Vow-Wrens

Overview

Vow-Wrens are the small birds of the Binding Song. Every promise spoken aloud on the plane makes a tether between speaker and listener, and the wrens hear it and repeat it, in the speaker's own voice, and carry it along the tether. The Oath-Breakers, who hunt those who break their vows, follow the wrens.

Appearance

A Vow-Wren is a tiny, round, short-tailed bird, smaller than a sparrow, with feathers of ink-brown flecked with parchment-white like spattered ink, and a tail it holds upright. Its eyes are bright black, its beak fine and slightly curved, the colour of old gold. It hops in quick, jerky bursts along shelves and railings and flies in short whirring dashes. Its own song is a loud, rippling trill, startling from so small a bird. When it repeats a promise, the voice that comes out is the promiser's. It smells of wax and paper.

Habitat and Range

They live everywhere in the Song's halls, libraries, and courtrooms, and in greatest numbers where promises are made: the singing halls, the courts of the Arbiters, and the places where contracts are sealed.

Behaviour and Temperament

A wren listens. When a promise is spoken near it, it cocks its head, repeats the promise once, word for word, and flies off along the line of the tether to the one who received it, repeating it again on arrival. Wrens gather around anyone who promises often, and a liar's promise sets them squabbling. They are otherwise ordinary small birds that forage for crumbs of fallen script.

Abilities

A Vow-Wren repeats exactly: the words, the voice, the tone. On the Song, where words are binding, its repetition is the promise spoken again, and the tether grows heavier with each telling. A promise that wrens have carried cannot be denied, and a broken one rings out from every wren that heard it.

Life Cycle

They nest in the gaps between books and the cracks of the walls of law, and the chicks begin to repeat as soon as they can chirp. Their lives are short, and a dead wren falls apart into loose letters.

Uses and Dangers

They give the Song nothing it does not have already, but they speed it. The Oath-Breakers hear a broken promise in a wren's mouth and come. The Scribes are said to read the wrens as a ledger. Travellers learn the plane's oldest advice faster for them: do not promise lightly, and do not promise anything where a wren can hear.

Lore and Belief

On the Material Plane, at the judgement halls and oath-places called Court-Gates, a wren in the rafters during an oath is taken as a listener, and in some places a wren's nest in a lord's hall is never cleared. Ordinary wrens are meant; the custom is said to come from travellers' tales of the Song. Children's rhymes warn that "the wren will tell" on a broken promise.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Natives of the Planes