Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  He shrugged. “Just as you please. I’ll see you’re taken care of, but only if you don’t make a fuss. And that means Jindra stays with me.”

  “You’ll never take my child away from me!”

  “Pull up a chair, make yourself comfortable, and watch me.”

  “You can’t!”

  “Fight me, and it’ll be back to workin’ for a livin’, and you’ve had all these years of doin’ as you like.” He deliberately coarsened his accent, mocking her. “Back to Frimham with you, me girl, paradin’ about all frustled up in your mum’s makin’s—”

  It was an odd thing: even weeping with frustration and shaking with rage, she was exquisite. He wondered why he didn’t fall onto the bed and take her right here and now. Who was this man who didn’t want her anymore?

  “You think you’re the only man as wants me?” she taunted. “You think there aren’t dozens of them—hundreds!—who’d do anything I ask?”

  She was counting on the piercing jealousy she had worked on to such powerful effect for so many years. Mayhap she was right to do so; he did feel a stinging like acid. But only for a moment.

  “Yeh, I don’t doubt there’s hundreds who’d walk through a mile of Wizardfire or stare down a real live dragon, just in the hopes of a smile. I oughta know. I was one of ’em. You go and do whatever it is you want. Jindra stays.”

  “No!”

  Anger began to nip at him again. But not jealousy. How odd. He’d spent years bristling with possessive wrath whenever any other man so much as looked at her. It really was singularly strange to feel … nothing.

  Except that he did feel something. He’d not allow his little girl to be trained up as a Witch.

  “I know things about you, too,” he said grimly. “What if I was to mention that what they chanted that night at Great Welkin is true?”

  “No it’s not!” A breath later she gave the game away with a panicked cry. “You wouldn’t fucking dare! If you whisper a word of it, you condemn Jindra, too! Witch-blood runs in the female line—if I am, so is she!”

  “And that’s why she’s staying here. I’ll have no more of your mum’s teachings to poison her. No more ‘silver needles and golden stitches.’” He tucked his shirt into his trousers, and the heavy silver bracelet caught on a belt loop. Too bulky for his wrist, weighing down his hand when he worked—on purpose, he knew that now. Replacement marriage-gift for the originals, thin and slithery, which she’d got him because he hadn’t wanted a necklace or a ring. Bracelets could be tucked away, hidden, invisible beneath shirt cuffs. A chain would have glinted around his neck, and a ring would have shone from his hand. He’d hidden her away, just the same as the bracelets, pushing her out of his mind while he roamed Albeyn and bedded whomever he fancied and behaved like a lust-struck sixteen-year-old newly liberated from an all-boys school. Whatever had gone wrong between him and her, he was willing to take his share of the blame. He’d admit to his full portion of lies, his shameful part in this farce of a marriage, with its heavy, shiny symbols weighing down his hands.

  He’d kept forgetting to have his mother or Blye or someone seal the silver bracelets with magic. He could take them off now without pain. He undid each clasp in turn, glancing at the inscription on one small, flat silver disk: his name, hers, the date of their wedding. It turned out that there was pain, but only a little. Tossing the bracelets onto the bed, he told her, “Here—I’m guessing you might be short on coin, so take these. Might be worth a bit, enough to get you back to Hilldrop, anyways.”

  As he sat down to pull on his boots, she snatched up one bracelet and threw it at him. It glanced off his shoulder. He arched a brow at her and returned his attention to his boots.

  “Mieka! It’s the middle of the night! He’ll slam the door in your face!”

  “Maybe so.” It was a possibility. Not a strong one, but it was possible that Cade wouldn’t believe him, wouldn’t listen to anything he had to say. It was possible that he could explain himself until next Wintering and Cade wouldn’t believe him. But that was all right. He could be patient. The Lord and the Lady and all the Angels and Old Gods knew Cade had been amazingly patient with him.

  Stamping his feet into the boots, he stood up and grabbed his jacket. It occurred to him that this would be the last time he’d ever see her alone—certainly the last time he’d look on her naked body in a bed. He tried to remember a time when this would have broken his heart.

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” he repeated. “You’ll hear from Master Burningcrag within the fortnight. You can have the house—”

  “Go back to that squalid little village? When I could crook my finger and have—”

  “—have a silk-lined bedchamber in a mansion here in Gallybanks? Have fun deciding which of ’em it’s to be. And be sure to let me know. I’ll need the address, so I can send the divorce papers.”

  Chapter 18

  Oh, Gods. What have I done?

  It was very late, long past curfew. There were one or two hire-hacks available in the streets. Mieka chose to walk to Redpebble Square.

  What have I done?

  He knew what he wanted to do: get drunk. Return to Wistly, find his thorn-roll, and—

  Oh, yeh, that would mend everything, wouldn’t it?

  Better he should throw it into the fire. He remembered that Jeska had done the same thing years ago, and how furious he’d been, foolishly taking a swing at the masquer. He’d ended up flat on the floor, laid out by an expert, efficient fist.

  Actually, unconscious sounded like a good thing to be right now.

  Surely he could not have just said and done what sharp clear memory told him was true. For the sake of a few lies—which hadn’t even caused that much trouble, when it came down to it—he was about to divorce his wife. The woman he adored. The most beautiful …

  What have I done?

  He tripped off the curb and into the cobbled street and cursed floridly. For a few minutes it felt as if he’d twisted his foot right off his ankle. Back on the pavement, he limped past a block of flats, the music of lutes and singing voices floating down from the upper floors. He recognized one of Briuly Blackpath’s songs and walked faster. Elf-light lamps were plentiful in this stylish section of Gallybanks. He left it behind, venturing into neighborhoods darker and shabbier, his ankle throbbing. He forced himself to be alert for pickers and lifters and plain unvarnished thugs. No knives in his boots, no blade tucked against his back—what had he been thinking, to go out unarmed?

  He avoided Chaffer Stroll, for some of the whores there knew him. Not because he had patronized them—he’d never paid for bedsport in his life—but from the Touchstone placards posted all along Beekbacks Lane. In fact, on almost every street his own face smirked at him. Jinsie and Kazie had evidently ordered up new designs: TOUCHSTONE written down the right-hand side, and individual imagings of himself or Cade or Rafe or Jeska, four times life-size. He frowned at his own face, not liking it that each member of Touchstone was set apart from the others on these new placards. Part of something worth being part of …

  What have I done?

  Rounding a corner into a better neighborhood, he encountered Cayden’s face, stark black lines on bleak white posterboard; severe, unsmiling, cold—not his Quill at all. Yet it was that face and those eyes that gave him his answer. What had he done? He’d grown up.

  He couldn’t say that he liked it much.

  No wonder he hadn’t recognized himself.

  Sober. Unmoved by beauty that had hitherto rendered him helpless and quivering with desire. No longer willing to gloss over what he knew to be lies, just for the sake of keeping a woman who had never truly been his. Aware now, without lying to himself, of what she was—and filled with a new and unyielding resolve that his daughter would never be like her.

  Was it a feature of sobriety to see things as they really were? And, worse, to know that there was no haven to be found in all the things that had made the world more bearable?

  He kicked at a mounti
ng block, snorting through his nose at the sharp stubbing of his toe and the renewed pain in his ankle. Childish, foolish—he wasn’t a little boy anymore. He wasn’t even a grown man playing (rather desperately sometimes) at being a little boy. Elf-lights, luminous with fear, glinted off hanging signs and shop windows, and he paused to study his own dim reflection. A child and a fool and the best glisker in the Kingdom because of those things—or mayhap in spite of them.

  He wasn’t deep, like Cayden. He didn’t like poking around his own insides, picking himself apart just to see how everything worked. He didn’t spend his time studying other people to figure out their motivations, their emotions. It was enough for him to observe how those emotions were expressed, and use those impressions in his work, evoke them in an audience through his skill and his magic and his withies.

  He’d felt so happy tonight after the performance. So alive. Onstage was where he belonged. Being a part of Touchstone was his truest identity, the thing he had chosen for himself, the only thing that could crush him if he got it wrong. He’d come scarily close at times, too drunk or thorned to give the audience everything they’d come for. Never again, he promised himself. He would never betray his partners or himself onstage again.

  Offstage … he was a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a friend. He’d done badly at all those much too often. But he’d do better. He swore he would do better.

  Again it struck him as being uniquely odd, that the sober confrontation with his wife had nudged him without his even knowing it towards the truth. And the truth was that he could have one of two things: the work and the people he loved, or the reckless delights of being thornlost or drunk or both. He could be a better man for his daughter and parents and siblings and Touchstone, for Blye and Chat and all his other friends … or remain a foolish child.

  He had reached Redpebble Square without realizing it. The bricks and bushes of the central garden were lumpy snow-shapes, the paths between them cleared by a weathering witch. He thought the word and flinched away from it.

  Gods, why couldn’t he have left well enough alone?

  There was a tavern a few blocks away. He’d been there with Quill. He could go there tonight. He had coin for a few drinks. He could go back to being—

  There wasn’t any going back, and he knew it. Just like the morning at Ginnel House, there was no going back to ignorance.

  But what use was he to anyone, if not as a clown? That, too, was something he’d chosen for himself. What if the drink and the thorn were what made him funny? What if without them he was a bore?

  He had no Elsewhens, but he did have an active imagination. He could never have succeeded in his profession otherwise. He saw himself sober, upright, earnest, conscientious … never. He couldn’t be that way if he wanted to, and the Lord and Lady knew he wanted to about as much as he wanted to go back to Wistly and his wife. To go back to being stupidly, adoringly blind.

  If he did what he’d just promised himself he would do, it had to be for himself. He couldn’t shove it all onto other people, because even people one loved—mayhap especially the people one loved—could disappoint. In a moment of anger or a perceived betrayal, he could blame them if he took a few drinks too many or sought out Master Bellgloss for a quick infusion of thorn.

  He saw that with vicious clarity. Damn Cayden, anyway. It was all his fault, taking him to Ginnel House and making him see. That had been the start of it. He understood that now. If not for that one rainy morning, Mieka would be in his own bed at Wistly Hall right now, making delirious love to the incomparably beautiful woman who belonged to him.

  The woman who had lied to him again and again. The Witch who did and thought and spoke as her mother bade her. Who had never betrayed him with her body but had betrayed him with her words—was he right in thinking that the latter was somehow worse than the former? She had loved him; she probably still did. But she had never really been his.

  He limped slowly across the brick square between ugly lumps of snow-shrouded shrubs. He fixed his gaze on the door of Number Eight, and knew that here was his reason for not going back. Whatever else he was, whatever his own actions had made of him, he’d been born with a glisker’s magic. It defined him. The work was the truest expression of himself. Proof? It made him happy. Not liquor nor thorn nor bedding his wife had ever made him as happy as being part of Touchstone. Without it …

  He tried to imagine Cayden without pen and ink, Cayden without all those words. He didn’t have to imagine Cayden without the Elsewhens; he knew exactly what that looked like, felt like. Cade hadn’t been truly himself without them, any more than Mieka could be truly himself without the work.

  If he did this, if he swore off thorn and limited his drinks to one after a performance, it had to be for himself. Nobody else. Just him. The alternative was a long, sluggish deterioration into someone he was certain sure that Cade had seen more than once in his Elsewhens.

  “Mieka?”

  Cade’s voice. Cade, standing in the open doorway of Number Eight, blinking with sleepy surprise. Mieka felt the prickle of his knuckles that meant he’d knocked them hard and repeatedly on the door.

  “Can I stay here tonight?”

  “Sure.”

  Mieka stepped into the entryway, shrugging out of his cloak—the fur-trimmed cloak that was so easily identifiable to the “witnesses” of events at Great Welkin. He didn’t remember grabbing it on his way out of Wistly. Handing it to Cade, who hung it next to his own and Derien’s coats, he said, “No, I don’t want to talk about it. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.”

  “All right,” Cade said warily.

  Relenting just a little, Mieka smiled a rueful smile. “I had trouble enough finding words to explain it to myself. Don’t make me do it all over again, Quill, not tonight!”

  “And maybe not ever.” Cade nodded, still bewildered but willing to wait for understanding. He pulled his dressing gown closer around him. “C’mon, it’s cold.”

  Ah, but that was where Cade was wrong. Cold outside, yes; here, inside, climbing the stairs, Mieka was warm. Safe. Cade would help him if he needed it. He wasn’t fool enough to think that he’d never need anyone’s help. The habits of years would take time to overcome. Still …

  “No more long breaks like this, all right? We have to work, Quill. We all get a little crazy when we don’t work.”

  “Just not like the last two years. Not anyplace and everyplace that’ll hire us.”

  “Right. But takin’ weeks and weeks off from the stage … that’ll come eventually, when we’re too old and feeble to hold the withies, so why rush it?” He flung a glance over his shoulder as he reached a landing. “How old did you say you were in that Elsewhen?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “And losin’ your hair.”

  “Don’t remind me!”

  But the grin belied the groan, and Mieka knew that he’d enjoy being reminded for the next nineteen years.

  Jindra would be all grown up by then. Hells, she would probably have made him a grandfather. And it was another odd thing on this night of oddities that this new man he had become didn’t shy back from the thought of growing older, and actually found himself rather looking forward to it.

  * * *

  If it was work that Mieka wanted, Jinsie and Kazie delivered it and then some.

  With the Shadowshapers no longer performing together, Touchstone was the most besought theater group in Albeyn. Though the lucrative season of Wintering was over, boredom was always a factor everywhere but Gallantrybanks, and requests came in from all over the Kingdom. They accepted those that required only two nights’ travel, but refused (politely) everything else. For one thing, Mieka had his divorce proceedings to consider. For another, Cade was in the process of selling Number Eight, Redpebble Square.

  It belonged to him now, according to his father’s will. Lady Jaspiela was livid about it, but there was nothing she could do. Cade told her she could have half the sale price to establish herself in congenial lodgin
gs wherever she pleased, but he’d be using the other half to buy a place on the river. Derien would be living with him. End of discussion.

  Finding this new home had been the result of one of Mieka’s long walks through the city. Sometimes Cade or Dery accompanied him; sometimes he was alone. Since childhood he’d explored nearly every part of the city from the Plume eastwards along the river, and his profession had taken him to most of the other sections in hire-hacks. On the days when he felt good, he deliberately chose routes that would take him past as many taverns as possible, and smugly congratulated himself on not entering any of them. When he was feeling the grinding, aching need for a drink, he stayed near the river, trudging through districts of grand mansions or wharfs and warehouses and manufactories.

  One night, when he was especially thirsty, and his tongue remembered the taste of whiskey, and his blood sliced through his veins like shattered withies with the lack of it, he decided he deserved the torture of a walk down Curglaff Road, where sailors and dockhands could find an open tavern at any time of the day or night and constables never, ever enforced curfew. The street name had its origins in a warning, for the buildings and the pavement outside them fetched right up to the steepest part of the riverbank. With no barrier to keep the unwary (or the very drunk) on dry land, a curglaff’s “sudden shock of icy water” was a very real danger. Mieka walked down one side of the street, forcing himself to look in at the windows of each and every tavern, then turned at the end and walked up the other side, his hands almost shaking. Then a brace of ludicrously drunken men burst out a door, lurched into the street, and were vehemently sick all over themselves and each other. Mieka stood awhile and watched them stumble upright, go down on their knees, yark again, and finally stagger to their feet, laughing like candidates for permanent residence at the Shelter, where Cade’s insane uncle had spent the last forty years of his life.

  They were filthy, sloppy, contemptible, and disgusting. And either one of them could have been him.

  He hurried back to Redpebble Square, needing to feel the warm safety of just being in the same house with Cade.