"Well, let's see."

It turns out that when Arcane says he likes transcription spells, what he means is that he has an extensive and well-researched understanding of all the ways people have tried to use sorcery to transcribe books and which ones of them are better than which other ones in which ways for which purposes. He has even invented variations of his own that he can successfully explain to people who don't sense harmonics.

Eeeee, geeking out over spells. With Arcane.

Promise is a very clever sorcerer, especially for her age, and a quick study.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

(She graciously accepts the compliments without eeeeeeeing out loud.)

She's very pleased. And wonders (once they have exhausted this topic and she has fixed them dinner) if he has tips about other sorts of spells.

She is sad when he has to leave in a few days but does her best not to be very demonstrative about it.

He indicates an intention to find and close that gate near her tree, and then to come back in ten or fifteen years and see how she's doing.

Then, off he goes.

Meanwhile -



Rose has a singular advantage. She is mortal, and therefore shiny and appealing to fairies who like to acquire vassals. And she cannot be vassaled. She can eat their food, she can even give away her true name - and she can pretend to be bound by their orders until the moment she is not.

Rose still wants to choose her faux master carefully. Ensnaring lone fairies won't get her anywhere fast; going after the wrong fairy with the strategy she has in mind will make for a very unpleasant, perhaps impossible, period of time. Not all masters are going to think of her as a charming pet before they let her feed them a sunflower seed from the supply in her pocket. And Rose is still mortal.

She uses her "Aunt Maria" - it's pretty hard to get used to calling her anything else; she has always been Aunt Maria, and it's not like she has a real name - as a spy, of sorts. Feeding Maria fairy food will seldom get anyone anywhere, Maria has no name to give up, and Maria, being a fairy - now supplied with a backless shirt from Rose's closet so her wings can come out and she can fly - is not as interesting a target. Rose parks in Uncle Jeff's house and sends Maria on exquisitely well-defined missions (Rose has a friend who is attending law school and thinks this is a book Rose wants to write) and acquires maps and lists and intel and samples of local fairy food.

Aunt Maria finds some moderately friendly individuals and a nasty-looking small court and she also finds a large colony of "breeder" fairies that has moved into a new home recently (in fairy terms). Their patriarch spends his time sitting on top of a wall of hanging gardens his descendants maintain, being brought news and curiosities, and has a taste for being hand-fed.

Perfect.

It's a hike and Rose is too heavy for Maria to carry her flying, so Rose goes to fairyland with good boots and some emergency food in case foraging is hard and her compiled maps and plenty of water and Maria waiting in the attic to come bail her out if she takes too long.

Fairyland is gorgeous and the hanging gardens, when she gets there after a day and a half of hiking through glorious summer wildflowers, are even better. They're maintained by a swarm of the cutest little fairies. They look like Indian paintbrushes, orange-red or yellow with tufts of matching petals instead of hair, averaging eight inches high, with wings that look like those helicopter seeds. They're so cute, and they look at her when she wanders near, and immediately six of them buzz up to her.

"Mortal?" "Are you lost?" "Who's your master?" "Are you hungry, mortal?" "Thirsty?"

And Rose pretends to be indignant: "Who's my master? Excuse me, who's your master?"

And the fairies mutter to each other and say "He is this way, mortal, come and he'll give you some juice, you look thirsty."

Rose goes with them, marveling openly at the gardens, and she crouches when they bring her to the patriarch, and she smiles and acts dumb. He gives her juice. She drinks it. He tells her to stay right where she is. She does, now letting a little of her lingering apprehension show through. He lets a few of his court also give her juice, and tells her to drink it, and she does. He has someone braid her hair and someone make her flower garlands to pretty her up because she's so drab. He sits on her shoulder.

And when he tells her to give him his supper, she slips a sunflower seed in with it.

And when all the fairies of the court have gone to sleep, she wakes him up.

And she says, "Shush."

He shushes.

"One by one, wake up all the others and don't let them sound any alarms and tell them to eat what I give them."

And he does, because what else can he do?

Rose had three hundred and thirty-five Indian-paintbrush-fairy vassals before the night ends (which, when it occurs, pauses at dawn for an oddly long period of time). She asks them what the Indian-paintbrush-fairy kind is called and they tell her they are called sunshine tepals. She has three hundred and thirty-five sunshine tepals and some of them know magic and they can fit in her backpack six at a time if she's willing to crowd them.

She sends one to tell Maria that all is well and Maria should join them. Rose doesn't plan to go back to the mortal world for a long, long time.

Especially since one of these sunshine tepals has read in a book somewhere that it is possible to de-age mortals with sorcery.

Rose makes them all call her Princess. She is a fairy princess. Everything is wonderful.

She contemplates her next move...

"Aunt Maria" is... well, dissatisfied.

Dissatisfied is a huge improvement on what she was before Princess inherited her. But it's not exactly pleasant. Rose leaves fewer loopholes than Jeff did. Rose has more ambition than Jeff did. Rose is not going to let her Aunt Maria go anytime soon - and Rose is not going to get sick and die. Rose, if she manages to chase down that rumour about de-aging, might never die at all.

In the midst of all that spying, she learns things about fairy culture that were not included in her starting package. Everyone goes by nicknames. They pick their nicknames themselves. Names like Petal and Sundown and Greenest and Flutter, Mirage and Duet and Evoke and Abyss.

Rose calls her Maria, and Rose can go on doing that, can probably not be dissuaded from doing that - but in her head she names herself Secret.

Princess snaps up a few neighbor fairies who would notice sooner or later the changes in the sunshine tepal court. She has several sorcerers at this point, but none who think they'll be able to learn to de-age her before she hits forty, fifty, later, fairies are fuzzy on time - before she slows down, at any rate. She doesn't want to slow down.

Princess sends vassals to leave notices at libraries. She is not above actually paying for what she wants when it's important.

Promise spots the notice. Sought. Sorcerer capable of reversing mortal aging. Negotiable pricing in vassals or resources.

Promise, admittedly, does not currently know how to reverse mortal aging. But she's very good at healing spells and thinks the theory likely to be similar. She looks it up just in case - the librarians are forbidding relevant books to be taken offsite while the notice stands, so the books are there, although there's a meadowjoy snoozing in the stacks nearby with a partially finished transcription, probably interested in the same job.

Promise reads through old writing and diagrams and A Harmonic Map Of The Mortal Form. It doesn't look hard. She'd have to spend a lot of time around the mortal in question, but she could do that.

Promise does her own transcription of the book with sorcery - nice and quick, thank you Arcane. She goes home and packs food and a notebook and this spell and flies the several hours it takes to go from her tree to the described court with a mortal they don't want to lose.

The court is very pretty. Hanging gardens and lovely flowers. Nearly everyone present is a sunshine tepal - there are a few miscellaneous fairies of miscellaneous fairy sizes -

And then there is that one. Six feet tall at least, with fragile rainbow wings whose edges dissolve at the merest brush of her hair and then re-form a moment later. She spots Promise and zips over curiously, leaving a faint rainbow trail of wing-dust.

"Hello! I don't know you! Who're you? Are you new?"

Well, no use holding it against this perfectly nice fairy that she might end up prolonging Secret's captivity forever.

"It's nice to meet you, Promise! I'm called Maria. I guess you want to talk to the Princess, then, huh?"

"Okay!"

Off she goes in search of the Princess.

Promise follows.

The Princess is peering at some maps with some of her favorite sunshine tepals. Another sunshine tepal admits Maria and Promise.

"Hello?" says the Princess, who is wearing a flower crown and a tastelessly large amount of gossamer.

"Hello," says Promise. "I'm called Promise and I'm here about your library ad, if you haven't already found a sorcerer for it."

"Oh! Can you do it?"

"I never have," says Promise, "but the theory looks straightforward, at least with my sorcery background."

"How long would it take you?" the Princess inquires.

"I'd need to spend time around you to get sufficiently familiar with you as a spell target," says Promise, "but probably not more than six months of frequently interacting or just watching you do whatever you do all day, maybe less. I could be a little quicker if you have a harmonic map of an area around here where I could do the casting."

"And what would you want for this?"

"The ad said vassals or resources. I'd prefer the former; ideally not the sunshine tepals since there are a lot of them and I don't fully understand what social structures I'd be breaking up. I'm pretty comfortable in the resources department. But I could probably be convinced to take a significant quantity of books."

"I've got a pair of creekpearls."

"I'm willing to learn to de-age you and then do it at least once for a pair of creekpearls." Which Promise will then send off to do as they like as far away as they care to, because she knows how nice that is to hear.

"What if you can't do it?" asks the Princess.

"I think I can do it, but if I can't, no need to pay me anything except letting me loiter around your court until I figure that out," says Promise.

"Do you know someone who can?"

Promise decides to phrase this as - "I've met people who are better at sorcery than me, but none of them live on this continent."