Playing to the Gods Read online

  There was more to being a parent than this—much more—as Mieka knew full well. He also knew he wasn’t as good at being a father as his father was. Well, Hadden had had eight times the practice, after all … which Mieka knew was no excuse. Sometimes he worried that he didn’t spend enough time with Jindra, especially these last two years—but how could things be different in his profession? How could he provide for his family other than on the Royal Circuit and all the hundreds of giggings that paid the bills?

  He could feel, on his father’s hand, the ring that had so special a meaning. He’d told Cayden about it years ago. “To hear Mum tell it, one morning Fa just looked at her across breakfast and they both knew neither of them would ever look at anybody else ever again.” His father’s ring, plain gold and not just sealed with magic but made with magic, betokened a true bonding, something deeper than love or marriage … something, he finally admitted to himself, though he’d known it for quite some time now, that he would not experience with his wife. Deeply as he loved her, for the two of them there did not exist the depthless understanding and commitment his parents shared.

  Then again, he argued with himself, Hadden and Mishia had been married ten years before it happened for them. He should just wait a little longer. But tonight he resolved to be much more of a presence in his wife’s and daughter’s lives.

  And all at once he wondered what, if any, magic Cade’s father, Zekien, possessed. Whether or not he used it. He couldn’t have fathered a son as gifted as Cade without having at least some magic in him. He’d never heard anyone talk about it—which wasn’t especially strange, considering he knew practically no one who actually knew Cade’s father. Considering what he did for Prince Ashgar as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber, Zekien’s magic probably consisted of discerning whether the girl chosen for Ashgar’s bed on any given night was afflicted with pox.

  “So you approve of Rafe’s ban on performances this week?”

  Jinsie’s question startled Mieka from sardonic thought. Evidently they’d gone on talking quietly while he was nattering around in his own mind.

  Hadden replied, “You’ve all been working too hard—not just you boys, but Jinsie and Kazie as well, seeing to the giggings and payment and suchlike.”

  Everything that Fairwalk used to do, Mieka’s sister and Jeska’s wife now did for them, with occasional help from Crisiant, Rafe’s wife. Mieka knew that Jinsie really took on most of it, for both other ladies had children to care for.

  “Now that everyone’s been paid,” Hadden went on, “Touchstone can afford to relax a little.”

  “Touchstone can,” Jinsie said. “Kazie and I can’t. We’ve managed to mollify the cancelations by promising a gigging at half price—”

  Mieka groaned softly.

  “—but you realize that Wintering is coming up, and some kind of decision has to be made about where Touchstone will be playing.”

  “Rafe and I both vote for not playing at all,” Mieka said. “A family Wintering—haven’t had one in forever.” As Jinsie leaned across their father to frown at him in the dimness, he whined, “Oh please! Just this once!”

  “Correct me if I’m mistaken,” their father drawled, “but wasn’t that what you said the first time we found you tottering about in your mother’s favorite shoes?”

  “I wanted to be tall,” Mieka protested.

  “That explains the shoes, but not the gown.”

  “I liked the way the silk sounded. Swooooosh!” He laughed. “C’mon, Fa, I was only five years old!”

  Jinsie snorted. “And now you’re twenty-five, and you’ve made it all into something of a hallmark, haven’t you? That, and the shattered withies. And there’s irony for you—the inspiration for getting noticed almost lost Cayden his fingers.”

  Mieka looked down at his own fingers, remembering how painful it had been for Cade to prime the withies. The bandages interfered, or so he’d said. Mieka had lost count of how many times he’d rewrapped Cade’s right hand. The healed wounds had left visible scars, and Mieka suspected that Cayden didn’t want them to fade. If they faded, they would be forgotten, and he didn’t want to forget.

  Chapter 3

  When Cade broached the subject, Derien replied with regret that he had too much schoolwork to skip attendance for that week of Touchstone’s idleness. When Rafe sent a note round to Redpebble Square decreeing that one week would become two, Cade ripped the page into as many small pieces as he could and threw them fluttering onto the hearth fire.

  Fine for Rafe—he had his wife, his son, his parents, their bakery, all manner of things to occupy his time. Equally fine for Jeska and Mieka, with their families. Cade had a brother who left practically at daylight and didn’t return until dusk, and a resident Trollwife who showed scant sympathy for Cade’s fidgets.

  And then there was Lady Jaspiela. No longer arm-in-arm friendly with Princess Iamina or Archduchess Panshilara, she had attempted to insert herself into Princess Miriuzca’s little circle, trying to trade on the Princess’s closeness to Touchstone. What this maneuvering availed her was almost daily attendance at tea—not with Miriuzca, but with Queen Roshian. Miriuzca, clever and kind, had invited Lady Jaspiela on a day when the Queen was present at lunching. Her Majesty had inquired whether Her Ladyship was of the same Silversun family as that talented young tregetour fellow. That there was no other Silversun family in the whole of Albeyn had evidently escaped her notice. Cade found it sublimely ironic that his mother’s entry into the top level of Society had been accomplished not through her husband’s position with Prince Ashgar, but through association with the son whose profession she deplored.

  If he’d wanted to, he could have joined her at the Palace. He most emphatically did not want to. The Queen was acknowledged (in polite, pitying whispers) to be the most boring woman in Albeyn. Cade was sure that all her ladies were as intellectually radiant as she. Not that this would matter to his mother.

  To all intents and purposes, then, Cade was alone in the house. Nothing appealed to him. He didn’t want to go to the Archives and do research. He didn’t want to go out drinking. He didn’t want to sail on the Gally River, or stroll through any of the parks, or visit any of his friends, or even spend a day polishing glass and talking with Blye. Work had been so much the sole focus of his life for so long that without the almost nightly performances, he had no idea what to do with himself.

  So he turned to his thorn-roll.

  Brishen Staindrop had gifted him with his very own, made of black leather stamped along the edges with small flaring suns in silver paint. They had a color code of their own by now, he and she, and whenever a package arrived from her, it took him only a few minutes to sort everything into its proper place. All the little twists of paper contained thorn prepared for him alone. Cade didn’t know precisely what was in them, or what effect such things might have on other people. But he knew how they worked on him, and so did Brishen, and whenever she sent him something new with suggestions about what it might provoke, he was always eager to try it. Lacking anything else he wanted to do, and feeling that he deserved an interesting afternoon, on the third dull day of Touchstone’s break he fixed up a new mixture shortly after lunching and lay back on his bed to enjoy. After all, who knew but that he wouldn’t get an idea for a new play out of it?

  More than three hours later, he surfaced from the thorn sweating and shaking. He had dreamed he was asleep, and in the dream he was asleep and having a dream. It wasn’t an Elsewhen inspired and abetted by thorn, it couldn’t possibly have been an Elsewhen—but it felt that way. It certainly hurt as much.

  He knew he was dreaming.

  He remembered sliding between fresh silk sheets that smelled of Mistress Mirdley’s herbs, and kissing his wife’s shoulder, and settling down for some much-needed sleep. He remembered thinking that the new play was doing very well and its accompanying quarto was selling briskly—the broadsheets were calling it another masterpiece, even though it hadn’t turned out anywhere near his or
iginal concept. This was a familiar feeling, though not so sharply galling as “Turn Aback” had been. He supposed he was getting used to it, to the dismal truth that no matter how much you wanted it and how hard you worked for it and how grimly you fought for it, not much in life turned out the way you thought it would.

  He remembered thinking, and then not thinking, and he didn’t remember waking up. So he knew he must still be sleeping. Dreaming. Sitting in a hard wooden chair in a cold and shadowy chamber without doors or windows, he wondered if there was such a word as nightmaring because dreaming was much too pretty a term for what was happening to him now.

  To his left sat a hunch-shouldered figure, thick blond curls hiding the profile. To his right sat a tall, long-limbed man wrapped in his usual watchful silence. Each in his own way seemed beaten, perhaps even broken. He knew that something about him expressed the same defeat. Perhaps his eyes, or the thinness of his lips as he bit them between his teeth to hold back a groan of familiar anguish as he stared at the man sprawled on a black velvet sofa before him.

  No, he was not dreaming. Whether it was a word or not, he was nightmaring. He’d been doing variations on it for years. The subject was always the same—the subject of so many Elsewhens and so many nightmares: a brilliant, funny, clever, mad little Elf. Sometimes Cade would scream warnings that were never heard, or find himself running and running and never getting closer, as if he slogged through invisible knee-deep mud. Sometimes he simply sobbed, helpless with fear and frustration. And sometimes, recognizing with cold anger that here was yet another hopelessness, he turned his back and walked away.

  But always before it had been just him and Mieka. Neither Jeska nor Rafe had ever been there, except as half-felt presences. Rather like the way it was onstage sometimes, the best times: him watching Mieka, Mieka watching him, their communication composed of instinct and intellect and art and pure clean joy. Jeska internalized Cade’s words and spoke them as if they’d been his to begin with; Rafe wove his agile magic around the whole to hold it steady; but Mieka was inside the play, living every emotion and image and sensation of it with his heart, his muscles, his brain. He and Cayden would stare at each other for minutes on end, utterly intent on their mutual journey, Mieka dancing behind his glass baskets and Cade completely still at his lectern, always aware of Jeska and Rafe nearby.

  Jeska and Rafe were on either side of him now. He had the sudden, sick feeling that this nightmaring was going to be different from the others.

  The man sprawled on the wide black sofa was dressed in plain tan trousers and a half-buttoned yellow shirt, ruffled cuffs undone. Unconscious, head lolling, skin ash-pale and clammy, the skin of his arms showed the red dots of healed thorn-marks. There were no new ones that Cayden could see, but that didn’t mean anything. There were so many places to find a vein.…

  “Rather a shocker, innit?”

  The voice that spoke behind them was light and soft, the way Mieka’s voice had been in his early twenties, before liquor coarsened it. The dark tones of unwilling insight were new. Cade tried to rise from the chair, but could not. Jeska had raised his head. Rafe hadn’t moved.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” Mieka went on. “It’s not what you’re thinking. I think my heart just … stopped. Didn’t hurt much. I didn’t even know what was happening until you lot showed up.”

  Cade told himself this couldn’t be. Mieka hadn’t touched thorn in a long time, and his consumption of wine and beer and whiskey and brandy was less than half what it used to be. The change to comparative sobriety had started after they lost Yazz—more than fifteen years ago now. The trauma had sent Mieka to the thorn-roll and the bottle for a solid month thereafter. And then he just … stopped.

  More or less.

  When a tour was too long, or Touchstone had too many Gallybanks performances over too few days, Mieka would turn again to thorn. Every audience must get the show it came for; he was adamant about that, about not disappointing anyone who came to see Touchstone. And sometimes that meant the added energy of thorn. Last year it had taken him over a month to stop again—he’d wryly termed it a “fortyer” after the isolation required of certain ships—but stop he always had done.

  Yet here he was, a broken crumple of limbs on black cushions.

  “I can’t go until you let me,” Mieka said behind Cayden. “You’ve been keeping me here—oh, not against my will, don’t ever think that. I don’t much want to leave. But this looks like I have to, yeh?”

  Jeska was shaking his head. Rafe’s long, powerful fingers clenched into fists. Cade couldn’t react at all.

  “Look at me. Without the thorn, I’m no use to you. Without it, my glisking is all gone to shit, and I can’t do justice to any of you, nor to the work and Cade’s words. But with it … well, we all know what I’m like.”

  Jeska’s shoulders flinched, and there was the slightest sound from Rafe, something like a whimper. Cade didn’t—couldn’t—move, or make a sound.

  “With thorn or without it, I’m no use to anybody. Not you three, nor Jindra, nor my family, nor myself. It’s—”

  “Why do you always put yourself last?”

  The sound of Rafe’s voice, a low, angry rumble, startled Cade so much that he cringed in his chair.

  “Anybody and everybody always matters more than you. Worth only whatever laughs you can provide, is that it? The laughs and the glisking, and nobody would keep you around otherwise? You stupid little quat!”

  Cade felt his jaw drop a little. He’d never heard Rafe rant like this, not even when he was furious—which happened about once a year. The very air in the windowless chamber seemed to quiver, strange shadows darting round each other behind the black sofa, as if they were as frightened as Cade was.

  “You never did figure it out, did you? What you’re worth to us, it’s more than the work—more than the fact that we weren’t anything until you showed up that night in Gowerion—”

  The scene appeared, hazy and washed of color, in the dimness. Jeska on the deck of a magic-spawned ship … Rafe hovering nearby … Mieka dancing lightly behind the glisker’s bench and the glass baskets … the tavern’s rough patrons weeping with laughter—then suddenly weeping real tears as the murky “Silver Mine” formed and doomed fathers, sons, brothers bade each other final farewell. But where was Cade? Where had he been that night? Not onstage. He’d never been onstage before Mieka joined them. He’d been hiding, the way he always did, so that no one could see him. Hiding, invisible beneath the stairs, because he didn’t want to be seen.

  “Yeh, center of everything, ain’t he?” Jeska suddenly sneered, and Cade cringed again. “You love it like that, don’t you, Mieka? Center of the whole fucking world! Most bloody selfish bastard who ever lived! More thorn, more whiskey, more women—black powder in every pocket to explode whatever takes your fancy, just to see the looks on their faces—”

  “That’s enough,” Rafe warned.

  “Not by bloody half, it ain’t! He never thought what he was doing to the rest of us, did he? Never knowing if he was drunk or thornlost or both in a brothel someplace—if the messenger would bring a note that he couldn’t be found or was too drunk or thorned to walk—or that he’d pricked his last thorn ever—” Jeska choked with rage. “All those years bein’ scared to answer the door—Gods fucking damn you, Mieka!”

  “Shut it!” Rafe bellowed.

  “No, it’s all right,” Mieka said gently from behind them. “You both have the right of it. I’m selfish and I’m thoughtless, and I put you through a lot, I know. Too much. Tryin’ to make up for it by pranks and jokes … playin’ the clown because that way I could make you laugh it all off and not kick me halfway to Scatterseed or throw me into the Flood. But in the end, y’see, I don’t matter—not like the work matters. It’s why I had to keep goin’ back to the thorn. Even after Auntie Brishen stopped that part of her business—even though the thorn Alaen and those others died from wasn’t hers—I had to find it and use it, or the work would suff
er. And I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “Mieka—” Rafe sounded frightened now.

  “I try so hard, and sometimes it’s all right, but I think maybe I’m not strong enough. I can’t do the work like when I was twenty, not without the thorn, and havin’ to go back and forth, back and forth—thorn and then no thorn…”

  A sigh glided through the air behind Cayden. It wafted over his shoulder and became a haze of memory over to his left, forming vague shapes and colors that resolved into Mieka, curled in a narrow bed with sheets tangled all round him, sick and shivering with the lack of thorn he’d used too much of and now must again forswear. Cade didn’t recognize the exact circumstances. He knew only too well the feeling of agonized helplessness spiked with anger that Mieka had done this to himself yet again.

  As the breath of memory faded, he heard the soft voice behind him say, “I think my heart just got tired out.”

  “We’re here,” Rafe muttered. “Damn it to all Hells, Mieka, you have us to help you through.”

  “No, Rafe. You have me. You’re holding on. I need you to let go.”

  “Fuck you,” Jeska said with weary bitterness. “I’m not letting go just because you tell me to.”

  “I love you, too, y’know,” Mieka murmured.

  With a brief, keening moan, Jeska bent nearly double in his chair, arms wrapped around himself. Cade wanted to do the same, but he still couldn’t move. He had never known anything could hurt this much, frighten him this much, and yet not kill him.

  Why did he think it wasn’t going to kill him?

  Rafe rose slowly to his feet, his profile grimly determined. He took the three steps to the sofa where Mieka lay, took one pale hand, held it tight for a moment before placing it at Mieka’s side.

  “Beholden,” Mieka whispered behind Cade.

  Rafe nodded once, and turned and walked away.

  Jeska almost lurched up from his chair, every muscle tensed for a fight. Then he let out a long breath, shook the hair from his face, and approached Mieka. His hand reached, shied back, then brushed gray-threaded hair back from Mieka’s forehead.