Laia brings Eloi home with her to Ostenso by ship once the convention draws to a close.
The whole thing was exhaustingly exciting, and she didn't make much headway. Political compromises are a strange sort of beast and she didn't get much better at taming the breed over the course of her experiences. She will never really understand why people who'll talk all day long about the importance of being Good are so resistant to strengthening the Good churches, conveniently already staffed for them by the Good gods with people those soul-seeing gods trust to work their Good will in the world. But she did her small part to chip away at the vengefulness and bitterness that sways the hearts of Cheliax, and when the convention ends she bids Songbird Gabriel goodbye with a great big hug and brings her assistant back the way they came.
Poor Eloi gets seasick and can only eat when she's got him under a Remove Sickness, and then it's a coin toss if he keeps down the ship's biscuit or not once it's worn off. Laia doesn't have that problem, though. She works on a new play during the trip. It's a bit too soon to pastiche the convention itself. Maybe in five years. Ten. There were some... strong personalities in the room who she's not quite sure of tempting. And she doesn't think she can pull off a good Eriape show while the lich herself is secreted away in some sort of incommunicado archmagical containment without the chance to buy herself back to life again; that's a downer ending, not a redemptive one. She winds up instead with a composite character of everyone who's ever come to her for spiritual counseling, bouncing between temptations and trials in his quest to seek the Good, and in the final number joining the angels in their choir. She's not sure if it's as high quality as she'd like, and there's probably lots of prior work in the genre from Andoran that she should really catch up on to be part of the relevant dramaturgical conversation instead of an unintentional iconoclast, but it's fun to write, and she makes herself cry a few times.
When she gets back to her own company in her own town they've got things running on both stages - that she isn't in, obviously, since she's been away. She polishes up the play a bit, writes a bunch of letters, reintroduces herself to everyone at her hometown church and learns new names and faces, learns and understudies one role in the ongoing comedy. The company is in talks to buy an amphitheater previously used for executions and she's heartily in favor. They want to put on the Acts of Iomedae there, as it's a pretty straightforward case censorship-wise (that is to say, it is straightforward in Ostenso, where the rioting after Valia's spark-igniting speech was never felt) and they're still feeling out the edges of the rules. Laia's penciled in as Iomedae Herself, and practices her footwork and waves a wooden sword around till she can sell it.
And Enric's there, of course, he never left. They've got him in a bunch of roles that don't happen to appear simultaneously, the Emperor of Taldor and a particular cleric of Aroden and the Black Prince and Tar-Baphon and some minor Knight of Ozem called Marit, and he's putting on mustaches and taking off hats between every scene, always there, her foe or her friend or her liege or her advisor. Distance has helped, she thinks, distance and maybe Shelyn passing on to Desna that she'd like a lower density of Enric-related dreams. She loves him. But it's more like the way she'd like to love everybody. Enric is an example of everybody, and it doesn't sting, to love him like that.
Laia cuts her hair for the role - they think it'll run a good long while - and when she's not rehearsing, she's at the temple of Shelyn, counseling the troubled, hosting improv classes, delivering sermons, doing dramatic readings of the Melodies, applauding at poetry night and harmonizing in the song circle and occasionally embarrassing herself with paint when it'll help someone feel better. They never do produce her spiritual, but she writes more children's plays, and those go on, a fourth theater built for the express purpose of catering to the school-aged audiences. The Acts of Iomedae runs for two and a half years, and then they put on something else. She's Aspexia Rugatonn, she's Andira Marusek, she's Areelu Vorlesh. She's a witch, she's a princess, she's a schoolteacher, she's a (different) priestess. She's an angel, she's a sailor, she's a fencer, she's a spy. A duchess, a demon, a dowager, a diviner, a dragon. She's not a lich.
Once a year she writes a petition to the Queen about Eriape. Once a week she takes Eloi out to lunch, till he finds work in a kitchen and then he insists on treating her instead. Once a day at dawn she wakes up, tells Shelyn everything there is to tell, and rolls over and goes back to sleep, until one day when she is very old, and she rolls over and goes home, instead.