Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  “I cannot—do not ask that of me!”

  “You must.”

  “No!”

  The Warrior cast the sword aside, clanging and sparking off stone. “You promised,” he said softly, taking one step, then two, then three, towards the Wizard. “You and the other councilors, in your wisdom you thought to fight evil with magic. This I acknowledge was noble. It was brave. But it didn’t work, did it? Evil cannot be overcome by goodness, even if magic fights on good’s side. Evil can be met and overmatched only by its like. Thus I and the others took upon ourselves the same evil.”

  The Wizard was in agony. “How can you and they be evil, if you fought on the side of good? I will never believe that of you—I will never believe that!”

  “Mayhap I ought to show you precisely what we have become.”

  Moving faster than seemed possible, he grabbed the Wizard’s arm and stripped the sleeve back. His voice was low, soft, seductive.

  “Blood. Thick, rich, sweet, pulsing blood. Within the bone cage of your ribs beats your heart, and at your throat, and here, at your wrist. Faster now, stronger, as the fear grows. Did you know that the fear is almost as nourishing as the blood?” He lifted the hand towards his lips, his gaze never leaving the Wizard’s horrified face. And then, with a rasping cry, he lurched back and let go, falling to his knees.

  “Trust me, do you?” he shouted hoarsely. “Nothing changed between us? Were that true, there would be no silver at your wrist—”

  “My wife’s gift to me upon our marriage! I always wear it, you know I always wear it! It’s nothing to do with you!” The Wizard extended a hand, let it fall to his side, the sleeve covering the glinting silver bracelet. “It is you who cannot trust,” he said sadly.

  “No one,” the Warrior agreed. “Not you, not myself. I beg of you. Show me that you do indeed trust me—by doing what you swore you would do. For I am such things as should not be left alive and free.”

  Slowly, with tears streaming down his face, the Wizard picked up the sword. He lifted it high and swung it wide and lopped off the Warrior’s head.

  Every single person in Fliting Hall screamed. Even Cade. Standing out of range of the more powerful magic, always holding himself aloof, going through even Touchstone’s performances essentially untouched even when it was his own magic in the withies—Cade cried out with all the rest.

  The torches flared, flickered, died into shadow. Then the gray woman appeared, carrying a candle, with which she went round to relight all the torches.

  “The one I was to serve … well, he’s dead now, right enough. But there are others. The plighting vow was made for me and my descendants, I received the mark on my flesh.”

  The torches all were lighted now. She went to the plinth, rummaged behind it, came out with a collection of smooth sticks, and sat on the floor before the plinth.

  “Slave? No, not me, nor my kind. Call us what they will, but slaves we aren’t. Nor Witches, neither!”

  Her hands began to assemble the sticks, locking them into place with wooden pegs, making a rectangle as long as her arm and as wide as her shoulders.

  “We’ll serve them as they need. There’s magic in it for us, right enough.”

  From her pocket she took a ball of blood-red yarn.

  “The Knights, they took on themselves the evil of the balaurin to save all the rest of us. So we must be evil as well, to be serving evil. That’s what everyone else will say. Even though what the Knights did went to the good, and we’re the ones who keep them safe so if the danger comes again, they’ll still be here—ah, can anyone say who’s good in this tangle, and who’s evil? It’s too complicated for the likes of me.”

  She bent over her loom, tying off the warp and the weft.

  “Just leave us Caitiffs to our work and weaving, can’t they? Slave or Witch, in the end it’s all the same to us.”

  * * *

  “The real trick,” Vered confessed a few hours later over a late supper at the Shadowstone Inn, “was keeping exactly to the pose. And I do mean exactly. Up until that very moment, y’see—”

  “—it was him playing the Warrior,” Rauel interrupted. “Chat had to work it so that—”

  “—so there wasn’t a hair’s difference between Vered-for-real and Vered-by-magic,” said Chat. “How and where he was kneeling, his hair falling to hide his face, the angle of his shoulders—originally he wanted to be standing up, but the smaller he became with kneeling, the less I had to duplicate.”

  “Painful on the knees, that,” Vered observed. “Crawling in silence, making sure nothing caught on a stray splinter onstage.” He grinned suddenly. “In the end, I just pretended to be one of my four new little carpet beetles. They can get into and out of a room so fast that you don’t even realize they’ve been there to steal the candies!”

  “Until you hear them yarking in another part of the house,” Chat reminded him, chuckling. “And here I thought six children all nicely spaced were a plague! We’ll all visit Wavertree when we need reminding of the sweet orderly silence of our own homes.”

  “Anyway,” Sakary finished, for he hated to leave a story hanging, “after all that, it was just a matter of Rauel slicing off the magical Vered’s head, while hiding the real one with a shadow while he sneaked away and then came back on as the old woman.”

  “Simple as peeling a turtle,” Cade said. He was still feverishly analyzing what he’d seen and heard and felt. For one thing, the Warrior had said that fear was almost as satisfying a sustenance as blood. After the war, Elves had been imprisoned in the dark that terrified them in order to produce the fearing fire that, captured and enclosed in glass, lit the streets of Gallybanks by night—had the Caitiffs done something like that? Or had they skipped the fear part and simply found enough people to kill so there would be enough blood?

  He could easily imagine Mieka’s mother-in-law in such a role. Did the girl have the mark on her flesh that Vered seemed to have found out about in his research? It wasn’t as if he could ask Mieka. And what did he think about what was news to him: that the Caitiffs had started out as servants to the Knights? Cade couldn’t ask him that, either. He wanted badly to consult with Mistress Mirdley. She was the only person he knew who knew much at all about Caitiffs.

  The conversation had gone on around him. It was just the eight of them at table, the Shadowshapers and Touchstone. Mistress Luta brought in yet another platter of food and yet another brimming pitcher of ale. Perhaps the Trollwife could enlighten him about Caitiffs—

  “What about rain?” he heard himself ask suddenly.

  Rauel’s look of puzzlement was worn in varying degrees by everyone else at the table except Vered.

  “I thought about putting it in,” he said. “But it didn’t quite work.”

  “Rain?” Rafe asked.

  “The tradition has it,” Vered explained, “that rain—pure water—is poison to a Caitiff’s skin. Except that it isn’t, really. There was a whole long passage in one of the books I slogged through—no gratitude to you, Cayden Silversun!—that dealt with standing naked in the rain and speaking the right magic to wash away the mark, so that nobody could tell a Caitiff by looking. But the bespelling and the rain also washes away the magic. I can’t see anybody giving up magic, can you?”

  Cade nodded. “I see now. And mayhap because they didn’t want to lose the magic, the spell was deliberately forgotten and the whole thing turned into a belief that rainwater is poisonous to a Caitiff.”

  “That was my thinking as well,” Vered agreed. “And besides, I didn’t want to give the Caitiffs an escape. Everybody’s trapped, y’see. The Warrior, the Wizard, the old woman—they used evil to defeat evil, and then they were all stuck with the evil.”

  Jeska stirred uneasily in his chair. “So at some point the Caitiffs were rounded up and taken to the Durkah Isle?” His gaze slanted ever-so-briefly towards Mieka. Cade saw it; so did the Elf. Before either of them could say anything, Jeska went on. “If that’s what happened, who t
ook care of the Knights?”

  “No one.” Vered shook his head to another glass of ale, and Sakary set down the pitcher. “My sense of it is that most of them died, without someone to provide them with fear and blood. The ones who weren’t quite so evil, anyways. As for the rest … it seems to me that they were the truly evil ones, because they held their own lives so dear. They killed in order to survive. When they were killing the enemy, that was one thing. But then they started killing the people they were created to protect. My sense is that they felt all that blood was owed them.”

  There was a small silence. Then Rafe cleared his throat and said, “The fear, that I understand. Lord and Lady can witness that we’ve all had audiences that slurp up the emotions in a piece like hogs at a trough. But is it only the blood of living people the Knights can feed on? Could they get by with—I dunno—cattle? Horses?”

  Vered gave a snort. “We could always go Vampire hunting on the Continent, and when we find one, we could ask.”

  “Armed with garlic, silver, wood, and a nice, long, sharp sword,” Chat said. “You’re welcome to go try, mate. Let me know how it works out.”

  “Talking of swords,” Cade said, “now that I think on it, why was it so necessary to remove Vered from the area before Rauel did the execution? It isn’t as if he was holding a real sword. It was just magic.”

  “Because,” Sakary explained patiently, “clever as he is, it’s not possible for Vered to actually, y’know, lose his head.”

  “Except over his wife,” Mieka teased.

  “And talking of wives,” Rauel began, but at that exact moment four young men oozed into the taproom and one of them called out, “All hail the Shadowshapers! We’ve come to join the celebrations!”

  Cayden would have sworn he’d never, ever be grateful for the existence of Black Lightning. Rauel had been about to mention Mieka’s former wife; he could feel it. He stopped being grateful less than one minute later.

  “Don’t recall inviting you,” Vered said calmly enough, but with a sharpness to his voice like the hackling spines on a dragon’s neck. “Did we invite them, Rauel?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Chat?”

  “Not me, neither.”

  “Sakary?”

  “None of us has the bad taste to suggest it,” the fettler said, blue eyes narrowed. “Sod off, Knottinger. You’re not welcome here.”

  “Oh, the insult! The anguish of it!” He pulled a chair from another table, turned it round, and straddled it, laughing all the while. “How will we ever recover?”

  Cade saw Mieka’s fingers twitch, and knew he was longing for the knives he kept in his boots, replacements for the ones lost. He owed Knottinger for Great Welkin. Jeska shifted his weight, ready to leap up at an instant’s notice with fists flying. Chat and Rauel, usually men of mild temperament, pushed back their chairs and rose to their feet. Sakary had tensed every muscle to the trembling point. Even Rafe looked prepared for a fight. The rest of Black Lightning—Herris Crowkeeper, Pirro Spangler, and Kaj Seamark—seemed eager to give him one.

  Vered tilted his head to one side, smiling slightly. “Now, as I see it, we’ve quite the dilemma here. If we were all of highborn blood, with titles to our names, we’d go about this all civilized-like. Challenges and seconds and swords at dawn and so forth. But we’re none of us nobles—except Cayden, of course, and I’d make a guess that challenging the likes of you four would be beneath him. Am I right, Cade?”

  “Irrefutably.” He had no idea where Vered was going with this, but was willing to play along.

  “Too big a word for them,” Mieka chided, and, turning to Thierin, added helpfully, “He means yes.”

  “Beholden, Mieka,” said Vered. “On another hand, if we were ordinary folk, not a word would be traded amongst us before we set at each other. The result would be broken jaws, busted ribs, and a few teeth skittering into dark corners to startle the girl when she sweeps tomorrow morning.”

  “Is there a third hand?” Rafe asked, politely interested.

  “Always,” Chat said ruefully. “Always.”

  “The third hand,” Vered went on, “is the way they used to do it in the old days. What Fliting Hall is named for, in fact. Poetry and more poetry, back and forth like a game of battledore, until somebody delivers the sockdolager and a winner is declared.”

  The flicker of annoyance on Knottinger’s face plainly indicated that he had no idea what in all Hells a sockdolager was. Cade glanced over at Mieka, brows arching. The Elf inclined his head in a gracious nod; he knew the term; either it was one of Uncle Breedbate’s words, or else he’d actually been listening to his glisking master regarding the history of the theater, which Knottinger obviously had not. Mieka opened his mouth to clarify the matter when Pirro—who had studied under the same master—spoke up.

  “The lines that knock everyone to the floor,” he told Thierin, “ending the argument.”

  “Ending it,” Mieka added, “with a verbal flourish so brilliant that nobody else can think of two words to put together for at least an hour afterwards.” He turned to Vered. “I don’t think that applies here, somehow. Like trying to bail a boat with a sieve.”

  “I agree.” Vered gave a sad, sad sigh.

  Thierin, overmatched and aware of it, smiled sweetly. “Is there a fourth hand?”

  “Oh, yes.” Vered laced his fingers behind his nape, elbows spread wide. “The hand nobody sees until it appears right before your eyes.”

  A shining globe of blue Wizardfire appeared about a foot away from Knottinger’s face. He lurched back, fell off the chair, and scrambled away. “You—how dare you?” he shrieked. “Using magic like that—off a stage—I’ll have the law on you—”

  “I’m thinking not,” said Mistress Luta from the kitchen door. She stumped around the bar, wagging a finger at Vered. “A shaming be on you, boy, for loosing your magic in my house! Don’t you know that I’m the only one as is allowed magic in here?”

  And with that she spread her hands wide, and a curtain of shimmering, shivering, opalescent fire appeared around Black Lightning. It expanded to encase them, from Thierin over on the floor to Herris beside a potted tree.

  “Out with you now,” the Trollwife said. The magic, not touching them, herded them along to the entryway. When the door had shut behind them, she turned to Vered. “No, I will not teach you how to do that. Finish your dinners and drink up, and go get some sleep.”

  When she was gone, Vered breathed again. “Great galloping Gods. Did you ever see—”

  “Never even suspected,” Cade managed. “And I was raised by a Trollwife.”

  They all sat back down at the table and followed orders. They finished their dinners and their drinks, and the only thing anybody said before they all went up to their rooms was when Vered remarked, “Well, at least now we know what color to make the Troll magic!”

  Upstairs, Mieka went at once to his bed, sat down, and pulled off his boots. He’d been uncharacteristically subdued all evening. Cade knew very well why. He also knew that there were questions coming, and he’d better have good answers.

  “Caitiffs,” Mieka said at last.

  “Yeh.”

  “You knew all along.”

  “It was years before Mistress Mirdley said anything.” Which was true. He just wasn’t specific about how many years. It was this next part that was a bit dodgy, so he pulled his nightshirt over his head while speaking, to hide his face and his eyes from Mieka’s all-too-discerning gaze. “They weren’t using any magic that Mistress Mirdley could tell, and she just figured what everybody else did who knew what the name meant—that it had come from a grandfather or great-grandfather or something, like all last names do.”

  “What made her talk to you about it?”

  He resisted a sigh of relief. He’d got away with the lies. The Trollwife had known all along exactly what the girl was and exactly what she’d done to captivate Mieka. “It was that counterpane. My Namingday present. Remembe
r? She put it through a cleansing. Not that she was sure it was bespelled.” Cade extinguished the candle and got into his bed. There was a lot to think about—too much to think about in any coherent fashion. He was trying to get it all organized when Mieka spoke in the darkness.

  “Remember when Jez hurt his leg? Jindra sewed him a pillow. Or maybe helped sew it, with her mother doing most of the work, I don’t know. But he said that it helped the pain.”

  “Mieka, that’s—”

  “Every shirt she ever made me. Every pair of trousers.” His voice was calm, almost meditative. “Every scarf and—and that neck-cloth, the very first thing she ever…” He stopped.

  “Mieka,” Cade said again, hurting for him.

  “Was any of it real? Did she ever love me? Did I ever love her? Was it all just—just spells stitched into the seams of a shirt? Was all of it a lie?”

  “She did love you,” Cade replied slowly. “She could have used it on anybody, but she chose you. She wanted you and she meant to have you.”

  “You’re not denying it, Quill. You’re not saying she isn’t a Caitiff, with a Caitiff’s weaving magic.”

  Caught. He squeezed his eyes shut and said nothing.

  “Stupid to keep the name.”

  “Most people don’t recognize it. What it really means.”

  After a time, Mieka spoke again. “Quill? Is Vered right? About where they came from, and who they served?”

  “I’ve heard enough and read enough to believe that there’s a basis in fact, but—it’s only a play, after all. Not really real.”

  “In the best plays, there’s more real than in so-called real life. But only the best plays.”

  “Only the best plays,” he echoed helplessly. “Go to sleep, Elfling.”

  Chapter 24

  Every time Touchstone returned to Gallantrybanks from Seekhaven, Blye presented them with glass boxes to keep their Trials medals in. This year, presenting them on the fly while everyone scurried about preparing for the Royal Circuit or preparing to move house, she grumped that she was running out of ideas. A dragon etched into each had been easy and obvious, that first year. She’d referenced each play of the Thirteen Perils that had secured them their places (for the Third, a single foot in a laced boot beside a knight in full armor who was only as tall as the Giant’s ankle). If there was a repeat, she decorated the boxes using symbols for their last names, a clutch of fanned-out withies, or an array of glass baskets. This year she confessed herself flummoxed by how to commemorate the first part of Window Wall, and instead depicted their wagon with TOUCHSTONE on the side and Derien’s map.