"That is not as complete an explanation as I might have hoped," he says. "Where am I, and how did you manage to borrow me, and why do you need to show me to Nemaar?"

"Is summoning a usual practice in Elcenia?"

"No, not really," says the blonde. "We weren't even supposed to, but we'll put you right back after."

"Wizards," he muses. "Hm. And is wizardry the sort of magic that one can easily explain? How exactly did you bring me here, and how exactly do you propose to return me?"

"Oh no?" inquires Arcane.

"I do not expect to be trapped here forever," he murmurs. "Although that does raise the question of when you will be letting me out of this circle."

Arcane... waits out this disagreement, for now.

"Hello," says Arcane. "I was not drawn away from any urgent business."

"I'm Keo, and I'm the school's headmaster's wife. We'll be able to let you out of the circle after confirming that it's safe. Do you mind if I check, minimally invasively?"

"...Check what, precisely, and by what means?"

"Whether it would be dangerous to let you out of the circle - or at least, more dangerous than leaving you in it would be inconvenient. I've got some mental talents that will let me look at that and nothing else if you'll allow me."

"Mental talents," he repeats. "What sort of mental talents."

"I'm a dragon," she says, "and green-group dragons in general are empaths, and some are telepaths, and I'm some extra on top of that -"

"Make that stop," Arcane orders Keo, referring to whatever is causing her to move.

She stops. Something makes a loud popping noise; a cloud of soot comes into existence and settles, mostly on Keo.

"Truthfully and concisely, without taking extraneous action, explain how it is you were able to move just now."

"My husband can operate my body," whispers Keo.

"Answer all of my questions truthfully and concisely, and do not contrive to deceive me by any means. Do not take extraneous action in the course of answering my questions. What is your husband doing right now?"

"He's contacting my brother and getting circle chalk."

"As expediently as possible without inflicting lasting harm, prevent your husband from continuing to interfere. Then tell me how you did it."

"I can operate his body too," she murmurs. "He's not moving anymore except to breathe."

"What are the likeliest sources of immediate interference with my control of this situation?"

"My brother will be confused about my husband contacting him via whisper spell. One of the girls' neighbors may have heard me botch the teleport and come to see what's going on. If any student or one of my friends or family members tries to get my attention for any reason and I cannot respond they will be alarmed."

"Which of these sources has the greatest capacity to interfere?"

"My brother."

"Can you, without extraneous effects, determine what your brother is doing right now?"

"Yes."

"Two. I don't know the elder's name. My husband contacted Narax," says Keo thinly.

"Without extraneous effects, determine what Narax is doing. What is he doing?"

"He's reading my and my husband's and our daughter's emotional states and trying to talk to me and drawing a scry diagram."

"How might you, expediently and without inflicting lasting harm, prevent Narax from interfering in this situation?"

"I - " Twitch; she was trying to say something that is not allowed. "I can stop him moving."

"Without taking extraneous action, do so. Does the means by which you have stopped Narax moving require your active maintenance?"

"Yes."

"Only if you don't have some kind of mental spoof in addition to whatever you're using to do this with. Probably."

"Wizards in general can do it if motivated but it's unusual to do so."

"And how common are wizards?"

"Worldwide something like one or one half a percent of the population."

"If someone outside of it intentionally disrupts it."

"What other effects will that have?"

"It will bring down the ward restricting your movement and visibly smudge the chalk."

He directs Saasnil, "Let me out of the circle."

Saasnil smudges the chalk with her foot, wide-eyed.

"Kanaat Inular," she whimpers.

"What is the nature of the connection that allows you to operate each other's bodies?"

"I established a mindlink with him years ago."

"Yes."

"How precise is your telepathic communication in only receiving what is deliberately directed to you?"

"Arbitrarily."

"You may, with maximal such precision, receive telepathic communication from me." Test that, and test that orders work telepathically: You may, without attempting to exploit this permission in any way hostile to my interests, communicate with me telepathically.

<Let the girls go. They're useless compared to me, nearly harmless, completely if you tell them to go quietly to the headmaster's office and sit with my husband there.>

<I have not yet reached a point where I am able to address such relatively minor concerns,> he says.

<Let me explain to my brother what's going on. Please.>

A man who resembles Korulen pops into existence besides Keo.

<I rescind that order.>

<Except for that one I rescind your orders.> Briefest pause - <And that one.>

Each adult present immediately grabs a sobbing child and teleports away.

Arcane tries the door, which doesn't let him out, and the window, which doesn't let him out either, and then for lack of a better way to occupy his time he starts cleaning the chalk off the floor with sorcery. This world is harmonically empty, which is interestingly novel for now but will probably begin to bore him as soon as he's figured out how to work with it.

<How does the names thing work?>

<You have my name and those of several of my loved ones and that of a student in my care. You are manifestly not consistently acting according to your own preferences even if you can do so right now. I need you to stop having those names. At minimum, I need an ally under an empathy ward acting as a deadman switch for the erasure if something happens.>

I have strong feelings about the integrity of my memory. If you will not compromise on this point, I will leave, attempt to solve your problem without you, and perhaps fail. If you work with me, we can solve it much more easily. Queenscourt will not start looking immediately; I am free for now. There is time to talk.

<I have strong feelings about my responsibilities to literally every person whose lives my compromised freedom could casually destroy. I would be able to do the name removal with surgical precision if there weren't something stopping me, but there is. Are our needs here absolutely incompatible?>

As my vassal, you cannot harm me. That is what stops you. Can we not discuss dealing with the Queen before we discuss contriving to allow that harm? Planned right, you can neutralize the Queenscourt before they know you exist, and there will be no trouble over my ability to act on my preferences.

And this faculty member can accurately comment on the various capabilities of local magic including yours?

<Yes.>

He erases his latest message and waits.

"I believe it would not be difficult for her to neutralize the Queenscourt using wizardry and her own magic. But I need to know more about the parameters of summoning before I can recommend a strategy."

"The summoning spell that retrieved you collects a random target from a random world. Spells also exist to retrieve specified individuals, given adequate specification of those individuals by the summoner or someone serving as a focus."

"Adequate specification being? Also, at what distance and under what other necessary preconditions can the headmaster's wife interact with a mind? And can she retrieve forgotten knowledge?"

"Having met the target or any unique specification of both world and person. She is unlimited by distance but most of her powers will not work transworld, except her mindlink, which should be able to persist even if she and the headmaster are in different worlds. She needs an empathic signature, most conventionally acquired by passing within thirty feet of someone, although she in particular can acquire them from other people whose signatures she has already collected. She can undo conventional forgetfulness but not all forms of magical mental attack if they sufficiently destroy the data in question."

"I expect to be able to adequately specify most members of the Queenscourt. It is likely that the Queen has forgotten her name in the conventional way. If the headmaster's wife can be brought to my world and can target the Queen's mind there, and can retrieve forgotten names, she could acquire the Queen's name and command her from a distance; without the ability to retrieve forgotten names she could still do that to any other targetable person in my world. If she cannot retrieve the Queen's name, the Queen should be summoned and securely confined here and someone should feed her mortal food, which will also work to vassalize her but may be difficult without her cooperation."

"The headmaster's wife wishes to convey that dismantling systems of government is well outside the scope of her usual activities," says the elf in an absolute deadpan.

"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.

<I can address the itching too, now, if you like.>

<You really can't.>

<If you'd rather I didn't, I won't.>

<It will not stop itching while I still have a mind that is still missing memories and still qualifies as mine. I would not prefer to destroy myself for the sake of temporary comfort.>

<Anyway. Our employee's presence no longer serves a security purpose, so unless you find him pleasanter to talk to than me I can send him on his way.>

<No opinion.>

The elf gets up and inclines his head politely and departs.

<Are you still going to refer this problem to the local national government?>

<I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to be urgent to the point where I cannot calm down the students and find some more suitable place to put you than a girls' dormitory and get a night of sleep before trying to make spectacularly enormous decisions.>

<Direct me to some open sky somewhere that rains ocasionally.>

<In a couple of angles I will be able to teleport you above an ocean on the bottom of the world.>

<The world has a bottom?>

<It's a square.>

He occupies himself attempting to envision the topology involved. (He's not far off in terms of the shape of the planet, but has no idea how their day/night cycle might come about without a single defined up from which natural lights emanate.)

Since he doesn't ask, and seems to be amusing himself contemplating the physics on his own, Keo does not answer. In a while, she appears in the room and holds out her hand. "I need to touch you to teleport you there."

She teleports him to a location midair above an ocean. She begins to fall, but teleports away before getting close to the water.

Meanwhile, Promise is flying with a sackful of groceries through the air when the wind and gravity change on her very suddenly and she winds up upside-down and falling. "AAAAGH!"

...Arcane dives to catch her.

"I am wary of the implications of this not entirely unwelcome coincidence," says Arcane. "We are in a mortal world that I strongly suspect is different from the usual one. It's harmonically empty and contains several varieties of magic that don't work anything like ours. One of those varieties belongs to a mortal with seemingly near-arbitrary mental powers. I managed to make a legitimate mistake that let her wipe out all my Queenscourt orders before I had to conquer the planet for threat/resource reasons, but now she's reluctant to take the obvious next step. And she erased all local names from my memory. The absence itches."

Promise blinks and takes that in. "And then I found a tear that dropped me, uh, on you. How long have you been here?"

"Less than a day."

"Okay, I'm concerned. What's the mortal's hangup?"

"Something about preserving a reputation for political neutrality? A lot of good that'll do her when the Queenscourt takes her planet."

"She does understand how the Queenscourt... works... right?"

"She can read my mind and doesn't seem shy about doing it when she perceives danger. If she has failed to notice how the Queenscourt works it is not through lack of opportunity."

Promise shudders at "can read my mind".

"And I tried to explain," he adds. "I am not sure how well I managed. She isn't a very cooperative mortal. She left me here while she went to contact her local national government, whom she expects will be happier to help."

"The local magic does allow sweeping the court? Securely?"

"Unknown potential failure rate if someone's kind-magic lets them escape local magical restraints, or if one of the mortals involved makes a mistake through lack of familiarity with vassalization. Otherwise, yes. I arrived here through an untargeted application of local magic, and it can be targeted, and set up with wards so that the summoned individual is unable to leave the area they were summoned in."

"Okay. Is it one-way, are we stuck here?"

"I'm stuck here through some kind of mistake in my summoning that wasn't fully explained; it was implied that summoned individuals can usually be returned with trivial effort. I haven't yet tried gating back to the fairy realm because I want to minimize the amount of information about this world that is even theoretically available there, so I don't know if it's possible, but I can't afford to assume it isn't. And if you came through a tear, that suggests gates are also possible. If you came through some other unknown phenomenon, I have no idea what that suggests."

"I assume it was a tear, but I couldn't see it coming the way you could've." Promise belatedly realizes that Arcane is still carrying her and extricates herself to begin flying under her own power. "Where are we? Do the mortals live under the ocean?"

"We are on the bottom of the world, which is a flat square; the mortals live on the top. 'Down' apparently points toward the middle. I have not yet arrived at a satisfying explanation for how all that works."

"Huh. Why are we here? More to the point, why are you here; I'm here because a tear or tearlike thing put me here."

"I asked to be put somewhere with open sky that rained occasionally, since I didn't know how long it would be until the uncooperative mortal or someone else contacted me again."

"Oh, that makes sense." Pause. "It's completely harmonically blank everywhere?"

"Yes."

"Does that make sorcery as easy as it sounds?"

"Yes."

Promise giggles. "I'm still freaked out about the mind-reading thing, but that's cool."

"The uncooperative mortal with mental powers is much less unpleasant than she could be, but still not exactly pleasant."

"Do you think she'll want to read my mind?"

"I hope not. I cannot claim to predict her motives."

"I wonder if I shouldn't make it clear I'm around. Am I useful particularly to a plan of sweeping the Queenscourt?"

"If she reads my mind again she'll notice you. And I don't know how valuable you'll be in a strictly practical sense, but you might help me deal with uncooperative mortals. Dealing with uncooperative mortals is arduous."

"Sure. I'll help you with that. Although I'm not sure I'll wind up being good for very much if she can't stay out of my head."

"Let's hope she can stay out of your head, then."

"Yeah. I don't suppose defensive mental sorcery interacts usefully with what she does?"

"I did not try it."

"And I've never studied it, since I never expected to be well-acquainted with anyone who wanted to attack me with mental sorcery. Bleah."

"I concur."

"I don't suppose you know the theory well enough that I might be able to cast something just in case?"

Promise listens; she has nothing to take notes with but she listens very intently.

Promise looks quizzically at Arcane.

"Your mouth was moving. Not telepathy?"

"Not telepathy. It almost sounds like the telepathic one dumped the whole problem on someone else and fled. Just as well for us, I suppose, although I still wish she'd help because with her we might not have to mess around trying to feed the Queen."

"With a whole bunch of mortals who have magic of their own it's probably not terribly difficult to get the Queen fed. Dicey, but not insurmountable."

"Yes. I'd rather minimize the dice involved, of course, but I do think it's possible to win this."

"If the mortals are competent. This one seems better? But not great, I assume?"

"I might be jaded on local mortals just now. It was hard to tell how competent he was, but he did at least assure me he was very concerned about his world being conquered."

"If you want to send me to interface with mortals for you - ones who don't read minds - I don't mind."

"I might want to do that, yes. Or at least bring you along to interface with the mortals while I listen and occasionally comment."

"Sure."

"Thank you," he sighs. "I am beginning to regret ever talking to other people in the first place, and the main points in favour of that decision are sorcery and your friendship."

"I, uh, cannot share your regret. But I'll do my best to mitigate it."

"I think I'd just as soon be invisible for paranoia's sake." She pauses, debating whether to mention other paranoid measures that could be taken.

"Reasonable. Could have unwanted consequences if he notices you anyway by whatever means; I don't know what local magic has to offer in that area."

"Did the mind-reading mortal learn your name or somehow omit to do so?"

"I gave it to her myself, in the course of altering my Queenscourt orders - given that one of them was compelling me to conquer a strange world full of unforeseen circumstances, getting out from under the rest served Queenscourt interests better than the alternative. And then she exploited a loophole to lift that one too. If only she had turned out to be more cooperative when I gave her her freedom."

"If there are uncooperative mortals around with your name - I can't think of a good way to mention this but will settle for a bad one. It might wind up being useful if I had it too."

"Potentially, yes... I could worry about who you might be made to give it up to but there really aren't very many options worse than the uncooperative mortal with arbitrary mind magic."

"I mean, I do know I don't hold up under torture, so take that under advisement. Or just order me not to tell anyone."

"Unfortunately I also don't have a way to tell it to you without either potentially saying it to Shrike instead, given his method of communication, or writing it down where apparently any local mortal with the right spell could spy on us and see it."

"True. ...Spell it out on my hand with your thumb or something?"

"Hm. Clever."

Invisible she goes. And inaudible and unsmellable. She can't do intangible, so he can still feel her hand. Flat harmonics are so nice, though.

He might actually be able to see her nod, if she's still harmonically interesting against the dead background, so she nods, but she also squeezes his hand.

"More comfortable than 'hovering miles above the middle of a desloate ocean', at least for me."

Promise lands lightly on the bare earth, a bit behind Arcane so as to leave less conspicuous footprints.

"The Queen is of a singular kind, whose singular magic causes her to know the names of everyone native to my world. As I believe you're loosely aware, there is a property of my world such that knowing our names makes us her vassals, meaning that we cannot harm her and she can give us arbitrary magically enforced commands. With this advantage she effectively rules the world, although in practice she only directly commands one part of it, called the Queenscourt. Other courts exist; one of my occasional duties with the Queenscourt was to conquer any that the Queenscourt wished to absorb, if they proved difficult to acquire by other means. At this point it is inevitable that the Queen will find out this world exists: either I will return to her and the information will come out in the course of standard security procedures for a Queenscourt vassal returning after an absence, or I will not return to her and she will seek me out and find me. The moment she learns of this world's existence and the magic its residents are capable of, she will seek to conquer it, precisely because this world's magic has the previously unprecedented capacity to capture her and dismantle her court without interacting with any of her normal defenses."

"Summoning," says Shrike, nodding.

"Precisely."

(Promise, meanwhile, is contemplating the power vacuum.)

"If you are able to arrange for about three dozen people to be summoned at once, into wards that prevent them from moving around or communicating with one another by any means, and for at least one but preferably all of those people to be immediately and regardless of their objections fed local food by a person who is present and able to communicate with them, that will take care of the Queenscourt. There are of course details and precautions, but I believe that is enough of a sketch to tell you whether this is something you can accomplish."

"As implied, feeding is an avenue of vassalization. The strength of the claim varies according to several factors, and weaker claims sometimes fail to take hold especially in the presence of many competing claims, but no claim can hold if the one feeding is already a vassal of the one fed, so the Queen cannot be vassalized this way except by a mortal - someone from outside our world. Across that boundary - if a mortal eats food from our world, or the reverse - such claims are extremely strong. Do not eat food from my world."

"...Noted. How will you manage here?"

"Sky-veils can subsist indefinitely on natural light and rainwater, neither of which carries a vassalization claim."

"Sky-veils seem to have many convenient properties."

"Yes."

(Promise, meanwhile, inaudibly rummages in her bag. If she can grow an unobtrusive little garden she can live on what she brought, with flat harmonics helping her force the plants.)

"But go on. Once we secure all these offworlders, what do you expect us to do with them?"

"I'll take it under advisement."

The Queen might require an honor guard of some kind to keep ambitious mortals away from her once she's no longer protected by her court, but that can be safely left for later.