Red's Ten - Redayne

Redayne

Age 17, Dancer

Redayne was tall and sleek and beautiful, with red hair and even redder eyes like her sire. Her mother's dark skin and statuesque height were mirrored in this girl, and she showed the same intense grace and power in movement as Yanne. She had an easy smile, a delightful laugh, and a beautiful voice that Harpers everywhere wanted to hear echoing off the guild hall. That was not to be: Yanne was a performer, not a teacher - and Redayne was of a similar bent. She'd sat through one stifling Spring and Summer session at the nearest Harper Hall, and that was enough for everyone.

While she learned the ballads and histories, she just had no excitement for them. She would far rather have been learning a new challenging dance move, showing off her remarkable flexibility, or making an audience laugh or cry with a well-sung tune. It almost angered her that 'all the best songs were about history'. Why did they have to be? When there were many other things than politics and thread-fighting to talk about? What about love? What about irony? She enjoyed singing about love far more than any tragedy, and looking at the words to these historical ballads: they were almost all tragedies.

At ten, Redayne and her mother's troupe moved away from their sedate home Hold, the atmosphere there had become a bit poor for entertainers - there were few crops to be shared at festivals, and less money than ever to pay for a performance. So they took their homes apart, assembled wagons, and emulated the gypsies that occasionally wandered through. They weren't gypsies, and it was immediately clear of that - especially when they ran into a group of them.

There was no animosity - because the dance troupe didn't want to steal their horses or their stages. They did however give ample warning about their Hold - gypsies might be run out if they were lucky, caught and shot as criminals even for imagined crimes, at the worst. Because of that warning, the gypsies turned another direction, and bid the dance troupe farewell.

Redayne had learned in two weeks from them, what took her mother three months - a veil dance that was far too mature for a ten year old, but she'd keep that in reserve until she was better equipped to perform it as it was intended. She practiced it, surely, but when no one was watching. She also added to it, made it her own, and insisted that the musicians make slightly different trills and beats to it for her. No one refused her, they enjoyed the challenge of making the already beautiful girl's dance even better.

Redayne had that effect on some people - she could bring the most out of them. And the opposite of others: if they didn't want her dances, if they didn't care for entertainment and wanted something else, she was suddenly seen as a too-bold, too-energetic and too-vapid girl to be brushed off. This didn't sit well with her mother, of course, but then they didn't have to stay around people like that for long. The troupe made a wide circuit traveling for a year before returning to their home, which had had better crops this year but was still badly behind on tithing. It was close to a festival time, when tithes would be collected and dragonriders would be there. Redayne and her mother's group decided to stay and bartered themselves a wide stage at the gather, in the hopes that they would be able to help pay the town's debts down.

This worked nicely, the troupe impressed the riders well enough that two of them outright donated their own marks to the town's deficit. They didn't stick around though, Redayne saw that her mother and aunts and uncles truly enjoyed their time touring. They'd made acts and plays, songs and performances to suit each of the Holds they visited. Thus for the next five turns they traveled the route, weather permitting and Thread likewise.

Redayne had met her father several times while traveling, and numerous times when he'd visited her old Hold. He always had a nice gift for her and her mother, usually clothing because he knew that as performers they had to look their best. Silks and pretty sashes were popular that year, and each got one. Redayne had tremendous respect for her father - even though others said he was just a wanderer and a ladies man. Well, he was a nice guy - he was a good person, she could tell that. He valued her mother, if the word love couldn't be applied - and it could. Redayne wasn't certain she'd ever fall in love and do the typical things that she saw ladies and drudges and crafters do.

For them, it seemed, once they fell in love, their life was over. In those ballads about leaders and weyrwomen too - once love struck them their story was over. How useless was that! Redayne decided that love would be for her like it was for her parents. They loved one another, but they weren't "in" love. Value and appreciate them, but don't hold them down.

Her life wasn't without its share of troubles though. There were places they wandered which did mistake them for gypsies, they experienced being run out of one town, and actually had injuries sustained from another when they were almost burned out of their camp. And, they had a tenuous truce with the local road brigands. They carefully kept track of who was the leader and when that changed, they asked the right questions to be sure they would continue to be unharmed on their journeys. As Redayne grew taller and older and more like a woman who could perform that veil dance properly for a man, her mother saw the looks on those brigands faces. She would not dare suggest her daughter perform anything for them, the danger was too great of her being attacked. Redayne herself had little fear of it, but ... the look in her mother's tawny eyes told her to be wary.

Then came the time when there were boys aplenty watching her, her age. Love... her thoughts on it echoed in her mind as she danced before them. They were not men, not like the rogues on the road, not like the Lordlings in holds, and certainly less like her father than she liked. Some had blank, wrapt looks on their faces. Others a kind of greed. Only a few had the spark of wisdom to them, and she paid more attention to those when she could. Unfortunately, it always seemed that those boys were the ones who got ribbed and joked with by their friends afterwards. As though her dancing and singing weren't directed at them because she liked them, but because she instead pitied them.

It was enough that she finally stomped up to them at their table, and slapped her long fingered hands down on the hard stone. "I am not pitying anyone when I sing, you insensitive jackass," she spat at one boy. "If all I wanted out of an audience was gawking and drooling, you'd certainly fit the bill - but when I want to dance in front of someone with a brain in their head and not in their crotch, I'll choose him."

The boys sat back wide-eyed, stunned, all but the one she had pointed to. He was known to be an 'egg head', a thinker and dreamer of course. He wasn't as deft as the others in his group, he wasn't fast and wasn't strong. But he could out-think them easily, and that stung when done right. Redayne decided they ridiculed him out of fear, not anger. She was right on there, and the boy thanked her later in the day with a flower and a deep (if wobbly) bow toward her. They shared a table for the feasting that night, and Redayne spent the night with him in his dorm, rather than her wagon. She was growing up, Yanne knew. She'd never settle down proper-like, but then neither had Yanne.

Just under a turn later, they got a flitter-note followed by a dragon visit. On the road, the troupe paused in its eternal motion on the road to change direction and head toward Dragonhope. They arrived just as the Red kids were being sent off to Talis weyr. As a sendoff, Redayne performed with them one last time before leaving. She was overjoyed, she'd seen dragons up close of course, because their travels included many festivals and tithing gathers. But she'd never ridden. She did so with grace and ease, just like learning a new dance. In fact that was how she described it to her mother, in training.

How would she ever describe her Impression... It was like the most beautiful song she'd ever heard, sung in her mind like the rays of the morning sun. The dragoness was green... mostly. Not quite all, with blue-tinted wingsails and a deep teal shade to her body that made it clear she was not just a simple darkish green! Taicicoth was her name, and she was into everything from the moment she was able to do more than eat and sleep. And like her rider, Taicicoth was graceful to a degree not usually seen in young dragons. She took her growth in stride, shedding properly and enjoying every minute of the scratching and scrubbing that Redayne did for her.

Some had said they almost expected Redayne to impress a gold, but that honor wasn't for her - and plus, she told them, a queen was much too responsible and had to do this and had to do that. At Dragonhope even though there were queens ridden by Master Crafters, her greeny-blue Taicicoth would be just perfect for attending gathers and collecting tithes!

Plus, her dancing would only add to those tithes collected - donations eagerly given even when duty demanded less. She was after all, still willing and quite able to show off her beauty leaping from the back of her dragon, onto a stage!

This secured her a spot in the Tariqa Rani wing, the Queen's wing! She would not be expected to fight Thread, which was fine because while Taicicoth was graceful she was not very fast and not very sturdy. And it turned out there was another such odd colored dragon among the ranks. She hadn't noticed him at first because off in the distant skies almost all dragons looked similarly colored. But Ny'on's dragon was a blue... with beautiful green speckles dotting his whole hide. The former herder wasn't unattractive at all, in fact he had red hair too, which made Redayne giggle. It looked as though she'd have to make any first moves, but then again... their dragons might do all the work for them.

NAME: Taicicoth
COLOR: Green-Blue (Female)
SIZE: Medium sized Green
PERSONALITY: Nosy, self-centered, sweet
PARENTS: White Saiath x Black-Gold Kurezath