Chapter Text
Wren looked up into the dazzling lights that separated her from her audience, hiding them from her view and illuminating her to theirs. Only it wasn't stage lights she was looking at, but the rising sun, dawning over the Aevar Mountains. She was Etain Starsteerer, not yet a celebrated hero or navigator of the seas at the edge of the world, just a girl on her first adventure, trying to rescue her brother.
Connor had written the part especially for her, but Wren reflected wryly that, made for her or not, she cut an odd figure as the storied heroine. The players had garbed her in a very loose, very full set of indigo trousers that billowed about her legs like skirts. Her feet were encased in a pair of sturdy, supple leather boots that rose to her mid-calf, and she wore a long blue tunic stitched with decorative streams of tiny glass beads that glittered as they caught the light. Her braid hung heavy down her back, the hair around her face blown back by the magicked wind.
But certainly Etain hadn't been nearly so short, nor had her doubtlessly slender figure filled out her clothes so fully. Thankfully, the tunic was stitched so as to nip in at Wren's waist, giving her figure some definition, but she'd still felt shy and odd when, during rehearsals, she'd stepped onto the stage in full costume for the first time. Like she was too heavy for the delicate, springy boards to support.
Tyron'd thought that she was being plain silly. "There's absolutely no reason to assume," he'd said, clearly working to hold back his impatience with her foolishness, "that Etain Starsteerer was particularly beautiful. It's not as if everyone who lived before a certain time was stunningly gorgeous and terribly heroic and mind-bendingly powerful. Most people in history were no different at the bottom than people today; they just dressed differently."
"It's very well for you to say it like that," she'd retorted tartly, "but it's clear enough that things were different, once upon a time. There were more heroes, for one thing."
Tyron had fixed her with a perceptive gaze, his brown eyes warm and thoughtful. "I think we've got plenty of heroes of our own. Etain didn't do so much more than you've done over the past few years, and you're only getting started."
"I'm not a hero," she'd said, feeling her own lower lip jut out mulishly. "My hair is too stripy. And I only did those things because there was no one else to do them."
"Wren, what on earth do you think a hero is? We all just do what has to be done; so did they."
Kial had called for him then, drawing him away upstage into a discussion of fire spells that eventually culminated in Jesran getting his eyebrows singed.
(Later that day, when Wren was curled up comfortably in bed, snuggled against Connor's bare chest, he'd rumbled at her, "Tyron said you were worried about playing Etain. Some nonsense about your being too - what's your phrase? Short and rounded?" She'd nodded sleepily, and he'd pulled her closer, hands resting on her hips. "Little goose," he'd murmured into her loosened, wild hair, "don't you realize yet just how beautiful you are?"
She'd looked down the length of her naked body and raised a skeptical eyebrow. "I wasn't born blind, if that's what you're asking."
He'd kissed her mouth. "And you think we were? Tyron and Teressa and I? Or do we only take you for pity? You, Wren Nissal Poth, are lovely, and one day I'll manage to convince you of it."
She'd blushed hotly, shy of his compliments but unable to resist needling him: "Do you mean to do any of that convincing at the moment?" He'd kissed her again, and she'd stopped thinking about heroic beauties.)
Now, in the moment of performance, she had little attention to spare for her worries and insecurities. She knew that if she didn't believe in herself, her audience certainly would not, and so she consciously drew herself up into the heroine's presence. She drew the knife that hung at her side, red paint flaking off of it in imitation of drying blood.
"By this knife's blood-coveréd edge I know/ my brother, dearer than my heart has come/ to grievous harm," she said, voice loud, strong, but tinged with worry - after all, Etain was only a girl. "He sought the fabled tree,/ whose blossom'd scent most perfect beauty is,/and gave to me his knife, to keep in his/ remembrance, saying: 'Sister, if the knife/ remain unstained, know that I shall be safe./ But if it do grow red with blood thou'lt know/ I am defeated, and ever lost to thee.'/ Three days ago the knife began to bleed,/ and so I follow my brother's footsteps,/ to save or avenge him, as I may."
Wren sheathed the knife, taking care not to miss the scabbard as she had so often done while practicing - it turned out that getting a knife into a sheath was a deal more difficult than she had expected. Tyron's illusions shifted around her, the sun rising higher, and Kial's voice, transformed so dramatically that he almost didn't sound human, came floating down from the wings. She looked up and saw his white teeth gleaming against his dark skin as he smiled. He did that a lot; Kial was the merriest magician she'd ever met.
"O wand'rer in this foreign land, defeat/ the tasks appointed by our company,/ who are the spirits of this fair place, and/ from your well-lov'd brother, who failed in them/ will fall our stony, insensate shackles." His voice sounded ephemeral and strange, almost inhuman, and made a strange contrast to his beaming face. But the effect was brilliant.
She'd had a terrible time talking Tyron into the play at all. "Playacting, Wren? As Connor informs me at least once a week, I've got no imagination to speak of - you've certainly never disagreed with him on that point." But then she'd coaxed him into a long talk about the aesthetics of the old legend, knowing that the best way to manage him was to appeal to his academic instincts. Tyron was odd that way: tell him a beautiful story and he'd enjoy it well enough, but ask him about the significance of that story and he could go for hours, long fingers restlessly punctuating the air as he theorized and extrapolated.
Once he'd had time to come up with a few pet readings, it wasn't much work to convince him that designing the play would be a fantastic way of expressing them, and so he was limed. He'd planned nearly all the spells for the entire production, only bringing Kial and Lissa and Jesran in to help him keep them all going at once - though he probably could have done it all single-handedly. But he still tended to be self-effacing, and Wren had figured it wasn't worth pushing him that far out of his comfort.
Tyron had been the one who thought of the play as a gift for Tess; Wren and Connor were so taken with the joy of playacting that they were blind to nearly everything else, but Tyron had insisted that, if the three of them were to make it together, Teressa had to be included somehow. As she gazed out into her hidden audience, Wren's heart grinned at the surprise they had in store for the Queen. She was sure that Tess would love it.
But now Tyron's work really took center stage, as they wordlessly performed the three transformations of Etain. First a translucent blue veil, shot through with gracefully-moving eddies, rose slowly from the front of the proscenium, eventually covering Wren entirely to signify her transformation into water. A whispered spell from Tyron set her braid to waving weightlessly, impelled by unseen currents, and the light filtered through the veil turned her skin a delicate blue. Iridescent scales crept down her throat and up her wrists - Connor had written up the stage directions to mimic the Iyon Daiyin shape-change he'd created for her once, and Wren tried to use that memory in her performance, striving to show herself as having become the water itself, as becoming inhuman and strange.
Then the veil receded, the magics gently unravelling to leave her standing alone at center stage. For the second transformation, thin filaments of delicate pale magic wound their way from all sides of the stage to where Wren stood, climbing her like vines. They spun around her, creating a pale cocoon around her body. This was the part of the play that she was most glad of magic for; if she'd had to put up with real cords wrapping round her like that, she would have gone off in screaming horrors, but Tyron's conjuring was weightless and, to her eyes, transparent, leaving her encased only in an illusion of binding, but essentially free and unbound.
The third transformation was the most complicated one, because Tyron had to not only weave illusions around her but also to perform illusions on her, and that was much more difficult to do without the construct being apparent. For her third transformation, Etain emerged from her silken prison with great purple wings, the same wings that eventually would allow her to escape from her shipwreck in the Soryn Sea. They'd decided to only leave the wings visible to the audience for a moment, but even that was difficult enough to do convincingly.
Slowly, the strands of the cocoon dissolved, exposing her to the bright stage lights. Wren could feel the wings reaching up from her shoulderblades, could see the colorful edges of them out of the corner of her eyes, and she threw Tyron a triumphant look where he stood concealed backstage. The wings fluttered once, twice, and then faded back into invisibility. The audience's silence was palpable; Wren knew that they had them exactly where they wanted them. She felt amazingly happy.
"You have passed the test," Kial whispered down in his magically-distorted voice, "and may claim your kin."
The curtain that had hung over the hindmost corner of the stage pulled away, revealing Connor, still and stony in his role as Etain's brother Tir Baiard. She shuddered, and it was very little feigned - this had not been a fun effect to create. Tyron's memories of Andreus's stone spell were a little too vivid, and she'd had no desire to recall her own either. He had looked so horribly dead, and he'd been so cold. Connor's face was grey, and his clothes were still and dark, giving him the appearance of a man carved from rock. His eyes were closed, and he did not move.
She walked to him, feeling the stage lights following her as she moved. He remained motionless, but very slowly Tyron pulled back the illusion of greyness from over him, allowing color to creep back up his throat, down his wrists. As Wren reached him, he drew in an exaggerated breath, and as she lovingly touched his face, he opened his eyes, restored to life. "Brother," she said, quiet and yet audible from the back rows of the theater, "will you not wake, and turn to me?"
He smiled dazzlingly, and even though it was just acting she felt herself melting under the force of his joyful charm. "For you," he said, voice strong and resonant, "I would return from Death itself." He lifted her in his arms, spinning her exuberantly, and then held her close. She tried to not go all breathless, which was difficult given the way he was looking at her, not to mention the feeling of his body pressed against hers, but she needed her breath to properly project her lines - and at any rate, the stage was scarcely the place for that kind of carrying on. Now, backstage afterwards? A completely different matter.
"Into this enchanted place, Etain, you/ have come great-hearted and in triumph. Your brother is won from his cell of stone,/ and the aim of your high quest near at hand./" The voice speaking was partially Kial, as it had been all along, but Tyron had carefully crafted another illusory voice to wrap around it - a woman's warm, alto voice, elegant and filled with the promise of power.
A silver-barked tree grew up from the boards at front center stage, sprouting up in a matter of seconds into a handsome sapling. "From this, the tree of beauty, I will take/ in guerdon of my travails and woes/ a single blossoming branch, and bear back/ with me its odor of greatest beauty." And so saying, Wren crossed to the tree, and knelt beside it to gently cut away with the now-spotless knife a bare branch.
But before she could do so, the tree burst into bloom, and the greatest surprise of their little production was revealed. Wren had debated at great length with Connor over how best to represent "greatest beauty," with Wren favoring a simple magical perfume, and Connor insisting that it had to be more flashy than that if the audience were to properly take the idea. Tyron had at last proposed the solution of embodying beauty, creating a visual allegory out of multiple sensory spells, and when he'd laid out the details of his idea they'd all agreed.
As the blossoms opened, a shimmering image appeared in the scented air around them. It was a woman's face, framed with tendrils of dark red hair that fluttered around the tree's branches like so many ribbons. Her face was high-browed and heart-shaped, and her eyes were a dark, piercing blue. Gleams as if of jewels framed her, sometimes seeming to wind through her hair, sometimes to spangle her damask cheeks, sometimes to cluster on her brow in an coronet.
Wren heard a gasp arise from the audience, and she couldn't help outright beaming. From the front rows, she heard an excited whisper: "It looks like Queen Teressa!"
Tess's conjured face, their personification of greatest beauty, smiled down at them serenely. "Cut loose your branch, Etain, and bear it on,/ that you may have Beauty's strength beside you/ as you take the great journeys of your fate," intoned the eldritch voice, and then the entire illusion faded and was gone, leaving only Wren, Connor, and the flowering branch in her hand.
The applause was tumultuous, and when the lights went down Wren could see Tess's beaming face clear as anything, eyes glittering and cheeks flushed with pleasure. She'd understood their compliment. Tyron, Lissa, Jesran, and Kial joined them onstage, the group of them taking their bows together. It was, Wren thought as the curtain closed in front of them,, not a bad go for her stage debut. Though she didn't see how she was going to go back to ordinary life after something so absolutely thrilling as the theater.
Tess caught them backstage, catching the three of them into a simultaneous embrace. "Thank you," she said. Connor's eyes crinkled happily, Tyron blushed, and Wren just hugged her friend back. Separating just enough to satisfy decorum, the four friends stepped out into the court.