Elsewhens (Glass Thorns) Read online

  More silence.

  “Or combine them, p’rhaps,” Cade went on. “Chat and Sakary would have to keep the magic separated, but—”

  Vered interrupted, “So what’ve you been plotting out lately?”

  “Nothing so complicated,” Cade admitted, sounding slightly abashed now. “There’s a dream I had once, about a hallway of doors—”

  Mieka couldn’t help it: he snorted and sat up in his bunk and hit his head on the ceiling. “Damn!” The three of them exclaimed in surprise, and he belatedly recalled he was supposed to have been asleep, and mumbled, “Are we there?”

  Cade chuckled indulgently. “Not yet. Roll over and go back to sleep.”

  “’M thirsty.”

  Bracing himself against the gentle swaying of the wagon, Cade unfolded himself from the deep chair and gave Mieka his own glass of whiskey. “Don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder to Vered and Rauel, “his mother vows it’s been years since he pissed the bedclothes.”

  “Quill!” Mieka spluttered on his swallow of liquor, and Cade laughed at him, patting his head.

  “Back to sleep with you, there’s a good little Elf.”

  What he wanted to do was demand why Cade had even considered telling rivals about so important an idea as the doorways. But what truly hurt was that Cade had mentioned his dream to Vered and Rauel, when it had taken Mieka months to coax even a portion of the truth out of him. He lay down, turned his back, and chewed on his annoyance, deliberately not listening now. Not that there was much to hear; they’d evidently decided that sleep was necessary sometime before arriving at Seekhaven, and the wagon soon grew quiet. For a little while Mieka tried to distract himself with thinking about her, but he was still too irked with Cade—and thinking about her always caused a physical reaction that in his present circumstances he could do nothing to soothe. This irritated him even more. Scowling he went to sleep, and woke scowling the next morning.

  Touchstone had drawn the same inn as last year, a little away from the river. They had ample time to settle in before heading off to High Chapel, where Mieka noted that Chat should have taken the bet. Black Lightning were all present and correct, even elegant, in clothes from an exclusive Narbacy Street tailor. One good look at Pirro Spangler told Mieka why: bluethorn. Useful stuff. But if they were pricking thorn as often as Pirro’s pinpoint pupils seemed to indicate, it was no wonder Black Lightning had a reputation for magic barely controlled.

  Mieka used, too, when he felt it necessary. But it was just plain unprofessional to rely too heavily on thorn for the energy needed in a performance. Worse, it was potentially dangerous to an audience. What if the magic got loose in ways a glisker was too thorn-lost to keep in check?

  He didn’t mention it, though. Cade would only arch his brows and remind him of a time or two when Mieka had made mistakes that Rafe had had to correct. Mieka didn’t feel like explaining that it was different. He couldn’t articulate just how it was different, but he knew it was.

  After a good night’s sleep they headed off for their scheduled time at the rehearsal hall. It had been a wet spring in the south this year, and Seekhaven had been washed pristine by torrents of rain. The castle fairly glowed in the sunlight. The whole world was wondrous this morning, and Mieka couldn’t help but dance a few steps along the river bank, planning how he’d present his Royal Circuit medal to her with flowers and flourishes and a proposal of marriage, and finally she’d whisper her name and he’d whisper it back in the darkness and—

  “Oy!” Rafe shouted. “Mind how you go, you maniac!”

  He turned just in time to see the stack of white bricks where boats tied up, and leaped awkwardly over it. Must stop thinking about her during working hours, he told himself sternly. There was his life with Touchstone, and there was the life he would make with her, and the two shouldn’t intrude on each other.

  So it was with his entire attention that he settled in a chair on the rehearsal hall stage and listened to Cade’s harangue about the Thirteen Perils, and how they knew all of them backwards and forwards, so unless anybody wanted a brief run-through of any of them, he had some more thoughts on how to stage “Doorways.”

  “You’re assuming we’ll get the invitation to perform for the gentlemen of the Court,” Rafe said.

  “Or the ladies,” Jeska put in.

  “And why shouldn’t we?” Mieka demanded. “I’ve been thinking about those doorways meself, Quill, and it seems to me there’s two ways to block it out. One long hallway, stage right to stage left, so Jeska walks along it to open the doors, or—”

  “Or maybe tilt it a little, have it at an angle so it’s not so squared off, and there’s a depth to the scene,” Rafe suggested. “And then Jeska walks either upstage or downstage, depending on how you want to work it—”

  “Or not have him do much walking at all!” Mieka exclaimed. “Move the hallway instead of him!”

  “I like that,” Jeska said. “Each door is different, yeh? If you use colors to set them apart from each other, or make some of wood and others of iron—the doorknobs and handles and things have to be really distinct, really noticeable, otherwise people might get confused—”

  “Once again,” Rafe chuckled, “it comes down to deciding just how stupid any given audience might be.”

  “Now you sound like Vered,” Mieka accused with a grimace. “I can give you as many different sorts of doors as you like, that’s no problem. But what I’m wondering is whether Jeska walks into the scene inside, or if it comes out to him, y’know?”

  “Hmm. Interesting point.”

  Cade stuck two fingers between his teeth and blew an ear-stinging whistle. “Who the fuck wrote this thing, anyway?”

  “Who the fuck will be playing it?” Rafe countered. “If you’ve something to say, say it.”

  They went on arguing it out, pacing the stage, throwing ideas at one another, finally deciding that there would indeed be an angled hallway and that Jeska would both walk through it and have it slide forwards to meet him.

  “It might work,” Cade allowed.

  “Don’t overwhelm us with your enthusiasm,” Rafe muttered.

  “Are you sure,” Jeska asked, “that you want to present it here for the first time? We could work on it some more, open it sometime during the Circuit.”

  “We need to make at least as big an impression this time as we did last time.” Cade walked slowly from one side of the stage to the other, arms folded around himself. “I’d like to have Jeska walk inside each of the doors, and as he does, the scene within expands to cover most of the stage—”

  “He can do both.” Mieka felt his hands clench into fists with the sudden excitement of the idea. “The audience won’t know which is coming. One door, he’ll open and they’ll see inside, feel what’s there, hear it—but the next, or maybe the next after that, it’ll come swirling out to grab at them.”

  “And maybe leave some doorways kind of blank,” said Jeska. “I don’t mean empty, exactly, just—something’s there that I don’t like, or that scares me, it doesn’t have to be specific, and I slam the door shut before anybody has a look inside—”

  “Like the way the Shadowshapers did ‘Dancing Ground’ that time, remember, Cade?” Mieka leaned forwards in his chair, hands wrapped together now. “They did this thing at the end—everybody felt he actually had what he most wanted in the world—nothing specific, like you said, Jeska, but the magic fitting their own desires like a bespoke suit of clothes. It was brilliant!”

  “No specifics?” Cade was frowning.

  Rafe eyed him sidelong. “Aren’t you the one talks about the communal experience of theater?”

  “But this would be the opposite. Not one experience shared by everyone, the sort of thing that gives the feeling of cohesiveness—”

  “It’d set them talking, though,” Mieka told him. “How good are we, that everyone had a unique experience while sitting through the very same show?”

  Jeska sank gracefully onto the stage,
wrapping his arms around his drawn-up knees. “It would pull them in, like,” he ventured. “Make a space for them to be inside the character.”

  “Have their own fears or delights seep out at them—or catch them by the heart.” Rafe stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I rather like this.”

  Cade was pacing again. “But it’s not what I’ve written. It’s not—”

  “It’s not imposing your vision on the audience?” Rafe suggested with a wry smile. “They’ve got used to sitting there and soaking up feeling and sensation—like Vampires, just as you said. But what if we make them participate? Leave room, like Jeska says, for them to inhabit portions of the character?”

  “What if they don’t experience what we want them to experience?” he challenged.

  Quill really was a stickler for control, though Mieka supposed he’d call it precision. He knew he mustn’t laugh. He wanted to, very much, but if he did, it would take another half hour to haul Cade out of whatever sulk he’d plunge himself into, and they had work to do before vacating the rehearsal hall by noon. So he said, mildly enough, “That’s just it, though, innit? We’re not dictating everything to them. We’re letting them do some of the work interpreting what they see.”

  “More work for them,” Jeska grinned, “and less for us!”

  “For you, mayhap,” Rafe growled, but he looked intrigued.

  “They won’t just be part of the audience,” Mieka went on. “They’ll sort of be part of the performance itself, won’t they?”

  Cade’s frown deepened, and for a moment Mieka thought he would be even more stubborn than usual. Then he said, “Reaching them in ways other groups aren’t smart enough or subtle enough to accomplish.” He squinted at Mieka. “Are we smart enough and subtle enough?”

  “Only one way to find out!”

  Late that night, as the two of them sat in the moonlit garden over a last pint of ale, Cade ran a long finger round the rim of his glass. “You really think I want to have total control over everything an audience experiences?”

  “I think it might be something you can’t help yourself about. I understand, Quill. There’s so much you can’t influence at all, leave alone make it come out the way you’d like it to. So you do what you can, where and as you can. The stage is easy, that way. It’s what we’re there for.”

  “But aren’t we stealing the idea from the Shadowshapers?”

  “You heard what Vered said that night at the Kiral Kellari. You told me later, remember?”

  “He was furious,” Cade mused, “that Rauel had worked it so everyone felt things. Whatever a man’s heart’s desire, that’s what Rauel gave him.”

  “Without regret and without a sense of loss afterwards—and that was the real skill of it, y’know, what Sakary did in controlling the magic.”

  “But what Vered wanted was for them to be … I don’t know, tempted, I guess, pushed into thinking about what it was they wanted most in the world. He wanted to engage their minds, not their emotions.”

  With an innocent flash of his eyelashes, Mieka asked, “If that’s not manipulation and control, what is?”

  Cade snorted. “Do they still work the piece that way? I might like to go see it again, if we’ve a chance.”

  “To find out who won, Vered or Rauel?” Mieka laughed. “That one night I did their glisking, I heard them backstage before the show. Arguing, as usual. Rauel yelled, ‘When does this end?’ and Vered yelled back, ‘It ends when I win!’ But with those two, it’ll end only when one of them is dead!”

  “Still, I’d like to see it again.”

  “Would you let yourself really feel it this time?”

  When Cade said nothing for a long while, Mieka was afraid he’d gone too far.

  “No,” Cade said at last. “I don’t want to know how it feels to have what I most desire.”

  “The struggle, not the prize? Like Tobalt wrote about you.”

  “I never asked what you experienced that night.”

  “Whatever it was, it’d be different now.” For a few heartbeats he seriously considered telling Cade everything about her, from how they’d met to how it felt to kiss her, what it was like simply to be in her company with those incredible eyes watching him and wanting him—

  “You’re a year older,” Cade said suddenly, “and I hope your desires have matured beyond a bottomless barrel of whiskey!”

  Mieka cuffed him genially on the arm. “Snarge!”

  “C’mon, up to bed. We’ve the draw tomorrow, and I want to be sure Jeska’s locked in for the night.”

  They shared a laugh as they walked towards the back porch, remembering last year’s horrifying shock of Jeska’s bruises, souvenirs of an encounter with a pretty girl’s jealous lover. Tomorrow would be very different, Mieka knew. Not only did Jeska have strict orders to keep it in his trousers until after they’d won their place on the Royal Circuit, but this year they were Touchstone, known and admired, and people would be frantic to see their show. They wouldn’t be getting looks from the Stewards; they would be watched.

  Halfway up the stairs, Cade murmured, “What Jeska said, about leaving space for the audience to inhabit the character—”

  “Every so often he pops up with a good one, don’t he? He knows his work, Jeska does.”

  “I always thought it was my job—our job—to make as complete a picture as possible. Not some undeveloped mess that any amateur could put together, but all the sensations, all the emotions, all the words—a precise experience.”

  Mieka hid a smirk. “I think mayhap Black Lightning has changed the way we all think about things. Getting bludgeoned about the head is rather a total kind of experience.”

  “That’s what Vered said last night—‘bludgeoned.’ Mieka…”

  “Hmm?”

  “D’you think it might be time we stopped shattering glass?”

  Chapter 4

  Having heard it all before, Mieka didn’t pay much attention as the Master of His Majesty’s Revelries explained how Trials and the three Circuits worked. His gaze wandered about the hall, noting statuary and paintings (good but not the best, here in a reception room where the common folk assembled for tours of the castle grounds), clothes (vile sea-green tunics on officials, and too many of those fussy pie-frill wrappings knotted around players’ necks), and especially attitudes.

  The groups who didn’t matter he passed over swiftly. The Nightrunners, still looking as disgruntled as they had on last year’s placard. Some new quartet called the Smokecatchers (why couldn’t anyone think up any original names?), who’d connected up on the strength of an advertisement in The Nayword. The Enticements were still around, though for players their age, a glass basket was useful only for planting kitchen herbs. Same for the Cobbald Close Players. Kelife and the Candlelights were as usual guaranteed a spot on a Circuit no matter how awful and old-fashioned they were; their tregetour was married to a lord’s sister’s cousin or somesuch. Then there were the Wishcallers, who had so mysteriously dropped out of third flight on the last Winterly. Black Lightning had replaced them.

  Black Lightning were present in all their snooty arrogance. Mieka behaved as if he hadn’t noticed them. Nearby were the duo of Redprong and Trinder, a tregetour and glisker who would yet again audition for a masquer and a fettler, and yet again drive either or both quite mad. As for the Spintales—Mieka repressed a snigger as they drew the most dreaded of all the Thirteen, a numbing story about how treaties had averted a war. Not even Cade was able to make that one interesting, and Mieka nearly fell asleep every time they rehearsed it.

  Next to draw were the Shorelines. Mieka had a soft spot for the Shorelines, for they were the first group he had ever seen perform. He’d been seven; he was now nearing nineteen; everybody knew it was long past time the group got out of the way for younger and better players, but people still enjoyed seeing them work.

  And that left the three best groups in the Kingdom: the Shadowshapers, Touchstone, and Crystal Sparks. If the Stewards hadn’t bee
n bought off—which was unlikely but not unheard of—that would be the lineup for the Royal this year.

  Most people would not have included the Sparks in the top three. Mieka knew his preference for their work was more than personal taste; he’d discussed them with Quill. What the Sparks did was innovative in ways different from the Shadowshapers’ intensely original pieces, from Touchstone’s daring rewrites. The Sparks played only the traditional, the same scripts that everybody had used for ages, but in ways that never failed to surprise. Mieka had seen them a few times this spring in Gallantrybanks, and what they had done with “Piksey Led A-Straying” had left him blinking. As usual, young lordling got lost on a moor, lured by Pikseys, and eventually turned his cloak inside out to break the spell. But in between, the Sparks toyed with the theme of invertedness: clouds and sky underfoot, hillsides overhead, rain that fell upwards, trees with leaves that shrank back into the branches as the trunk dwindled into the ground and became nothing more than a seed. For a little while during the performance, Mieka feared that the thorn he’d pricked beforehand contained some of what Pirro had given him this spring, stuff that had befuddled his mind and sent him running through Castle Eyot to find safety with Cade. The creativity of Crystal Sparks’ performance, the gleeful warping of perception, had impressed Mieka, as did the strict control exerted by the fettler, Brennert Copperboggin. To modulate safely such confusion without sending the audience reeling and yarking to the nearest garderobe was much more difficult than the pummeling that seemed to be Black Lightning’s only real knack. Once the Sparks began doing original work, they’d turn out almost as good as Touchstone.

  Thirteen aspiring groups at Trials meant that all the Perils would be performed. Mieka felt sorry for anybody who got the one about the Dragon. Last year Touchstone had made it so spectacular a piece that nobody would ever be able to perform it again without someone muttering, “Not a patch on them!” The points awarded for some of the Thirteen were always greater than for others, and Mieka frankly suspected that this contributed to the continued presence on the Circuits of dilapidated groups like the Spintales. Luck in the draw had much to do with it—