Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  No magic, no voices, no scenery. No sounds or sensations.

  Words.

  Power.

  Whether read in books or performed on stages, words had power. The Archduke knew it. The magic had nothing to do with it.

  It was the words.

  Mistress Mirdley levered herself to her feet. “I’ll bring up a pot of tea every couple of hours,” she said.

  He almost laughed. He must look like a hunting hound straining at the lead. He barely paused to hug her on his way out the door and up the stairs. A hurried gesture lighted two lamps, one on each side of his desk. Paper. Ink. Pens.

  For Rauel, words existed to tell stories that evoked emotion. For Vered, they goaded people to think. When woven together, Rauel’s stories in the service of Vered’s ideas, the Shadowshapers had been unbeatable.

  Cayden’s approach was different. He had begun his career using standard, well-known stories to explore and examine ideas. It had been the addition of Mieka’s uninhibited performances that had pushed Cade’s work to another level. In addition to writing for Jeska’s massive talent and trusting to Rafe’s subtle and solid control, he had begun to write for Mieka. In doing so, he discovered that at his best, he was writing for himself, for the things in his partners that he knew and understood and trusted with his visions and, most important, his words. It didn’t surprise him to realize that he trusted them more than he trusted himself.

  He had let them down, he knew. “Turn Aback” had been a mess because he hadn’t understood what the thing was really about. He’d written it, and he didn’t understand it. But now he knew. All his philosophical maunderings—nonsense. It had been about the dangers of looking. Of seeing. He’d got it wrong in that play. But Window Wall …

  He knew it still wasn’t quite right. He began correcting his mistake. He was vaguely aware of a pot of tea and a mug appearing at his elbow, and he supposed he drank every so often. At some point, a different pot replaced the first, piping hot and fragrant with herbs. All the while he was marveling in a corner of his mind that he could have written all this, so many words, without knowing what these plays were really about.

  They weren’t about a boy imprisoned in a room, denied the world outside and his own magic by a frightened and embittered father, his life spent looking through a wall of glass. It was about seeing what was beyond that wall, and wanting to touch it, be in it, even though so often it was naught but suffering and sorrow. And fear—Gods, the fear. That was the worst, Cade thought over and over again as he wrote. Hatred stunted the soul; jealousy was poison; envy warped the heart; anger destroyed more than angry fists could break. But fear paralyzed. All those things would the boy encounter beyond the glass window.

  Yet there would be love as well, and compassion and friendship, and a million different kinds of joy.

  It wasn’t for the girl, that supremely beautiful girl, that he would break that glass. It was for himself.

  Chapter 31

  Before Touchstone could do anything about the Shadowshapers’ long-scheduled performance at the Palace’s theater for King Meredan’s Namingday, they had to get hold of all three scripts. The first two were in the possession of the surviving Shadowshapers. But the third presented a bit of a difficulty.

  Mieka and Jeska put on their most somber clothing and took a hire-hack to Wavertree. The crowds of mourners outside the house were gone. So was the lake of flowers. The ever-flame candles, though, were still glowing. They were arranged on the front steps, so many of them that there was barely room to pass between the ranks of glass containers, blue and yellow and red and orange and green and purple and every color in between.

  “Still burning?” Jeska whispered. “I thought they sputtered out after a week or so.”

  “The cheap ones do. The cheaper ones have a tendency to crack the glass. And the cheapest have been known to blow up.” Mieka lifted his hand to the door knocker, sadly noting the little glass eye so recently installed. Blye had done her best. Not her fault—any more than it was Cayden’s—that Vered was dead.

  The Princess’s Guards were gone, too. A couple of them still walked the grounds of Moonglade Reach, and lingered outside Rafe’s and Jeska’s homes, wearing civilian clothes in an attempt not to be obvious. There had been a contingent of them in full uniform as an honor guard at Vered’s burning last week. Bexan had not been present, still too overcome with grief to appear in public. Mieka didn’t blame her; the crowds outside the Kilnminster, where such things took place, had been huge despite a hammering rain.

  Before he could touch the brass knocker, the door opened. A maidservant, swathed in solid black, invited them in, her voice hushed. The staircase banister was wrapped in black silk. In the entry hall, a black glass vase on a table shrouded in black held a huge bunch of blue flowers: forget-me-nevers. Beside it, stark white on black cloth, was a piece of parchment with blue and brown seal ribbons. Framing the three doorways down the hall, more black silk was gathered and draped and swagged like theater curtains. Upstairs an infant began to wail, the sound quickly muffled by a door that was not quite slammed shut. Otherwise, the house was silent. Mieka found himself placing each foot very carefully on the wooden floor, lest his bootheels make an unseemly noise.

  He and Jeska were led down a passage to Bexan’s drawing room. Although Cade had warned them about the black decorations, it was rather a shock. The only light came from sliver rifts between drawn black curtains, a thin gray light from the rainy day in the garden outside.

  In all this darkness, Bexan’s face was luminously pale. Mieka went to where she sat and took the hand she extended, pressing his lips to her wrist where a bracelet of woven gold proclaimed her marriage. She had not yet had the right one removed by a Good Sister for transfer to her left wrist, in the manner of widows.

  Jeska, too, bent over her hand.

  She waved them to a nearby couch. “It was kind of you to come.”

  Jeska said, “We thought we’d wait until—”

  “Until everyone else had abandoned me?”

  Mieka hid a flinch. This was going to be more difficult than anticipated. Cade had declined to join them, saying that it was entirely possible that Bexan would blame him for putting Vered in touch with people who had assisted his researches into the plays that had cost him his life. When Mieka asked how she could possibly have guessed, Cade just arched a brow. No, Bexan was not a stupid woman.

  “They kept coming for over a week,” she went on. “Flowers. Candles. Standing outside my house, trying to get into my garden. Reciting speeches from his plays, sometimes well into the night. They can have no idea how painful it was for me, how deeply it hurt me, hearing his words just outside my windows.”

  “They valued him,” Jeska murmured. “They loved him. We all did.”

  “And now they are gone. He’s dead and burned, and they’ll forget him. As they have all deliberately forgotten me. Do you know the words they recited most often? Nothing that was his alone. Nothing that he read first to me, seeking my judgment and my help. No, they spoke over and over again—chanted it, like a hymn in High Chapel—” She broke off.

  Mieka could guess. “The part of ‘Life in a Day’ about not knowing what would happen, and how much had been left undone and unsaid.”

  “It was what he wanted them to think about,” Jeska assured her. “What he reminded them to do in their own lives. And they learned. Those lines mean that they learned what he was trying to teach. I think he would have been proud of that.”

  “How would you know?” she snapped, dark eyes glaring at him. “I knew him better than anyone! I birthed his children! How dare you presume to tell me what he would have felt? I am his wife!”

  “And for that reason,” Mieka said with gentle sympathy, “we’ve come to you.”

  No, it wasn’t easy—but neither was it impossible. They left an hour later with Vered’s own copy of Blood Plight, all three plays, wrapped in a shroud of black velvet.

  “I don’t want to do anything
like that ever again,” Mieka told Cayden when he and Jeska arrived back at Moonglade Reach. “You shoulda seen the place. Wasn’t just her room that’s black, like you told us. It’s all over the house. Like walking into a cavern and the candle going out—or falling into a pot of tea that’s been brewing for a fortnight.”

  “And gone very, very cold,” Jeska added. “There were hothouse flowers from the Princess. In a black vase, with the letter right beside it, in case anybody missed the point of the forget-me-nevers.”

  “Sounds charming.” Cade ushered them into the drawing room, where Mistress Mirdley had provided tea. Cade and Rafe hadn’t waited. Mieka and Jeska fell on the food, talking all the while.

  “We had to lay it on with a shovel,” Mieka said around a mouthful of peach muffin.

  “Both at the same time, and as fast as we could,” Jeska agreed. “From the start it was clear that talking of Vered’s legacy wouldn’t work.”

  “Nor an appeal to let the Kingdom know exactly what he’d written that led to his death, neither. Oh yeh, you were right. She knows. It’s a good thing you stopped at home, Quill. She’s not what I’d call—how shall I put this?—fond of you right now.”

  “How’d you get her to hand this over?” Rafe fingered the black velvet.

  “Agree to give her credit for coauthorship?” Cade asked, arching a cynical brow.

  “She’ll do that when she has it published,” Mieka said. “No, it was a combination of reminding everybody what she’s lost, and her courage in working on this with us—”

  “What!” Cade exclaimed.

  “—and courage in attending the performance at the Palace, and that everybody will say afterwards that it was good, even brilliant, but nowhere near as brilliant as if Vered had been there to perform it himself.”

  “And,” Jeska finished, “telling her that only she can give us permission, and how much people will love her—”

  “Wait for it,” Mieka advised when Cade opened his mouth again.

  “—for her courage, that she overcame her grief to give Vered’s last play to the people of Albeyn.”

  “Have some more tea,” Rafe said, pouring from the earthenware pot, “and get the taste out of your mouth.”

  “Work with us?” Cade demanded.

  “Settle down,” Jeska advised. “It won’t kill us to have her at a couple of rehearsals.”

  “If she starts meddling,” he warned, “I won’t be responsible.”

  “All we have to do is tell her that we swear to be utterly faithful to Vered’s original script, right down to the last a, and, and the.”

  Mieka nodded agreement. “If it needs any work, we just won’t tell her. She can’t quibble once it’s been performed. We had a look at it in the hack coming home. There’s not much to be done to it, honest. Just cues and things, getting the look right for Jeska when he plays the Warrior.”

  “Will it have the Archduke shitting bricks?” Rafe wanted to know.

  “Enough to build a twelve-room addition to Great Welkin.” Mieka leaned back in his chair and stretched lingering tension from his shoulders. “Y’know, she said something really strange. People were outside the house for at least a week, giving mass recitals of Vered’s work until all hours of the night, and she told us how painful it was for her. I mean, I understand that, and of course it was painful—but doesn’t any pain count except hers? What about his sons? And those four babies who’ll grow up without their father? What about everybody else who loved him? And those people holding vigil outside Wavertree—weren’t they in pain, too? They were showing how much they loved him, and maybe easing their own grief with his words, and thinking they might be easing hers. But she doesn’t see that.”

  “People say odd things when they’re grieving,” Rafe said. “We can’t hold it against her.”

  “I don’t. I just think it was weird. Like you said that time, Cade—that she’s not looking into you but looking right through you, as if you aren’t even there and don’t matter to her at all.”

  Cade nodded. “I guess the only person she ever really saw was Vered.”

  “Let’s just hope she doesn’t make a career out of being his widow,” Jeska said. “Like old Queen What’s-her-nose, who shut herself up in the South Keep for fifty years.”

  “And came out only once a year,” Mieka added. “On his death date she’d drive through Gallybanks in an open carriage with his urn in her lap.” Unsuccessfully repressing a snigger, he finished, “Until one year the carriage made a sudden stop to keep from running over some children, and she dropped the urn. There being a westerly wind at the time, the ashes blew all the way to the Flood!”

  “You would remember that part of your history lessons,” Cade remarked.

  “Only the stuff that was gruesome or funny—or both!” He waggled a finger at his tregetour. “And don’t pretend you didn’t listen with both ears instead of only one to such things. After all, you remember it, too!”

  Jeska cleared his throat. “That’s as may be, but what do we do if Bexan arches her back over the play?”

  “As long as we can ready it in time for Meredan’s Namingday, I can’t say that I really much care what Bexan does.” Cade shrugged. “If that’s cold, too bad. There’s something more important here than her.”

  “And her courage,” Mieka said irrepressibly.

  If the Shadowshapers’ rehearsals last spring in the undercroft of Redpebble Square had been known only to a few, the meetings in Mieka’s sword boards were so secret that, except for Bexan, not even wives knew about them. Rauel, Chat, and Sakary took three hacks in three directions to get to Moonglade, always arriving separately and at widely spaced times. Rafe and Jeska used no such maneuverings, for Crisiant and Kazie expected them to go to rehearsals. Bexan almost blew the gaff one sunny afternoon, arriving in an open carriage; people along the main street recognized her. Mieka had to put it about the next morning—ever-so-casually, while buying spices that Mistress Mirdley didn’t need—that it was an unlooked-for politeness, to have her return their condolence call on her, and they’d tried very hard to give her a distraction from her grief during a lengthy tea. It was Jindra (who had long since charmed the locals with her Elfen beauty and ready laughter, poor little motherless mite) who had been most successful, he confided with a smile, knowing the news would be talked of in every house within two miles by lunching, and be all over Gallantrybanks by dinner. He finished with, “Y’know, we’ve all got to admire Mistress Goldbraider’s courage through her sorrow, don’t you think?”

  It wasn’t courage that prompted Rauel, Chat, and Sakary to agree to the plan. It was anger and shock and a crippling burden of grief. During a fortnight of rehearsals, each of them broke down in tears at different times, each of them saying the same thing: I can’t believe he’s gone. Bexan’s presence at three rehearsals—once at the beginning, once at the middle, and once a mere two days before the scheduled performance—was much less intrusive than everyone had feared. The first two plays were, after all, done and dusted, with Jeska having to learn Vered’s part (including that heart-stopping decapitation scene) and nothing at all for Cade, Mieka, or Rafe to do. Thus Bexan’s attendance at the start of rehearsals yielded only a single piece of advice, and this from Vered himself.

  “He said he had to duck down as fast as he could. It may all be done with magic, but you’ll scare yourself half to death and give yourself nightmares otherwise.” She made a little gesture, both gold bracelets now gleaming from her left wrist. “I can vouch for the nightmares.”

  “He never said anything about that to us,” Sakary protested, then supplied his own answer. “Well, he wouldn’t. He wrote the thing to do himself.”

  During the second visit, Blye and Jinsie were most conveniently there to provide distraction. They’d shown up just before tea, giving Derien a ride home from the King’s College in the hire-hack and picking up Jindra from littleschool down the road. Both women knew something was up; neither could contain her curiosity an
instant longer. They hadn’t even manufactured an excuse for coming by. They sat with Bexan at one end of the long, wooden-floored room and watched Touchstone and the remaining Shadowshapers grind out ideas for staging the final play, and were quiet through all of it.

  After Bexan returned home to her children, however, Blye presented Cade with a sheet of paper, closely written on both sides.

  “Her notes. She didn’t want to say much while she was here. I think that was nice of her, don’t you?”

  The challenge in her eyes for anyone to say anything about Bexan’s meddling made them all feel like shits.

  “And generous as well,” Jinsie added, “not to embarrass you with the obvious. That last bit, for instance—even I could tell nobody’s comfortable with it. The audience has already seen a throat ripped out. This time it ought to be just as sudden but not so gory—something people can imagine happening to themselves, if they ever ran across a Vampire.”

  They all of them flinched, the three Shadowshapers and the four members of Touchstone. Mieka realized that they’d never yet used that word amongst themselves. They knew what the Knights had become. They just never called it that. Cade was right: words were power. To think that this one word had such horror attached to it that they shied back from using it for what was so damned obvious—that was scary, and that, too, was power.

  He had something more personal to discuss with Jinsie, though. He’d heard from her namesake, who’d heard her grandfather and grandmother talking about it, that Jinsie had turned down yet another suitor. She’d been seeing this one—whose name Mieka didn’t even know—for more than a year. He wanted marriage, a home, and a family. She wanted marriage, a home, a family, and her work with Kazie managing Touchstone. It never did any good to approach things all roundabout with his twin, and he’d known her way too long to bother being polite. He asked her flat out what was wrong with this one.