Mira would rather have a fairy than not have a fairy. All else being equal. In fact, right at this moment she is particularly glad to have one rather than not. So why does the fairy have to be so infuriating?

"Will you keep protecting me from her?" Mira asks.

The fairy looks like an insect-winged cross between a child's drawing and a masterful sculpture of a person - proportioned wrong, colored wrong, sized wrong, but absolutely exquisitely sleek and luminous in every detail, like she was carved from yellow jade and is supposed to have her too-big eyes that far up on her face and meant to have legs that long and be three feet tall yet have fingers longer than Mira's own. And this isn't even, if Mira understands her correctly (only modestly likely), what she "really" looks like.

"Yes," says the fairy.

This is a straight answer. Straight answers can be trusted. Mira relaxes, partly.

"What about Chals?"

The fairy shrugs. "Promised you."

"He's important to me. He was important to Rinay too." Mira's not clear on how much referring to the fairy's prior human charge helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt. "Please."

"Breaking rules," trills the fairy. And she's starting to fidget, if you can call it fidgeting, bored or impatient or left the fairy equivalent of a teakettle boiling wherever she goes when she's not attending Mira. Her wings flicker out of existence for a moment, then come back in different colors. Blue and red becomes white and orange and pink.

"If you won't help me what am I supposed to do?" Kill her stepmother in her sleep? The fairy would then go to one of Kelsey's children by her first husband, in that case, and then the child would be furious, Mira doesn't have a plan for the perfect murder, she'd be caught. Hell, depending on how thoroughly Kelsey's fairy's magic wore off, Chals might turn her in himself. If it didn't wear off very thoroughly in a damn hurry he might outright kill Mira in revenge, she doesn't know, she can't predict him anymore.

"Hmmmmmm," says the fairy. There's an unpleasant buzz in the air while she thinks, and then she says, "Ask a human."

"Who?" She's not even sure Kelsey's technically broken the law. Fairies are a fuzzy area of jurisprudence. And if Kelsey were absolutely in the legal wrong, the person Mira would normally go to would be Chals, but.

"Oh! I know!" says the fairy, making as though to clap her hands but not quite connecting and making a sound like chirping frogs instead of an actual clap. "Here."

She waves her hand, a beat behind the actual magic she's doing, a signal that isn't made with an understanding of why there would be a signal.

Mira's outfit transforms into what is frankly a magically spectacular dress. Her boots disappear only to be replaced with the most staggeringly impractical glass heels of all time, she feels her hair restyling itself on her head, and when her fairy is in a mood like this she can only assume that there's makeup magic going on too. A gourd on the edge of the pumpkin patch swells and changes into a coach and nearby rodents are transformed into horses and a driver. (Mira remembers that she did in fact extract a straight answer from the fairy, once, years ago: she does not make people. This is a human-shaped magical automaton of some kind. When the fairy inevitably elects to destroy it, only a mouse will die.)

Mira looks at the resulting tableau: coach, driver, horses, fancy dress, ridiculous shoes that she inexplicably hasn't already fallen into the mud just from standing still in.

"Here, what?"

"Go! Ask humans," giggles the fairy.

The fairy cannot harm her, the fairy cannot send her into danger - but the fairy can do some bewilderingly stupid things sometimes. "In formal wear?"

"You don't like it," says the fairy. Her wings change again - black and brown and gray. Mira doesn't think this represents any emotion so human as disappointment. "Well, then, it will stop bothering you at midnight."

"I -"

The fairy's wings flicker out, and then so does the rest of her. Mira could call her back, but she's not convinced at this point it would be helpful.

Technically Kelsey wants her home half an hour ago to make dinner and scrub the floor and do the laundry, because if Mira can't be "civil" she can at least be useful.

Mira thinks that if Kelsey gets anything she wants that's a dreadful tragedy.

Mira gets in the coach. The slippers - damn it, the slippers that she complained about that will now disappear at midnight - they guide her steps. She could probably dance in these things. That'll teach her to question the usefulness of a ride to some extremely formal event when what she needs is an assassin.

Maybe she can get the fairy to reconstruct the shoes later, but probably not. Fucking fairies.

---

The coach takes her to the palace.

There is a party ongoing at the palace.

...Okay.

Mira looks like she belongs at a palatial shindig, doesn't she? She does. The fairy outdid herself.

She sails right in.

And immediately corners someone holding and hors d'oeuvres platter and asks them where she should go with a problem that needs delicate handling. The servant suggests the crown prince. "He's very nice," he assures her.

Mira twirls her way through the dancers and goes up to him.

"May I have this dance?" she inquires. Like it's a private joke, because it is.