by Melanie Rawn
“Mieka!”
His envisionings vanished, and he was looking at his partners, who were looking at him with varying degrees of annoyance.
“What?” he demanded.
“Places, all!” sang out Fairwalk from the far end of the hall. “First performance is tonight!”
Following a dinner he couldn’t eat, Mieka was disgusted to find that after so long offstage, he was jittering with nerves. Cade, standing nearby in a corridor as they waited for the audience to settle, gave him a long, level look.
“Kearney says everybody’s in there.” Jeska was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, fingers clenching and unclenching. “Not even room enough to stand.”
“It’ll be hot as a glass forge,” Rafe agreed. “Too much to ask if they’d open those windows high on the outside wall, eh? Let some of the heat escape?”
“Maybe they’re scared our magic will escape.”
Mieka tried a smile in response to Cade’s remark, but it was a very bad fit. He could feel the sting of sweat beginning in his armpits and across his brow.
“It was that third glass of ale what did it, right? And on an empty belly, too.” Cade glanced about. A moment later some flowers had been evicted from a wide-mouthed ceramic vase, and Mieka was gratefully yarking into it.
“Your Highnesses, Your Grace, my lords and gentlemen—Touchstone!”
Rafe unwound the black neckband from Mieka’s collar and wiped his face and mouth with it before tossing it aside. Jeska opened the door into the great hall. Cade tucked Mieka’s hair behind his ears, grinned down at him, and said, “Remember, now—no pig!”
Rafe gave them both a push, and suddenly they were onstage, greeted by nothing more than indifferent applause. Mieka’s lip curled. Didn’t these people understand that they were here to see Touchstone? He jumped up onto the riser where the glass baskets waited, flexed his fingers, tossed a grin at Cade, and prepared to smack the audience into full awareness of what theater could be.
But gently, of course. Because of the language problems, they’d decided to play the piece more visually than usual. Because they had to play it straight, Mieka had to restrain his sense of humor. And because this audience had never experienced this kind of theater before, Mieka had to diminish, and Rafe had to keep tight hold on, the sensory effects. Which put much of the burden of the play on Jeska.
Mieka had always known their masquer was good. He’d never before realized just how good. The complications of the arranged marriage, the girl’s kidnapping, the young man’s flight, had to be expressed mostly with gestures and vocal inflections, for Mieka couldn’t let loose the full power of emotions, could only hint and tickle, so as not to frighten the audience. The sisters’ spite and the young man’s rebelliousness could be only fleetingly conveyed. Once the youth was on his wandering way, Mieka could lark a bit as he usually did, giving Jeska peculiar backdrops to stumble through before he eventually came upon the cottage where the girl was concealed, but Cade had sternly warned against farce. Even though she wasn’t officially watching, the Tregrefina had specifically requested this piece, and the Tregrefina had to be made happy. So Mieka didn’t get to do the pig. The work became easier for Jeska once the cottage was discovered and the love-at-first-sight part was done, and as much as Mieka wanted to sneak a few laughs in, a single glance at Cayden’s grim face kept him in line. By the end, with the lovers triumphant, he was bored out of his wits, and resentful, too. They were Touchstone, and they had their reputation to consider.
When the applause began, it sounded polite and reluctant, like the look on Mum’s face when Tavier showed her yet another collection of worms he hoped would grow into dragons. Mieka had had enough. What these people had just seen was magic, and damned fine magic, no matter how much they might want to hide it away and pretend it didn’t exist. So he tossed a spent withie high in the air towards the rafters and shattered it to splinters on its way down.
Through a million tiny grains of glittering glass he saw Rafe’s sudden grin—and through the shocked gasps he heard sudden screams as the dozen small windows high in the side wall exploded outward into the night.
“Mieka was dead right, and so was I,” Rafe said later on, after they had been hustled back upstairs to their room. Kearney Fairwalk was in agonies, actually wringing his hands. “It’s us, and that’s what we do, and if they don’t like it, they shouldn’t have asked us to come.”
“We didn’t do hardly any of it the way we could have,” Mieka seconded. “They didn’t get even a taste of what theater really is.” And because the iron restraint still nettled: “I didn’t even get to do the pig!”
“None of it matters,” Cade said, lounging in a low chair, long legs stretched out to a footstool. “The girl is the only one we had to impress.”
“But it was only men in the aud—” Jeska interrupted himself with, “The minstrels’ gallery!”
“Yeh, she was watching.” Cade nodded. “And a footman came up to me after with this.” He held up a single little blue flower, five-petaled, with a yellow center.
“So it’s a forget-me-never. So what?” Jeska asked.
“So it’s her symbol, innit? Embroidered all over her gown when we met her. Same color as her eyes. I thought you noticed these things—and especially things about pretty girls!”
Fairwalk nodded slowly. “When Prince Ashgar saw her picture—just in watercolor, nothing grand—he said her eyes were the color of forget-me-nevers. Or so it’s said that he said.”
“Must’ve got back to her, eh?” Mieka shrugged. “She liked us, then.”
“Even without the pig.” Cade gave him a wink. “I know we were going to do one or two of the Thirteen, Kearney, but I think we can try something a little more interesting.”
“What about ‘Doorways’?” Mieka asked. “We don’t need much dialogue for that—it’s just Jeska getting out of bed, lots of swirlies to show he’s dreaming, and then we can do as we like with every opening door.”
Fairwalk’s mood changed from dismayed to delighted in a heartbeat. “And the concluding one, that can be Prince Ashgar, don’t you see, walking through the door to greet her—”
“No.” Cade said it so grimly that they all turned to stare at him. He didn’t elaborate on the stark negative.
Their large, airy bedchamber had a private garderobe adjacent. That night, as Mieka lolled in a warm bath before bed, Cade came in to give him a nightshirt and said, “I’ll not be priming anything for you to do Prince Ashgar with, so don’t even try.”
“I hadn’t planned on it. And I think I know why.”
Cade stood there pleating the soft white linen. “Do you? Astonish me.”
“Don’t be a quat. When you reminded me that we did ‘Cottage’ at Trials, I remembered how Ashgar was sitting with all those ambassadors and suchlike, and had tears in his eyes.”
“And?”
“And she heard about it. That’s why she asked for us. So she could see what he saw.”
“Yeh, but there’s more. I talked with one of her ladies after the show tonight. She told me the girl was so moved that he was moved that it’s a lot of why she decided to marry him.”
“And now you feel guilty. You can’t warn her what a shit-head he is—and even if you did, she wouldn’t believe you, because she’s already in love with him.”
“She’s in love with the idea of him,” Cade corrected bleakly.
For an instant Mieka considered asking if Cade’s father might look after the girl, guide her, help her in her new life. Then he recalled that First Gentleman of the Bedchamber Zekien Silversun was in essence the Prince’s pimp, with cards from brothels like the Finchery in his coat pockets. So instead he tried to offer consolation. “You weren’t to know what would happen when we did that play. I never realized how awful it must be for you, seeing things and not understanding. Feeling helpless.”
“I’m used to it by now,” he lied.
“Quill.”
A shrug, and
a smoothing of crumpled linen. “When Blye’s mother was killed,” he said in a low voice, “I didn’t understand for a long time why I’d seen it. I didn’t yet know that it was my choices that affected the futures I saw. I finally worked it out. The night before, Mistress Mirdley said something about fish for dinner the next day, and I whined and wheedled for bacon pie instead. Mistress Cindercliff called in that morning on her way to the fish market. Mistress Mirdley said no, His Lordship—meaning me—wants what he wants, and there’s an end to it.”
“So instead of both of them going—”
“It was just Blye’s mother. That was the difference—the delay of a moment’s conversation, or bartering with the fishmongers for two orders instead of just the one, or—”
“You said you can’t live other people’s lives for them, Quill. What I keep wondering is that with this thing happening inside your head, how you’re sane enough to live your own.”
“There’s been times,” he replied wryly.
“Seen much lately?”
“That’s the odd part of it. Except for the thorn dreams, nothing.”
Mieka clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Think it through! We’re at other people’s beck and call, and will be until we get home, most like.”
“You mean that other people are living my life for me.” A sudden broad grin decorated his face. “Can’t say I’m enjoying it much!”
“That’s the way,” he teased, “leave all the decisions to the rest of us—like tonight with the glass!”
“But not Prince Ashgar, with ‘Doorways.’ Not that, Mieka.”
Matching Cade serious for serious, he answered, “You saw her the first time because it was your choice to play ‘Cottage’ without the laughs. Well, partly your choice, anyway. But you’ve not seen any more Elsewhens about her, so there’s no decision for you to make, right? It follows, then, that whatever we do, whether we show him in ‘Doorways’ or not, it won’t matter.” He stopped and shivered, though the night was summer-warm and the bathwater hadn’t yet cooled. “Gods, and there’s the other thing, innit? That whatever you try to do, it won’t matter.”
Cade wore a small, sour smile. “At this point, Sagemaster Emmot would’ve sneered and said, ‘Poor Wizardling, how horrid to be you!’”
“But he didn’t understand, did he?”
The smile softened. “You are rather astonishing, y’know.” Then he left the nightshirt on the little table next the tub and made his escape.
* * *
Though she had viewed the performance supposedly in secret from the minstrels’ gallery, word of the Tregrefina’s reaction to “Hidden Cottage” was common talk by the next morning and did indeed set the attitude for everyone else. Touchstone was celebrated, congratulated, and generally made much of whenever any of them cared to show his face around the palace or grounds. Even if they had broken most of the upper windows in the great hall. They mixed more with the nobles at court than expected, which had Fairwalk flitting from one to the other of them to make sure they didn’t destroy diplomatic relations. More accurately, he kept watch on Cade and Mieka, for Rafe never said much and Jeska was every manner of charming there could possibly be. Their second show—“Sailor’s Sweetheart”—was applauded to the rafters, and rather than sidewise glances during the daylight hours, they were greeted with smiling nods.
Mieka adored the attention, especially from the ladies. Someone, probably the Tregrefina again, had decided that his ears were, if not exactly normal, then at least socially acceptable. How much of this might be due to the performance and the power of the magic it implied, he couldn’t have said. But he took to wearing his topaz earring instead of the knitted cap.
What he would wear to the masked ball was a poser, though, until a stroll through the palace gardens made the decision for him.
Palace was a bit of a courtesy title. The parts they had seen—great hall, grand staircase, their upstairs bedchamber—were trim and tidy for the most part, if a trifle frayed around the edges. But compared to the solid mass of stone that was the Palace in Gallantrybanks, this place was a joke. Constructed of everything from bricks to rounded river stones to timber-and-plaster to plain planks nailed together with nails growing rustier by the year, there was no discernible plan, not a hint of unifying style. A tower here, a turret there, a whole side wall of mismatched windows (facing west, terrible in summer), and a young forest of chimneys growing at random from the undulating roofs—it seemed to have been slapped together whenever need arose for more room, without the slightest regard for the look of the whole. It reminded Mieka a bit of Wistly Hall.
The gardens were beautiful. Usually Mieka found trees and flowers a bit dull, despite the Greenseed strain of Elf that made his sister Cilka such an avid gardener. But these gardens were marvelous, stretching from the back of the palace for at least a quarter mile to the lakeshore, laid out in a series of “rooms” separated by hedges of varying heights. Some had color themes—white, blue, yellow—and some were knot gardens, and there was a small orchard of stunted citrus trees in big earthenware pots. But what Mieka liked best was the graveled walk down to the lake, bordered by a dozen hedges sculpted into huge fantastical shapes. Ordinary bushes had been fashioned into a teacup (with saucer), a candle (with flame), a flight of steps (with banisters), a crown (with flowers blooming where jewels would be), a tilted pitcher (with real water flowing out its lip). There were two horse heads facing each other across the path, a cat, a dog, a squirrel, a fully antlered stag, and a gigantic urn with roses growing out of the top.
Mieka was enchanted. He spent a delightful two hours one afternoon inspecting the hedge sculptures from all sides. Gradually he realized that what these gardeners had done with wire frames and shears could be done even better by magic in the clever hands of an Elfen girl with Greenseed blood.
And there, he thought triumphantly, was another possible result of his decision to head for Gowerion that night last year: If his sister could figure out how to do these sculptures, and start a fashion for them, she’d get very, very rich.
Midafternoon heat sent him back up towards the palace, and along the way he glimpsed Drevan Wordturner in one of the smaller “rooms,” seated on a bench in the shade, an open book in his lap. At Mieka’s approach, he glanced up, turned pink, and fumbled to snap the volume closed. It slipped off his knees and fell to the gravel, open.
“Living up to your name, I see! Books, forever books!” Mieka teased, and bent to take a look. “As bad as Cade! What’s this?”
“Nothing—it’s just—no, don’t—”
Mieka blinked. Several times. Drevan plucked up the book and clutched it to his chest. He wouldn’t look at Mieka, and his cheeks were brick-red now. After a moment, Mieka asked carelessly, “Any girls in those drawings?”
A startled glance upwards, an embarrassed cough, and Drevan flipped through the book to the middle. Mieka frowned down at the pages. Not girls, but men dressed as girls, and obviously so.
“Th-they’re called ‘shims’ back home,” Drevan said with a failed attempt at casualness. “She-hims. Shims.”
Mieka turned a few more pages, then gave a snort. “I can do better than this for Jeska onstage. Hells, I could do better than this meself, offstage!”
* * *
How did women endure such torture? For the twentieth time since he’d finished dressing, Mieka resisted the urge to rub where the corset pinched, reminding himself that ladies didn’t do such vulgar things in public. At least there was no low-cut neckline to hike up in surreptitious haste, the way Jeska sometimes did with an onstage costume to get a laugh.
The shocked, giggling chambermaids who’d succumbed to his wheedling had been remarkably obliging, once they’d got into the spirit of the thing. All the frills and trappings had appeared by sundown in the lesser maidservants’ tiring room—high up in a far tower, and it had been six kinds of hell coming back down all those stairs in high heels—and they’d helped him negotiate laces, buttons, clasps, hook
s, and all the rest. His own experience was in taking women’s clothes off women, not putting women’s clothes on himself, but there he’d stood, regarding the vision in the brown-specked mirror: corseted and gowned, cheverel-gloved and silk-stockinged, and from whose wardrobe the clothes had come he hadn’t a clue. Whoever it was, he was lucky that her feet were big and his were little. The girls had even provided jewelry suitable to a lady attending a Court entertainment. With a bit of furtive magic applied on his way down the stairs, the dangling necklace and armbands even looked real. Every time he tried to take a deep breath, he wished he’d dared do the whole thing with magic. Too late now.
As he wandered slowly about the great hall, he reflected that it was mildly intriguing, trying to form an opinion about a woman’s beauty from a few hints. The shape and color of the eyes, the line of the throat, the angle of the jaw, the curve of the lips—one looked at the features one could see, or almost see, and judged accordingly. Of course, the skin beneath the mask might be pockmarked, the nose bumpy, the cheekbones wildly uneven, but as Mieka watched and speculated, he decided that to compensate for their hidden faces, the ladies were emphasizing their most striking physical features—and in some cases attempting to emphasize what wasn’t really there. He had never in his life seen so many breasts so daringly displayed. Recent experience of padding a bodice allowed him to estimate quite accurately which of the ladies was as expert at illusion as the maids who had crammed enough silk between his chest and the velvet gown to give him a rather impressive bosom.