Leareth smiles slightly to himself, says nothing. 

So Cam teaches him Earth musical notation.

Great!!! 

Vanyel is now quite cheerfully taking advantage of this excuse to delay, and transcribing all the songs he knows from Valdemar. (With the exception, of course, of all the ones written about him during the war. Because they're terrible.) 

"Van, seriously, are you going to deprive the multiverse of 'Demonsbane' just because it embarrasses you? I happen to think it's quite a good song." 

"Well, if you like it so much, maybe you can do it yourself!" 

"Van, unlike some people, I don't have perfect pitch. Come on. It won't kill you to admit that you did some really impressive things and people wrote songs about it." 

"...You mean I murdered a lot of people." Vanyel turns his back on her. 

"I'm not looking forward to that part myself, yeah."

"...I'm sorry." Now he feels bad for even straying near the topic. 

"You could do that song that you taught me once, the one from Seldasen's time," Leareth says across the room. 

"–Oh, you mean the one about the captain not passing a false alarm from one of their border trap-spells to his superiors, because it would disrupt the peace talks with Karse?" Sigh. "I can't believe how Karse has started wars with us, what, at least five times? I guess it depends if you count that period in the early 300s as all one war or a bunch of short ones." 

"Maybe this time the peace treaty will stick. Since Vkandis showed up personally and all." 

"Showed up personally?"

"Possessed Queen Karis - well, Princess, she wasn't officially crowned yet but she was the surviving heir to the throne after the coup by the priesthood. Anyway, she came to us and wanted help taking back the country, which was sort of stretching the letter of the law on 'Valdemar does not invade and conquer' but at least it got Randi to let us win the stupid war. And after we'd taken the capital city, Vkandis possessed Karis and gave her miraculous healing powers for a night, and then miraculously showed her where the high priest was hiding, and that got everyone in Sunhame to agree that obviously Vkandis wanted her in charge and for Karse to be allied with Valdemar." 

"Might stick, but who knows."

"It might not, given how much trouble we had with the stupid rebel groups, it took two years to get the entire country back under Karis' rule. Although that's mostly thanks to the stupid lord on our own council who thought it'd be great to supply some corrupt priestess blood-mage–"

"Can we talk about literally anything else. Please." 

"Do you want to watch my favorite aerial ballet."

"Ooh! That sounds really neat, what is aerial ballet even?" (Lissa is easily distracted.) 

"It's a dance, with flying, and music, and there's not a ton of dialogue but it's all sung."

"Huh! What a creative idea!" And Vanyel is now also distracted from the subject of recent Valdemaran scandals. 

Cam puts on a production of Atriama. Not his favorite, one that will be more accessible to foreign audiences.

The main character, a demon called Atriama, dances her way from a set representing the plane of gold to a set representing another planet within Hell, where she visits a friend who lives on that planet. She expects to find him alone but is intrigued and delighted to discover that he has genetically engineered (or, at least, somehow invented) some bird-people (played by demons with feathers and beaks on), and she twirls around through their treehouses and dances among them making birdpeople friends, until eventually a grey-feathered birdperson gracefully plummets out of the sky, dead. Atriama alights beside the casualty, checks for a pulse, shakes her head, sighs, smiles, cups her hands - observes them to be empty -

- spins around increasingly frantically, her hands containing nothing every time she reaches out to catch something she'd been trying to conjure.

Intermission contains an entr'acte.

Lissa is an excellent audience; she watches raptly, oohs and aahs at all the right parts, gasps and seizes her brother's hand when the dead birdperson falls.

"Gah!" she says, when the scene ends and intermission starts. "Why is it stopping there - I want to know what's happening, I'm so confused. Is their magic not working?" 

"There's a second half, it just gives the dancers a break here."

"Oh, good, I'm glad we get to find out what happens next." Lissa bounces a bit.