Yellow smiles. "Put down the stick."

Azi really really does not like this.

She puts down the stick. What the hell. Why did she put down the stick.

"Follow me," he adds, lifting off into the air and settling to the forest floor a ways away.

Azi grabs Ru's arm to hold her back from following him, and then finds that both of them are following him.

Her heart is pounding. "Ru," she says. "I don't... I can't..."

"Are you okay?"

"Something's wrong," she whispers. "I don't think we should follow him."

"Okay," says Ru, and they keep following him. Ru looks mystified.

"You see," whispers Azi. "Have you read of any kind of demon like this?"

"No..."

They reach Yellow.

Nah, he keeps ahead of them. "Don't whisper. Tell me what you were saying."

Azi and Ru trip over each other answering.

"We were saying something is wrong, and we don't think we should follow you, and we were trying to figure out what kind of demon you are—"

"Azi said Ru, I don't, I can't, and I asked Are you okay, and—"

"Shush," he says, targeting Azi and letting Ru continue.

Ru repeats the conversation word for word.

Azi takes the opportunity to open her mouth and curse Yellow out very creatively out in dead silence.

"Are you being rude?" Yellow asks Azi.

She feels no compulsion to answer, which is very interesting. Does it have to be phrased as an order?

She still can't talk, so she shakes her head and puts on her dumb innocent slave girl expression.

That seems, for the moment, to satisfy him. He leads them on through the forest, walking in the densest parts but taking off for short bursts of flight when he has room. They're going around the edge of the lake.

Ru and Azi follow. Azi sticks very close to Ru. Her mind is whirling.

It is very obviously a bad idea to try to hit him with a rock, so she just does it quietly to herself inside her head.

For some reason he doesn't seem at all worried that they will do this.

Eventually they reach a little house, more sized for someone his size than a human's, though they can duck in when he leads them through the door.

"Pick nicknames for yourselves," he commands.

Ru thinks for long enough that Yellow might start getting impatient, then says, “Pei”—her younger sister’s name.

Azi can’t talk.

"You may state your nickname," Yellow says to Azi after Ru's given hers.

“Faruinezu,” says Azi. It’s Shou Cti for “Do whatever you want”.

"I'm not going to pick for you, come up with a real nickname."

Damn. It was worth a try.

”Sha,” she says, because it’s the Dazhan prince’s informal name and this is hilarious.

"Okay. I've got another vassal, she's called Promise, but she's out for now. You'll share her room, work that out with her when she gets back. Don't leave the house without permission."

They each perform a full court obeisance—traditionally, among palace slaves, performed to the cadence of any of a large variety of insult songs. Then Azi points to her mouth, hoping for full permission to speak.

"Don't be rude, but you may speak."

“Thank you for your graciousness,” says Azi, performing a quarter bow. She didn’t need the command not to be rude; she’s passing her snark off undetected since she was captured at fourteen. “May I ask if there is anything we may eat. Also, if you would be so generous as to inform us as to where we are, as we are strangers in this land and arrived by accident.”

"You're in Fairyland, in my house. Promise is out foraging now, but you can have some of this in the meantime." He pulls some of the leaves he gathered out of his bag and puts them on the table.

“Thank you for your graciousness,” says Azi, and bows again. “May we have permission also to go to the lake for water and for hygiene?”

"Don't drink the lake water, you can pour yourself cups of water to drink from the pitcher there, Promise purifies it," he says, gesturing at a glass pitcher on a counter. "There's an aperture to the lake over there that doesn't involve leaving the house."