Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  “Quill!” Mieka exclaimed, outraged that Cade could think for an instant that he’d do something so vulgar.

  “And I do mean ever. As in losing the wherewithal for any little adventures of that sort for the rest of your life.” He paused, still smiling, but with a warning glitter in his gray eyes. “I take it you understand? Excellent. I knew you were a bright lad underneath all that deliberate stupidity. Dinner’s at seven, as usual. Don’t be late.”

  He pushed Mieka into the room and shut the door in his face.

  * * *

  Their naps weren’t long ones. Mieka, whose bedchamber was at the back of the house, heard a mild commotion in the garden just as he was dropping into a real sleep. After dragging himself off the bed, he looked down from the window but could see nothing and no one, though the voices told him the visitors were his brothers and their wives.

  He hauled his trousers on and went barefoot downstairs. Whatever they’d been doing at the back doors, they were now outside in the archway, where a door led into each drawing room. He joined Cayden in watching as Jed drilled a single hole in the thick oaken door and Blye inserted something, whereupon Eirenn—tall, chestnut-haired, dark-skinned, very pregnant, and taking the three descending steps very carefully—went back outside.

  “What are they doing?” Mieka asked.

  Cade answered with a bewildered shrug.

  Blye tiptoed to peer through whatever she had placed in the hole. Eirenn called out, “Is it working?”

  “Gorgeously! Now the other one.”

  Jez began filling the edges of the hole with something or other, while the other three crossed the cobbles to Cade’s drawing room door and repeated the process. Mieka and Cade followed, still confused. Jindra had joined them, and Derien and Mistress Mirdley. At length, after Eirenn had once again asked her baffling question and Blye replied just as happily, they all gathered round the open door.

  “Home-cozying presents,” Jez explained with a grin as he finished the seal around what looked like a length of glass circled by polished brass. “Eirenn, dear heart, one more time?” She nodded, and he shut the door. “Want to give it a try, Miek?”

  He didn’t quite have to stand on tiptoe. Squinting through the glass, for a moment all he saw was Eirenn. Then he yelped and jumped back as the glass suddenly glowed crimson round the edges. “What the—? What is this, Jez?”

  “Just a little something my brilliant bride dreamed up. Take a look, Cade.”

  He did, and reacted with a start. “It shows if the person outside is using magic!”

  “It won’t tell you what kind of magic,” Blye said, “or whether it’s for good or ill, but at least it’s a bit of a warning.”

  “Do we need warning?” Cade asked, bemused.

  “We think you do,” said Eirenn, and lowered herself into a chair. “We’ve done the same for the front and back doors of all the Shadowshapers’ houses.”

  “Especially Vered’s,” Blye added grimly. “I’d put them into every ground-floor window, too, if I could.”

  “Beholden,” Mieka said. “Lovely idea, if not a particularly lovely thought behind it. I assume you’re all here for dinner? Do we have enough food, Mistress Mirdley, or shall I nip down to the local shops?”

  “All those months at Redpebble,” she asked tartly, “and have you ever known me not able to feed however many showed up in the dining room? Cade, this is your drawing room, welcome your guests and see them comfortable in chairs while Derien and I fetch cold drinks.” She left with the grinning Derien, muttering, “When I think of the work I went to, trying to learn that boy some manners—!”

  Mieka had the feeling that Cade’s drawing room would become their usual gathering place, and wondered briefly what would be done with his own. But someone else was knocking at the door, and he remembered to peer through the peephole—no red glow—before opening it gladly to Rafe and Crisiant.

  If they’d wanted a quiet first night in the new house, it wasn’t going to happen. It seemed they were throwing a party. Jeska and Kazie arrived, and Mieka’s parents and the rest of his siblings, and for the first time in his life, Mieka really did worry that there wouldn’t be enough to feed them all. He didn’t dare insult Mistress Mirdley by asking again, but he did remind himself to do some shopping tomorrow.

  And these thoughts told him that this truly was his home.

  This was emphasized at Wintering, which he organized himself with Jinsie’s help. A real Elfen celebration, with tables groaning under huge platters of food and drink, and singing and dancing with music provided by a longtime customer of Hadden Windthistle’s named Garef Bendering. (Mieka had tried to get Alaen Blackpath, but he was already engaged by the Archduke for a whole week; something about a gathering at one of His Grace’s country holdings.) Bendering was mostly Human from the same Islands as Kazie and Croodle, with a touch of Troll in his gait and a hint of Wizard in the long fingers that danced over the strings of his lute. No magic in his music that Mieka could detect, but that didn’t mean the music didn’t have a magic all its own.

  The old year was banished and the lights went out one by one (courtesy Derien). Then Jindra came in, dressed as Spring with flowers woven through her thick black hair, wearing a charmingly antiquated Elfen costume of bright red blouse and bright green dagged-hem skirt that she had sewn herself with some help from Mistress Mirdley. She was as yet too young for full Caitiff magic—though her gift of a pillow for her uncle Jez’s wounded leg a few years ago had the sweetness of her love and concern for him in every stitch. The lights came up again, the music started anew, and Cilka and Petrinka went round to give everyone a flower in a small, thin vase crafted by Blye. The guests would take these home and Cilka, who was very good at such things, would visit next week to read the fall of petals that would foretell the events of the coming year.

  It was well past midnight before everyone left and they had the house to themselves. Mieka, who had stretched out a single beer (a rather large one, admittedly) through half the evening and then switched to icy tea that was the same color as good whiskey, climbed the stairs to the bedchamber floor, then reconsidered and kept going. Past the sword boards, more formally known as his fencing studio, where a rack of variously sized practice blades shone by moonlight through the riverside windows; down the hallway to a steep, narrow staircase that led to the roof. Flat and broad, with a four-foot wall all round (Mieka wanted to have it crenellated, like a castle), next summer it would have potted trees and troughs of herb beds, comfortable chairs and tables. For now, a visit by a weathering witch had melted all the snow, making it safe to walk across. The witch had been well paid for his work. The prospect of floods or droughts ruining the harvest had motivated country folk, and everyone knew that every city in Albeyn would come to a standstill this winter without the weathering witches to clear the snow, so King Meredan had given in to Princess Miriuzca’s pleas and granted them a Guild with a Royal Charter.

  That it had been Miriuzca to take up their cause impressed Derien, who had explained to them her political maneuvering. Not just the witches but everyone who depended on them—which was pretty much everyone—adored her even more deeply than before. There was, of course, the possible exception of the more tightfisted amongst the landowners who had to pay more for rain and sunshine at the appropriate intervals, and the more miserly amongst the city-dwellers who had to pay more to have streets and sidewalks cleared of snow. But the specter of a bad harvest and subsequent privation had scared everybody, and Miriuzca was seen as a heroine by everyone from the lowliest peasant to the King himself, who was rumored to have remarked that one did appreciate a bit of rain now and then in the hot summer months, and some sunshine every so often in winter.

  “The broadsheets,” Derien said, “are reporting—unofficially, of course—that she told the King about a withered harvest in her homeland one year when she was a little girl, and how much the people suffered. What they aren’t reporting is that what moved her father to action was hav
ing to sell off the best studs in the royal stables to buy grain from other countries.”

  “And that’s what convinced King Meredan?” Mieka asked.

  “All very secret,” he said with a knowing grin.

  “Then how did you find out about it?”

  “Books,” he replied blithely. “For one thing, it didn’t happen during Miriuzca’s childhood. It was a generation or so earlier. She knows that the King isn’t one for reading history, except the history of Albeyn, and then it’s only what impacts him personally. And it wasn’t the crown’s horses, it was the crown jewels. She also knows that Meredan isn’t much for shiny rocks, but he does love his horses. She’s a very clever woman, our Miriuzca,” he finished with an appreciative nod. Mieka, trading glances with Cade, knew that they were thinking exactly the same thing: Future government minister sitting right here at our dinner table.

  Mieka smiled now at the memory, standing at the parapet, looking down at the snow-swathed garden. Cilka and Petrinka viewed the roughly three acres as an opportunity for agricultural experiments in shaped hedges and exotic plants. Mistress Mirdley had claimed a section for vegetables. Mieka wanted a maze, and if nobody agreed with him, then he’d buy up some of the land next door and build it himself. He rather hoped so; demolishing the wall would provide some lovely fun.

  That thought led to a stifled snigger as he recalled an incident of that autumn when both he and Cayden forgot their keys to the garden gate. It happened after a gigging at the Keymarker. Mieka and Cade had both found congenial company afterwards, and just before dawn, with the mist drifting across the river, Mieka had caught Cade (though Cade insisted that he had been the one to catch Mieka) skulking round to the river side of the house at an exceedingly unrighteous hour of the morning. They’d nearly suffocated themselves trying not to laugh, fearful of waking everybody in the house.

  Repairing to the kitchen for a snack, they compared notes on the difficulties of enjoying their status as celebrated theater players now that taking a girl home wasn’t possible. Sometimes the chosen companion of the night had her own flat, but mostly not. Sneaking about somebody’s parents’ house was, they agreed, something they had outgrown long since. Mieka had found an amiable tavern keeper who, for a price, let him have an upstairs bedroom for a few hours. Cade had an old school friend who occasionally obliged by vacating his premises in favor of a night with his own girlfriend. Getting laid was getting to be unmanageable, and the only thing either of them could think of was renting a small flat in town and keeping to a schedule for its use.

  Which both of them thought rather tawdry. Still, what else could they do? They were young, sought after, unattached, and well off again. It would be criminal not to take advantage of circumstances that most men would gladly give a testicle to experience.

  “You’re on the wrong side of the roof,” Cade said softly behind him, and Mieka spun round. “Didn’t mean to startle you. I thought those Elfen ears of yours caught everything in a half-mile range.”

  “Only when I’m paying attention. Why is this the wrong side of the roof?”

  Cade ignored the question and came to stand beside him, looking out at the garden. “I’m glad we did this tonight. I’m beholden to you, Mieka. I never had many good Winterings to remember in place of that one with Iamina and the Woodwose. I was thinking about it tonight, but in a remote sort of way. As if it all happened to somebody else.”

  Mieka nodded. “We can do this every year, if you like.”

  “I would. Come over here for a moment, will you?”

  He followed Cade to the river side of the roof, and caught his breath. There below him, stretching the length of the Gally until it curved southward, was a moonglade.

  “You’re always asking me to make you a moonglade onstage. How about one you can live in? What d’you say we call the house that? Moonglade Reach.”

  “Perfect!”

  And it was. There was the real wonder of it: that something, anything, in life could really be perfect. Not just the right thing, but the perfect thing.

  Chapter 29

  Enjoying themselves with dawdling and detouring, it had taken the Shadowshapers all summer and part of autumn to make a leisurely tour of Albeyn, sticking to the more populous middle and west of the Kingdom. As Cade understood it, they would settle at a congenial inn (or two, considering the size of the four family parties), relax, play a show if they felt like it, appreciate the weather and the sights and each other’s company, then move on. Touchstone, on the Royal Circuit schedule that summer, had encountered them only once, in Lilyleaf, though they barely missed each other at Frimham.

  Cade would have welcomed the distraction: Mieka thought nobody knew that he’d gone to a certain house and stood there staring at it, then walked aimlessly along the beach for hours. Cade was more relieved than he could put into words that Mieka’s reaction to the pain of separation, the bitterness of divorce, and the shock of her appalling death hadn’t been a months-long binge of thorn and liquor and women and sorrow. He was ashamed of himself for his impatience with this one small indulgence in Frimham—surely Mieka deserved a few brief hours to be alone with his grief. Yet when he’d returned, solemn and dispirited, Cade had been on the edge of snapping at him. It was over, she was dead, let that be an end to it. Cold of him, he knew, and lacking in compassion. But something Mieka said that night had grated on his nerves all the way back home to Gallybanks.

  “You never even asked her name.”

  Startled, he’d turned in bed to stare across the room. “No,” he said at last. “I didn’t want to know it. I don’t now.”

  “Because she never mattered to you.”

  “She was Jindra’s mother. Of course she mattered.”

  An impatient sigh. “What I’m saying, in case you’d care to listen, is that she never mattered. As herself. As a person. Not to you.”

  He couldn’t deny it. Neither could he explain that she had had meaning only as the source of his own anxiety and Mieka’s pain, nor say out loud that he was just as glad she was gone forever. Not glad that she was dead—he wasn’t a monster—but that she would never trouble their lives again.

  He couldn’t say he was sorry, either. He wasn’t. And Mieka knew it.

  The bustle and excitement of moving into the new house had pushed the subject out of his mind, until one day, a few weeks after Wintering when they’d decided that Mieka’s largely unused drawing room would do much better as a sort of private tavern tap-room and dining room, he came in one afternoon to find Mieka and Jindra placing framed drawings and imagings on the wall behind the bar. Family, friends, places they’d played, Yazz standing with the horses and the wagon—all these were fine with Cade. But one of the imagings was of Jindra and her mother.

  He provided the expected praise and made suggestions for other scenes and people that could be included. All during dinner his gaze kept straying to that wall. A sweet-enough portrait, a beautiful child seated on her beautiful mother’s lap in a garden setting, all smiles. Mieka caught him looking. He said that he didn’t understand how the imager had persuaded Jindra to sit still long enough. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.

  The next day, that imaging was gone. He later learned that it had been transferred to Jindra’s room upstairs. Nobody ever said anything more about it.

  Everybody was saying plenty about Blood Plight. The two plays shocked audiences wherever it was performed. Wait’ll they see the third one, Cade thought to himself, with the feeling that in years to come, people who hadn’t seen it on this particular tour would claim that they had—except those who lived on the Archduke’s father’s old domains. The Shadowshapers didn’t set foot in those.

  Interestingly, some people were saying that they’d be proud to have an ancestor who’d given his life to save the whole Continent. There’d been a long series of letters in The Nayword on the subject. Cade strongly suspected that “noble self-sacrifice” and “true to their vows” and suchlike had been disseminated by
the Archduke himself and his cronies.

  Now the Shadowshapers were back in Gallantrybanks, waiting for Vered to finish that final play, the one that would openly state the name Henick for all the Kingdom to hear. He was still making Drevan Wordturner’s life a burden to him, and once Cayden had arranged all his books, especially his grandfather the fettler’s library on theater, Vered came by to borrow whatever might be useful.

  Truth to tell, he had all the material he needed. Rauel told Cade this after an afternoon Touchstone gigging at the Sailors Guildhall: a performance of “Bewilderland” to which he’d brought his wife and children. It disturbed Cade to talk about such dark things (low-voiced in a back office, to be sure) after the pure joy of children’s laughter.

  “There’s no problem with the plot,” Rauel said, frowning. “And that’s what scares me. Are you sure this information is accurate?”

  Cade nodded unhappily. He’d vacillated back and forth for a long time, and finally done what he’d known he would do all along: told Vered everything he knew.

  “I’m trying to get him to tone it down some—concentrate on the emotional story rather than the political one.”

  “Political?”

  “We’ve been having quite the row over it,” he admitted. “Chat and I take turns not speaking to him, and Sakary says he’s tired of keeping track so he doesn’t speak to any of us. There’s a lot about controlling magical folk, and planning to exile them if they’re uncooperative. Vered says the Knights wanted dominion over the whole of the Continent, to bring order and organize society for enduring stability.” He made a sour face. “From an audience’s point of view, boring.”

  “From the Archduke’s, dangerous. But that won’t stop Vered.”