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.
He sees the house.
He descends for a closer look. His wings billow - dozens or hundreds of gossamer veils speckled with tiny motes of light, each individually so thin as to be near-invisibly translucent, each a slightly different shade of midnight. Where enough of them overlap, the effect is like a dark sky full of stars. It's very visually impressive.
The door opens, revealing a four-foot-tall fairy with metallic lace for wings. "Hello, Sugar."
"Hello, Verve! I got one! May I take him to Thorn?"
"I'll do it, Sugar. Tell me his name and go back."
"Yes Verve." Sugar whispers Arcane's name to Verve, Verve says, "Stay put" to Arcane, and then Sugar turns and flies away.
"What has Sugar told you to do so far? Tell me," Verve says to Arcane.
"Master, this is Sierulyperinon," Verve says. "Sugar got him. He's obnoxious."
"Oh? What has he done that's so obnoxious?" asks Thorn.
"I asked him the caution question and he just said 'yes'. Smirking."
"And when you asked him what exactly the content of his yes was, Verve?"
"I - didn't."
"You didn't."
"No master."
"Go and tell Sunstroke that you've earned thirty minutes."
"Yes master," squeaks Verve, and she slinks away.
Thorn regards Arcane. "Tell me your nickname and what Verve would have liked to know before she brought you here."
"I am called Arcane, sorcerer of the Queenscourt," Arcane says serenely. "I have been traveling for one hundred and sixty-one days out of a two-hundred-day leave. In thirty-nine days, if I am not back where the Queen expects me to be, she will send others to retrieve me. If you try to keep me from her, or interfere with me otherwise, she is likely to be annoyed with you."
"Tell me," says Thorn, "the best way to ensure no attention from the Queen or her court after this incident."
"If you rescind all orders from me and let me go, with some appropriate compensation, then I will not mention this incident unnecessarily at the Queenscourt and if it should come up I will advise her that you were very cooperative and need not be punished, nor is your court remarkable in any way that would make it worth capturing for her purposes. A vassal would qualify as appropriate compensation. One with some sorcerous skill, partcularly."
"Arcane, this is Alisyrrabel, called Promise, a sorcerer of some talent if few years. She can show you beyond the edges of my property, whereupon you may consider all orders you received within my court rescinded for yourself and do as you like with her. As described the pair of you may go."
Promise nods shakily and turns to lead Arcane out of the building.
"That depends substantially on what you would like done with you," says Arcane. "You have the option of accompanying me on the rest of my leave from the Queenscourt and then returning there with me to work as my sorcerous assistant. You also have other options. I have no demands on my time for the next thirty-nine days, and no particular plans except to leave Thorn's court and not return. If you would like to be escorted beyond his reach and left alone thereafter, I can accomplish that without trouble and would be happy to."
"My main interests are solitude and sorcery. I could use another assistant but don't need one. I suggested Thorn give me a vassal because I wanted to reduce the number of fairies who have to put up with him, not because I am interested in collecting vassals at all."
It's a quick trip. Arcane doesn't talk. When he spots the hawthorn tree in the described location, he slows their approach, and finally lets go of Promise's hand when they are drifting above it.
"I don't detect anyone nearby," he says. "If there were someone, I would be very likely to detect them."
"On the other side of those is a desert that is habitually night, and past that there is quite a large stretch of forest that was mostly uninhabited when I passed over it eighty days ago. The breeder colony that used to live there moved out because they could no longer produce children in it. There would almost certainly still be plenty of room for you if I took you there now. The trip would be about fifteen days, less if you brought plenty of food so we did not have to stop to find more."
They approach an area where it is raining. Arcane flies just under the clouds and drinks rain which he sorcerously funnels to his mouth; the bubble of air remains otherwise pleasantly dry.
"Do you want a drink?" he asks.
"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."
"Thorn likes - he likes his vassals to be so afraid of him that they stop factoring it in to whether they like him or not," Promise murmurs. "It worked really well on Blossom, you saw her. I think she's gotten to the point where it's an absolute fact that displeasing him is bad and has constructed other reasons to think so besides the part where when he's displeased he starts torturing people more."
She wakes up. She startles, but takes stock of the situation and composes herself presently, heart rate calming down.
"When I sleep I just keep going in about the same direction at about the same speed that I was going when I fell asleep. It's convenient on long trips, and if I drift off course I can correct it easily enough with fast-flight when I wake up. I think I will stop fast-flying and go to sleep soon. Do you expect to be able to keep up with me for seven or eight hours if I pick a reasonably sedate pace?"
"One of the problems of having a direct harmonic sense is that it's very difficult in general for me to teach my spells to anyone. Fast-flight is one of the ones I haven't managed to translate. I might be able to translate a stripped-down version with fewer conveniences, but so far no one has expressed serious interest in being able to fly very rapidly while making a terrible racket that can be heard for miles in every direction, leaving behind a very obvious trail of disturbed air, and running out of breathable air in somewhere between one and six hours. Or about a minute if the spell didn't include an air bubble at all."
"I have no particular reason to mention you to her, except very incidentally in the course of describing what happened at Thorn's court if that comes up. She doesn't ask for detailed accounts of my travels, just for points of interest I may have discovered while I was out. 'So I took one of his vassals and deposited her out of his reach' will not provoke her curiosity."
"Yes. There are plenty of advantages. I might also like being in no one's court, but if I had been in no one's court to start with I would currently be having much more trouble with Thorn. I appreciate the security of being the Queen's best sorcerer, and of expecting to continue being the Queen's best sorcerer for the forseeable future."
"I could visit you once in a while on leave, and look for you if I don't see you in the forest," Arcane suggests. "Less definite than being a prominent member of the Queenscourt, but also doesn't involve coming to the Queen's attention unless she has to send someone to rescue me from someone I tried to rescue you from."
It takes them seven days to reach the jeweled seas, and Arcane is asleep at the time, so their approach is slow. First the blue-green shine is visible on the horizon; then the shores of glittering gem-sand creep into view, and the water.
They are coming up almost exactly on the border between the Sapphire Sea and the Emerald Sea; to their left the sand is blue, and to the right it is green, and in between it mixes. The colour of the water obeys a similar gradient. In fact, from this height, it almost looks like a huge liquid sapphire and a huge liquid emerald lazily fighting over the contested territory between them. Streaks of colour ride shifting currents from one side to the other, then diffuse peacefully until no trace of them remains.
"I started over a much bigger ocean, all the way on the other side of central Queenscourt territory from here, and it had floating islands with incredible crystal formations growing on their undersides. For a good few centuries they were the only landmasses I had any experience with. I was mildly disappointed by my first sight of ground I couldn't get underneath; it seemed to be missing the best part."
He is quiet for a second or two, then says, "The first thing that really sold me on the merits of continents was a mountain range. They weren't even particularly good examples of mountains - I've seen prettier ones since - but they were enormous and solid and mountain-shaped, and they had beautiful lacy trees growing all down their sides."
"I didn't stop at any on this trip, but I know of one a few miles north and another one to the southwest near the edge of the desert, and I don't know of any reason why either of them might have collapsed in the last twenty years. They weren't being maintained by the breeders who left the forest recently. If you settle all the way in the southwestern corner of the forest, they'll be about the same distance away; otherwise the one to the north will be closer."
"I spent a lot of time just watching the sun go around and the harmonics shift. I didn't really have a more interesting life to compare it to. Maybe it would bore me if I went back there now and tried to live like that again, but I don't think I can get a long enough vacation to tell."
"I remember a nice harmonic tangle right in the middle; let's see if it's still unoccupied."
It is, as advertised, a very large forest. And when Arcane slows down over an unremarkable-looking clearing by the side of a very small stream, it sure doesn't look inhabited.
"Do you like the location?"
The finished map depicts a tangle, all right. There is a harmonic cliff intersecting the stream, dividing the clearing and surrounding sections of forest between two different complex patterns. And Arcane can apparently produce in half an hour a level of detail that would take most sorcerers several years to map.
She watches him leave. Then she studies her harmonic map, and grows her tree. She plants her seeds, and eats the last of her stored food, and boosts the garden plants - she brought not only food but also something she can use to make paper and soft pillow-fluff. She sips water from the stream. She boosts all the growing things again. Her tree won't be ready to live in for at least a few days, even with the map, but she can push the food harder than that. When she's rested her wings she explores the area around her new home and finds where there's already edibles growing; leftover cultivars from the breeders, some things apparently wild.