Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

  He really ought to have known. Practical and Mieka Windthistle were not acquainted with each other. Indeed, they had never even been introduced.

  Two hours later, the Elf was perched on an overstuffed footstool upholstered in garish green silk, fascinated by a process most men never saw. Cade had effaced himself into a corner, wishing he could hide behind the nearby draperies. Rafe lounged on a velvet couch, sipping from a dainty teacup of what their hostesses called mocah water, the latest importation from a land so new and remote it didn’t yet have a name anyone recognized. Jeska sat rigidly before some of the most expensive looking-glass in the kingdom as the queen’s ladies-in-waiting made him beautiful again.

  For Mieka, practical had meant marching right up to the castle gates, a thing that in anyone else would have been sheerest folly. But he shamelessly traded on Cade’s father’s position at Court, somehow got Touchstone through to the inner precincts of Seekhaven Castle, bluffed them past a succession of guards and footmen, and through a combination of cheek, charm, and chatter enlisted one of Her Majesty’s younger ladies in the cause. This girl whisked the four players into private hallways, up and down several stone staircases, and at last into the royal apartments. Because the Court had yet to arrive from Gallantrybanks, they used the queen’s own dressing room and the queen’s own cosmetics to repair the damage to Jeska’s face.

  Cade watched mindlessly, not really paying attention. Every step he had taken inside this vast castle had been silently dogged by his father’s name and function. He’d expected raised brows and curious glances once his name was announced at Trials, but he would have been in familiar surroundings—his familiar surroundings, the honest stage, where fiction was labeled as such, rather than the play-acting that everyone pretended was reality at Court.

  One of the ladies—a delicate redhead with the most elegant way of moving he’d ever seen—approached him and smiled. “None of us can wait to see you play, Master Silversun. We don’t have chances like this very often!”

  The price of the ladies’ artistry was a private performance. In secret. It happened all the time, but rarely did ladies have the opportunity to make the arrangements for themselves. Or, in this case, to have a quick-talking glisker arrange it for them.

  “And I promise none of us will get caught,” she added. “Or, if we do, all of us have enough credit with Her Majesty so that no one will be punished.”

  Punishment there was—specified in the law books, at any rate. It was hardly ever meted out. Ordinarily Cade would have relished the risk of flouting tradition, but this was different. If Touchstone were caught, even after they’d won a place on the Winterly, that place might be taken away as an example to others. And it would be the Downstreet, and cold wagon rides to distant taverns, and living at his parents’ house for the next year until Trials came up again.

  “The pavilion is lovely,” she went on. “We’ve seen other players there, when His Majesty wants to surprise the queen with a treat.” She gave him a smile through long lashes that owed nothing to cosmetics. “It’s rather exciting, sneaking about late at night, even if everyone knows where we’re going and why.”

  Well, that was Court, wasn’t it? Behaving as if subterfuge were necessary even when it wasn’t. It must make a nice change from the real artificialities. Aware that he was confusing himself, he nodded again and managed a smile.

  “Your glisker told us where you’re lodging, so I’ll send a note with the day and time—oh, and an official pass, so no one will question you in town or within the castle.”

  “Beholden, Lady,” he said.

  “He’s a bit of a lad, isn’t he? Your glisker.”

  He flinched as a pretty little silver clock on the wood-paneled wall chimed the quarter-hour. “I-I don’t mean to hurry the ladies, but—”

  “I quite understand.” Turning to the work in progress: “Bodgerie! Aren’t you finished yet?”

  Cade hardened his face against a wince. Bodger meant “to fix something very badly.” Not a reassuring nickname. The redheaded lady saw it in his eyes, though—one had to be clever about reading people’s faces at Court—and smiled again.

  “It’s to keep her humble. She’s quite brilliant, really.” Tiptoeing, she whispered, “Why do you think Her Majesty always looks ten years younger than her age? And the last time Princess Iamina—” She smirked. “Let’s just say she trips on cracks in the tiles and bruises her cheek or her chin, usually after she’s caught her husband with someone he oughtn’t to be with. But you’d never know it, after Bodgerie’s been to her.”

  “Does Lady Bodgerie mend Lord Tawnymoor’s accidental falls, too?”

  Her green eyes gleamed appreciation of the oblique inquiry. “No. He just tends to disappear for a few days after one of his and the Princess’s—”

  “—mutual clumsinesses?” he suggested, and a grin broke across her exquisite face.

  “All done!” Bodgerie sang out, and Jeska stood and turned for inspection. “What do you think?”

  “Gorgeous,” one of the ladies sighed, without a hint of a blush for such frank enjoyment of a young man’s looks.

  Mieka pouted a little before bouncing to his feet. He gave the ladies a low bow. “We are more beholden than we can possibly convey—but we’ll give it our best try any night you name! Your ardent servants, ladies, and do excuse us for running out on you like this, but we’ve an appointment.”

  “Go, hurry!” said the little redhead, and they went.

  Along the way, following directions given to Mieka, Cade scrutinized his masquer’s new mask. “A bit swollen still, but nobody will notice,” he decided.

  “Don’t talk,” Rafe advised Jeska. “You’ll crack your face.”

  Jeska raised a hand in an especially rude gesture. As they rounded a corner into a marble-floored atrium—and the full view of all the other groups of players waiting for the draw—Cade grabbed Jeska’s arm and yanked it down before anyone could see.

  It appeared, however, that the moody tregetour of Crystal Sparks had noticed. Mirko Challender looked down his long, thin nose for a moment, then grinned and returned the salute with both hands.

  An underling in the royal livery of sea-green and brown rapped a gold-topped staff on the floor, and into the abrupt silence announced the Master of His Majesty’s Revelries. This proved to be a tall, skeletal personage carrying a brown velvet drawstring purse. He started talking, but Cade didn’t hear him; his attention had fixed on the bag of tokens to the exclusion of everything else. It took Rafe’s elbow in his ribs to make him realize that Touchstone’s turn had come.

  Side by side the four of them walked to what Cade devoutly hoped wouldn’t be disaster. A group of men stood just behind the Master, chains of office draping their shoulders in rivulets of silver. The judges. They looked directly at him when the velvet purse was held out and he reached in his hand and pulled out a small round token. Lord and Lady and Gods and Angels, why hadn’t he offered a prayer or a pence at High Chapel yesterday—they needed all the help they could get—

  It would have been hideous manners to look at the token. Besides, he didn’t want to betray which of the Thirteen he’d drawn by an involuntary smile—or wince. He bowed, backed up the required two steps, and Touchstone returned to their places. Mieka was quivering with excitement at his side, Jeska stood as if his bones had suddenly turned to cast iron, and Rafe tried unsuccessfully to stifle a sigh of relief that the ceremonial part was over. Cade gripped the token in his fist and stared right back at the judges. It was so damnably unfair that his future would be decided by six fusty middle-aged men who had never stepped onto a stage in their lives, who didn’t know the first thing about creating and performing so much as a blank-verse poem, who had no magic and probably even less taste—

  “Cade.”

  He felt Rafe’s strong hand at the small of his back and obeyed it unthinkingly, walking outside into the forecourt and then through the tall gates with absurd little towers on either side, across an e
qually ridiculous moat complete with lily pads, and eventually to the street.

  “Not yet,” Rafe said suddenly. “Wait till we’re private, Mieka.”

  “But I want to know!”

  “So do I. But not here, not out in the open.”

  At length Cade felt grass rather than pavement beneath his feet. They were walking along the riverbank towards a little grove of willows. Excellent trees, willows, he thought; lovely leafy curtains to hide whatever reactions would come once he revealed the token in his hand.

  He rubbed his index finger over it, trying to discern the image stamped thereon. Oh Gods—wings—no, no, not that one—

  “Quill?” Mieka asked, hush-voiced. “Which did we draw?”

  Cayden tossed over the token. Jeska glanced at it and moaned. Rafe closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. He wasn’t particularly fond of it either, but at least the magic he would be called on to control would be primarily visual, not emotional. Mieka’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.

  They’d drawn the Ninth and flashiest of the Thirteen Perils, nothing subtle about it; lots of dazzle and very little artistry, as far as Cade was concerned. Even if they did it brilliantly, they hadn’t a hope of First Flight on the Winterly. Nothing in this piece could possibly gain them the necessary points.

  They all knew it. Rafe didn’t bother stating the obvious. Fatalistically, he said, “At least we’ll be working regular this winter.”

  Mieka eyed him sidewise. “Yes, we will. And you’ll be marrying the lovely Mistress Crisiant—”

  “Using what, exactly, for money?”

  “—at High Chapel, not Low,” Mieka went on stubbornly, “because the players of the First Flight make the most in trimmings.”

  Rafe hooted with laughter. “And how do we get First Flight? Because of our charm?”

  “No. Because of how Gods-damned fucking great we are!” Pulling aside the willow-leaf curtain they were all hiding behind, he went on crisply, “Did you bring the directions to the rehearsal hall? Good. Let’s go.”

  They had drawn “The Dragon.” Two characters: a Fair Lady held captive and the Prince who rescued her. The Dragon itself was nothing more than a threatening shape and some sound effects. The judges’ thinking was rumored to be that the better the Dragon, the more impressed the common folk would be, and points were awarded accordingly. The playlet started with the Lady, who for a page or so whined about her dreadful fate. Then the Prince rode to the rescue: noble, unselfish, dedicated, courageous, and so forth. A switch was made back to the Fair Lady, who did a lot of hand-wringing as she commented on the battle that occurred outside the cavern she was trapped in. The environment around her won points as well. The Prince victorious, the finish was her reaction as he strode in to free and claim her, and of course she fell deeply in love at first sight. The End.

  Cayden reviewed all this in his head on the walk to the rehearsal hall. This was akin to a cavern itself, a great drafty emptiness of a place with no seating. It was, however, the precise dimensions of the theater they would be allowed inside on the morrow. Thus it served as a preliminary venue, just to work the rough edges off a performance before refining it in the castle theater itself.

  Touchstone arrived just as Macielin Redprong was concluding auditions for this year’s masquer and fettler. Things did not seem to have gone well. A shudder of distaste, quickly repressed, jolted Cayden out of his anxiety over their draw; one look at the dozen or so rejected applicants provoked a rush of sheer gratitude that he was, as Mieka had put it, part of something worth being part of. To subject himself to Redprong, a man would have to be desperate indeed to become a player.

  Redprong himself—a tregetour, though short and stocky and without a hint of Wizard about his Gnome-and-Goblin looks—eyed the new arrivals haughtily from his place at stage right. “Come back tomorrow,” he grunted.

  Jeska stiffened with insult. So did Cade. Rafe caught his breath. Mieka began to laugh.

  “As much hope of that as of me gettin’ me ears kagged!” he jeered. “Get off the stage and leave it to those as knows what they’re about, won’t you? There’s a good lad!”

  When the celebrated tregetour had betaken himself off with a Gnomish hiss of fury, Touchstone claimed the stage.

  And stood there, staring at one another in an abrupt and empty silence that somehow they would have to fill.

  Mieka flipped the token into the air and caught it, over and over, frowning more deeply each time. At last, just as Cade was about to shout at him to for the love of all the Gods stop it, he snatched it from the air, tucked it in a pocket, and said, “So which of us has the scathingly brilliant idea?”

  There were a dozen or so chairs on the stage. Jeska dragged four of them into a square and sat, waiting for the creative portion of the team to come up with something. His expression of calm confidence—visible even under all the makeup—settled Cade somehow.

  “I wish we could show what really happened,” he mused. “The dragon was real, but it wasn’t a lady who was rescued from a cave, it was a treasure from a castle dungeon someplace up north, and the poor beast was chained inside to guard it.”

  “More noble, though,” Rafe said, “rescuing a pretty girl from a hideous great fire-breather.”

  “Be a shocker, wouldn’t it?” He smiled and shook his head. “Hauling up the money in a sling made of your second-best cloak after you’ve stuck your sword into a dragon that can’t even see to bite you.”

  “We can tweak it, can’t we?” Mieka pleaded. “As it stands, in the version everybody does, there’s nothing that will get us noticed—”

  “And nothing that will get us tossed in quod for insulting the royal family,” Jeska cautioned, speaking slowly and carefully.

  “But it’s boring!”

  “It’s the one we’ve drawn,” Rafe said. “We’ll just do it better than anybody ever did it, that’s all.”

  “But—”

  “Make an end to it!” Rafe snapped, and Mieka subsided with a scowl. “Fair warning—you try anything silly, and I’ll shut you down.”

  Cade saw Mieka give the fettler a look that plainly said, You can try! He shrugged. They were stuck; they had to perform this; they had no choice.

  But Mieka wasn’t giving up. “You say it was a real dragon, Quill?”

  “I did some research on all the Thirteen. My grandfather’s tregetour left him his library, and the true stories are there if you know where to look.” But the one book that was missing—the volume that told the truth about all the Thirteen and the history of the theater in unflinching detail—that book was the one book his grandfather’s tregetour had never owned. Lost Withies … so ancient and obscure that few tregetours even knew of it … there were rumored to be five or six copies still extant.… He dragged his mind back from hopeless book-lust. “Remember what we were saying about putting in some lines wondering what his famous great-grandfather would’ve done? Whether he can live up to it? I think that’ll work well here. And that would be different enough—”

  “But the dragon was real,” Mieka interrupted, scowling. He dug the token out of his pocket, looked at it, and suddenly flung it high in the air again, laughing. “So what we’ll do is give them a Dragon that’ll scare the piss out of ’em!”

  Even on the Royal Circuit, audiences were used to threatening shadows only. Once Mieka explained what he wanted to do, Cade gaped at him, then joined in his laughter. A real fire-breather? Ideas for accomplishing it swarmed in his head—yes, it was possible, and more besides.

  “If we do it, then let’s do it. You and me, we’ll make us a Dragon, right enough—and forget the Fair Lady, just stay with the Prince.”

  They could linger, he explained, with the Prince long after the usual switch was supposed to have been made. The Fair Lady’s voice would provide commentary on the battle, just as the piece was always done, but the scene onstage would stay with the Prince and the Dragon. Mieka would have to provide Jeska with an enswathing illusion that w
ould allow him to speak the Fair Lady’s lines without the audience being able to see his lips move—all of this while he was wielding a phantom sword against a Dragon more real than anything anyone had ever seen.

  “I’ll work a cavern mouth into it,” Cade said, “and the echo we use for ‘Deep Dark Well.’ The contrast between the battle and all her whining will be—”

  “—will get us shouted off the stage!” Rafe interrupted. “This is one of the Thirteen, in case you forgot! We have to treat it with at least some respect!”

  “Why?” Mieka asked, wide-eyed.

  Cade threw him a grateful smile. “They’ll be so busy being scared of the Dragon and amazed by the battle that they won’t even notice how we’ve messed with it. And we’ll be using the standard script. Most of it, anyway. We’ll just be shifting the focus.”

  “But how do I act it?” Jeska wailed.

  “Like you always do,” Mieka replied. “Like you’d been birthed to perform this piece and this piece only.”

  “Heroic,” Cade told his masquer. “Give ’em every move you’ve got. And at the end, you’re exhausted. You’ve just defeated a Dragon, for fuck’s sake! The girl’s blithering on and on about how brave and noble you are, and how much she adores you, while you’re practically dead on your feet.”

  “Seeing what she wishes to see?” Rafe suggested.

  “Exactly.” Cade grimaced. “Just like everyone else in the world.”

  “You’re too young to be so cynical,” Mieka observed, “or so me old fa would say. Will we be showing the Fair Lady at all?”

  “We have to.” But Rafe suddenly didn’t sound very certain.

  “And there’s another thing that’s never been done,” Cade said. “We give them a real Dragon, a real battle scene, all the while with her voice giving the descriptions, and finally—”

  “What?” Jeska asked. “Finally what?”

  “We don’t show her at all! She can be the shadow. Not the Dragon, like everybody else does it. You stay the Prince—”