When the Marsh Hag welcomed Donovan into her swampy lair and agreed to his paying request for a murderous storm, James momentarily forgot that he was watching from a cushioned velvet seat in a crowded theatre. He seemed to be dreaming the scene, watching from the flickering edge of the Hag’s firelight, the stink of her cauldron and rot of fermenting moss filling his nose as she, in all of her extravagant ugliness, proclaimed her famous, cackling warning: “The gale ye conjure hungers great, its appetite is hard to sate. Feed it well and bid it sleep, lest its gaze to you retreat!”
“Of course,” Millie sniffed during the intermission as they stood in the crowded lobby with glasses of spiced mead in their hands, James’ head spinning dully, “every seat in the theatre is enchanted with a disbelief-suspension charm. The longer you sit there, the more real everything on stage seems. If they didn’t have an intermission to break things up a bit, some of us would be charging the stage to join Treus on the Ballywynde every time he gives his rallying speech, deadly magical storm and raging Wraith river or not.”
“Wizards and men, forth draw ye wands and wits!” Edmund cried, stabbing his own toy wand into the air.
“Stop!” Ariadne insisted in her most strident, motherly voice.
“You’re embarrassing yourself! Can’t you at least try to act like a proper gentleman?”
By the time the fourth act was underway, the aforementioned magical storm was a pall of clouds and thunder boiling in the upper reaches of the theatre from wall to wall, flashing with gouts of bruise-coloured lightning. Treus gave his famous rallying speech, and while no one rushed the stage to accompany his quest, many in the audience did join in the recitation even from the first words— “Foul Donovan! Thou traitorous malcontent!”—some standing in their seats and raising their own wands in the air, pointing them at the magical storm overhead.
Somehow, actual ocean waves crested and broke over the ledge of the stage, cascading into the busy orchestra pit, as the Ballywynde circumvented the storm via the treacherous Dagger Peninsula. It beached spectacularly on the shore of Seventide within sight of the castle, just in time to prevent Donovan’s and Astra’s cursed wedding.
The villain was confronted and defeated by Treus’ sword, yet the castle itself quaked under the onslaught of the merciless storm as it tirelessly hunted its focus, Treus himself.
James gasped as the cyclone tore across the stage, shattering stained-glass windows with its icy mist and stabbing the walls with lightning, setting tapestries afire and cracking the stone floors into heaving, broken canyons. Treus leapt these, drawing Astra along with him, still in her wedding gown and streaming veil, now torn by the battering gale. Distantly, James remembered this scene from his own performance of the Triumvirate. Then, the pedal-powered wind machine had accelerated out of control, causing real and unexpected chaos. The scene playing out now seemed even less staged than that.
Walls tilted inward, disintegrating into rains of brick and stone. Fire raced along the ceilings, wrenching rafters loose and heaving them like pick-up-sticks in the hand of a child in tantrum. And Treus wove through it all, sometimes leading Astra, sometimes tugged forward by her, until the doomed lovers were in sight of the castle entrance. A flaming rafter fell upon them, finally breaking the lovers’ grasp on each other, and crushing Treus under its weight. James simultaneously saw the remainder of the scene as both lines in a playwright’s script, and dim, heartbreaking memories of Petra.
ASTRA [returns to Treus’ wounded side despite the onslaught all around, pleads]: “Advance! We’re nearly free! The castle’s doom’d, but hope prevails! O Treus, curse it not!”
James heard the line in Petra’s voice, untainted with melodrama and hysterics, speaking as if no one was listening but he himself, her expression stricken but stubborn with a thread of hope.
TREUS: “Dear love, I curse not hope. I’ve brave’d the tempest’s watery wrath and fell that sorc’rer’s might. I’ve cursed them all to gaze upon your loving face. But hope? What life I’ve left I live in barricades of hope.”
On the stage, Treus struggled to free his arm from beneath the burning rafter, flinging it out to grasp Astra’s hand. Blood painted his fingers, stained the side of his face. Astra dropped to her knees as darkness closed slowly in on them, the castle collapsing and crumbling inward, tightening the space, making it tragically more intimate and desperate with each moment.
Treus went on, and James mentally said the words along with him, thinking of Petra. “Though God himself may shake this world to fall upon itself, my love and hope remain. Depart, my dear, and leave me now: I walk to death in peace.”
ASTRA [overcome by futility]: “Pray no, beloved!”
The Astra on-stage flung her free hand against her brow, palm out, and sang the line with shrill hopelessness. But her voice was drowned out in James’ mind by Petra, who claimed the words forcefully, not like an elegy, but like a sudden plea, hoarse and breathless, the spoken equivalent of a grasp about the shoulders, a desperate embrace that comes seconds too late. James’ mind flashed with green, and in that flash he saw his cousin Lucy tumbling through the air dead, heard his own scream mingling with Petra’s.
The scene on-stage blended dizzyingly with James’ memories.
Astra was Petra, and Petra was Lucy.
ASTRA: “For months and years I’ve longed for thee alone: my dreams the home of thy desperate love! I’ll not depart my place at body’s side, lest unrequited dreams shall crush my soul!”
James sat forward in his seat and spoke the final words of the play aloud:
“Then give me a testament to love. A kiss to cure the pains of death, this one… to stand for all.”
On-stage, Treus and Astra kissed, even as the castle finally collapsed upon them, buried them, ended them. The lights dropped.
The entire theater vanished into perfect blackness. And James was kissed. In the seamless dark, it was Petra’s lips on his. Strangely, disconcertingly, it was also Lucy’s, chaste and brief and careful as a dove.
Heartbreakingly, he smelled his lost adopted cousin, the warmth of her exotic, silky black hair, a hint of lavender soap, a tease of licorice on her breath.
And then the lights came back on, dimly, and it was Millie. Her face was close to his still, smiling faintly, one eyebrow arched.
“Wow,” she whispered, “that suspension of disbelief charm really worked on you, didn’t it? You were Treus for a second there.” Her eyebrow arched a notch higher. “Was I your Astra?”
James couldn’t answer. He couldn’t think quickly enough to lie.
Millie saw this on his face, but merely nodded, still smiling, and dipped her eyes.
James had very little memory of leaving the theater.