Celyn and Mahaut’s Miracle Players

This is Celyn’s story of his time with an acting troupe. Please don’t read unless it has been revealed in game

It had been a series of odd coincidences that had gotten Celyn to join Mahaut’s Miracle Players, but of course a series of odd coincidences was the sort of thing that Celyn treated with absolute faith. Mahaut herself was a fierce, plump woman, middle aged but going grey, who was a terrifying force of organization, and probably therefore entirely necessary for having a successful troupe at all.  If it had been left to Josse, who did most of the writing, the whole thing would have been run on wisps and inspiration; as it was, Josse had a wagon and a sensible supply of paper and a small boy who brought him meals and brought back script pages.  If he was mad, which he might have been, at least a little, Celyn thought it a Wyrdling-touched sort of madness.

It was a respectably sized troupe, with a routine of a route that arced back and forth around the Western Gulf.  The three wagons that could be arranged to make a stage were mostly filled with actors the rest of the time, though one of them - the one Celyn slept in - was full of costumes and props.  Several other wagons managed to house a small addendum of acrobats, a few support staff, and a strangely solitary halfling musician, additional supplies, and, of course, Mahaut and her husband, who was a quiet fellow who mostly did accounting.

Celyn, officially, was the assistant to the seamstress, but his responsibilities spilled off in a number of directions.  He was rapidly settling in as the local master of stage makeup, to the delight of the actors.  He was turning into a passable acrobat, not much of a performer, but enough to help them choreograph routines and serve as a reasonable assistant.  He collected useful herbs for the cook; the time he successfully foraged for some particularly good mushrooms got the halfling to actually introduce herself - her name was Adri Lightfoot, apparently, and she had a sideline in small illusions.  He admitted he could make things glow - he was shy of larger miracles, but the light was a small thing that he felt he could share - and the resulting conversation eventually encompassed Piet the juggler, who felt that luminous spheres could do his somewhat struggling act some good.

Eventually Adri worked around to asking, “Why do you bunk in the props wagon?” which was the sort of question he shrugged at.

“Don’t like to be around people when I’m sleeping.”  After a moment he added with a grin, “Also actors are rowdy.”

Adri snorted.  “Good earplugs.  But I get it.”

Celyn was glad that she was willing to drop it; he found the whole concept of people in sleep overwhelming and nervewracking.  He did not want people to see him adjusting his bindings, possibly tinkering with the cosmetics that helped the shadows on his face do the things he wanted to do.  It made the delicate nature of dealing with his lingering discomforts even more difficult, having people aware of the steps he took to manage them.  And of course sleeping meant no chance of having any control over what people saw.  No, he would sleep in the props wagon and be eccentric, eccentric was the sort of thing that he was.

He did enjoy working with the troupe, though.  Every so often Josse would emerge with a new miracle play and everyone would bustle around figuring out what to do, and he would have odd jobs and entertainment and the satisfaction of doing work that was important without being worldshaking.  He was no bard, or poet, or performer, not even when someone handed him a shield and a blunted sword and said “Make it look good!” for the background of a show and he figured out how to use what he knew about actually fighting to be in the background usefully.

And people loved a good miracle play.  In each town, they had a selection that were locally known, the tales of their particular miracles, but also tried out one or two others, to share the sorts of things that other people had known, that seemed likely to play.  A town couldn’t support players forever, so once they’d done a few plays and performances, it was back on the road, practicing lines and dances and tumbling runs and such in the camps in the evening, tinkering with costumes, and so on.

Celyn liked the seamstress, who had introduced herself with “Call me Ruby,” and let Celyn get her the information she needed to do her work.  It meant he took measurements, ran errands, occasionally went to shops for materials though that was always with Mahaut or her husband to make sure someone’s eyes were on the expenses.

It meant that when they hired on a new performer, he had a little book from Ruby to write her basic information down.  And this one had all the signs of someone who was coming into womanhood the hard way, and who had maybe not gotten the help she needed to do it.

“I’m Charlotte,” she said.

Celyn could never quite find his way to be comfortable with the way Sembarans just gve out their names like that, with no space for safety in them.  Not like Ruby, who might have been Tyrwinghan, but long enough ago that she’d lost the accent, he supposed.  He said, “You can call me Celyn,” and explained what he needed to do with the measurements.  She let him do them, and sighed, and looked faintly melancholy.

“Next question, then.  How much curve do you want to have on stage?”

“What?”

He gestured, a little awkwardly, at her chest.  “How much, you know, busty do you want to be?  Do you care about the shape of your hips?”  When she seemed likely to get upset he clarified, “This is costuming, we can make you look however you want to, whatever would make you happy.  And I mean, I can help you figure out how to do that with regular clothes too.  And other things.  If you want to change your shape.”

She sat down, abruptly, not quite centered on the stool so it wobbled and he had to grab her arm to kep her from falling.  He let go as soon as she was stable with a murmured apology.

“No, it’s, it’s okay.  Please explain.”

He pulled the other stool over and sat on it.  “You’re a woman on the hard road,” he said, with as much earnestness as he could muster.  “But there’s cuts of clothing that can change the - Ruby calls it the silhouette - how you look.  There’s stuff you can get made up at the apothecary too, that can help, if you’re the sort of person who wants her own curves rather than having to pad things to look like yourself.”  He sucked in a breath.  “Cosmetics, too.  To soften your features even more, if you want.  I can teach you.”

“You can?”  Her disbelief was palpable, but thrilling: she hadn’t figured him out.

“Yeah.  I learned.  At the Wyrdling temple in Ruthin.  How to dress, how to do the makeup.  It’s why I help Ruby, and help with the stage makeup - it’s good for that too - but I learned it for people like us.”

“Like … us.”

He grimaced.  Not that he was good at the acting thing, but putting on the wry, he had found, helped here.  “I had such a hard time figuring out the road to being a man that I needed an actual miracle to not destroy myself on the way.  This,” he spread his hands, “I’m just passing it on.  Because we all deserve miracles - I know we do - but none of us should have to wait to get them.  I know the clothing tricks.  I know the things to get at the apothecary, and what to mind for them.  It’s…”  He looked at the ceiling of the wagon, which was painted with masks showing a dozen different expressions.  “It’s important.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said.  “That you’re one like me.”

“Proves I know what I’m doing, right?” he said with a grin.  “I’m not—”  He paused, and on a whim, a chance, a throw of the dice, he confessed.  “The miracle I got was one of knowledge.  Knowing why everything felt wrong, why it made me hurt so much.  It didn’t take away the pain, except that it guided me towards ways to deal with it.  Maybe someday I’ll find another miracle, or some magic, to do the rest, but I don’t need it, because I know what I am, that I’m part of the unfolding miracle that is our sort of people, made to choose, to become.”

“Miracle?”

“I don’t mean the big ones, the ones we tell stories about, that we act out when Josse writes them up as plays.  I mean the whole— the world is a constant stream of miracles, have you noticed?  The gods work on the small scale too.”  She did not look convinced, so he went on.  “Have you ever watched a rose unfold into a bloom?  Isn’t that the Sibyl’s miracle?  Seen the fruit on the vine - or a tree I guess - go from little nubs to nourishment, at the Mother’s command, or watched the summer sun turn the grain from green to gold for the Father?  Seen how red-hot iron turns into a scytheblade because the Warlord gave the blacksmith the miracle of transforming it?  Have you ever… I mean.  Birds.  Watched birds.”

“Birds?”

“I guess they’re the Wildling’s miracle, birds?  But they fly.  How amazing is it to fly, that there’s something in the world that can?”  He waved his hands energetically.  “Birds.  Just.  Miraculous.  And ordinary.  At the same time.  We,” he gestured to her, then to himself, “we’re like that.  Sliding between seasons, finding the way to choose, to hold, to change, whether it’s how we do our faces, what clothes we wear, me being the sort of man who was maybe a girl and grew into a problem before learning how to be a man, you being the sort of woman who went through whatever changes of season brought you here, by luck, to find me and take the next throw of the dice towards becoming yourself.”

The phrase ‘grew into a problem’ made her smile.  “You’re a mystic,” she said.  Which was probably more polite than madman, which some people also said when he got like this about things.  Fey and strange and sideways of what most people thought.

“I guess?  I just, I really like the small miracles.  The ones that most people don’t notice are miracles.”  He shrugged a little.  “There’s a tea I have, and when I started it, my voice cracked like a boy’s and dropped, and it was something I could choose, something I could embrace, something out there in the world for people like me that the gods left there - the Wyrdling and the Wildling, I’m guessing, working together - and isn’t it a miracle that that’s there for me and people like me?”  He added, with a laugh, “Not that I’ve managed to grow a beard.”

Charlotte grimaced.  “Yeah.”

“Hey.”  Celyn waited until he had her attention.  “I’ll write it out for you.  The proportions on the herbs and things.  Mixed with oil and beeswax - the beeswax isn’t strictly necessary if the apothecary doesn’t have it, but it helps it stay where you put it on your skin, oils rub off easy on their own.  A lotion, put it wherever you want to thin out your hair, like your face or your, I dunno, legs or something, before you go to bed, and it’ll change it over time.  Not fast, and don’t put it on more than once a day to hurry it up!  It’ll leave you with, it’s something like sunburns, if you do too much, and then you’ll have to stop using it at all until it heals.”

“That’s a thing?”

“See?  I told you.  Small miracles.  I’ll have to get some paper from Josse or Mahaut, but I’ll write it for you.”

“And you said— tea?”  Charlotte was visibly anxious.

“For growing your own curves?  Yeah.  I’ll put that there for you too.  They ache growing in, by the way.”  He grimaced again, and she laughed.  “So that’s not something going wrong, that’s just how it is.”

She nodded, and studied him thoughtfully.  “I have a question and I can’t tell if it’s a bad one.”

He shrugged.  “Ask and I’ll tell you?”

“You won’t get angry?”

“I try very hard not to.  People are where they are. It’s okay.”  He shrugged.  “You’d have to work really hard to ask a question that made me angry.”

“Okay.”  She thought it over.  “I had no idea you were like me.  You’re, you’ve even got the things that a woman needs, not just what you need, to share.  You don’t let anyone know, but you say ‘like us’ and ‘our people’.”  She spread her hands, helplessly.

He grunted.  “It’s not that I hide it, but I don’t like to talk about it.  Show it.  Not with people who aren’t our people and understand.  You know what it’s like to be growing out of season, to have the wrong things happen when you came of age.”  He paused, drumming anxiously on his leg with his fingertips.  “I didn’t understand what was wrong.  It wasn’t like I knew I was supposed to grow into a man, I just knew that I was wrong, and it made me angry.  Destructive.  Mostly to myself, maybe other people too?”

She nodded slowly but did not interrupt.

“Being a man out of season, it’s important to me.  Other people noticing the ways I’m out of season?  Hurts.  It reminds me of being angry.  It pushes me back towards being angry.  Hurting myself and other people.  Like I said, the miracle I got, it was a miracle of knowledge, and I followed it and learned about the herbs and the lotions and things.  Which helps some of the things I need, for it not to hurt.  But I still have to bind my chest.  I still have to be careful what I wear, sometimes I do,” he traced a finger along his jaw, “shading and things.  But I can’t bear to be seen doing those things, because it hurts to be reminded that, that people on the outside don’t have to, to look like themselves.”

He was not sure if her expression was more sympathy or pity.  It didn’t matter, really, but she had asked, and it was not an unreasonable question.

“I guess it comes down to that I don’t want to be seen when I look like anyone other than me.”

“That, I get,” she said with a soft chuckle.  “So let’s talk about how to do curves in costuming.  And … the rest of the time too.”

When they’d done all the work, and Ruby had done all the costuming and talked to Charlotte about what it would take for help with her daily wardrobe, Charlotte positively bloomed.  Looking like herself - feeling like herself - gave her a sort of vivacious hope that Celyn was glad to have helped with.

Unfortunately, Charlotte herself made the situation a little awkward.  Her confidence won her a number of well-earned admirers; she decided, however, that Celyn was clearly one of them, for reasons that he remained at least somewhat unclear on.  Certainly it was not that he had great skill at flirting, not that he was deploying it even if he had.  He quietly arranged his tasks so the matter did not come to confrontation and felt a steady unease about it.  Further, as he grew uncomfortable, he also started to dream in ways that suggested his time with the Players was short.

When he explained that to Mahaut, she sighed and shook her head.  “You’ve been a great help to us your time here, but I suppose when you said dreams brought you I can’t be surprised that they’d take you away again.  Do you know more?”

He shook his head and shrugged.  “I’m sure it’ll make sense when it makes sense.”

She snorted and waved him back to work.

It was the bandit attack that finally changed things.  Not very well-organized footpads, but definitely more inclined to raid some travelling players than a halfling caravan or other such; the players neither ran to strong guards nor, really, much money, and all the costume gems were paste anyway.

Nonetheless, there they were, a ragtag crew of them, splitting up among the wagons to demand valuables.  The one that broke into the props wagon had awakened Celyn by rattling the door, and he had rolled into the costumes and come to his feet, then slipped out to figure out what was going on.  When it became clear that there were threats in the offing, he rather regretted leaving the man behind, though he supposed Ruby would not have thanked him for getting blood on the costumes.

The leader seemed to think that Josse’s wagon was the one with the money, rather than Mahaut’s, and was threatening the playwright with a crossbow for it.  Josse had his hands up, expressing his denial, and the shot was fired, and Celyn flicked his hand, to send it awry in a shimmer of fae trickery.  As the leader threw the crossbow aside and drew his knife, Celyn was there, behind him, and his own knife struck, and the man went down, curled around his pain and wheezing.  He met Josse’s terrified eyes for a moment, said, “It’ll be okay.  The Wyrdling is looking out for you,” and then turned, abruptly, when he heard someone scream.

Someone was menacing some of the players, and Celyn was angry, now, the sort of pinpoint anger that did things, fierce things, that remembered learning to fight in the woods.  He jumped down the steps from Josse’s wagon, loped across the camp, and saw the menace through the unshuttered window of one of the other wagons.

An unshuttered window was good enough to jump, so he did, shimmering into mist, appearing in the woman’s face.  “Boo,” he said.

There were more screams, startled ones this time, and the bandit took a step back, her gaze catching Celyn’s bloody knife.  Celyn glared up into her eyes, the thing that he knew never to do unless he meant it as a challenge or a threat, like any Tyrwinghan knew, but this was no fey, this was a mortal and she had been threatening his people.  She took another step back, then another, and then Adri was at the door and hit her over the head with a quarterstaff.  “Wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

He shrugged.  “There’s one in the props wagon, I went to help Josse first.”

“Let’s deal with that, then.”

The two of them met the last bandit as he came out of the wagon with a bundle of stolen things and then stopped, not sure what to do with a halfling armed with a quarterstaff and a madman with a knife.

“Put it down,” growled Adri, “and nobody else gets hurt, right?”

Celyn was not gifted with frightening people except, maybe, by accident, like he’d done by teleporting in front of the bandit.  Adri was an artisan of it, for all that she usually spent her efforts on being friendly.  The last bandit dropped the loot and sat down on the steps, gaze snapping back and forth between Celyn and Adri like he was not sure what was going to happen next.

There had been four bandits.  The one Celyn hadn’t seen had bothered the wagon with Adri and the acrobats, and Adri and the acrobats had given him a thorough thumping before the halfling had come out to respond to the scream.

The scream had been one of the actors.  He had, apparently, tried to do the brave thing and the female bandit had stabbed him for it.  There was a great crowd around him, now, that Celyn worked his way to the edges of.

The actor was lying with his head in Charlotte’s lap, and she was crying.  He commented, as Celyn got in earshot, “I don’t even have a good line to die on.  Where’s Josse?”, trying to make light of it, trying to do something to ease matters.  Antonin was the leading man, more often than not; Celyn supposed he was probably a bit at a loss without a line, besides.

It was a gut wound.  Those were ugly and people didn’t survive them without miracles.  Celyn gently worked his way through the crowd - it took a little time, because he was honestly a bit mousy at least when compared to the actors - and sat down next to them.

“It’s too late for me,” the actor said, with a cough that was only half theatrics.

“Hush,” said Celyn, pulling a pebble out of his pocket, one that shimmered as he put it down with a cascade of rainbow lights.  “It’s going to be okay.”

Charlotte howled, “It is not!” in outrage, and Celyn patted her shoulder gently.

“Don’t jostle him,” he said, and extended his hands.  After taking in a breath, he closed his eyes and reached for prayer, for hope, for the gift of healing; like it had before, it came to his hands, always startling in its readiness, in the fact that it was there for the asking.  Guts were messy things, and the dirtiness of them needed to not be scattered through like that, and the rent needd to be mended, and....

Antonin coughed again, and then, slowly, sat up, and Celyn rocked back onto his heels.  “Okay?”

“I… It’s a miracle?”  The actor did not sound entirely certain.

Celyn nodded a little.  “But now you’re okay.”  He said it as gently as he could, as quietly as he could, to put the importance of it all on Antonin’s life, not the miracle, and Antonin seemed to understand and nod.

Charlotte was looking at him, though, like he was some alien being, unpredictable and dangerous as a fey, without any of the sensible rules any Tyrwinghan would know for dealing with the fey politely.  It was uncomfortable, and he made his escape as quickly as he could, vanishing into the dark so he would not be found.  Only after the bustle settled - Adri seemed to have tied up all the bandits and bundled them into her wagon to be watched by shifts of acrobats armed with cudgels - did he slip back into the props wagon to go back to sleep.

The dreams meant that he went to find Mahaut first thing in the morning and explain.

“Well,” she said, “we’re a day out from Wisford.  You’ll stay long enough to see that lot handed over to the guard there, I assume?”

“Of course.”  He sighed.  “I don’t know what to feel about that.”

“Bandits through here’s right unusual.  I’ll be glad enough to get inside Wisford’s walls, I’ve an uneasy feeling.”  She shook her head.  “Where will you go?”

Celyn considered the import of his dreams.  “I think towards Fellburn,”  he said.  “That’s not the way you ever go.”

“No.”  She had a regarding look.  “Well, we’ll miss you, you’re a good worker.  But I won’t be keeping you.  I’ll have a gift for you when you go, in thanks for it all.”  Celyn tried to protest, but she waved him off.  “Your usual pay doesn’t cover bandits, and Josse made it right clear you saved his life.  Where would we be without a playwright?  No.  You’ll take your gift and be happy with it, young man.”

He had to laugh and say, “Yes’m.”

He was surprised, in the end, that the gift was a sword, and some armour, and a shield.

“I’ve a feeling that you’ll be doing more fighting than costuming the road you’re going,” was all Mahaut had to say about it.