"It would be a new technique, those take time to invent."

"Noted. I think I still prefer to be overly cautious, though." 

Leareth gets to work on collecting books for her. Twenty works of fiction, none containing the names of gods or real still-living humans, can be scrounged up from nearby sites in the north within a day. For the rest he'll need to make a request from the Order of Astera, which will take longer. 

She doesn't want to fly all the way to and fro with twenty books at once. She takes a bundle of ten, and flies out, and comes back.

Nayoki dismisses all orders via Mindspeech every few minutes, which should work according to their tests, and then when Promise is on her way back, holds up a hand and gets Promise to pause ten yards from the Gate and looks at her with Mindhealing Sight to check for any new orders before ushering her through. 

She's clear.

Nayoki adds a verbal rescind-all-orders anyway as Promise comes through the Gate, mostly because she wants to be solidly in the habit of this, and then smiles at her. "Successful trip?" 

"Yes - the librarians were curious but I think have decided I'm more likely to come trade them more books on my own."

Nod. "If they did want to make you a vassal, how would they actually go about learning your name? Presumably you do not have it written down or anything stupid like that." 

"Well, last time it was tortured out of me."

Nayoki winces, but takes it pretty calmly. "Ah. ...If I order you not to give away your name even under torture, would that prevent it from working? We are checking in often enough that even if they try something, we ought to notice and be able to get you out within a candlemark. It would still be - awful - but if we could get you back still not vassaled..." 

"That would work as far as it goes. It's not impossible for a fairy on fairy food claim to work - most fairies would be too cautious to eat haws off my tree, for instance - but I didn't see anybody of a kind I know to have that kind of ability in the library."

"All right. Should I give you that order now? I suppose I would have to do a different wording, if we were using that method, to rescind all orders except that one..." 

"You could do 'I rescind others' orders'. A good wording would be, hm, 'do not communicate your name to any party by any means'."

Nayoki repeats this wording exactly, watching Promise's mind with her Mindhealing Sight. 

It drops into place like a snare trap.

"Good. One more precaution. What sort of books did you get today?" 

"A couple more sorcery books and some atlases and field guides and novels."

"I am sure Leareth will be very curious to see them! Though - what language are they actually written in, you can read anything but humans are not like that." 

"They're written in plain text just like how I talk."

"Huh. Can I see?" 

Promise hands her a novel.

Nayoki peers at it for a moment and then flips it open to the first page. Can she read it? 

Yup. Long ago and far away, in a Queenless land, there began a creekpearl, and he called himself Infinity, begins the book.

Weird. Nayoki squints at it, then touches the page with a finger and tries to trace the shape of the letters - is it normal writing, with an alphabet and all? 

It's not harder to trace than Promise's voice is to hear as sounds and it looks like her native language.