Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  “I don’t think there’s anything could.”

  Again Cade nodded. “Unfortunately, you’re probably right.”

  They were both wrong. Something did stop Vered, about a fortnight after Wintering.

  It was late at night when one of Princess Miriuzca’s guards knocked on the door of Moonglade Reach. They were all accustomed by now to squinting through Blye’s cunning little spyglasses, if only to see who it might be without having to pull curtains aside and peer rudely through a window. Especially did Cade take a look that night, when it was past curfew and the Minster chimes had recently struck eleven.

  No magic crimson glow; just a tall, dark-haired, square-jawed young man who would have looked military even without the livery that amounted to a uniform. The brown of his tunic was dark on the shoulders and sleeves with rain. Cade opened the door.

  “Master Silversun? Her Royal Highness’s compliments, sir,” the man said before Cade could do more than open his mouth, and extended a meaty hand clasping a folded and sealed page. Not Miriuzca’s writing, which he would have recognized from graceful little notes asking them to lunching or tea. As he broke the seal and unfolded the paper, he glanced at the signature. Megs? Of course—her thin, sprawling scrawl had been on one or two letters for him in the past couple of years, not so familiar as Miriuzca’s or Vrennerie’s writing, but recognizable now that he’d seen the signature. What was she doing sending him a note at this time of night? And by one of the Princess’s own guard?

  “Invite the poor man in out of the rain,” Mieka scolded from behind him.

  Cade hardly heard. He’d read the letter. His free hand groped back towards Mieka’s voice and he felt his shaking fingers connect with a solid arm. “Oh dear Gods,” he whispered.

  “I’m beholden to you, Master Windthistle,” said the guard, “but my orders are to stand watch with my fellows outside your house until tomorrow morning, when others of the Princess’s household will take our places. For the foreseeable future,” he added.

  “What the—? Cade? What is it?”

  “Vered,” he managed, digging his fingers into Mieka’s wrist. “He’s dead.”

  Mieka grabbed his shoulder and turned him, almost shook him. “That’s—he can’t—I don’t—” Unable to finish a sentence—Cade knew exactly how he felt—he simply stated, “No—” and “No!” again.

  Cade read aloud Megs’s curt few sentences.

  “‘We’ve just had word that Vered Goldbraider was knifed to death outside Rauel Kevelock’s house tonight. The murderer is unknown and uncaught. The Princess begs you to stay in your home and rely on her guards, whose orders are to protect you and yours as they would her. I’m so sorry, Cayden. He was a remarkable man.’”

  The guard had meantime directed seven other liveried young men—tall like Wizards and shouldered like Giants—to the back doors, the front of the house, and the garden gate. He would patrol the whole property himself on horseback.

  “Similar arrangements,” he finished, “have been made for the other members of the Shadowshapers, Touchstone, the Crystal Sparks, Black Lightning, and Hawk’s Claw.” He snapped to attention, gave them a crisp nod, and departed.

  Mieka shut the door behind him. “No,” he said once more, but without hope. “It’s not true. Not Vered.”

  “I never thought he’d go this far,” Cade murmured.

  “It has to be a mistake. Somebody’s fucking with us.”

  “Megs’s handwriting. The Princess’s seal. Her own guards, for the love of—Mieka, it’s true. Nobody could magick up all that. Nobody. And why would they? Just to scare us? It isn’t Touchstone that’s a fortnight away from performing a new play at the Palace theater.”

  Mieka didn’t seem to be listening. “What did that guardsman say? Did he say Black Lightning?”

  “All three parts of Blood Plight,” Cade said numbly. “And this last one, this new one that Vered just finished, he’s heard about it somehow, he knows what Vered plans to—planned—”

  “Quill!” Mieka shouted. “Black fucking Lightning! Why would the Princess want to protect them?”

  “She wouldn’t, if she knew. I don’t think she does.” He gulped and started for a chair, his knees wobbly, his thoughts skittering. “Mieka—he’s dead. Bexan … their children … his boys … what was he doing at Rauel’s? Are we really in danger? No, I don’t think we are. He got what he wanted. The Shadowshapers won’t ever do that play—”

  All at once there was a teacup in front of his face, brim-filled. “Drink,” Mieka commanded, and he drank, spluttered, drank some more. The whiskey went down him as if he’d swallowed molten glass.

  “Quill, listen to me.” Mieka was crouching before him now, those eyes staring up into his, gone all dark and shadowy. “There’s no point in trying to figure it out tonight. Megs will send to us tomorrow with whatever she learns. Everybody else is being guarded. We’re all safe. I think you’re right, and the only danger was to him—” Tears welled and were knuckled away. “Ah, damn it,” he muttered.

  They stayed downstairs, mostly silent, with lamps burning until dawn. By then news had spread throughout Gallantrybanks and was well on its way through the rest of Albeyn. Megs justified Mieka’s prediction by sending another letter with the replacement guards just after Derien and Jindra had been told and Mistress Mirdley had cleared away a mostly uneaten breakfast.

  It’s just dawn, but there are flowers and ever-flame candles outside the Kevelock house and the gates of Wavertree. Miriuzca has official and unofficial questions being asked. I’ll write with whatever answers seem true later today.

  All we know right now for certain is what the hire-hack driver said: He was driving off when he heard someone cry out, and by the time he’d turned the horse, Vered was lying on the front steps. A maidservant opened the door and screamed. Rauel came out, saw Vered, and yelled at the driver to get a physicker and the constables. Which he did, but of course by then it was far too late.

  Preliminary word is that a group subscribing to Iamina’s religious views has decided to attack all players. The King’s Guard and Ashgar’s Regiment are guarding everyone on the Circuits. Miri’s people—her best and most trusted—are guarding the Shadowshapers and Touchstone. She insisted.

  Keep the children home from school and please don’t even try to go anywhere for the next few days.

  More when I know it. Have a care to yourself, you and Mieka.

  Mistress Mirdley was going round to each ground-floor window of the house, locking locks and drawing curtains shut. There seemed to be a dozen guards now. Cade knew they were unnecessary, just as he knew that the religious angle was nonsense. A deliberate deception.

  Jindra had known Vered as a nice man who came to the house every so often and had wonderful white-gold hair and a kind smile, and once had brought her a lovely porcelain doll. She had been gently told that he had gone away and would not be coming back. She thought this over, then asked if he had gone to visit Mummy, and if so, she hoped he would be as happy there as she knew Mummy was. Derien, of course, knew what Vered’s death meant. During the months of the Shadowshapers’ rehearsals at Redpebble Square, he had got to know each of them better, and to see the boy bite both lips and look away when told what had happened clenched at Cade’s heart. After he had read Megs’s letter—Cade had given it to Mieka and then to Dery, not wanting to read it aloud where Jindra could hear—he took the little girl upstairs to her room to play.

  “Don’t leave the house for the next three days?” Mieka asked once they were gone. “Fuck that.”

  “Mieka,” Cade began, but he was already up and heading for the back hallway. He returned with hooded cloaks, gloves, and boots.

  “Get dressed,” he said. “We’ll take one of the guard with us if you like, but you know and I know and everybody who knows anything about the Archduke knows that we won’t need him. You had the right of it last night. The Shadowshapers won’t ever be doing that play. Might be none of Blood Plight won’t ever
be performed again, anywhere. But I’ll bet you my half of this house that Bexan publishes it just as soon as she can get a clean copy put together.”

  “Who’d take the risk of printing it?”

  Mieka snorted. “There’s a small fortune to be made. They’ll be lined up for a mile to print it. C’mon, put your boots on. We’ll find a hack and go over to Rauel’s. If we go in the back way, maybe nobody will see us.” He wrapped himself in his oldest cloak, woven with a dark green warp and a black weft with crosswise threads of blue. Cade remembered when that cloak was new. The “gold” threads had tarnished years ago.

  “What are you going to tell our guard?”

  “That he’s welcome to escort us if he likes, but we’d rather he stayed here to protect Jindra and Derien. As if anyone taking one look at Mistress Mirdley would think she’s in need of any help protecting them!”

  The guard captain assigned one of his underlings to accompany them—the price of allowing them to go at all. The burly young man rode up top with the hack driver, who wasn’t pleased but didn’t dare complain. They were, to say the least, conspicuous on the streets of Gallantrybanks. They reached Rauel’s five-story town house without incident, and, driving past on their way to the back alley, they saw that Megs had been right. There were several gardens’ worth of wet, bedraggled flowers on the steps, and dozens of ever-flame candles in glass containers. These wouldn’t burn infinitely, but they would last at least a week—by which time Vered himself would have been consigned to the flames. Cade reminded himself to send a note to Blye to make the urn, and in the next instant heard Mieka’s voice inside his head, and Mieka’s face—older, wearier, framed in silvering hair—was clear before his eyes.

  {“Don’t let people turn the steps into the Royal Botanical Garden. Send all the flowers to the Princess’s Sanatorium for the patients there. And don’t let ’em burn down the house, neither, with candles! I don’t trust some of those ever-flame crafters.”

  “All right,” he replied quietly. “But don’t ask me to get rid of the letters they’ll send, Mieka. They’ll want to express how much you mean to them.”

  He looked startled. “Will they?”

  “Of course they will.”

  “Oh. Well … do as you like. Just don’t get all maudlin and mawky when you read them, right? I mean it, Quill. This is gonna be bad enough without all that kind of thing.”

  He made himself remember how to smile. From the expression in those eyes, the attempt wasn’t entirely successful. So he said, “I promise that if I get weepy, I’ll go into the garden and remember that time you got lost in your own maze. Will that do?”

  The smile was the same smile, wide and whimsical and full of mischief, in a face that was thin and pain-weary and still beautiful. “I still say you had Petrinka change the layout one night when I wasn’t looking.”

  “And then regrow all the hedges six feet tall by dawn?” he scoffed. “Your little sisters are good, Elfling, but nobody’s that good!”}

  Lost in his own garden maze … yes, that would be entirely like Mieka.

  “Quill? We’re here.”

  Mieka hadn’t noticed the Elsewhen. Cade took a moment to praise the Lord and Lady and Angels and Old Gods. If Mieka hadn’t seen it on his face, Cade wouldn’t have to lie about it. And not succeed. And have to admit that he’d seen Mieka old and frail and silver-haired and dying.

  Two men in the Princess’s livery waited outside the back door of Rauel’s house in Peasmarsh Square. Their own guardsman established their identities and they went inside, relinquished their coats, and sought out Rauel in the sitting room.

  He sat there alone, staring at nothing. The big blue eyes barely glanced up as they entered. The boyish face looked twenty years older. The manservant who had escorted them paused to collect an untouched breakfast tray. Cade asked quietly if a fresh pot of tea could be readied; the man looked grateful for something to do.

  Mieka, with a practical understanding of the circumstances that was more than Cade could summon at the moment, stirred up the feeble fire and loaded it with fresh logs. Only then did Cade realize how cold the room was. The Elf made sure the fire was drawing properly, then produced a distinctive long-necked bottle from his jacket pocket. When tea arrived, he dosed Rauel’s and Cade’s with Colvado brandy. Rauel gulped noisily, coughed, gulped again. Nobody said anything until all at once he looked up.

  “We had another row yesterday. I don’t even remember what we said.”

  “One row, counted against all those years together?” Mieka shook his head and passed him the bottle. “All the plays, all the performances—”

  Cade took up the cause. “All the nights in all those flea-bitten inns—”

  “All the days rattling your bones to bits in that wagon,” Mieka finished. “He wouldn’t be grateful to you for being so stupid. You’d’ve worked it out. You always did.”

  All at once Sakary was there, his narrow ashen face framed in red hair soaked from the rain, as if he’d walked all the way from his house. “It’s true? Is it true? How can it be?”

  Mieka stood, went to him, put an arm round his shoulders. “C’mon, mate. Time to have a drink.”

  “Why did they kill him?”

  “Couldn’t say,” Mieka lied, coaxing him gently along, over to Rauel, who looked up with anguished eyes and got clumsily to his feet. Cade saw Mieka nudge Sakary slightly off-balance, so that he had to reach out. Rauel caught him. Mieka backed off, turning to Cade. The Elf’s determined self-possession cracked for an instant, tears glittering in those eyes. But then he raked the hair out of his face and dragged a knitted blanket off a chair to drape over Sakary’s shoulders.

  The morning wore on, drear and dreadful. Chat arrived, to be left alone with Sakary and Rauel in the drawing room. Mieka shut the carved double doors behind him and Cade, then headed for the kitchen.

  The manservant who’d shown them in was slumped at the worktable. The cook, an elderly woman with gorgeous silver-white hair, was patting his shoulder as he mumbled, “Known them both from mere puppies, both of ’em, from when they first played their first plays at my uncle’s tavern—”

  Mieka cleared his throat. “Could you have somebody stand at the drawing room doors and see that they’re not disturbed? More tea would probably be a good thing as well. And lunching, eventually—if you can get them to eat it.”

  “I know all their favorites,” the cook said, polishing her hands on her apron. She set to work with a look of grim determination, snapping orders at the kitchen maid.

  The manservant straightened up. “Begging your pardon, sirs,” he said. “I’ve not attended to my duties. There’ll be two boys on those drawing room doors, and I’ll see to the front door myself.”

  “You won’t be able to turn everybody away, much as we’d all like to,” Mieka said. “P’rhaps there’s another room where Master Silversun and I could receive them, keep them occupied?”

  “I’d be more than grateful to you, sir.”

  Cade spoke up. “There might be a letter coming for me. From the North Keep.”

  “I’ll tell the Princess’s men outside to keep watch for her messengers.”

  They spent the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon in a front parlor, furnished in a more formal style than the drawing room—a more public place, for show, not for everyday family living. Cade had rarely met Rauel’s wife, Breckyn, but observed that she had exquisite taste. Striped wallpaper and plain curtains, a huge flowered rug, nubby silk upholstery, all in soothing colors of buff and sage and the same blue as Rauel’s eyes, with accents of silver. The glass lampshades he recognized at once as Blye’s work. Breckyn was at their country home with the children for a few weeks after the family Wintering celebration; Mieka made sure that someone had sent her a letter with the news.

  Mieka was, in fact, a complete surprise all through the day. Cade knew he shouldn’t have been amazed by the Elf’s gentleness and compassion, but he was. When other friends began to arri
ve, he saw that everyone had tea or something stronger if desired, made sure the hearth fire was kept good and warm for the comfort of all, sat quietly and listened to those who needed to talk. The only person allowed past the front room was Romuald Needler, whose eyes were so swollen with weeping that Cade had to take his arm and guide him to the drawing room door.

  In the hallway, the manservant approached to tell him that messages had begun to arrive—none from the North Keep yet—and there were certain individuals who were insisting on seeing the remaining Shadowshapers. Cade became positively ambassadorial. Derien would be proud of him. He stood beside a small table just inside the front door and sorted messages into piles in between expertly deterring people nobody wanted to talk to but couldn’t simply be told to fuck off. He had a horrible moment when he first looked out the door, his gaze going to the rows of candles on either side of the steps. Last night Vered had died there. Right there.

  After more than two hours, and something close to two hundred notes and letters categorized as best he could, yet another visitor arrived—some self-important nobody that Cade didn’t recognize and the manservant frowned upon seeing. While expressing gratitude for the visit and explaining for approximately the thousandth time that Master Kevelock was too distraught to receive anyone—while keeping one foot firmly planted behind the half-open door—he caught sight of the same guards captain Miriuzca had sent last night to Moonglade Reach shouldering his way through the crowd.

  “Beholden to you,” Cade babbled to the affronted visitor, “I know they’re all very much beholden for your concern, please do excuse me, message from Princess Miriuzca—”

  Her name appeared to be magic. A path was instantly cleared for the captain, and he picked his way carefully through the inundation of flowers and candles. Within moments the manservant had shut the door behind him. Cade’s fingers were shaking again as he ripped open the letter. Not a note or scribble message, but pages and pages of a letter.

  We hear you’ve been naughty. Not that anybody could blame you. Mieka’s doing, I suppose.