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]

Secret likes cooking.

[imeanforever]

Then this is convenient. Although Promise does ask if Secret has any plans to find her own place.

[feel_so_free]

"I don't know," she says. "I don't really know how. I haven't ever done anything except be somebody's vassal and live with you."

[imeanforever]

"The thing is, at some point Arcane is going to visit," says Promise. "And he's really smart, and he works for the Queen, and I think he'll know something is up if you're living here then, possibly before I can give him berries and rescind his no doubt very thorough Queenscourt orders."

[feel_so_free]

"Oh," says Secret. "And then what? The Queen tries to steal me I guess."

[imeanforever]

"The Queen tries to neutralize you. You are impossibly dangerous to the Queen and she is much smarter than the mortals who had you before."

[feel_so_free]

"Yeah. So I guess I should go be somewhere else."

[imeanforever]

"Just until Arcane comes here. Once I've got him out from under the Queen's orders he'll probably want to tell you his name. You don't have to go far, but you should probably go north and not have a house that's very visible from the air or he's more likely to notice you coming in. Maybe a sort of cabin in the dense forest twenty minutes from here?"

[feel_so_free]

"Maybe. I dunno. Do I need a house?"

[imeanforever]

"If you'd rather sleep in the open you can do that but I find it convenient to have a home base."

[feel_so_free]

"Mm. I'll go be in the dense forest, I guess."

[imeanforever]

"We can pick a place for me to leave you a note if I can't find you when Arcane visits."

[feel_so_free]

"Okay."

[imeanforever]

So they select such a place and then Promise goes home alone to wait for her friend.

[feel_so_free]

(Secret just kind of flops on the forest floor. She doesn't know what she wants to do, so she doesn't do anything. She doesn't have to do anything. That part's nice.)

[imeanforever]

Promise sometimes comes by to leave little parcels of food at the note spot with a note saying not yet. She wouldn't want Secret to think that she has been forgotten about altogether and lose track of her.

[feel_so_free]

She checks the note spot once in a while, so once in a while she eats little parcels of food.

[imeanforever]

And Promise goes back to her normal routine (she peeks in on the wrecked court of the Princess; the court of sunshine tepals seems to have basically reassembled with the breeder patriarch at the top and most of the non-conspecifics off by themselves in some sort of unstable but not overtly abusive tangle of mutual vassalizations). And she waits for Arcane.

[infinitely_stranger]

It's been thirteen years since his last visit when Arcane drops in again, this time in late afternoon.

He brings books.

[imeanforever]

Promise has been practicing. She will not trigger the Queen's paranoid security orders and lose the only window of opportunity, she will not. She greets him with a perfect amount of crush-induced nervousness that he has never noticed before and will probably not start noticing now, and invites him in, and thanks him for the books, and shelves them.

And makes dinner.

[infinitely_stranger]

"I wasn't sure what you'd like, so I assembled most of my favourites except for the rulebook of an extremely complicated game that went out of fashion several centuries ago," he says, spooning up a spoonful of nuts and grains and berries. "If I was wrong and you would like the rulebook of an extremely complicated game that went out of fashion several centuries ago, I can bring you a transcription next time. What produced all that colourful dust? I've never seen anything like it."

[imeanforever]

"Oh, I thought I'd swept that up. I had a messy houseguest." She tries not to stare intently at his spoon. "What kind of game is it?"

[infinitely_stranger]

"It involves moving stones around in elaborate patterns. I like the idea of it very much, but the rules are too complicated for it to be practical to play with anyone except another enthusiast, and those are in short supply these days."

Promise is acting a little oddly. But he saw her make dinner and he knows the source of all the ingredients; there isn't secretly any mortal food in it from a lurking new master. Is she worried he won't like it? He eats his spoonful.

[imeanforever]

"I wouldn't mind at least looking over the rules in case it sounds like fun. I've never tried a game like that, maybe it'll be my favorite thing."

When she sees him swallow, she adds in a rush, "Irescindallyourorders."

[infinitely_stranger]

"Alianor," he murmurs testingly.

"Well. I'm surprised. I am more surprised than I have been in my life. That was the name of a dead mortal who briefly belonged to the Queenscourt, by the way. No one ever bothered to rescind the order not to speak her name. How did you manage that?"