"The alternative is that the Queen eventually comes here and dismantles all of yours. Which outcome does the headmaster's wife prefer?"

"It is not at all clear how the queen in question would accomplish this," the elf points out. "She has found instances of controlled interworld travel in your memories but says they do not appear to refer to our world as their target."

"I - not as a relay for the headmaster's wife - wonder to what extent you are asking, to what extent you are offering, and to what extent you are threatening."

"I am not threatening. I am still here entirely because my desire to save your world from probable conquest outweighs my desire to avoid the non-negligible risk that someone will out of poorly aimed caution damage my mind with unknown local magic. If neutralizing the Queenscourt is not a project that you or the headmaster's wife or anyone else here wishes to involve themselves in, then I will look elsewhere for help and have considerably more trouble, but I intend to neutralize the Queenscourt regardless because otherwise, whether in a few hundred days or a few thousand years, the Queen will learn that wizardry and unique green-group dragons exist and she will take steps to eliminate those threats to her sovereignty."

"The headmaster's wife very much values her reputation for nonintervention in large-scale politics," says the elf. "Do you have an idea which does not require her direct participation or put her freedom or those of the other people whose names you acquired at risk?"

"Omitting the highly advantageous mind magic - prepare whatever resources are required to summon," he thinks it over for a moment, "about three dozen people more or less at once, each isolated so that they cannot communicate with one another or with anyone else by speech or writing. Contrive to feed them all mortal food, whereby they will become vassals to whatever mortal fed them. Command the Queen to describe the structure of her court and disclose any remaining obstacles to dismantling it. If my knowledge is not as complete as I think it is, it may be necessary to summon more courtiers at that point, but vassalizing them will be easier with the Queen available to give you their names. The Queen must be ordered to never give an enforced order and never reveal anyone's name. Everyone else can be ordered to free Queenscourt captives and dismantle security measures and so on, and then returned to where they were taken from. The Queen herself should not be returned to her court until all its unwilling members have successfully fled. And this method will work unless one of the summoned courtiers is clever enough or magical enough to escape your captivity, or one of those not summoned is clever enough and quick enough to find where everyone else has gone and lead an army after them."

"Could you have exited your ward without its disruption from the outside? Could others from your world?"

"I could have made a gate back to my world, stepped through, closed it, and made another one to come back with outside the ward, and it's possible that there are other generic magical solutions I haven't thought of. Someone whose kind can teleport might have been able to teleport out of it. Someone with other travel-related kind magic might have been able to use that. I know most but not all of the kinds and associated magics that might appear in the Queenscourt, and cannot guarantee that I know them well enough to be sure none of the ones you might need to capture can escape a ward."

"Kind magic?"

"We come in kinds. I am a sky-veil, for example; I can sense harmonics, which you don't have here. The teleporter I was thinking of is a crystalswift. The Queen is the only one of her kind, and her kind's magic is to know all our names, but it does not extend to mortals."

"The headmaster's wife is tempted to turn over the entire quandary to the local national government," reports the elf.

"I have no objection unless the local national government is likely to behave stupidly."

"They are not prepared to address the challenge, but might rise to the occasion and would probably fail gracefully if fail they did," opines the elf. "Additionally, she is very agitated that you are so insistent on retaining her name and those of her husband, daughter, brother, and student. She could have someone perform a memory-altering spell but is concerned you would find a way to retaliate."

"I will not retaliate, I will just be perpetually slightly upset about it for the rest of eternity," he predicts. "In case the headmaster's wife has not yet extracted this fact from my mind, by the way, the Queenscourt will begin to look for me in about a hundred and twenty days. Our day length may or may not correspond with yours."

"She had already looked into that, yes. Your days are slightly shorter than ours."

"If the headmaster's wife insists on editing my memory, might she at least have a way to ensure that the names she takes will be returned after the named persons are dead? If it is possible for me to allow her. I do not know if it is."

"Under ordinary circumstances she can place contingencies, depending on you either verifying the death or just waiting out the end of her and her brother's lifespans."

"And those lifespans are...?"

"The headmaster's wife and her brother may live more than three thousand seven hundred fifty years on the outside."

"If it works, yes. What needs to happen to allow it?"

The names disappear, the headmaster's wife's first. Nothing else is a casualty of the extraction.

And now the empty space where they used to be itches, and continues to itch, and will go on itching for the next not quite four thousand local years, however long that turns out to be in units he is familiar with. But at least it won't be forever.