Drowning gets almost samey after long enough.
She floats limply under the lid of the tank, airless and aching and weak and everything but thirsty, and her wings are under too and can't breathe for her, and she drifts from minute to minute without bothering to open her eyes.
That lake is really fucking shiny.
And she's still invisible.
"Relevantly it means I can open and close the gate from either side instead of just this one."
And therefore she can easily be on the other side with it closed, right.
"I see."
"You obviously don't think fairy orders are too horrible to use ever or you wouldn't be inviting me to help at all and you could make me and you're not but I don't know if that's actually for ethical reasons or because it would be harder to make use of me if I were hostile and you haven't given up on not needing to do that yet - you seem very nice but -"
"I feel that fairy orders are too horrible to use ever, but I judge that in the case of the Wood mage I can't afford not to if I have the option, and in the case of my father the potential benefits are too great to ignore the possibility. If you do not agree to help then I do not have the option. Not only for ethical reasons but also because if I did that I would be unhappy enough to cease to function."
He shakes his head. "I have no reason to doubt you about that, and yet."
"They are pretty much never found by themselves, since there wouldn't be much point to ordering people to do things they were going to do anyway, but still."
He sits by his boat and tries to do something more useful than panic.
It would be very convenient if Promise's ethical opinions were such that rescuing her from Thorn and getting her her tree entitled the prince to one free assassination, that having exhibited an objection to strangers drowning other strangers and her being without something it took him a few seconds to fetch he could be safely issued a license to kill.
Her ethics are not thus, so she has to think.
What would have to be true for this to be an elaborate deception -
- for one thing he'd have to believe he wasn't actually obviously in the right, that his actual case was weak and he needed to make up for it with not even particularly lurid allusions to torture. He's not optimizing for sounding convincing or urgent, though.
That flash of horror when he rescinded her orders would have to be fake, composed very quickly, composed without knowing anything about her or even fairies in general besides that she'd been held by someone who hurt her -
It's possible he's a mindreader and lied about that to tailor his pitch but she was not exactly thinking very clearly when he originally rescued her so she couldn't have been originally filtered for the purpose even like that.
Okay, he's not lying; could he be wrong -? Unlikely; if his story is true-as-he-understands-it he was paying attention and he seems very - meticulous.
She writes herself in circles for a bit, decides to sleep on it, does that, wakes up, eats haws that taste like safety all alone in her very own tree -
- comes out and says, "I'll help you."
"Do you have a plan for finding out what if anything about the situation has changed since you were there?"
"I can use my communication power to ask my friend," he says. "She is the Wood mage's... project. Which puts her in a position to know a lot about what goes on at court."
"It is very unlikely that she wouldn't be there, but if she isn't, I don't have an alternative source of information. The best I could do in that scenario would be to guess where the Wood mage was likeliest to be and go there as quickly as possible."
"Are there any things I might not commonsensically know not to do which would cause you to order me?"
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