Itâs not the first thing people notice about her, usually. The first thing is generally that sheâs young, and female, and lovelyâthe first thing people notice about their entire party is that theyâre all young, and female, and lovely, and thatâs gotten more than one would-be thief or mugger in far over their head when they havenât noticed the the paladinâs hammer or the rangerâs axe. It comes up rather quickly though, often enough. Whoever heard of a bard who canât sing?
She plays a lute, mostly, or a lap-harp made of shell and sinew, string instruments she can pluck while she smiles in secret and watches everyone around her. She dances quick, except when sheâs tired, when sheâs scared, when she forgets to remember the feet at the ends of her legs.
She doesnât tell her story to strangers, but enough of the other girls have learned to sign by now, and itâs easy enough to sketch out the outlines of the old bargain: the voice, the prince, the witch, the thousand shards of glass she walked upon on her way up the beach, the look in her sea-green eyes when they travel too near water. The thousand shards of glass she walked upon when she left the palace, and turned back towards the sea to throw herself upon the rocks, and then made her way up the road inland, and kept walking.
The warlock is beautiful and mild and self-effacing and shy, is tidy and generous and charming. Sheâs small with herself in exactly the right way to shout abuse to the half of her party who knows how to recognize that same look in the mirror in the morning. The bird on her shoulder is too small, too bright, too sweet for a real warlockâs familiar. The knife at her belt is sharp enough for anything that needs doing, though, cooking or otherwise.
Her fae patron visits sometimes, in the quiet hours between dusk and midnight, a sweetly old godmother made of moonlight and shadow. Sheâs kind to the whole lot of them in her own chaotic way, free-handed with transmutations and illusions that break halfway through the evening, for better or worse. She once spent three hours around their campfire drinking brandy and gossipping outrageously about the Feywild and teasing the wizard into fits of laughter.
Sheâs never told the story of how she met the warlockâs mother, or what debt was owed there, and the warlock doesnât know herself. It was never meant to be a debt paid in power and violence and the deft will-sapping enchantments the warlock weaves now, but, well. The prince wasnât meant to be cruel, the warlock says. The palace was meant to be warmer than the fireplace cinders in her stepmotherâs house. The faerie was meant to be saving her from her lot, not throwing her into something worse. The powerâs an apology of sorts.
The wizard is awkward and joyful and nervous. She has no fear of heights or small places, which just stands to be expected, she says, after all those years in that little tower, and sheâs got no skill at lying or even edging around the truth at all, which is why she isnât in the tower any more in the first place. She says too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely, always, but the most well-socialized member of the whole party is the ranger who walks around with a dire wolf at her hip, or maybe their mute bard, so who are any of them to judge.
There was nothing to do in that tower but read, and brush her hair, and sort through the witchâs endless stockpile of dried herbs and potions ingredients, and watch out the window as woodcutters and hunters and princes rode by, and dream. The reading was more interesting than the dreaming, most of the time, and the witch didnât mind it as much when she talked about it. She never bothered to actually use any of the magic in the witchâs books until the thing with the prince and the haircut and the desert, which sheâs told them all about in all the detail they could ever ask for, but most of the girls get uncomfortable when she starts talking about princes. Itâs a little easier if she just starts rambling about conjuration and abjuration and illusion theory, about the 400-year-old history of a city that doesnât exist any more, about the proper grammatical structure of Celestial, until maybe one of the quiet ones finally answers back.
Her hair is too short. She keeps an illusion up over it whenever she can, while it grows back slowly, tickling the side of her face and the back of her neck and leaving her head too light and unbalanced. Â
The ranger doesnât care about princes, which makes one of them at least. Then again, the ranger doesnât trust anyone, really, prince or no, not wolves or monsters or the men who kill them. She more or less trusts the rest of them by now, mostly, when the wind blows in the right direction.
She wears bright red in the middle of the woods and it shouldnât help her slip into the shadows half as easily as it does, but most beasts canât see color and redâs just another shade of gray if the lightâs low enough. She never uses her axe against trees. She doesnât need to. She can find a path through any brush without it. She picks flowers when she finds them, and tucks them into the other girlsâ hair.
Her wolfâs mother killed the man who taught her to use the axe, and the man who taught her to use the axe killed that wolfâs mate before that, and the mate had an old womanâs blood on his teeth when it happened. The rangerâs blade found the wolfâs motherâs throat. The rangerâs mother sent her out into the woods in the first place. Itâs not as though anywhere is really safe, cottage or forest, axe or teeth. One of these days maybe her wolf will turn and go for her in return, and maybe one of these days her axe will be faster and maybe it wonât. In the mean time, thereâs flowers and berries and pastries and enough game to keep everyone sated, for a little while.
The paladinâs hair is raven black and her skin is chalky as a corpse. Sheâs not undead, mostly. The undead are her job. She knows that much.
She was sweet, once (they were all sweet, once) but apples are bitter now and so is she, and thereâs judgment to lay out in the world. Her grip on her warhammerâs all wrongâshe holds it like a mining hammer, but it hits as hard as it needs to. Her armorâs all dwarven make, and her shieldâs black and red and white like snow.
She was sweet once, and frightened, and when she says it quietly around the campfire in the night when none of them can quite make out the glimmer of understanding on each othersâ faces, everyone still nods. She took a bite of poison and somebody left her a full year in a glass coffin of Gentle Repose, dangling on the edge of the Raven Queenâs domain while all the other newly-arrived dead passed by and faded away. She woke up to somebodyâs lips and hands and skin on her lips and her hands and her skin. She doesnât like princes. She doesnât like necromancers.
She likes sunlight, and summer, and colors that arenât black and white and red. She likes the way the bard grins when she whirls into a dance, and the look in the warlockâs eye when she sets her feet to say no, and the wizardâs laughter on high with a Fly spell, and the rangerâs gentle fingers braiding flowers into everything she can touch. Â
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