"Will you keep protecting me from her?" Mira asks.
The fairy looks like an insect-winged cross between a child's drawing and a masterful sculpture of a person - proportioned wrong, colored wrong, sized wrong, but absolutely exquisitely sleek and luminous in every detail, like she was carved from yellow jade and is supposed to have her too-big eyes that far up on her face and meant to have legs that long and be three feet tall yet have fingers longer than Mira's own. And this isn't even, if Mira understands her correctly (only modestly likely), what she "really" looks like.
"Yes," says the fairy.
This is a straight answer. Straight answers can be trusted. Mira relaxes, partly.
"What about Chals?"
The fairy shrugs. "Promised you."
"He's important to me. He was important to Rinay too." Mira's not clear on how much referring to the fairy's prior human charge helps, but it doesn't seem to hurt. "Please."
"Breaking rules," trills the fairy. And she's starting to fidget, if you can call it fidgeting, bored or impatient or left the fairy equivalent of a teakettle boiling wherever she goes when she's not attending Mira. Her wings flicker out of existence for a moment, then come back in different colors. Blue and red becomes white and orange and pink.
"If you won't help me what am I supposed to do?" Kill her stepmother in her sleep? The fairy would then go to one of Kelsey's children by her first husband, in that case, and then the child would be furious, Mira doesn't have a plan for the perfect murder, she'd be caught. Hell, depending on how thoroughly Kelsey's fairy's magic wore off, Chals might turn her in himself. If it didn't wear off very thoroughly in a damn hurry he might outright kill Mira in revenge, she doesn't know, she can't predict him anymore.
"Hmmmmmm," says the fairy. There's an unpleasant buzz in the air while she thinks, and then she says, "Ask a human."
"Who?" She's not even sure Kelsey's technically broken the law. Fairies are a fuzzy area of jurisprudence. And if Kelsey were absolutely in the legal wrong, the person Mira would normally go to would be Chals, but.
"Oh! I know!" says the fairy, making as though to clap her hands but not quite connecting and making a sound like chirping frogs instead of an actual clap. "Here."
She waves her hand, a beat behind the actual magic she's doing, a signal that isn't made with an understanding of why there would be a signal.
Mira's outfit transforms into what is frankly a magically spectacular dress. Her boots disappear only to be replaced with the most staggeringly impractical glass heels of all time, she feels her hair restyling itself on her head, and when her fairy is in a mood like this she can only assume that there's makeup magic going on too. A gourd on the edge of the pumpkin patch swells and changes into a coach and nearby rodents are transformed into horses and a driver. (Mira remembers that she did in fact extract a straight answer from the fairy, once, years ago: she does not make people. This is a human-shaped magical automaton of some kind. When the fairy inevitably elects to destroy it, only a mouse will die.)
Mira looks at the resulting tableau: coach, driver, horses, fancy dress, ridiculous shoes that she inexplicably hasn't already fallen into the mud just from standing still in.
"Here, what?"
"Go! Ask humans," giggles the fairy.
The fairy cannot harm her, the fairy cannot send her into danger - but the fairy can do some bewilderingly stupid things sometimes. "In formal wear?"
"You don't like it," says the fairy. Her wings change again - black and brown and gray. Mira doesn't think this represents any emotion so human as disappointment. "Well, then, it will stop bothering you at midnight."
"I -"
The fairy's wings flicker out, and then so does the rest of her. Mira could call her back, but she's not convinced at this point it would be helpful.
Technically Kelsey wants her home half an hour ago to make dinner and scrub the floor and do the laundry, because if Mira can't be "civil" she can at least be useful.
Mira thinks that if Kelsey gets anything she wants that's a dreadful tragedy.
Mira gets in the coach. The slippers - damn it, the slippers that she complained about that will now disappear at midnight - they guide her steps. She could probably dance in these things. That'll teach her to question the usefulness of a ride to some extremely formal event when what she needs is an assassin.
Maybe she can get the fairy to reconstruct the shoes later, but probably not. Fucking fairies.
---
The coach takes her to the palace.
There is a party ongoing at the palace.
...Okay.
Mira looks like she belongs at a palatial shindig, doesn't she? She does. The fairy outdid herself.
She sails right in.
And immediately corners someone holding and hors d'oeuvres platter and asks them where she should go with a problem that needs delicate handling. The servant suggests the crown prince. "He's very nice," he assures her.
Mira twirls her way through the dancers and goes up to him.
"May I have this dance?" she inquires. Like it's a private joke, because it is.
Oh, look, someone he doesn't recognize. The king would be disappointed in him, he's supposed to know all of these people already. Right, well, there's nothing to be done for it now but figure out who she is and how important or useful she is. Hopefully she won't flirt with him, but he's supposed to smile at her anyway, no need to be rude.
"Certainly," agrees Adanir, using the smile. It can be accurately described as 'dazzling.' Too bad it's not his natural one.
"A fair amount. They attend a particular person, only one at a time, and can be passed to someone else upon death. They're extremely powerful, somewhat helpful to their person, but often in bizarre ways. It's more helpful to have one than not, at least for the person that has one. What's the disaster that involves fairies?"
Mira appreciates it. "My mother has been dead since I was five, which is where I got my fairy. My father has never dated since. Then, three weeks ago, he came home and told me to meet my new stepmother Kelsey and her two daughters from her first marriage. Kelsey's fairy is around a lot and stared at my father and me all the time, sometimes the daughters too. Kelsey acted like it was inconceivable that I didn't want to call her Mother and hug her every time I saw her and generally behave more affectionately with her, a complete stranger, than I did when I was five with my real mother. All of which would merely be bizarre, not incriminating, but then the next time I called my fairy up, she told me you're welcome and when I wanted to know what for she said she'd prevented Kelsey's fairy from forcing me to love Kelsey because she suspected that I'd perceive that as a harm. Since then I've been trying to get my fairy to help Chals somehow, but she won't or can't, and Kelsey's on to me, and my father is no longer just ridiculously in love with his wife but acts like he finds me unpleasant to be around even when Kelsey isn't in the room or the subject of conversation. My fairy's most recent failure to directly assist involved dressing me up like this and giving me a coach ride to this party, which I am taking advantage of because maybe you can help. I hope it's not a problem that I snuck in."
"If anyone is annoyed with you for sneaking in tell them I invited you," he says, reasonably. He's already got one 'stray,' no one will think he's gone mad for inviting another to a ball. "And then if it was ever a problem it will cease to be one. I can possibly help, but I will certainly try. I don't have a fairy, but what I can do involves sending people that do to go arrest this woman and try to get her to - stop it, and verify that the fairy isn't acting on her own, trying to be 'helpful.'"
He is not going to let the king hear of this. Ever. One, because he'd be annoyed with Adanir so readily committing to helping this poor girl, but also because Adanir is genuinely worried about what he'd do with a person who had a fairy that willingly and consistently brainwashed people. The thought is terrifying.
"Send people who have fairies who understand that brainwashing is harmful," says Mira. "But I don't think arresting her will fix it. The fairy could be misinterpreting Kelsey somehow and creating this behavior more or less of her own accord - but the consistency means that Kelsey isn't trying to stop her, even if stopping her was just the bare minimum of not calling her up and asking her for things anymore, and the way Kelsey acts means she approves. I think the best thing you're going to be able to do is kill Kelsey and hope whichever of the daughters is her heir isn't the same way."
"You have to keep her a certain distance from anybody who isn't fairy-guarded. The fairies won't or can't operate on things too far away from their people. Mine has a range of about a hundred yards, but they might vary. I don't know if you already have a prison setup that accommodates that. But the effects are persistent - my fairy isn't around right now and my dress and these magic shoes still exist, the coach is probably where I left it, she said they'd disappear at midnight but that was something she added because I complained. So just taking Kelsey away from my father will not fix him, although it might let the effect wear off by itself, if that's something it can natively do - in the same way that I could rip this dress."
"When I've asked my fairy if she can just fix my father, she says something about rules. I don't know why she's invoking rules, or what they are, or how they work, or for that matter if she's lying, but I would bet that Kelsey's own fairy would be able to reverse the damage if Kelsey's heir wanted her to."
"The girls are eight and nine. They're not nice, but - they're not nice for an eight and a nine year old. They aren't, as far as I can tell, evil. And I can't think of who else Kelsey's heir would be, unless inexplicably she's decided she doesn't like my father enough to leave him his own mind but does like him enough to give him her fairy. It pretty much has to be one of the girls."
"Hmm. Okay, I'll talk to them myself once Kelsey has been arrested and the entire situation has been investigated, with the understanding that they're also probably brainwashed. Are there any other telling behaviors that are easy to verify? I do believe you, but I like having proof before I throw people in jail."
"I'll look into it," he assures. "Don't worry about - all of that, I'll take care of it. Is there anything else I can do?" Pause. "Not just - 'take care of this particular problem' but also 'send you to a friendly person to talk to' or 'find a place for you to stay that is away from her.'"
"You're welcome. Do you know what time it is? I'd rather be tucked away wherever you're putting me when midnight hits and I can no longer dance and the dress goes away to be replaced with either nothing or what I was wearing before depending on how annoyed my fairy was."
Even in the glass shoes she's not a great dancer, but she doesn't fall over, step on his feet, or kick anyone in the shin.
When the song ends, she lets him go without further protest. "Where am I going?"
The servant departs to go get a spare bedroom ready, and Adanir looks at Mira. "Well, you can stay at the party until your room's ready, or I can ask someone else to take you elsewhere. Which is up to you."
"I don't know for certain, one never does with fairies, but I objected to the - putting me in a fancy outfit solution to my father being mind controlled, so she said it would stop bothering me at midnight. I've tried to get her to address my clumsiness before. She's just not that directable in most ways."
Adanir rattles off several large-scale public works projects, and several places where a fairy's efforts could be extremely, extremely helpful. Persistent things that heal, items for mass-transit, and a wire-laced dome with gates to go around a town that's harassed by avii.
"I asked her for a healing wand when I first got her," snorts Mira. "I'd heard about the one they used to have in - anyway, haven't been able to get her to do it. Tried to get her to do something nice with the roads, too - I considered fancier systems but if she'd actually given me magic plates people could stand on to teleport from here to there it wouldn't have done the infrastructure any favors when I'd died and they'd all stopped working. Didn't get it, anyway. I haven't tried the wire lace question. If you take me to a town like that I'll see if I can get her to help."