by Melanie Rawn
He scratched his jaw, shook his head, and capitulated. “All right. In spite of what I’ve been saying, this feels right. That’s why we all need to be sure. We can’t prove it because we’ve got no real proof. All we can do is convince everyone else the way we’re convinced. And that means onstage.”
“Are you convinced?” Sakary challenged.
“Yeh. I don’t like it—Hells, I hate it—but I believe it.” Running both hands back through his hair—Mieka saw that since Vered’s death, or perhaps because of it, there was a gray streak—he suddenly laughed, reminding everyone of how charming and boyish he could be. “Ah, bugger it! Can’t wait to see the look on his face, can you?”
* * *
Bexan was waiting for them back at the Shadowstone Inn. She was not happy. The ladies had all arrived days ago, and Cade, overruling everyone else’s objections, had left a copy of the rewritten play in her room this morning.
Rauel escaped upstairs with his wife, Breckyn; Chat suddenly remembered that he’d promised to bring his children some sweets, and vanished; Sakary was left to greet Bexan. She looked right through him, her eyes fixed on Cayden.
“You changed it. Without my permission, without telling me—you changed it!”
Mieka rolled his eyes at Rafe behind Cade’s back. They went to the bar and asked for a pitcher—make that two pitchers—of ale. “How much does it take to get a Piksey dead drunk?” he whispered to Rafe.
“Dunno. She’s little, but she’s tough.”
“Poor Quill.”
“His own fault, for giving her a copy.”
They took the pitchers and glassware over to the table where Bexan was favoring Cade with quite the lecture. But it wasn’t to do with having treacherously changed Vered’s immortal words. She was furious that now she’d have to call back the final version of the plays from the printer’s and rework them so the text fit what would be presented onstage.
Mieka poured Cade a drink and put it at his elbow. He was listening to Bexan’s tirade, staring down at his hands. At length she was done. Mieka didn’t think he even tasted the ale he swallowed before speaking.
“Sorry.”
She waited.
But that was it. Mieka bit his lips against laughter.
“One thing more,” she warned.
She glared at Cayden, who didn’t look up. Mieka noted that a flush of color on her pallid, ever-so-slightly blue-tinted cheeks produced a unique shade of lavender. No, more like mauve. He liked to remember little details like that. It was part of his job.
“None of you—not you, not Rauel, not anybody—will claim a single rewritten line as your own. Not a single word!”
“Fine.” Cade drained his glass and stood. “Is that all?”
Mieka opened his mouth to say something—anything—when Chirene Grainer made her elegant, exquisite way into the bar. “Bexan!” she exclaimed happily. “Here you are! I’ve found the most wonderful silk—exactly your color! Hurry, come with me right this minute or somebody else will have bought it!”
Mieka knew full well that Chirene was of the opinion that the wares in every shop in Seekhaven were overpriced and underwhelming. As she urged Bexan towards the door, she cast an exasperated glance at her husband, who raised both hands in innocent disclaimer of all responsibility for anything—except, Mieka thought with a hidden grin, the resulting bill from the silk merchant’s.
Mistress Luta ambled out from the kitchen with a folded parchment note, which she handed to Cayden, and a small package wrapped in burlap. This she gave to Mieka.
“Don’t ask, because I don’t know who sent it,” she said. “I didn’t see the messenger, nor did anybody. Waiting on the hall table, it was, and no note.”
As Mieka picked at the twine knot, Cade said, “They’ve set the order of performance for the new theater. By popular vote, or so Megs says.” He snorted. “It’s certainly not by merit! Hawk’s Claw, the Sparks, Black Lightning, Touchstone. Oh, and opening night will be free to anyone who doesn’t actually have an invitation—which means about a thousand seats for the general public. The rest are the King’s personal guests, a dozen ambassadors and their aides, justiciars, nobles, ministers of the Crown who aren’t in Gallybanks running the country. Megs says her father will be there—we’ll have to remember to find him before the show and offer our compliments.”
“You do have an interesting and useful correspondence with the lady,” Jeska teased.
Mieka barely heard. The twine and burlap had been wrapped around a knife. His knife, six inches of steel with a silver thistle and leaves inlaid in the blade and a big dark amethyst at the tip. The knife he’d lost at Great Welkin. He pretended to drop the burlap onto the floor, and bent down to slip the knife into his boot before anyone else saw it.
“She’ll be here tonight,” Cade went on. “The ladies are all dining together, which means we men have to find someplace else to eat. What was your present, Mieka?”
“Hmm? Oh. New buckle for that red belt.” He wadded up the burlap, not looking at Cade. “It’s hideous. Nothing like what I ordered. I’m returning it.” Which got him to wondering who had sent it. He’d thought it lost forever, that night before Wintering. Well, it had been found again.
“Where shall we have dinner?” Rafe wanted to know.
“Did you say Megs was coming tonight?” Mieka asked. “Did her father bring the child along?”
“She doesn’t say anything about her stepmother, so I assume not.”
This proved to be the case. The men got back from a tavern on the other side of Seekhaven—not a patch on the food at the Shadowstone—just as the ladies were finishing up, and joined them for a drink. Mieka bustled about, making sure everyone had a whiskey or wine or a cordial (except him; mocah over ice) and then made sure he was sitting next to Megs.
“How’s your little brother?”
“Fine.”
“Are we ever going to see him?” Meaning, of course, was Cayden ever going to see his son.
“When he’s older.”
And that was the end of his questions, which had gained him no information at all. He had a lot he wanted to say, of course, but he couldn’t say it here. So when everyone rose to go up to bed or, in Vrennerie’s and Megs’s case, return to the Castle, he made sure he was the one to help Megs on with her lightweight tan velvet cloak.
“You ought to visit us at Moonglade more often. And bring your nephew.”
“Now, why would I want to expose the poor child to Cade’s endless wittering about snags in his writing?” She spoke lightly, but there were sparks in her green eyes.
“Oh, but with Quill, that’s half the fun! Getting him to laugh himself out of his sulks—he can be a lot of fun, y’know.”
“Aren’t you the one who spent half an hour one time regaling me with the—what was it? The invisible play?”
He couldn’t help making a face. Back in the awful months when they’d taken any gigging offered so they could pay off their debts, Cade had been drinking a lot of brandy and pricking a lot of thorn. Well, they all had. As their tregetour, however, Cade was responsible for coming up with something new for their performances (which was why any snide remarks about “the same old plays” still stung him right where he lived). One of his ideas had been for the main character, a young girl, to be invisible.
Jeska had wanted to know how he was expected to play somebody invisible. Cade told him that he would instead be all the people she interacted with. Jeska asked, What sort of interactions? Rather unwisely—he’d been either drunk or thorned, he couldn’t recall and in those days it hadn’t mattered—Mieka had suggested that they should make her a prostitute: Disappearing Diella, Albeyn’s Only Invisible Fuck. Jeska would have no problem being the customer, except that Touchstone would get quodded for obscenity.
Cade had exploded. What was obscene, he snarled, was the way women were ignored in society. It was criminal. It was wrong. It was—
Rafe had quietly pointed out that making the gir
l the center of the play wasn’t exactly making the point about invisibility. And that perhaps it wasn’t the girl’s being invisible that was the point here; perhaps it was the tregetour.
Cade had used it, of course, in the way tregetours had of slicing out bits and pieces of one play and grafting them onto another. For this had been part of the key to Window Wall: that everybody wanted desperately to be visible to someone.
Now, looking into Megs’s sardonic face, Mieka said defensively, and without thinking too much about it, “He was pretty drunk at the time. And that wasn’t anything compared to—”
“Compared to what?”
Caught, he decided he might as well tell it. “There was another idea of his.”
“Drunk or thorned? Or both?”
“No idea,” Mieka lied. He knew very well it had come from an hallucination Cade experienced while reacting with predictable unpredictability to a new kind of thorn. “Anyways, he wanted to make words real. To have Jeska speak the words and me turn the words into what they were—what the words meant, I mean.”
“Sounds … bizarre,” she finally said. “If Jeska said ‘dragon’—”
He nodded. “What Quill was going for—I think—was that words are symbols for things, whether they’re spoken aloud or written down or you read them. And if the symbols become the actual things they symbolize, we’d all be a lot more careful about how we use words. Treat them with more respect.”
“Oh.” She considered for a moment, frowning. Then she asked, “But is that your job? To make symbols or force people to understand the relationship of words to images, or—or whatever it was he wanted to do? Isn’t it your job to entertain?”
“That’s just about what Rafe said.”
“You alter perceptions,” Megs said musingly. “While you’re onstage, you change the way people see or hear things. Mieka … what if you could do it so it’s permanent? What if you could change their perceptions—”
He hitched a shoulder uncomfortably. “I’m sure it’s been tried. The fact that we don’t do it has to mean nobody succeeded, right?” The underhanded practice of planting a thirst in the patrons of a tavern didn’t count. Did it? On their brief tour of the Continent, had Black fucking Lightning really managed to increase the demand for rumbullion? “Giving them something to perceive isn’t the same as telling them how to perceive it.”
“What did you and Rafe and Jeska do about the play?”
“Told him it was shit,” he replied bluntly. “And that we wouldn’t do it.” He paused a moment, reminiscing. “You’ve never lived until you’ve been on the wrong side of those gray eyes when he’s like that. Knives, swords, and bright sharp shiny three-inch nails are nothing compared to Cayden Silversun in a temper.”
“I’ll bet that when he sobered up, though, he agreed with you. One thing I’ll say for him, he’s reasonable, once things are explained to his satisfaction.”
“There’s one thing,” he said quietly, “that I wish you’d explain to my own satisfaction. I don’t promise to be reasonable. I’d just like to know.”
“I can guess. Shall I?” Annoyed, she faced him squarely and lowered her voice. “Here’s what I see. All of you—Touchstone, the Shadowshapers, Hawk’s Claw, any group that’s been together for years—you’re married to each other. You live in each other’s pockets on the Circuits. You put up with each other’s moods—or, as you say, laugh each other out of them. You work together, eat together, travel together, get drunk together—and when one of you is lost, as Vered was, the grief is…” She broke off, bit her lips together, then continued, “I’ve seen enough of players to know that it takes an exceptional sort of woman to be married to any of you. The theater fascinates me. It always has. As exciting as it would be to live with a man whose whole life is the theater, that’s exactly the point. I want to live my life.”
He really couldn’t argue with that. “You’re always welcome at Moonglade Reach, y’know. No invitation ever necessary.”
She gave him a smile—and from her, he realized such things really were a gift. It wasn’t the bright social smile Court ladies seemed to wear all the time or the tight, narrow-eyed baring of a few teeth that was a warning a blind man would recognize. This was a warm, humorous, whimsical, confiding smile. The kind one shared with a friend.
“I’m beholden to you, Mieka. And one day, when he’s older…”
He nodded, and Vrennerie approached, and he handed the ladies into a hire-hack for the drive back to the Castle. He stared down the street for a time, thinking that he’d lost his chance to tell Cade what he knew. He’d said nothing for so many months—no, longer than that, for Mieka had known Megs was pregnant, the way he always knew somehow, whether a woman was far enough along to show or not—that to speak now would be to bring forth a storm of angry betrayal from which neither of them would emerge intact.
Later, once he and Cayden were in their beds, he said, “That package I got tonight—somebody sent my knife back. The one I lost at Great Welkin. Somebody there must’ve found it.” When Cade seemed disinclined to reply, he went on. “Why send it now, unless to warn us against doing the play?”
“Mieka! Can you think of anybody who believes a warning would put us off? Go to sleep.”
Chapter 37
Blinded by tears, the Wizard lopped off the Warrior’s head. The old woman began her weaving. The scene faded into shadows, leaving the audience to its own thoughts and feelings.
Then there was bright sunlight, dazzling, almost painful. A town street empty of people, though sharp chimes rang out midday. A man ran into view, gasping, hurling himself into the shadow of a doorway. He tried the shop door; locked. The sunlight moved gently, slowly, touching his cloaked arm. He huddled into the shade, whimpering.
An old woman—not the one from the cavern—hobbled along the street, hunched in an intricately woven shawl. The man cried out incoherently. She sped up her pace a little, and he reached to haul her into the shadows, moaning as the sunlight fell on his hand. Once more he shrank back, cradling the hand to his chest.
“Here, now, my fine Lordship,” the woman scolded, “and now you see the folly of leaving it too late to find the safe, quiet dark!”
“Get me out of here! It’s your sworn duty to help me! Take me out of this damned sun!”
The light shifted again. Soon the sun would find him. He yanked again at the shop door, panicking.
She regarded him sardonically, enjoying his predicament, seeing it as vengeance for a thousand thoughtless slights. “How many times have I warned you? But it never sinks in, not until the sun catches you—and you’re about to be well and truly caught. Do you understand that you can’t go hunting on your own? They know enough now to seal themselves inside their homes and not go outside after dark. And when you’re caught outside, as you are caught today, they lock their doors against you. Soon enough word will spread and they’ll come for you.”
He drew as far back into a corner of the doorway as he could. “We saved them! If not for us, they’d have no homes to cower in nor doors to shut!”
She shrugged. “The sun shines, and people forget.”
“Damn you, take me somewhere safe!”
“Come along now, put on your gloves, pull up your hood, hide your face from the light. That’s right. This way.”
The scene changed, became a cellar. The old woman went around lighting candles. Some were in elegant filigreed holders; others were stuck into empty bottles; still more were snugged into guttered wax on coffers and cabinets, shelves and wine racks. As the cellar slowly filled with light, the man flung back his hood, peeled off his gloves, winced as his injured hand was scraped by leather. He paced, muttering, while she unpacked the bag that had been slung over her arm.
“Is it so much to ask?” he demanded suddenly. “All the lives we saved—is it so much to ask in payment?”
“You refused the last one I brought you,” she reminded him tartly.
“Old! He was old! Old, feeble, unafrai
d! He welcomed death!”
She shrugged. “Blood’s blood.”
“That’s all you know.” He moved towards her, his eyes glinting red. In spite of herself, she shrank back. He laughed. “Fear me, woman—tremble, and remember how long I can make linger the deaths of those on whom I feed.”
“You don’t dare kill me,” she spat, facing up to him. “You need me.”
“And you have not provided. Tonight I did not feed. I hunger and thirst and I must feed.” He paced the confines of a cellar not even big enough to bring a swirl to his cloak. “Bring me an Elf. Make it a woman. And bring her to me in the dark. They fear the dark as they fear nothing else. There’s exquisite sport to be had with an Elfen woman.”
“I would,” she retorted, “if it hadn’t just happened this last fortnight that every Point-ear was gathered up and thrown out! But you don’t pay any attention to such things, do you? As long as there’s blood enough and fear enough, you don’t care what happens!”
“Gone? They can’t be.”
“The Elves will only be the first. They look different. They’re easy to spot. Taken away by night they were, by moonless clouded night when Elves are most afraid, from every city and village and crofter’s cottage, by every soldier these many lands command! Loaded into carts and wagons with only what they could carry, driven to the borders of every country in a thousand miles, told never to return on pain of death! That frightened sweet Elfen blood you crave isn’t to be had!”
He was genuinely bewildered. “But what had they done?”
“They’re magical folk. That was offense enough. You don’t understand what’s happened out in the world. Everything we are, everything we can do, all the advantages we bring, the help we give them—they don’t want magic anymore. It’s wicked. Evil. That’s what their religion tells them. And do you know why they think so? Because of you! Your stupid greedy kind, killing as you wish, making no effort to mask what you’ve done, no shame or remorse for doing it—”
“We are owed this!” he thundered. “Of the thousands—millions!—we saved, one life each month!”