Playing to the Gods Read online

  “Damn it, Mieka,” he whispered feebly.

  “It’s all right. Beholden.”

  Cade didn’t watch him leave. He refused to stand up from his chair, even though he knew that he could have if he’d tried. He wouldn’t do this.

  He. Would. Not.

  “Cayden.”

  He shook his head wordlessly.

  “C’mon, old love,” coaxed the familiar voice that for twenty years had wheedled him into glorious excesses of drink and thorn, mayhem and magic—but now asked for mercy. “Please, Quill.”

  He couldn’t. He wondered if this meant he loved Mieka more than Rafe and Jeska did, loved him too much to let him go. Rafe had been the first to give Mieka what he needed in an act of selfless tenderness that Cade knew himself incapable of matching. And Jeska—the crushing weight of grief and guilt was a thing he could bear. That was love, too. So did all this mean that he loved Mieka less than they did?

  He stared at the man collapsed gracelessly on the black velvet. No memories came to claw at him. He saw Mieka as he was—as he knew he must see him. Not the blithe, laughing, clever, mad little Elf, for there was almost nothing left of him. Nothing now but the haggard, worn face that had once been so beautiful; nothing but the healed scars of thorn on his arms.

  Cade was the last, the only one left. The only one still holding on.

  “Mine you are and mine you’ll stay.”

  “Yes, always—but not like this. I can’t live like this.”

  Cade got to his feet, stumbled a step, then two, fell hard onto bony knees, caught himself on the sofa. His eyes were almost on a level with those closed eyes, so near that he could see every one of the long black lashes weighing the eyelids down.

  “You should have let me see,” he whispered. “I kept trying to look, but you never let me see.”

  Still behind him, sounding more remote now, Mieka answered, “I didn’t think you’d like the view. I had to keep making you laugh, so you’d forgive all the rest of it. You didn’t laugh much, y’know, before I came along.”

  “And you think that’s all you were worth?”

  “I had to be what you needed—the best glisker in Albeyn, the one who could always make you laugh—the one who never wanted you to hide your Elsewhens or anything else about you.”

  “But you never forgave yourself.”

  Silence.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? When Yazz died—it wasn’t your fault, Mieka!”

  Silence.

  He knew now. He understood. He saw. “You thought you didn’t deserve to be here, not if he was gone. Gods, Mieka, you should have told me! You should have let me see!”

  “That’s all done with now, Quill. Let go. Please.”

  Cade bent, resting his brow against the silent, motionless chest. Then he pushed himself to his feet and turned to walk away.

  Mieka stood before him, young and strong and beautiful. “Beholden, Quill. I know that was impossible for you. Beholden, for doing it for me.”

  This wasn’t the Mieka of the past. There were lines at the corners of those eyes, threads of silver in his hair as if he’d combed it with moonlight, and knowledge—perhaps even wisdom—that Cade had never seen in that face before. All at once a smile appeared, dazzling and irresistible. The laughter was just as boisterous, but held nothing of the maniacal cackle that meant impending havoc.

  “Cayden Silversun, you softhearted fake! All that deep-minded artsy-fartsy wyvern shit you toss around—you’re naught but a sentimental old grandmum!”

  Yes, Mieka had always seen right through him. Fear pierced him again. “I can’t let you go, Elfling.”

  “It’ll be all right. I promise. I’ll be waiting for you. For all of you.”

  He tried to touch Mieka, but the Elf took a small step back, away from him. Ready to leave.

  “I’d come with you if I could—and I could, Mieka, it would be so easy—”

  “No! You’ve so much more to write, so much to do that’s really and truly important—not like me. I always knew that if the wind blew too hard, I’d be gone. But you—bright as the whole sky, Silversun!” He smiled. “I’m not worried about being forgotten. Not as long as your work exists.”

  And everything he wrote from now on would have Mieka in it—but how could it ever be performed if Mieka wasn’t there onstage to do it? How would anyone ever truly see one of Cayden’s plays again, without Mieka behind the glass baskets?

  “When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”

  Where had he heard those words? It didn’t matter. With Mieka gone, he would hear those words again and again, and read them, and dream them and nightmare them—

  “Every word,” he heard himself say very slowly. “You’ll be here, in every word.”

  “Beholden for that, too,” Mieka said.

  The dimness began to brighten, coalescing into a thin ribbon of silver that broadened to a rippling and glowing pathway. Moonglade.

  “Quill?” Mieka whispered. “Break the window. You have to. Just like you have to let me go.”

  Those eyes. Innocent, wise, mischievous, compassionate—it was the compassion that finally convinced him. This was Mieka as he’d been meant to be, all insecurities and hurts and masks and fears gone, revealing a loving and compassionate man who knew him, understood him, saw him as he was.

  But between one blink and the next, Cade was alone. Mieka was gone.

  * * *

  He lay in his bed, the thin sunlight of a winter afternoon impotent to warm his shivering. Something was scratching at the bedchamber door—Rumble, of course, peeved that Cade hadn’t let him in. He pushed himself to his feet, pulling the big feather-stitched counterpane around his shoulders in a vain attempt to stop the shaking, and opened the door. Rumble stalked through, lush white tail lashing, and made straight for the soft black armchair. He leaped up, turned, and yowled a demand for Cade to stop being such a fool and sit down and pet him.

  When Cade had settled with the cat in his lap, the rhythmic purring provided a background for his thoughts—not soothing, exactly, but calming. He knew, intellectually, that his mind had done what it always did when a dream or nightmare or Elsewhen invaded: took the disparate elements and made a cohesive (but sometimes not quite coherent) story of them. The mind he had trained to organize and remember the Elsewhens always did the same with dreams, thorn-visions, nightmares. This time it seemed to him that his brain had been rather kinder to him than usual. It had, after all, presented the entire sequence as if he had been dreaming it. Shorn of all the fantastical elements, though, it was a fair approximation of a possible future.

  Two things were conspicuous. First, Yazz had died. Mieka held himself responsible somehow—else why that long debauch of liquor and thorn? Second, Brishen Staindrop had given up Thornlore because too many people had died. Alaen had died. Not from her mixtures, but those of other concoctors—Master Bellgloss, perhaps, and the dragon tears that Master Lullfinch supplied to select customers at his brothel. Yes, thorn could be dangerous. Certain kinds of thorn were especially perilous to Elves, Wizards, Gnomes, Goblins, and so on. Evidently quite a few people hadn’t been careful, or aware of their own bloodlines. He had the thought that mayhap Black Lightning’s little trick of being able to identify each person’s background—and to make them ashamed, should it include anything other than Wizard or Elf—could be used at large to warn those who wanted to use thorn just which ones they ought to steer clear of. This wasn’t why Black Lightning had worked it out, Cade was certain. Just what they had in mind, he’d no idea.

  And it didn’t matter right now. Yazz would be dead, and Brishen would stick to distilling whiskey. All Cayden had to do was decide whether this really had been nothing other than a thorn-dream, or if there were elements of an Elsewhen mixed up in it—and if so, how much was a forewarning and how much was his own convoluted imagination.

  He heard Derien’s rapid footsteps up the stairs, and Mistress Mirdley’s call: “Tea right now, or go hungry!
” He smoothed Rumble’s fur by way of apology, and shifted the cat to his shoulder as he stood up. Well, if nothing else, this nightmare-Elsewhen had shown him how Window Wall had to end. And that was something, wasn’t it?

  Chapter 4

  Even though one week’s holiday from performing became two, then lengthened into three, Cade didn’t much mind. Now that he had the ending for the two plays that made up Window Wall, he had plenty to keep him busy.

  In the first play, the boy’s father, traumatized by magic in the Archduke’s War, decided to make an environment for his only child that would keep him safe from all magic. That he had to hire a prodigiously talented Wizard to do it was an irony that escaped him—but not, Cade trusted, the audience. The tale of the man’s wounding was the first part of the first play. His experiences in battle of withies that came spinning and shining to ravage the King’s Army with magic emphasized that part of the horror was that one never knew which it would be: merely malicious or hideously deadly. Returning home, sick in mind and heart and incapable of fighting anymore, he discovered that his wife and son had fled as refugees. His search for them ended with his making a promise to his dying wife that he would protect their child from the evils of magic.

  There were no changes for Jeska to make. He would be only the father as soldier, invalid, and seeker, and then silently cradling his son in his arms as he walked through a war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a place for them to live. Cayden decided to let all this play out with only a backdrop—no emotions gliding through the audience. The scenes and dialogue would be enough. And that meant that the words had to be the best he could find, and the visuals the most evocative he and Mieka could come up with. He knew in his guts that the words were more important, but he would never be so foolish as to tell Mieka that.

  As for emotions—the horrors of war and the terrors of Cade’s own grandmother’s lethal withies, the pain of magical wounds and the desperation of the search, the pathos of the mother’s plea and the grim resolve of the father—he trusted to his own words that all these things could be felt by the audience without prompting. Besides, he needed the impact of feeling later on to communicate the sincere determination of the father to shield his son from all magic by locking him away in the room with one huge window.

  The Wizard, tall, spindly-limbed, cloaked in dark brown, would pace the stage creating each portion of the boy’s prison. This would give Mieka the chance to build the final scene section by section, while the Wizard mused aloud on why anyone should want such a thing, and that mayhap it was a good idea and mayhap it wasn’t, but he didn’t really much care as long as he was being paid.

  At last the boy, five or six years old by now, was brought into the room by his father, who showed him all its marvels: fireplace for cooking, sink for washing, bed for sleeping, books for education, toys for playtime, a lute for music, and a screen to hide the toilet. While rewriting this scene, Cade changed his mind about which of the characters Jeska would inhabit. He’d thought the father, but how much more effective to have Jeska play the son—with the scale of the room upsized to stress the child’s helplessness, just the way they’d played about with the Giant at the tournament in the Third Peril at Trials a few years ago. Rather than have the boy brought into the room by his father, Cade would let him wander through it on his own while his father’s voice explained everything. Jeska would stay the little boy, bewildered and more than a little scared (Mieka would underscore these feelings with magic) until his father shows him a big wooden rocking-dragon. The play would end with the boy stroking the nose and wide wings of the garishly painted dragon, and contentment would waft gently through the audience … threaded with the barest hint of sadness and misgiving.

  Cade wouldn’t have to give the boy words to detail everything, but only such dialogue as a child would speak. But in the second play, the boy—now sixteen, perhaps seventeen years old—could display the sort of vocabulary one might expect from someone who had learned words only from books and one teacher: his own father. If nobody noticed that subtlety, fine. It was there, and Cayden knew it was there, and that was enough for him.

  Staging it would be tricky. Everything depended on the audience’s seeing what the boy saw and fidgeting with the lack of sensation. No sounds of the people passing by outside. No smells of flowers or horses or the man pushing the cart of meat pasties. No tastes. (He’d have to figure out how the boy and his father acquired the food they’d cook over the hearth, but … well, leave that for some other time, don’t get caught up in something that would distract him from the flow of the play.) No feeling of a breeze or sunshine or even the clothes on his back. Cade would have the boy moving around the room, tidying things, shelving books, whatever, while all sorts of things went on outside, beyond the window. The boy would ignore them, having long since exhausted any longing to know what the outside world was like. All the yearning, the frustration that this yearning went unfulfilled, the anger that came from frustration, the weariness of spirit that followed an explosion of anger—he would have gone through all of these a thousand times, and was now simply resigned. He didn’t ignore the world beyond the window because it would hurt too much to look. He ignored it because he just didn’t care anymore.

  What would happen next?

  This was where Cayden got stuck. He knew how it would end: the boy using his fists to shatter the glass (“Break the window, Quill” echoed in his mind from that horrible dream). But what motivation was there to leave the safety of the unmagical world behind his window wall and risk all the chaos beyond?

  Years ago, around the time of “Turn Aback,” he would have wrestled with it alone. He would have flogged his brain stuporous and ended by hating the whole piece. He knew better now. He’d take the problem to his partners. They’d be able to see what he couldn’t. They’d look at it from their own unique viewpoints and offer suggestions. And he’d listen to those suggestions. He knew their value now and wasn’t too proud to admit it.

  A memory teased him of the afternoon spent at Seekhaven reworking that piece that the players from the Continent had performed. All three groups involved—Touchstone, the Shadowshapers, and the Crystal Sparks—had functioned quite differently from one another. Crystal Sparks’ tregetour and masquer had done the creative work between them, while their glisker and fettler played cards over in a corner. With the Shadowshapers, it was a mad little dance of constantly changing partners, as Vered and Rauel took turns talking with Chat and Sakary; two of them would meet, then three, then a different pair, then a different three, until all possible combinations had occurred—except the final debate between Vered and Rauel, which would eventually (and with varying degrees of rancor) decide the outcome. Watching these two groups at work had caused in Cayden a profound gratitude for his own glisker, fettler, and masquer. To be sure, the four of them argued—but it was the four of them.

  Over the years he’d come to rely on that—unknowingly at first, then deliberately and with eager anticipation. All four contributed vitally to each play. What worked for the Shadowshapers or the Sparks wouldn’t work at all for Touchstone.

  And that, he realized, was one of the great strengths of theater in Albeyn. On the Continent, the scripts were set and the words sacrosanct, leaving no room for anyone to be truly creative. Cade amused himself for a few moments imagining reactions to Window Wall in those other countries where magic was seen as suspect at best. The boy battering at the glass with his fists seemed to him symbolic of anyone born there with magic—no, that wasn’t it. The window would work the other way: those with magic trapped, caged like animals in a traveling menagerie, stared at by a society that considered them dangerous. What if the magically gifted broke the window?

  More to the point for his present project, what would happen when the boy broke the window separating him from a world he could see but not live in? And why would he finally choose his freedom to go out into that world, and experience the magic it contained?

  Rafe or Jeska or
Mieka would have some idea. They could work it out together. A good feeling, that; knowing he had partners as talented and clever as himself. Even better, knowing that he was no longer so blindly prideful, and could freely admit it.

  Still, on the ninth evening of Touchstone’s self-imposed break, Cade leaned back in his desk chair, rubbed his stubbled face, smiled tiredly at the pages and pages he’d written today of dialogue and performance notes, and chided himself for having avoided this sort of exhaustion for so long. The demands of sheer survival had of course taken precedence over real creativity—or so he’d told himself. For so long now, when he’d done something new, it wasn’t really new, only a rehashing of some old play from the copy of Lost Withies Mieka had found years ago at the Castle Biding Fair. The plays were new to Touchstone’s folio, perhaps, but certainly not original or different. He’d convinced himself that he hadn’t the time to indulge. For certain sure, he hadn’t the energy.

  What he hadn’t realized until now was the disservice he’d done to himself, to his partners, and even to the audiences. He’d forgotten how good a spate of creativity could feel. (And how hard the work was—its satisfaction in direct correlation to its difficulty. Put simply, the more exhausted he was, the happier.) It shamed him to admit that the desperate necessities of financial survival had become so easy an excuse for not putting in the hard work that left him feeling as limp as a strand of seaweed and as powerful as a crashing wave.

  Writing was his outlet and his safeguard as surely as performing was Mieka’s. He owed it to himself and to his sanity to create. He owed Mieka and Rafe and Jeska new and original pieces to challenge and fulfill their talents. And he owed the audiences the best work he was capable of, not some warmed-over reworking of a play that had grown gray-bearded fifty years before Grandfather Cadriel the fettler had been born.

  And as long as he was admitting things, he might as well admit that the things he had to say could be said by no one but him. Vered Goldbraider and Rauel Kevelock, Mirko Challender, Trenal Longbranch, even Thierin Knottinger—Cade would never be able to write their words (and in one case wouldn’t care to try) any more than they could write his. He had something to say. All these pages proved it.