Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  Rafe had been absolutely right to demand a break. They were all sick of each other. This was what they told themselves, and it was true—but didn’t openly admit to the overuse of thorn and liquor that frayed tempers and caused mistakes onstage. They’d grown stale, careless, at times complacent and sometimes even bored. And a new play, an original play, was just the thing to invigorate Touchstone. Arguing over dialogue, debating stagecraft, proposing effects, rehearsing and rehearsing until they got it right—Cade was smiling as he fell asleep, tired and happy and without the slightest interest in or need for blockweed.

  The next morning he sent notes round to the Threadchaser bakery, Jeska’s flat, and Wistly Hall, tentatively suggesting that perhaps they might want to gather for a talk about Window Wall. Not a rehearsal, he pointed out, just a chat over tea and Mistress Mirdley’s seedy cakes and apricot muffins.

  Mieka, Rafe, and Jeska all arrived at Redpebble Square within minutes of each other. The bustle of removing cloaks and hats and gloves in the hall got them through any awkwardness of first greetings; Rafe, who had decreed the break in the first place, won everyone’s heart when he announced that after fifteen years he’d finally mastered the spell his father used to keep the loaves warm, and proceeded to use it on his partners’ shoes.

  The fettler was looking less tight about the eyes. Wryly aloof as a rule, thorn had wound him up to a dangerously uncommunicative tenseness. Cade was ashamed of himself that it took this new relaxation to make him notice the difference. They had been taking one another for granted, concentrating too much on their own problems, just as they’d done during the time he refused to see the Elsewhens. Of course, the problem this time was a collective one: money. In a way, they hadn’t dared talk too much about it amongst themselves. They all knew the mess they were in. Endless reiteration only led to frustration and anger that they took out on each other. Now that they were solvent again, and actually beginning to earn more than the bare minimum for survival, Touchstone had needed a rest from Touchstone.

  The fear was still in Cade, though. He wondered if the others were prey to the sick, cold terror that of itself had been enough to send him to the bottle or the thorn-roll, even without the seemingly endless cycle of enforced energy onstage and nervous exhaustion in private. He had the nasty feeling that no matter how much piled up in his bank account from now on, he’d worry about money for the rest of his life.

  Seated around a cheering fire, warmed by Rafe’s newly learned spell and the lavish tea Mistress Mirdley had laid on for them, it was nearly like old times. Old, Cade thought with an inner wince, when it wasn’t really that long ago. They’d been so much younger then, and arrogant with it in the way young men were who knew they were good at their chosen calling and hadn’t yet known that being good at something didn’t always guarantee success.

  Back then, they hadn’t fully developed the give-and-take of working through a play. As Cade presented his outline of the two Window Wall scripts, he was ready and willing to make notes based on their ideas and comments.

  And then he got to the sticky part.

  “He has to get out. He has to want to get out. But what’s his motivation? Why does he want to leave that safe little room?”

  The three looked at him, and then at one another. He had the sensation that the answer would be so devastatingly obvious that they considered him a total shit-wit for not recognizing it instantly on his own. The looks they turned back onto him were, in varying degrees, amused, pitying, exasperated, and impatient, but mainly disbelieving that he, their esteemed tregetour, could be so vividly stupid.

  “All together now?” Rafe asked, and when Jeska and Mieka nodded, continued, “One day he looks out the window and sees—say it with me, lads—”

  They obediently chorused, “A girl!”

  A girl. Of course. Painfully, mortifyingly obvious. Cade wondered if he could use one of his own withies to make himself disappear. Why hadn’t he thought of it himself? He knew how plots worked, what motivated characters, why people did what they did and said what they said. The boy suddenly sees outside the window the most beautiful girl in the world, and falls in love with her at sight. Surely Cayden ought to have thought that one up for himself.

  Well, it had never happened for him like that, had it? Rafe, gobsmacked by Crisiant while they were still at littleschool; Mieka, stunned, staggered, and stupefied by the first sight of his wife at the Castle Biding Fair; Jeska, stumbling and incoherent upon first seeing Kazie … and then there was Cade, and the girls he casually chose for bedding when Touchstone was on the road—but that wasn’t love. Not the way his friends loved their wives, with desire ever renewed and a need to be with them whenever possible, with companionship and laughter, arguments and passionate reconciliations, struggling through these last two years somehow together, always together … No, he knew nothing of that kind of love. The nearest he had ever come to it was Lady Megueris, and that feeling certainly hadn’t happened with his first look at her. It had come only after months and months of getting to know her, being annoyed by her, infuriating her in his turn, and finally, inexplicably, that night of the King’s celebrations when he’d hurt his hand and she’d spent the night in bed with him. Was that love? He wasn’t sure. Was what he felt the sort of all-powerful, thoroughly overmastering thing that would incite the boy to break through the window at last?

  No.

  He’d have to leave this part of it to his masquer, fettler, and glisker. They had the experience of it, so he’d trust them to make it come out right in the play. There was usually a happy dearth of explanation from men rendered incoherent and sometimes speechless by falling abruptly and violently in love. So there wouldn’t be much by way of dialogue, and he wouldn’t have to embarrass himself by writing drivel.

  They were already plotting it out. How old was she? What should she look like? Hair, eyes, height, proportions, style of clothing, the expression on her face—something had to set her apart from all the other girls the boy had seen beyond the window wall. Something had to make her so different and so compelling that for love of her, for the need to hear her voice and touch her hair and skin and breathe in her scent and taste her kisses, he would break through the protecting glass and brave the world outside.

  Cade was astonished to hear himself interrupt. “Yeh, yeh, that’s all very well. But in a way, all he wants is just to see her—whether she’s really everything he thinks she is, or if the glass has distorted something. He wants to look at her without anything getting in the way.”

  “And that means she’s got to see him as well!” Mieka exclaimed. “Are we going to show that? Will what she sees make her want him and love him, or will she run away screaming?”

  “Well, she’d be nervous,” Rafe mused. “Maybe even scared of him. But what happens to her isn’t the real point, is it? And it’d be—I dunno, kind of dishonest, to imply that all he has to do is break open the window and go outside for everything to be rainbows and rose gardens.”

  “I think he waits until she’s passed by,” Jeska said. “He works himself into a dither, and realizes that he has to see her again but there’s a horrible chance that he won’t—she might never walk past his window again. And the only way to find her is to break the glass and go out looking in the big scary world.”

  “And the decision takes him all day and into the night!” Mieka went on, practically jumping up and down in his chair with excitement. “And then—”

  “Does he realize that all sorts of people are going to be looking at him now?” Jeska interrupted.

  “Looking,” Cade stated. “Not seeing. That the really important thing—that he finally realizes that even if he never finds her again, he does want to be seen by somebody. By at least one person. Seen for who and what he is, as he is.”

  “—and then,” Mieka said loudly, “it’s night, and everything dark outside until the moon begins to rise—and on the wet street outside—”

  “If it’s raining, how can there be a moon
?” Rafe scoffed.

  “It rained earlier, all right? Think what a nice, gloomy backdrop it’d be for his ditherings and whinings. But when the moon hits the slick of the road—” He clapped his hands together in triumph, beaming all over his face. “Moonglade!”

  Rafe scratched at his beard. “And he’s so thrilled with the very idea of it that he crashes through the window to get at it? I thought he wanted out because of the girl.”

  “I want a moonglade, damn it. Cade’s been promising me a moonglade for years.”

  “Maybe,” Jeska said, “he imagines her as kind of a spectral figure walking along the silvery path—”

  Rafe’s groan stopped him. Cade hid a grin.

  Jeska glowered and kept going. “Maybe the something unique about her is her blonde hair—silver-blonde, like Jinsie’s or Vered’s. And when he sees the moonglade, he associates that with—” When Rafe screwed his face up with disdain, he burst out, “All right, then, you think of something!”

  “Not my job,” he drawled. “Leave it to Cade. But I know what we can do at the end, when he shatters the glass.” Rising, he came over to where Cayden sat, took a sheet of clean paper, stole the pen, and started to draw. The others gathered round. “Like so—at an angle, the way we do ‘Doorways,’” he said. “When he throws the chair, it goes through the window, the glass splinters onto the stage—”

  Cade saw where he was going. “—and the chair goes flying out over the audience, scaring the shit out of them!”

  “And then it vanishes,” Mieka contributed happily, “as a distraction while I change the scene onstage—”

  “—to all the sights, sounds, feelings, and smells rushing in through the broken window,” Rafe finished, nodding approval.

  “I can give a huge yell as the chair vanishes,” Jeska offered, “to bring their attention back to me.”

  “The timing will be tricky,” Cade mused. “But I like it. Give me a few days to work it all out and write it up, and then we can meet downstairs here where no one will bother us.” He said this last rather feelingly, for a clattering in the kitchen announced Derien’s arrival home from school.

  “Brilliant,” Mieka declared. “We are all of us and each of us collectively and separately absolutely brilliant.”

  Chapter 5

  Books piled up around him as he searched through his grandfather’s library for something that would help him stage an angled presentation, and how it might affect the bounce of magic. Then, on a soggy gray afternoon, Mistress Mirdley marched into his bedchamber without knocking and snatched a heavy volume right out of his hand.

  “Downstairs. Now.”

  Cade had a moment of sheer panic—Derien? Had something happened to Derien? No, he thought, searching her face as he got to his feet. There was a grimness to her harsh features, a tightness to the lines of her mouth, but no grief. Aware that questions would gain him no answers, he followed her down the stairs to the front hall.

  Mieka and Hadden Windthistle were there, brushing rain off the cloaks they had just hung up. The two men turned at the sound of footsteps. Mieka looked subdued. Hadden looked solemn.

  “Beholden, Mistress,” he said. “Good afternoon, Cayden. Is there perhaps someplace we can sit down?”

  Mistress Mirdley pointed to the drawing room door. “Tea,” she said, as stingy with her words today as a full-blooded Goblin, and departed for the kitchen.

  When they were seated, Hadden glanced at Mieka and then looked Cayden straight in the eyes. “I’m very sorry, Cade. There’s been an accident. Your father is dead.”

  He waited for something more. No, that was all. The father he hadn’t seen to speak to in longer than he could remember … never more than a vague presence someplace in Gallantrybanks, unless he was traveling with Prince Ashgar … to Seekhaven, mostly, for Trials, where Zekien had never so much as acknowledged his own son’s presence either onstage or off …

  Was Cade supposed to cry? Should he express some sort of sorrow? He wasn’t that much of a hypocrite. He decided that he was, in fact, rather shocked. Zekien was still quite a young man, by Wizardly standards. Just fifty-one. No age at all.

  “Accident?” he asked.

  Mieka threw an apprehensive glance at his own father, then said, “It was—the circumstances—oh, Hells, Quill! He took some strange kind of thorn last night and this morning they found him dead in his room at the Palace.”

  Now Cade was well and truly shocked. Thorn? His father?

  “Master Lullfinch,” Hadden said quietly, “has a new mixture, it seems. Spiralspin, he calls it. Among the effects are visions and illusions—deliriums, in fact—”

  “And a raging cock-rise,” Mieka interrupted. “No sense trying to pretty it up, Fa. He obviously took it to—um—renew the fires, as it were.”

  When one considered what Zekien’s position had been in Ashgar’s household, it was scant wonder he’d tried such a thing. And considering that Master Lullfinch owned an exclusive brothel called the Finchery, it was even less of a wonderment that he’d cooked up a recipe to stimulate flagging desire. Lullfinch, who had once given Mieka’s wife a business card that had led to all sorts of trouble.

  “Princess Miriuzca sent to us at Wistly with the news,” Hadden went on. “She thought it would be easier for you, coming from friends.”

  Cade nodded politely. “Does my mother know?”

  “Probably. Would you like us to stay until Derien gets home from school?”

  “I’ll tell him. Beholden for the offer.”

  Mistress Mirdley came in then with the tea tray. On it, in addition to the pot and cups and saucers and spoons, the milk jug and the sugar bowl, was a small bottle of whiskey. The Trollwife departed and Cade poured out, liberally dosing his own and Mieka’s cups, obedient when Hadden shook his head. They drank in silence.

  “I’m told that they’ve packed up all his things from his Palace chambers,” Hadden said at last. “I asked the Princess’s man to have it all sent here.”

  “Beholden,” Cade repeated.

  They sat for a while, listening to the crackling of the fire.

  It was Hadden who once more broke the quiet by clearing his throat awkwardly. “I don’t like leaving you alone here, Cade, but I have a customer coming by before dinner.”

  Mieka said at once, “I’ll stop awhile, if it’s all right with Cade.”

  It made little difference to him, but he held himself from the dismissive shrug that would have been an insult. He saw Mieka’s father out the front door, wrapped in a plain black cloak and wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the rain. Returning to the drawing room, he caught Mieka taking a swig directly from the whiskey bottle.

  “Put that down.”

  Those big, changeable eyes blinked wide. “Huh?”

  “Just go easy on the drink, all right?”

  The Elf set the bottle carefully on the tea tray, tilted his head to one side, and asked, “You’ve had another Elsewhen about me, haven’t you?”

  At least he could answer with the truth—Mieka always knew when he was lying, anyway. He always saw it. “No.” And the fact was that he hadn’t. “But wasn’t one of the reasons Rafe wanted some time off that we should all stop using so much thorn and liquor?”

  “You, maybe. You’re the one who bollixed the show that night.” Then—and it was obvious in his face—he thought better of sniping at someone who’d just lost his father, and said, “Sorry, Quill. Quite the shocker, this.”

  The words were so much like the ones Mieka had spoken in the dream that Cade had to turn away. He looked into the fire for a time, and all he could see was the yellow of the flames. Yellow, like that shirt Mieka had been wearing—and something to do with a yellow shirt tugged at his memory. It pulled no threads free to be followed back to their source. Perhaps it had been in an Elsewhen that he’d deliberately forgotten. The more fool he.

  “I know you weren’t close,” Mieka went on. “But he was your father.”

  “No oftener than was
convenient.” With a shrug, he sat back down in one of his mother’s spindly little wooden chairs. His chairs now, he supposed, being the eldest son and heir. Dreadful thought. “Beastly weather today, innit?”

  “Oh, c’mon, Quill. I’m not sayin’ you should crumble down weeping, or wear mourning for a year. You gotta feel something, y’know.” He made an abortive reach for the whiskey bottle, then settled back in his chair. “Your mother will be home soon, I’d imagine. You’ll have to think up something to say to her, at the very least.”

  “No, I’ve an idea she’ll stay at the Palace as long as possible. Collapse in tears—tastefully, of course, even decoratively if she can manage it—and be fussed over by the Queen’s Ladies, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she manages to spend the night in somebody’s bedchamber, unless she can arrange to be driven home in one of the Queen’s carriages.”

  Mieka looked truly shocked. “She’s not that bad!”

  “I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.” He glanced up as someone made emphatic use of the door knocker outside. “That’ll be Father’s rubbish.”

  It was. Five footmen wearing Prince Ashgar’s livery brought in two large wooden crates and a coffer old enough that Grandfather Cadriel might have used it on the Circuits. Cade directed the men to put everything in the drawing room, and tipped them a couple of coins on their way out. Touchstone was solvent again, and he had to start behaving like it.

  The first crate, its nails pried up with a fire iron, contained just what Cade had predicted: rubbish. Clothes, mainly, plus a large collection of unmatched buttons; broken boot laces; empty ink bottles; a rusty flint-rasp; one of those glass neck-cloth rings, Mieka’s idea that had been briefly popular and made Blye such a tidy profit, finely worked but chipped at one corner; shirts that needed mending and stockings that needed darning; and a whole slew of slippers, shoes, and boots in various stages of wear and disrepair.