Window Wall (10 page)

What if Black Lightning had created during their Vathis shows a preference for rumbullion? Cade knew they had another ploy: an ability to direct specific magic at specific types of people. Anyone but Wizards and Elves would feel the shame and the stain of their Goblin or Gnomish or Piksey or Troll blood. Did that match up somehow with this? Assuming that
this
, the lingering suggestion that one sort of drink was superior to another—no, that wasn’t right. It would be an inclination, and mayhap more than an inclination, for one thing over another. Did Black Lightning know how to create a desire in their audiences? Not just a preference, but a need and a want and—and even a
compulsion
?

“Not possible,” he said aloud, and the three stared at him. “What we make of emotion through magic lasts only as long as the performance. It can’t go on for days or weeks at a time.”

Rafe lifted his head slightly. “If you’ve never tried, how can you be certain?”

Cade heard himself spluttering. “It’s not—I mean, it just isn’t—I don’t know how it would—” Then, with a glance at Mieka’s fiendish grin, everything resolved itself into a simple, “I absolutely forbid it!”

The Elf shrugged, magnificently unconcerned. “But we could, y’know. Might take some effort, but I’ll wager it could be done.”

Cade shivered and shook his head again. “No. It’s not—it’s not
honest.
”

“Is
anything
we make them experience during a show ‘honest’?” Jeska asked. “Fabricated feelings, contrived sensations—”

“But that’s what they’ve come for!” He surged out of his chair and rummaged through the cupboard again. “Here—I wrote this a while ago, I wasn’t going to work it up into anything for a goodly while longer—but you have to read it, and even if we don’t perform it—well, there’s nothing, really, to perform, but—”

“Give it here,” Rafe said, maneuvering himself into a sitting position, hammock swaying. He read rapidly through the pages, looked at Cade for a long, hard minute, then began to recite the words aloud.

Cade heard only some of them, phrases here and there. He’d forgotten about this piece, deliberately forgotten, because it had come to him in an Elsewhen.

B
UT TO FEEL IS WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR
. Y
OU KNOW IT, WE KNOW IT
….

In an abrupt panic, he wondered what other things he might have missed these past two years that could be worked into a play. So much of “Treasure” had come to him as an Elsewhen, as a dreaming, but he had stopped dreaming. What might he have lost by denying the Elsewhens?

Y
OU ARE SAFE HERE
. W
E WILL LET YOU FEEL ALL THE THINGS THAT FRIGHTEN YOU, ELUDE YOU, COMPEL YOU, SEDUCE YOU
. T
HE THINGS YOU CANNOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN THEIR REALITY, IN THEIR MAD INTENSE AWFUL PURITY
….

What had Mieka said on his Namingday? That not all the Elsewhens had to hurt?

I
T’S WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR
. I
T’S WHAT YOU WANT. WHAT YOU NEED
….

What had he missed? What had he deliberately turned away from, rejected, refused to see and feel?

B
UT DO NOT SAY, LATER, THAT YOU WERE TRICKED
. Y
OU WERE NOT
. Y
OU KNOW IT, WE KNOW IT
. Y
OU WANT THIS
. A
ND WE WILL PROVIDE
.

Into a long silence he heard Jeska say softly, “We’ll do this at Trials. We have to. There’s so many these days looking sideways at the theater, ever since women began attending openly. This tells them why they need us. We have to do it, Cade.”

“When did you write this?” Rafe asked in the same hushed tone.

“A while ago.” He held out a hand for the pages, and Rafe gave them back.

“Don’t you dare throw that away,” Mieka warned.

Cade gave a guilty start. How had the Elf known how much Cade was regretting the impulse that had led him to share this vision?

“How does the rest of it go?” When Cade shook his head, helplessly this time, Mieka got up and took the pages right out of his hands. “Just us four standing there, and Jeska saying the words? That feels right, doesn’t it, Rafe?”

“The plainest stage-clothes we’ve got,” Jeska mused. “No backdrop, no effects. Just the words. But which play could possibly follow it?”

“It doesn’t come at the beginning of a performance,” Mieka chided. “It comes
after.
”

“Something to take home with them,” Rafe agreed.

Cade listened as they worked it out amongst themselves. For all that none of them had realized about the Elsewhens, professionally they knew him all too well.

“Speaking not just for ourselves,” Mieka went on, “but for all players. Isn’t that what you wanted, Cade? Isn’t that what you saw?”

Before you stopped seeing anything?
He could hear it as clearly as if Mieka had said it aloud. He couldn’t look at him, nor at Rafe nor at Jeska. He could only stare at his hands that had written those words in a frenzy after having seen the whole of it in an Elsewhen. No, they didn’t all hurt. This one hadn’t. But so many of them had been agony, and him so powerless to know what actions of his would or would not make them come to pass that he was better off not seeing them. He was better off walling his conscious brain away from the Elsewhens that had been his torment, and looking at the world from a safe distance.

“I suppose that’s what I meant by it,” he said at last.

* * *

T
rials at Seekhaven; Touchstone’s sixth. It was difficult for Cade to remember how excited and scared he’d been that first time, how eager to prove himself and Touchstone. He had no doubts now about how good they were, and it really had nothing to do with Trials. Everyone knew that they would again come in second to the Shadowshapers. Mayhap next year, or the year after, Touchstone would come out on top. In a career that had seen triumph after triumph (with that one mortifying exception), this was Cade’s secret striving: to best the Shadowshapers.

Both groups stayed at the Shadowstone Inn, as usual. Vered had left Bexan at home this time, and Mieka was fool enough to comment upon it that first evening in the taproom over dinner. The chill that descended over the table could have frozen the blood solid in their veins. Rauel began babbling about how dull it was for her when they were rehearsing or performing, and the weariness of the trip, and how this year they’d not be going back to Gallantrybanks before heading out on tour. Vered cut across this helpful speech with, “Someday women won’t just be in the audience, or making suggestions to their husbands. They’ll be on the stage.”

Cade understood this to mean that Bexan had taken to interjecting her own ideas into the Shadowshapers’ work. He tried to imagine Crisiant or Kazie or Mieka’s wife giving advice on how to write or perform a play. The absurdity of it made him decide to make a little mischief.

“There’ve been lady poets before, y’know. Published, giving public recitals, and all that. Quite good, some of them.”

“Writing’s one thing,” Sakary said. “Performing? And in some of the places we’ve played through the years?”

“Not my daughters, that’s for certain sure,” Chat announced. “Look at the life we lead! A girl of eighteen or so, slogging round Albeyn on the Winterly Circuit?”

Rafe was smiling beneath his beard. “Seems to me we’ll have to improve the reputation of theater folk before fathers will risk their daughters in so scandalous a profession.”

“You’re doing your part,” Mieka told him. “Married, faithful, don’t drink half what you used to—are you getting old, or just boring?”

“You might give it a try, old son,” Rafe replied amiably.

Cade held his breath at this indirect reference to last year’s misdeeds. Jeska, as he did so often, saved the situation by saying in his sweetest voice, “Especially the drinking. Running out of belt to put extra holes in, aren’t you, Mieka?” He directed his gaze at the Elf’s midsection.

“Not a bit of it,” Rafe said as Mieka flushed crimson. “The leather shrunk in the wash.”

They all laughed, and conversation meandered off in other directions. The third round of ale loosened Rauel’s tongue enough to produce arch hints of spectacular plans for the Shadowshapers’ final-night show.

“Finally finished your bloody—and I mean that in every sense of the word—play, then?” Cade asked Vered.

He pushed his drink away and looked sour. “Six different ways, all of ’em done so wrongly that not even I can get it sorted. Those books I borrowed of you were so much help that I’ve no notion what really did happen.”

“And if not for you,” Chat added, “and your stickler-ness for historical accuracy, he’d simply write the thing the way he thinks it ought to go, and be done with it.”

“Historical accuracy,” Mieka said amiably, “has little to recommend it. You tregetours, your problem is that you think too much. And thinking just gets in the way.”

“Angels forfend that anybody should ever catch
you
thinking,” Chat teased.

“You know as well as I do,” Mieka shot back, “that the best players don’t play the play—they
are
the play.”

Sakary smirked. “A good thing, then, that Black Lightning is nowhere near the best.”

“Heard aught of what they’ve come up with this year?” Jeska asked.

“Nothing new.” Rauel lifted his glass to his partners in turn. “All the creative vision in Albeyn was with
us
this winter. Nothing left for anyone else.”

The Shadowshapers grinned; Touchstone groaned; Cade took the opportunity to mention that their early rehearsal tomorrow meant they really ought to get some sleep. He didn’t mention how much they needed the time in the rehearsal hall; they hadn’t been onstage together in over a month. A review of all the Thirteen would be followed by a preliminary discussion of what Rafe had named “The Avowal.” After a winter of few performances and a spring of almost none, Cade knew he ought to have had a whole new play ready. But he didn’t. And the first person who remarked on it would get a withie right up his nose.

The day following an adequate if not inspired rehearsal, they were bidden to lunching with Princess Miriuzca. This had become something of a tradition at Trials. Other groups hid their envy behind jokes and sneers, but the fact of it was that Miriuzca liked each member of Touchstone and enjoyed their company. They were, after all, some of the first Albeyni she had ever met, and had done her nothing but kindnesses. Cade wondered occasionally whether or not she had forgiven him for performing the play that had seemingly made Prince Ashgar weep, thus convincing her that he was a sensitive, gentle, tenderhearted man and their marriage would be unadulterated bliss. Still, as Mieka had told him several times (with increasing exasperation), nobody forced Miriuzca to believe what she’d believed, let alone marry the miserable cullion.

“She really shouldn’t be inviting us,” Jeska said worriedly as they presented themselves at Seekhaven Castle. “She’s just had a baby, and her father died a few weeks ago—”

“And she’s probably looking for a little distraction from both those things,” Rafe interrupted. “Between the congratulations and the condolences, between the happiness and the grief—she won’t know what to feel from one minute to the next. Crisiant didn’t.”

Cade trusted Rafe to say all the right things. He had experience, after all, of a woman who had given birth and lost her father all in the same month. A tregetour was supposed to be able to imagine what such things would feel like; he was supposed to be able to project himself into any sort of person in any situation. But lately Cade had come to believe that the only feelings he could feel were his own, and those he got rid of as quickly as he could into the withies. And perhaps the lack of performances that used up his emotions was causing his sleep to be even more fractured than usual. He’d observed long ago that Mieka became tense and uneasy if denied the release of a performance. Mayhap he was made the same way. He’d always thought that he sluiced out all his emotions when he was writing—and that outlet had been closed off for a goodly long while, too.

The Princess awaited them inside a charming white summerhouse, octagonal in shape, with curtains on four sides made of multicolored ribbons. These blew and tangled in the slight breeze, but the table was set far enough from them so that Miriuzca and her guests wouldn’t be constantly picking silk out of the soup. The footman who had escorted Touchstone across the lawns announced them, bowed, and departed, and it was left to the Princess herself to make introductions.

“My brother, Tregrefin Ilesko,” she said, indicating with a smile and a nod the young man seated beside her. “He’s so eager to meet you—I write much in my letters. Do please sit down and be comfortable, won’t you?”

Tregrefin Ilesko didn’t look eager. He looked sullen, which suited his narrow features admirably. He shared with his sister the somber dark gray of mourning and a pair of very blue eyes, but that was all. When his sister said
please
to a group of nobodies, his pencil-thin black eyebrows nearly disappeared into an unruly thatch of black hair. He was handsome in a brooding sort of way, and looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old.

Commonplace civilities were exchanged as food was set before them—slices of cold roast chicken and three sauces to dip it in, a salad of fruit and walnuts, and mazey-cakes baked with yellow ground meal from some foreign land or other. Wine was poured, the servants effaced themselves, and it became evident that Miriuzca was the eager one, asking questions about Trials designed to acquaint her brother with the whole process of theater that she adored. Jeska provided answers and charming smiles; Mieka contributed several stories of life on the circuits suitable for Royal ears; Rafe explained the functions of masquer, glisker, fettler, and tregetour. Cade said very little, for he was busy disciplining his mind against an Elsewhen that battered and howled at him like a hound frantic to come in from a thunderstorm.

Ought he to let it in? Despite what Rafe had said about the accident at the Gallery—that unless Cade could have changed something, he wouldn’t have seen anything about it in advance—that day had been enough of a shock to make him question, just a little, his decision to banish all Elsewhens from his mind. Mieka’s words kept coming back to him: “
My brother’s likely crippled, all because you think your Elsewhens are a
bore.”