
"...I doubt it?"
"So how come I still understood what you said when I was playing it back there? Shouldn't I have heard whatever gibberish you're actually saying?"
"I'm not doing magic to your ears," she says. "I'm just talking and you understand me. The phone transmits sound, so you can hear me talking through it, and you can understand me."
"...that's. That's pretty much magic. It's not the same magic as sorcery or the ordering business, but being automatically understood by whoever hears you is not a thing the regular laws of physics really allow."
"I didn't say it wasn't magic, I said I'm not doing anything to your ears."
"Well, what are you doing the magic to, then? Where is the magic?"
"I don't know. I just talk. It works in writing too, though, even if all there is is paper and ink, you'd be able to read what I wrote."
"Argh," he says eloquently.
Shrug.
"Okay, I'll need to run your voice through software and hire someone who knows more about this in case the software can't do it automatically. And it might be best to record Yellow, as well, to see if your plain speeches are similar and what can be derived from that."
"Sure. Before or after I go plant a new tree?"
"I'll record it now with my phone, and run it through stuff while you're doing that and I'm setting the mortal side of things up."
"Okay. Anything else that should be handled before I go?"
"Hmmm, nothing springs to mind."
"Okay. So I need a phone, and then Yellow and I will go take a cutting of my tree and assuming we don't get caught doing that I'll find a new place to put it and grow it until we can all fit inside and gate from the interior of the tree to the same place the gate that got us here is."
"Yeah. Might be ideal for you to come back here and tell me once you got the cutting so I know you're alright?"
"My tree's not very near the place. I could send you Yellow then, maybe."
"You could make another gate here? By the way, how long do you expect to take to get there?"
"I can get to the tree in a few days - are you expecting to need to physically transport any mortals to Thorn's court? If you don't I want to put it well away from there, within day trip distance but not so close he could notice easily."
"I don't expect to physically transport any mortals to Thorn's court, but we'll need to transport trap materials. And, why day trip distance?"
"Someone may notice I've moved in, he might hear about it. Less likely to happen in the relevant time frame the farther away I am. Are the materials going to be too heavy to fly with?"
"No, not that heavy, but I mean, why not like a week trip distance? Or half a month?"
"So I don't have to sleep on the way, delivering things, and spend time asleep, outside my tree, without a gate ready, near the court."
"...I'm confused about the logistics and I think we're miscommunicating. What I'm picturing here is we'll make a gate somewhere near Thorn's court to a safe place here, which will be how we'll transport our gear, and then there'll be another gate very far away from Thorn's court, in your new tree, that opens to a different safe place here, one that'll be our proper HQ, and a third gate from your new tree or somewhere around it to the first safe place so we can go there if we need to."
"Oh, I see. Yeah, that works. Then I can put my tree really far away."
"Yup, really far away from Thorn is the best idea. And the gate near Thorn's court doesn't need to be made now, either, we already have the one we came through that's a few hours from him and we can use that once stuff on my end's done."
"A few hours flying. It'd take you longer to hike it."
"Well, yes, presumably one of you would do it while invisible. And we still need to figure out how exactly we'll capture our first vassal and how that'll fail and so on so forth so we can know where to put that gate anyway."
Nod.
"I'm thinking we might nab one of the lower-ranked fairies when they're not around powerful sorcerers, as a first step in the ladder."
"Dangerous. They can leak as much as anyone can and don't gain us as much."
"But on the other hand more powerful sorcerers are more likely to give us trouble... Well, I suppose you can order them well enough."
"I can maybe order them well enough. They've all had my same 'education'."
"...right. Do you know how the internal dynamics of his courts work? You mentioned ranks aren't set in stone and stuff, there might be some sweet spot of rank and accessibility, someone who's high enough to give us access to a place where we can trap Thorn but low enough that we'll be able to properly capture them if we need to."
"Nothing comes to mind. Like - anyone could be sent to the torturers if Thorn didn't want to attend to them personally, but the torturers don't get to go around ordering anyone around and it would be obvious if one were wandering outside their rooms, and they know some names but other people are just ordered to obey them. They're hard to rank; they have a fair number of names but few privileges in using them."
"How much freedom of his court did you have when under him?"
"Depended on what he was trying to get me broken in. At most I'd be allowed to go to the court library and study, or do sorcery he wanted done."
"But you didn't get to see the social dynamics? Who came and who went, how often, who did what, should I stop asking questions?"
"I heard things. I saw some things. I was his project, he didn't keep me in a cupboard. But I don't know as much as a more cooperative vassal would have picked up."
"Okay, so, what can you tell me about power and stuff in there? How many people would usually stay around the court, how many were permanent—do people travel often between courts? That would maybe be a prime situation to capture someone."
"There's regular messengers, delivering things and information. You could get one of those, maybe, they travel alone... They're not good sources of names but they can move around pretty freely."
"They travel alone?"
"Yes. I mean, maybe not right now, if Thorn's being paranoid about you based on your mother's information."
"I... don't know if my mother would necessarily presume I'd try to capture a messenger, but having messengers go here and there all on their lonesome by default... Are the paths between his courts warded? Because even if he sends more fairies it's probably possible to overwhelm them there."
"They don't travel along roads, and they're fast," she says. "The paths aren't warded, they just usually don't have to worry about an ambush - they're not on a predictable schedule and it's genuinely very rare for a food claim on a fairy to get anywhere - half the reason he wanted me is that leaflets get strong food claims on our trees - and they're forbidden to break under torture."
"But mortal food claims are something else entirely, we should probably assume he'll have strengthened his security there."
"Right. So they may be in pairs or with escorts, or armored, or traveling invisibly, or under heavy ward, and probably moving less often."
"Of these, armoured and under heavy ward are the biggest problems. Armour... I'm pretty sure we can deal with that, I think I've made it pretty clear that mortals are much better at destruction than varies in general, but wards are more your area of expertise than mine."
"There aren't any flawless wards, you can batter any of them down, but it'll give them a chance to react."
"But I mean, what sorts of wards could there be, what kind of battering would we need, etc. A special bullet could cut through armour easily, I'm not as sure about wards."
"I don't know what bullets can or can't do. By default the factor is time and not force, though."
"Bullets can be made to go through almost arbitrary materials, depending on thickness, can be made to explode on impact, that sort of thing. But basically what I want to know is: I set up a trap that detects invisible fairies and shoots them with something to vassalise them. How does the ward make that go wrong? And I realise there are many possible wards, but if there are general kinds and stuff..."
"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?"
"...I don't know, we don't have those, but it might well."
"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."
"Affect how you have to fly? How's that?"
"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?"
"Not literally, but that'll do it too."
"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?"