She would yell after him that he is an absolute twit, except that when she tries to yell, what comes out is an honestly terrifying hissing noise.

Okay. Unlike some people, Iris is aware that swans can fly. How about she tries that first?

...getting off the ground proves to be more difficult than anticipated. It's not that she can't do it. She can totally do it. But unlike walking, which she has been doing for years, flying is kind of a fundamentally alien enterprise. There's all these... wing movements, and things. She begins to suspect that the other swans are laughing at her.

Fine, she's not good at flying. She's a human, give her a break. She should be coming at this from a human angle.

Fences have gates. Gates have locks. Or they don't, in which case this exercise just got a whole lot easier.

What does the lock situation on this particular gate look like, exactly?

"Lock" is a rather charitable descriptor in this case; the gate is mostly ornamental, and the gardens are designed for nobles to be able to wander around as they please. There's a wrought iron bar on a rotating hinge that's fitted into a hook on the other side of the gate that is better described as a "latch" than a "lock". 

That sure looks like an object she could grab with her beak if she stuck her head through this gap between the bars!

When she attempts to do so, the two bars she is attempting to stick her head through glow purple, and whatever part of her is passing through the plane of the fence feels like it's on fire. 

Additionally, though it acts more like a curtain than a solid barrier, if she tries to force her neck through anyways, there is a lot of resistance, which increases the more she tries to push through, and she likely doesn't have the strength to push more than an inch or so through the bars.  

Well then. Well. Then.

She tries a couple more times, never quite managing to achieve the right leverage with her phantom-burning beak.

What's her first lesson here, again? Think like a human.

She grabs a stick off the ground and shoves that through the bars to try to lever up the latch.

The stick passes through the bars without any resistance or purple glow. 

The stick has a disadvantage over her beak in that she has much less control over it given that she is rather unused to her new body. But even so, it is not a difficult feat for her to use it to lift up the latch and pull the gate inward enough that it doesn't just re-latch when she shifts the stick in one direction or another so that the bar accidentally falls back down. 

It would be really convenient to have hands. She misses having hands.

But she's not about to let that stop her. Fine, the gate is ajar now. Will it set her on imaginary fire again if she tries to lever it a little farther open using the same stick and then wiggle through the gap?

If she brushes up against the gate or the fence itself, any part of her that tries to pass through the physical gate or the rest of the fence will set her on imaginary purple fire. 

But she can pass through the opened gate just fine. 

That's good enough for her.

She gives her wings a little shake, sort of the same way she would resettle her skirts after jumping down out of a tree, and tosses the stick at the gate and sets off for the gardens at a determined waddle. Picking the lock on the garden shed is probably a lost cause with no hands, so the secret passage she was aiming for is out. If she wants to spy on the main entrance... she should hide in the rose gardens, actually, she can think of several spots where a bird her size could sit unobtrusively in the shade and have a good view of arriving visitors if she pokes her neck through the hedge.

A gardener squints confusedly at her as she makes her way through the grounds, but beyond that there are no further obstacles to her goal, and she reaches the rose garden without incident. 

Note to self, bake cookies for the groundskeepers at some point once this is all over. They deserve none of this. Hopefully reports of strangely behaved swans will not make their way to Reed's ears; it's not like he ever listens to anyone anyway, really, especially not the servants.

In the meantime, she tucks herself into a cozy spot underneath a hedge, with a nice view of the front gate, and settles in to wait for the guests to arrive.

She'll have to wait there for a little while, but before long a pair of carriages and a short baggage train rounds the corner, guarded by a score of men on horseback in a precise formation, their immaculate dress uniforms glittering in the last golden remnants of sunrise. Iris should be able to recognize the sigil of Autumn Hills on the lapels of the guardsmen, though it is much more obvious on the sides of the carriages themselves. 

It might be somewhat difficult to hear over the sound of hoofbeats, but there's a conversation happening inside the first carriage, the one rather more ornately adorned than the other. 

She stretches her neck out a little farther, to the point where her beak is almost poking between the leaves. Almost but not quite. It wouldn't do to be spotted.

Sitting as still as she possibly can, leaning as close as she possibly can, listening as hard as she possibly can, she... can't quite catch the words, only the voices. Maybe when the carriage rolls a little closer...

"...should be adequate," says the alarmingly lovely voice of Princess Nightingale of the Autumn Hills. "We'll see."

"Are... are you sure, Nightingale?" replies a slightly worried and whinging male voice. "After we were told, the um, leak in the guest quarters, was finally repaired for real four months ago, um, I think I still might be worried about, um, water damage? Are you sure we shouldn't wait a year to make sure, um, all the curtains have dried out? There are so many things that could go wrong if the curtains are too wet. We could stand to lose so much more than, um, our, um, royal outfits, if they get wet. Is there any reason for such urgency with, um, our state visit? Really, we don't want the curtains to be wet." 

"If the curtains are wet when we arrive, I suppose we'll just have to have them hung out to dry."

...Iris has SEVERAL questions.

1. What??

2. What are they talking about, because it definitely isn't curtains? Wait, is it her memory? Is she the curtains?

3. She has never heard anyone discuss drying damp curtains in a tone of such veiled menace before and she is both impressed and disturbed.

4. Who the fuck is Princess Nightingale? That's definitely her voice, you don't forget a voice like that, but Iris can't remember her sounding so terrifying before. Then again, Iris can't remember a lot of things. Probably the memory spells were to erase a friendship with the Prince of Golden Fields but (4a.) what if they were, instead, to erase her knowledge that Princess Nightingale goes around menacing the curtains?? Concerning.

5. What is she, a swan, going to do about all this, exactly?

"If... if you say so, Nightingale," the male voice replies in a just as worried but even more obsequious tone. It is, perhaps, unclear if he's worried about the curtains, or something else. 

"Oh, don't worry about it, Diamond," says a female voice. "You should know to just trust our clever daughter. She always knows what to do. I'm sure our state visit will go as planned, water damage or no."

"Thank you, Mother." A rustle as of someone leaning back in a comfortable seat with a great deal of skirt. "Fear not, Father, I'll see us through."

????

"If, if you say so, Nightingale," he says, with some resignation. "We're already in sight of the castle anyways, we could hardly turn back now, could we. No matter how wet the curtains are." 

The retinue continues by, and further conversation is now fully out of earshot, at least from where Iris is currently hidden. It will likely be a little while longer until the contingent from Golden Fields arrives. 

Okay. Think, Iris, think.

Princess Nightingale is engaged to Prince, what's his name, note to self: look up his name if you can't get your memory back, Prince Golden Fields. Princess Nightingale is talking about this visit using water damage to the curtains (note to self: cause some water damage to their curtains) as a sort of code for something else, something that got fixed four months ago, which is a pretty plausible timeline for when Iris's memories were erased. (Princess Nightingale's father is much worse at speaking in code than she is.)

It really does look like Nightingale is behind the memory thing, probably because Iris's friendship with Prince Definitely Has A Name was interfering with her engagement. At least, Iris really can't think of any other reason why Nightingale would want to erase such a friendship, unless maybe she's just the sort of person who does these things for fun. But making someone else's court wizard mess with their memories really isn't the sort of thing you do for fun. It's a pretty serious thing, suborning a court wizard. Not everyone even has a court wizard; they're very valuable and Iris must imagine they're closely watched for loyalty. On the other hand, maybe Reed has been solving more of his problems with memory spells than she thought... no, the book about pitfalls really did strongly imply that you can't use a memory spell to make someone forget something as specific as "all the reasons I seem disloyal". So how did he manage it? What has he been doing to Iris's parents? Are Iris's parents just idiots, is that the problem?

Or maybe it's something subtler. Maybe Nightingale is just manipulating events to make them come out her way, not outright paying Reed off to mess with Iris's head. Maybe she had her parents—her mom, probably, her dad seems pretty useless—talk to Iris's parents about how concerned they were that this friendship might get in the way of their budding alliance, and Iris's parents came up with the solution themselves.

...That's actually a really awful thought and she's gonna need a minute to chew on it before she gets back to trying to understand the situation.

While she is doing her best to understand the situation, the procession makes it the rest of the way to the gates of the palace. She can see the party (but not really hear, from this distance) be formally greeted there, after which the royal family of Autumn Hills and their retinue (and all their luggage) enter the palace and disappear into its hallways, while the horses and carriages are taken to the stables. 

Iris has another half-hour or so to think, as the sun slowly rises higher in the sky, reflecting beautifully over the Silver Lake's eponymous body of water, before the delegation from Golden Fields round the corner and are visible. 

This party is actually quite a bit more exuberant than the one from Autumn Hills -- depending on how well Iris remembers things (and she does remember the basics, despite the fact that most of her memories of the Spring Festival are full of bottomless yawning gaps with torn ragged edges that she couldn't fill in no matter how hard she tried) she may remember that much of the nobility of Golden Fields makes a yearly visit to Silver Lake for the Spring Festival, and they (and their maids and servants as well) enjoy the visit and the festivities immensely. There are several more carriages, and significantly more men and women on horseback milling about up and down the loose pack making their way slowly towards the gate, and quite a few of them can be heard chattering gaily. 

If she listens closely, she might hear a few snippets of a voice that is wholly unfamiliar but still sends a bit of a shiver down her spine, a voice that makes her feel warm and happy, even if she cannot place it at all.