“Cade.”
He felt Rafe’s strong hand at the small of his back and obeyed it unthinkingly, walking outside into the forecourt and then through the tall gates with absurd little towers on either side, across an equally ridiculous moat complete with lily pads, and eventually to the street.
“Not yet,” Rafe said suddenly. “Wait till we’re private, Mieka.”
“But I want to
know
!”
“So do I. But not here, not out in the open.”
At length Cade felt grass rather than pavement beneath his feet. They were walking along the riverbank towards a little grove of willows. Excellent trees, willows, he thought; lovely leafy curtains to hide whatever reactions would come once he revealed the token in his hand.
He rubbed his index finger over it, trying to discern the image stamped thereon. Oh Gods—wings—no,
no
, not that one—
“Quill?” Mieka asked, hush-voiced. “Which did we draw?”
Cayden tossed over the token. Jeska glanced at it and moaned. Rafe closed his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. He wasn’t particularly fond of it either, but at least the magic he would be called on to control would be primarily visual, not emotional. Mieka’s eyes widened, but he said nothing.
They’d drawn the Ninth and flashiest of the Thirteen Perils, nothing subtle about it; lots of dazzle and very little artistry, as far as Cade was concerned. Even if they did it brilliantly, they hadn’t a hope of First Flight on the Winterly. Nothing in this piece could possibly gain them the necessary points.
They all knew it. Rafe didn’t bother stating the obvious. Fatalistically, he said, “At least we’ll be working regular this winter.”
Mieka eyed him sidewise. “Yes, we will. And you’ll be marrying the lovely Mistress Crisiant—”
“Using what, exactly, for money?”
“—at High Chapel, not Low,” Mieka went on stubbornly, “because the players of the First Flight make the most in trimmings.”
Rafe hooted with laughter. “And how do we get First Flight? Because of our charm?”
“No. Because of how Gods-damned fucking great we are!” Pulling aside the willow-leaf curtain they were all hiding behind, he went on crisply, “Did you bring the directions to the rehearsal hall? Good. Let’s go.”
They had drawn “The Dragon.” Two characters: a Fair Lady held captive and the Prince who rescued her. The Dragon itself was nothing more than a threatening shape and some sound effects. The judges’ thinking was rumored to be that the better the Dragon, the more impressed the common folk would be, and points were awarded accordingly. The playlet started with the Lady, who for a page or so whined about her dreadful fate. Then the Prince rode to the rescue: noble, unselfish, dedicated, courageous, and so forth. A switch was made back to the Fair Lady, who did a lot of hand-wringing as she commented on the battle that occurred outside the cavern she was trapped in. The environment around her won points as well. The Prince victorious, the finish was her reaction as he strode in to free and claim her, and of course she fell deeply in love at first sight. The End.
Cayden reviewed all this in his head on the walk to the rehearsal hall. This was akin to a cavern itself, a great drafty emptiness of a place with no seating. It was, however, the precise dimensions of the theater they would be allowed inside on the morrow. Thus it served as a preliminary venue, just to work the rough edges off a performance before refining it in the castle theater itself.
Touchstone arrived just as Macielin Redprong was concluding auditions for this year’s masquer and fettler. Things did not seem to have gone well. A shudder of distaste, quickly repressed, jolted Cayden out of his anxiety over their draw; one look at the dozen or so rejected applicants provoked a rush of sheer gratitude that he was, as Mieka had put it, part of something worth being part of. To subject himself to Redprong, a man would have to be desperate indeed to become a player.
Redprong himself—a tregetour, though short and stocky and without a hint of Wizard about his Gnome-and-Goblin looks—eyed the new arrivals haughtily from his place at stage right. “Come back tomorrow,” he grunted.
Jeska stiffened with insult. So did Cade. Rafe caught his breath. Mieka began to laugh.
“As much hope of that as of me gettin’ me ears kagged!” he jeered. “Get off the stage and leave it to those as knows what they’re about, won’t you? There’s a good lad!”
When the celebrated tregetour had betaken himself off with a Gnomish hiss of fury, Touchstone claimed the stage.
And stood there, staring at one another in an abrupt and empty silence that somehow they would have to fill.
Mieka flipped the token into the air and caught it, over and over, frowning more deeply each time. At last, just as Cade was about to shout at him to for the love of all the Gods
stop
it, he snatched it from the air, tucked it in a pocket, and said, “So which of us has the scathingly brilliant idea?”
There were a dozen or so chairs on the stage. Jeska dragged four of them into a square and sat, waiting for the creative portion of the team to come up with something. His expression of calm confidence—visible even under all the makeup—settled Cade somehow.
“I wish we could show what really happened,” he mused. “The dragon was real, but it wasn’t a lady who was rescued from a cave, it was a treasure from a castle dungeon someplace up north, and the poor beast was chained inside to guard it.”
“More noble, though,” Rafe said, “rescuing a pretty girl from a hideous great fire-breather.”
“Be a shocker, wouldn’t it?” He smiled and shook his head. “Hauling up the money in a sling made of your second-best cloak after you’ve stuck your sword into a dragon that can’t even see to bite you.”
“We can tweak it, can’t we?” Mieka pleaded. “As it stands, in the version everybody does, there’s nothing that will get us noticed—”
“And nothing that will get us tossed in quod for insulting the royal family,” Jeska cautioned, speaking slowly and carefully.
“But it’s
boring
!”
“It’s the one we’ve drawn,” Rafe said. “We’ll just do it better than anybody ever did it, that’s all.”
“But—”
“Make an end to it!” Rafe snapped, and Mieka subsided with a scowl. “Fair warning—you try anything silly, and I’ll shut you down.”
Cade saw Mieka give the fettler a look that plainly said,
You can try!
He shrugged. They were stuck; they had to perform this; they had no choice.
But Mieka wasn’t giving up. “You say it was a real dragon, Quill?”
“I did some research on all the Thirteen. My grandfather’s tregetour left him his library, and the true stories are there if you know where to look.” But the one book that was missing—the volume that told the truth about all the Thirteen and the history of the theater in unflinching detail—that book was the one book his grandfather’s tregetour had never owned.
Lost Withies
… so ancient and obscure that few tregetours even knew of it … there were rumored to be five or six copies still extant.… He dragged his mind back from hopeless book-lust. “Remember what we were saying about putting in some lines wondering what his famous great-grandfather would’ve done? Whether he can live up to it? I think that’ll work well here. And that would be different enough—”
“But the dragon was real,” Mieka interrupted, scowling. He dug the token out of his pocket, looked at it, and suddenly flung it high in the air again, laughing. “So what we’ll do is give them a Dragon that’ll scare the piss out of ’em!”
Even on the Royal Circuit, audiences were used to threatening shadows only. Once Mieka explained what he wanted to do, Cade gaped at him, then joined in his laughter. A real fire-breather? Ideas for accomplishing it swarmed in his head—yes, it was possible, and more besides.
“If we do it, then let’s
do
it. You and me, we’ll make us a Dragon, right enough—and forget the Fair Lady, just stay with the Prince.”
They could linger, he explained, with the Prince long after the usual switch was supposed to have been made. The Fair Lady’s voice would provide commentary on the battle, just as the piece was always done, but the scene onstage would stay with the Prince and the Dragon. Mieka would have to provide Jeska with an enswathing illusion that would allow him to speak the Fair Lady’s lines without the audience being able to see his lips move—all of this while he was wielding a phantom sword against a Dragon more real than anything anyone had ever seen.
“I’ll work a cavern mouth into it,” Cade said, “and the echo we use for ‘Deep Dark Well.’ The contrast between the battle and all her whining will be—”
“—will get us shouted off the stage!” Rafe interrupted. “This is one of the Thirteen, in case you forgot! We have to treat it with at least
some
respect!”
“Why?” Mieka asked, wide-eyed.
Cade threw him a grateful smile. “They’ll be so busy being scared of the Dragon and amazed by the battle that they won’t even notice how we’ve messed with it. And we’ll be using the standard script. Most of it, anyway. We’ll just be shifting the focus.”
“But how do I act it?” Jeska wailed.
“Like you always do,” Mieka replied. “Like you’d been birthed to perform this piece and this piece only.”
“Heroic,” Cade told his masquer. “Give ’em every move you’ve got. And at the end, you’re exhausted. You’ve just defeated a Dragon, for fuck’s sake! The girl’s blithering on and on about how brave and noble you are, and how much she adores you, while you’re practically dead on your feet.”
“Seeing what she wishes to see?” Rafe suggested.
“Exactly.” Cade grimaced. “Just like everyone else in the world.”
“You’re too young to be so cynical,” Mieka observed, “or so me old fa would say. Will we be showing the Fair Lady at all?”
“We have to.” But Rafe suddenly didn’t sound very certain.
“And there’s another thing that’s never been done,” Cade said. “We give them a real Dragon, a real battle scene, all the while with her voice giving the descriptions, and finally—”
“What?” Jeska asked. “Finally
what
?”
“We don’t show her at all!
She
can be the shadow. Not the Dragon, like everybody else does it. You stay the Prince—”
Rafe was shaking his head. “And have everybody think we’re not good enough to do multiple characters?”
“Who else is good enough to do a real Dragon?” Mieka countered, and tossed the token back to Cade. “This is brilliant!”
Jeska was nodding, his blue eyes alight with plans, his lips already framing the customary lines. But Rafe was still balking, skeptical.
“Look,” Cade said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “We’re there to give ’em a show. They don’t really care what sort, as long as it’s something they’ve never seen before. If we weren’t capable of multiple characters, we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
“And first place on the Winterly is where we’ll be,” Mieka stated. “Is that High Chapel wedding a little more real to you now?”
Rafe’s broad shoulders relaxed, and he gave a slow nod. “If this works, I’ll let you hold the loving cups.” He paused. “Mind, I’ll skin you alive if you drop them.”
Over the next hour, they paced the stage, planning, arguing, sparking ideas off one another like—like true silver and true gold sparked off a touchstone, Cade told himself.
This
was how it was supposed to be: the exchanging and enhancing of techniques, the almost instantaneous comprehension of a new ploy, the eagerness, the
joy
of it.
And though he didn’t mention it, he was thinking all the while that there would be no opportunity for their usual attention-grabber. There would be no shattering of glass. If they tried it, the stewards would be on them like a wolf on unguarded sheep. Everybody knew what Touchstone did at the end of a show. The fettlers who stood watch to protect the audience from everything from deliberate violations to nervous mistakes would be aware of every move Touchstone had ever made.
They would have to do this on sheer talent alone. And something within Cade was glad that this was so. There would be no flash, no gimmicks, no tricks. Just the work.
He wondered why he felt not the slightest misgiving. After all, Touchstone had first drawn attention with the glass-shattering stunts. Part of the reason the four of them were thrashing out the performance of the Ninth instead of getting ready for another show at the Downstreet was that the maids at the Downstreet swept up more broken glass in one night than most taverns did in a year.
But he knew he wouldn’t mention his certainty that they would be great even without their hallmark move. He wanted his partners a bit edgy; they did their best work when they were just a touch anxious. Himself, he functioned most effectively
after
he had worn himself out with worrying. In fact, he mused, he had so little in common with these three it was ludicrous. Offstage, Jeska rarely if ever stopped thinking about girls and how best to bed whichever beauty had taken his eye. If Mieka had seen an open book since he left littleschool, it was only because one had fallen off a shelf in front of him. As for Rafe—despite his love for the theater and his determination to travel the Circuit, he was essentially a homebody, a confirmed nestcock eagerly anticipating marriage to Crisiant and a settled home with a dozen rambunctious children.
But the four of them understood each other on more basic and more important levels: they knew the work. Jeska was poised to become one of the legendary masquers. Rafe was only growing in power and confidence. Mieka was the most talented, if the most maddening, glisker Cade had ever seen.
And they’re mine,
he told himself.
Together we make this singular thing: Touchstone. The standard to measure against, the proof of worth. Let the rest of them strike their work against ours. They won’t prove gold or even silver. Compared to us, they’re wood shavings.
“I think he approves,” Rafe said suddenly, and Cade looked over at the three of them. They were watching him with varying degrees of speculation on their faces.
“How can you tell?” Mieka asked, frowning.