Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A demonstration of power.

Isla should have prepared for this. Heck, Poppy and Terra’s plan had included preparations for a situation like this, a time when she was expected to use magic. It involved stealing an enchanted ring that caused plants to grow rapidly from King Oro’s treasury. Not only would it have required getting much closer to the king than she wanted to by now, she had also been worried he would recognize the enchantment, or realize that the item was missing and connect the dots. 

Except, she hadn’t come up with an idea of her own to survive the demonstration. Even if she wasn’t following the general shape of their plan, even if it was a ridiculous scheme that they had never allowed her input in, any plan was better than none. She felt like a child, unable to act without guidance.

But there wasn’t time for self hatred. She needed to figure out how she was going to fake this effectively, or find an excuse to not go.

“Wildling, why don’t you go first?” Cleo asked, and though her tone was fairly neutral, her gaze was like an archer’s aimed at a target. Isla must not have schooled her expression as well as usual, flinched when the challenge was announced. Cleo had picked up on it. She was testing Isla, trying to gage just how much of a weak point Isla’s magic was.

“I’d love to,” Isla replied, and her voice was calm and normal and not the voice of a woman about to reveal her darkest secret and doom herself and her realm. “But I would need to retrieve some plants from my room. We weren’t alerted that this was a demonstration in advance. Did you forget?”

“Isn’t that what the magic is for?” Cleo raised an eyebrow with her. “If you can’t make plants unless they would be there anyway, I hate to break it to you, but you aren’t using power.”

“I don’t create them from thin air! I need seeds, at least! Can you make ice from thin air, or do you need water? If it’s the latter, I guess you’re powerless.” Snapped Isla. She felt disconnected from her body. On the surface, she was irritated, nothing more, but inside her heart was pounding. She felt cold all over, wanted to scream, wanted to curl into a ball and just quit. Quit the game, pass saving her realm over to someone who wasn’t about to fail it. 

“I mean, there’s water in thin air,” Grimm pointed out unhelpfully, with a faint smile. “It’s this little thing called water vapor-”

Isla shot him a death glare.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t have a servant bring your little trees while the rest of us do our demonstrations,” He shrugged. “You can go last. Is that alright with everyone?” 

There were nods all over the room. 

It was Isla’s only blessing today that Ella had come to watch the demonstrations, that she could have someone who was a little familiar with her plants, and who she trusted at least a bit, fetch them for her. 

Her mind was scattered as she walked over to the Starling woman. If only she was at good at thinking in a crisis as she was at acting normal in one. Could she get Celeste to move the plants for her, and pretend she was doing it herself? No. Cel had great control, but any artificial movement from her would still look like a hand was bending the plants, not like they were moving themselves. If Cel did a good job it could be subtle, but Cleo was already revealing herself to be sharp-eyed, and Isla was sure she and several others would notice.

So what could she do?

“Miss, what plants do you want me to retrieve?” 

Isla was cursing mentally, drawing after blank, anything useful in her brain hidden under a fog of panic.

“Queen Isla, what plants do you want me to retrieve?” Ella repeated more firmly. “I can’t bring all of them. You brought very many.”

Which plants… 

She scrolled through the list of fruits, cuttings, seeds, and live plants she’d brought, and suddenly the plan burst into her head. 

It wasn’t ideal. It would make a pathetic demonstration even if it worked, and that depended entirely on the other rulers not knowing of the plants she was dealing with. Both species were tropical, at least, ideal for rainforest climates like Wildling, but not the other rulers’ realms. Maybe they just wouldn’t be familiar.  

“Ah, sorry-” She snapped out of her head and met Ella’s eyes with a smile. “Bring the bowl of kumquats, the oranges, and the shameplant. That’s the one with the purple flowers and the bipinnately compound leaves- errr, it’s the one in the medium pot with the snake on it. But don’t touch it. It’s spiny.” 

***

Ella arrived back with the plants midway through Cleo’s demonstration. Isla set the shameplant on the table - it didn’t need any preparation. Then she discretely pulled out a pocketknife, unfolded it, and started to shave the peel off one of the oranges.

***

Isla stood in front of the other rulers, now the center of attention. Why did that make everything so much worse, the attention? There were spectators here to act as judges, but they were far fewer than the crowd that had watched her when she left for the centennial. Still, she felt the same anxious prickle of stage fright. Poppy and Terra had prepared her to act, but they hadn’t prepared her to do it with the undivided attention of so many other people. They hadn’t prepared her for people, period.

It probably didn’t help that she was almost certainly still about to have her powerlessness revealed, and that she had already seen five demonstrations more impressive than anything she could dream of. 

“So, to start, I’m going to move this plant,” She said, holding up the shameplant for all to see. Oh dear. Why was she talking like this? No one else had said what they were going to do before they did it. 

She waved her hand over the shameplant, and let the trailing sleeve of her dress at least brush every one of its leaves, each one of which was made of many leaflets branching from the petiole. Maybe it looked like a fern to one without understanding of botany. 

As if on command, the leaflets started to move, folding upwards and inwards like butterfly wings closing.

She looked around at the audience. They seemed bored and unimpressed, Grimm wearing a slight, pitying wince that felt almost as bad as Cleo’s outright scorn and suspicion. But she had used power, right? They recognized that, they believed that?

She set the shameplant down. 

“For the next part of my demonstration I need a volunteer,” She announced. “To taste-test something.” 

“I’m sorry, but we do remember this is a death competition, how exactly are we supposed to believe you aren’t trying to poison us?” Oro demanded.

“I’m not allowed to kill anyone until day fifty.” Isla said simply, obviously. Ostensibly, any ruler who broke that rule would be hunted down by the other rulers and be the one to be killed, but it was obvious that would only be followed if it was a weak realm with no relevant alliances. One like Wildling. 

“Yes, but if your poison is fast acting and you don't think we have access to an antidote, you might be confident that I would be dead before you face any consequences. Or perhaps it’s slow acting enough that it would kill us, but not until after day fifty, and you could argue your case for it not breaking the rules,” He pointed out.

“Oro, I think that’s a little paranoid,” said Azul. “She’s been eating food in your house, made by your chefs, for days. We all have. If we throw around accusations of poison already, then we’ll all wind up hunting for and cooking our own meals.”

“I for one am going to do that after day fifty,” Cleo volunteered. 

“That’s. Smart but really not helpful to the mood-” Azul sighed. “Fine. I volunteer. What do you want me to eat?” 

Isla held up the bowl, now full of orange peels. She picked a sliver of pith and rind up, and held it out to him. “Try this.” 

“Really?” He did obediently eat it though, looking as if he was seriously contemplating the flavor. “Well, it doesn’t taste great. We don’t get oranges too often as far from the tropics as Skyling, but I didn’t think you were supposed to eat the outside.”

“You aren’t, usually,” Isla explained. “But wildling magic, if precise enough, can make them quite sweet and edible.”

Grimm barely contained a disbelieving, slightly mocking laugh across the room. Celeste was trying to shoot her do-you-know-what-you’re-doing looks without anyone else noticing.

“It’s just converting sugars into other sugars that taste more like sugar,” Isla assured, and handed another bit of peel to Azul. “Now, taste this .”

“I can’t believe you’ve convinced me to eat orange peels twice.” Azul’s eyes widened a little as he bit into the peel. “Oh. huh. You weren’t joking, that’s much sweeter.”

“I wouldn’t make my demonstration into a prank,” Isla chuckled, “I’m not Grimm.” 

Cleo’s expression turned genuinely bemused at that, as if she were surprised Isla would get close enough to Grimm to be able to joke about his behavior like that. She didn’t really understand why Cleo was surprised- it wouldn’t take more than five minutes in a room with him to realize that he suffered from chronic inability to be serious. 

Isla was almost taken aback by how at ease she felt, though. In the horrifyingly deadly Centennial, she was bantering with Azul, laughing at Grimm, appearing confident as she survived her demonstration of power. How?

A murmur ran through the spectators. 

“She’s weak, isn’t she? She barely moved those leaves.”

“Can we trust King Azul that she changed the flavor? Maybe it was power of suggestion.”

But among the unimpressed voices, a few snippets of conversation made her glow with pride. “Sweetening a fruit with power would take so much control,” someone marveled, while another commented, “I know it wasn’t visually impressive like the rest, but that’s tricky magic. Especially for a ruler so young”. It wasn’t the awestruck expressions or raucous applause some of the other rulers had gotten, but she couldn’t believe she had won even polite respect for her skills. 

As the spectators voted, Isla pretended that she really did have the power they were judging. She pretended she had earned those approving voices.

I have excellent magical control. I’m a skilled phytomancer. A promising ruler of Wildling.

***

“How did you do all of that?” Celeste asked, when they were in her room and had safely closed the door behind them. “I was going to move the plants for you, but you… had it. And I don’t even know what you did with the orange peels. I can’t think of a way to candy or sweeten them without it being obvious.”

“Oh, I mixed them with kumquat peels. Those are naturally sweet, so I just pretended it was the same plant and prayed no one knew what a kumquat was. I was so lucky…” Isla let out a shaky, incredibly relieved breath and lay back against the deep blue star map patterned blanket on Cel’s bed. 

“Yes, you were. It was clever, though. Even if I knew there was a sweet-peeled citrus I might not have considered that someone would fake a demonstration like that.”

“If you didn’t know me, you might not consider that someone would have to,” Isla pointed out.

“Eh, anyone who wasn’t as powerful as they wanted to be would consider cheating in a demonstration of power. You cheated in an interesting, unexpected way,” Celeste shrugged. “So I understand the oranges, but what about the leaves? They moved. You moved them.”

“No.” Isla almost laughed at how simple and unimpressive the trick was. “It was a shameplant. “Their leaves fold up when you touch them. They’re one of the few plants that move rapidly. I mean, I didn’t have to do anything, they’re just like that.”

“ Oh .” Celeste paused, staring at the still folded up shameplant on her bedside table. “Forget what I said about the peels, that was a gamble. I mean, most of the spectators are from Lightlark, so they’re very isolated from any flora that don’t grow here, but still, I’m shocked no one knew about it.”

“I know,” Isla hid her face in her hands. “The worst part is I had a real, not last-minute plan for a power demonstration and I thought I had more time , and I didn’t do it-”

“Hey.” Celeste gently grabbed Isla’s wrists and pulled her hands away from her eyes. “There’s no point in beating yourself up about it now. You got through the demonstration, and you did it well, just by being a magnificent botany nerd. Which is… pretty much your power when you think about it. You did a good job.”

Isla didn’t know what to do with the approval in Cel’s gray eyes. The love, admiration, even. Celeste knew she had faked the demonstration and still felt she had earned that, but she also sometimes thought Cel would love her if she was a worm and didn’t do anything but eat dirt all day. Her friend praised her even when she didn’t push herself anywhere near her limits.

“Alright. Thanks,” Isla replied dumbly. 

“I know that was… terrifying for the both of us. Do you want to take a few hours to relax, and then we can figure out a more reliable solution if you have to fake power again?”

“That would be great.”

Chapter Text

Here's a ref of my designs for Celeste and Isla! Isla's is basically cannon compliant, and Celeste's could not be further from cannon compliant cause goddamnit why can't she have short hair and be really tall and plus size. No one is stopping me. I more or less made up the design for Isla's dress, and got Celeste's scrolling through images of clothes royal medieval women wore. Fashion in Lightlark isn't very similar to how medieval clothing was, and I respect that, but also I just genuinely like that dress and cape.

Warning for revealing clothing here, because it's Isla and she's not in armor. It's basically a super translucent dress, and I don't show anything awful in it, but just a bit of warning.

https://imgur.com/a/zJAgkEs

Idk if I was that good at putting characters' heights where I wanted them to be on the height bar, but I was envisioning Isla as 5'3" (160 cm) and Celeste as 6'2" (188 cm), because I like making people taller than any human being has a right to be. I might make Isla shorter because 5'3" is pretty average and she's implied to be kind of small, but we shall see.