Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  The choice became difficult sometimes—like tonight, in a tavern where everyone drank their fill while he dawdled over a single beer. Perhaps he wasn’t so funny these days; perhaps the jokes didn’t come so quickly or get told so elaborately. But he didn’t black out anymore, either. He didn’t wake in some girl’s bed wondering how in all Hells he’d got there. He didn’t have to ask Rafe or Jeska or Cade the next morning if there was anyone he should apologize to.

  As for thorn … some nights it was damned near impossible to get to sleep. Some days it was damned near irresistible, the thought of sneaking off to Master Bellgloss (Auntie Brishen had been forbidden by her sister from providing Mieka with anything but medicinals) for a little something to make all his worries disappear, or give him that extra punch when a tough performance was coming up.

  “The drink and the thorn, or your profession. Give up one or the other, Mieka, because you can’t have both.”

  He’d made his choice. He had no regrets—but Gods how he missed it sometimes.

  Besides, there was nothing to prevent him from drinking himself stuporous every night or using thorn until his arms bled, once Touchstone had shattered their last withie. Something to look forward to in his old age.

  The drummer and one of the lutenists came by the table, looking for praise and, Mieka supposed, trimmings. Miriuzca smiled and produced a gold royal—much too much, but Royals never carried money and perhaps she wasn’t all that certain about which coins were which. He saw the Elfen-eared drummer eye Miriuzca with an invitation all over his face. To judge by the glint in his dark eyes, he recognized her.

  Mieka tugged on his sleeve, and when he leaned down, whispered, “Forget it, lad. You can’t afford her.”

  “Ah, but you’re assuming that she can afford me!”

  When Mieka glowered, he laughed.

  When Mieka’s boot-knife suddenly appeared three inches from his nose, he backed away hastily and went to bother someone else.

  “It’s a truth generally acknowledged,” said Mieka, sticking the knife back into his boot, “that whatever can be accomplished with a smile can be accomplished much more quickly with a smile and a sharp blade. Now,” he went on, turning to address Megs and Vrennerie, “I’ll tell you why I’m here. And by the by, Jinsie, if you want to keep these little crawls to yourself, you’ll have to learn how to sneak out of Wistly in secret, not stroll out the front door. I followed you tonight because Cayden wants to be kept up to date on what Touchstone is doing. I’m told you know everything there is to know.”

  “Oh, very funny,” Jinsie observed. “It’s not as if you rehearsed in secret.”

  “If you knew,” he pointed out, “then so did others. And that’s why I’m thinking that Piercehand would’ve done what he did no matter which play we performed that night.”

  “You mean that he was prepared and at the ready to stagger in and make a fool of himself?” Megs shook her head. “He’s not that stupid.”

  “He’s not that sober these days, either,” Vrennerie said.

  “You may be right, Mieka,” said Miriuzca. “I’m seeing that it would be easy to provide enough whiskey and then point him in the right direction.” She poured herself more beer. Mieka knew he should have been amazed by the sight of the Princess serving herself, but he couldn’t think of her as the Princess in these surroundings. “The Archduke did not wish the Shadowshapers’ play to be performed. He couldn’t know you’d changed your minds.”

  “He got a good giggle out of it anyway,” Megs observed acidly. “I wanted to smack him.”

  Vrennerie nodded agreement. “Let’s hope the man either was paid enough to compensate for publicly disgracing himself, or that the liquor was the best in the Archduke’s cellars.”

  Mieka blinked. They knew not just about the play but also about the Archduke. He wanted badly to know exactly what they knew, but instead remarked, “He’s at that stage of whiskey-thrall where he’d down a bottle of cheap scent for the alcohol in it, then belch behind his hand and ask for more.”

  Jinsie was looking at him again, and he knew what she was thinking: exactly what he’d told Cayden that night. It could have been him.

  Conversation turned to the publication of Bewilderland the previous week, with congratulations on the transfer of a stage show to the printed page, aided by whimsical illustrations. Touchstone was the first to employ an artist in this fashion, but surely not the last. Jinsie had already been contacted by the Crystal Sparks and Hawk’s Claw, for she was the one who had selected the Bewilderland artist from the students and graduates she knew at Stiddolfe and Shollop.

  “I’m thinking about starting up a Guild for illustrators. None of the people who do woodcuts and pen drawings for the broadsheets have any representation.”

  Mieka waggled a finger at her. “Don’t you go neglecting us for your new project!”

  Ignoring him, she went on, “And I’d like to talk to the imagers as well. All of them seem to be at the mercy of whoever hires them, with no set fees or system of apprenticeship or anything.”

  “It wouldn’t help, I suppose,” said Miriuzca, “to have them be doing a tools-down, the way the weather witches did. People can live without pictures.”

  “And plays,” Megs put in impudently, winking at Mieka.

  “Gracious Gods,” he drawled, “is this really what you women talk about behind men’s backs?”

  “Not always,” Vrennerie replied sweetly. “Usually we discuss how adept men are—or aren’t!—in bed.”

  “And,” Megs added in the same tone, “what we can do to help them improve.”

  The evening was still young by Mieka’s former standards when Vrennerie regretfully reminded Miriuzca that they had an early morning ahead of them.

  “An emissary from the Grand Something of Somewhere wants to plant some exotic sort of flower in the Palace gardens,” she said as Mieka gallantly helped the ladies into their cloaks and coats. “Beholden, kind sir. His personal fortune-teller insisted that tomorrow morning is the absolutely perfect time to plant the thing, so…” She finished with a shrug.

  “They are seeming to be great believers in oracles and such to see the future,” Miriuzca said. “Every important person in his country employs someone—Oh, Megs, remind me to look up what his land is called and practice how to pronounce it!”

  “I predict,” said Mieka, “that you’ll say it perfectly on your very first try.”

  “Hmm.” Vrennerie looked at him sidewise. “If you’re so good at predictions, why didn’t you know about Lord Piercehand?”

  Aware that this turn of the conversation was dangerous, he smiled sweetly and opened his mouth to reply he knew not what. Megs beat him to it.

  “The lore in Albeyn is that only the Fae can see the future—and they tell only the good things, never the drunk and disgusting.”

  “How very considerate of them,” said Miriuzca.

  “Not at all,” Jinsie told her. “It’s just that they hate all the fuss and bother the rest of us make if the news isn’t good. Mieka, walk me home, yeh?”

  They said good night out in the street, where a nondescript carriage was waiting to take Miriuzca, Megs, and Vrennerie back to the Palace. The Goldhawk wasn’t so far from Wistly Hall that it would be dangerous for a man and woman to walk the well-lit pavement—especially if the man was carrying one knife behind his back and another pair in his boots and knew how to use them. Not that he’d ever actually fought anyone with the blades. It was all speculative. But he wasn’t about to tell Jinsie that.

  “You could’ve just asked to come along, you know,” she said all at once.

  “More fun to sneak after you.” He let another half block of shuttered shops go by before he said, “I forgot to ask Lady Megs—how’s her little brother?”

  “How much do you know?”

  Were Jinsie and Megs close enough friends to share this sort of thing? “How much is there to know?” he parried.

  She stopped under an Elf-light streetlam
p and searched his face. He saw the quick calculation in her eyes and tried to look both innocent and knowledgeable at the same time.

  “I don’t know why her father didn’t marry again years ago, if he wanted a son so much.”

  Which told him exactly nothing about how much she knew. He placed a hand beneath her elbow to urge her along. “So Megs is disinherited. She doesn’t seem all that broken up about it.”

  “She’s bloody thrilled, if you want the truth. Lord Mindrising settled an allowance on her, more than enough to live very well in Gallybanks—more than more than enough, actually. As a lady-in-waiting, she takes all her meals with the Princess and has private chambers at the Palace.”

  “Mm.” Of this he was well aware, for a couple of years ago, he’d found Cade not just in Megs’s bedchamber but in Megs’s bed.

  Jinsie linked her arm with his as they walked. “There’s nothing in her way now except those smarmy old Stewards and their obsolete rules.”

  “I haven’t noticed many of them being smarmy. Senile, yeh, but—”

  “Oh, you know what I mean. Every time she talks with one of them, they pat her on the head and tell her to be a good little girl and run along and play. How can she prove herself when they won’t even let her try?”

  “I’m sure she’ll figure something out. She’s good at that—figuring things out, I mean.”

  So was he. None of his business, of course … except that the boy was Cayden’s son. And Cayden didn’t know. And would never know, if Megs had her way. During the rest of the walk back to Wistly Hall, he debated the wisdom of telling him (thereby bringing Megs’s wrath down on his own head) or waiting for Megs to decide to tell him herself (thereby provoking Cade’s much scarier wrath if he found out that Mieka had known all along and never said a word). It was the lady’s secret to tell or not tell, of course. Mieka kept other people’s secrets.

  He stayed the night at Wistly, breakfasted with those of his family still living at home who rose at the same late hour he did, then took a hire-hack out to Moonglade Reach at around noon. He could have lingered in town the rest of the day, for Touchstone had a gigging that night at a private party, but he missed home. Strange and actually quite lovely to realize that this was indeed home. As the hack pulled through the open gate (the guards had been called off long since) and down the short drive, he smiled to think that it was odder still that he’d so quickly come to treasure the peace and quiet.

  A nice, calm, lazy day. Lunching with Cayden and Mistress Mirdley in the kitchen. Receiving the woodcrafter sent by Jed and Jez to finish off a few things in the house and check the banisters on the stairs to the roof. A short nap followed by sword practice and a long, hot bath. Listening to Jindra recite the poems she’d been set to learn at littleschool. Dining early, while discussing what they’d do at tonight’s gigging. Gathering glass baskets and primed withies for the ride in a hire-hack back into the city. A successful show for an obscenely rich and very generous silversmith (whose younger son was one of Jinsie’s artistic friends) and his two hundred guests. Driving home just as the Minsters were ringing ten.

  “Y’know,” Cade said in the tone of voice that meant he’d been pondering the issue for a while, “it’s probably good that Window Wall got interrupted.”

  Mieka didn’t ask how he figured that; Cade would eventually tell him. He just enjoyed being asked.

  “What I mean is, everybody will be expecting it at Seekhaven. If nobody tattles, then when we all walk onstage to do Blood Plight, it’ll be a total surprise.”

  “Mm.” Mieka looked out the window at the dark street.

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “I think we can’t hold any rehearsals here at all. And no more than two run-throughs of the whole thing. We can’t trust people not to notice, and we can’t trust them to hold their tongues.” He snorted. “I just spent an evening with the ladies, after all.”

  “They’d keep it quiet if we asked.”

  “I’d rather not have to ask. Why not send everybody the script, with notes, and—I know! We can rehearse at Hilldrop! Yazz and Robel won’t mind. It’d be perfect.”

  The barn—untouched by black powder—had been renovated to hold Touchstone’s wagon, with room for a couple of horses when and if Romuald Needler could be persuaded to sell. At Mieka’s request and at his expense, Windthistle Brothers were rebuilding the cottage to Giant specifications—twenty-foot ceilings, twelve-foot doorways, everything wondrously outsized and comfortable for Yazz and Robel. Mieka owed it to them. Yazz could move his arm at the shoulder, but hooves and the carriage wheel had broken too many bones and damaged too many muscles. He could still drive, having proved it on short trips starting this past winter. He had yet to join them on the Royal Circuit. Mieka was hoping that overseeing construction of his new home would keep him from the coachman’s bench one more year, so he could heal completely.

  Cade stretched and resettled his long limbs in the stiffly uncomfortable seat. “Hilldrop. Yeh, I think that would work. If we don’t all arrive and leave at the same time, nobody will think much of it. But let’s make our visits on days when the workmen aren’t there, all right?”

  “Good thought.”

  Mieka loved returning to Moonglade Reach after a gigging. As the hack rattled up the street of shuttered shops and Elf-light lamps spaced well apart, the house could not be seen for the wall and the row of trees on the adjoining property. And then the wall and the trees ended, the hack turned in at the gate, left open on nights when they performed in town, and there was the house: the peculiar, top-heavy, inverted U, its central tunnel lit on either side with blue Wizardfire by Derien to welcome them home. Nobody, not his mother or father or siblings or even his wife, had ever thought to leave lights on for him.

  Mistress Mirdley had prepared a snack, as usual: fruit, muffins with butter, hot tea. They ate in the kitchen where it was warm, seated on tall stools at the central worktable, the evening broadsheets spread all around them.

  “Review of the Bewilderland book in the Blazon,” Cade said. “They like the illustrations. ‘Best cherished as a keepsake after seeing the play onstage.’” He snorted. “Hasn’t anybody realized yet that if you get children interested in the pictures, they’ll want to read the book themselves, and—”

  “—and go to see the play, which will set them on the road to being theater-mad their whole lives,” Mieka finished for him. “Mayhap the reviewer for the Blazon is too pure-minded for any thoughts so rancid as those about money.” He paused for a sip of tea. “Here’s a good one—letters from adoring populace about recently published plays. Quill, guess who they’re talking about.” He read aloud. “‘A swift and absorbing hour’s read. I had the great privilege of experiencing this in person, and even on the page it summons memories of the most exciting night I ever spent at the theater.’”

  “Well, if he got through it so fast, it can’t be us or the Shadowshapers. Or Hawk’s Claw.” He considered. “Not the Sparks, either—they haven’t published anything yet. They’re having trouble finding something that’s a drastic enough rework of the old standards to get them the majority of the money. Who’s this man writing about?”

  “Black Lightning.”

  Cade grimaced sourly. “Should’ve guessed. How about us?”

  Grinning, Mieka declaimed, “‘I read the first ten pages and gave up. This is a terrible play, with no action, no plot, strange words, unsatisfying characters, and a sloppily described backdrop.’”

  Bristling, Cade demanded, “Which play was that?”

  “Does it matter? From the sound of it, whoever this is has a real problem paying attention for more than a couple of minutes. Who cares what somebody like that thinks? If you can call it ‘thinking.’”

  “He probably eats his dinner in two minutes flat.”

  “And spends the same amount of time making love.” He laughed aloud. “Master of the Two-Minute Fuck! How many lovers d’you think his wife has?”

  “None.” Cade
laughed, too, good humor restored. Mieka could always do that for him. “Any woman who marries a cullion like that doesn’t deserve any fun in bed.”

  “Talking of cullions,” Mieka said, “it says here that Fairwalk is selling the ancestral barracks.”

  “Not surprising,” Cade replied, “when you consider all the gold he brought back that somehow didn’t find its way into his bank account.”

  Mieka raised his teacup. “To Derien.”

  “Derien,” Cade agreed. “Who d’you think will buy it?”

  “Not a clue—but we should send Lady Vrennerie and Lady Megs to talk to him. Five minutes with them, and he’ll be donating Fairwalk Manor to the People of Albeyn!”

  “I’ve been there,” Cade said. “It’d make a spectacular holiday camp.”

  “Let’s do it! Only we’d have to find him first. Jinsie says nobody’s heard anything of him. Seems he doesn’t go to those taverns anymore—but word is Bellgloss makes up a special velvet pouch just for him every week, lined in silk and stitched with his initials.”

  Cade winced.

  Seeing it, Mieka went on, “I’d be lying if I said I cared. And so would you. Slimy git, he was and is and always will be.”

  “He helped give us our start,” Cade said softly.

  “And bloody damned near finished us!”

  Unfolding The Nayword, Cade shook out the page. “Lord Rolon Piercehand is holed up at Castle Eyot, writing his reminiscences.”

  Mieka was willing to be distracted from the subject of Kearney Fairwalk, though Piercehand was an equally unwelcome name. “First of all, I didn’t know he could read, leave alone write.”

  “All those books—” Cade began.

  “It took Drevan Wordturner to figure out what they were,” Mieka reminded him. “Second, he never even went on his so-called voyages.”

  “Which is why,” Cade informed him with a grin, “he’s advertising for all the sailors and scholars and imagers to get in touch with him. ‘An all-inclusive record of exploration and adventure,’ he calls it. A week or so at Castle Eyot, reminiscing—which is code, I suppose, for ‘Please come tell me what happened while I spent four months lying on a beach in Yzpaniole.’”