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  “Terrible? Us?”

  They all took up the shouts of abuse. Roundly chastised, he laughed and wrapped his arms around his head, crying, “Mercy! Mercy on the poor player!”

  But what he’d said got Cade to thinking, and Vered as well. When the others had departed on various errands—a nap, more shopping, writing letters, or polishing withies—Vered accepted the innkeeper’s wife’s offer of chilled fruit juice served in the sunny backyard and asked Cade to join him.

  When they were seated in the shade of an elm, Vered lost no time in getting to his point. “The audiences on the Continent must get something out of this sort of theater, or it’d not be thriving as it seems to be.”

  “But it’s all they’ve got, innit? It’d be a bit like amateur theatricals, the sort people do on long winter evenings when they’ve run out of books and conversation and all the lute strings have snapped.”

  “Children dressing up in mummy’s gowns and grandfather’s boots. But from that sort of playing come players—if they grow up with the magic for it. And if they do, it’s not the back wall of the drawing room they’ll be playing to. They’ll play to the gods.”

  Cade smiled. It was an old expression in theater, not much used anymore: playing to the gods meant making sure the entire audience heard and saw and felt everything to the very back rows and beyond, where the Old Gods gathered to watch.

  Vered brushed a buzzing insect away from his face. “I hear you’ve been fooling about with removing one or the other of the tricks we all use during a play.”

  “Just as an experiment. Mieka’s sister Jinsie has friends at Shollop who challenged us, more or less, to leave out the sounds. Theater for the deaf. Yet you’ve done the same—more or less!—with ‘Life in a Day,’ and no emotion until the ending.”

  “Is there more of honesty, d’you think, in that way of doing it? Words and sights that reach into men and drag their own emotions out of them, rather than making them feel what the scene’s supposed to make them feel?”

  “Men and women,” Cade corrected, smiling.

  “Because of your mad little glisker, yes.”

  “And the Princess.” And Lady Megs, he reminded himself, memory distracting him with a picture of her in trousers and jacket alighting from Miriuzca’s carriage. He dragged his thoughts back to the subject at hand. “Would you have Black Lightning take it all one step further, and do nothing on the stage at all except stand there and send out bludgeoning after bludgeoning of emotion?”

  Vered laughed harshly. “Great Gods, Cade, don’t ever say such a thing in their hearing! Yeh, they make sure everyone feels what’s intended to be felt, thus assuring themselves that they’ve been spectacularly good even if the play itself is shit.” He scrunched down in his chair, scowling. “There’s not a decent sentence in any of their original pieces. They fool everyone with their intensity. Take away the magic, and they’d be laughed off any stage in Albeyn.”

  Cade sipped his drink, then said, “It’s rather like falling in love with a beautiful woman. I mean, a man sees the outward flourishes, he’s knocked all agroof by the way she looks, and thinks only with his cock.”

  “But when the beauty fades, as it always must … there he is, staring at her across the breakfast dishes and wondering why he married her. Yeh, I see that. The magic is the beauty, and if you take it away, there’d best be something else to give the audience or you’re back playing for trimmings in taverns.” He raked one hand through his white-blond hair, suddenly laughing. “We’ll be doing that, we Shadowshapers, if we’re not careful!”

  Cade snorted his derision. “First Flight on the Royal for how many years now, and how many years stretching ahead? And I don’t like to think what you can command as your fee for a private performance.”

  “Ah, and that’s just it, me lad,” he replied merrily. “There’s two choices: be a free man or be a thrall. Let other people tell you what to do, where to go, how to play a play, what to think or whether you’re allowed to think at all—or tell ’em all to go fuck themselves.”

  “What are you talking about?” But then he remembered a conversation of several years ago, and how the Shadowshapers wanted to be quit of the circuits, and become their own masters. “Vered,” he said, instinctively lowering his voice and instantly disgusted with himself because of it, for why couldn’t they talk of such things out in the open? “You’re not seriously thinking—?”

  “It’s the choice we don’t have, as players. There’s no guild for the likes of us. If there were, we could deal with people like that Prickspur lout up near Dolven Wold, and nobody like that could touch us without serious consequences. What happened to him in the end? Lord Fairwalk complained, Rommy complained, all of us refused to set foot in his miserable old inn—but what really happened to him? Sweet fuck-all. There’s no guild for players. There’s nobody to protect us but ourselves.”

  “The King—”

  “The King and all his little minions, they don’t give two shits about us. We’re sent out on the circuits, we get paid, we get transport and bed and board—and who collects the profits from those as bids highest to present us, eh? Not us!”

  “Our fee is set,” said Cade, “but if the Bexmarket Smithing Society outbids the Merchants Ladies League, the Crown pockets the excess.”

  “True as true can be. Look at this life we lead. Five shows and a break. Three or four days on the road, no matter the weather, then another five shows and a day off. ’Cept that day gets used up in a private booking, so we can actually make ends meet—because who survives just on what they earn on a circuit?”

  Cade frowned at an inoffensive flowering bush. “But to go out on your own? That’s quite the risk, Vered.”

  “Not so much as you’d think. If we do nothing but private bookings, they want us, they pay us. Us, not His Majesty’s Revel-rouseries.”

  “But the venues,” Cade objected. “Where are you going to play?”

  “Almost everywhere we do now—besides, d’you have any idea how many castle courtyards there are in this Kingdom? How many great halls that hold three or four hundred? How many guild halls? They can’t pay what’s needed to book a circuit performance—but what they can pay comes all to us.”

  “Hundreds of royals a night,” Cade murmured.

  “Hundreds upon hundreds. And none of it goes to anybody but us.”

  “But—the scheduling—won’t you be competing with whoever else is in town?”

  “Compete with us? Do me a favor!” Laughing again, he teased, “Be sweet to us, Cayden lad, and we’ll think about not playing the same town Touchstone’s playing!”

  “Only,” Cade replied serenely, “because you don’t want to find out who’d win.”

  “You should consider it, y’know,” Vered said, swiftly unsmiling. “Going out on your own, without the bother of the circuits. You’ve that wagon now, just like us, and enough of a following to pack your giggings full.”

  “What does Rommy Needler say about this?”

  “Hated the whole idea at first. Got all stroppy about the extra work in keeping everything straight—the scheduling could turn up a right disaster, unless it’s done careful-like. But he’d been to dinner with your Lord Fairwalk a few nights before we told him our plans, and they were both gnawing over how much the Crown takes by way of profit. So for lacking of a better way, he’s got used to the plan.”

  Immediately Cade knew how it had really happened. When Kearney Fairwalk arrived late that afternoon, Cade took him aside in the taproom and made him admit it.

  When discussing business, all His Lordship’s affectations and mannerisms vanished; even his voice changed pitch, became deeper and softer by comparison to his usual fluty, fruity tones. “Why shouldn’t the Shadowshapers make the experiment for us? They’re already rich, they can afford it.”

  “But if it doesn’t work out—”

  “Cayden, tell me this, please. How long do you think Vered Goldbraider and Rauel Kevelock will continue to tolera
te each other’s ambitions? Each is a Master of two disciplines, tregetour and masquer. They’ve competed with each other since they formed the Shadowshapers. I’m surprised they’re still speaking to each other. Good Lord and Lady, I’m astonished they haven’t slit each other’s throats by now—or that Rommy hasn’t taken a knife to his own neck!” He sniggered in his well-bred way. “I told him once that it seemed rather a war of nerves betwixt him and Vered, and d’you know what he said? That Vered hadn’t got any.”

  “Any what?” Cade asked, aware that Kearney was waiting to deliver the payoff line.

  “Nerves.” He sniggered again, then went on more seriously, “Vered and Rauel haven’t actually done deliberate damage to each other’s plays during a performance, because they’re still dedicated to the Shadowshapers as an entity. But once their loyalty to the group as a whole wanes, as quite honestly it looks to be doing in the next few years—”

  “Why?”

  “Because their personal identities are changing. They have wives, homes, children—they’re not just players anymore. Husband, father, householder, those are adult words.”

  “Rafe’s married,” he challenged. “And Jeska and Mieka, too.”

  “Touchstone hasn’t the inbuilt tensions the Shadowshapers have. You are the driving force, the inspiration behind the group. Rafe, Mieka, and Jeska all see themselves within the group in relationship to you. But Vered and Rauel are constantly switching back and forth, so the group’s structure is always changing. Chat and Sakary juggle this very well, but one day Vered or Rauel—or mayhap both—will want to be in complete and permanent control of everything.”

  Cade had witnessed enough of their sniping at each other to acknowledge the truth of that. Still—“You mean they’d do what Trinder and Redprong used to do, and advertise? Because you can’t tell me that one or the other would take either Chat or Sakary with him. The Shadowshapers as they are—” He shook his head helplessly. “They’re the best, and everyone knows it. How could they ever be as successful individually as they are together?”

  “One day we’ll all find out, won’t we? But, Cade, listen to me closely now. It’s your work that makes Touchstone something extraordinary. Yours is a gift in a million. It’s an honor and a privilege to help you make the most of it.”

  Cade knew, in his secret soul, that he was first amongst equals in Touchstone. But the notion that Rafe, Jeska, and Mieka were there only to do as he told them—

  Kearney said it out loud. “The rest of Touchstone exists to serve your vision.”

  He gave a short, cynical laugh. “I can just imagine how well that would play with them!”

  “But it’s true. You’re the one with the ideas and the words, and the magic that makes it all into art.”

  “I could do it just the same with any other glisker, fettler, and masquer, you mean?” He thought he was saying it just to see what Kearney would reply.

  “Not just the same,” the nobleman said at once. “But perhaps it might be even more yours. If you didn’t have to do battle with them over every little thing …” He finished with a shrug.

  But those jeering, sniping, shouting battles honed his ideas. Made them better. Made him better.

  All the same … not having to fight over the wording of a speech, the intensity of a sensation, the scenery and pacing and emphasis and—

  To work without Rafe? Without Jeska? Without Mieka?

  Kearney was wrong. The rest of Touchstone didn’t exist solely to serve his work. They were an essential part of the work. Whenever he wrote, he kept in mind their talents, their strengths and limitations, their styles of stagecraft. He wrote to their gifts, and because those gifts were prodigious, they were in effect challenging him to make it better before they even heard about the piece. Simply put, he was writing for the best masquer, glisker, and fettler in Albeyn.

  He tried for an instant to visualize others in their places—Sakary, for instance, as his fettler, or Lederris Daggering of the Crystal Sparks as his masquer—and shied back like a scalded cat.

  Whatever their battles with each other, Touchstone was a thing greater than the four of them. They were each a part of something worth being part of, as Mieka had said years ago. Or as Cayden had phrased it in “Doorways”: This life, and none other.

  * * *

  Cade saw at once that there were no ladies in the audience at Fliting Hall for the Continental group’s performance. Touchstone had walked over with the Shadowshapers, and as they found their seats, he nudged Sakary with an elbow and gestured round. Sakary whispered to Chat, who leaned over and murmured, “Women aren’t allowed in their theaters, so I’d be betting they refused to perform if women were present tonight. They’ve no Mieka Windthistle to overset their boring old traditions.”

  “Gods in Glory,” Cade whispered back, “don’t mention that anywhere near him!”

  “Oh, no fear of it, old thing,” Mieka said at his other side. “Enlightening them would mean another trip on a ship with a yark-bucket slung round me neck!”

  “By the bye,” Chat said, “I have the answer to our puzzlement over who exactly owns the Shadowstone Inn. I asked the Human couple about it, and he said they were hired about thirty years ago, and the ones who had the pleasure of the place before them had been there at least forty years. Mistress Luta is indeed the owner.”

  Sakary turned to his partner with a frown. “But why does she need someone to pretend otherwise?”

  “Who knows why a Troll does anything?” Chat countered.

  “How old is Mistress Mirdley?” Mieka asked suddenly.

  “It’s awfully bad form to inquire as to a woman’s age,” Cade chided with a wink.

  Somebody two rows ahead of them turned with a terrible scowl, and was about to reprimand them for making noise when everyone hurried to stand for the arrival of King Meredan. He was accompanied by Prince Ashgar and Archduke Cyed Henick and selections from their assorted retinues. Cade saw his father’s gaze find and dismiss him as smoothly as if he hadn’t been recognized at all, and felt his lips twist wryly with the thought of sending Zekien Silversun a gift in gratitude for so reliably ignoring him.

  The King planted his plump posterior in the chair specially placed for him in the exact center of the front row. Everybody else sat down. The curtains slowly opened, and the play began.

  The basics were easy, and required no words. The lead character was a learned man, his learning signaled by the setting, which was a library thick with books (shelves and volumes painted on canvas; not a bad attempt, Cade thought, but not all that convincing, either). He paced the stage, lighting candles and drawing chalk patterns on the floor. Soon enough, with a clap of thunder (Cade grinned to himself, recalling Chat’s story of stolen thunder), a being appeared from a truly amateurish gout of smoke.

  So far, so boring. All this masquer had to work with was the physical appearance of the being, identification by way of costume: red robes swirling round a very tall and thin body, red close-fitting hood shadowing the face, and a three-tined hayfork. A theater group in Albeyn would have added noxious smells and a tang of fear, the better to indicate that this was Mallecho, a spirit bent on malicious mischief.

  Evidently someone had taught the players enough words to get the salient points across, for Mallecho asked in perfectly understandable Albeyni, “Who summons me?”

  “I am Vaustas,” replied the scholar, “and I want all goods of the world!”

  Now, this could be interpreted as wanting nothing but good for the world, or as a desire to possess all the good things the world could offer. It was only when Mallecho answered, “All riches are yours!” that the meaning became clear.

  Cade would have done it with conjurings onstage—Mallecho summoning up gold coins stacked halfway to the ceiling, a score of beautiful women, a dozen barrels of fine wine, and so on—to which Vaustas would have cried, “Yes!”

  But these players had no magic, and very few Albeyni words.

  “How long?” asked Vaus
tas. And Mallecho held up one hand, fingers spread. “More!” cried Vaustas; the other hand, to make ten. “More!” Both hands fisted and opened again: twenty. Eager and greedy, Vaustas shouted, “More!” but this time only the left hand was held up. “More!”—and the thumb curled into the palm. Vaustas was evidently no fool; he nodded, and Mallecho drew a scroll from inside his robes, and Vaustas signed it in his own blood. It was a nice little trick, Cade thought, with the masquer pretending to prick his own thumb and let the “blood” drip into a bowl which was then used as an inkwell; the drizzle of red liquid came from a vial hidden up his sleeve.

  A skeletal finger pointing at Vaustas, Mallecho cried out, “Now mine!” and the stage went dark.

  The audience shifted restlessly. This was, of course, nothing like what they were used to. Neither was the next bit of stagecraft, which Cade appreciated for its imagination in getting round limitations. The lights went up again, directed specifically to what looked like a large, rectangular painting in the middle of the stage. In Albeyn, painters who used magic—such as the one who’d done the mural on the wall of the Kiral Kellari—could make the scene change with a spell. Having no such ability, this scene changed with the turning of sections of the painting. Eight panels, when locked together, gave at first a rendering of a large, fine brick house; then an interior of silk furnishings and beautiful carpets, gold fittings and a table laden with delicacies, at which Vaustas sat enjoying his meal. Finally there was a landscape of a gray castle on a green hill, with black tiles roofing its many graceful towers.

  Gods, how easy it would have been for him and Mieka to do so much more! He pitied these players the inadequacies of their craft.

  Darkness again, and the sound of the changeable painting being rolled away out of sight. Someone in the audience snorted scornfully. Light came gradually to the stage this time, in a pretty demonstration of a skill with lanterns no group in Albeyn would ever need. The scene was the interior of the gray castle, walls covered in mounted shields and tapestries, with a wide, frost-rimed window to the left. Three people were now onstage: Vaustas, and a man and woman finely dressed in yellow velvet and white fur cloaks, with small coronets to indicate noble status. The woman pouted and sulked; the man gestured to the iced over window. The woman pulled the fur more closely around her, shivering. Vaustas smiled, bowed to the lady, and waved a hand at the window. Cade bit his lip against laughter as one panel of painted scenery slid from the window to reveal a sunshine day “outside” and a view of green hills. It wasn’t the masquers’ fault that the frost window got stuck for a moment just at the bottom, and someone had to yank it down out of view.