Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  He swallowed the cold liquid that was held to his lips and looked up at Mieka. “She doesn’t know,” he heard himself say.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Her grandmother. She doesn’t know it was the Archduke. She’s all ready and eager to serve him—she thinks she has a better chance to get at you if she’s working for him.”

  “At me? Huh! I’d like to see her try!”

  Cade would have argued, but it struck him as it had undoubtedly occurred to Mieka that the only one of her plans that had succeeded was the one that ended in the marriage. Everything after that—the things they knew about or could guess at, anyway—had failed. And now that they were on their guard …

  He felt a smile tug the corners of his mouth. “Might be entertaining,” he agreed laconically.

  “That’s me Quill!”

  Mieka danced lightly over to the tray and snatched up a knife. Wielding it like a sword, he advanced on an imaginary opponent, and did it with a great deal of expertise, Cade noted.

  “You and me, Quill, with swords and magic and swords that are magic! That flea-bitten old crambazzle of a Witch doesn’t stand a chance!”

  It didn’t take the magic of a withie to supply the scene as Mieka battered his opponent to his knees. He dug his fingers into the man’s hair and swung the sword down and across to lop off his head. Cade could damned near see the grisly trophy held up high and dripping blood, and the face was a familiar face. Before Cade could react, Mieka tossed the invisible head aside, wiped the knife on his shirt, and flourished it several times in a low bow.

  He applauded and smiled because he was expected to. And he mostly meant it. But there was something both childlike and frightening about Mieka’s pantomime—and, worse, the face that Cade’s own imagination had drawn, slack-jawed and empty-eyed in death.

  Chapter 27

  It was a long, joyless slog through the remainder of the Royal Circuit. Only one other piece of news had the power to astonish, and it came to Touchstone rather tardily. After Nevin Tranterly took them on an unplanned side trip to a town in the wrong direction for Lilyleaf, they rolled in to Croodle’s well after midnight, tired, hungry, annoyed. Croodle was unsympathetic, saying that they ought to know every rock in every road of the Royal by now and if they got lost it was their own silly fault for not paying attention. But she said it while carving up a roast kept hot for them, and in between slices called out to the maids to make sure the sheets were fresh and scented in their rooms upstairs.

  “You’ll have missed the latest broadsheets, being on the road,” she said as they began plowing through beef and bread and glazed carrots. “I’ve letters for you, of course, but they’ve been here a few days and this new thing only just happened—or at least we’ve just got word of it.”

  “And that might be?” Rafe asked.

  “Not even a rumor was heard of it—not until the Palace announced it the other day, and then the broadsheets published it, to be spread all the way to Scatterseed by next week.”

  “Whatever it is, who’d it happen to?” asked Mieka.

  “Princess Iamina and the Archduchess.”

  Jeska sighed. “You’re better at drawing out a story than anyone but a tregetour ought to be.”

  “You’ll never guess,” Croodle told them.

  “I’ll bet I can.” Cade stuck his fork into a carrot. “They’re dead.”

  Croodle was vastly put out. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve been waiting for it.” When he reached for another hunk of bread, she snatched the plate up and glared. “Croodle, it was obvious. The Archduchess ruined herself with what happened at Great Welkin last year. He must’ve been furious with her for plotting behind his back.”

  “She must’ve thought it would please him,” Rafe said with a glance at Mieka.

  “That’s as may be. When he sent her away for the summer, and Iamina with her, she probably thought she’d come back to Albeyn and all would be forgiven and forgotten.”

  “Ah,” Croodle murmured, her voice soft but a dangerous glint in her eyes. “By making herself useful in the only way that counts with a man like that, she made herself useless.”

  “Exactly,” Cade said. “She’s the mother of a daughter who’s supposed to marry the little Prince, and a son who’ll be the next Archduke. Meddling the way she did, she made herself into a liability. I was surprised when they got safely to the Continent, and I thought I might be wrong, and he was only banishing her. But it appears I was right after all.”

  “If you’re so bloody brilliant,” Croodle challenged, “tell me how they died.”

  He hesitated a moment, not looking at Mieka. “Well … my first guess was a shipwreck.” The Archduke had done it before, to Miriuzca’s brother. Croodle wasn’t privy to that information. “However, they arrived in the appropriate number of pieces, so…” It was just too appealing, and he knew it to be a flaw in his character, but he couldn’t resist showing off that he had figured out what was a total mystery to everyone else. “It was a carriage accident, wasn’t it? Somewhere along the coast, or a road above a river gorge, someplace like that.”

  “How in the name of everything holy—? Cayden Silversun, you’re either too clever by half, or the luckiest guesser I’ve ever met—in which case, I’m taking you to the new gaming club on the south side of town!”

  “Neither one, Croodle, me love,” Mieka said. “It’s just that he’s the sneakiest and twisty-turniest cullion in Albeyn—second only to me own sneaky self, of course!”

  Later, upstairs and in private, Mieka simply turned and looked at him.

  Cade rummaged for his nightshirt. “I didn’t see it in an Elsewhen. But, really—it’s obvious, innit?”

  “What’s obvious to me,” Mieka said quietly, “is that he felt he needed a rehearsal. What’s her grandmother going to do when she finds out?”

  “She’ll be on the Isle by now, rallying Caitiffs to the cause. Mayhap she won’t hear for a while—and it’s possible she won’t make the connection.”

  Mieka washed his face and hands in the basin like a good little Elf. “The Archduke promised to make me dead, and she wants me dead so much, she’ll be blind to everything else.”

  “There is that,” Cade acknowledged.

  “It’s touching, the faith some people put in other people’s promises.”

  Cade tossed him a towel. “I know one thing for certain sure. I’m going to Chapel tomorrow. Derien’s safe.”

  “I been thinking about that.” He disappeared behind the towel for a moment, then emerged, pink-cheeked, and said, “And what I’m thinking is that you don’t have to worry about not seeing him in any Elsewhens. He can make his own decisions and take care of himself.”

  As he settled in for the night, Cade reflected that Mieka was correct about promises: little if any faith should be put in them. Cade trusted more to patterns. Meaning was something that religion assured believers they could discern if they had faith enough, could subsume their own individual wants and needs and bend their heads to the divinities and trust to them for some kind of purpose to their lives. He wondered if Panshilara and Iamina, had they been told in advance that they were about to die at the Archduke’s bidding, would have considered it all a part of a greater plan. Was anyone’s faith in the Lord and the Lady deep enough, unquestioning enough? The only “greater plan” that Cade could see was manifestly not that of any divinity. What the Archduke meant to achieve was clear enough. How he meant to get it was still murky.

  But if there was in fact a supreme plan, a divine logic, what right did he have to meddle in response to Elsewhens he didn’t happen to like? Or was his gift of prescience an integral part of it all? Had all his diverse bloodlines come together to some deity’s purpose? When he did change things—fumblingly, uncertainly, anxiously—should he simply have faith that whatever he did had some preordained meaning in a greater scheme?

  Cade had never been much for faith. If he believed in anything, it was in his magic and
his art. He had faith in himself—in his ability to create meaningful work—and in Touchstone, for being the instrument of expressing that meaning.

  As for the rest of it … he turned onto his side so he could see Mieka—a lump of pale sheets in the nearby bed, a dark head on the pillow. Oddly enough, he had a remarkable degree of trust in Mieka’s promise to forswear thorn and almost all liquor. Not because the Elf had promised Cade, but because he’d promised himself. Cade was just the visual reminder. Why this should be so wasn’t entirely clear to him, but he wasn’t about to argue with it, either. He had faith in Mieka—and this thought put a smile onto his face, for if anyone had told him when he’d first met this wild, capricious, mad little Elf that he’d end up trusting him, he would have marked that person down as tragically delusional.

  It so happened that their path crossed the Shadowshapers’ for a few days in Lilyleaf. Two of the Shadowshapers, anyway, which suited Touchstone: no competition for audiences.

  Vered and Bexan showed up first, then Chat and Deshananda and their tribe of offspring. Sakary and Chirene had lingered for a few days at her grandparents’ home in the country. Rauel and his wife, Breckyn, might be in Lilyleaf within the week, and then again they might not. One of their daughters was feeling a bit poorly, so their travel had slowed.

  “It’s a right mess, trying to plan anything,” Chat confided cheerfully on the night he arrived. “But it’s really like a goodly long holiday. We play when and where we like, and if we don’t feel like it, we don’t.” He slid an arm around Deshananda. “And having our families with us is—”

  “—a rare blessing and a total disaster,” she finished for him. “Four girls, two boys, all betwixt the ages of three and eleven, one nursemaid, one governess, one footman, three coaches and three coachmen—they have to play as often as possible to pay for it all. As for keeping everyone housed and fed, and gathered up with their things packed and ready to go when it’s time to leave—” She shuddered. “Never again, precious husband, never again!”

  They were lazing around after an early dinner in Croodle’s back garden. Vered and Chat were treating their wives to a night out at Touchstone’s performance that evening. Jeska was moping, picturing himself with his own wife and sighing for her absence. He’d hoped that Kazie would be at Lilyleaf to visit with her cousin Croodle for a week or two while Touchstone was there, but instead a letter had been waiting for him saying that the children were in the process of passing a summer cold back and forth. When Kasslie had the sniffles, her brother, Jeccan, had the cough. A few days later, the symptoms would be reversed. Listening to the parents in the group—all of them, except for him—discuss child-rearing had Cayden congratulating himself once again on being childless.

  Once the obvious subject of Archduchess Panshilara’s and Princess Iamina’s demise was discussed—with Cade and Mieka studiously avoiding each other’s eyes and hoping nobody else recognized how similar the circumstances were to the deaths of Lord and Lady Ripplewater—talk moved to the even more obvious subject of theater. Black Lightning was creating almost as much chavishing as the Shadowshapers’ return to performing, with a new play that seemed to be effectively plotless. And effective it most certainly was.

  “Nearly as I can figure,” Vered said, “there’s a sequence of scenes, each one to demonstrate a particular emotion. Happiness, rage, something funny and then something sad, and so forth. They do the setup with a minimum of words, and then drown the audience in what it feels like.”

  “Never the same series or situations twice,” Chat said, “so people keep coming back a second or third time. Rather like your ‘Doorways’ for that, and full apologies for the comparison, so don’t thump me. There’s nothing subtle about any of it. There’s one—or so I’ve heard—as has a man come home to find another man’s socks under his pillow. Now, why they should be under his pillow, of all places, nobody says.”

  “I always leave mine on the bedposts,” Mieka said. “That way, I see them and don’t forget them when I leave.”

  “I didn’t hear that,” said the glisker, whose wife mimed throwing a bread roll at him. “Anyways, in the play—if you can call it that, which I wouldn’t—first there’s shock, and then there’s furiousness. Which he takes out on his wife.”

  “Beating her,” Bexan said tightly. “Nothing spoken but words like slut and whore and bitch—while he takes his fists to her and beats her bloody as she screams for mercy.”

  It was out of their power to shock Cade with this. “I read an interview Thierin Knottinger gave to the Blazon’s theater writer. He said—if you can believe it—that they let the audience feel such things on purpose, so they can get out all those emotions and don’t act on them in their daily lives.”

  “Doing everybody a favor,” Rafe muttered. “Isn’t that sweet of them.”

  “Exposing and then draining away the dark and violent emotions,” Cade went on, “purging them, if you will. He also said that they do gentler things—like a girl getting a proposal of marriage, for instance, that lets the ‘less fortunate’—that’s how he phrased it—experience such things for probably the only time in their lives.”

  Jeska drew expanding circles in a puddle of condensation left by the beer pitcher. “But isn’t that what we all do, in a way? Think about people’s faces when they come into the theater. They’re hoping we’re going to take them someplace other than their own lives. Cade did a piece about it. ‘The Avowal’—where we promise them that there, in the theater with us, it’s safe to feel.”

  Bexan fairly turned on him, dark eyes snapping with anger. “You’re supposed to evoke emotions, not batter people with them! You’re supposed to give them a story that leads into feeling what the characters are feeling! A masquer uses his skills to persuade, and a glisker enhances what they’re already feeling because of the words the tregetour has written—”

  “And the fettler,” said Rafe, “keeps it all under control. I think Jeska’s right, dear lady. And I think you’re right, too. What Cade wrote about coming to the theater to experience things they wouldn’t ordinarily experience—or that they’re too scared of the consequences to let themselves feel—they are safe with us. They trust us to make it meaningful and yet keep it from overwhelming them. And that’s where Black Lightning—and I do beg your pardon, ladies—can give you a guided tour of all the many shits they do not give. They want to drown their audiences.”

  “Something else Cade said once,” Mieka offered. “That they’re a group for addicts. Like thorn-thrall, or not being able to face the day without half a bottle of brandy at breakfast.”

  “The question is,” Cade mused, “are they the future of theater? Will we all end up—”

  The howls and growls of protest that interrupted him made him smile.

  When the din died down, he said, “Well, then, we’ll just have to keep showing them that it’s more satisfying in the long view to see a play with an actual plot, and characters, and good writing, and masquers who know their craft, gliskers of skill and subtlety, and fettlers who make sure everybody’s not wrung out like an old washcloth by the end of the evening.”

  That night Touchstone did “The Avowal” just for Vered and Chat and their wives. Standing at his lectern, Cade hid another smile when he saw the two men nodding quietly to themselves. Curious to think that the whole piece had come to him in an Elsewhen.…

  Chat escorted the ladies back to their inn, for Vered had something he wanted to discuss with Cayden. For a time Bexan looked as if she might insist on staying, but Vered gave her a soft kiss and a softer smile and told her he’d be back soon. He and Cayden walked slowly to Croodle’s, talking.

  “Two years ago,” Vered confided, “I would’ve told my wife to shut her trap and do as she was told. A year ago, I would’ve said it was men’s business, and given her a slap on the rump by way of farewell.”

  “You’ve learned wisdom in your old age,” Cade teased.

  “I learned because I got schooled, boy, and
no two ways about it. I wasn’t there, y’see, when my other children were born. When I saw what Bexan went through … four babies, Cade. Four!” He shook his head, marveling. “I miss the little bantlings, though I have to say it’s nice to sleep the night through. Anyway, there were a couple of things I wanted to get your opinion about.”

  “First tell me why you didn’t use the name you know for certain sure to be one of the original Knights.”

  “Oh, that. Well, I thought about it. And when I do the third play in the cycle—”

  “Three? All in one night?”

  “With a break between the second and third. As it stands, the Knights look like heroes, yeh? Noble sacrifice and all like that. Would we want such a thing attributed to that name? We would not. But once I show audiences exactly what they became…” He finished with a grin, teeth white against his dark skin in the lamplight.

  Cade considered. “Just don’t tell anybody about it before you present it for the first time. Talking of which, Bexan might want to have a talk with Jinsie Windthistle when you get back to Gallybanks—about publishing the plays, and who has the rights to them.”

  “They’ve been corresponding all through this trip!” Vered laughed. “All right, then. First thing is, don’t you think it’s odd that magical folk on the Continent were eventually all thrown out? I mean, they gave the Knights all those spells and suchlike for battle, and ended up saving everybody. Were the Knights and their Caitiffs so evil that everybody just decided to have done with magic completely?”

  “Maybe the tale got warped in the centuries between. That often happens. If it twisted round so that people thought the Wizards and so on created the Knights apurpose, to terrorize and control the population…”

  “Hmm. Yeh, I’ve been leaning in that direction meself. You see the same thing in the Perils—what happened according to the standard scripts isn’t what really happened, historically speaking. But even if that’s the explanation, it doesn’t prevent the people on the Continent from using magical folk when it suits them.”