call me maybe [Connecticut Yankee] | Glowfic Constellation

connecticut_yankee

Hank tries to match his voice to the armor. "We have a message for your master. Where can we find the king you answer to?"

The answer he gets is "I am Muirchertach mac Muiredaig of the Goidels, High King of Ireland, and I answer to no one," so they're in the right place.

"You will soon." Hank raises the Glowy Rock and gestures toward Muirchertach mac Unpronounceable.

from_scratch

And Muirchertach collapses.

And then abruptly both Hank and Cam are thrown hard into the nearest wall.

connecticut_yankee

Hank is stunned in multiple meanings of the word. The next thing he knows is that his vision is swimming and at least this helmet is pretty cushioned, by armor standards. After what seems to be no time at all, he finds himself on the ground wondering whether anything happened while he was out.

from_scratch

The ensuing fight happens very fast. Everyone else in the room collapses except for one nut-brown woman in a cloak, who Cam blindfolds. That doesn't last long, but next the glowy rock and the windows are all covered in tar; the fires and candles in the hall are snuffed out with a hiss of steam. There's a squeak as the fairy's weighed down to the floor and then glued before she can simply pick up the weight, and then Cam roars, "POISON -"

The fairy shrieks.

"If the king's your summoner and you like him enough to work for him," Cam tells the fairy, "you do not want me unsummoned, right now. You want me to denature the poison in the capsule in his stomach before it dissolves. It is too big for you to get it out through his throat without killing him. Are you calmed down? Can we talk?"

"Y-yes," says the fairy. "Oh, please put the lights back on."

Cam reignites one of the fires.

connecticut_yankee

Hank is gradually regaining his senses. Once he's pretty sure the room is darker because the windows are blocked and not because of the head injury, he checks that the thing that hit him was in fact just a wall and not any kind of train.

"If he's her— she's a— a mover?"

from_scratch

"Evidently," says Cam. "This king summoned you?"

The fairy, still glued to the floor, nods unhappily.

"He's completely safe unless I am unsummoned or I decide to stop adding layers to the capsule," Cam tells her.

connecticut_yankee

Everyone asleep, good. Mover captured, better. They're not in any immediate danger then. "But," Hank asks her, "if the king of Ireland can summon daeva, why is he only king of Ireland?" His entire plan for international relations depended on being unassailably more powerful than everyone else. Muirchertach could be a problem.

from_scratch

"Answer him," Cam says, when the fairy doesn't reply at once.

"He - he only knows how to get me," says the fairy. "And only with a binding that requires me to stay near him. Neither of us knows the language the circle's written in so I can't teach him to change it..."

"He wouldn't trust you unbound?" asks Cam.

"Not yet..."

connecticut_yankee

"Are there more people who know? How did he learn?"

from_scratch

"His father knew how to get ahold of me. I think I must have been summoned to this - time, well, general time period, before, and someone must have taught him, but I didn't notice the difference, they didn't keep me long and it's not like I know enough about human languages to tell I'd got an old one."

"Met any other daeva?" Cam asks her.

"Just you. How did you -?"

"Ah-ah. What all have you been doing here?"

"I helped his father become king. He paid all right, no tech, obviously, but meals and trinkets. I'm mostly a bodyguard."

connecticut_yankee

"Does that mean that if we take him as a prisoner to Ca— to Catraeth you'll try to destroy our beautiful Anglian castles until you find him?"

from_scratch

"Your demon will kill him if I cause trouble," says the fairy. "Won't he."

"It's definitely an option. We didn't come here to do him any permanent harm, but if he won't dismiss you and you're a major problem? It's an option."

The fairy nods glumly.

connecticut_yankee

"Assuming we prefer not to kill him, do you think you can convince him to never war against anyone outside Ireland again? We might not know if he breaks a promise like that, but if we do find out you know we have more firepower."

from_scratch

"He doesn't exactly listen to me," says the fairy.

connecticut_yankee

"I guess we can do the threatening ourselves. Cam, can you wake him up early or does the drug need to wear off?"

from_scratch

"I can speed it up, but it'll still take a few minutes."

connecticut_yankee

"We might want to be somewhere else, then, unless you'd rather put the entire court to sleep when they inevitably turn up here. Is it safe to leave a hostile mover unattended, or do we need some way of bringing her restrained?"

from_scratch

"That's sort of a meaningless question. She can get out of the glue eventually and then she'll try to follow the king because her binding says she needs to be near him. I can't meaningfully restrain her, so keeping an eye on her and being ready to kill off her summoner at a moment's notice is probably the best we can do."

connecticut_yankee

"Can a binding tell her where her summoner is?"

from_scratch

"No, so we could try to confuse her and bolt too fast for her to follow, and then she'd meander around controlled only by whatever's left of her binding, which obviously leaves her free to fling people into walls at high speed - maybe only if they're threatening him, maybe not."

connecticut_yankee

"It's a bit of an uncharitable assumption that a binding is what stops a daeva from killing people, but we don't actually need to trust her if we're watching. Point taken."

from_scratch

"Hey, here I am, totally loose, not killing anybody -"

"You put poison in him!" exclaims the fairy.

"Which will only kill him if I stop renewing the capsule. I suppose it might produce a digestive complaint if it goes on for days and the capsule material disagrees with him, it'd add up, but he'll be fine. But her, even the guy she's been working for for however long won't let her loose and she has no reason to like us, plus, we can't send her away and resummon her with so much as revised binding without her current summoner's cooperation or death."

connecticut_yankee

"We could get cooperation, but possibly only by threat of being medieval at him. And then erase and re-draw the relevant circles often enough that she doesn't dare take a summons ever again.
But it seems to me that the situation isn't all that different from what we thought it was coming in, except that they know exactly why they can't compete with us. We can probably trust them not to start spontaneously killing people about as much as we could trust the other kings and their minions."

from_scratch

"I'd like to get a good look at the circle that he summons her with - let me see if I can -" A piece of paper appears in Cam's hand. "Drat, I don't read this language either. What is that, ogham? Let me see if my computer can figure it out -" Cam has his computer on him under his nondescript outfit; he takes a picture of the circle and attempts to feed it to a character recognition program. "Nnnnnope. Linguists everywhere have fallen down on the job. We don't know what this circle says and neither does anybody else who's seen it. If we can get her unsummoned, we could resummon her, under a binding that we thoroughly vet or just intending to leave her in the circle taskless and well-treated... The problem is you can offer her no permanent consequences. Her incentives are not just like his, even though they've been cooperating this long. She is immortal, she can at worst be inconvenienced or sent home to where no one knows or cares what she's been up to. She doesn't have the same concerns about, say, threat of retaliation or social censure, that a human would."

connecticut_yankee