Promise sits on the windowsill.

The prince looks at his hands as though searching them for signs of misery.

The prince's friend puts her clothes back on, ignoring stray smears of blood, and shakes her hair out and perches on the edge of the bed, well away from the small pile of dust that was once a Wood mage.

"So," she says. "What have we got? Magically enforced commands, invisibility, whatever you did to get rid of my leash, making people fall apart into little piles of dust - why did you do that in particular, out of all the ways you presumably could've killed her, not that I'm complaining—"

"My magical powers come in nine - elements, I suppose, of which one is epru, and that does erasing or lessening of things. If I had erased her completely it would have made a loud noise when the surrounding air leapt to fill the resulting void. So I... lessened some crucial things about her physical structure."

"Okay, and numbers two through nine?"

"Ileyi, creation, heat and light and sound and motion. Poetically 'Sun'. You'd like it. Rilte, reflection, to copy and alter and extend, poetically 'Moon'. Soryo, cycles and balances, dynamic stability over time, poetically 'Tide'. Tsaer, edges, boundaries, joining and separation. Beshenn, structure and permanence, resistance to change, poetically 'Ward'. Poai, poetically 'Life', mostly what you would expect from the name. Kiina, identity and personality, poetically 'Heart', mostly much less terrifying than you would expect from that description. Naharr, 'Chaos', theoretically capable of anything but prone to doing more than you asked it for and more dramatically the more you asked of it. Most of those three years were spent using ileyi and rilte to make a stone boat and then gradually turn it into a flying teleporting stone boat that can move between worlds, but the first half a year was spent constructing myself a form of immortality as complete and convenient as I could make it. The invisibility - and inaudibility, and a handful of other things - are Promise's magic, from her own world."

She turns her attention to Promise. "Invisibility, inaudibility - anything else broadly applicable to the situation at hand?"

"I don't know very much about the situation at hand. I could have healed you myself if I'd had longer to look at you. I gated us here. I can do lights," she does some lights, "and temperature and grow plants and turn people into animals and stuff."

"The current Emperor - I'm just going to nickname him 'Disaster' because he is one - will be much easier to deal with than Dusty over there in terms of direct danger, but much trickier in terms of political fallout." She glances at the prince and adds, "Things have been... not great... since you disappeared."

He winces slightly.

"The situation looks approximately like this: Disaster inspires almost no personal loyalty in anyone, and in fact most of the common people of the empire will be outright relieved if the prince openly usurps him, but it's not the greatest trend to continue and there will be opposition from members of the imperial court who like their fucked-up lifestyles and want to keep them. So ideally we go for something subtler than that. Magically enforced commands seem like a useful resource, but I'm not sure if they're a perfect solution, because if it becomes commonly known that you did that it sets an even worse precedent than a straight-up coup."

"This is nearly irrelevant by comparison but we make something of a point of abiding by self-chosen nicknames even of people we really really hate so I'm not going to call somebody 'Disaster' if he didn't call himself that and there's something else available."

"That's fair. Okay, my best guess at what he'd pick for himself is 'Power', and if he ends up in a position to disagree I'll happily switch. Back to politics: He's going to more or less have a meltdown when he realizes that his vanished son came back with the power to casually destroy him at any moment. Luckily for us, the first place he'll look when he inevitably tries to strike first is right there," she points to the pile of dust. "He has other mages but none of them are half as terrifying. So we can definitely afford to negotiate, I just don't have high hopes for Power being even slightly reasonable about how to respond to the change in circumstances."

"Yes, I made similar predictions," says the prince. "Our options include killing him immediately, trying to talk him into abdicating, forcing him to abdicate with fairy orders, imprisoning him with or without also transforming him into an animal..."

"I can't actually decide whether imprisonment or death floats better politically," she says, tapping her fingers on the bedspread. "Could go either way. I wish we had - anyone at all outside this room we could trust." Glancing at Promise, "I don't suppose you have a way to resurrect the dead?"

"I'm not actually confident it's impossible, fairies don't die at all so it probably hasn't been seriously tried, but I certainly don't know how or have a guess at how long it would take to develop."

"We'll come back to that, then. ...ooooh, I just had a really bad idea." Her tapping fingers go still for a moment, then she shakes her head. "We'll come back to that too. Okay. So we go find Power - I can do that part, it won't be remarkable to see me in the palace the way it would with the vanished prince or a mysterious winged woman - and we, what, grab him and flit off to a nice mountaintop and explain to him that he's completely fucked so he might as well play along and live? That'll go over so well."

"Is this one of those bad ideas that would be an excellent idea if it worked, which it is very unlikely to do?"

"That is exactly the kind of bad idea it is, yes."

"Then I'll trust your judgment about when and whether to suggest it. In the meantime, do we have a plan better than 'whisk my father off to a remote location and threaten him'? Because that does not seem like a very good plan."

"Well, don't look at me, I only know how this works in fairy courts."

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking," says the prince's friend. She glances over at the prince. "You need a real nickname, by the way, I actually can't bring myself to call you 'Prince' in casual conversation. I assume you haven't thought of anything better or you'd be using it. Something after a poem you like? That one book, you know the one - Rainchime, Lightfall?"

"How do you just pick those out of the air like that?" he wonders. "It's been days and I haven't thought of anything that good... hmm. I think I'll go with Monument."

"And I'll be Sunbeam."

"...six languages, a library's worth of literary references, and you went with that?" he asks, sounding faintly horrified.