by Melanie Rawn
Cade drummed his fingers on his lectern, caught himself at it, stopped, and wondered why the curtains stayed shut. Nervous enough about this performance already, the tregetours and gliskers, masquers and fettlers, all looked at each other with varying degrees of anxiety, bewilderment, and annoyance. Then Cade heard a gruff voice rise disapprovingly.
“What’s it called? Never heard of it. And weren’t we given to understand that Hawk’s Claw would perform tonight?”
The King, who had been attending plays for longer than any of these particular players had been alive, was confused. Someone else’s voice came soothingly, but His Majesty was having none of it.
“All three in the same play? Never been done. Crowds the stage, what?” Pause; low-voiced explanation. “Goldbraider, you say? And Silversun? Hm. Clever boys, both of ’em. But I don’t care much for surprises in my theater.” Longer pause. Then: “Response to what? Oh. I see. Very well. Let’s see what this new thing is.”
Cade was so astounded to hear himself praised in the same breath as Vered Goldbraider that he almost missed the opening swirl of shadows. They were of Chat’s making; this was, after all, partly a Shadowshapers performance. As for the rest of it … Cade smiled to himself and did his usual work of surveying the audience in support of his fettler. Strange, to sense two other fettlers in the mix, and stranger still to have four masquers onstage while three gliskers used the magic of four tregetours to create Albeyn’s reply to the Continental players.
Vaustas (Lederris Daggering: nondescript, plainly clothed, and fidgety) was a boy of about fifteen, with mixed Wizard, Elf, and Goblin blood, physical traits indicating his ancestry: height, pointed ears, crooked teeth, and so on. The play opened on him alone onstage in a library that looked just like the one used in the magic-less players’ play. It was Mieka’s little joke on them to have Vaustas wander over to the shelves and pluck out a book or three to hold in his hand or set on a table or chair. Lederris’s own glisker, Brennert, was clothing him, but for this portion of the play, Mieka had control of the backdrop while Chat provided the sensations.
“Vaustas!” yelled Vered, unseen behind the illusory library walls, in a woman’s high-pitched tone of demand. “Clean up your clutter, boy, and come downstairs to dinner!”
Lederris called back, “Yes, Mother!” and, surveying the piles of books and papers all over the chairs and table and flowery rug, sighed dismally. He struggled within himself, the emotions clear on his face and in the magic lightly touching the audience. Then Vaustas pointed a finger, and a small pile of books rose from the floor and drifted lazily towards the shelves. Vaustas pointed to another stack of books, but before they rose from the table, he turned away and clenched both fists.
“No. I won’t use magic. I won’t!”
Cade sensed it, but knew the audience did not: the skilled handoff of the background to Chat, while Mieka readied himself. From the window that opened onto pasture and woods came a whirl of silvery smoke, and from it Jeska appeared, wearing his own gorgeous face, gorgeously robed in blood red: Mallecho.
“My, my! You have made a bit of a mess, haven’t you? Looks to be the work of an hour at least, and that means your mother will be annoyed and your dinner will be cold. Why not use magic on the rest of it, too?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Really? Why not?”
“I don’t like magic!” He hesitated, then burst out, “I hate my magic!”
“No need to be so defensive, lad. Magic is a thing that could happen to anyone, you know.”
“It’s deceitful.”
Mallecho snorted. “About as deceitful as having red hair or big feet. It’s part of you, and no denying it.”
“But I could dye my hair,” Vaustas said sulkily.
“And lop off your toes to make your feet shorter?”
“I wish I could do that to my magic! It’s wicked, don’t you see? It’s a cheat, and it’s rotten and evil and—and I hate it! I wish I could chop it out or carve it away, and have nothing to do with it ever again!”
“Hm.” Mallecho walked slowly round him, and at last folded his arms across his chest. “Well, then. If you feel that way about it, and if that’s what you truly want … I believe I can oblige. For a price.” He smiled, and it was Jeska’s sweetly captivating smile, nothing sinister about it at all—but with a smidgeon of mischief wafting over the audience from Mieka’s withies and Cayden’s magic.
“Anything! If you can truly rid me of magic, I’ll pay anything!” Feverishly, Vaustas clasped both hands together. “If I have to work the rest of my life mucking out stalls in the castle stables—cleaning the middens—taking care of the cows or—or stuck all alone on a hillside with the sheep!”
“Oh, it’s nothing so dire as that. Truth to be told, it’s really nothing much at all, as most people reckon it, if one takes into account what they do with their lives. One can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking, or if they think at all before they act, but—that’s their own business, I suppose.” Mallecho shrugged. “The price of your magic, my dear Vaustas, is your soul. You may live your life free of your own magic, but at the end of your life, your soul is mine. Agreed?”
“Agreed!”
“You don’t want a minute to think it over?”
“I don’t need even an instant to think it over! My soul will be the purer and my life the more virtuous for being free of magic. Do it now!”
“Don’t you want to clear up the library first? No? Very well. Brace yourself.”
Vaustas struck a pose, arms outstretched, head flung back. Mallecho rolled his eyes and shook his head. He made a coaxing gesture with his left hand, and from Vaustas’s chest, there streamed shimmering rivers of light, the blue of a Wizard and the gold of an Elf and the green of a Goblin. Mallecho caught all in his right hand and stuffed it into a pocket of his robes.
After a moment, Vaustas looked at him, frowning. “Well? Is it done? I didn’t feel anything.”
“Would you like it to have hurt?”
“No—I mean, shouldn’t I have felt something?”
“Try some magic,” Mallecho suggested.
Vaustas half turned, saw a pile of books, and made a gesture as if to brush them all back onto the shelves. The books stayed put.
Mallecho, listening to the young man’s joyous laughter, shook his head again and spread his arms wide, as if to say, Who can possibly understand this idiot? Then the mother’s voice shouted an impatient demand, and Mallecho said, “I told you that you should have cleaned the place up first!”
Shadows wafted once more across the stage. When they lifted, Vaustas was much older: stooped and white-haired, any age from eighty to a hundred. He wore the same drab clothing, and stood in the same library, with the same books and the same woodland scene beyond the windows. He hobbled about the room, as faded as the flowered rug, mumbling to himself.
Mallecho, young and vigorous, handsome as ever in his dark crimson robes, appeared in a gusting shadow that rippled lightly across the library’s curtains and a few loose papers on a table. Vaustas looked at him, blinking and confused.
“You?” he asked at last. “Have you come for me?”
Strolling idly round the library, Mallecho said, “Don’t tell me you’ve read all these books! The work of a lifetime, eh? Have you had enough? Not that it matters. Yes, I’ve come for your soul.” He trailed a finger along a shelf, and held it up, gray with dust. “Ugh. Nasty. Well, it’s appropriate, anyway. Dust you came from, and dust you shall be. It’s time, so if there’s any note you’d like to leave for your loved ones—no? Not a single loved one? Not a single friend?”
Before Vaustas could reply, two more shadows were spun from thin air, and in the next eyeblink had coalesced into the Lord and the Lady (Vered and Rauel, respectively).
Mallecho looked mildly surprised, but unworried. “And what are you doing here?”
“He is one of Ours,” said the Lord, gathering his dark green cloak around him.
; “One of Our children,” added the Lady, beautifully garbed in blue and silver. “All living beings are Our children.”
Both of them lowered their hoods to reveal ears extravagantly pointed, more Fae than Elfen. Mallecho bowed mockingly and said, “Come to claim him for yours? I assume you know he sold his soul to me, in order to be rid of his magic.”
The Lady inclined her head gracefully. “Nevertheless, We claim him.”
“That depends on what sort of soul he’s got, doesn’t it? What he’s done with it during his four-and-twenty and four-and-twenty and—” He paused to count up on his fingers. “—and four-and-twenty years. Let’s have a look-see, shall we?”
Vaustas limped forward at the Lord’s gesture. Hunched and frail, he seemed completely uninterested in this contention over his soul.
“I have everything all ready for him,” Mallecho said, and snapped his fingers, and where the window had been, there now was a yawning void that quickly filled with greedy flames. The red glow flared, then settled down like a cat at a mouse hole, complacently waiting for the inevitable kill. “Haven’t decided yet which Hell would be the most appropriate,” Mallecho went on rather apologetically, “but he can roast a bit while I figure it out.”
“We, too, are prepared for him,” said the Lady, and waved a hand. Opposite the fires a scene of sylvan peace replaced a wall of books: tender greens, crystalline blues, warmed by sunlight and cooled with a soft breeze.
“Very pretty, my dear,” approved the Lord. “Now, where were We? Ah, yes. The soul.”
The Lady spread her open hands wide, as if to gather something up. Nothing happened. The Lord attempted the same thing, with the same result.
“What’s wrong?” Mallecho asked in a concerned and sympathetic tone at odds with the smile playing around his lips. “Can’t you find it?”
“Silence!” the Lord commanded. Both he and the Lady tried again, but to no avail.
“But he has to have a soul,” the Lady fretted. “Everyone does.”
“He’s not dead yet,” Mallecho remarked, “so it must still be in there. I mean to say, it’s not as if it suddenly vanished or anything. You gave it to him, so if not even You can find it, then—”
The Lord, after a horrible scowl for Mallecho, confronted Vaustas and bellowed, “Come forth!”
All at once a thin, shriveled, colorless lump of something appeared in Vaustas’s place. More substantial than a pallid gray fog, less solid than a cloud of spun white sugar, it drifted aimlessly upwards, then downwards, from side to side, and at last settled a few feet from the library floor.
“That’s it?” Mallecho asked, staring. “Scarcely worth contending over!”
“Pitiful,” muttered the Lord. More briskly, moving around the wan, pathetic lump of a soul, he said, “You know what’s happened, don’t you?”
“Enlighten me,” Mallecho invited.
“It was all your fault,” the Lady admonished. “You were the one who took away his magic.”
“But he asked me to! Said it was evil and unclean, and wanted nothing to do with it!”
“Without it,” said the Lord, “he could not become what he was meant to become. His soul remained a mere nursling. It never grew up. It never grew at all.”
Mallecho propped his fists on his hips, frowning. Then, with a sigh and a shrug, he said, “If that’s all there is to his soul, it’s of no use to me.”
“Nor to anyone, most of all himself,” agreed the Lord. “It isn’t as if any soul, any being, can grow and ripen when so much of it is rejected and denied.”
“But what will We do with him?” the Lady asked anxiously.
“Whatever you like,” Mallecho said, with a final, disgusted glance at Vaustas’s blighted soul. “Nothing in it for me. I bid you good day until next we meet—in more interesting circumstances, I hope, to battle over something worth having!”
He ambled into his fiery preview of Hell and vanished.
There was a brief silence as the Lord and the Lady contemplated the shapeless soul before them. At last the Lady said, “I know what We ought to do, my Lord.”
“I was just thinking the same thing, dearest Lady.”
They smiled at each other. Standing so that Vaustas’s soul was between them, they spread their arms and from their fingertips arced blue and gold and green fire that surrounded and then penetrated the hazy, stunted soul. The light grew brighter and brighter, and the unshapen thing acquired substance, color, identity, and became Vaustas, a young boy again, immobile and silent yet radiant with all the magic that had been his at birth.
“It’s no guarantee,” mused the Lord, “that he’ll do with his gifts that which will keep him from ending up in any or all of the Hells.”
“But he is once again a whole being, and his soul is his own, and complete. To use oneself and all the gifts of intellect and magic and spirit and everything else for good or ill, that is every person’s choice. He must decide.”
“It will be interesting to see if his soul will be worth fighting for.”
Vaustas came to life then, stretching his shoulders, looking at the Lord and at the Lady, and saying, “Every soul is worth fighting for.”
Smiling at him, the Lady nodded. “You’ve made a start, then. Every soul is worth fighting for. Luck to you, Vaustas, and Our blessings.”
With that, all the magic onstage abruptly winked out, and the four masquers were joined by their gliskers and fettlers and tregetours, linking arms, standing there in silent challenge to the audience. The applause began an instant later and threatened to shake down the walls. Mieka, in between Cade and Sakary, laughed aloud and tossed a withie high into the air, where it shattered into a million tiny shards that rained down in a shimmering curtain behind the players. If this had been a Shadowshapers performance, it had also been Touchstone’s. Cade wondered with a smirk whether Mirko was regretting that Crystal Sparks had no signature move that hallmarked a play as theirs.
His Majesty was grinning broadly. Never the shiniest jewel in the coffers, he nonetheless understood very well what messages his players were … well, to be honest, what they were shoving under everyone’s nose in letters six feet high while beating them over the head with a pickax. Princess Miriuzca was applauding excitedly, and when Cade caught her eye, she winked. Her brother, sitting between her and the Archduke, was seemingly questioning the latter regarding a matter of such importance that both of them forgot to clap their hands. This was noticed by nobody except those immediately around them—and the players onstage, of course.
Backstage they were congratulated by every other player there—including Black Lightning. Thierin Knottinger approached Cayden and said it had been a real treat to watch them disgrace and discredit those Continental quats, and Pirro Spangler clapped Mieka so hard on the back that he nearly fell over. The tumult in the tiring room, being in a more confined space, was even louder than the applause in Fliting Hall, and with a triumph in it that, for all their competition and rivalry, made them all Players of Albeyn together.
Toasts were shouted and drunk, and all the while, Tobalt Fluter, notebook in one hand and pen in the other, was trying to interview anybody he could get close enough to hear. Cade watched his frustrated progress through the crowd, scribbling a word here and a half a sentence there, desperate for just one coherent, attributable quote. Mieka compassionately offered Tobalt a few sips of his own beer, but somebody bumped into them and the drink drenched Tobalt and his notebook. Cade finally broke down laughing when Mieka attempted to wring out the pages like a soggy stocking.
“Come by the Shadowstone later,” he told the anguished reporter. “We’ll tell you all about it.”
“Somebody said Copperboggin argued for including the twining vines, just to show how it ought to be done.”
“Yeh, but we couldn’t figure a way to work it into the piece without doing the whole tedious scene with the knives. Take pity, Tobalt—we only had a couple of days. Couldn’t do everything!”
They h
ad also argued about who would play Vaustas, and Jeska lost against Lederris’s point that not only were old men one of his own specialties, but having Jeska wear his own delectable face during the whole of it would let Mieka concentrate on supporting Chat, who had to keep both Vered and Rauel costumed and so on. These two had got into a laughing scrape about which of them would do better as the Lady, centering on who moved more convincingly when fully gowned, until Mirko drawled that it was a shame Mieka wasn’t a masquer, because he was the only one with any experience wearing real skirts instead of those created by magic. Those stories and a few more would keep Tobalt happy, Cade felt, but would scarcely divert him from probing into the other staggerment of the evening: the announcement that Touchstone would be taking First Flight on the Royal Circuit.
On the walk back to the Shadowstone Inn, notable for becoming more raucous and chaotic with every step, it was reasonably easy to avoid Tobalt. Things were a little more tense once they stashed their equipment and invaded Mistress Luta’s taproom in boisterous triumph. Tobalt stood the first round of drinks (for twenty-one: the Shadowshapers, Touchstone, the Crystal Sparks, and Hawk’s Claw, plus their managers, plus himself; considering the sure sales of the Trials issue this year, The Nayword could afford it) and when everyone was supplied with a tankard and rose for a toast that Tobalt as benefactor was supposed to give, he looked panicky. The success of the new play? Touchstone, as First Flight? The Shadowshapers, who could be assumed to need a toast to luck now that they were going out on their own?
Mieka solved his problem for him. Leaping up onto a table without spilling a single drop of beer, he yelled, “His Majesty the King!”
The Loyal Toast was drunk. Mieka jumped down—losing nothing but a globule of foam on the way—and settled into a comfortable chair, smiling his blithe delight with the world and all its wonders. Cade snorted, shaking his head, and devoted himself to further avoidance of Tobalt. The poor man couldn’t decide if he was more anxious to get the Shadowshapers’ reactions to being kicked off the circuit by vindictive Stewards, or Touchstone’s feelings at winning First Flight without having actually won it. His readers would be keen for details. There was never much to be had out of Sakary or Chat, though Rauel was always good for a mild joke and Vered could rival Cade in talking the hind leg off a wyvern. But Mieka’s jokes were better than Rauel’s, and if Rafe and Jeska were reticent, Cade the Eminently Quotable always made up for it.