pumpkin princess

[imeanforever]

Promise settles in. Her garden grows. Her tree grows; she stores her map and the rest of the notebook in there, first, and after she's been there for seven days, she can fit inside it herself. (At that early stage it's only an improvement over the outdoors when it's raining, but it's her tree. It'll get bigger.) She slowly broadens her diet as she learns the peculiar local plants and which ones she likes. She coaxes her tree into flower, picks one and ensorcels it, wraps cottony fluff from one of her trees in a giant flower petal of the same kind her bag is made of, and she has a pillow. The other flowers turn into haw berries that taste like home. She practices fairylights and then more complicated spells all around her new turf with her map, then without, until she has it memorized by feel and by the response of the magic when she casts.

When she doesn't need to do magic to her plants every single day to get and keep them producing at a rate sufficient to sustain her, she goes to the library and tells them things about the continent she came from in exchange for a half-century's membership. She brings home books. She makes paper to take notes on.

She doesn't have any near neighbors, but she has distant ones, and she trades foreign seeds and candied dewdrops for glass and books. She drinks her stream and writes her thoughts (a lot of her thoughts are about Arcane). She decompresses. She reads and thinks.

Time goes by. It's dark at night; sometimes she watches the stars.

Comments

[feel_so_free]

"I bet! She's too heavy for me to carry alone but not by much."

[imeanforever]

Promise seizes one of the Princess's arms. She has to kick a tepal.

[feel_so_free]

Secret grabs the Princess's other arm. Gently. Of necessity.

She lifts off, trailing wing-dust.

[imeanforever]

The Princess is not cooperative with this endeavor, but they manage to haul her. "I heard her telling some tepals to make sure everyone knew the new court borders. I don't think we'll be followed if we go beyond them," she says.

[feel_so_free]

"We'll see."

[imeanforever]

They are chased by tepals, but tepals are not very fast, and Promise has been around here enough to spell-sling with some facility. She doesn't like hurting the tepals but she doesn't want them to come make her hand over the Princess long enough for the Princess to find a loyal sorcerer and get re-audibled.

Eventually they find a spot beyond the Princess's current borders. The Princess is crying in perfect silence.

[feel_so_free]

"Okay," says Secret. "Now what?"

[imeanforever]

"Do you know where her gate is?"

[feel_so_free]

"Yeah."

[imeanforever]

"I have a friend who can force them closed even when he didn't make them, but I don't know when to expect him to visit, and sorcery won't work in the mortal world so if we put her through it anything stopping her from coming back will stop working. Unless I'm wrong about how your magic works?"

(Princess tries to escape. Princess now has a lot of earth mounded up around her feet. This is inconvenient.)

[feel_so_free]

"The secret is: if you would be my vassal you're no one's vassal, ever, even if you were before. And I don't have a name."

[imeanforever]

Promise smiles.

"So we can't order her to stay put. I could make my own gate, but she might wind up somewhere close enough to her original gate to use it, or someplace too far away from what she's used to to find food and shelter and die. Do you happen to know how comprehensively her court is ordered to look out for her interests in cases like this?"

[feel_so_free]

"They pretty much aren't. She never thought something like this would happen."

[imeanforever]

"Do any of them like her? Besides Nap."

[feel_so_free]

"The tepals like her better than they like their patriarch. She's nicer. But nobody's a huge fan."

[imeanforever]

"She's inconvenient to transport, I don't really want to kill her, she's dangerous to leave anywhere. I wish my friend were around. It's pretty unlikely that he turned up in the past day though."

[feel_so_free]

"I don't really want to kill her either. But I don't want to let her go. Could you, I dunno, keep her for a while? Until your friend shows up? When is your friend gonna show up?"

[imeanforever]

"I can't keep her under control if she can't be vassalized, so she might hurt me or my tree or something, and it could be years before he visits again."

[feel_so_free]

"You could just kill her," Secret says contemplatively.

[imeanforever]

"I don't want to kill her if I don't have to." Promise taps her foot. "If I knew exactly where the gate was, I could put one directly in front of it that led somewhere else in the mortal world, someplace she wouldn't want to go, and then she couldn't get into Fairyland, it would just be in one gate and out the other. You were there a while, can you think of somewhere good?"

[feel_so_free]

"I didn't really go out of the house... you could put it to an ocean or something. There's oceans. Or you could put it to right back where she started, for that matter."

[imeanforever]

"Yeah, that works. And when my friend comes by he can close them both. Will you show me?"

[feel_so_free]

"Sure."

[imeanforever]

The Princess continues to be uncooperative. They fly her to the gate anyway.

Promise goes through the gate and back a few times, figuring out exactly where it is.

"I'll make it facing the opposite way so we can still put her where she came from after it's settled," Promise explains, and then she starts the new gate. "But this might take a while."

[feel_so_free]

"How long's a while?"