by Melanie Rawn
But that night Cade’s magic, primed for “Hidden Cottage,” was in Mieka’s clever hands modified to the service of “Doorways.” The creation of assorted environments for the young lord to lose himself in was not so very different from crafting worlds behind doors. He had enough from the rehearsal to make those doors, and the slanting hallway that moved forwards on the stage as Jeska moved into it—a tricky little bit of skewing the perspective that he didn’t get quite right, though nobody but the four of them would know the difference. That Jeska wore his own face, body, and simple clothes meant there was just that much more for Mieka to work with in fashioning the visions that spun out from those doors as Jeska opened them, one by one.
A beautiful wife, a family, a home, a life no man in his right thoughts would turn from. Yet he did turn from it, unsatisfied. Scholarly solitude high in a castle tower, surrounded by books; dragging himself, drunk and filthy, through a city street; striding through richly golden fields he’d plowed and planted; lazing on pillows aboard a pleasure barge, nibbling berries and sipping wine, surrounded by beautiful girls; white-robed in the paneled severity of a law court, eloquent in defense of the innocent; wearing red robes as he pointed a stern finger at the guilty; stalking about a gigantic stage shouting This is a comedy, you talentless snarge, so why am I not laughing—
Love and disillusion and loneliness and disgust, glutted sensuality and utter boredom, fury, delight—and flickering around and through them the scents of grass in the sunshine, of parchment and bookbinding leather, cheap alcohol and vomit, the sounds of the river and the laughter of children, the feel of silk and flowers, of sickness, of a sheaf of folio pages clenched in one hand. The doors kept opening and the visions kept coming, each of them possible, and with them the tastes of pleasure and failure and satisfaction and despair.
And then the final door, the one they had argued about. Make it happy and lovely with lots of bright colors and pretty scents and bells tinkling in the distance—or leave it blurry, misted with shadows that drew the minds and imaginations of the audience right into the play? This door was the one that accompanied the lines about choosing this life, every morning before he woke from his dream of doorways: this life, and none other. But should they give a specific vision, or allow each woman to fill in the empty places for herself?
Vered Goldbraider had wanted his audience to think about what they most desired; Rauel Kevelock had given them fleeting moments of emotional fulfillment. Without Cade to contend that the more detailed the experience, the more satisfying it would be, Mieka, Rafe, and Jeska had decided to make the audience create its own experience: This life, and none other.
As Jeska walked through the magic-hazed doorway and vanished, every woman in the Pavilion gave voice to a cry or a shout or a sob or a laugh, and Mieka knew he and Rafe had crafted it perfectly. They had seen, felt, heard, sensed—for a few instants lived—whichever life their instincts yearned towards. They would remember it.
Mieka heard the applause as if from a great distance. He was exhausted. He hadn’t danced his way through this one—too risky. He’d had to reach for and explore instantly withies that hadn’t been distinctively primed for this piece, and if necessary choose another without faltering. The intensity of concentration and caution left him drenched in sweat even in the cool midnight air. He didn’t have the energy to leap over the glisker’s bench and the glass baskets when Touchstone gathered onstage to bow.
Cade wore the kind of smile a mountain cat might smile while choosing especially succulent chunks of raw meat. Mieka could already feel the bite marks.
Offstage, someone came up to him with a large goblet of wine. He drained it down his throat. Then he smiled, handed the cup back to the serving girl, stripped off his shirt, twisted it, and wrung the sweat into the glass. He saw in her eyes—and the eyes of every woman within twenty feet of him—that bedding down alone was his only choice tonight. It wasn’t only that selecting any of these ladies—or any two, or three—would mortally offend the rest. He knew himself to be so tired that he’d never be able to do justice to even one. So he distributed a flourishy bow amongst them, slung his shirt over his shoulder, and started across the grass towards the Castle.
“Hold up,” Rafe called softly.
Jeska was nowhere to be seen. Well, he hadn’t worked as hard as Mieka or Rafe tonight, either. The fettler was looking a bit frayed around the edges, but satisfied. Cade, striding along beside him, still wore the smile.
Mieka sighed.
“I’d kill you right now,” Cade said in surprisingly mild tones, “but you’re too knackered to appreciate it.” And with that he took off his own jacket and draped it around Mieka’s bare shoulders. “No sense getting a start on a cold when we’ve the whole Winterly ahead of us for you to get sick in.”
He could almost interpret that as forgiveness. He might have asked, but the boys carrying their crated glass baskets had caught them up, and all was silence amongst the three of them on the way back to their lodgings. It wasn’t until Rafe had gone to bed and they were in their own room that Cade spoke.
“I have a few memories of having said this before, but it’s worth repeating. Don’t ever do that again.”
Mieka shrugged off the jacket. “Don’t make us do it again, and we won’t.”
The candle Cade had lit with a glimmer of blue Wizardfire flared, then died out. Mieka snorted at the betraying reaction, then rolled himself into a light blanket before collapsing onto his bed.
A long while later, Cade murmured, “I would kill you, but it was brilliant.”
“Still don’t understand yet, do you?” Mieka asked.
“Understand what?”
“It was brilliant, yeh. It was yours. Dream sweet, Quill.”
* * *
Even after their triumph of the night before—and they knew by the looks they were given that word had flashed through the whole of Seekhaven Castle—it was humiliating to walk into Fliting Hall, scene of their defeat by Black Lightning. Specifically invited by the Shadowshapers to the performance, Touchstone frustled up in their best clothes and walked up to the gates as if they and not Black Lightning had won third flight on the Ducal Circuit. No other group was present. The Shadowshapers were letting it be known that they considered Touchstone to be the only other players whose opinions were worth anything.
As they approached Fliting Hall, shoulder-to-shoulder, off to one side Kaj Seamark and Thierin Knottinger were oozing through the crowd. Mieka nudged Cade in the ribs and pointed. The briefest suggestion of a smile twitched the long mouth before he widened his gray eyes to anxious innocence and plucked timidly at the sleeve of a nearby footman.
“Dreadfully sorry, but—I think I recognize those men over there, the dark one in green and the fair one with the curling hair.”
“I don’t think they’ve been invited,” Mieka contributed.
But not even he would have dared what Cade said next, in a low, worried voice that brought a terrible frown to the footman’s young face.
“Efters,” Cade whispered.
“Muchly beholden,” said the footman, and hurried off.
Mieka bent his head to keep his face hidden, and shook with silent laughter. “Gods, Quill, you are just wicked cruel,” he said at last.
“Did I lie?” Cade challenged grimly. “All a matter of interpretation, innit?”
Efters were thieves who robbed theater patrons before and after a performance—and sometimes during. Mieka tiptoed to see over the crowd, and nearly choked on giggles as Thierin and Kaj were marched crisply down the cobbles to the front gates.
Touchstone’s seats were sixth row, just left of center, three rows back from the King Himself. The theater settled quickly. Glass globes of light over each door dimmed, the sea-green and brown curtains parted, and the Shadowshapers walked onstage. The lords and gentlemen of the Court were too sophisticated to greet them with applause, but the excited murmurs that rippled through the crowd were as good as a standing ovation. Sakar
y and Chat took their places, Vered and Rauel stayed where they were at center stage, and the variance from the usual configuration caused renewed whispers. Vered’s blazing eyes searched the theater, found Touchstone, and a brief, broad grin decorated his face.
“‘A Life in a Day,’” he announced.
For the first time ever while he watched a performance, Mieka tried to do what Cade did, to keep a portion of himself apart and figure out what they were doing, how it all worked. He couldn’t. The Shadowshapers were that good. He knew them all, had shared his whiskey and their wagon; Chat was a good friend, Vered and Rauel were becoming so, and Sakary was even talking to him these days (as much as Sakary ever talked to anybody—and what was it about fettlers, he wondered, that made them so reticent?). But when they were onstage, they became Players: the Shadowshapers, the best in the Kingdom, and he defied even Cade Silversun to resist them.
He thought all this in the few seconds of his struggle to stay at least partially removed, a struggle he didn’t mind losing. The Shadowshapers were that good.
Afterwards, he could understand why they’d used a configuration nobody had ever used before: both tregetour/masquers onstage, Chat’s withies becasting each of them according to their roles in the piece. As the signature shadows wafted through Fliting Hall, Mieka saw Rauel quietly move upstage a few paces and bite his lip. They were all nervous. Chat especially was concentrating on the glass baskets of withies, arranged tonight with a visible space between one grouping and the other, keeping the two separate according to which of the tregetours had primed them. And he was using both hands, the way Mieka always did but few others could. Mieka reminded himself to congratulate his friend on this new dexterity. And then he forgot everything else as the play surrounded him.
An ordinary day. Vered wore a middle-class merchant’s plain, neat clothing and a nondescript face to match, hiding his fierce black eyes and dark skin and white-gold hair. Walking into a cozy little kitchen, stretching, peering out the window to judge the weather. Sitting down to tea and toast, a broadsheet before him on the table. Shouldering into his coat. Pulling on his gloves. Walking out his front door. All of it perfectly commonplace, the sort of thing thousands of men did every day.
He never saw the carriage that ran him down and left him broken and bloodied in the street.
It was done in perfect silence. It was done without any emotion at all.
There were scents of cinnamon tea and toasted bread. There was warmth on shoulders and back as he donned his coat. There was a slight breeze touching skin as the door opened, and then a few droplets of rain that brought a vague wish for a cap. But there were no sounds of knife scraping butter and jam onto the toast (though there was a faint flavor of raspberries), no click of a closing door, no street noises, not so much as a footstep. The horse trampled him in silence. Bright yellow wheels crushed his bones without sound. The garish crimson carriage bumped over his body onto the cobbles and lurched away into deathly quiet shadows.
The pain was real, and piercing. Back, legs, arms, belly, one cheek where a hoof slashed his flesh—but there was no emotion.
The shadows shifted, the flashing agony was gone, and Rauel, wearing the same nondescript face and plain, neat clothes, was seated at the breakfast table.
“I never thought. I never think. And today I’m going to die. I didn’t know. Does anyone?”
This time there was emotion—great searing spasms of regret, fear, fury, denial. He mourned what he had done and what he had left undone. He pounded his fists on the table and set the plates and cup rattling right onto the floor to shatter with a sound like branches cracking in a windstorm. He raged at everyone and everything and cursed the Lord and Lady and Angels and all the Old Gods for doing this to him. When the shadows melted from the other side of the stage, and he saw his own ruined and dying body in the street, he covered his face with his hands and wept.
The pain was twofold now—physical and emotional, joined inextricably as the two voices joined, one from each side of the stage.
“I didn’t know. I never thought. All the things I ever did, all the things I could have done, should have done—”
Then a gasp of a death rattle, and an abrupt blackness.
The withdrawal of the magic was so wrenching that Mieka trembled. The audience, shocked and horrified, was a rustling and muttering thing that seethed softly at first and then more and more loudly as the shadows dissipated to reveal the four players standing together onstage: proud, defiant, knowing they had done something catastrophic to every man there.
It was Cade who pushed himself to his feet and began to applaud. Mieka swayed upright to stand beside him, arms above his head as he clapped. Others joined them, and it wasn’t long before every one of the four hundred men present were giving the Shadowshapers an ovation that rattled the glass globes above the doorways.
All at once, Chattim flung a withie into the air. It twirled upwards, arcing high above the stage, and abruptly shattered. The Shadowshapers bowed as motes of bright glass drifted down onto their shoulders, and when they straightened up they were grinning.
The reference and the tribute were unmistakable. Mieka felt his jaw drop a little, felt Cade give a violent start of surprise beside him. Nobody else understood why Touchstone had been singled out this way, but Mieka and Cade did—and Mieka had to remind himself to remember that he was supposed to have been asleep at the time, he wasn’t supposed to know that it was Cade who had provided the spark of an idea that had resulted in this performance.
It was quite a while before they could extricate themselves from the tumult. Buffeted about, with many mumbled apologies, they finally stumbled out a door, down some steps, and within a few strides there was relative quiet, and soft grass beneath their boots. They walked on for a ways, with no idea where they were inside Seekhaven Castle, until the noise had faded behind them.
Mieka looked up at Cade, then at Rafe and Jeska. They were all shaken.
“I’ve never seen anyone do anything that dangerous,” Jeska murmured. “I think they might just owe you their skins, Cade.”
“If you hadn’t stood up—” Rafe shook his head.
“Sakary had a little left in reserve,” Cade told them. “Didn’t you feel it? He was still holding on to the magic through the shadows. It was incredible.”
Mieka caught his breath. “You mean if the crowd had come at them, he could have stopped them?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
“I couldn’t have done it,” Rafe said. “No disrespecting meant to your magic, Cade, or your use of it, Mieka, but that’s beyond what any fettler should ever be called on to do.”
“They planned it that way.” Cade paced ahead of them into the tree-strewn grounds. Then he spun, arms outstretched. “Couldn’t you feel it? It was Rauel’s magic Sakary saved to use if he had to. From the right-hand baskets. Rauel’s withies, not Vered’s.” He gave a harsh laugh. “Knowing Vered, he would’ve welcomed a riot! But Rauel gave Chattim what might be needed. It was there for Sakary to use, just in case. Gorgeous!”
“Insane,” Rafe stated.
“You really sensed all that?” Jeska asked.
Cade nodded. “They almost got me, I’ll admit that. It’s a powerful piece of work.”
But he never let anything touch him. Mieka folded his arms around himself, shivering in the night chill. Nothing touched Cade: not even the greatest group in the Kingdom, and certainly not Touchstone. Never allowing himself to be caught up in the magic, his brain always bubbling away until steam came out his ears, forever picking things apart to find out how they worked. One day, Mieka swore to himself, one day—
Cade was still talking. “—set every other group to wondering if two masquers isn’t the way to go in future? I mean, it wasn’t just a stunt. It could’ve been that they were flaunting the fact that they can do it, but—”
“Recall, please,” Jeska said in the accent he reserved for portraying the haughtiest of stick-up-his-bum lor
ds, “that both of them are also tregetours. They made their own magic to be used on themselves.”
“In case you were thinking of hiring another masquer,” Rafe added maliciously.
Cade threw back his head and laughed. “Or another tregetour? Or maybe learn how to do the masquery myself? Oh, yeh, that’s what’ll happen!”
“Imagine our delight,” Jeska said, still a bit coldly.
“Oy! Miek! Why are we forever runnin’ after you, eh?” Chattim panted to a stop beside them and cuffed Mieka genially on one arm. “You’ll miss the party!”
“Not in this lifetime,” he declared, knowing Cade would catch the reference. “Where to?”
“Our lodgings,” said Rauel, who had one arm slung across Vered’s shoulders as if they had never exchanged a belligerent word in their lives.
“Not the same as last year,” Chat hastened to add. “Much better drinks!”
“We owe you,” Vered said. “’Twas the two of us at each other’s throats over this one, y’know, until you set us right.”
“Not two pieces, but one,” Rauel affirmed. “Woven together, like.”
“And never mind the trouble it caused,” Sakary muttered, but only for form’s sake. He knew as well as everyone else what the Shadowshapers had accomplished tonight.
“C’mon,” Vered urged. “Took half an age to find you—shouldn’t’ve run off like that, should you?—and I’m all the thirstier for it.”
“Everybody will be there,” Chat told Mieka. “And two or three drinks ahead of us by now.”
“Not everybody,” Mieka confided. “Unless you want to stop in at the local quod and pick up half of Black fucking Lightning.”
Chapter 6
“Quill?”
“Go ’way.”
“No, really, you have to get up. We’re off to High Chapel in half an hour.”
Cade buried his face in his pillow. “Have fun.”
“We missed it last year. We have to go.”
Was he expected to bow his gratitude to Whomever or Whatever for giving them first flight on the Winterly instead of the Ducal or Royal they deserved? Not bleedin’ likely.