Window Wall (14 page)

On their way back to the Shadowstone Inn, Mieka put forth his opinion that they had rehearsed the Third often enough in the last five years that they had no need to go through it yet again. Rafe disagreed. Jeska didn’t care much one way or the other. Cade startled them all by siding with Mieka.

“What?” Rafe exclaimed. “You’re not going to make us change up half the play to suit your ideas of how it really happened?”

“Let’s put it this way,” Cade said. “Everybody knows that the Shadowshapers will be First Flight on the Royal. Even with a performance of the dreaded Second, they’ll be better than anybody else. Our only real competition is the Sparks and Black Lightning. And they drew the Fifth and Thirteenth.”

In the Fifth, the heir to Albeyn’s throne went a-wooing a foreign princess. The “peril” part of it happened when three other suitors tried to kill him in various ways. He survived. The princess, captivated by his courage and cunning as well as his matchless good looks and exquisite manners, fell wildly in love, as princesses were obliged to do. In the right hands it could be a fun piece, but there was nothing of either flash or subtlety about it. The Sparks would do it just fine, but not fine enough to unseat Touchstone from Second Flight. As for the Thirteenth—that one dealt with a clever diplomatic victory that prevented a war. Lots of talk, and some interesting costume choices if the tregetour had done the research (needless to say, Cayden had), but no opportunity in it for an exhibition of Black Lightning’s signature brute force.

The Third Peril was just the sort of thing that Mieka delighted in. Cade had long since investigated the playlet and discovered that it wasn’t a Giant that the king defeated at a tournament; it was just a regular knight. Nothing he could rework with fresh meaning, so they stuck to the usual script—and Jeska did love stomping about and roaring in his deepest voice as he played the Giant. Mieka had come up with an entertaining twist when first they’d discussed the Third: rather than cloak their masquer in magic that made him ceiling-tall as the Giant, why not shrink everything else? Horses, lances, pennants, spectators in the stands, all dwindled down to the size of a child’s toys—it came very close to being a comedy of skewed proportions, and Mieka enjoyed making visual jokes. The Giant would, for example, pluck up a miniature sword from the King and use it to clean his fingernails. There wasn’t much else to be done with the straightforward plot, but at least doing it from the Giant’s perspective was more interesting than having the King walk onto the tourney field with magic providing only the Giant’s massive legs and feet, which was the way everybody else always did it.

Rafe frowned as he thought it over. “We’ve never done it for an audience, but our Third is better than anybody else’s I’ve ever seen—and different, too, which at Trials seems to be the main thing.”

“How outrageous can I get?” Mieka wanted to know.

“Well,” Cade said, considering, “we don’t want it to be a full-on howler. Just some giggles here and there. This is purportedly King Meredan’s ancestor we’re portraying, after all.”

Jeska gave an inelegant snort. “Since when has that stopped us?”

They spent the rest of the morning on a long stroll around Seekhaven, shopping, greeting the citizens, and idly trading other ideas on how they’d do the Third. Then they repaired to the Shadowstone Inn for lunching. Waiting for them, and for the Shadowshapers, were invitations to Fliting Hall that night for a performance by the theater group from the Continent.

“Here’s betting that they take more than an hour to do what we can in a half,” said Vered, who seemed to have forgot all about his father’s visit. Everyone else was more than willing to forget about it, too.

“Now, now,” Rafe teased. “Play nice.”

“We can’t really judge them by our standards, can we?” Jeska asked, frowning earnestly. “And who knows but that in their circumstances, we’d be terrible.”

“Terrible?
Us?
”

They all took up the shouts of abuse. Roundly chastised, he laughed and wrapped his arms around his head, crying, “Mercy! Mercy on the poor player!”

But what he’d said got Cade to thinking, and Vered as well. When the others had departed on various errands—a nap, more shopping, writing letters, or polishing withies—Vered accepted the innkeeper’s wife’s offer of chilled fruit juice served in the sunny backyard and asked Cade to join him.

When they were seated in the shade of an elm, Vered lost no time in getting to his point. “The audiences on the Continent must get something out of this sort of theater, or it’d not be thriving as it seems to be.”

“But it’s all they’ve got, innit? It’d be a bit like amateur theatricals, the sort people do on long winter evenings when they’ve run out of books and conversation and all the lute strings have snapped.”

“Children dressing up in mummy’s gowns and grandfather’s boots. But from that sort of playing come players—if they grow up with the magic for it. And if they do, it’s not the back wall of the drawing room they’ll be playing to. They’ll play to the gods.”

Cade smiled. It was an old expression in theater, not much used anymore:
playing to the gods
meant making sure the entire audience heard and saw and felt everything to the very back rows and beyond, where the Old Gods gathered to watch.

Vered brushed a buzzing insect away from his face. “I hear you’ve been fooling about with removing one or the other of the tricks we all use during a play.”

“Just as an experiment. Mieka’s sister Jinsie has friends at Shollop who challenged us, more or less, to leave out the sounds. Theater for the deaf. Yet you’ve done the same—more or less!—with ‘Life in a Day,’ and no emotion until the ending.”

“Is there more of honesty, d’you think, in that way of doing it? Words and sights that reach into men and drag their own emotions out of them, rather than making them feel what the scene’s supposed to make them feel?”

“Men
and
women,” Cade corrected, smiling.

“Because of your mad little glisker, yes.”

“And the Princess.” And Lady Megs, he reminded himself, memory distracting him with a picture of her in trousers and jacket alighting from Miriuzca’s carriage. He dragged his thoughts back to the subject at hand. “Would you have Black Lightning take it all one step further, and do nothing on the stage at all except stand there and send out bludgeoning after bludgeoning of emotion?”

Vered laughed harshly. “Great Gods, Cade, don’t ever say such a thing in their hearing! Yeh, they make sure everyone feels what’s intended to be felt, thus assuring themselves that they’ve been spectacularly good even if the play itself is shit.” He scrunched down in his chair, scowling. “There’s not a decent sentence in any of their original pieces. They fool everyone with their intensity. Take away the magic, and they’d be laughed off any stage in Albeyn.”

Cade sipped his drink, then said, “It’s rather like falling in love with a beautiful woman. I mean, a man sees the outward flourishes, he’s knocked all agroof by the way she looks, and thinks only with his cock.”

“But when the beauty fades, as it always must … there he is, staring at her across the breakfast dishes and wondering why he married her. Yeh, I see that. The magic is the beauty, and if you take it away, there’d best be something else to give the audience or you’re back playing for trimmings in taverns.” He raked one hand through his white-blond hair, suddenly laughing. “We’ll be doing that, we Shadowshapers, if we’re not careful!”

Cade snorted his derision. “First Flight on the Royal for how many years now, and how many years stretching ahead? And I don’t like to think what you can command as your fee for a private performance.”

“Ah, and that’s just it, me lad,” he replied merrily. “There’s two choices: be a free man or be a thrall. Let other people tell you what to do, where to go, how to play a play, what to think or whether you’re allowed to think at all—or tell ’em all to go fuck themselves.”

“What are you talking about?” But then he remembered a conversation of several years ago, and how the Shadowshapers wanted to be quit of the circuits, and become their own masters. “Vered,” he said, instinctively lowering his voice and instantly disgusted with himself because of it, for why couldn’t they talk of such things out in the open? “You’re not seriously thinking—?”

“It’s the choice we
don’t
have, as players. There’s no guild for the likes of us. If there were, we could deal with people like that Prickspur lout up near Dolven Wold, and nobody like that could touch us without serious consequences. What happened to him in the end? Lord Fairwalk complained, Rommy complained, all of us refused to set foot in his miserable old inn—but what really happened to him? Sweet fuck-all. There’s no guild for players. There’s nobody to protect us but ourselves.”

“The King—”

“The King and all his little minions, they don’t give two shits about us. We’re sent out on the circuits, we get paid, we get transport and bed and board—and who collects the profits from those as bids highest to present us, eh? Not us!”

“Our fee is set,” said Cade, “but if the Bexmarket Smithing Society outbids the Merchants Ladies League, the Crown pockets the excess.”

“True as true can be. Look at this life we lead. Five shows and a break. Three or four days on the road, no matter the weather, then another five shows and a day off. ’Cept that day gets used up in a private booking, so we can actually make ends meet—because who survives just on what they earn on a circuit?”

Cade frowned at an inoffensive flowering bush. “But to go out on your own? That’s quite the risk, Vered.”

“Not so much as you’d think. If we do nothing
but
private bookings, they want us, they pay us.
Us
, not His Majesty’s Revel-rouseries.”

“But the venues,” Cade objected. “Where are you going to play?”

“Almost everywhere we do now—besides, d’you have any idea how many castle courtyards there are in this Kingdom? How many great halls that hold three or four hundred? How many guild halls? They can’t pay what’s needed to book a circuit performance—but what they
can
pay comes all to us.”

“Hundreds of royals a night,” Cade murmured.

“Hundreds upon hundreds. And none of it goes to anybody but us.”

“But—the scheduling—won’t you be competing with whoever else is in town?”

“Compete with
us
? Do me a favor!” Laughing again, he teased, “Be sweet to us, Cayden lad, and we’ll
think
about not playing the same town Touchstone’s playing!”

“Only,” Cade replied serenely, “because you don’t want to find out who’d win.”

“You should consider it, y’know,” Vered said, swiftly unsmiling. “Going out on your own, without the bother of the circuits. You’ve that wagon now, just like us, and enough of a following to pack your giggings full.”

“What does Rommy Needler say about this?”

“Hated the whole idea at first. Got all stroppy about the extra work in keeping everything straight—the scheduling could turn up a right disaster, unless it’s done careful-like. But he’d been to dinner with your Lord Fairwalk a few nights before we told him our plans, and they were both gnawing over how much the Crown takes by way of profit. So for lacking of a better way, he’s got used to the plan.”

Immediately Cade knew how it had really happened. When Kearney Fairwalk arrived late that afternoon, Cade took him aside in the taproom and made him admit it.

When discussing business, all His Lordship’s affectations and mannerisms vanished; even his voice changed pitch, became deeper and softer by comparison to his usual fluty, fruity tones. “Why shouldn’t the Shadowshapers make the experiment for us? They’re already rich, they can afford it.”

“But if it doesn’t work out—”

“Cayden, tell me this, please. How long do you think Vered Goldbraider and Rauel Kevelock will continue to tolerate each other’s ambitions? Each is a Master of two disciplines, tregetour and masquer. They’ve competed with each other since they formed the Shadowshapers. I’m surprised they’re still speaking to each other. Good Lord and Lady, I’m astonished they haven’t slit each other’s throats by now—or that Rommy hasn’t taken a knife to his own neck!” He sniggered in his well-bred way. “I told him once that it seemed rather a war of nerves betwixt him and Vered, and d’you know what he said? That Vered hadn’t got any.”

“Any what?” Cade asked, aware that Kearney was waiting to deliver the payoff line.

“Nerves.” He sniggered again, then went on more seriously, “Vered and Rauel haven’t actually done deliberate damage to each other’s plays during a performance, because they’re still dedicated to the Shadowshapers as an entity. But once their loyalty to the group as a whole wanes, as quite honestly it looks to be doing in the next few years—”

“Why?”

“Because their personal identities are changing. They have wives, homes, children—they’re not just players anymore. Husband, father, householder, those are
adult
words.”

“Rafe’s married,” he challenged. “And Jeska and Mieka, too.”

“Touchstone hasn’t the inbuilt tensions the Shadowshapers have.
You
are the driving force, the inspiration behind the group. Rafe, Mieka, and Jeska all see themselves within the group in relationship to you. But Vered and Rauel are constantly switching back and forth, so the group’s structure is always changing. Chat and Sakary juggle this very well, but one day Vered or Rauel—or mayhap both—will want to be in complete and permanent control of everything.”

Cade had witnessed enough of their sniping at each other to acknowledge the truth of that. Still—“You mean they’d do what Trinder and Redprong used to do, and advertise? Because you can’t tell me that one or the other would take either Chat or Sakary with him. The Shadowshapers as they are—” He shook his head helplessly. “They’re the best, and everyone knows it. How could they ever be as successful individually as they are together?”

“One day we’ll all find out, won’t we? But, Cade, listen to me closely now. It’s your work that makes Touchstone something extraordinary. Yours is a gift in a million. It’s an honor and a privilege to help you make the most of it.”