Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  Cayden had suggested that Blye and Jed take over Number Eight, using the downstairs as a reception and office space for Windthistle Brothers and the upstairs as living quarters. Jez was bespoken to a girl who was just finishing up her apprenticeship in weaving (one of the few trades that officially admitted women to its Guild), and once they were married could live at Redpebble Square as well. Rikka Ashbottle, whose Goblin teeth had been straightened and filed to Human perfection, was married now, and could live above the glassworks and handle the sales room while Blye worked at the kiln. Lady Jaspiela would have enough to buy a flat someplace fashionable. She wasn’t happy about it, but his mother’s happiness was at the bottom of Cade’s list of things to worry about. Jed and Jez could repay Cade in kind, by working on the new house.

  “Got it all arranged as neatly as one of your plays, have you?” Blye had remarked.

  “Yeh,” he’d countered, grinning, “and it’s a shame and a pity that I can’t write the rest of life the same way! But you’ll do it, won’t you? I mean, just because it’s perfect doesn’t mean you have to buck at the traces like a contrary filly.”

  “Are you calling my wife a horse?” Jed had demanded, then spoiled the effect by laughing. He ducked as Blye threw a pillow at him. “Peace, woman! All right, yes, it sounds as close to perfect as anything will ever get in this life. We’ll talk it over with Jez and Eirenn, but I can’t see that they’d have any objections.”

  All Cade needed now was enough to buy the house. He didn’t want the distraction of puzzling out what Tobalt had meant in that Elsewhen. Scared of being remembered for being there, for being the best glisker in Albeyn? Or for not being there—for being dead?

  Now Cade understood better the other Elsewhen, the one wherein he and Hadden had arranged bottles on a table like the King’s Guard on parade while Mieka lay in a drunken daze. Mieka hadn’t cared about living or dying. He’d held himself responsible for murdering Yazz. Well, Yazz was alive, and would recover—though it would be years, if ever, before he would have the use of his left arm again.

  Remembered for being dead. Cade didn’t like that idea much himself. Remembered for being alive? For the glisking, for his skills as a player … or for his pranks and jokes and hilarious outrageous stunts onstage and off?

  The work mattered to Mieka now more than it ever had, because he finally understood that it was the truest expression of who he was. It defined him, provided him with release for his impulses and emotions, left him both exhausted and elated. What Mieka felt about performing, Cade felt about writing. And he began to see that Mieka would indeed be afraid of being remembered for the faults and follies that had ended up killing him, rather than for the brilliance of his magic.

  However, living with Mieka at Redpebble Square was much the same as living with him in the wagon on the Royal Circuit. Mistress Mirdley had fixed up a bedchamber for him right next to Derien’s—the boy was ecstatic at having, as he put it, two brothers—but somehow Mieka seemed to spend most of his time in Cade’s room. To someone who required solitude and plenty of it, the presence of someone who required company and plenty of it became rather wearying.

  It took one sentence, a fortnight after Mieka moved in, to silence Cade on the subject. He’d asked if Mieka could possibly find it in his heart to go bother Mistress Mirdley or Derien or Blye or indeed anyone within a five-mile radius for the rest of the afternoon, because it really would be nice to get some work done.

  Mieka, with equal measures of shame and defiance that convinced Cade as nothing else could, replied, “I’m sorry, Quill, but you’re the only one that when I look at you, it reminds me why I threw my thorn-roll into the fire.”

  There wasn’t much Cade could say to that. So he didn’t. But it made him wonder if he wanted to spend the rest of his life watching Mieka’s every move.

  Not that the Elf had suddenly turned Angel. Cade was unsurprised when, the night his wife agreed to Mieka’s terms for divorce, he vanished after Touchstone’s performance at the Kiral Kellari and only showed up again a little after noon two days later. Where he’d been was something Cade never discovered; what he’d been doing was all too apparent.

  As Mistress Mirdley mixed a cure for a hangover, she remarked, “I hope at least that it was expensive liquor, and worth all this.”

  “It was,” muttered the Elf. “Almost.”

  Cade noted that even though he’d spent the time at the bottom of successive bottles of whiskey, he’d chosen nights when Touchstone didn’t have a gigging. Maybe Mieka really had grown up.

  Now that his soon-to-be-former wife and her mother (grandmother) had decamped from Wistly Hall, Cade expected that Mieka would move back home. He didn’t. Mishia was happy to continue caring for Jindra while the winter and spring wore on. With Trials coming up soon, Cade finally asked why Mieka was still living at Redpebble Square.

  “Not that you’re not welcome,” he added hastily. “You can stay as long as you like. I was just wondering.”

  Mieka was quiet for a moment, ruminating. “You want the nasty old truth? I’m scared to face Jindra. I don’t know what to say. Look at it, Quill—how do I tell her that I sent her mum away, and that her mum went willingly once I agreed to pay her enough money? And I just know she’s going to think it was her fault somehow, because that’s what Vered’s boys think. You said it yourself, last year when he did that play for them, and they didn’t come, and he told you their mother said some pretty awful things—”

  “All the more reason you should go home and talk to her.”

  “I’m scared to.”

  Cade opened his mouth to urge him again, then shut it. Although he’d purposely forgotten quite a few Elsewhens, bits and pieces of them lingered (probably because he’d wanted them to; he didn’t care to analyze that too deeply). Scenes like imagings, just flashes—and a couple of them had to do with Jindra, and were the source of his determination not to see her grow up spiteful and embittered. With the purchase and renovation of that house, a home for him and Dery and Mieka and Jindra and Mistress Mirdley, he considered that he was keeping his promise, however unexpected the means would be. He hoped so, anyway.

  Blye had been right about him. He wasn’t an ordinary sort of person who could live a normal life. She was right as well that he didn’t want to be ordinary. But he felt that now, with this new home, he was constructing a life that would be normal for him—and to all Hells with what anybody else thought of it. After all, Blye’s household wasn’t going to be ordinary: husbands and wives working at their chosen professions. Would so-called normal, ordinary people look askance? Who cared? Blye certainly didn’t.

  Planning which rooms would belong to whom, envisioning the life they’d lead there, he decided that normal was a word used by boring people to disapprove of those who weren’t just as boring. Normal, to Cayden, had come to mean whatever made a person happier, more productive, more at ease with himself and the world, and caused no bother to anyone else. Picturing the way he and Mieka and Derien and Jindra and Mistress Mirdley would live at the new house, he knew that it would become normal for them, and that was all that really counted. As for people who found it strange, people who disapproved … fuck ’em.

  The planned renovation would be done while Touchstone was away on the Royal Circuit. Jed and Jez would make sure the place was structurally sound, create walls to divide off rooms, install the most modern plumbing available, and oversee the placement of paving between the river stairs and the two front doors (one into Cade’s half of the house, one into Mieka’s). Mishia and Mistress Mirdley would make sure it was actually livable, with things like beds and tables, chairs and sofas, standing wardrobes and cabinets and sideboards, plus all the necessary sheets and towels and curtains. Dery would supervise the book room—Cade considered his collection too limited to be termed a library—and pick out which of the furnishings from Redpebble Square would look best and be most useful. They would also raid Wistly, with Mishia’s help. Derien had already confided a plan
to Cade that involved framing selected placards from Touchstone’s career, and a display of their Trials medals inside the boxes Blye had made.

  It was just as well that his personal life was getting itself nicely organized, because his professional life was about to become a chaos he could never have foreseen in the most detailed—or brutal—Elsewhen.

  First, there was the secret reunion of the Shadowshapers.

  Then the news that Lord Kearney Fairwalk had returned to Gallantrybanks.

  The day after, he learned that Princess Iamina and Archduchess Panshilara would be leaving in the summer for a journey to the latter’s homeland.

  And the day after that, Derien came home and announced that a competition would be held at the King’s College to select three students—those intending a career in diplomacy or in government service—to accompany the Princess and the Archduchess, and he intended to enter.

  Chapter 20

  It ought to have been impossible to keep the secret about the Shadowshapers. Yet day after day, Cade was astonished to find that almost nobody knew that they were rehearsing in the undercroft at Number Eight, Redpebble Square. Judging by the half-smiles Cade intercepted from time to time, Tobalt Fluter might have guessed, but Cade surmised that he was too excited by the prospect of a reunion to say a word to anyone who might blurt out the news and ruin everything. The most he revealed in The Nayword was that “those who know are anticipating this year’s Trials with more eagerness than at any time since the spectacular first performance by Touchstone.”

  Romuald Needler had long since sold the Shadowshapers’ wagon to Black Lightning. It had been repainted white with jagged black lightning bolts. At the time of the sale, Vered had got together with Chat and Sakary, who insisted that Rauel be included even though he and Vered were scarcely speaking to each other by then, to leave Black Lightning a little home-cozying present: a spellcasting in the firepockets that emitted a faint odor of manure whenever the things were lit. Anything stronger would have been discovered and dealt with immediately; by being subtle, they guaranteed at least a week and possibly longer of frenzied speculation—and open windows in autumn cold.

  Cade had used that fondly remembered trick to remind them—after arranging an “accidental” meeting between Vered and Rauel at Redpebble Square—that it hadn’t been all acrimony and spite amongst them. The event hadn’t been all that difficult to organize. Rauel was invited for tea. Just as he settled into a chair by the fire, Cade heard the front door open. For once in his life, Mieka was right on time. Instantly Cade began a plaintive moan about please could somebody teach Mieka a little subtlety in his pranks, like the firepockets left for Black Lightning? Rauel was laughing when Vered walked in. Cade repeated his grievance, and Mieka chimed in with protests that elegant as restraint might be, it could never be half so funny as, say, a fistful of black powder.

  Vered had looked Rauel in the eyes and said, “Aren’t you glad this mad little Elf showed up to torment Cade and not us?”

  From then on it was easy. Well, relatively easy. Once Chat and Sakary were brought in on things, Cade offered the use of Number Eight’s undercroft for rehearsals. There being two entrances to the house, Redpebble Square and Criddow Close, they could lark about with the timing and the combinations of their arrivals as they pleased. And there were so many people coming in and out these days that no one would notice four more men in the mix, what with Lady Jaspiela moving to her new flat, and some of the furniture Cade wanted for the new house going into storage, and Jed and Blye and Jez and Eirenn planning their move.

  Thus nobody—except Tobalt—outside their immediate circle knew that the Shadowshapers were together again. A few of the workmen might have guessed, but if they were familiar enough with theater to know these faces, they were, like Tobalt, eager to see this group reunited. Of course, what went on downstairs in the undercroft was known only to the Shadowshapers themselves. Not a wisp of stray magic escaped to hint at anything. Cade admired their control, but rather wished he could have a bit of a preview.

  With Redpebble Square in fairly constant uproar, his own working time was nonexistent. Touchstone was performing at least three days a week. They took overnight trips in their wagon to giggings outside Gallybanks, using those huge white horses of Needler’s and the Shadowshapers’ former driver, Rist. He had not been part of the bargain with Black Lightning—in fact, he flatly refused to work for them. Cade presumed they’d found somebody with enough muscle to control the beasts. Yazz assured them that until he was well, he was perfectly content that his good friend Rist should be on the coachman’s bench. But Yazz did summon him out to Hilldrop Crescent, where he was recovering under Robel’s stern wifely eye, to read poor Rist a long lecture on taking care of Touchstone both in the wagon and out of it.

  Cade wondered sometimes—not that he really cared—about the atmosphere at Mieka’s old home. The girl and her mother—grandmother, he still had to correct himself—lived in the cottage. Yazz and Robel and their children occupied the converted barn. Did the inhabitants of the two dwellings have anything to do with each other at all? Did they even speak? Did Yazz—or, more to the point, Robel—know that right next door was the person truly responsible for Yazz’s injury? No news reached Gallybanks of mayhem or maiming, so he assumed Robel had no idea of the truth.

  He stopped wondering and started worrying when, about a month before Trials, it was announced in the Court Circular that Lord Ripplewater’s son had married Master Mieka Windthistle’s former wife. Cade had seen in an Elsewhen what Yazz’s death would have done to the Elf. Surely the same or worse was possible now that he’d irrevocably lost the woman he’d adored. So Cade held his breath for a day, and then two, and then three, and all of a sudden a week had gone by with no outburst from Mieka. No wild binges of drink or thorn; no frenzied raging; no dire vows of vengeance; no suspicious sharpness to the emotions emanating from the withies at performances. If he wept or raged into his pillows by night, Cade didn’t hear it and those eyes didn’t betray him in the morning. He watched carefully for signs of anything, anything at all, knowing it was futile to try concealing his watchfulness. But Mieka didn’t even snarl at him to for fuck’s sake stop staring at him as if he were a stewpot on the boil. It would seem he’d taken out all his anger and misery months ago. By now he was either purged of the emotions or simply numb.

  This was unprecedented. Mieka had never been shy about expressing himself. Silence and reticence from him were unnerving.

  Cayden hadn’t really seen before how radically their lives were changing. He’d seen his new house and Mieka’s divorce as inevitabilities more certain than any Elsewhen. Cade was free of his father, his mother, the house he’d lived in all his life. Mieka was free—or so Cade hoped—of helpless passion for a woman who’d betrayed him and lied to him for years. Where both of them might journey from this place was not an inevitability. And Mieka, in choosing to abandon his habitual methods of escape, had done what Cade had never really thought he would. He’d grown up.

  Cade was appalled with himself for having even a moment’s worry that a Mieka who was no longer a child would also no longer be the glisker Touchstone needed. There was proof enough to the contrary three nights a week. He was as brilliant as ever. Mayhap now he would become even better. Who could say?

  Chances were good that there would be no hideous decline into an early death, that no one would ever say that when Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul. He’d seen it so many times … and so many of the alternatives were things seen once and never again. And sometimes on their evenings off, when they sat with Mistress Mirdley in the kitchen at Redpebble Square, drinking hot tea and just talking, Cade saw Mieka laughing and told himself that this was how it would be in the new house, too. Mine you are and mine you stay.

  So the Shadowshapers worked at Cade’s house, and Cade couldn’t get any work done at all, and one dreary afternoon Dery came home from the King’s College fairly bursting with news. He couldn’t eve
n wait to shuck off heavy layers of wool and hang it all up, but raced into the drawing room where Cade was waiting for him and their tea, shedding scarf and coat and gloves as he talked.

  Lord Kearney Fairwalk was back in Gallybanks. His own elegant residence in town had long since been let to someone else, so he was staying in a flat, two pitifully small rooms in an inferior part of town, all he could afford.

  “But here’s a puzzler for you, Cade,” Dery said as Mistress Mirdley brought their tea to the drawing room. “My way home goes past his old place, where the Scrapebolts live now, and there’s something different about the house.”

  “Different how?” Cade nodded his gratitude to the Trollwife and bit into a mocah-walnut crispie.

  Mieka came downstairs just then and pounced on the plate of crispies, muffins, and cakes. Dery waited until he’d seated himself on the floor by the fire and Mistress Mirdley had returned to the kitchen before he spoke.

  “It’s the cellar.” Sitting back in his chair, his dancing eyes belied his elaborately casual pose. Cade caught a glimpse of the diplomat Derien wanted to be—glad that for now, he was still a little brother, alight with excitement.

  “Well?” he prompted, because he knew the boy wanted prompting. “What’s in the cellar?”

  “Something he brought back with him. It wasn’t there yesterday, but it is today. Probably sneaked it in overnight. Or maybe out in the open, because it’s still his cellar, after all, and he can store things there if he chooses.”

  “What did he bring back?”

  Derien smiled.

  “Out with it!” Mieka demanded.

  But Cayden already knew. He set his cup down carefully on a side table. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  The boy shook his head. “The house is on my map, and—”

  “What map?”

  All traces of the self-possessed future ambassador were gone. Dery wriggled a bit in his chair, then burst out, “It’s of Gallybanks—most of the houses, anyway, the ones where rich people live. I started it a couple of years ago, after what happened at Piercehand’s Gallery. I don’t have to check it to know that there’s a lot more gold in that cellar today than there was yesterday. A lot.”