by Melanie Rawn
The shirts, trousers, and sleeveless jackets were of more or less the same cut, but in differing combinations of colors. Rafe was in black with a charcoal jacket; Jeska in pale gray with black; Mieka in white with light gray; Cade in charcoal with white. All four of them flatly refused to wear the neckbands. Rafe said the pleats looked like pie-frills and Jeska decreed that the white lace edging was absolutely outside the limit.
Kearney was frantic when they wouldn’t even try the things on. “But it’s the latest fashion, and it will soften all the stark lines of black and white—”
“It’s dead hideous, and I won’t wear it,” Mieka said, tossing the neckband to the table where Tobalt waited with a grin on his face. “What’re you lookin’ at?” he demanded in a growl. “You like it, it’s yours!”
“My wife would love it. Beholden.” He bunched it up with scant reverence for the pleated frill and shoved it in a pocket. “Now, if you’re all frustled to your satisfaction, if not Lord Fairwalk’s, shall we get started?”
“Not just yet.” Mieka raised his head and his voice, and shouted, “Croodle! Four ales, my darlin’, from the goodness of your heart!”
Mistress Ringdove was their hostess here in Lilyleaf. No one dared term her an alewife; her husband had been a sailor who brought her home from the Islands, took over his father’s old tavern in the seacoast town of Frimham, and promptly died. She sold up, moved to Lilyleaf, and on the strength of her home brew—said to be as beneficial to the health as drinking the rather smelly waters here, and tasting infinitely better—had within a few years purchased this inn all on her own. She was nearly as tall as Cade, her skin was as black as the soot that wouldn’t dare come within miles of her pots and pans (from which came the most delicious food), and when annoyed she planted her fists on her hips and roared like a guards captain, but with an even more shocking vocabulary. This was why everyone called her Croodle, the cooing of a dove being the very last thing she sounded like.
“Only four ales?” Tobalt asked a bit forlornly. “But I’m thirsty, too!”
“You’ll stay sober and write what we speak.” Mieka grinned at him. “Now. What are they saying about us back in Gallytown?”
“Not much—yet.”
Rafe gave his usual taciturn answers to the reporter’s questions about life on the Winterly Circuit, then sat back with his ale and listened while Jeska elaborated. Not only did he have something complimentary to say about each locale but each compliment was different. Cade was frankly amazed until he recalled an evening up in Scatterseed when the masquer had been debating the attractions of six different girls, trying to decide whose bed to embellish with his presence that night. The astonishment of it was that he’d conducted this discussion with a seventh girl—the one he’d intended to and in fact did end up with—and hadn’t had an unkind word to say about any of them. She thought him the sweetest, dearest man in the world. Quite the line of patter, had Jeska, adaptable to any occasion.
Mieka told several very funny tales of their travels. Some of it was even true. Then it was Cayden’s turn.
Tobalt asked a single, simple question: “Why is it, do you think, that men go to the theater?” Mieka groaned and signaled for another round. Cade glared at him, and then began his answer.
“I’ve thought a lot about this—”
“And talked even more about it,” Mieka interrupted.
“—and it seems to be that it’s the same reason they go to bear-baitings, musical concerts, and Chapel. They can be part of a group, all experiencing the same thing. They feel connected to each other—not just for the duration of the show, but in the future, when they meet up with someone who was there and they say, ‘Oy, remember that night we went to see Touchstone?’ There’s a sense of belonging, a connection to the rest of the audience that comes during a performance, and this is given back to the players through energy and applause—”
“And money?” Tobalt said with a grin.
Cade forced a smile and took a swig of his ale. Beside him, Mieka was chortling quietly. Rafe looked amused; Jeska looked bored. But this was important, it addressed the whole concept of why there were players and plays and theater to begin with, and—
“So no matter what the composition of the audience,” Tobalt was saying, “whatever their ages and station in life, their work, their other experiences, at the theater that night they have this one experience in common?”
“Yes. And that’s another reason why it’s so unfair that women aren’t allowed to attend the theater. It deprives them of that chance to feel that connection with other people. To have those kinds of experiences in common with the rest of society. They’re part of society, a hugely important part. They cook our food and sew our clothes, they take care of our families, clean and organize and—and make sure everybody gets to Chapel on time!” He smiled, thinking of Mistress Mirdley. And then he thought of Blye. “They do other things, too, things that it used to be only men were allowed to do. Even what’s tolerated these days, and it’s barely tolerated in most cases, it’s not officially approved. There are women who are crafters and run businesses and shops, but they can’t join the guilds who’re supposed to represent them and have a care to their rights—as far as the guilds are concerned, they have no rights. I think it’s unjust, that they’re excluded from so much, and I’d like to see them included in the theater experience.”
“Onstage?”
Cade blinked.
Mieka laughed aloud. “Never thought about that one, eh, Quill? Give him another couple of months to talk it out with himself—and any poor lout within hearing range!—and he’ll have an answer for you. But he’ll need some time to—”
“Yes,” Cade said suddenly. “Absolutely. Onstage.”
Now Mieka looked awestruck. “Oh, they’ll be talking about us and nothing else back home after this is printed, and no mistake. What a scandal-maker you are, Cade Silversun!”
“I think I’ve got what I need,” Tobalt agreed. “Just one thing, if you would, Cade. You talk about the communal experience of Chapel or theater—what about executions? There’s always an awfully big crowd at a hanging.”
While Cade was flailing about for something to say, he saw a look of wicked glee cross Mieka’s face, a look he had grown to dread. But before he could open his mouth, the Elf spoke.
“And lots of women there, too. Isn’t that right, Cade?”
Goaded, he retorted, “And there’s the contradiction! How is it that society forbids women to watch a play, to protect them from I don’t know what, and yet doesn’t bat an eyelash when they come to watch a man gasp his life out at the end of a rope?”
Tobalt’s pen scratched so quickly it nearly tore the paper he was writing on. Mieka succumbed to a fit of giggles, mischief accomplished beyond his wildest hopes. Cade wanted to wrap his arms around his head and moan. Instead he smiled as the reporter got to his feet, and said, “You’ll owe me a drink for the increase in sales.”
“I’ll owe you half a wine shop. See you at Castle Biding, then. And I think the imager’s ready for you now.”
Lord Fairwalk, who had been hovering in the taproom doorway this whole time, now came forward and fussed over their clothes and their hair. Then he led them to the front parlor—Croodle ran a classy inn—where the two lecterns and a glass basket of withies waited for them, along with the imager—who looked rather ill. The watery greenish eyes were as unfocused as Mieka’s could be on thorn, he was pale as a corpse, and he kept mumbling to himself as if in a fever. He stood, swaying a little, behind a wide table on which the huge portfolio had been opened. At least a dozen short, colorless withies lay to his right, and a large glass of whiskey to his left.
“Here’s what I want,” said Kearney, and proceeded to pose them much as they arranged themselves onstage. Cade and Rafe behind their lecterns, Mieka in back, a withie in each hand, Jeska in front. It was so utterly uninspired that the four of them traded eye-rolls and grimaces.
“This will be the first
one,” His Lordship said, standing back to survey the effect. “Nothing behind them—I don’t want anything to distract. We’ll see how this one comes out before we try the next.”
“It’s only for a bleedin’ broadsheet,” Jeska muttered, “not to hang on a wall at the Palace!”
“Shush! Hold still! He’s about to start!”
They became petrified as the imager gave a sudden whimper. It was the oddest damned thing, watching him work: the vagueness and torpor turning to a crisp precision (though he kept mumbling). It didn’t take as long as Cade thought it would, not nearly as long as Arley’s agonized process. From a corner of his eye he could see Mieka, frozen in place but clearly desperate to break free. No imaging could come close to portraying him unless that imaging moved and danced and flung withies into the air and shattered them as he laughed behind the glisker’s bench. And Jeska—how did a motionless picture in a broadsheet capture the subtleties of voice and face and movement that were his artistry? The brief show they’d done at Castle Eyot, with Cade able to provide perhaps half of what Mieka did, had nonetheless been a success, and because of Jeska. Ever since then Cade had been toying with the notion of doing a playlet without any magic transforming his masquer at all, using nothing but that expressive face and voice to draw the audience in, to move them. It would relegate Mieka and Rafe to providing and controlling the backdrop and physical effects, but Cade didn’t think they’d mind very much. In point of fact, he didn’t care if they minded at all. It was an idea that excited him, not just because it was different but because it would be a challenge. Art was about challenging oneself: to do better, to be better. Sagemaster Emmot would have said, “So is life, boy,” but Sagemaster Emmot’s voice was figuring less and less in Cade’s contemplations these days.
Lord and Lady and Angels, when would this man finish? Cade knew the cramp threatening his shoulders was merely nervous tension: the annoyance of having to hold absolutely still was starting to make him twitchy. He didn’t see the need for any of this anyway. There would have to be placards to advertise their performances in Gallantrybanks before and after Trials, but imaging was expensive and wouldn’t give anyone a real idea of what Touchstone looked like. Rafe, whom he could just see beyond Jeska, was the only one that an imaging could fairly portray—but only if it caught him with that glint in his blue-gray eyes and that sardonic turn to his lips. As for himself … he’d rather not think about it, beholden all the same.
Finally the fourth withie dropped to the table and the imager drew in a wheezing breath before groping for the whiskey. Mieka took that as a signal to howl his release. He hurtled for the taproom door, yelling for Croodle to save his life by pouring him a drink.
“Excellent, excellent,” Kearney murmured, standing at the exhausted imager’s shoulder. “For the next—and take your time recovering, dear boy, there’s no rush—I want something rather different. But we can discuss that once you’ve rested a bit.”
Cade followed Mieka into the taproom, found him gratefully gulping down ale. Ordering another, he sat at the bar beside his glisker and undid the top two buttons of his collar.
“You forgot your falcon,” Mieka said. “But it probably wouldn’t’ve shown up anyway. If he does the next one close-to, you have to wear it. Dery will be in transports, to see it on you.”
He nodded, ashamed of himself for not thinking of it. Again he wondered how Mieka could be such an infuriating, impossible little smatchet one moment and so gentle and thoughtful the next. All Elfenkind were capricious, but Mieka—
“And you were wrong, y’know,” he went on. “There’s men as go to the theater to escape everything around them, including the rest of the audience.”
The abrupt turn in subject left Cade a step or two behind—another of Mieka’s irksome qualities.
“They don’t want to feel ‘connected’ to anything but what’s happening onstage. It’s their own little world they retreat inside, and they let us in but they don’t let any of their own feelings out. Remember that night in that empty old house in New Halt? Whoever was sittin’ there, he sucked up everything we had and then some. You can’t tell me he wanted some kind of ‘communal experience’ or to be part of anything. Lookin’ back on it, makes me feel a bit of a whore.”
There was the other thing about Mieka, Cade thought helplessly: Just when you wanted to wring his neck, he’d come up with something shrewdly instinctive that rearranged Cade’s brain the way a foreseeing did.
“And as for protecting the ladies from theater but letting them watch a hanging—oh, but here’s His Lordship, come to haul us off to imitate statuary again.” Mieka sighed, and finished his drink, and called, “Oy, Kearney! Wait a bit while Cade gets his little silver falcon out of its cage, right?”
The second imaging took much longer than the first, because it was of their heads and shoulders only and thus required more and finer detail. The young man, sufficiently revived but still muttering under his breath as if rendering incantations, had them each sit before him in turn, stared without blinking until Cade marveled that his eyes didn’t water like fountains. He seemed determined to capture inside the withies each hair in Rafe’s mustache and beard, every faint freckle on Jeska’s nose and cheeks, the exact furl and point of Mieka’s ears. Cade didn’t want to know what feature of his own face occupied the man to the point of obsession. Or, rather, he was sure he knew: his nose.
His was the last imaging to be completed, and when he was finally told to go, he discovered his friends were a drink ahead of him. The ale kept coming courtesy of Croodle, whose heart had been melted days ago by one glance from Jeska’s limpid blue eyes. Not that she flirted with him; no, she had decided that he, and by extension the rest of Touchstone, were exactly the little brothers she’d wanted but never had. Mieka initially pouted a bit, that he hadn’t been the one to win her over. But as long as it got them free drinks, he’d evidently decided that Jeska could have the credit.
They were discussing the next night’s performance, which would be at the Old Bath Hall with its dizzying seating and oddly sunken stage. Jeska was worried about having to play up, not out and to each side; Rafe was worried about bouncing all that magic back down into the well. Mieka scoffed at them both. Full of liquor and full of himself, he turned to Cade all at once and said, “Don’t listen to ’em. You can put the usual magic into those withies, y’know. Hells, gimme some extra! Cram ’em up till they won’t take no more. I can handle it.”
“No,” Cade said quietly, “you can’t. And even if you could, there’s Rafe and Jeska to consider.”
“And the audience!” he said stubbornly. “The place must seat four hundred!”
“No,” Cade said again.
“Coward.” He raised a piteous face to Croodle, who chuckled and drew a whole pitcher. “Oh, beholden, sweet darlin’!”
“Cheeky li’l ol’ thing, you be.” She grinned. Then, spying the beginnings of a fight at one of the tables, she surged out from behind the bar, bellowing, “Oy! Under my roof, you raise your fist and you lose it at the wrist!”
Cade decided that a return to their conversation was necessary. “Rafe does just fine spreading the magic so everyone feels it. Even in a theater as odd as that one. I can’t give you any more than I’m giving you right now.” He heard what he’d just said and watched Mieka’s mocking smile and wanted to squirm.
“Really? Pity, that.” After knocking back the rest of his drink, he grabbed the pitcher and poured anew. “Y’know, Quill, you’re lucky I came along to Gowerion. Without me, you’d still be playing for blashed beer in leather tankards. Instead—” He held up the glass, swirling with green like a trapped whirlwind, which Croodle said must be used for Mieka’s drinks because it matched the color of those eyes when he was drunk and happy. “The best, an’ all ’cause o’ me!”
Rafe, silent until now over his drink, glanced up, a sudden spark of danger in his eyes. Jeska merely snorted his opinion of Mieka’s boasting, perfectly sure of his own beauty, wo
rth, talent, and destiny.
Cade said, “Without my magic to use, and Jeska to use it on, and Rafe to make sure it doesn’t get used badly—”
“Badly? When have I ever—?”
“My point precisely. It’s him you’re beholden to for that.”
Mieka slammed a fist onto the bar, abruptly furious. “You’d be nothing and noplace without me!”
“Really.” Rafe wasn’t smiling.
“It’s me they come for, I’m the one who does all the work! Who’s the one talks to the reporters at every stop on the Winterly as has a piddling local broadsheet? You can’t be bothered, Jeska’s off with some skirt, Cade goes on and on about what this piece or that piece means and nobody gives a shit—’cept for today, when he has to go and say somethin’ so outrageous, we’ll be lucky to keep him out of quod for incitement to rebellion! Women onstage! You never know when to shut up, Quill!”
“You’re saying that?” Jeska spluttered. “You?”
“Those other broadsheets, all they want is a funny story or two so they can sell a few copies of their two-pager! And it’s me as gives ’em what they want!”
“Good at that, aren’t you?” Rafe murmured.
“Yes, I am! And you oughta be glad of it. It’s for us. For Touchstone.”
“Well, if we’re such a chore to be around, and if we’d be nothing without you, find yourself another group of players. Go on, do it. Or—better still, do your absolute minimum next show, since we bore you and aren’t worthy of your brilliance. Show us how much we need you.”
Mieka turned white. “I can’t do that. I won’t. And you know it.” Then, shrewdly eyeing Cade, who had been silent this whole time: “And you won’t slack off on bespelling the withies, either, and for the same fucking reason. Oh, you’d love to, wouldn’t you? Give me almost nothing to work with, show me how much I need you? Your pride wouldn’t let you do that and we all know it.”
“Neither will your pride let you give anything less than your best,” Rafe reminded him. “You say what you like to us, in private, but if I ever read anything about Touchstone that even tinges of what you said just now, I’ll take you apart. Do you understand me?”