what makes you pull the poison rose? [backdated to ~4/22, for rian]

[fairywren]

This is taking a little longer than Wren had anticipated. He's had luck, good and bad, along the way in his search for a patch of nettles big enough and wild enough that he won't be caught picking them. A kind little girl throwing bread to what she saw as a wild swan, before her mother warned her away ("What is a swan doing resting this far from water? It's sick or enchanted, come away from it.") and she'd frowned and waved goodbye as he flew away.

He'd spotted what seemed like a good patch, big enough to send him home to Hana with all she needs and more if he's fast about it, but he'd run into some hunters on the way back and lost not only the nettles but a few wingfeathers.

Wren tries to keep flying and can't, too exhausted and with nothing to show for two days of work but determination and the graze of stray shotgun pellets. He'd found a thick woods, thick cover from hawks and hounds and a vast array of plants growing there including nettles. It's hopeful.

When night comes, he transforms, setting his mind to his task. Nettles sting, and he curses softly as he bends to pulls them.

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[wastelandflower]

"And who are you?" Rian asks from a tree. The last few days have been a swirl of mad confusion. Ever surface he touches has brought him conflicting images and incomplete truths. It's enough to drive a changeling mad and it's no better when he finds a cursed man tromping through his woods.

"Who are you that pulls my weeds and roses without the leave of me? A thief? A sacrifice?"

[fairywren]

Wren's startled by the voice above him, and looks up to see a man lazily watching from the branches of a tree.

His stomach tenses a little, both because he knows too many stories about the fae and what they might do to humans traveling their ground, and because there's something about him that he can't look away from. Something familiar, and strange, at once.

But right now, he's someone telling Wren he can't do something. And Wren has traveled a long way. "A man, and a swan, and a lover," he says boldly, arching an eyebrow, "and right now a nettle-picker. Who are you that I should ask your leave?"

[wastelandflower]

"Tam Lin of Faerie," he says, keeping his true name concealed for safety's sake. He isn't a faerie proper, but he knows their rules and plays by them, grinning at the other ma.

"These woods are mine. What payment do you offer?"

There's something familiar about this birdlike man. If paid in information, that may be just enough for him.

[fairywren]

Wren raises an eyebrow at the man - faerie's - question. "What payment do you seek?" he asks with a small smirk. "What you see is what I have: no riches or land. I don't even have this form past the dawn."

Wren pauses. "I can sing, though," he offers.

[wastelandflower]

Typically, Rian asks for jewels. Lacking those, he demands more physical favors like kisses or even more. Obviously, a man with a stolen form picking nettles has none of the former and will fight against the latter, but a song...

"I'll hear your song. Make it good."

[fairywren]

He usually has an instrument with him when he sings, some rude guitar or lute to fill in the blanks, but here there isn't much.

He's not sure what happens next, if the faerie doesn't like his song. Nothing good, he imagines. He hates the idea of surviving a couple of hunters just to be killed or at best, stolen.

More than that, though, he wants to prove himself. There's something about this Tam Lin he wants to defeat and another he'd like to impress.

Wren leans, aching joints and grazed arm both thankful and complaining for it, and starts a beat with just hands and knees. He hums himself the beginning of a mournful melody before starting, in a voice that grows stronger after a moment of adjusting to use.

there's a story, so it goes
a maid sits on a bank of reeds
she never speaks she never sings
she weaves until her fingers bleed

guess the ending if you can
cold ground left where nettles grow
a bird whose heart beats like a man
feathers fair as falling snow

seven swans take to the sky
six return to summer sun
five fingers count the days before
three seasons gone since two were one.

He glances at the tall man, before continuing with the story itself. It's easier, a little, to tell this as a riddle, a ballad.

[wastelandflower]

As the swan man tells his tale, Rian's appearance shifts along with the story. The finest feather patterning unfurls across his arms as he leans forward, compelled by the melancholy of the song. There's such a perfect tragedy in it, heartrending and almost succulent for it. It's perfect.

It makes a fair payment indeed and as the man sings, Rian makes circles in the air with his pointer finger. The nettles follow his command and pluck themselves from the ground for him.

[fairywren]

Wren blinks, watching the feathers appear across the man's arms, almost startled out of the rest of the song by the suddenness and beauty of it. With him, it's willing and on command, not some curse taking its effect, and he's able to see the beauty of it instead of feeling slightly resentful. He doesn't regret any decision he's made, but the fact that the curse was levied is still unfair to both himself and Hana.

He's even more startled, and grateful nearly to tears when the nettles pluck themselves from the ground. Wren finishes the last chorus and stands, inclining his head. "Thank you," he says. "I'm in your debt."

[wastelandflower]

It's also not real. The delicate beauty of it is all false glamor. "I'd be careful whose debts you sell yourself into," Rian warns. "The Fair Folk are only as fair as their beauty is genuine." Inherently untrustworthy.

"Put your faith in men instead," he suggests. "They lie, but you'll come to prefer to the folks truths told slant."

[fairywren]

Wren collects the nettles with a raised eyebrow, tying it all up into a bundle he'll be able to carry when dawn comes. "Does that leave me alone to be cruel enough to speak truly?" he asks, rhetorically. He's not, quite, a man, but not one of the Folk either.

"I don't know if your beauty is genuine," he says, looking up with softer eyes, "or what being in your debt would cost me, but I know you didn't have to give me these if you didn't want to. And you have my thanks for that. As for men, they can earn my faith the way anyone else does." He doesn't trust most people naturally; the few he's allowed into his life have proven themselves more than unusual.

[wastelandflower]

Even among men, there are riddling sorts. Rian stretches forward, letting all glamor fade away. He becomes a little more earthly, less faery touched, his own beauty not quite supernatural.

"I will let you judge for yourself," he says, sweeping a wide bow and looking at him through loose brown hair. "If I look trustworthy."

[fairywren]

Wren can see the shimmer fade, but the man's appearance is no less compelling for it. Moreso, in a way, because it's real.

"You look like someone who could break hearts," he says. "That should mean no."

He might be in love, but he still has eyes, and the natural inclination to flirt of a performer.

"Your glamour doesn't change your shape. Were you human once?"

[wastelandflower]

"From my father's horse I fell and yon' faery queen brought me to her bower to dwell," Rian agrees. But that was centuries and days ago. He is a man at his core, but his heart is still all trickery.

"But maybe, not for much longer."

[fairywren]

Not a changeling, exactly: stolen to be the paramour of a faery queen, perhaps. Wren tilts his head, trying to follow the story.

"No? Why not?"

[wastelandflower]

"Because pleasant is the faerie land," Rian says. "But the eerie tales they tell, for at the end of seven years, they pay a tithe to hell."

He gestures at himself, handsome, magically gifted. The kind of captive that makes a lovely human sacrifice.

[fairywren]

Wren raises an eyebrow. "You? They're just going -- to sacrifice you to hell?" He gives him a disbelieving look. "There's no way to fight that? You just accept it?"

Wren doesn't have much way to fight his own fate, true, but he could have at least made life living hell on Hana's parents even if she'd chosen to leave him to this curse. Swans are mean. Or perhaps he'd have accepted it, but he's not the kind of person who gets told his lot easily. Or he'd never have been stuck like this to begin with, for one thing.

[wastelandflower]

"Unless some mortal intervenes," Rian says, a little insulted by the implication he might simply accepted. Cossetted by the Seelie Court he may have been, Rian hasn't run out of self-preservation.

"To catch me again from my horse and hold me fast, even as the queen transforms me into all manner of beasts."

He has no mortal ties nor mortal love and so, Rian knows, he will die.

[fairywren]

"A mortal," he says, and looks up at the man who's granted him nettles for a song, that he feels so drawn to, a tragic tale to mimic his own "And you have no mortal who would risk themselves for you?" He tilts his head toward him. "No wayward girl you've charmed? Or boy," he adds with a small smirk.

There's a part of him that's angry at curses, and another part drawn to the man in a way he can't altogether explain, that would fight this for him. And another part that thinks this might all be another trap. It doesn't matter: if it's going to take place during any semblance of daylight, he won't have the ability, and if it's too long from now, he can't afford to stray. But it's unfair, and it pulls at him.

[wastelandflower]

"Charm and glamor are faery tricks," Rian says. Otherwise, he'd have tried it and have done to escape. "No, it takes a real, mortal bond. Love, family. I've got neither."

He sighs tragically, melodramatic despite the horror of the situation.

[fairywren]

"You'd be surprised," Wren says, with a raised eyebrow. "A good song and a bit of gold flake goes a long way toward entrancing."

"I can't offer you true love," he says, "I think that's a thing that takes more than an hour and some nettles. But I am in your debt, and that bargain's not fair. I don't say things I don't mean. If there's a way I can help you, even in friendship, I owe you that much."

[wastelandflower]

"You don't even know me," he says, caught between being intrigued and alarmed. He doubts this mortal knows what he offers.

"The end of this month will be the Eve of Beltane and we will be taken into a procession." He will be fed the sweetest food and given the best wine, fatted and comforted.