by Melanie Rawn
“I tell you there is not!” And the Knight’s eyes glowed suddenly the midnight black of death and the blood red of fury, and there was a feral stench in the air.
The Wizard stumbled back, pressing his hands and his spine against the stone walls. “No!”
The hideous burning eyes became the Knight’s own once more. “There is no other way. We swore the severest vows that we would be rid of the balaurin—and that means all of the balaurin. All of us who will become as they are. All of us.” He paused, gazing with compassion at his friend. “Even me. When this is finished, I must die. If I am not killed in battle, then you must kill me. You must promise this. Please.”
The black shadows were so abrupt and appalling that the audience cried out. A flicker of a moment later, the Wizard stood alone at the castle battlements, wind whipping at his blue cloak and his white-blond hair. The clamor of battle changed slowly to tumultuous shouts of victory.
“And thus we prevail,” the Wizard murmured. “Their heads tumble from their shoulders, and they die. The balaurin threat repulsed, our lands and peoples saved. Yet—ah, Gods, the cost!”
Slow, dragging footfalls echoed on stone steps. The Wizard turned. His friend, come to make sure he kept his promise?
Gray churning shadows swept the stage in silence. Six hundred men sat there in the empty darkness, shattered more surely than any glass Touchstone had ever broken.
* * *
“I made up a good bit of it, y’know.”
The eight of them were lounging in the back garden of the Shadowstone Inn. Tonight Cade conceded without resentment that this was the order those names would be spoken for as long as theater existed. What Touchstone did, they did superlatively well. But the Shadowshapers were matchless.
Vered went on, “The Wizard and his friend the Knight, f’r instance. No book had a specific tale about how it all happened. But it did happen, and the friendship gives it emotional impact—”
Rauel chuckled a bit uneasily. The effects of the performance were still very much with him. “It’s a wonder and a marveling, isn’t it, that the man who scorns emotion in his work avows that emotion is essential to this one.”
“Fuck off.” The tregetour spoke amiably, raising his glass to his partner. All the animosity of that night at the Downstreet was gone. The play was brilliant and Vered knew it; he could afford to be generous. “You were right about not showing the blood-guzzle the Wizard sees at the camp. Much better saving it for when the Knight does it himself, with the taste and smell of it in the audience’s mouths and nostrils.”
Rafe made an inarticulate noise. Sakary gave a snort.
“Got you, did it?”
Another grunt, which evidently didn’t quite satisfy his fellow fettler.
“The glowy red eyes were a nice touch, don’t you think?” Sakary persisted.
Mieka broke in with, “They were perfectly ghastly.”
“But effective,” Vered said, sleek and complacent. “And that’s what counts.” He paused for a sip of wine. “Wasn’t sure about the colors, either—I mean, we all know Wizardfire is blue, but I’m not sure that Giants can even make magical fire. Never seen one do it—must remember to ask Rist one of these days. But the effect was too good to pass up.”
“We saw someone do a sort of purply-gold once,” Mieka said.
Cade kicked him under the table and spoke up for the first time since ordering their drinks. “The play ends up saying the opposite of Black Lightning’s piece of last year, yeh?”
“Glad somebody noticed,” drawled Vered, but in the next instant, unsmiling, he went on, “Not that I started out to do that. But the forrarder I went, the more it seemed to me that it was something that ought to be said. All that tripe and twaddle about whose blood is pure and clean and whose isn’t—” He snorted, and finished a bit gloomily, “Though how many people will understand that part of it, I don’t know.”
Considering that Vered had willfully misunderstood “Doorways,” Cade was remarkably unruffled. “Could’ve done a whole play based just on the arguments about sharing their powers.”
“Oh, and what fun that would’ve been!” he jeered. “Right up Black Lightning’s road! Jealous Elves and secretive Pikseys, the whole lot of ’em guarding their rights—” He paused. “And talking of Rights, you didn’t do ‘Treasure’ this year.”
“No, back to the good old reliable ‘Dragon,’ ” Cade said. “I wasn’t looking to see how Thierin Knottinger reacted to your work, but I hope he was writhing. Just a bit. Do him good.”
Chat wore a smug little grin. “Oh, he writhed. Squirmed and squiggled like a worm on a hook.”
“Well done, old thing,” Mieka said, toasting him.
“The problem,” Rauel mused, “is that the legends are all agreed, and the Knights couldn’t win with just the magic given to them. They had to become like the balaurin.”
“Not just knowing your enemy in order to defeat him,” said Vered. “But becoming him.”
“Not completely,” Chat argued. “The Knights know they have to die. There’s self-sacrifice in that.”
“Same as any warrior,” Jeska observed, from long experience playing warriors onstage. Or mayhap it was because he was the grandson of a soldier. “Doing his duty no matter what the cost.”
Rauel shook his head. “But this is a choice they made. It wasn’t an order from a commander. They chose to become what they became. And they knew they’d become too dangerous and too different to live amongst their fellows anymore.”
Remembering the whipsaw between the horror and grief of the Wizard and the burgeoning savagery of the Knight, Cade repressed a shiver. He signaled to Mistress Luta, standing in readiness at the back door, who nodded back and disappeared to fetch more liquor.
Mieka turned to Vered, smiling that sweetly endearing smile that always meant mischief. “And what happens next?” When Vered narrowed suspicious eyes at him, Mieka laughed. “There’s more. I’d know there’s more even if I didn’t know from hearing the legends that there’s more. I’m knowing you tregetours, I am. Never leave anything well enough alone, do you?”
“The next part,” said Vered, conceding the point, “begins with the Wizard standing at the battlements and reciting his little speech—and then the Knight comes upstairs.”
“And then?” Jeska asked eagerly. Cade wondered if he was seeing himself playing the Wizard or the Knight. “What happens then?”
Vered grinned. “Twenty kinds of Hell break loose!”
“Both plays on the same night,” Rauel explained happily. “Never been done before!”
“Exhausts me to my bones just thinking about it,” Sakary growled.
Chat nodded glumly. “Tonight was weariness enough. Two plays like that in one evening—none of us will be any use for a week after.”
“Well,” Mieka said musingly, “none of you is as young as once he was, Gran’fa.”
Chat cuffed him playfully upside the head. “I’m still trying to get used to two masquers onstage,” he admitted. “Bit tricky, keeping the two sets of withies separate and remembering which is used for whom. I can’t imagine putting in a third masquer.”
“A second glisker?” Rafe asked, smiling. “And a second fettler to keep his magic organized—Gods know just the one gives me trouble enough.”
Mieka laughed and blew him a smacking kiss.
“Why not a dozen of each?” Vered asked with cheerful malice. “One for each masquer onstage!”
“Oh, you’d like that, you would,” Sakary said. “Lolling about at your lectern, giggling at the collisions!”
“And collide they all would,” Rauel stated with an exaggerated shudder. “Them, the sounds, the scenery, the feelings—all that magic scurrying across the stage and out into the audience and all the way to the rafters! Doesn’t bear thinking of.”
“I quite agree,” Cade said. “Have a care what you start with your two masquers onstage, and your two-plays-a-night,” he went on, smiling. “Soon enough you’ll have us in c
haos, like Rauel says—or we’ll have to abandon magic onstage altogether and work the plays like they do on the Continent. Lots of masquers, bad lighting, and scenery painted on wood.”
A short time later everyone began to amble up to bed. Cade hung back with Vered, making what he knew to be a futile attempt to caution him.
Scornfully, as Cade knew he deserved, Vered told him, “Don’t you be daring to tell me what to write or how to write it. So somebody might not appreciate what I have to say? Who the fuck cares? What can anybody do to us? We’re the Shadowshapers!”
“Vered—all I mean is that you need to be careful.”
“What was it Mieka was saying about us being doddering old grandsirs? Take your worries and frets and drown ’em in the garderobe!” Vered laughed through his nose and strolled along after his partners.
Cade watched him go, wishing he hadn’t said, “What can anybody do to us? We’re the Shadowshapers!” It felt wrong to him, but he couldn’t have said why.
Mieka fell into step with him across the lawn. “Oy,” he said suddenly, “wasn’t it this table I’m s’posed to’ve danced on last year?”
“What?”
“Starkers, you said.”
A smile began to curve his lips. Mieka could always do that for him. Mad little Elf. “Why, yes, I believe it was.”
“With a lace cloth as a veil, and a rose betwixt me teeth.”
“I had you convinced for a minute, there.”
“But only one. That’s because you just don’t have any idea at all how to finish off a prank, Quill,” he scolded. “Now, if it’d been me authoring that particular jest, I’d see to it that the table was in splinters next morning as proof.”
“And you’d’ve paid for the table, too!”
“Of course! But you—” He shook his head sadly. “Your imagination, though prolific and terrific, runs inwards and not outwards.”
“In other words, my imagination makes us money, and yours costs you a fortune.”
Abruptly serious, Mieka said softly, “If it banishes that look from your eyes, I’ll gladly give over every pennypiece in my bank account.”
Moved, Cade slung an arm around slight shoulders and hugged. Mieka settled comfortably against his side on the walk upstairs. The usual routine of washing and changing into nightshirts was accomplished in silence. Cade was waiting for it, and soon enough the question came.
“You’ve had Elsewhens about this play of Vered’s, haven’t you? It’s not about me, so you can tell me with a clear conscience.”
Cade sat wearily on his bed, then stretched out, hugging a pillow to his chest, and stared at the ceiling. “No, it’s naught to do with you.”
“What, then?”
“I saw the Archduke receiving information from somebody who’d heard Vered was reading up at the Archives and in my grandsir’s library for this play. His Grace… shall we say he wasn’t thrilled, and leave it at that?”
Cade was fully aware that Mieka knew him well enough by now to know that by leaving it at that, whatever that might be, he was leaving something out. He wasn’t exactly lying. He knew Mieka well enough by now to know that he would never be able to get away with lying. He was grateful that tonight Mieka didn’t seem to be inclined to plague him about it, and only nodded.
Cade was quiet a moment, then said, “All this business of the Knights and so forth supposedly happened in the Archduke’s ancestral lands, or near to. You know what Vered will write about next.”
“How the Knights didn’t all die, and some of them went back to their homes, and the common folk brought them offerings of newly dead animals, like Lady Vrennerie said.”
“For the blood.”
Mieka paused to wash his face, then climbed into his bed. After a while Cade did the same, and closed the lamp, and the two of them lay there in the darkness on opposite sides of the room.
All at once, unable to help himself, Cade murmured, “Mieka? What if it’s not just legends? What if it’s true?”
25
Everyone knew something had happened at Mieka’s Hilldrop Crescent house before Touchstone left on the Royal Circuit. No one, not even Cade, had the temerity to ask about it. The lingering purple-green bruise on Mieka’s jaw wasn’t something anybody cared to bring up in conversation. Cade did sneak a few glances at Mieka’s hands. The reddened knuckles of a thrown punch sickened him. And he hoped with all his might that Jindra was still too young to remember any of it.
The Elf was surly the first day out, keeping himself to himself with a mutter and a snarl. By noon of the following day, as their route to the coast took them through Gowerion, he livened up during a brief stop for lunching at Brishen Staindrop’s distillery. Brishen was gone to the Pennynines, hunting for rare flowers that bloomed but briefly and only once a year, and herbs said to be exceptionally potent when gathered at Midsummer. Mieka led them on a tour of the facilities and they all got tipsy just on the fumes from the huge oaken barrels of whiskey. There was a separate building, squat and thatched atop gray fieldstone walls, where Brishen concocted various types of thorn. This, in the absence of its proprietor, was sternly and magically locked.
A whole barrel of whiskey was loaded into the wagon. They made a stop at Yazz’s parents’ house to drop off Robel, who would be staying there until the birth of their child. The Giant looked so forlorn when someone mentioned that it was time to get back on the road that Cade decided they could just as easily leave early tomorrow morning. It was a small thing, and only a few additional hours to spend with his wife, but Yazz was almost tearfully grateful.
This made Cayden feel a bit of a shit, because he’d suggested it for his own convenience. Had they stayed with the original schedule, they would have passed Sagemaster Emmot’s Academy in the late afternoon, and someone—probably Mieka—would have suggested they call round for tea. By spending the night many miles from their intended stop, there was no time to linger anywhere. He lazed in his hammock, staring out the window, glad to avoid the awkwardness of a visit, wondering in spite of himself where the old man was these days. Cade hadn’t seen him since leaving this place of tall brick towers and heavy slate roofs years ago; he’d heard Master Emmot resigned from his post, but had no idea why or what he might be doing with himself. He supposed he could have found out by stopping in and asking, but he had no desire to be pointed out to young scholars as a famous former pupil, a shining example of the advantages of an education at the Academy.
Ten miles beyond the Academy, the skies churned up great gray mountains as if every weathering witch in Albeyn had coaxed every cloud to this one particular place. The rain was beyond torrential. It didn’t fall in individual drops, but as if a million colossal buckets had overturned all at once. Though it lasted only ten minutes or so, it turned the road into a river. The drenched horses—four of them, not of Romuald Needler’s stock—struggled to haul the wagon up a hill, fetlock-deep in mud, as water flooded down. At last Yazz reined in and simply waited it out.
Had they not lingered in place last night, they would have been nearly to Lord Mindrising’s estate by now. It was an interesting little lesson on the consequences of one’s choices, Cade thought, and resigned himself to having to get out and push.
He consoled himself with the memory of their latest Gallybanks triumph: the command performance before the Princess and her ladies in the garden of the Keeps. Miriuzca had developed a liking for the tower on one side of the river, and the King had ordered its apartments redone for her. Touchstone, the Shadowshapers, and Crystal Sparks had been invited not just to play but to stay the night as well. A look at little Prince Roshlin wasn’t part of the schedule, but a tour of all the presents sent from around the Kingdom and across the Continent was. There were hundreds, divided into three groupings: those that would be used, those that were too expensive to use, and those that were duplicates (sometimes quadruplicates) and would be sent with the Princess’s compliments to young mothers who might not be able to afford such luxuries. Cade took th
e opportunity to move, quite unnoticed, a certain embroidered velvet pillow from the “use” tables to the “send” tables. The card identifying the crafter as one Mistress Windthistle of Hilldrop he pocketed for later disposal in a garderobe.
Rafe pointed out the place of honor given to Blye and Jed’s pottinger and spoon, and Chat joked that if he was ever given the Gift of the Gloves, it would make handling the withies rather difficult, and Mirko Challender told them he’d hold out for a knighthood, beholden all the same.
The Elsewhen that ensued had left Cade smiling then, and brought a smile to his lips now, even in the rain and mud.
{In the antechamber, all sea-green velvet and gilt, a small commotion was centered round a tall, good-looking blond boy who was talking with shy eagerness to Jeska and Rafe and Mieka. Cade approached in time to hear Jeska startle everyone in earshot by saying, “You’re more than welcome to come along tonight to our celebration at Wistly Hall, Your Highness.”
The boy, after a glance over his shoulder at his grandfather in the next room, as if wondering whether he mightn’t get away with it, mumbled, “Supper and King lessons tonight with Gran’fa.”
Cade told him, “All well and good, Your Highness. But I hope you pay attention to what your mother can teach you, too.”
“Every day,” the boy said with a smile that knew more than his years could account for. “I hope His Majesty kept a good grip on the sword. Sometimes, when he’s knighting somebody wearing a uniform, there’s shreds of shoulder fringe all over the carpet after.”
Mieka snapped his fingers and exclaimed, “Damn! I forgot to ask when I’m gettin’ the sword!”
“You’re not,” Cade said firmly.
The Prince was grinning. “I’m sure we’ve a few spares round here someplace.”
Before Mieka could yelp his delight, Cade clapped a hand over his mouth and said, “Please, Your Highness, don’t encourage him. He’s behaving himself for now, but it won’t last. And the thought of a real sword in these destructive hands—it just doesn’t bear contemplating.”