by Melanie Rawn
“Everyone here?” Jed asked.
“Not yet,” Mieka said, glancing about for Megs.
“This lace is itchy,” Tobalt muttered. Then, remembering his role, he cleared his throat and in a high whine repeated, “This lace is itchy!”
“Pull your shawl tighter,” Jinsie giggled. “You’re drooping again.”
Mieka felt a tapping finger on his shoulder and turned to find Cayden smiling down at him. “You really do take my Namingday celebrations seriously, don’t you?”
“Oh, very special this year, not a doubt be about it!”
“Why’d you keep it secret? The girls and… the not-exactly-girls, I mean.”
“Because I knew you’d have six fits.”
“Mmm. One or two, mayhap, but not the full six. Here comes a constable. Start talking.”
Mieka turned. “Fine evening, innit?”
“Wot’s all this, then?” Seeing and recognizing Mieka—for he was one of the constables from the grand reopening of the Downstreet—he moaned. “Lord and Lady and all the Angels save me, it’s you again!”
“Me my very own self, and properly dressed as a man this time,” Mieka replied cheerily. “How’ve you been keeping, Constable?”
“Look, I know what you’re about, and I can’t say as I have personal problems with it, like. But it’s as much as me place is worth to let you do what I’m mortal certain sure you’re scheming to do. Have a heart, won’t ya?”
Mieka frowned worriedly. “I don’t understand. What could possibly be amiss with a group of gentlemen wishing to attend the theater?”
Cade put in, “As we’ve already established, what a man wears is his own business—well, except when he has absolutely no taste in clothes and offends the sensibilities, like that big redheaded one over there. Pink, with an orange cloak?” He shuddered.
“It do catch the eye,” the constable agreed dryly. “But what’m I to say to me chief, that’s wot I’d like t’know.” He cast a despairing eye over the group. “Some of these as is wearing ladies’ dresses, it’s certain sure to me that they really are ladies.”
Mieka gave the unfortunate man his most ravishing smile. “Would you really truly care to investigate in order to make sure?”
The constable sighed. “I’m tellin’ you again, it’s as much as me place is worth to let this happen. Oughta take every one of you in, I ought.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’ll be doing that,” Cade murmured, and nodded over the constable’s shoulder to where the queue had come unraveled.
A carriage—not a hire-hack, but a beautifully appointed carriage drawn by a prancing white mare—pulled to a stop. The man driving it wore highly recognizable livery. The boy who leaped down from the back to open the carriage door wore the same blue and brown, with lots and lots of shiny silver buttons.
Out stepped a trim and nimble personage. Gleaming brown boots to the knees, loose black trousers, dazzlingly white silk shirt beneath a dark green jacket that matched green eyes, elaborately tied turquoise neck cloth, green peaked-and-billed velvet cap perched on tightly coiled and pinned blond hair…
Mieka was about to alert Megs with a wave when right behind this personage came another: much taller, much blonder, dressed the same but for the color of the jacket and the cap. Both matched the forget-me-never blue of wide, excited eyes.
Mieka almost lost his footing. After a single stunned moment, he glanced up at Cade, who looked about to lose not just his footing but consciousness.
Formal introductions later, Mieka decided crisply. He strolled over to stand between the new arrivals, cupping an elbow in each palm. “Delighted you could join us! Shall we go inside?”
The constable stumbled back. Mieka gave him a look of sincere sympathy. It would be as much as his life was worth to arrest Her Royal Highness Princess Miriuzca of Albeyn.
* * *
“You knew,” Cayden accused. “How in all Hells did you know?”
Mieka found himself backed into a wall of the tiring room by his half-drunk and entirely exasperated tregetour. The position and the person were things he had been meticulously avoiding all night.
Ah, such a lovely night it had been! Sweeping past the queue outside, distributing smiles all round. Waving the card, signed by Romuald Needler, that allowed them as many seats as they required. Making their scandalous way down the aisle to the very front row. Seeing the consternation on a few faces and knowing that these men were torn between the expression of their outrage by walking out and the consideration of the money they’d paid to get in. (The money won.) Hearing the muffled laughter from behind the stage curtains that meant the Shadowshapers were watching. Making a polite fuss over the comfort of Jez and Jeska, Briuly and Alaen—and the gobsmacked Tobalt finding himself taken solicitously by the arm and assisted to a seat by the tall, fair-haired young personage in the blue coat. Applauding as the Downstreet owner’s wife and her two daughters decided they wanted in on the fun and marched down the center aisle to seats in the second row. Choking on repressed sniggers when he noticed Cade trying not to look at Megs’s pert backside.
The Shadowshapers had outdone themselves with one of their silliest plays. Any ill-feeling in the audience was demolished by Vered in his most antic mood, strutting about the stage as Sir Bavin Blatherskite, declaiming his own perfections to a series of admiring beauties (all played by Rauel), until a little girl (also played by Rauel, on his knees in a frilly orange dress) waddled up and socked him right in the crotch.
In a high, lisping voice, as Vered rolled and moaned on the stage, Rauel said, “Mummy was right. Men aren’t much, are they, if you get them right where they live!”
Most of the ladies had left hours ago. Megs and Miriuzca had returned to the Palace with Jed and Blye’s escort immediately after the performance. Neither noblewoman had entered the tiring room; a theater was one thing, and shocking enough, but at least it was public. No one but players knew what went on in a tiring room, which at times came close to what rumors described. Hadden Windthistle had taken Jinsie and Crisiant home, too. Deshenanda had, daringly, lingered with Chat; so had Bexan, sitting over there on a couch tucked comfortably under Vered’s arm.
Mieka had considerately arranged to have men’s clothes waiting for Alaen, Jeska, Jez, Briuly, and Tobalt. All of them looked devoutly relieved to be in trousers again (though the carpet slippers rather spoiled their style). The Downstreet’s owner, whose shock at hosting not just women dressed as women but a Princess dressed as a man had been beyond his ability to articulate, had revived enough under the ministrations of his gleeful wife to send out for food to go with the many, many bottles of bubbling Frannitch wine he’d laid on for the Shadowshapers. Everyone was well fed, mildly tipsy, and utterly jubilant at the night’s triumph.
“Damn it, Mieka, how did you know?” Cade demanded again.
“How did I know what?” Mieka parried. Then, hoping without much hope to deflect or at least to postpone Cade’s questions, he asked a passing barmaid if bottles had been delivered to the constables outside, to comfort them and possibly their chief when word of this night got round. She simpered and nodded, and glanced him down and up, and he wondered if he mightn’t escape using the girl as an excuse.
“A favor, if you would, darlin’,” Cade purred. “Bring us a fresh bottle and two glasses over to that corner right there, would you? Much beholden, and here’s something for your trouble.” He tucked a few coins into her bodice, gave her a wink, and clamped long fingers round Mieka’s arm.
“Ow!”
He was dragged to the indicated corner and loomed over.
“How. Did. You. Know. Because I know that you did know, I just don’t know how you were knowing it.”
“You want to untangle that for me?”
“Mieka! Stop stalling!”
“I didn’t know about Herself, if that’s what you mean. Gods, I thought I’d swallow me own teeth at the sight! Where d’you think she got the cheek to come out on her own to a play?”
“Probably from the person she came to the play with. What the unholy fuck was Megs doing here with her?”
“Now, that’s a tale.” The arrival of the girl, the bottle, and the glasses gave him a few moments’ reprieve. “To the Princess!” he said, and gulped down golden bubbles. “All right, then, here’s how it happened. She was the one what gave the Gift of the Gloves to Blye, because she’s Lady Megueris Mindrising and a lady-in-waiting, and she really was at Coldkettle for the wedding, only she was a guest and not a servant, and then after the wedding she went to Lilyleaf on holiday because she knows Croodle from a long time ago, and that night at the Keymarker she was with the son and daughter of her father’s friends who were at a Court banquet that night, which is a lot of work so she didn’t really lie.”
Cade’s eyes were as wide and round as the rim of his glass. He seemed incapable of saying anything. Mieka knew from experience that this wouldn’t last. After draining the glass down his throat and pouring more wine for them both, Cade finally said, “She’s Lord Mindrising’s daughter?”
“Yeh. But she still wants to be a Steward.”
The second glass of wine followed the first. “Please,” Cade muttered, “please tell me that this will all make sense when I’m sober.”
“This will all make sense when you’re sober,” Mieka repeated obligingly.
Again Cade poured wine. “Do you promise?”
“More or less. The sense, not the promise. I kept me word about the no magic with the clothes, didn’t I?” He paused to savor the wine. “How’s Dery these days?”
Cade recognized the real question. “She’s never said anything directly—she hasn’t spoken to me at all, in fact—but I’m still allowed to stay at Redpebble. So I guess Crisiant was right and she really is trying to keep an eye on me for the Archduchess, which of course means the Archduke.”
“Of course. Still not clear on what he wants, though.” He sipped bubbles and felt them explode delicately on his tongue. A thought struck him and he laughed. “Do you know how much money we’re about to make because of him? And him all unknowing!” Then, as another thought struck, and quite a bit harder: “You didn’t—I mean, there hasn’t been any change, has there? The baby will be born tonight?”
“Tomorrow morning we collect.”
They toasted each other gleefully.
“When His Grace approached the Shadowshapers,” Mieka said, “Chat thought it was because he wanted to buy his own theater group like they do sometimes on the Continent. For the brag of it. But I don’t think that’s his reason.”
“Nor more do I. Did you see where Black Lightning has returned from their little outing to Vathis?”
“Yeh. I read The Nayword yesterday mornin’. Rousing success and suchlike rubbish. Tobalt will have something much more interesting to write about in the next issue.”
“He did look a fright, didn’t he?” Then he frowned and said, “She’s really Lord Mindrising’s daughter?”
* * *
He was still muttering much the same thing a fortnight later at Trials.
“For fuck’s sake, Quill, give it a rest!” Mieka exclaimed on their second night in Seekhaven. “Yes, she’s Lord Mindrising’s daughter! Yes, she’s unspeakably rich! Yes, she’s a lady-in-waiting to the Princess! Yes, she wants to be a Steward! And yes, she stayed in Gallybanks with the Princess because the Prince is too young to travel.” He’d learned this last only that afternoon, when the invitation to perform at the Pavilion came from Lady Torren, who complained comically that the recent uproar caused by the Shadowshapers and Touchstone had taken all the fun out of pretending to sneak about at midnight.
Cade seemed embarrassed. “I only wanted—I mean, I haven’t seen her to talk to since that night, and didn’t even have the chance to be introduced then, and—and I’ve never seen her all frustled up in Court clothes, so I guess I can’t really believe it, y’know?”
They started downstairs, where dinner was waiting for them out in the back garden. The inn had renamed itself this year—not that Mieka remembered what its previous name had been—partly for their favorite group and partly for the group who had got round the nominally random voucher system and demanded to stay there from now on. Touchstone and the Shadowshapers had taken over the whole of the Shadowstone Inn for Trials. Mistress Luta had made gruff apology that her boys hadn’t got first place in the naming, but Jeska had assured her that Touchshapers made no sense, Stoneshapers sounded like a school for sculptors, Stoneshadow was a bit creepy, as if something might fall over on you, and Touchshadow would simply look weird on a sign. But Shadowstone, he soothed, was something to sit beside on a hot sunny day with a cold beer; a nice, sheltering name.
Vered had brought Bexan Quickstride along on the trip. His partners were studiously neutral about this development. Less convivial than usual, he’d so far kept to his bedchamber. Mieka thought it was for the usual reasons when one’s woman was readily available, especially after the journey from Gallantrybanks in their wagon—which must have been an ordeal for all concerned. Cade considered it a result of nerves over the new play.
The second night in Seekhaven, right after the obligatory appearance at High Chapel, Vered displayed no discernible nervousness.
“Bit of a bore, innit?” he was saying when Mieka and Cade walked into the taproom. “Trials.”
“For you, mayhap,” Jeska observed wryly. “You know where you’ll end up. Us, we’ve got the Sparks and Black fucking Lightning to worry about.”
“Sparks, possibly,” Rauel told him. “Black Lightning—oy, here you are, Mieka, Cade. Mistress Luta has a rack of lamb going for us tonight. Sit down and snap your napkins so we can eat.”
Mieka settled at the table next to Chat and whispered, “Where’s Bexan, then?”
“Dining alone upstairs.”
The careful lack of inflection in his voice confirmed Mieka’s opinion: the Shadowshapers were not markedly fond of Vered’s new love, but didn’t like to say so where he might be listening. It must have been a fun trip to Seekhaven, he didn’t think.
At least Vered and Rauel weren’t at each other’s throats anymore. Mieka took this to mean that the new play was done and dusted, and everyone was happy. Well, as happy as Vered ever was, and as happy as Rauel could be when the play wasn’t strictly his own. Two tregetour-masquers in one group; madness, simply madness.
“What’s Black Lightning got this year?” Rafe wanted to know.
Rauel smirked. “A fettler still seasick from the trip to Vathis, and a masquer who caught some sort of pox.”
“Not at their best,” Vered confirmed.
Mieka waved this away. “As if we couldn’t beat them on the best day they ever had!”
“Modest,” Sakary commented.
“It’s what we all love about him,” Rafe confided.
“Among the thousands of other things,” Mieka shot back. “I’d made note that Black Lightning didn’t do much gigging before Trials.”
“Do much what?” Rauel asked.
“G-i-g-g—‘Get in, get gone,’ ” Jeska translated. “Thinks he’s clever, he does.”
Dinner arrived. Talk meandered away from Black Lightning to speculation about the differences between theater on the Continent and theater with magic.
“Wish we’d gone to see one of their plays while we were over there,” Mieka said. “It’s one thing to know we’re better than anything they’ve got, but it’d be nice to know what they’ve got that we’re so much better than.”
Cade eyed him askance. “Y’know, I worry when you say things like that and I understand them. I think I’ve a few scripts someplace, or at least the old versions that came over here and got changed up when somebody had the bright idea of using magic for the masks and suchlike.”
“What was his name?” Mieka asked. When Cade blinked at him, he grinned. “There’ll be a person and a name behind the changes, count on it.”
“Well, yeh. Naught but a basic education, which in
those days wasn’t much. He either went traveling on the Continent or read every book he could get his hands on, nobody’s really sure. But he was the first to use magic onstage. His name was Shuddershaft. No, seriously!” He smiled as they hooted at the name. “What’s worse, he came from a village called Snitterfield. Is it any wonder that in all the official histories of theater they give Lord Bullbeck all the credit?”
Mistress Luta came in with the sweet—gorgeous mounds of brandy-soaked cake layered with fresh berries, heavy cream, and four sorts of drizzles, including burned-sugar and mocah. They were in the midst of ecstatic devouring when she returned with a sealed and beribboned parchment on a silver plate.
“That’ll be for us, then,” Vered said complacently.
And it was: the coveted invitation to perform on the last night of Trials for the lords and gentlemen of the Court at Fliting Hall. Mieka knew it had to go to the Shadowshapers and not Touchstone. There were too many rumors about what Vered had been working on, and Romuald Needler had been promoting the mysterious piece with placards all over Gallantrybanks for more than a month. He also had his suspicions that the more conservative Stewards were taking the opportunity to spank Touchstone’s collective bottoms for the stunt Mieka had pulled at the Downstreet. It couldn’t actually be laid to the Shadowshapers’ account, and somebody had to be reprimanded somehow. Still, at least the summons hadn’t gone to Black fucking Lightning.
Cade, of course, had already had all these thoughts and more. It was a right pain, Mieka told himself glumly, being friends with someone whose brain not only kept nattering to itself pretty much constantly but never even paused for breath.
“It wouldn’t’ve been us anyway,” Cade said as they settled into bed for the night. “Though it ought to’ve been the Sparks this year. We had the invitation three years ago, and then the Shadowshapers, last year Black Lightning—” He gestured and the little blue Wizardfire winked out from the candle. “And they’re not really punishing us because of what happened at the Downstreet, if that’s what you’re thinking. If it was, then it wouldn’t’ve been the Shadowshapers on the last night, either. Needler’s good at bigging up his group, but Kearney has more connections.”