sugar berry

[imeanforever]

Near a stream that pours off a high cliff and then snakes away is a garden, carefully tended, and a house, built of wood and stone and transmuted pearl. Fairies weed the plants. One is fixing the roof. A berrybush, hair atangle with spidery branches, is painting gold stripes onto her purple arms.

Comments

[imeanforever]

"Thank you."

[infinitely_stranger]

"You're welcome."

[imeanforever]

[infinitely_stranger]

[imeanforever]

Promise watches the land underneath them go by as they streak through the air.

[infinitely_stranger]

It continues to do that. Look at that land, and all the going-by it is doing. Rapidly.

[imeanforever]

Eventually Promise ventures to ask a question.

"Did you pick me to take away or did Thorn?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"Thorn did. Do I correctly surmise that you were troublesome to him in some way?"

[imeanforever]

"He didn't like my - attitude."

[infinitely_stranger]

"I can imagine he wouldn't have liked mine much either, if he had been foolish enough to try to keep me. He seemed like the sort of person it is easy to develop a bad attitude about."

[imeanforever]

"Some of his vassals like him. One way or another."

[infinitely_stranger]

"He's clever, I'll give him that. I'm sure that berrybush didn't invent and set up her own dart traps."

[imeanforever]

"Ber- oh, Sugar. No, I wouldn't think she did."

[infinitely_stranger]

"But he has just been introduced to the rare but significant hazards of capturing unknown passersby, so maybe he will reconsider the traps. I could have been some much more temperamental member of the Queenscourt."

[imeanforever]

"He probably didn't expect Queenscourt members to be ranging so far from her epicenter."

[infinitely_stranger]

"It's not inconceivable. Grandmother Stone - have you heard of her? This far from her territory I wouldn't expect it, but stories do travel."

[imeanforever]

"I haven't heard of her."

[infinitely_stranger]

"She's a breeder matriarch with strong feelings about who may have control of her descendants. Her colony has been a subsidiary of the Queenscourt for a very long time because it sits near a few Queenscourt locations, and anytime someone takes a stonecrusher as a vassal - that's the name of the kind - Grandmother Stone finds that person and endeavours to make them forget the stonecrusher's name. It became necessary to absorb her so that she would stop interfering with peripheral members of the Queenscourt. If she ever gains enough favour for the Queen to allow her out on an expedition in search of escaped stonecrushers, this is one of the directions she might go, and if Thorn were to capture one of her scouts she would certainly dissolve his court and might also write down his name; Grandmother Stone's Book is an infamous repository of her descendants and people who have annoyed her by trying to steal them."

[imeanforever]

"I've never met a stonecrusher, but I know what they look like. I'll bear that in mind."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Yes. I've never been able to determine whether or not she is the first stonecrusher, but she certainly likes people to think she is, and considers the entire kind hers whether or not she is lying about being their progenitor."

[imeanforever]

"And if she has any ancestors they're presumably thoroughly neutralized."

[infinitely_stranger]

"One can assume."

[imeanforever]

Promise sighs.

[infinitely_stranger]

"Hm?"

[imeanforever]

"I'm a malcontent."