(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (65 page)

But why?
No one ever explained that curious whim.
Why should the gods care whether mortals are worthy of anything?
It was a bit like a person walking around in a stable, testing all the animals to see which were pure of heart or particularly clever, so they could be rewarded and the other beasts punished. She supposed people might do that to find which were the most
obedient
animals—was that the gods’ reasoning?

See, here I am, drifting again,
she chided herself.
What is Briony Eddon going to do now, that’s the question. What’s next?
Before his death in the fire, Shaso had talked about raising an army, or at least enough men in arms to protect her when she revealed herself, a force to defend her from the Tollys’ treachery. He had talked of appealing to the Syannese king for troops and here she was in Syan. Most of all she wanted to go to Hierosol where her father was prisoner—she ached to see his face, to hear his voice—but she knew it was a foolish idea, that at best she would only join him in captivity. Shaso would tell her to cast her dice here, among old allies.

But would that be a good suggestion, or would it simply be Shaso, the old soldier, thinking as old soldiers did—no other way to reclaim a kingdom except by force of arms?

Thinking of the old man scalded her heart, the terrible injustice she and her brother had done him, caging him like an animal for months and months…
And now he is dead. Because of me. Because of my foolishness, my headstrong mistakes, my…my…

“Tim? Tim, what’s wrong?” It was Feival, his handsome face full of surprised concern. “Why are you weeping, pet?”

Briony wiped angrily at her cheeks. Could it be possible to act more like a girl? It was a good thing all the players knew her secret. “Just…just thinking of something. Of someone.”

Feival nodded wisely and turned away.

The tavern called The False Woman—a somewhat ill-omened name, Briony couldn’t help feeling, considering her own nested impostures—crouched in the corner of an old, beaten-down market in the northeastern part of the city, a neighborhood known as Chakki’s Hole after the Chakkai people from the mountains of south Perikal who had come to the city as laborers and made this maze of dark streets their new home. The Hole, as inhabitants often called it, was so close to the high city walls that even just past noon on a clear day the winter sun was blocked and the whole neighborhood in shade. One of the city’s dozens of canals neatly separated it from the rest of the Perikalese district.

The sign hanging above the tavern doorway showed a woman with two faces, one fair and one foul, and a pointed hat of a type that hadn’t been worn in a century or more. The taverner, a stout, mustached fellow named Bedoyas, ushered them through into the innyard with the air of a man forced to stable someone else’s animals in his own bedroom. “Here. I’ll send my boy around for the horses. You will drive not a single nail into my wood without my permission, understood?”

“Understood, good host,” said Finn. “And if anyone is asking for us, send them to me. My name is Teodoros.”

When Bedoyas had stumped off to see to other guests (not that he seemed to be overwhelmed with custom this winter) Briony helped the company begin setting up a stage—the most permanent they had built since she had been with them, because they would now be at least a tennight in one place. Several of the men were in truth more carpenters than performers, and at least three of the shareholding players, Dowan Birch, Feival, and Pedder Makewell himself, had worked in the building trades.

Hewney claimed he had as well, but Finn Teodoros loudly suggested otherwise.

“What rubbish are you spouting, fat man?” Hewney was helping Feival and two of the others lash together the barrels that would be pillars for the stage. They did not bother to bring their own, since most inns had more than a few empties to spare, and The False Woman was no exception. “I have built more houses than you’ve eaten hot suppers!”

“You must have set up Tessis by yourself, then,” said Pedder Makewell. “Look at the size of our Finn!”

“It would be a more telling jest, Master Makewell,” Teodoros replied a touch primly, “if your own greatly swollen sack of guts were not falling over your belt. As it is, the nightsoil digger is suggesting that the saltpeter man stinks.”

Briony did not know why she found that so funny, but she did; she nearly fell over laughing despite (or perhaps because of ) Estir Makewell’s sour look. She and Makewell’s sister were shoveling sand into the barrels to make them stronger supports under the middle of the stage. Estir still did not really like the person she thought of as “Tim”—she would never like adding another hungry mouth to the troop, which reduced the income of the shareholdings—but she had softened toward Briony a bit.

“Leave it to a child,” said Estir, rolling her eyes, “to find such a jest so laughable.” She scowled at the others. “And you men are just as bad. You would think you were all still babies, soiling your smallclothes, to see you get such pleasure out of dribble, fart, and ordure.”

This started Briony laughing all over again—it was the same thing her prim and squeamish brother Barrick had often said about her, although her twin had obviously never blamed it on her being a child.

It was cold out and her hands were chapped and aching already from the rough handle on the shovel, but Briony felt oddly content. She was almost happy, she realized—for the first time in too long to remember: the miseries that dogged her thoughts were not by any means gone, but for the moment she could live with them, as if she and they were old enemies grown too weary to contend.

The men brought out the pieces of the stage and joined them together in one large rectangle, then set it on top of the barrels and lashed the whole thing together. Briony herself, as one of the lightest, was sent to stand on top of it to test its resilience. When she had bounced up and down on it vigorously enough to assure everyone, they continued preparing the rest of their makeshift theater. The smaller of the two wagons was rolled into place at the back of the stage where it would serve as a tiring-room for entrances, exits, and quick changes, as well as a wall on which to hang painted backdrops. They lifted up the hinged top of the wagon, folding it upward so that it could serve as a kind of wall or tower-top from which actors could speak their lines or, as gods, meddle in the lives of callow mortals from on high. Briony could see the persimmon-colored sunlight of fading afternoon on the uppermost peaks of the mountains southeast of Tessis and wondered if the gods were truly up there as she had been taught, watching her and all the other petty mortals.

But Lisiya said they were…what? Sleeping? They can hear us, she said—but can they still see us?

It was strange to think of the gods being blind and only faintly aware of the existence of Briony’s kind, like vastly aged grandparents snoring in their chairs, barely moving from the beginning of one day to its end.

No wonder they long to come back to the world again, as Lisiya said.
She was immediately chilled, although she could not quite say why. She bent and returned to bracing the wagon wheels with stones.

The morning meal, a surprisingly hearty fish stew the tavernkeeper Bedoyas had served them in a big iron pot, with a spicy tang that Finn told her came from things called
marashis,
was not lying quietly in her stomach. It was no fault of the tavern’s cook, though: Briony was fretful. The tavern yard was already starting to fill, even though the play would not begin until the temple bells rang in Blessed Lady of Night to call the end of afternoon prayers, which was most of an hour away. She had never performed in front of more than a few dozen people in any of the villages or towns along the way, but there were twice that many here already and the yard was still half empty.

What are you frightened of, girl?
she asked herself.
You have fought a demon, not to mention escaped a usurper. You have stood before many times this number and acted the queen in truth—or at least the reigning princess—a far more taxing role. Players don’t lose their heads when they fail to convince, as I almost lost mine.
She thought of Hendon Tolly and a little shudder of rage passed through her.
Oh, but I would glory to have his head on a chopping block. I would take up the ax myself.
Briony, who although rough and boyish in some ways, as her maids and family had never ceased pointing out, was not or bloodthirsty, but she wanted fiercely to see Tolly humiliated and punished.

I owe it to Shaso’s memory, if nothing else,
she thought.
I can’t make amends for imprisoning him, but I can avenge him.

Shaso had been innocent of her brother’s murder, but she still did not know who exactly was guilty, beyond the obvious. Who had been the guiding hand behind a murder by witchcraft? Hendon Tolly, however dark his heart and bloody his hands, had seemed genuinely surprised at Anissa’s maid’s horrific transformation—but if the Tollys had not had her brother murdered, then who was to blame? It was impossible to believe the witch-maid had conceived and executed such a scheme on her own. Could it have been one of Olin’s rival kings? Or the distant autarch? Perhaps even the fairy folk, reaching out somehow from their shadowy land, a first blow before their attack? In truth, the lives of the Eddon family had been completely shaken to pieces in a matter of months by magic and monsters. Why had
any
of this happened?

“Hoy, Tim.” Feival was already pulling his shirt over his head as he squeezed into the cramped wagon. “You look stuck—do you need help with your dress?” As the company’s principal boy he was more familiar with putting on a gown than Briony herself, who had always been assisted by her maids.

She shook her head, almost relieved. The workaday had returned to push out other things, no matter their importance. “No, but thank you. I was just thinking.”

“Good house today,” he said, stepping out of his tights with the indifference of a veteran player. Briony turned away, still not used to seeing naked men, although it had not been an infrequent experience since she had been traveling with the troop. Feival in particular was lithe and well-muscled, and it was interesting to realize that she could enjoy looking at him without wanting anything more.

Maybe I really am boyish, as Barrick used to say. Maybe I’m just fickle of eye and heart, like a man.
There was no question, though, that she wanted more in her life than simply a handsome man at her side. She could feel it some nights, different from the yearning she felt for her lost brothers and her father: she did not want a particular person, she wanted
somebody,
a man who would hold her only when she wanted, who would be warm and strong.

But sometimes when she had such thoughts, she saw a face that surprised her—the commoner, the failed guardian, Ferras Vansen. It was exasperating. If there was a less appropriate person in the world for her to think about, she could scarcely imagine it. Who knew if he was even alive?

No,
she told herself quickly,
he must be alive. He must be fit and well and protecting my brother.

It was odd, though, that Vansen’s not-so-handsome face kept drifting into her thoughts, his nose that bore the signs of having been broken, his eyes that scarcely ever looked at her, hiding always behind lowered lids as he stared at the ground or at the sky, as though her very gaze was a fire that would burn him…

She stopped, gasped in a short breath. Could it be?

“Are you well?”

“No—I mean yes, Feival, I’m well enough. I just…I just poked myself with something sharp.”

It was madness to think this way. Worse, it was meaningless madness: if Vansen lived, he was lost—lost with her brother. The whole of that life was gone, as if it had happened to another person, and unless she could somehow find help for herself and Southmarch, nothing like it would ever come again. Her task now was to be a player, at least for today—not a shareholder, even, but an assistant to the principal boy, working for meals in a tavern yard in Tessis. That was all. She knew she must learn to accept that.

“We are not in the March Kingdoms any more, so speak your parts loudly and broadly,” said Pedder Makewell, as if any of them did not know that already. “Now, where is Pilney?”

The players were all crammed into a little high-walled alley behind the tavern because there was not room for them all in the tiring-room and the yard was filled by their audience, a large group of city folk finished with work and eager for the start of the Kerneia revels. One end of the alley was bricked off, the other sealed with a huge pile of building rubble, so the spot was fairly private, but a few people in the buildings that backed on the alley leaned out of their windows to stare at the crowd of actors in their colorful costumes. “Where is Pilney?” Makewell asked again.

Pilney, younger even than Feival Ulian but far more shy and not half so pretty, raised his hand. The heavyset, red-faced youth was playing the part of the moon god Khors, and although this had thrown him much together with Briony, he had scarcely spoken a word to her that Teodoros had not written.

“Right,” Makewell said to him sternly. “You have spattered me quite roundly with blood the last two performances, boy, and you have spoiled my costume both times, not to mention my curtain call. When you die today, do me the kindness of facing a little away before you burst your bladder, or next time you’ll die from a real clubbing instead of a few taps with a sham.”

Pilney, wide-eyed, nodded his head rapidly.

“If you have finished terrifying the young fellow, Pedder,” said Finn Teodoros, “perhaps I might essay a few truly important points?”

“It is an expensive costume!” said Estir Makewell, defending her brother.

“Yes, the rest of us, in our rags, have all noticed.”

“Whose name is on the troop, I ask you?” Pedder demanded. “Who do they come to see?”