"It does suit me."

...

"Anyway, now that we've got that cleared up."

She looks at Promise again and says as an aside, "Feel free to ask clarifying questions if you're lost and don't want to be, by the way, I know the two of us talking is not the most externally comprehensible thing in the world and being from a different world probably doesn't help anything."

"It seems like I'm mostly missing personal stuff that's not any of my business rather than things I really need to know. I'd offer to leave but you may start discussing uses of fairy orders at any time."

"Monument has that fancy communication power if I want to address him privately. But yes, uses of fairy orders."

She looks thoughtful.

"Could you, if you had to, make someone who was having a breakdown act like they were fine and everything was normal? He's... not really a great actor, if that makes a difference."

"I can with sufficiently precise wording exert arbitrary control over voluntary actions but if his voice would crack or he'd tear up or something I can't do anything about that."

"Okay, so that's a potential practical issue with the 'force him to abdicate' plan, because he will absolutely be having a breakdown. More in the vein of rage than grief, I think."

"If he'd be genuinely unable to control his tone of voice, whatever."

"Yeah. So. We try to talk him into abdicating, and when we can't... mm. How applicable are fairy orders to the problem of imprisonment? We really can't afford for him to escape and sneak off somewhere and scrounge up an army and go to war with us, and it's going to be just about the only thing on his mind."

"They handle that very neatly and I learned from the best."

She glances at Monument, reads something in his posture or expression not visible to the unpracticed eye, and looks sympathetic.

"Okay. So we can imprison him. ...Are there any failure conditions for fairy orders? Do they wear off after a thousand years or something?"

"If it's name-based they wear off if I forget the vassal's name. More recent orders take full precedence. They are almost wholly governed by wording and not intent so I have to be careful."

"Mmm. Could be better, could be worse."

"...he would keep trying to escape for hundreds of years until it worked, wouldn't he," sighs Monument.

"Your father is a really inconvenient person."

He almost smiles.

"That's one way to put it."

"Fairies do routinely keep vassals for hundreds of years but I haven't actually done that."

"And, by implication, these fairies do eventually lose their vassals?"

"Forever is a long time."

"Yes. But if precedent suggests that we're going to keep hold of him for a few centuries and then he's going to get loose and go back to doing what he does best - that being, fuck everything up and torture people a lot - then we should really just kill him."

"It would be a lot harder for him to get loose without any other fairies around to rescind his orders, especially since it would mean I wouldn't update them often."

"Okay. If we can assume that other fairies aren't going to show up. Can we assume that?"

"I don't think we can. The danger to my people if they did..."

"Literally no fairies but me know that there are worlds other than Fairyland and the mortal world at all and that's been stable for millennia. Are you planning on lots of contact with Fairyland?"