Celyn and Perception
Before the miracle, Celyn had never thought much about appearances. He had been a furious, feral child, who had the sort of responsibilities that the fey-touched and peculiar had, and that did not at all depend on looking like anything in particular. If his hair had sometimes been full of leaves, that was not out of the ordinary for what he was, unlike perhaps the normal sorts of village girls like he had never been.
His hair was shorter now, and unlikely to hold onto any leaves. He fidgeted with the ends of it as it brushed his jawline. It helped people remember that he had a new name, at least, though not everyone was as good at it as Ellis. But Ellis was a special case, and saw through to the heart of him from the beginning, and asked gently about things like where he could touch and whether they needed to spend less time kissing so that Celyn’s pain at being aware of himself would ease. He could even trust Ellis to stand guard when he needed it, washing up in the hills, in perfect faith that no matter what Ellis saw, he knew he was seeing a man. Other people would adjust, sooner or later; he wasn’t worried about that. He had talked with Grandfather Trefor in Nefyn, and Grandfather Trefor had assured him it would happen soon enough.
The thing that occupied his mind - gnawing on it like a rat, really - was the sense of a choice of fates, something that lingered even after the initial thrill of the miracle and the relief it had brought had faded. There was nothing stopping him, certainly, from continuing with the life he had built, from tending the stones and learning from Ampelos and whatever other fey wanted to be friendly with him. He could do that. The Wyrdling’s gift could be just a momentary thing, something that set him right enough to live without destroying himself or others.
It could be.
And if it was, he would never hear the song of those birds again. His awareness of the god’s love and protection, the effort they had gone to for his well-being, would be a memory, a thing that had happened once. A necessary once, yes, but a distinctly past one. He could easily see how someone might choose that. He could imagine, for example, that Grandfather Trefor, if he had needed some earth-shattering revelation, would have said “Thank you” and gone back to his life.
Celyn could see how that sort of life looked, and he found that it did not like the way it fit on him. He did not like the way people looked at him, even when they recognized him as a young man of the village rather than a young woman, the way they seemed to expect that he could have been through something profound and have it not actually matter to anything real.
He had a choice; the knowledge he had been given included the knowledge of the choice. He could stay where he was, and have an ordinary life, and probably marry Ellis or someone else but honestly it looked like it would be Ellis if it was anyone, and it was not a bad life, not at all. Or he could follow the queer rhythm of the Wyrdling’s presence, and see where it led, but where it led was, almost certainly, not that.
The problem came down to appearances. There was nothing he could do, no way he could be, that would mean people remembered that he had been through something remarkable. Perhaps he was already too odd, so it just washed into other things, or perhaps that sort of miracle just didn’t matter outside the person it happened to; either way, nobody expected him to be anything other than he had been all his life, even when they used his name and agreed he was clearly a boy. It itched, was the best he could explain it, and it was unpleasant to stay where things itched. He didn’t want to make a grand show of it, but he didn’t want people not to notice that he’d changed, beyond having to remember a name.
Celyn was not entirely conscious that taking that other road would mean leaving Clawyn for longer than just the time it would take to seek out the second apprenticeship at the Wyrdling temple in Ruthin; he was seventeen, and not yet as good at seeing the patterns of fate as he would become later. Nonetheless, he knew that that path would have changes he could not anticipate and would not understand when he gathered his things and started to walk west, towards the river, towards Ruthin. He accepted those changes, whatever they might be; that was the only way forward, however strange his life might appear to him afterwards.
Learning was sometimes complicated. Celyn hadn’t shared a bed since he was too young to remember, not before he was bundled into one with someone in Ruthin, and that was how he learned that he hated any sort of company when he slept, hated the possibility of it, the sense that someone might see him when he wasn’t in control of how he looked, when he had to take the bindings off because Eirian scolded him when he wore them constantly. It was all terribly awkward, but he eventually wound up with a creaky cot in someone’s attic and didn’t have to worry about being perceived when he was vulnerable anymore. And nobody had to worry about his foul temper when he felt that he was being seen incorrectly, either, which he suspected was a relief to more than just himself.
And then of course Eirian started teaching him more about appearances. Not just the simple things, like how to bind, and the things that he needed to do to do so safely, or even how to pick out a shirt that was loose in the right places to hide the curve of his hips, or any of the other things that she made sure he knew. She got at deeper questions as well, saying things like, “Most people, they figure out what sort of man or woman they want to be by living it and figuring it out piece by piece, but we need to make more deliberate choices. What sort of man do you want to be? Let’s figure out how that man picks out his clothes.”
After that, it was thinking about how that sort of man moved, how that sort of man sounded, things that went deeper than the most simple appearances but which, Eirian insisted, made more of a difference. And once he knew that, she drilled him on the same things for women, and for others, too, who chose, she said, from a broader palette.
It left him with a lot to think about. He experimented a little with trying things out, putting on manners to ask himself ‘is this the sort of man I am?’, and then discarding them when they did not fit. When he returned to Clawyn it turned into a game he played sometimes with Ellis, adopting manners that he had seen, trying them out, getting commentary on how they suited or did not suit him. He had thought he was making reasonable progress, maybe, on figuring out how to look like himself before the miracle upended everything.
Now the problem was not that nobody remembered that he had had a miracle happen to him. No, the problem was that everyone had seen him do a miracle, and they couldn’t see Celyn, who had grown up there, who was one of them, anymore. It was not an improvement. And he felt foolish when Ellis had to point out to him that it was appearances again, this time not that he was being seen as a girl, but that he was being seen as nothing other than a source of miracles, and not even always the Wyrdling’s miracles. There was no way for him to be himself there, not anymore, no way of moderating the extremes, and he was consumed by the irony of it as he contemplated the dual face of the Wyrdling and packed his things to go.
He would have to decide who he was and how that looked somewhere else, away from the life he understood. Which meant he was trying to figure out what face made sense to wear when he found the Players. Exposure to the fancier cloth that was used for some of the costumes made him retreat back to simple fabrics, simple dyes; he found himself preferring nettle to linen, but it was hard to come by, and Clawyn’s goat wool was less common than sheep. But still he returned to whatever was closest to what he knew, when he needed something: simple cloth, simply and robustly tailored. A vest helped hide the shape of his chest, and he accepted some small ornamentation on that, simple embroidery, rather than the lusher adornment of fancier fabrics.
Unlike many people who had left home to become something else, Celyn stubbornly remained a farm boy. It began almost as an affectation, a way of being from where he was from, and then he discovered that it was useful: another peasant in the background drew no particular attention, unless he chose to do so. He found that he did not need people who had not known him all his life to acknowledge the Wyrdling’s touch on him, which was at least less stressful than having people not acknowledging that he had changed; he also found that working in the background of the stage gave him many opportunities to figure things out that the people up front would never see. That was useful to him, and sometimes to Mahaut.
And, of course, he learned costuming, learning about how the clothing supported the character, which was the same sort of knowledge from a different angle, like looking at something from one eye and then the other. Eirian had taught him about how clothes could help shape bodies, and had gotten him thinking about the other things clothes shaped; Ruby taught him about how clothes brought out the right reactions from the audience. He filed all those things away as things to understand, and things that could help him with his deeper purpose, of finding the people like him, the Wyrdling’s people, who needed help becoming themselves properly.
Celyn made a careful study of the people who associated with the Players, studying their manner, their style, their choices. Mahaut herself dressed plainly, as did her husband, though not as much so as he did; a merchant would have made more a display of wealth, to prove success, and she wished to fade into the background. Josse the playwright favored dramatic puffed sleeves even though he got ink on them routinely; eventually Celyn noticed that he picked out his vests to match the inkstains, which was a delightful bit of madness to contemplate. Charlotte wanted bright colors and expensive fabric and fancy embroidery and couldn’t afford them, but she revelled in the more ornate costumes that Ruby turned out when she got to wear them. Adri swapped between plain clothes not entirely unlike Celyn’s when they were travelling and fancier for when they were settled in a village, while Alys defaulted to performance outfits that showed off her muscles most of the time and only occasionally pulled something on over it for the weather or to avoid attracting the wrong sort of attention when she went gambling.
Alys, of course, was of profound interest to Celyn as he tried to figure out whether or not he wanted to tell her he fancied her. By the time he had worked around to considering the possibility seriously, however, she had made clear that her own fancies were only towards women. Which was awkward, to say the least; she saw him entirely as a man, one she could dice with happily rather than the sort of annoying man who took appreciation of the muscles of her well-displayed arms and shoulders a little too far when drunk. And that was how he wanted, how he needed to be seen, and he couldn’t shake the fear that if she accepted his interest and made an exception to her usual tastes for him, it would only be a grudging thing alotted to him because his body was of the sort she preferred, more or less. He did have the good fortune to not have the bounteous curves topside that she so cheerfully liked, so it was perhaps even a bit more ‘less’ than ‘more’. In the end, he let his own appreciation of her excellent arms and, more importantly, the steadiness and reliability that ran under everything about her, be quiet, and had matters remain as a friendship he cherished, without having to worry about what she saw him as.
None of these thoughts helped when he reached the point of having to leave the Players, though, as this haring off into the unknown was an entirely new set of things to worry about in how he was seen. He had never carried a sword before, not as more than a prop when they needed an extra who had enough competence to not look like a fool on stage. The armour that Mahaut got for him was mostly plain, with a little yellow and blue on the straps, and he appreciated that she paid attention to that sort of thing. It also meant that he didn’t need to bind so tightly when he wore it, which was probably for the best, given that if he had to fight, he would want to be able to breathe clearly.
Celyn had no idea what he looked like, though. What that appearance meant. It wasn’t a peasant, not anymore, farm boys certainly couldn’t afford swords. It was definitely not a soldier, though; the garrison troops tended to weigh themselves down with more metal. He wouldn’t make a plausible scout, not unless he learned a lot more about the wilderness, and for all he was no city boy he wasn’t that, either. He hadn’t really solved it at all by the time he had arrived in Cleenseau, and by that point he decided to let people react to him and see if he needed to change things.
Of course, that meant that he had to figure out what it was to look like a man who was a hero, and he was not at all sure what he thought of that. On the one hand, it involved a certain amount of excruciatingly upper-class meals with people who would not have spared him a second glance if he were still a Clawyn village boy in fact rather than merely at heart. On the other hand, it also involved a completely private room to sleep in, one where he could take the time to redo his binder properly in the morning and even, when he wanted to be really fussy, do the shading on his jaw that made it look just that little bit broader and made him feel that much more confident that he actually looked like himself. In the end he settled on better sleep being for the best and would deal with the rest as it came.
At least the others in their impromptu set of heroes seemed as uncertain about what it was to look like a man who was a hero as he was. The most curious, of course, was his fellow Tyrwinghan; it rapidly became clear that while he favored the sort of bright colors that might suit a bard or other entertainer, he did not actually seem to want that sort of attention from others. Celyn supposed Robin must not think about clothes like that, that most people didn’t, but he certainly didn’t know the man well enough to ask about his choices, only to find them oddly similar to Adri’s. He also did not know enough about dwarven clothing to feel confident about Izgil’s choice in outfit, but he certainly looked like a plausible casting for “wandering scholar”. Najeer was a portrait of a somewhat prissy merchant and never seemed to adapt that to circumstances at all, which was a sort of pigheadedness that suddenly made a great deal more sense when they learned that the clothing was an illusion and Najeer was actually a child named Viepuck.
Celyn thus moved on to making a study of what it was to look like a hero. Since nobody in their little group made any particular adjustments based on being deemed such, it was mostly a study of reactions. The general consensus of the population of Cleenseau and its surrounding towns and villages was that the one of the four of them who looked most like a hero was Robin, which was, Celyn thought, probably accurate. He was himself rather deliberately scruffy, even aside from the fact where his equipment was not, aside from the sword, particularly remarkable; neither Viepuck nor Izgil went in for particularly dramatic gear either, and Viepuck was further hobbled by being a child, though he did burnish himself a bit by positioning himself as Robin’s squire, which suggested asiprations to proper herodom as everyone else seemed to reckon it.
Being a hero at least resolved some of the issues with appearances. If he did something miraculous, or dramatic, or whatever else, nobody was shocked, at least once Izgil stopped being vocally confused whenever he did almost anything at all. It didn’t change anyone’s opinion of him to do those things, so he didn’t have to worry about people being strange and offputting if a miracle happened, or if anything else. The price for it was an even keener awareness of the difference between someone who was a hero and someone who was ordinary than even he had had when Ellis had so gently ended things. Celyn could find affable cameraderie playing dice with Ames Benthey, which at least was a partial compensation for the loss of Alys in his life; he didn’t know how to have the sort of conversations he had had with Alys, though, about deeper things, and the man also did not catch his eye like she had. Too old; too staid. And there was a gap there, between the ordinary and the remarkable, and the remarkable was too strongly drawn now to be easily bridgeable.
He refused to brood about it; it was what it was. And people’s behavior was a constant show of responses against which he could better hone his model of what a hero was like, so he could decide when he wanted to be that, and when he wanted to be something else. And, since mostly they were responses to Robin, he could observe that without having to do his own reacting.
Not that Robin particularly liked it, he noticed. Robin was steady, and diligent, and generous with his power of healing, and he certainly had a knack for presenting himself publicly that assured people of that stability. And as soon as someone tried to approach him personally, he was stammeringly uncertain of himself, or at least uncertain of something about the situation. It was an interesting dichotomy between Robin-the-hero and Robin-the-person, one that Celyn kept an eye on in the hope that it might illuminate something. He suspected Robin found it wearing, more than anything else.
Of course, he did eventually realize that his interest was not merely in trying to figure out how to manage appearances. He’d gone over with Robin to Tavoise, because someone there had a blight in her orchard, and he’d— well, he didn’t actually know much about apple trees in particular, other than the things everyone knew about picking the fruit and harvesting the leaves for dyes in the spring and such, but he had thought he might have known something. Though it turned out apple trees were very much not like grapevines at all. He probably could have managed a graft, but Abigail wouldn’t have needed help with that, she could handle her own grafts. And it was mostly nut trees anyway, not even apples, so he was doubly not useful.
In any case, Celyn had not been terribly helpful, but Robin had managed to figure out how to cleanse the corruption from the grove. And Abigail, well, she’d come out of being shy and reserved and made entirely clear that her gratitude was quite personal, to a level that made Robin visibly uncomfortable. And Celyn had found himself quietly furious, in a way that was entirely unsuitable to a hero, he was sure of that much; but also, he was clear that it was Robin’s discomfort that enraged him more than anything else. The anger was the sort of protective fierceness that Celyn remembered from wanting to protect Pryce, or could imagine if something had threatened Ellis - not that Ellis was easy to discomfit, not like Pryce was.
He couldn’t, once he sorted it all out, grudge Abigail her attraction to Robin’s warmth; it showed that she had some good sense to her, after all. But she didn’t, in his judgement, have enough care with the paladin himself, and so he was rather quietly glad when Odo started courting the woman. Perhaps that would divert her, for the future, so she didn’t spend much more time putting Robin in an awkward situation that he clearly did not want to have to handle.
Celyn put a lot of mental effort into not being another awkward situation for Robin to handle. It was easy enough to treat it like he had treated Alys, and carry on as a friend, as a companion in arms.
The encounter with hostile fey was one he had to think about a great deal, aside from the bit where he was frustrated that nobody other than Robin had the sense to get out of the way of the horned being who had appeared after they finished off the redcap. He had to expand his understanding of the shape of what it was to be seen, when being seen by something potent and alien and dangerous, something that he knew how to deal with in theory and had never truly considered facing in practice.
The feeling was only sharpened by the strange dream, the one with the dangerous fey who had taken on Llinos’s face to lure him, which had him wondering what the others would have made of seeing her, at least if they could see what was going on. But then the birds, the Wyrdling’s birds, sang him out of danger, and he awakened in the light of Robin’s lantern, which was another thing to contemplate, privately. When he said that he’d seen a girl version of himself nobody seemed to act oddly about it, which was pleasant.
There were no fey in the area, or not any who were willing to speak with him. He knew they existed, he remembered the warning, the “little bird”, before the attempted poisoning, but they were still skittish and strange and not much at all like even the less friendly ones at home. He was not sure what manner to put on to sort things out or get them to talk to him, or even where they might be found. It felt like it might be a correctable problem, if he could only learn enough, somehow, but he wasn’t going to solve it any time soon for certain. Mostly, it left him with the unsettled feeling that he did not quite know how to be, not in Sembara, where half of everything that he was turned out to be alien and implausible even when it was entirely relevant. The fey turning up only made him homesick, for a place and people who made sense.
The project of figuring out what sort of man he even was in Sembara was substantially interrupted by Rosalind’s summons to the capital. Instead of being wholly left to his own devices to figure out the fey of the area, Celyn had to help the others be heroes that could keep the region from falling apart. While this had fewer dinner parties, which was a relief - Celyn was still not sure what he needed to do at those, and stripping out of his armor meant having to bind tighter than he was used to and feeling exposed and touchy even with that - there was a lot else going on, and Rinault to manage, and that was even before they got to the point of the infant zombies and the utter horror that that was.
Celyn had not thought himself the sort of man who held grudges, really. But yet, he found himself wanting, even after they cleared out the ruin and Robin destroyed the gem that was poisoning the area, to find whoever had roused those undead and put a sword through it. Cedric had been one of his people, his responsibility, though they had never met, and he found himself cherishing the bloody hunger for vengeance. It was a new feeling, but not an alien one; he knew how protective he was of his people, after all, and this problem of heroing meant that his more furious side had received much more cultivation than before. He was not, in the end, surprised by it. There was nothing specific he could do about it, not without information he did not have, so he accepted it and went on with the things he needed to do.
If those things involved healing people with Robin, well, that was only sensible, as he had his miracles to draw upon. They didn’t taste as peculiar as Viepuck’s particular powers for healing. And if he maybe stayed nearer the paladin than was technically necessary for the situation that was hardly something worth commenting on; this part of being a hero was easy to do, even with his own complicated personal feelings making him a little more uncertain about how he wanted to be. And, perpetually, whether he wanted Robin to notice him.
At least he felt he had a handle on it when they called all the locals in to figure out how to organize defense. Hold steady, make people believe there is hope to address at least some of the problems, appear confident, keep your temper. All of those were things within Celyn’s power. As the chaos of the meeting refused to settle into listening to Robin, though, he reached just a little for the thinnest thread of the Wyrdling’s power, letting it pour into his voice; he didn’t know how to do this like they did in the Players, with just the power of voice and personality, but echoing with the strength of the god, he got people settling in and ready to listen. The show of divine power was probably, he reflected, good for the purpose as well, to remind the people they were not alone, and the powers of the world had care for them.
Of course, the Wyrdling’s power was delightfully present that meeting. El’s recounting of their miracle left Celyn feeling warm with the awareness of his god; then El’s divinatory prayer, showing that they were still interested in intervening, in protecting, in looking after the town of Asineau and the garrison that they wanted to establish there, that was glorious chaos in the moment. The theatre of it was spectacular, and the part where it drove Isolde to storming out to report to Lord Valbert cemented their position nicely.
Of course, Valbert fleeing the area made things both easier and more complicated. Celyn was briefly torn, as Robin was dealing with the chaos the man had left in his wake, and could probably use the help, but on the other hand, administration was absolutely not one of Celyn’s skills - his sister got most all of that in the family - and continuing with the Wyrdling’s interest in Asineau in order to lean on the fleeing lord was probably important. He could be seen in his role as one chosen to allow the god’s will flow through him there, and perhaps that would mean something to the end results. Also, Viepuck should probably not be off on his own. It was only a brief dither, before he went to go talk to the horses and help figure out which way they needed to go.
And that was all appearances. Trying to figure out what a hero looked like when he was trying to make someone do what he wanted. Celyn was not natively gifted with the power to intimidate, and he knew it; he was small and lightly built and had chosen to cultivate being easily overlooked and easily dismissed rather than any sort of overt show of force. His violence was the clever kind, the subtle kind that depended on attention and and precision rather than strength, and it worked best from surprise, so he had never paired it with the promise of it. It left him leaning in the doorway to serve as a reminder of the Wyrdling’s interest and occasionally holding back Rinault, who did, it seem, have some capacity for threat to him. Really, Viepuck did most of the work of substance.
Celyn suspected that Viepuck might take well to some of the knowledge about how the clothing choices affected how people reacted. He knew more about actual clothes than Celyn did, and the more information would probably feed into that rapacious mind and produce interesting results.
The fight at the bridge was almost more a problem of appearances than it was a problem of fighting, though there was quite a lot of fighting to be had. It was, however, not a problem for Celyn’s appearances; Celyn hardly mattered at all for the particular dramatics of it, not compared to Izgil, and certainly not compared to Robin. But it seemed half the town had seen what they did, and was coming down to the Wanderer’s shrine to celebrate because they had seen something magnificent.
The fact that the something magnificent they had seen was Robin was going to be a problem for Robin.
The fact that Celyn was rather more taken with that magnificence than was suitable for a public conversation was something that Celyn refused to make into a second problem for Robin.
He was pretty sure that he would have held that position even if he wasn’t tangled up with the rolling intensity of the feelings he was having, though when he was honest with himself, he wasn’t sure at all how much of his reticence was driven by care for the paladin’s shyness and how much was the sharpness. It left him feeling more out of season than he had since before his first miracle, the one that had saved his life; at least that miracle meant that he managed to maintain the appearance of normality while he hoped that the reactions would go away again. Perhaps they had come from the way a fight made things more intense, and times without violence would let things settle back to the more equable level where he had been quietly contemplating whether Robin was actually too shy to ask for a kiss or just seemed that way.
Ellis had always been better at reading that sort of appearances. Celyn had never been interested enough in people that way to learn, and right now he regretted that a little. Or maybe a lot.
In any case he warned Robin what the appearances had been, so that Robin would be prepared. It broke his heart a little, the way Robin wilted at it, but he would far rather the paladin be warned than be ambushed by starry-eyed townsfolk. He could only hope that he had managed to keep his own manner under control in the moment, and that everything would calm down to a level that he understood once they had a chance to recover from the fight.
To Celyn’s relief, the sharp and overwhelming part of the emotions did, indeed, settle down once they had gotten some time to recover, when the blood-pumping intensity of the combat faded away.
To his immense chagrin, it did not settle down to a level that he understood.
The only relief on that was that Robin gave no sign of having noticed anything odd at the bridge, which meant that he had plenty of space to figure out how to deal with not merely being interested, but actually wanting that interest to actually go somewhere. It was not, overall, a peaceful feeling, and it troubled his dreams, leaving him feeling particularly out of season.
He threw himself into the work of being a hero, as best he could, admitting to himself that, yes, he would do that work more adjacent to the paladin than not when it made any plausible sense. And there were plenty of things that Robin was better at than he was; he was at least some help dealing with Odo’s grief, where all Celyn could do was hold that protective space for the sort of madness that comes of unbearable pain and keep watch for falling rocks. Like he told Viepuck, he understood that particular madness, though his own pain was not grief. He did resolve to write a letter to Pryce, though.
Meeting the other heroes was at least a mild diversion from his efforts to remain normal when in Robin’s vicinity. They were an interesting set of people and gave Celyn a great deal more to think about in terms of what it was to look like a hero. Which was, more often than not, still fancier cloth than he preferred. He began to suspect that he should invest in a more upper-class sort of shirt at some point, so that he could cultivate a more heroic-looking presence that would make it easier for him to change back into his more comfortable peasant mien and go unnoticed when he wanted.
As they proceeded to figure out what to do about the lake monster, he started to feel a bit that even if he felt internally unsettled, he could at least act like nothing had changed. He did feel a surge of hope when the wizard asked Robin about the lantern, because he did very much want to hear that story - hear more stories, all of them - but he was unsurprised when the paladin demurred. Tales like that were probably too much for strangers, and his disappointment was certainly not going to motivate Robin to speak up when he was uncomfortable doing so.
The wizard’s house provided a corner where he could sleep alone, though, which was a relief, and meant he would be well-rested for the venture into the lake. She did not ask him why he had asked for it, but he suspected that she might have guessed something, even if her own experience was so very different. She did not appear to feel out of season much at all, though he could easily imagine how someone with the right sort of proclivities would choose to study that sort of magic, in her position. It was a delicate sort of choice, though, to have selected a path that meant that nothing she could do with how she chose to appear would help her; the only way she could be accepted was to hide the way she knew things, and she had obviously not chosen to hide.
Knowing what she had faced in the lake made it easier to plan to not be ambushed. Aside from being underwater it was almost normal, until close to the end, until the eel coiled around Robin and Robin fell.
It didn’t even matter that Celyn fell on his way to stabbing the eel and only managed to stagger-swim his way to it once it was already dead after getting fed one of Viepuck’s baffling magical berries. The fury was deep and dark enough that he knew he had fought without sense or strategy, and that was something that he would have to keep under control in the future.
Unfortunately, that meant he would have to actually talk to Robin about it.
Of course, once he had settled out of the blissful night of being up far too late for how early they had to be up to ride to Fellburn being curled up against Robin, talking and snuggling and even some kissing, he had a whole new and more complicated problem to solve with being seen. He had fumbled his way to an understanding of being seen as a hero, more or less, at least enough that he didn’t ruin the effect of it, though he suspected that he could not hold that standard on his own without trying out fancier clothes or armour to hold the attention. He could not begin to figure out how that worked now that he was actually with Robin, partnered, especially since none of the answers were particularly in line with his own preferences.
He could hold himself reserved and try to remain as much as he had been before, so as not to disrupt the balance of the set of four by putting weight on the two of them. Which was, really, at least somewhat a doomed venture; he and Robin were the two adult humans in the group, and Robin was the one of them that most looked the part of ‘hero’ anyway, and of course they were the ones most likely in the forefront of the fighting when there was fighting. Two young men, both Tyrwinghan, fighting often as a pair? That would get commented on at some point regardless of whether or not anyone saw him kissing Robin. Someone would come up with something to say about it sometime, at least when they did things that people saw. Celyn couldn’t figure out whether or not it was better or worse for the work of being a hero if other people knew.
On the one hand, it did seem something a bit out of a story, and ‘something out of a story’ attached well to the concept of heroism, to the concept of the public face that Celyn was worried about managing. They were, collectively, the Heroes Of Cleenseau; whatever did people ascribe to them in their tales? Names were uninformative, and epithets accrued. He would have to see what people wound up saying in their stories, so he could figure out whether or not he liked being seen that way and react accordingly. Managing people’s perceptions was complicated and exhausting.
Robin could handle people’s morale by talking, as well as looking like he looked and his generosity with his strength and healing; Celyn had to figure out how to do it with other sorts of action. On the other hand, too much visible turning towards each other rather than the various crises of the outside world would make it harder for people to trust they might actually help. What it would do to Robin’s undeniable personal magnetism was entirely unclear, and Celyn had no idea what fraction of people who approached the paladin did so with an undercurrent of attraction. Not, of course, that he could blame them without being a hypocrite; he didn’t even mind if they flirted, not really, so long as they seemed likely to treat Robin as gently as he deserved. Celyn wasn’t sure that he could treat Robin as gently as he deserved and he had a profound skepticism about anyone else, but he definitely allowed for the possibility in his personal thoughts.
And of course there was Robin’s own comfort to consider, given that a kiss made him blush and even stammer a little in reasonable privacy. Having that sort of thing seen in public had the risk of denting the burnished assurance that was part of appearing the part of the hero, yes, but worse, it had the risk of discomfiting the paladin entirely. Not making Robin uncomfortable with his affections turned out to be highly motivating, in the end, and he settled on keeping his public behavior reasonably decorous. Even if Robin had given him permission to lean on his shoulder the next time they encountered an awkward dinner party - which Celyn felt quite likely to take him up on - he kept his touches where other people might see to the small and unremarkable, a hand on an arm or a shoulder, a shared look rather than an offered kiss. He cherished the new routine of helping Robin get all that armour on - and off - for reasons that certainly included the physicality of it; it was very good to have those minutes in which the touch was utterly unremarkable, into which he could sneak more little moments of affection.
He thought he had it sorted out when they made it to Fellburn. It worked well enough for the fighting; it worked well enough for the immediate aftermath, for the finding the people who might be saved and directing Robin or Viepuck, depending, towards some of them.
And then they got to the Duke.
All of this was worse than one of those dinner parties; Rosalind’s table had been a great deal more ordinary than this. The pomp and formality of it put Celyn entirely on edge, and he rehearsed what he wanted to say in his head over and over again while they waited for their chance to speak, so as not to fumble any of it. He was keenly aware that they were present as heroes, very much, that the chances that anyone would listen to them or take them seriously depended on putting forward that face, and the structure of the space itself made slipping on that point seem entirely impossible. He should have guessed that Robin wouldn’t like being teased about being left to make sure Rinault stayed out of trouble, though.
He was managing it all right until he tried to offer a blessing. He had worked out what he wanted to say in detail, all the things, all the allusions, he was no poet but he had spent enough time with them to know how these things went together in theory. And then he poured his well-wishing, his hopes for their safety, out, and it was like it got swallowed up in a whirlwind. The little light of hope he wanted to light was a candleflame precariously guttering in those winds, and he did not know what to do other than offer up as much as he could.
The effort was debilitating, but he managed not to stagger with it, managed to suggest that his inability to offer his good wishes effectively was, itself, a form of blessing, that they knew this was a deep danger for certain. Robin was right there, and concerned, and that kindness nearly broke him; he wanted to collapse against the paladin, searching out that sense of comfort and support that he could not afford to ask for, not without breaking that delicate sense of how they needed to be seen. He was glad of Robin being there, but the refuge that he desperately wished to have was not something he could indulge. Probably better, overall, than not having Robin present like that, but it hurt.
He had recovered enough to explain what had happened with the blessing, at least, by the time they had gone up to the Oracle of Hope to observe the pilgrims. He had not, however, recovered enough to deal with Charlotte, and the implications of Charlotte, without help. She had only stopped actively chasing him when she’d taken the notion he was only interested in men, and he was sure that getting her started was nothing he could have helped since she was willing to take his devout duties as affection and he was not going to stop being the Wyrdling’s man. She had no reason to be here. All the reasons he could think of for why she might be were upsetting, but she seemed too cheerful for any of them. The whole thing was so much to deal with that almost without thinking of it he reached out a hand towards Robin, even though the space was public and he still wasn’t confident that that was okay.
But then Robin took his hand, and he could breathe, and then he could deal with her. After she had gone, he could even find it funny that she didn’t seem to notice that he was there with someone, that he was holding on to someone. He wondered how much of that was her self-absorption and how much was that maybe the way he was about Robin was not, in fact, as loud as it felt inside, at least when he had his public face on, his hero face. She had seen the hero face and been disconcerted by it, and maybe that was a good thing this time.
The one unmitigatedly good thing about being a hero was the part where he had a private bedroom in the manor in Cleenseau. It was more comfortable than the storage wagon, with the same lack of having to deal with anyone looking at him while he was asleep. He could entirely unwind the binder and breathe freely all night, and take the time to put it back on properly - and his armour - in the morning, and even tinker with shading when he wanted to put in the effort.
The consequence of that being the best thing was that travel, and dealing with inns, and sharing space, and all of that, was somehow even worse than it had been before. He couldn’t honestly say it was the worst thing, not when there were hordes of undead, but it was on a personal level very stressful. Taking off the binder at all was nearly impossible because he didn’t have the privacy for it - never mind hearing Eirian’s lectures about that playing in his memory, there was nothing he could do about it - though at least he could clean the sweat and things out of it with magic now so that he didn’t rub his skin raw from wearing it too long for safety. It didn’t fix everything, but that made enduring it easier.
He eventually settled on binding more loosely than he preferred and getting into his armour as quickly as possible as the best thing he could manage so that he was not seen incorrectly and was not risking hurting himself any more than strictly necessary. Eirian would disapprove, but Eirian was not there to have to figure out how to deal with this situation of being stuck, not only in a room with people, but with the same people over and over again, who would notice things that he did not want noticed. Not because he expected them to react poorly, he just did not want the effort he went to to look like himself to be seen. Even if he set aside the way being seen when he was wrong made him short-tempered, when people saw the work he put into it he wound up resentful of the fact that most other people didn’t have to think about that sort of thing, they looked like themselves without having to fight for it.
The most difficult part was now, ironically, Robin.
With Ellis, Celyn had years of trust that the body didn’t matter to his wanting to be together and, further, that Ellis saw him as he was. Ellis had recognized he had changed after his miracle, and he had never, ever faltered in seeing Celyn as a man, not from the first moment. Being seen by Ellis when he wasn’t perfectly arranged the way he wanted to be seen hurt, but it had been okay, because Ellis saw the real him even before he had learned anything about how to make it show.
He had known Robin for, what, a handful of months? He trusted the paladin with his life. That was, it turned out, not the same thing as trusting him with his most fragile and intimate vulnerabilities. Which of course made sense, because being seen wrong had always felt worse than the concept of dying, even before Celyn had had particularly regular brushes with actual mortality.
And, of course, he wanted to be able to trust Robin so far.
He hadn’t solved it by the time they made it back to the vicinity of Cleenseau, and the blessed relief of private rooms.
The time spent training people was, weirdly, a relief; if the trouble wasn’t coming until the next new moon, then they had time to prepare, and that was better than rolling from crisis to crisis without having breathing room. They knew the next thing, they had time and space to prepare, no hurrying from place to place, and no inns.
Celyn spent his days making himself useful. He was not, in fact, any good at the administrative nonsense that occupied too much of Robin’s time, but he tried to be useful, and at least playing courier for some of it was something that was within his competences. He did better coming up with training exercises, and rather enjoyed the one where he armed himself with paints and practiced ambushing people in the fog he’d summoned up with a little twist of fey magic.
And of course the evenings were wonderful, because he had time with Robin when they weren’t worrying about being heroes. When they could talk, or play music, or just lean on each other and enjoy the small miracle, the one that meant they had found each other even while everything else around them was trying to be as awful as it could be. The raw edges of his feelings softened and warmed, and even if he had no faith that he knew how to be gentle, he got more and more confident that he could, at least, take care of Robin reasonably well. He was even trying to be better about not looking exasperated when people refused to believe the fey were doing things, though they did persist in being that sort of frustrating and he was not always good at it.
When Robin suggested organizing a meeting for morale before the possible undead rising, Celyn was, of course, completely ready to help. It was absolutely the sort of thing that made sense to do, multiple ways around, and part of the work was putting on the right appearance so that people did not feel they were going to fall apart. That much was easy.
The hard part was when Robin thought Celyn should also give a speech. Celyn supposed that Robin, who absolutely could not go unnoticed in a crowd, who was gifted or skilled with that sort of thing, probably did not think this was a large request; Robin rallied people like breathing. But they had talked what seemed like a long time ago about how Celyn had been trained in taking care of places, more than people, and Celyn’s skills were still aimed more at taking care of individual people, and more specifically individual people who were the Wyrdling’s special concern, rather than a crowd. Of course, when he protested that Robin was much better at that sort of thing than he was, Robin assured him that people respected him too, that they respected his god too, that their blessing of hope was what was needed.
And of course he could not disappoint Robin by declining. Particularly when Robin was quite correct about bringing through the Wyrdling’s influence. So he did it, best he could, fishing out the priestly robes he never bothered with but which were at least cut so that he did not feel wholly selfconscious without his armour, picking up the threads of Robin’s message and putting his own influence into them, with the shimmers of bright hope and good fortune. And once he’d said his piece, he handed the attention right back to Robin, who knew what to do with it. And Izgil illuminated the area with his magic for a theatrical touch that Celyn certainly approved.
Everyone slept well, and when the warning of undead attacks came in the early morning, everyone was prepared.
The whole encounter with the erstwhile tax collector was odd from the start. Though it took VIepuck to thoroughly puncture the appearances - not just because he identified the man to start with, but with his sudden bringing out of the correct procedures for doing such a thing and all the ways the man was violating them. The bandit clearly had not put as much thought into the way the thing looked as he ought, but Celyn supposed that given that his entire desire was to be greedy about it it was not that much of a surprise that he had given himself away in quite the ways he had.
Robin had been magnificent, in a wholly different way than the miracle at the bridge, and Celyn felt rather fluttery about it, though. The man had no idea what to do with either “I am resident nowhere” nor the paladin fresh from the fight they had had against the zombies, and it had been beautiful to watch him squirm. And Robin’s cold fury had a sharp recognition in Celyn’s own bloodyminded temper, besides; while he was sure that the fact that he had a capacity for such rage was not, at this point, something that would frighten Robin off, it was weirdly good to see a similar emotion there, as another thing they nearly shared.
He considered, for a moment after Robin had jumped in a flicker of mist to intercept the man as he tried to flee, trying to make a similar step, but onto the man’s horse behind him, to interfere more directly. He gave it up as something he probably shouldn’t try without practice, though, and instead interposed himself in front and failed to have any notion of how to intimidate, once more. He would have probably done better with that actually trying to be a madman with a knife on the horse, but honestly without a blade in his hand he couldn’t come up with anything particularly plausible to do, and being small would always work against him there.
And then Robin was huge; everyone was startled, just about, though Izgil was clearly quite pleased with himself. It certainly ended the altercation quickly, though Celyn was rather flustered when Robin presented him with the bandit to tie up. There was rather a lot happening all of a sudden and a great deal of it had to do with a very impressive paladin.
Celyn did find, after all was said in done, that the last time he’d had reason to deal with a bandit, he had felt rather sorry for them. They had been desperate people, people in need of something that the world was not giving them, rather than people who wanted to hurt and exploit opportunities to gain wealth. Yes, he had stabbed one of them and threatened the others, with Adri’s help on the actual intimidation part - he suddenly wondered how she managed, because she was notably smaller than he was and certainly did not find height a plausible excuse - but they had been people in pain. The only good thing about this man was that he had given them information about fey making trouble that was going to be useful soon.
Though it would mean being on the road again, and inns, and that meant he needed to figure a few things out rather promptly.
Celyn had not expected the exploration into the woods in search of missing people to have been quite so demanding on the matter of appearances, but there it was, sometimes like brought an unexpected fate. The dice fall how the dice fell.
The throw of the dice that meant he went straight from trying to figure out if the song in the forest was fey and thus familiar and something he could figure out to finding himself held, quite firmly, in Robin’s arms was intensely disconcerting. However, in the moment he could only lean against the paladin in a quiet recognition that he had been protected from something unknown, and then deal with the fact that the thing in question wished to become aggressively known very promptly. And, of course, he had the opportunity to return the favor, twisting the fate of the bear that was going for Robin’s throat and turning its luck to bad; the way the fury brought his god’s intervention was profoundly satisfying.
And then there was the Hunter.
The thing about starting the conversation with that fey was that Celyn was very aware that he was almost certainly the most qualified mortal to be having that conversation within several days journey at least. Unfortunately, just because he was the most qualified mortal to be having the conversation did not mean that he felt that he was, actually, qualified for the scale of the problem. This seemed like a masterwork problem and he was probably only a journeyman, and it was not like Tyrwingha actually needed masters outside of maybe the Oracle of the Riven, anyway.
Not that it would be at all good for any of that sort of doubt to show. This was not something that anyone had taught him, precisely, but Celyn knew it nonetheless, though he would not know how to explain it. It was not something anyone had taught him because the diplomacy he had learned had been among friends, even if friendships between mortal and fey were strange and hard to define; nobody who had instructed him, even Ampelos, would have imagined that this was the circumstance in which he would have to apply the training. It owed more, actually, to Eirian and her questions of “What sort of man are you?” and “What does a man like you are look like?” and “How does a man like you act?” and she had never imagined that this was a tool of war, but this was the fight that Celyn had, and he would use the tools he had for it.
The Hunter was built like a bear, broad and strong, and he needed to match that. He could never match him on mass, on strength; not even Robin could do that. He had to beat him in cleverness, in slipperiness of mind, by as much as he was overmatched in raw power. He had to gather together what he knew, what he had overheard, all without slightly hinting that he had been eavesdropping on the Hunter’s conversation with the child to get some of that information, he had to keep track of the threads of it all without dropping them. He was too slow to protect Greymalkin in the exchanges, too unable to juggle everything properly, he should have played to “You invite us to parley and then change the terms after we agree?” faster, but he at least caught that fast enough to protect Robin.
He reacted to the gambit on the rock before he had even analysed it. Afterwards, he would have been able to say that the Hunter thought to waste their time, that he thought they would struggle to match his new terms, his compromise, and he had not allowed that. That he had demonstrated matching power specifically as a counter to an attack that he was not sure anyone else in the party saw as such. That they could not afford to give away those minutes spent climbing, that would give the fey reason to think them weak; that he at least needed to meet the attack both head-on and with casual grace, as if to say that such trickery was nothing to him, why would such petty games work on him, surely nobody would be so foolish as to think him so easily thwarted by such a small magic.
Afterwards, the Hunter would call him a straw-haired trickster, and he would know he had earned a modicum of respect from it, for being too slippery to be dismayed by such things. In the moment, it was just a duel, and one with a clear counter, which depended on him not showing that he was aware that they were fighting with the mastery of magic as much as threat and words. In the aftermath, too, he would contemplate that his time with the theatre had left him with a keen sense of move and countermove, of the drama of it, of the necessity of artistry that even so brutish as being as the Hunter would perceive and see as having value.
What kind of man are you? The kind who knows what a fight for his life looks like, and how the battle must be met with a smile and a light tone, who can respond to an agitated beloved - was that the right term? He couldn’t let being flustered about that show, either - with an airy, confident, “This is all perfectly normal” and continue on with the dance under the drumbeat of threat, dodging and weaving and making a net of his own, snares that he hoped the fey would think of as unimportant, acknowledge as the competence of a worthy opponent. He couldn’t let his own fury at the way the fey had been particularly harsh to Robin show, or do anything other than harden him under the surface, because if the Hunter noticed that he was particularly responsive to Robin’s distress, the Hunter would find ways to hurt Robin just to change the balance of the discussion.
Celyn was entirely aware that the Hunter’s weakness, like that, was the children; Celyn refused to consider threatening them. As Izgil said, they were not monsters. But he made sure the Hunter knew he was aware of the children, of the difficulties of raising them in a foreign land, and if the Hunter decided to consider that a threat, well, that was on him and his choices. He could at least wonder about it, and wondering would make him distracted, and distraction would make him less able to be tricky. Not that that appeared to be his strong suit; that would be for the other two competitors in that little game, who Celyn would have to figure out how to thwart without getting into this sort of fencing match with them. They would probably be much better at it.
He had to hold his face, he had to remain affable and sharp, he had to keep track of as many of the pieces, pick up the pieces that his friends mentioned and thread them in as if it was all part of a plan, and he had to know when to stop and take their safe passage and go. It was as much a juggling act as any he had ever assisted with back with the Players, and he managed it, he thought, at least adequately. They took their escort out of the territory and left.
And then, because they had not sworn to stay out, they went right back in, to get the people to safety. Which was as much an act of violence as any of the rest of it, an attack that the Hunter would have to figure out how to counter, but also, it was proof that he knew what he was bound by.
And what he was not.
Afterwards, when Celyn slept, he curled up with Robin between him and the rest of everyone around them. It was not as far as he wanted towards trust, but it was something that he could do.