Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  She didn’t know. Not knowing, what else would she be willing to do for him? For the heirs of the Knights of the Balaur Tsepesh? For the man whose ancestral castle had become their refuge?

  Moving very deliberately, Cade walked to the door. He didn’t bother to look through curtained windows or the peephole. He knew what he’d see. He opened the door and there she was, exactly as in the Elsewhen.

  “I know why you’re here. You won’t be seeing Jindra. Not now, not ever. You have no rights where she’s concerned.”

  She looked up, offered the package. “You won’t even give her—”

  “She’ll touch nothing made by you.”

  “It’s only a skirt. Just a simple skirt. Pretty, with violets embroidered at the hem—”

  “There’s something you ought to know.”

  He told her. She said almost what she’d said in the Elsewhen. He listened, and it was as if he heard her voice in that moment and in the Elsewhen, an inexact echoing, as if the lines spoken by a masquer had been changed and he hadn’t quite got the newer version right.

  {“Liar. Liar!”}

  “That’s a lie!”

  {“You don’t know that—”}

  “How could you know that?”

  {“No—an accident—”}

  “No! Not my girl!”

  But it was true, and she knew it. He saw her face age a hundred years and knew what was coming next.

  It didn’t.

  No anger. No words about the Knights, the Caitiffs, the expulsion of magical folk from the Continent. Instead, she clutched the package to her breast like a suckling child and curled around her grief.

  “My girl … my perfect, beautiful girl…”

  “I’m sorry,” he heard himself say. Some small fragment of him truly was sorry. How odd.

  “You!” She glared up at him. “You’re sorry! It was coming out perfect—even though she first chose that stupid little Elf! She became a titled Lady, just as she deserved! But you—he’s obsessed with you—your foreseeings and your arrogance—and the Elf, always that bedamned Elf! I could have made it perfect there, too, only you were there. He was never truly hers. No matter what we tried, the pair of us—but he ruined everything and now she’s dead. It’s your fault, it’s you who should be dead, not her! Not my beautiful girl—”

  His fault? How could it be his fault? Cade took a step back, as he had not done in the Elsewhen. Her frenzy had been directed against the Archduke then; now she spat her rage at him. He wondered what had changed.

  “What is that doing here?” Mistress Mirdley snapped, shouldering him aside. “Begone with you, Caitiff! Take your weavings and stitchings and get yourself gone from this house. We want none of your kind here.”

  Spent, hollow-eyed with suffering, she whispered, “Yes, gone.”

  Cade watched over Mistress Mirdley’s head as the Caitiff turned and walked down to the narrow cobbled road between the house and the river. She turned right, moving with slow, stumbling steps upstream.

  “Good riddance,” Mistress Mirdley growled.

  “I had to tell her. She had to know.” He heard himself babbling and couldn’t stop. “Otherwise, she would have done other things for him—helped him—I couldn’t let her do that. I had to tell her.” He hauled in a long breath to clear his head. The Elsewhen and the reality backed away down some side road in his mind.

  He thought Mistress Mirdley would leave the doorway, come back inside the house. She was still watching the Caitiff, who had passed the brick wall that marked Moonglade Reach’s land. He squinted, trying to see. Just walking, only walking, her gait more certain now, and she got to the steps carved into the grassy riverbank.

  Too late, he realized what she was about to do. He started forward.

  The Trollwife seized his arm in a grip like stone. “No. She has nothing left. You just made certain of that.”

  There was no blame in her voice. He heard Mieka’s light footstep behind him, the soft gasp as the Caitiff walked purposefully into the water.

  Someone in a sailboat called out a warning. Mistress Mirdley hung on to Cade’s arm, and in his turn, he hung on to Mieka’s shoulder.

  “No,” he whispered. “She’s right. There’s nothing left for her.”

  They watched as sodden skirts dragged her down and washed her into the current. If she cried out in pain as the water took her—clean, pure, new water swelling the river after so many days of rain, water that was poison to a Caitiff—if she screamed, he didn’t hear.

  Perhaps Mieka did. Perhaps those elegant, sensitive Elfen ears heard her agony. “My girl … my perfect, beautiful girl…”

  Mieka stood beside him, trembling but not flinching; if he did hear, he gave no sign. The muscles of his shoulder shifted as he tensed, strong with his almost daily practice with sword and knife. He wasn’t a boy anymore. He was a man full-grown. When Cade turned his head from the scene of people vainly trying to save the Caitiff from the river, he saw a face just as beautiful, but older. It had been happening for months now, without his consciously noticing it. His capricious, sweetly outrageous, mad little Elfling had grown up.

  He didn’t know whether to rejoice or mourn.

  Mayhap a little of both.

  Chapter 33

  “Honest,” Jeska said, returning to the tiring room after getting a peek at the audience, “Yazz and Rist and all their uncles and cousins shoving together couldn’t cram more people in.”

  Cade really hadn’t needed confirmation that the Palace theater was packed. He’d taken a look himself earlier, and seen them squeezed in everywhere, even behind the last row of seats—the space where, Vered had told Cade, the Old Gods lingered, invisible, more judgmental than any Steward. “Amateurs play to the front row, because that’s where their friends sit. So-called professionals, they aim for the middle, thinking that the front will take care of itself and the back doesn’t matter that much. But those of us who really understand … we play to the Gods.” There would be scant room for the Gods tonight, Cade thought wryly.

  Everyone who had paid any attention to the broadsheets, and The Nayword in particular, expected the surviving Shadowshapers and Blood Plight. Of course the place was crammed to bursting. Throats encircled with diamonds or sapphires or spectacularly knotted silk scarves craned to get a glimpse of Rauel, Chat, Sakary, even of Romuald Needler, their manager. All four were here tonight, drifting aimlessly about the artists’ tiring room, forlorn and trying not to look it. Cade guessed that it had finally struck each of them that there would be no more Shadowshaper performances—not in the way there had been for so many years. He’d had a frightful time convincing them that the plays had to wait for Seekhaven. What they would do after that, with no prospect at all of standing on a stage together again as the Shadowshapers, he didn’t want to guess. During the two years or so they’d spent apart, Sakary had begun tutoring aspiring fettlers. Chat had given Master classes to those gliskers who belonged to groups but wanted to hone their skills. Rauel had written a couple of plays for others to perform. Cade, glancing at Mieka, didn’t let himself wonder what might have happened to him and Jeska and Rafe if they had indeed lost their Elf, as so many Elsewhens had shown him. He didn’t worry about that anymore. He’d realized that the peace he felt at Moonglade Reach was founded on something that it had taken him months to understand: safety. He and Mieka were safe there. Never again would he hear in an Elsewhen the words that terrified him: “When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”

  A few months ago, just before Wintering, they’d played the Downstreet (three nights, two shows each night, and still people had had to be turned away), and Mieka had impishly changed one of the “Doorways” to a view of Moonglade Reach. Just for a moment; just a glimpse for the audience as the scene moved to a prospect of the Gally River’s green, tree-lined banks and blue water with the city rising in the background. “This life, and none other.” Cade had hidden laughter behind an exasperated glare. Mieka just laughed.

&
nbsp; As Touchstone took the stage, this sureness of safety allowed Cayden to see with perfect composure the Archduke’s smug face there in the front row. He was more certain than ever that this man had been the second member of the audience during their final gigging at that creepy mansion outside New Halt. It made no sense, of course. Cyed Henick walked about in daylight just like anyone else. He couldn’t possibly be what Cade suspected him of being. And as for the other man—or woman, there’d been no way to tell, what with all the disguising cloaks and enshrouding blankets—Cade hadn’t a clue. He only knew that both of them had fed off the emotions Touchstone’s magic had provided that night, and Touchstone had emerged from that cellar staggering with exhaustion.

  No such possibility tonight. Just a regular audience—well, an audience made up of regular people, some having bits of magic and others not, but all of them rich enough or important enough to be invited to the King’s Namingday. He remembered something else Vered had said once, that when an audience such as this one applauded, it was difficult to hear the handclaps over the rattling of jewels.

  The Archduke wasn’t looking well. His color was bad, his hairline receding, his fingers swollen around his rings. He sat next to Prince Ashgar, whose good looks were fading. Cade, whose father had died in the Prince’s service (more or less), could make a pretty good guess about the activities wearing down his health.

  Maybe, he thought as Window Wall progressed onstage near him, maybe the pair of them would do everybody a favor and drop dead. Then, when King Meredan finally died, Princess Miriuzca could act as regent while Prince Roshlin grew into the kingship.

  “Magic!” Jeska exclaimed, and Cade nearly jumped. The Father in the piece was well into his ranting. “Magic and the war fought because of it took my wife from me. Very well, then. Magic will keep my son safe from the world and all its hurts—especially those wrought by magic.”

  The staging of Window Wall had cost Touchstone day after day of perplexity and the occasional shouting match. It had been maddening, figuring out how to show both the inside and the outside of the room where the Boy lived his isolated life. The first section of the first play was the easy part. The Father’s arrival home from the war to find his wife dying of an enemy spell; their infant son whimpering in his crib; the promise to protect the child at all costs from the magic that had destroyed thousands of lives. Cayden watched closely as the wall was built, the room stocked with furniture and books and toys and a lute, a glowing hearth over to one side and no door. As he worked, the Father kept talking, mumbling to himself about what the Boy would need as he grew older. Food, and a bowl and a spoon and a knife to eat it with—skirting the issue of where the food would come from. It was a play, it was magic, why waste time on trivialities? Or so Rafe had convinced him, slicing out the parts of the speech that dealt with some friend delivering food and so forth. “Boring. Get rid of it. And the lines about the piss pot and bathtub and fresh water. Nobody cares. None of that is the point of the play.”

  “But it’s supposed to be real!”

  “You think we can’t convince them that it is real?”

  Rafe, he’d had to admit, had a point.

  As the bricks rose to knee-height and glass began to fill the space—a glistening sheer curtain of magically conjured glass—the sound of the Father’s voice and the urgency of his emotions were gradually blocked from the audience. Cade grimaced as he noted that Mieka had once more done what the rest of them had decided was unnecessary: included a loaf of fresh bread on the table and a cauldron of simmering soup on the hearth, using the scents and their slow fading to emphasize the barrier of the glass. Perhaps it was best, for King Meredan wasn’t the shiniest withie in the basket.

  Now came the tricky part. The entire scene ebbed into shadows, and when the room reappeared it had rotated a quarter-turn, angled so that the room and the glass window were on two-thirds of the stage, towards the back, and the outside world took up the rest. People and horses, flower-sellers and sausage carts, clatter and laughter and shouting and songs—the tumult of sensation washed over the audience until the Boy entered the room. And then all sound and scent, the brush of the breeze against a cheek, the warmth of the sunny day and the cheerful bustle of a Gallybanks street were gone. The people were still there, beyond the window; shoppers strolled, carriages passed, children chased a ball. But it was all as silent as a magical stained-glass window in a wealthy Minster.

  The Boy was nearly grown. The Father lay in bed, dying.

  “I’ve done all I could do,” he grated, coughing, and Cade hid a smile, knowing it was anybody’s guess as to which figure was Jeska and which was wholly made of magic. Damn, but he and Mieka were good! “You’re safe from the world, my son. Nothing can hurt you. Should you ever doubt the wisdom of what I’ve done, watch through the window and see how they suffer and grieve and weep and hate! You’re well out of it. Safe. Protected. Alone.”

  There was a death rattle, and the Father fell back into the pillows. The Boy rose to his feet, feeling nothing. Surprise and discomfort rippled through the audience. Shouldn’t he be feeling something? The only person he’d ever spoken with was dead.

  In rehearsal, Mieka had wailed, “What in all Hells am I to do with the body?”

  Rafe again, confident in his judgments: “Just let it fade out. They’ll be watching the Boy move towards the window. I’ll make sure they’re concentrating on that. The body can just disappear.”

  And it did. The Boy shifted a chair to face the window, and settled down with an expression of remote interest to watch life happen a finger’s touch away.

  Outside, two men got into a fistfight. A nimble child picked pockets. A girl pettishly turned her face from her lover’s kiss. A carriage rolled by and crushed an old man beneath its wheels.

  “Alone,” said the Boy, well-satisfied. And the silence and his emptiness filled the theater.

  Thus ended the first play. The stage faded into darkness, and one or two people in the audience clapped half-heartedly.

  “That’s the finish of it, then?” the baffled King was heard to say, and someone tittered, swiftly hushed.

  “There’s another play coming after this one, Your Majesty,” Miriuzca told him, just loudly enough for Cayden to hear. “Look—it’s starting.”

  The scene flickered into being again, this time with the room crowded into the front third of the stage, the window wall angled towards the space halfway between Mieka and Rafe. The audience was now looking through the glass just as the Boy was doing, seeing Elf-light kindle in the streetlamps, shadows deepen beneath trees, traffic slow and finally cease, a cat prowl delicately across the cobbles. No scents this time, no sounds, no warmth from the hearth fire, no sensation of footfalls as the Boy paced back and forth, back and forth, older now, a man grown.

  “Safe from magic—protected from all hurts—did he understand what he did to me? No heartache, no pain, no fear, no grief, no wickedness. Yes, I’ve seen those things. I watched through my window. But I’ve also seen love and delight, joy and pleasure, and goodness.” He paused in his pacing. “At least, I think I’ve seen those things. I don’t know. I can’t tell. I’ve never felt any of them—not the bitter, not the sweet. I’ve read all these hundreds of books, and the stories and poetry are about love and pain and evil and good and they’re naught but words to me! I don’t know what any of it means!”

  In a fit of rage, he began pulling books from the shelves, flinging them wide, gasping for breath.

  “What is it like to be happy? What is it like to feel sunlight on my face? I’ve seen the rain fall from the sky—is it cold? What does it taste like? How does it feel to laugh or to cry?”

  He grabbed a thick volume and hurled it against the window. In the instant before it hit the glass, the book turned into a bird the same green as the leather binding, pages fluttering into wings. The bird flew around the room, increasingly frantic, then slammed into the window, broke its neck, and fell dead to the floor.

  On the ot
her side of the window, a girl came into view. Graceful, furtive, cloaked in wool the color of midnight, she paused before the window and pulled her hood back to study her reflection. She was as beautiful as the morning, as the starry night sky. The Boy stumbled to the glass, looking at the girl, who could not look at him.

  She tucked a wayward golden curl behind her ear. She adjusted the glowing white pearls at her throat. She ran the back of her finger along the delicate line of her jaw, and smiled. She was the kind of woman who couldn’t pass a reflective surface without admiring her own perfections. The audience knew it; the Boy did not. Love awakened in him and spread through the theater: helplessly enthralled, desperately craving.

  In Cade’s original version, she had been sweetness personified, kind and gentle and good. In the revision, the audience knew her to be vain, shallow, thoughtless. The Boy didn’t see that, of course. He saw only her beauty. She didn’t see him at all. And that was the beginning of the point Cade was making: no matter how it might hurt in the end, and sometimes it could seem as if life were one long series of hurts, one had to see other people as they were, clearly and without—

  “Wha’s all this, then?” a man’s voice bawled from the side aisle. “Call this a play, do you?”

  Mieka pulled back the magic slowly, carefully. Rafe smoothed it like the fur on a cat’s arching spine. They kept the audience safe as always.

  “Seen better’n this in village taverns! Don’t tell me the Crown is paying for such chankings!”

  Lord Rolon Piercehand, large, loud, resplendent in a dark red silk suit, and very drunk, shoved his way through to the front row. The erstwhile favorite of all the Queen’s ladies had used up his considerable good looks in the pursuit of whiskey, thorn, and women, though he seemed to believe he was as winsomely handsome as ever. He bowed to Queen Roshian, straightened up, bowed again to Princess Miriuzca, and nearly toppled into her lap.