Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  Touchstone was favored with their usual lunching in the Castle grounds, attended by Princess Miriuzca; Lady Vrennerie; her husband, Lord Kelinn Eastkeeping; and Lady Megueris. Cade was both grateful and irritated when Mieka maneuvered him to a seat at the table next to Megs. That he no longer interested her as a bed companion was obvious by the fact that she treated him exactly as she treated everyone else. Hells, she flirted more with Jeska than with Cade. This was irritating, too. Some part of him was grateful, though, for it appeared this was the end of his own nervous anticipation whenever he was around her. He had enough to fret about these days without worrying whether or not Megs would show up at the Shadowstone Inn one night and slip into his bed. And he knew that Mieka and Rafe and Jeska—Hells, any man worth the naming as a man—would be disgusted with him.

  Vered and Rauel arrived (separately) and took up residence in the rooms named for them at the Shadowstone. Vered sneaked in at dawn one morning, but Rauel made an entrance, sauntering into the tap room at dinnertime with a bag of withies slung over his shoulder. Blye’s new sister-in-law had woven several lengths of wool in Windthistle purple and Cindercliff gray, accented with thin threads of silver and gold. From these she had made drawstring bags for Blye’s favorite customers: Touchstone, Hawk’s Claw, and the Crystal Sparks—and now the Shadowshapers. Sakary and Chat were dining with friends on the other side of town, so they missed this silent public declaration of the Shadowshapers’ intentions. Tobalt Fluter, leaning back with his chair propped against the wall while he sipped an after-dinner brandy, choked on the liquor as the chair righted itself with a soft thud. Vered laughed at him. Rafe pounded him on the back. Rauel gave them all his innocent, boyish smile.

  “Just like that fool glisker of ours to leave the most important bits at home,” he told Vered.

  “Then it’s true?” Tobalt managed in a half-strangled voice.

  “Many, many things are true, my son,” Vered intoned, examining the play of lamplight through the single glass of beer he’d been nursing all evening. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  The next day, during Touchstone’s turn in the rehearsal hall, they were joined by the Shadowshapers. At Vered’s request, they stayed to watch and comment upon a couple of scenes from Blood Plight—a play on words, for the latter meant both a “promise” and a “predicament.” The young Steward-in-training who presided over the hall during Trials this year was goggle-eyed when the Shadowshapers showed up. He was enjoined to absolute secrecy.

  “To be honest,” said Sakary, scrubbing long fingers through his dark red hair, “me mates here promised I can try out a bespelling that me old granny taught me years ago. So it makes no nevermind to me if you shout it from the rooftops. I’ve always wanted to turn somebody into a two-headed lizard who can’t agree with himself on which way to go.” He paused. “Of course, if you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t get lost.”

  “My lame hop-frog is better than your old lizard any day of the week,” scoffed Vered.

  “Shut it,” Mieka chided. “You’re scaring the lad.” He smiled kindly at the young man, who seemed half-certain he couldn’t possibly be turned into a lizard or a frog, and half-certain that if anybody could do it, the Shadowshapers could. “Just you stand right outside that door in the front hall, and make sure nobody gets in. Right? Right!”

  The first play of Blood Plight was done and dusted. The second had been seen by no one other than the Shadowshapers themselves down in the undercroft of Redpebble Square. Cade thought he might have a few ideas about what Vered would do, but had kept them to himself. He and Mieka and Rafe and Jeska sat on the floor in the middle of the hall to watch, listen, and marvel.

  To set themselves up for the concluding play, the Shadowshapers ran through a brief scene from the first. There was no scenery, no costuming, no magic at all as Rauel, the Wizard, confronted his old friend who would choose to become one of the balaurin.

  “That which troubles you, my old friend, also troubles me. How long have we known each other? How well do I know you, and you me?” Rauel’s voice was suddenly deeper, more resonant, as he met Vered’s gaze. “We are known, one to the other, after all these years. So tell me, my old friend. Share your thoughts and your fears—share your soul with me.”

  Vered replied, with a slight tremor in his voice, “With you and no one else.”

  This was real, Cade realized with a wrenching of the heart, more moved by this exchange than by anything he’d ever witnessed on a stage. He always held himself aloof from the magic, observing rather than experiencing. There was no magic here; Chat’s hands were empty; there was only the honest emotion of the words and the men speaking them. His mind began to analyze the possibilities, so clearly and poignantly demonstrated to him, of a theater with no magic at all—until he recognized that he was backing off again, uncomfortable and even a little resentful that Rauel and Vered had made him feel so much. He forced himself to pay attention, to open himself a little to what was being done onstage, because he owed it to his friends who had asked for his opinions. But an idea nagged at him that perhaps magic in theater was not so much a tool as a crutch. Did it interfere with or even prevent moments such as these, moments that were real and true? Did it compel rather than evoke emotion in an audience? Did it hide the inadequacies of a player or the players behind the flash-dazzle of—of black lightning splitting the cold white air?

  That group from the Continent—considered the best, presumably—they wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t satisfy something within their audiences. They adamantly condemned magic. Nothing to work with but wood and paint, cheap cloth and shoddy props—and words. Yes, it could be done just with words. Cayden had just had that proved to him. He’d not give up Mieka’s skills of scenery and costuming, scents and textures, tastes and sounds. What Mieka did was art. But so could the words be. In Jeska’s handling, with Cade’s own special gifts …

  What if all the maneuvering of emotion by the withies were left out? How many plays could stand on their own?

  And, the question with the most sting to it, the only question that meant anything: Are my words good enough?

  When his gaze refocused onto the rehearsal stage, Chat had clothed Rauel in a flowing blue robe over brown leather trousers and a white shirt. Vered was in chain mail, sword at his side. Cade settled down to concentrate on the scene being played out before him.

  Because it was Vered’s work, it was talky, with ideas piling up one onto another. Because Rauel had worked on it, too, there was physical movement, emotion, and a breathtakingly difficult sequence where the Wizard conjured up the aftermath of a battle, hazed with smoke and reeking of blood. The horror wasn’t in the slaughter. It was in the manner of the killing. The scores of bodies. The corresponding number of heads nearby.

  “It’s the only sure and certain way,” Vered said wearily. “The silver and the garlic, all they can ever do is repel and repulse balaurin. I know, because I’ve experimented on myself.”

  Rauel flinched. “You’re not like them!”

  “Am I not? Do you see those pathetic dead things stacked like cordwood, their heads like a mound of rocks to be smashed down to gravel? I did that! I alone! And even to accomplish only those deaths, we lost more than two hundred of our own!”

  The Wizard waved a hand, banishing the conjured scene. “Let me be clear on this. You’re saying that you cannot do it alone. That others must become like you—”

  “Like them.”

  “Like you,” the Wizard repeated forcefully. “You’re no more one of them than I am!”

  The Warrior sighed deeply. Slowly, softly, he began to walk the width of the stage towards the Wizard, talking all the while, his voice as gentle as his footsteps. “Does it burn inside your body, the smell of blood? Does it howl through your veins? Does it claw at you with the hunger? Does it shroud your eyes with crimson in those sweet, sweet instants after a kill, when it knows it will soon feed? Until you can say, Yes it does, to all of these th
ings—”

  He paused, within arm’s reach now of the Wizard, then took a single, small step. The Wizard took a quick, involuntary step back, instantly ashamed.

  “You see?” asked the Warrior. “You’re wondering if the hunger has been sated recently enough. Can I see the vein pulsing in your neck and hear the beating of your heart without wanting your blood?”

  “No!” the Wizard cried. “You are the same man! The same face, the same eyes—the same honor—the same heart!”

  “Give me your hand.”

  The Wizard hesitated only a moment—but it was enough to bring a bitter smile to the Warrior’s face. The Wizard’s hand was guided to the Warrior’s chest, pressed there for long seconds. The Wizard leaped back, horrified.

  “Do you understand now?” asked the Warrior. “Oh, it’s still there. Silent and still. Tell me, my old friend, what is a heart without a beat? When this is all over, and their armies are defeated and the heads have rotted to skulls enough to build a warning wall lest they think again to conquer us, you will do for me what I cannot do for myself. And the rest of me will be as dead as my heart.”

  The scene faded into shadows. Cade felt himself shaking. He hadn’t known that about the balaurin. A heart, but no heartbeat …

  Mieka was trembling, too, curled beside him, arms wrapped tightly round his knees. Cade wanted to touch him, comfort him, reassure himself that—well, he wasn’t sure what kind of reassurance he needed, but it involved feeling Mieka warm and alive beside him.

  Then the stage seemed to flare with light, capturing his gaze and his mind. He only had time to think how masterful the Shadowshapers were—and how much he resented their ease in manipulating him—before a scene emerged from their signature shadows.

  The Wizard, all in white and garlanded with the crown of fragrant green leaves that betokened victory, stood in the sunlight in the mouth of a small, rough-hewn passage that became, behind and to the left, a torchlit cavern. A woman knelt before him, so gray of clothes and hair that she might have been a heap of fallen rock.

  “And do you so plight yourself and your descendants?” he demanded. “To dedicate your life and their lives to this task?”

  “I do so plight and swear,” she answered, head still bowed in submission.

  “For all that you have no choice but to do so.” His voice thinned with contempt. “No one else will tolerate you.”

  “And you have no one but us,” she retorted.

  “Just the same…” He cupped in his hands tiny orbs of glowing color that merged into a single sphere that pulsed a deep blood red. “A binding, to keep you to your word—a mark upon your flesh—”

  “Oy! What’s this goin’ on in here?”

  The shout from the suddenly open doorway made everyone flinch. Chat was too good a glisker to lose control of his magic, and Sakary was too good a fettler to lose control of Chat’s admirably controlled magic, and thus no one experienced a second shock that could come of a sudden break. Even though the magic extended only so far as the middle of the hall where Touchstone sat, and was being used on those who were themselves possessed of magic and theater players besides, any too-abrupt ending was dangerous.

  After the threads of magic had gently disentangled him, Cade jumped to his feet and strode angrily to the door. “Who the fuck d’you think you are?” he demanded, furious not just for himself—he’d been caught up in the play—but more especially for the Shadowshapers. How dared this man interrupt? How dared he intrude?

  “And who the fuck are you, to be that rude?” He was about forty, dressed in a regrettable excess of fashion, with slightly bleary brown eyes and a reek of alcohol about him. “High and mighty, are you?” he went on, sneering. “Think the whole world is your own just for the asking?”

  “This is a private rehearsal!”

  “So get the fuck out!” Rafe was suddenly beside him, grabbing one of the man’s arms. Cade took the other one. They lifted him right off his feet and started for the door.

  “Oy! You can’t do this to me!”

  “We’ve already done it, snarge.” After a brief glance at Cade, he helped fling the man into the vestibule.

  Just then the Steward-in-training who had charge of the rehearsal hall came running up, babbling apologies interspersed with “checking on time allotments” and “said he’d stay outside” and “rehearsal schedule missing from the front door” and “ran to get another one, but when I came back—”

  “Just get him gone,” Rafe growled.

  “You’ve not heard the last of this!” blustered the ejected intruder.

  Cade advised him to do something socially unacceptable with the nearest diseased goat, and slammed the door shut.

  All traces of magic were gone now. Vered, Rauel, Chat, and Sakary stood center stage, as if preparing to take their bows. Cade, Rafe, Mieka, and Jeska stood in the middle of the hall, facing them, and it seemed for many long seconds that nobody could think of anything to say.

  All at once Vered laughed out loud. “I’d like to say beholden to you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition!”

  Chapter 23

  Heart beating as hard as if this were the very first time he’d ever been on any stage, Cayden slid between the curtains and waited for all eyes to focus on him.

  “Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, my Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen,” he said, “it is Touchstone’s very great privilege to cede the honor of this performance on the final night of Trials to another group of players.” Jeska had told him to wait out any reaction. There was none. The whole audience sat there stunned. So Cade said, very simply, “The Shadowshapers.”

  He scanned the faces as he spoke. Startlement, delight, amazement—and on a very few faces, suspicion. He made note of these. They were all together in the eighth row, and they belonged to Black Lightning and two young men who worked for them. Mainly there was shock. And there were more shocks to come.

  Cade joined his partners in the wings as the Shadowshapers took the stage. Chat and Sakary were eager, quick to assume their places. Vered looked defiant; Rauel’s smile kept coming and going like sunlight on a cloudy day. It was the first time they’d been in front of an audience in at least three years.

  “That’s it, lads,” he heard Mieka whisper at his side. “No worries. Get out there and give it to ’em so great that even people who look like them will weep.”

  The familiar shadows swirled through Fliting Hall. Cade wasn’t sure if it was better to be out there in the rows of seats, experiencing the whole of the plays, or here, watching and appreciating the artistry. Whichever, it would be a grand tale to tell in his old age: that he had seen the reunion show given by the inimitable Shadowshapers. Hells, he’d been instrumental in making it happen. Definitely a tale for the chroniclers.

  The first play he had, of course, witnessed when it had first been performed. He’d seen much of the second in the rehearsal hall two days ago. Now, as the story of the invasion, the desperate gifting of special magic to a select group of Knights, and the voluntary transformation of the Warrior into a balaurin—for the battles could not be won otherwise—part of his mind was busily documenting the performance. The techniques of voice and gesture, the small details of setting and costume, sound and sensation, that made everything real. Where he stood, there was the gentlest backwash of magic, so he felt wisps of emotion as well. As the Wizard stood waiting for the outcome of the final battle, Cade felt again the sting of tears. He knew what was coming.

  There was a slow fading of magic as gray and white shadows once again spun lazily through the hall. A brief respite for the audience—and for the players. Cade saw Princess Miriuzca, seated between Lady Vrennerie and Lady Megueris, take a long, steadying breath. He wondered suddenly if she had ever seen Black Lightning perform their awful little play where every member of the audience who had any sort of Goblin or Troll blood, or anything but Wizard or Elf forebears, felt dirty and ashamed. If she had seen it, and felt that sha
me, had she understood why?

  He lost the train of thought as the Wizard and the Warrior argued back and forth, ending in a stalemate. Well, that was Vered and Rauel, wasn’t it? Two stubborn, forceful, outrageously talented personalities, clashing over and over until they’d torn the Shadowshapers apart. It must have been very easy to write … or very, very hard.…

  The Wizard argued that the balaurin Knights could live apart from those they had saved, and indeed must go on living lest the invaders return and their special, terrible skills be needed once again. He would see to their protection—and to the protection of the world of men from the Knights. The Warrior, unconvinced, forced the Wizard to repeat his promise: that once the danger was definitely over, the Wizard would kill him with his own sword.

  The scene changed to the cavern. Cayden watched more carefully now, for this was the part of the play he hadn’t seen. He could feel Mieka at his left, trembling with tension, and Rafe to his right, still as stone, hardly even breathing.

  There was something new in the background: a long, wide, rough-hewn stone plinth. The gray woman knelt and accepted the charge the Wizard placed upon her: to protect the Knights of the Balaur Tsepesh, to serve their needs, to see them safe in their exile from the society of men. In addition to the sphere of blood-red magic that hovered at her nape before melting into her bent spine, the Wizard proclaimed that he had set a secret mark upon her flesh that would appear on all her kind, so that they might identify themselves one to the other.

  The Warrior entered, and the old woman faded into the shadows between torches. Beneath chain mail was a gray tunic, and wrapped around him was a gray velvet cloak. The Wizard explained his plan—or tried to.

  “No.”

  “But it’s perfect, I’ve thought everything through—”

  “No.” The Warrior unsheathed his sword and extended it, hilt-first. “You promised. You swore to me.”