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  Trials at Seekhaven; Touchstone’s sixth. It was difficult for Cade to remember how excited and scared he’d been that first time, how eager to prove himself and Touchstone. He had no doubts now about how good they were, and it really had nothing to do with Trials. Everyone knew that they would again come in second to the Shadowshapers. Mayhap next year, or the year after, Touchstone would come out on top. In a career that had seen triumph after triumph (with that one mortifying exception), this was Cade’s secret striving: to best the Shadowshapers.

  Both groups stayed at the Shadowstone Inn, as usual. Vered had left Bexan at home this time, and Mieka was fool enough to comment upon it that first evening in the taproom over dinner. The chill that descended over the table could have frozen the blood solid in their veins. Rauel began babbling about how dull it was for her when they were rehearsing or performing, and the weariness of the trip, and how this year they’d not be going back to Gallantrybanks before heading out on tour. Vered cut across this helpful speech with, “Someday women won’t just be in the audience, or making suggestions to their husbands. They’ll be on the stage.”

  Cade understood this to mean that Bexan had taken to interjecting her own ideas into the Shadowshapers’ work. He tried to imagine Crisiant or Kazie or Mieka’s wife giving advice on how to write or perform a play. The absurdity of it made him decide to make a little mischief.

  “There’ve been lady poets before, y’know. Published, giving public recitals, and all that. Quite good, some of them.”

  “Writing’s one thing,” Sakary said. “Performing? And in some of the places we’ve played through the years?”

  “Not my daughters, that’s for certain sure,” Chat announced. “Look at the life we lead! A girl of eighteen or so, slogging round Albeyn on the Winterly Circuit?”

  Rafe was smiling beneath his beard. “Seems to me we’ll have to improve the reputation of theater folk before fathers will risk their daughters in so scandalous a profession.”

  “You’re doing your part,” Mieka told him. “Married, faithful, don’t drink half what you used to—are you getting old, or just boring?”

  “You might give it a try, old son,” Rafe replied amiably.

  Cade held his breath at this indirect reference to last year’s misdeeds. Jeska, as he did so often, saved the situation by saying in his sweetest voice, “Especially the drinking. Running out of belt to put extra holes in, aren’t you, Mieka?” He directed his gaze at the Elf’s midsection.

  “Not a bit of it,” Rafe said as Mieka flushed crimson. “The leather shrunk in the wash.”

  They all laughed, and conversation meandered off in other directions. The third round of ale loosened Rauel’s tongue enough to produce arch hints of spectacular plans for the Shadowshapers’ final-night show.

  “Finally finished your bloody—and I mean that in every sense of the word—play, then?” Cade asked Vered.

  He pushed his drink away and looked sour. “Six different ways, all of ’em done so wrongly that not even I can get it sorted. Those books I borrowed of you were so much help that I’ve no notion what really did happen.”

  “And if not for you,” Chat added, “and your stickler-ness for historical accuracy, he’d simply write the thing the way he thinks it ought to go, and be done with it.”

  “Historical accuracy,” Mieka said amiably, “has little to recommend it. You tregetours, your problem is that you think too much. And thinking just gets in the way.”

  “Angels forfend that anybody should ever catch you thinking,” Chat teased.

  “You know as well as I do,” Mieka shot back, “that the best players don’t play the play—they are the play.”

  Sakary smirked. “A good thing, then, that Black Lightning is nowhere near the best.”

  “Heard aught of what they’ve come up with this year?” Jeska asked.

  “Nothing new.” Rauel lifted his glass to his partners in turn. “All the creative vision in Albeyn was with us this winter. Nothing left for anyone else.”

  The Shadowshapers grinned; Touchstone groaned; Cade took the opportunity to mention that their early rehearsal tomorrow meant they really ought to get some sleep. He didn’t mention how much they needed the time in the rehearsal hall; they hadn’t been onstage together in over a month. A review of all the Thirteen would be followed by a preliminary discussion of what Rafe had named “The Avowal.” After a winter of few performances and a spring of almost none, Cade knew he ought to have had a whole new play ready. But he didn’t. And the first person who remarked on it would get a withie right up his nose.

  The day following an adequate if not inspired rehearsal, they were bidden to lunching with Princess Miriuzca. This had become something of a tradition at Trials. Other groups hid their envy behind jokes and sneers, but the fact of it was that Miriuzca liked each member of Touchstone and enjoyed their company. They were, after all, some of the first Albeyni she had ever met, and had done her nothing but kindnesses. Cade wondered occasionally whether or not she had forgiven him for performing the play that had seemingly made Prince Ashgar weep, thus convincing her that he was a sensitive, gentle, tenderhearted man and their marriage would be unadulterated bliss. Still, as Mieka had told him several times (with increasing exasperation), nobody forced Miriuzca to believe what she’d believed, let alone marry the miserable cullion.

  “She really shouldn’t be inviting us,” Jeska said worriedly as they presented themselves at Seekhaven Castle. “She’s just had a baby, and her father died a few weeks ago—”

  “And she’s probably looking for a little distraction from both those things,” Rafe interrupted. “Between the congratulations and the condolences, between the happiness and the grief—she won’t know what to feel from one minute to the next. Crisiant didn’t.”

  Cade trusted Rafe to say all the right things. He had experience, after all, of a woman who had given birth and lost her father all in the same month. A tregetour was supposed to be able to imagine what such things would feel like; he was supposed to be able to project himself into any sort of person in any situation. But lately Cade had come to believe that the only feelings he could feel were his own, and those he got rid of as quickly as he could into the withies. And perhaps the lack of performances that used up his emotions was causing his sleep to be even more fractured than usual. He’d observed long ago that Mieka became tense and uneasy if denied the release of a performance. Mayhap he was made the same way. He’d always thought that he sluiced out all his emotions when he was writing—and that outlet had been closed off for a goodly long while, too.

  The Princess awaited them inside a charming white summerhouse, octagonal in shape, with curtains on four sides made of multicolored ribbons. These blew and tangled in the slight breeze, but the table was set far enough from them so that Miriuzca and her guests wouldn’t be constantly picking silk out of the soup. The footman who had escorted Touchstone across the lawns announced them, bowed, and departed, and it was left to the Princess herself to make introductions.

  “My brother, Tregrefin Ilesko,” she said, indicating with a smile and a nod the young man seated beside her. “He’s so eager to meet you—I write much in my letters. Do please sit down and be comfortable, won’t you?”

  Tregrefin Ilesko didn’t look eager. He looked sullen, which suited his narrow features admirably. He shared with his sister the somber dark gray of mourning and a pair of very blue eyes, but that was all. When his sister said please to a group of nobodies, his pencil-thin black eyebrows nearly disappeared into an unruly thatch of black hair. He was handsome in a brooding sort of way, and looked to be about eighteen or nineteen years old.

  Commonplace civilities were exchanged as food was set before them—slices of cold roast chicken and three sauces to dip it in, a salad of fruit and walnuts, and mazey-cakes baked with yellow ground meal from some foreign land or other. Wine was poured, the servants effaced themselves, and it became evident that Miriuzca was the eager one, ask
ing questions about Trials designed to acquaint her brother with the whole process of theater that she adored. Jeska provided answers and charming smiles; Mieka contributed several stories of life on the circuits suitable for Royal ears; Rafe explained the functions of masquer, glisker, fettler, and tregetour. Cade said very little, for he was busy disciplining his mind against an Elsewhen that battered and howled at him like a hound frantic to come in from a thunderstorm.

  Ought he to let it in? Despite what Rafe had said about the accident at the Gallery—that unless Cade could have changed something, he wouldn’t have seen anything about it in advance—that day had been enough of a shock to make him question, just a little, his decision to banish all Elsewhens from his mind. Mieka’s words kept coming back to him: “My brother’s likely crippled, all because you think your Elsewhens are a bore.”

  “Yes,” the Princess was saying, “I’m only a half-sister, and we look nothing alike except for our eyes—that’s Father, and all of us have his eyes. So do my children. And so will Ilesko’s,” she said, fondly teasing, “if he ever finds a girl who suits him to becoming their mother!”

  “Is that what brings you to Albeyn?” Rafe asked. “Apart from visiting Her Royal Highness, and finding comfort in your mutual grief, that is.”

  “A girl from this place?”

  The young man did not elaborate on his obvious distaste, for Miriuzca swiftly interrupted with, “I’ve warned all my ladies not to lose their hearts to him, Master Threadchaser.”

  Cade watched the Tregrefin’s lip curl before a smile was forced to the corners of his mouth. So: he did not like the ladies of Albeyn. He probably did not like the gentlemen of Albeyn, either, nor Albeyn as a whole. Why, then, was he here? Surely not to console Miriuzca. Anyone less likely to provide solace in her sorrow could not be imagined. Well, her husband, perhaps—but Cade knew himself to be prejudiced.

  The sweet was served. Some whimsical pastry cook had concocted two towers of cake on either side of a river of blue frosting meant to represent the Keeps and the Gally. Windows were picked out in candied fruit, and the green whipped-cream lawns were dotted with yellow and purple sugar sprinkles representing flowers. How they were to eat this elaborate creation was beyond Cade but, perhaps predictably, not beyond Mieka. He snatched up a knife and decapitated one of the towers, placing it on Miriuzca’s plate, then lopped off the top of the other one for her brother.

  And at that point, the Elsewhen shrieked at Cade, breaking through the chinks of doubt. A hundred screaming voices; a feeling of horrible panic; the crashing of stone onto stone and into deep water; the smells of fire and the smoke of black powder exploding—

  No! I won’t! Leave me alone!

  He recovered himself and glanced quickly around him. Everyone was laughing at the way Mieka was carving up the Keeps. No one was paying any attention to Cade. It hadn’t been a full-on Elsewhen, but all the same it left him with a taste of sick dread in his mouth, and when Mieka offered him a plate of cake and frosting and candies and whipped cream, he thought that he’d vomit.

  “My brother,” Miriuzca said, “brought with him people who will interest you. They are players in the theater, from—where are they from, Ilesko?”

  Cade swallowed wine and commanded himself to pay attention. The word that answered the Princess’s question might have been anything. He didn’t recognize it, couldn’t even sort out its syllables in his head. Derien would have known, he told himself. Derien, who loved maps and knew more about where Touchstone had been on the Continent than Touchstone did. If anyone found out what Derien’s magic could do, he’d be seeing all those places and dozens more on a quest for gold. Could an Elsewhen warn Cayden about who might have designs on his adored little brother? He repressed a shiver.

  “Will they be performing for the Court?” Jeska asked politely.

  “I think yes,” the Tregrefin said. “Plays differ here. Not only the making and doing, but the meaning.”

  “Indeed? May one ask how they differ from what we perform?”

  “No magic, of course.”

  Cade understood then the source of his stiffness, his disapproval. He ought to have known. Miriuzca had taken a while to become accustomed to the magic practiced every day in her new country—but she was used to it by now and more than used to it, for had she not given Blye the Gift of the Gloves, signifying her Royal patronage? All at once he wondered when, if ever, Miriuzca would ask him to seal the little glass box Blye had made and he had given her back in her own country, a box to hold a keepsake safe forever.

  With that thought, another Elsewhen hammered at him. He escaped most of it, but for a quick vision of that glass box gleaming at its edges with magic, and a tiny lock of golden hair, tied with a forget-me-never blue ribbon, inside.

  Mieka was saying, “D’you know, back when we were in Vathis, a boy tried to steal one of our withies—thought it would give him the magic he needed to be a player.” He sighed sadly. “It’s there or it’s not, and there’s no stealing it.”

  “But how do they manage?” Rafe asked. “Without magic to set the place and feel of the thing—?”

  “Words,” Cade said. “They do it all with words.”

  “But how?”

  “Beautiful words,” the Tregrefin agreed. “Words to honor the Lord and the Lady. Words of faith. Words to say that right is right and wrongness is wrongness.”

  And magic, Cade assumed, was a wrongness. “I’ll be interested to see them perform,” he said, meaning it more than the young man could ever know.

  Ilesko took that as encouragement to elaborate. “Words to make mind again of truth. All are birthed with—” He broke off, asked his sister something in their language, and nodded his gratitude when she replied. “All are birthed with inborn bent to sin. Sometimes one, sometimes many. No escaping from inborn sin.”

  Cade had never heard anything so sad in his life. He didn’t think much about religion; he went to Chapel when he couldn’t avoid it, and knew all the stories from the Consecreations, but the subject wasn’t anything that took up long hours of sleeplessness. Lord and Lady, Angels, Old Gods—people believed as it suited their characters and lineages. But nobody talked about innocent children being born not so innocent at all, children born with inherent sin that they could never escape.

  A swift look at Mieka and Rafe showed him that they weren’t exactly charmed by that notion, either. Jeska went on smiling slightly, nodding slightly, thoughts and feelings hidden behind his beautiful golden face.

  “Plays,” concluded Ilesko, “are for showing the sin, and how it is punished, and what to do for the earning forgiveness.”

  Miriuzca was looking a little desperate. Cade imitated Jeska, knowing the smile to be infinitely less effective on his infinitely less beautiful face, and said, “Our theater was once much the same, you know. Plays were made to encourage people to behave honorably towards each other, and to educate them about history, and the ways of the Lord and the Lady and Angels and Old Gods—”

  “That is a very great wrongness,” Ilesko interrupted severely. “There is the Lord and there is the Lady and that is all. The other things—they do not matter. They do not exist.” He turned to his sister, who looked uncomfortable. “You are now believing these things that you should not.”

  “It is the custom of Albeyn, which is now my home,” she said with simple dignity. “And in Albeyn the theater has expanded beyond plays about morality, and now a tregetour can write about anything. Is this not so, Master Silversun?”

  “Your Royal Highness is perfectly correct. Theater has and indeed must move on from the traditional plays, and explore whatevery person thinks and feels. Has Your Royal Highness ever seen the Shadowshapers’ play, ‘A Life in a Day’?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  The more she praised it, the less her brother liked it.

  Jeska explained the difficulties of having two masquers onstage at once, and how it complicated the work of the glisker and fettler; Rafe expressed himself g
rateful that Cade and Jeska were too much the individualists to permit more than one tregetour or more than one masquer into Touchstone’s plays, because he and Mieka had enough trouble with the pair of them as it was.

  “How many masquers appear in plays on the Continent?” Rafe asked.

  “For the play they perform, five.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “A learned man named Vaustas, a nobleman and his wife, and the Lord and the Lady.”

  Rafe grinned across the table at Mieka. “You hear that? Five of them onstage!”

  The Elf gave an exaggerated shudder. “I’m good, but nobody’s that good! I’d get so confused, I’d dress the nobleman in a ball gown and his wife in full armor!”

  “The Lord would have long blond curls and a feathered fan,” Cade said deliberately, unsurprised to see the Tregrefin’s flinch of disgust.

  “And the scholar would smell of the stables!” Miriuzca laughed.

  “The masquers,” the Tregrefin said humorlessly, “do not become confused. They are knowing the importance of their roles and the words.”

  “All done with words.” Rafe sighed. “Well, Mieka, that’s us out of work!”

  The Tregrefin looked as if he thought that would not be a tragic turn of events.

  By the time a last round of tea was served, Cade considered that he had the boy’s measure. Snobbishly confident, self-righteous in the way only an eighteen-year-old could be (from the vantage point of his twenty-four years, Cade was honest enough to admit that he was living in the skin of the perfect priggish pattern for this attitude); pious, and militant in his piety; wary of magic, and giving Mieka’s ears many nervous sidelong glances. Condescension and disapproval competed to a standstill on his dark face. Cade wondered suddenly if the Tregrefin had met Princess Iamina yet.

  Miriuzca turned her face to the spring sunlight and smiled. “I so enjoy Seekhaven,” she said. “Not as formal as the Palace or even the Keeps. Though it’s fun to be there on tour days.”

  When her brother looked blank and baffled, Rafe said, “There are days for schoolchildren to visit, and days when the Keeps are open to the public.” He smiled over at Cade. “Site of our first foray into theater, wouldn’t you say?”