Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  Trials continued much as usual. The following afternoon as they rehearsed, he reflected that it might be a good thing to remind people of the real perils attendant on mucking about with things that belonged to the Fae. For he’d learned, quite by chance, that the Archduke’s new theater had been constructed on what some suspected to be an ancient Dancing Ground.

  “No bounce off the ceiling, because there isn’t any ceiling,” Rafe mused as the four of them joined Hawk’s Claw and the Crystal Sparks in pacing off the open-air theater’s dimensions. Black Lightning was not present. They’d helped design the theater; presumably they had seen it many times before its completion. Cade thought it odd that Thierin Knottinger wasn’t here to gloat.

  “Have to be careful with that marble wall at the top, behind the seats,” Rafe went on. “What is it, four feet high? But I think that’s the only potential problem.”

  “Those seats look bloody uncomfortable,” Mieka said. “Quill, should we make them feel nice and soft, as if they’re sitting on a pillow? And then whisk it away when they least expect it?”

  The seats—stone benches, really, with slight depressions carved out to fit an average-sized bottom—were arranged in three sections with stepped aisles in between. At sixty rows to each section, fifty seats across, the theater held three thousand people. Front row center, a two-foot marble wall partitioned off six carved stone chairs where the Royals would sit, presumably in well-cushioned comfort. The ranks of seats rose at the perfect angle to allow everyone to see everything, and for a fettler to modulate the magic without concerns such as wooden beams or stone pillars. Flanking the seats were grassy hillsides topped with flowering trees.

  “Not much comfort in what passes for a tiring room, either,” Mieka added. “I’ll be generous and assume they’ll bring in chairs on performance days. But, really, it ain’t nothin’ more than the space between a few walls.”

  Cade stood center stage to survey the seats from one side of the theater to the other. “It’s more than half a circle,” he told Jeska. “You’ll have to make your turns broader, play to the sides more.”

  The masquer nodded. “It isn’t in-the-round, praise all the Gods. I won’t have to play with my back turned to half the audience half the time.”

  Mieka and the gliskers for Hawk’s Claw and the Sparks had gathered on the slightly raised platform provided for benches and glass baskets, farther back from the lip of the stage than usual, nestled close to the back wall. This was paneled in polished fine-grained wood, supported at regular intervals by stout round beams. Cade watched for a moment as three Master Gliskers discussed the technical aspects of their profession, and rejoiced in the serious, absorbed expression on Mieka’s face. The hangover was forgotten—and the reason that had prompted the acquisition of that hangover. He wasn’t scared anymore. Now that his wife was gone, there wasn’t much that could hurt him enough to seek alcohol or thorn. And it wasn’t danger to himself that had frightened him last night; it was what might threaten those he loved.

  It was odd, really, that he hadn’t fallen into a whiskey bottle and never come out after his wife left him. Cade supposed she’d told one lie too many. Considering how many times Mieka had lied to her about other women, it was two-faced and despicable to use her lies as reason to leave her. But Cade thought he understood that, too. Mieka’s betrayals were of the flesh, and bad enough; hers were of honor, which he saw as infinitely worse. Cade wasn’t sure that Mieka wasn’t right about that.

  When he married her, Mieka had promised faithfulness, and broken his promise more times than anybody could count. He’d lied to her about other women and would have continued to get away with it if he hadn’t contracted the pox. Cade didn’t know whether or not he’d once more sworn fidelity after that, but he did know that the dalliances hadn’t ceased—though he’d been much more careful about his supply of sheaths. There was nothing excusable in his conduct or in his lies. But were his worse than hers?

  Cade wasn’t exactly impartial. One of her betrayals had been of Cade himself, telling her mother about Mieka’s drunken revelation of the Elsewhens. True honor would have kept that knowledge between husband and wife. Instead, she had shared it with the person she honored more than she did Mieka. Certainly she valued herself more highly than she did him—witness the lies she’d told about that night at Great Welkin, endangering Mieka’s freedom and even his life. Mieka had understood why she’d done it, and possibly forgiven her. Cade had never asked. What Mieka couldn’t forgive was that she hadn’t trusted him, relied on him to help her. He might have sacrificed himself for her sake, loving her, if only she had told him the truth.

  In the past now, Cade told himself firmly. He watched his glisker for a few moments more, satisfied that Mieka was now where he’d been born to be. He might find another woman someday, someone to marry. Cade hoped he would—for one thing, it would cut down on their ridiculous early-morning encounters, returning to Moonglade Reach after a night in town.

  Jeska and Rafe were still pacing off the dimensions of the stage. Cade stood where he would place his lectern, scanning the seats, thinking it would take a bit of doing to monitor everyone in this vast theater when it was full. Scant wonder it had taken so long to build: the hillside to be dug out and reshaped, the stone quarried and moved, set in place, carved, the pathway laid out and flagstoned, and all of it—entrance to pathway to theater and the grassy verges on either side—landscaped. Cilka and Petrinka would have done interesting things with trees and flowers, Cade mused. The Archduke’s gardeners had planted unimaginatively: all the trees had flower beds in a circle beneath, with thick bushes forming a kind of backdrop. It must have taken a while to coax all that transplanted greenery to grow. Likewise the dozens of ornate bronze torch stands rising from the back wall and placed at intervals along the pathway and down the aisle steps hadn’t been finished in a fortnight.

  The theater was only a mile or so from Seekhaven Castle, the last quarter of it done on foot along the pathway; carriages were not allowed. Refreshments were obviously not allowed either. Cade had seen no provision for booths selling drinks or nibbles—and, more important, there were no garderobes. All these people in one place for hours, and nowhere to piss?

  “I don’t like it,” said a voice beside him, and he turned to see Trenal Longbranch, Tregetour for Hawk’s Claw, beside him. The boy had grown into a man these last couple of years, long-locked and handsome, sure of himself and his talents, confident that he and his group were in the company of equals. It pleased Cayden to see it, for of course Trenal was right.

  “It’s big,” Cade conceded. “But it won’t be that much of a strain.” Except to three thousand bladders.

  “I don’t mean the size of this place.” He pointed round the curve of the seating, blue eyes narrowed in the afternoon sunlight. “You’ll all tell me I’m insane, I know, but I can’t help it.”

  “Help what?”

  “Don’t you see it? Turn all the way round. No, stand center stage, just here, and turn a circle.”

  Cade did, and faced front again. His imagination suddenly gave him the feeling that the seats extended in a full circle, a gigantic stone bowl with the stage at the center, each aisle a groove cut into the hollow as if to drain liquid smoothly down to the stage.

  It reminded him of something. He wasn’t sure what. Something he’d seen or read about? One of the Elsewhens he’d deliberately forgotten?

  “It’s a Fae Dancing Ground,” Trenal said at last. “There are circles like this all over the place, where I grew up. Made of stones, some of them—just a circle of rocks—but some of them are outlined by trees or bushes, and all of them have a kind of focus in the middle. A place where all the magic converges—at least, that’s how my granny used to tell it. The Shadowshapers got that play wrong, you know. The one they used to do about the Prince on his way to his wedding, and meeting the Fae Queen. There was no convergence in the Dancing Ground.”

  “Or drainage.”

  Longbranch
looked startled, then nodded. “If there was a drain, like at Rose Court, I’d tend to agree with you. But this is different.”

  That was it—Rose Court, the outdoor theater with the blood trickling through to sate the hungry ones below …

  “How is it different?”

  “No drain,” Trenal replied impatiently. “Whoever stands in the exact center, that’s the focal point of all the magic.”

  “But this hasn’t been built as a complete circle.”

  “Mayhap not. But I’d swear on my daughter’s life that a long time ago, this was a Dancing Ground.” He raked both hands back through straight brown hair. “And did you get a look at the carvings atop those support struts?” He pointed to the wall behind the stage.

  Cade peered upwards—he admitted, but only to himself, that one of these days he’d need spectacles like some tottering old man—and could just make out the features of the middle two. Well, they were thirty feet high, those beams, and the tall, handsome Wizards in long flowing robes took up only the last five feet or so. The next supports were shorter, each featuring a beautiful Elf in full traditional Elfen regalia of dagged-hem tunic and trousers bloused over pointy boots. The rest of the beams descended to a height of about fifteen feet, with matched figures of other magical races staring out at the audience.

  “The expressions on the faces of the Pikseys and Giants are bad enough,” Trenal went on. “But the Trolls and Gnomes and especially the Goblins look like pure evil.”

  Evidently the artist who had repainted part of the Kiral Kellari’s wall—and been sacked by Master Warringheath—had a friend who worked in wood. The figures were exquisitely carved and grotesquely offensive.

  “Cade! Cayden!”

  He turned at Rafe’s bellow of his name. “Be there in a tick!” Then, to Trenal: “Is there a way to, I dunno, test for it or something? Just to make sure it was a Dancing Ground?”

  “Wizard, Elf, Goblin, Human—and a bit of Piksey—I am. Fae, I am not.”

  But Cade was. And Mieka. He tried to feel something, sense something, but all this was to him was a vast half bowl of stone edged by grass and trees, with six seats for Royal backsides and a raised platform for gliskers. He’d ask Mieka.

  “Ask around,” he told Longbranch. “I’ll talk to the Trollwife at the Shadowstone, see if she knows the history of the place.”

  The younger man nodded, and Cade went to consult with Rafe on whatever he needed to be consulted about.

  Mistress Luta, when asked, shook her head. “Not to my knowing. But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She folded her arms and frowned, then seemed to decide in favor of providing information. “When that man first plotted out his theater, it was on the other side of the river. Bought up the land, started digging. Then he brought in those boys who’re so reckless with their magic—”

  “Black f—Black Lightning,” he supplied.

  “As you say,” she agreed, her eyes telling him she’d heard what he hadn’t said. “Seems they told him that wasn’t the right place. Tromping all over Seekhaven and miles into the countryside, they were, until the location was settled. Him having no magic and them having not as much of it as they’d like to think.”

  “They felt something there? In that exact place? Did it used to be a Fae Dancing Ground?”

  “One thing, lad, that I know for certain, and it’s this.” She looked up at him almost resentfully with her gorgeous lavender eyes. “With suchlike as the Fae, there’s no such thing as ‘used to be.’” She nodded once, portentously, and returned to her kitchen.

  Cayden had no more time to pursue the subject, because a couple of days later, the ladies arrived, and then Touchstone won First Flight on the Royal (again), and suddenly they had only two days before the last time Fliting Hall would be used for the final night’s performance. Touchstone would have a busy time of it, doing Blood Plight there and then Window Wall at the new theater. Cade was just as glad that Mieka had drunk the drunk out of his system. Cade needed everyone awake, aware, sober, and more brilliant than even Touchstone had ever been.

  Chapter 36

  Dismayed, yes; daunted, never; but for the first time in a very long time, Mieka felt sick to his stomach at the idea of being onstage. Cade trusted implicitly in that Elsewhen of a forty-fifth Namingday party; why couldn’t he?

  It wasn’t Cade who had damned near been brought up before the justiciars for attempted murder, now, was it? And it hadn’t been Cade’s former wife that the Archduke had ordered killed. But it was Cade who could change enough things to make that Elsewhen of eighteen years hence impossible. That was how it worked, wasn’t it? Or had he seen it in the future because something he’d already done had brought that future about? Was it something that might happen because of something he would or wouldn’t do, or had he already done whatever it was that was necessary to make that future inescapable?

  It gave Mieka a headache to add to his grumbling stomach.

  Three afternoons before the one-time-only performance of Blood Plight, they all gathered for one last rehearsal. Their Steward friend of the last few years, Baltryn Knolltread, stood watch outside the hall with a friend he swore he could trust. “Mainly,” he’d grinned, “because he’s married to my favorite sister, and if he tells anything, she can make his life more of a misery than I ever could!”

  Up in Mieka’s sword boards, they’d run through the final play for Derien and Mistress Mirdley, but that had been more than a fortnight ago. The three Shadowshapers seemed to have spent the time thinking up questions for which, Mieka thought grimly, Cade had better have all the answers. Impatient with the waste of time they should have spent on the play, nonetheless Mieka kept his mouth shut. It would be as well to go over it all one last time.

  “I still don’t quite understand how we can be sure of the way they … feed, for want of a better word,” said Rauel.

  Mieka saw Cade repress a sigh. He was as weary of these justifications as Mieka was of listening to them. But with quiet certainty he began again.

  “You remember that gruesome old place outside New Halt. The one where we were paid a small fortune to play to one person in a cellar. Whoever it was, he was wrapped up as if it were winter.”

  Sakary said, “Nobody ever found out who we were playing to. I mean, who cared, as long as the money was that good?”

  “Our first year,” Rafe said, “we’d’ve done all Thirteen Perils stark naked in a snowstorm for that kind of money.”

  “Ugh!” Rauel grimaced, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “I’ll need a while to wash that image out of my poor, innocent brain.”

  Cade went on, “Eventually we all decided that the money wasn’t worth it. Remember what it felt like?”

  “Too right, I remember!” Sakary said. “We couldn’t hardly walk, we were that exhausted.”

  “It wasn’t just physical, though,” Rafe reminded him. “It was as if every emotion had been yanked out of you and you’d never feel anything ever again.”

  “Yeh,” Rauel said, frowning now. “But—no, that can’t be.”

  “Explain it some other way,” Cade invited. “We were playing to a Vampire who’d learned how to feed off emotions to sustain himself between blood feasts.”

  When Chat took up the persuasion, Cade looked simultaneously irked and grateful. “After they weren’t needed to defend the Continent anymore, they became outcasts. Having them around was just fine when they were doing battle, and feeding off the blood and terror of the enemy. But once the war was over—”

  “That’s why there are so many legends,” Sakary said. “They starting hunting regular people. It took a while to figure out how to ward them off and how to kill them. Silver and garlic and wooden stakes—”

  “Why,” Cade challenged, “do all those old stories specifically talk about how the corpses were found not just drained of blood, but with faces frozen in terror?”

  Rauel was still resisting. “It’d be pretty sca
ry, having something like that pounce on you—”

  “The fear was part of the feast.” Chat met his tregetour’s eyes squarely. “You forget, I’m from that part of the world.”

  Rauel shook his head vehemently, long dark hair flying. “Don’t you realize what you’re saying? And if it’s true, if that person at New Halt was a Vampire, why haven’t there been any tales in Albeyn about blood-drained corpses?”

  “Because,” Cade told him, still patiently, “they can live off emotion and off other kinds of blood than what’s in here.” He raised his arm and pointed to his wrist. “But the emotions have to be powerful, and who better to give that than players like us?”

  “I can tell you who better than us,” Mieka said. “Black fucking Lightning. And the Archduke owns them.”

  “The Archduke?” Rauel laughed, though a bit nervously. Full marks for stubbornness, if not insight. “Last time I saw him, he was inspecting horses at last autumn’s fair in full daylight! Next you’re going to say he doesn’t have a heartbeat!”

  “Do I look like an authority on Vampires?” Cade snapped. “All I know is what Vered found out and what I found out—and it’s going into this play, Rauel. If you don’t want to participate, tell me now, so I can learn your part.”

  Oh, clever Quill! Mieka hid a grin. No better or swifter way to shut Rauel up and gain his total cooperation than to threaten his last great role.

  “You? Play the Wizard?”

  Chat faced him again. “If you don’t, he will. I mean it, Rauel. If you want out, say so right now.”