Laia is indentured to the Ostenso Theatrical Company when she's three. She looks younger but she's very biddable, all "stand here" and "smile" and "run over to that man and give him the flower" and "scream like you're being burned alive" executed as prettily as you please. They need child actors for plenty of productions, and for an infant you can use a prop but for a toddler you can't so much. Some nights they've got one thing playing one one stage and another on the next and she's bustled between them matinee to intermission to curtain all day long, the costumer who doubles as her handler praying to Asmodeus Below that the timing will line up and she won't be late for a cue, because they haven't been able to find another like her.
Her skills are marginally less rare, when she's six, and less rare still when she's nine. Why, probably just anyone can scream like they're being burned alive when they're nine, and the director also resents losing hours of rehearsal time in sending her to school, and more hours still if she messes up an assignment badly enough that she comes home struggling to walk smoothly, let alone dance. There's talk, during an iffy year, of rejiggering her contract to let them put her in a whorehouse or something.
Ultimately they keep her, grouch though they may about having a company member who's in school and who could in theory be replaced. It would take a lot of looking. The other kids her age are all also in school, and none of them have half the craft she does. Having halflings play children is common in some parts of the theater scene, and it works if the audience is acquainted with the visual language, but it's not a great substitute objectively speaking. Halflings are not proportioned right for any age of human child and too short for many of them. The Ostenso Theatrical Company doesn't put anything on that requires a toddler once Laia can't pass for one; they do yet run Laia ragged, having her change between the Resplendent Theater and the Dockside Stage from orphan to prince and then back in time for bows. (She plays boys as often, or oftener, than girls. It's all in the costuming.)
Maybe it's because she doesn't know anything else, but Laia likes acting. School is a wasteland of sitting still and being serious and - it's not that you never have to sit still in-character, never have to seriously study your lines in rehearsals, but you do those things for the sake of playing pretend, for getting a laugh or a gasp or even a treasured sob from the audience. It's not that you never, on the stage, have to go on even when you're sick or hurt or exhausted, and do your job anyway line-perfect so nobody can tell; it's that you have to do the same thing at school and nobody would even be disappointed, if you failed. They aren't excited to see you, or angry that they're missing out on your performance if you don't show up, they just have it written in their script that the next thing they do is whip you.
She learns to read and she avoids being tracked for anything demanding and only rarely has to tapdance across the set of historic Taldor or faraway Minkai with fresh lashes sticking to her costume. Her indenture is over when she's thirteen, and they start paying her, and she never thinks of going anywhere else.
When Laia is fourteen she is old enough to start playing romances. (She's played the victim, in critical darling "Baron Cua's Pet", but the critics don't fill many seats on their own and the run was very short. At any rate it's a different sort of role, that.) They recruit a boy from a traveling troupe, a couple of years older than her, not as good as her at projecting the voice or timing the words, but very handsome, good with the legible arm sweeps and head tilts that you can read from the balcony. They put on "Summer, Autumn". He's supposed to seduce her ("Summer"), then betray her and be betrayed likewise ("Autumn"). His name is Enric Joya.
Their chemistry fills seats. Everyone wants to watch Laia circle him with cautious, then enthusiastic ballet steps; everyone wants to watch Enric dip her and trail his fingers up her neck, collar to jaw. Their last, ironic kiss brings the house down. They do seven shows a week plus matinees for two years running. Everyone is sold, and hard, on their young and rash romance; everyone is crushed and bitterly vindicated when it falls apart.
Nobody is sold harder than Laia.
She knows, of course, that he's playing a role. He is really Enric Joya and not the dashing and treacherous Tardor. For that matter, she is really Laia Solandra and not the passionate and conniving Estiu. But it's a very intimate pair of roles, and she does talk to him at all out of character. They have to choreograph, they have to rehearse, they have props to replace in their niches and director's notes to take together and hardly any other characters in the entire play. Enric doesn't act like his character. But - in its own way, that's attractive too. Too much attention is usually not a sign of favorable intent. She's had her overly invested fans since "Baron Cua's Pet", and they don't wish her well. She's seen breakup-fueled sniping between the lighting technicians and the musicians that ended careers and could have ended lives, and it would really have been better for everyone if the flautist had turned down the advances in the first place. And Enric isn't behaving like that. Enric keeps a respectful distance, off stage, so she knows he's not setting out to close in and hurt her; and he plays Tardor to the hilt under the glare of the stage lights, so she knows how it feels, when he holds her and presses his lips to hers. The combination is intoxicating when she's fourteen and it doesn't get a lot less intoxicating during the run of the play.
When she's of age Laia proposes. She didn't ask the lead producer who manages the company's overarching affairs first, but it turns out he's all for it. It'll get a lot of press, revive flagging interest in "Summer, Autumn" for a few final months, and launch a new romance he wants to put on.
Enric says no.
And this is predictable, really. He has been keeping a respectful distance for two years. He would probably have used the established comfort level to try something, if he wanted her, in all that time. Laia is still crushed, but - she wads up every emotion she's ever had in her life up into the same ball, Acting, and lobs it into the mezzanine with maximum force, night after night as she embraces her beloved and pretends to double-cross him and then takes her bows to fall back into the reality that said beloved has no strong feelings about her one way or the other at all.
Summer, Autumn closes. The shows go on. Laia plays a merchant's daughter, a cobbler's wife, a wooden infant's mother. She is a duchess, a schoolgirl, a priestess, a druid. She is twenty. Twenty-five. She is a wizard and a devil and a beggar and a drunk. She burns at the stake, she cuts her own throat, she's struck by an arrow, she's drowned in a storm. Enric usurps her or defrauds her or kidnaps her or murders her. Sometimes he's on the other stage, or their characters don't meet. Very seldom anymore is she in love, except for how she is always in love. Audiences won't suspend disbelief when the principals aren't young and stupid.
She tries writing a play of her own. The producer laughs her out of the room. Too heretical, they'd both have very uncomfortable conversations with the Church - writing the lines is one thing, you can always say you're just a shit writer and didn't at all get across the loyalist interpretation you had in mind, but they can't actually portray it. Too soppy, to boot. What, is she trying to follow up on her big hit with a reprise of just the first act, over and over? Summer, More Summer? So she tucks it away in a drawer. It will certainly not help anything to tell anyone that she just wants to recapture that feeling when she was fourteen.
One night she's in elven makeup, with the stinging contacts and the ungainly ears, on the Resplendent Stage, portraying a thinly veiled parody of Felandriel Morgethai who is due to take a series of humiliating falls. The playwright decided for no particular reason that Morgethai is probably a Shelynite, so there's a prop shrine, destroyed in the third act every night and put back together for the following day. She spends ten minutes praying to it in the background while some character parts do their comedy skit and dance.
Night after night.
She's listening for her cue, but that's on the level of instinct now. She's not going to forget to leap to her feet and start shrieking about how they are all expelled at the right moment. She gets a little lost in thought, staring up at the rainbow-tailed songbird, a parody of itself with big goofy eyes and prearranged seams where it can fall to pieces. Goddess of art, right? Like the theater? Like, ironically, this very prop itself, not particularly respectful art but still crafted with wood and paint to communicate something?
Goddess of love, right?
Ten minutes a night, plus matinees, she starts praying.
It gets out of hand immediately. First it's just that ten minute stretch, but she finds it's - pleasant, to suppose that someone wants to hear that she fell in love when she was sixteen and never got quite over it. To suppose that someone's interested in hearing about her acting decisions in terms other than whether they'll sell tickets.
There are other occasions through the show when "Felandriel Morgethai" has opportunities to press her lips to the bird's head, to take out her pocket-sized similar prop and gaze at it while delivering a line, to ad-lib a "Shelyn preserve us" in a hubbub where everyone's supposed to be talking on top of each other and it doesn't much matter what they say. There are moments backstage when it's her and the shrine and no one is paying attention, and she can look at it, and think little prayers in its direction. In Her direction.
The show closes. Laia drops the prop behind a shelf full of various costume shoes in case it's missed. When it's not, she brings it home and hides it inside the wig she kept from "The Last Toilday of Rova", any time she's not looking at it.
Maybe it will help her write a play that isn't too soppy. She's not optimistic that it'll help with the heresy angle, but maybe if she gets the emotional core of the story arc right she can edit out all the heresy herself. A romance, so she can get Enric opposite her again -
But, under the watchful eye of the little painted wooden disk where she places it on her writing desk, what she actually writes is a children's play. Usually children watch what adults watch or they stay home, but she has some idea they might have different tastes, and there are enough well-to-do schoolkids with spending money to fill some seats... In Laia's play, children discover a monster holiday observance, and raid an ancient Azlanti ruin while the resident monsters are all at the festivities. The kids go home with all the treasure they can carry, after they find the one riddle-giving monster in the heart of the dungeon who did not feel like celebrating and answer all its questions. It's not really heresy. It's silly, but silliness is only heresy if it's in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, while you could have the kids deliver the teasing lines as cruel, could have them rolling their eyes behind each other's backs or stage them shoving each other for a favorable marching order... she has managed to write something that doesn't require it. You could stage this in Ostenso. Maybe you could also stage it in Almas.
She brings it to the producer. It's a different guy, now, and he agrees to a limited run if she wrangles all the child actors herself. She used to be one. She can manage. Monster Festival plays matinees only, so Laia can also show up for her evening role (now as a jilted wife), with her understudy taking her place there when she's the riddling sphinx and the children's director.
The critics don't really know what to make of a play for children, but the children don't read the critics. They buy tickets and come after school and laugh their heads off and the run is extended. She barely thinks about Enric any more; it turns out directing takes up more of her attention than she expected.
Then Cheliax is conquered, and Laia's painted wooden disk abruptly becomes much more important, the moment alignment detection will no longer mark a Shelynite for death.
