by Melanie Rawn
“But the expression of it,” Vered broke in, “can be beautiful. Simply its expression, in words and pictures—getting it out, that’s a worthwhile thing for the creator—”
“—and when an audience sees what he’s done with this not-very-pretty something inside him,” Bexan said quickly, “that he has made from it a play that makes them think and respond—”
“—and apply it to themselves, to improve their own lives—”
“—interior or exterior—”
“—then even a thing that started out ugly becomes beautiful because it has value,” Vered concluded triumphantly, raising his water glass to his wife. A glance told him it was empty; he grimaced sheepishly, poured from the pitcher, and toasted Bexan. She covered her face with her fingers and giggled—an oddly girlish sound to be coming from this earnest, self-possessed woman.
At this point, Mieka would have said something mischievous about being dizzy from swiveling his head back and forth to follow the conversation, worse than a battledore match. This occurred to Cayden, but he didn’t say it. He recognized that this subject was something they had often discussed between them, refining ideas. Further, he saw several other things: that they were glad of an audience, an audience who moreover understood exactly what it was a tregetour did; that Bexan was only the second woman he’d ever met who could speak of such things with real knowledge, leave alone authority; and that Vered was superlatively happy with this woman who understood him and his work. Cade wanted the same thing for himself and knew he was unlikely to find it except with the only other woman he’d ever met who knew theater—and he had no idea when or if he’d ever see Megs again.
Vered was summing things up for Cade’s benefit. Cade hoped he wasn’t expected to argue any of the points, or even to think about them just now. He’d succeeded in depressing himself anew with wondering about Megs. It would take more to distract him than Vered’s announcing that the worth of any work had to be judged by the actions it provoked, and if these weren’t good, then the work had no value at all. Cade nodded; Vered looked slightly disappointed; Bexan gestured to the servants to clear the table.
“Shall we relax in my drawing room?” she asked the men, and led the way.
But for the carpets, her drawing room was entirely black. Walls, curtains, furniture, upholstery, everything from the fireplace bricks to the candlebranches hanging from the ceiling, all of it was black, except for the rugs, which were white with black patterns. These were no two alike, and competed with the shadows thrown by candles and firelight until one was uncertain which was which. The idea, Cade guessed, was that one felt that there were shadows, rather than actually saw them individually. Which was as nice and neat a representation of Vered’s former partners as anything he could have come up with even if he’d thought it out with both hands for a fortnight.
Bexan indicated a comfortably deep chair, black velvet on black walnut with black tapestry pillows. Cayden sank into it, extending his legs towards the fire. The dancing red and gold and orange flames were a relief to look at; so was the swirl of blue and gold in the blown glass of the brandy snifter Vered handed him.
“Just for you, Cade,” he said with a grimace, and went to sit in a chair next to his wife’s. Cade noted how effectively the room emphasized Vered’s hair and Bexan’s skin, leaching from it the faint blue Piksey tint. Her pallid face seemed to float in an aura of black; his white-blond hair formed an Angel’s halo around his dark face. Cade amused himself by speculating on the effectiveness of such a set onstage: all one color but for whatever one wanted the audience to notice—or, no, what the audience should notice instead of what was really important in the room … it had interesting possibilities for teasing the audience’s expectations—
—much like the play Vered had staged on his own last winter, with a hired glisker, masquer, and fettler. Cade remembered this just in time to keep his mouth shut regarding notions of mucking about with perceptions. The play had not been a raging success. Intended as a present for his sons, to lure their mother into bringing them to the theater so Vered could see them, it had featured a boy searching for a girl he’d glimpsed only once. The lovelorn, perquesting youth drifted through various fantastical scenes, traveling in a hire-hack plastered all over, including the wheels and harness, with broadsheets whose black-and-white headlines screamed the breakup of the Shadowshapers. Eventually the young man caught sight of the girl down by a river. Gigantic flowers of yellow and green, transparent and shining, grew beside the arch of a stone bridge, and as the hack came to the middle of the span, the rest of the scene vanished. The youth hovered above rushing pink water—supported not even by the bridge—calling frantically for his love as stars twinkled like a scattering of diamonds in the clear blue sky.
This stars-in-daylight scene was as far as the audience had allowed the play to get. No glisker could have evoked emotions powerful enough, and no fettler could have spread them compellingly enough through the theater, to keep people in their seats, not when their perceptions were being jumbled like that. They walked out severally and then in groups, muttering that Goldbraider had lost his touch and mayhap his mind. Vered had pretended not to care that much. His children hadn’t been in the audience anyway.
But the tale of the great Vered Goldbraider’s humiliation had wildfired through Gallantrybanks and the length and breadth of Albeyn. Cade’s own mortification with “Turn Aback” was nothing to it. He was very glad he’d remembered Vered’s play in time not to mention anything that could be remotely connected to it.
Vered settled into his chair, a thing of cast iron painted black and cushioned with velvet pillows, adopting a lord-of-the-manor pose and a grin.
“Finished it,” he said.
Cade knew instantly what he was talking about. “Finally? Well done!”
“After so many years of writing and research—and then rewriting after the research turned up something new—curse you for that, Cayden Silversun!—I have the thing the way I want it.”
Cade raised his glass. “Magnificent, I trust.”
“Of course,” Bexan purred. “Only now he must find someone to perform it with.”
He had the sudden, hideous thought that perhaps, after the catastrophe of hiring a glisker, fettler, and masquer, Vered wanted Touchstone to present the play—or to borrow the rest of Touchstone while Cade stood around backstage, unheeded and useless.
But that wasn’t what Vered had in mind at all. Looking anywhere but at his wife, he said, “Been thinking about that. A lot. And it occurred to me that mayhap we left money on the table, as it were. The Shadowshapers, I mean.”
“It isn’t the money,” Cade said. He knew this man. More to the point, he knew how much the Shadowshapers had made during the time they’d been out on their own, turning their backs on the Royal Circuit. “You’ve more than enough. It’s the work, Vered. The work.”
“Well…”
“Nobody could do it the way you four could.” It was only what Vered wanted to hear. It also had the virtue of being true.
Vered’s gaze drifted from side table to window to door: a blackness as lacking in answers as whiteness would be. No shades of gray here—Cade found it intriguing that Vered’s black eyes sought the flickering fire in the hearth. “That’s a thing, yeh.”
Bexan murmured, “We’ve looked for gliskers and fettlers. None were good enough.”
He was very glad he hadn’t mentioned that wreck of a play. “They can take direction,” he guessed, “but have no ideas of their own.” When Bexan’s eyebrows arched almost to her hairline, he added swiftly, “—that they can use in service to the work. Your work, I mean.” He regarded first one and then the other of them, then thought about that painting of an empty stage. There had been arguments between the two of them, he felt certain. So now they were discussing it with him, with an eye to … what?
“Would you like me to approach Chat and the others?” he asked softly.
Vered nodded, palpably relieved that Ca
de had got the idea. “You can be subtle. You can sound them out, sideways-like. You can—”
“It would be Vered’s play, without question,” Bexan interrupted. “They would have to understand that from the outset.”
Each group worked differently, of course, according to talents and personalities, but every group’s members analyzed and contributed to each piece. Everyone had a say. Everyone in the best theater groups, anyway. Greater than the sum of the individuals—part of something worth being part of—
“I’ll see what I can do,” Cade said.
Vered nodded gratefully, Bexan graciously enough but with less enthusiasm. It was clear to Cade that however reluctantly they had reached this decision, they both knew that Vered’s work required the best performers they knew.
“Mayhap you’d care to hear her latest?” Vered asked Cayden, who understood at once that this was his peace offering to his wife for gulping down enough pride to ask for help.
Just how Cade would go about helping, he had no idea. Imaginary conversations played out in his head, and always ended badly. He sat in that remorselessly black chair, listening to Bexan read her own work, and wondered how much of Vered’s balaurin play had been influenced by his wife. Her words were good, but as a play, this piece being recited for him now would be impractical to perform. That was the difference, he mused, between professionals and amateurs, no matter how talented. Whatever Bexan might have contributed to her husband’s play, it was Vered who knew what worked onstage.
Amateurs, he further reflected, were always absolutely convinced that the way they’d written the thing was the way it absolutely must be performed. No changes. No compromises. The mark of the professional was the ability to see difficulties and make changes to solve them—and to listen when the professionals one worked with pointed out problems. One could not get so caught up in one’s own brilliant visions that flaws were never admitted and altering even one word was like a dagger to the guts. “Turn Aback” had taught him that lesson; Vered had learned it with the play about the girl and the boy and the diamond sky—
And all at once he heard Bexan’s voice screaming. An Elsewhen, not the here and now. Blood on her hands—screaming, screaming—
Chapter 8
Nothing good would come of this night, Mieka was sure. He hadn’t wanted to go to Great Welkin. Now he was here, and he wanted to be someplace else. Anyplace else. But his wife had been so delighted by the invitation that he couldn’t deny her. This would be her first foray into real Society, the kind that was always capitalized in the broadsheets, with all the famous names printed in bold type. Were the name Windthistle to appear thus, she and her mother would be in ecstasies.
He’d had a weak moment yesterday night, mentioning that it would be a long drive there, a long evening, and a long drive back, with another long night to follow as the Windthistles and all their friends celebrated Wintering. He ought to have known better. He ought to have kept his mouth shut.
That her pleas had included a lot of “Mum says” and “Mum told me” merely made him shrug. Her mother was not a happy topic of conversation. Back when they’d first found out that Touchstone wasn’t just broke but also deeply in debt, Mistress Caitiffer had raged at him for so thoughtlessly endangering her daughter and granddaughter. “Everything we’ve worked for, everything we have—all at risk because of your stupidity! And if you’re thinking to sell this house to help pay the debts, think again, boy!” Further, it was her opinion that his share of the proceeds ought to be bigger than Cayden’s, for he had a family to support and Cade did not. “His parents are still alive to support his little brother, aren’t they?” And she didn’t see why they all had to contribute to paying off what she saw as individual debt. “Reckon up whose bills are whose! Why should my daughter suffer because Threadchaser bought his mother new furniture for the parlor? Pay your own debts, not theirs!”
Mieka wondered if it was a symptom of growing up that he hadn’t pointed out the obvious: that if divvied up strictly by who had bought what—and never mind the mess Kearney Fairwalk had made with ordering things in their name for his own properties—Mieka’s share would more than likely have been the biggest of all. His wife spent whatever he gave her and then some. This amount had to be greatly reduced while Touchstone was struggling, and Mieka had heard about it. Vehemently.
No, her mother was not a preferred subject for discussion. But last night Mieka had hidden his annoyance at his wife’s constant references to her mother’s advice, and to end it had taken her onto his knee, listening with a smile as she told him how she’d decided on the color and cut of her new gown. Not that anyone who would be there had seen any of her old ones, but they were old, or at least not new, and there was something about wearing new clothes that gave additional confidence. He understood that right enough, recalling that first Trials, that first performance at the Kiral Kellari. There was an extra and often vital bit of self-assurance that came with knowing there wasn’t a single loose stitch or remnant of a stain to betray poverty—and knowing, too, how good he looked. So she had made herself a new gown. And he had a new jacket and trousers to match his favorite of the wondrous embroidered waistcoats she had made for him over the years. As they dressed that evening in their room at Wistly Hall, she chattered about who would be there and what they might say to her and she to them, ending with, “And Mum says that Lady Jaspiela has had a falling-out with the Archduchess and won’t be there! Imagine it, Mieka, we’re going to a party where Lady Jaspiela Silversun isn’t invited!”
This was a life she dreamed about: wealth, fame, elegance, admiring mention in the most fashionable broadsheets, glances directed at her wherever she went that paid tribute not only to her beauty but to her social standing as well. Mieka didn’t comprehend her ambitions himself; perhaps it was because Windthistle was one of the oldest of Elfen names, and perhaps it was because he’d met plenty of the nobility and been bored silly by them—not to mention having been swizzed to near-bankruptcy by one of their highborn number.
Still, he loved his wife, and seeing her in her new pale pink silk gown with gold lace trim, her bright hair swirling into a high pile of braids and curls set off by thin brown velvet ribbons, he was exhilarated at the prospect of showing her off. The stiffened collar rose up around her jaw and behind her head like an opened pink calla lily, framing that exquisite face in a much more elegant manner than the newly fashionable starched ruffs ever could. But for all the modesty of long sleeves (necessary in this weather), she was exposed from throat nearly to nipples, with the pink pearl he’d given her resting just above the deep cleft of her breasts. She was the most beautiful thing he or anyone else had ever seen, and she was his.
And any man who sought to change that would repent of it at the point of Mieka’s blade.
It had turned out that he was rather good with sharpened steel of varying length and lethalness. Not surprising about the knives; the dexterity required for plying one withie after another onstage served him well when it came to daggers. With a sword, though, he hadn’t expected to be this good this soon. Neither had his instructor, who supplemented his income at the King’s College by giving private lessons.
“Not built for it in reach,” Master Flickerblade had told him. “Needs Wizard blood for that. Height, long bones. But you Elves—rarely do I see such as your kind for speed, and that will do you fine, just fine. And you’ve a sharp eye and you keep your wits about you. Theater training, I expect.”
His instructor was descended, like Jeska Bowbender and many others, from a foreign soldier who had fought for the King in the Archduke’s War and stayed on in Albeyn. Unlike Jeska, he showed no signs of magical inheritance. Human to his toenails he was, and so accomplished with any sort of steel that Mieka understood why the Archduke had lost. Send Flickerblade up against any dozen other men, no matter how armed and armored, and within the space of a dozen breaths a dozen corpses would litter the landscape.
The lessons had come about because of Mieka
’s determination never to be caught again in any situation where he couldn’t defend himself with more than magic—at which, lacking a withie, he was admittedly not very good. He hadn’t anticipated enjoying himself. As he was naturally indolent except when onstage, the hard exercise required ought to have made him cancel the lessons on the first afternoon. Yet from the beginning he thought of it as a dance, just as his glisking technique was a dance, and what he wielded could be just as dangerous. He also found that if he kept up with his practice, he could drink as much as he pleased without consequence to his waistline. So, all in all, the decision to hire Master Flickerblade was a grand success. He’d never had to use his developing skills yet in earnest, but they were there if he needed them.
And, truthfully, it was most satisfying to be good—really good—at something besides glisking.
Tonight, even though he was headed for Great Welkin, the very place where he’d vowed to learn swordsmanship after an unpleasant encounter in that horrible ballroom, he’d left his long blades at home. At his back, in a special sheath disguised by careful tailoring, was a six-inch knife, steel with a thistle and leaves inlaid along the blade, hilt tipped with an amethyst; a short plain knife was in each of his tall boots. Rafe teased him about this new fixation for armament—all very well for him, over six feet tall and more solidly built than most people with Wizardly bloodlines—but Mieka shrugged off the mockery. If they ever got into the kind of trouble they’d encountered on the Continent, with a gang of toughs chasing them for no other reason than that they were magical folk, Rafe would be singing quite the different song.
The sheath at his back had the additional advantage of making him sit up straight. His mother had nagged him since boyhood about good posture, and his glisking master had insisted on it; they would be proud of his straight spine and squared shoulders as he settled beside his wife in the new rig.