"—you could? How?"

"The Queen is a one-of-a-kind and her power is to know every fairy's name."

"oh"

"I support this ambition very much."

He looks at his feet. "Fairies don't die. Fairyland can wait until you're back on your feet."

"The thing that makes me feel bad about waiting is that Thorn knows your magic exists. I just - I don't know it to be enough of an emergency that I have to rush -"

"...yeah. Thorn—is a thing."

"He's unusually bad even for masters of courts, for whatever that's worth."

"Yeah, I—got that impression. ...what would go wrong if I just—walked up to him, invisibly and intangibly, and put a berry inside his stomach?"

"Well, for one thing he knows your name and you can't vassalize him by food anymore."

"...oh. Okay, then... I could just stay around him and spy? See if he's planning anything, find out how much we should worry?"

"If you feel safe doing that."

"The way I could see that failing is if there's some way for sorcery or some kind magic to detect my presence."

"Kind magic maybe. Depends on how thoroughly undetectable you can get."

"Pretty thoroughly, but you saw what I had to do to cast the spell on us—most people don't actually describe the effect out loud like that, but I do have to come up with a sufficiently detailed description, and more complex things are more expensive and harder to define."

"Being undetectable outright isn't?"

"'Undetectable' isn't really a primitive action, I have to specify which methods of detection I'd be immune to and what would happen instead, and every bit I don't specify but want anyway is filled in by the magic and makes the spell more expensive."

"Unfortunately I don't have a complete list of fairy kinds in the court."

"Yeah. I didn't get, like, caught while I was running away with you, though."

"Thorn has subcourts and moves around between them."

"...okay. So either I was very lucky or he doesn't have anyone with kind magic that can detect that in that court and amongst the people that usually move around with him."

"The only person who usually follows him is Blossom."

"First thing, then. I'm not sure how to ensure this won't—backfire horribly."

"Yeah."

"How—fast-acting do you expect him to be?"