Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  It was easy to see who did the bulk of the work in Crystal Sparks. Mirko and Lederris went off by themselves in a corner for a while, muttering, gesturing, scribbling, snarling, and final nodding approval. Their glisker and fettler, Jacquan and Brennert, had brought a pack of cards and ignored everyone while Mirko and Lederris thrashed everything out between them. Some sort of signal told them when to join their masquer and tregetour, yet there was no further discussion of what they wanted to do. Mirko and Lederris simply informed them of what was needed. All the other two did was take notes.

  The Shadowshapers, on the other hand, worked in shifting threes: Sakary and Chat with Vered, then with Rauel, then with Vered again, and so on until all four got together to squabble a bit before agreeing on a working draft.

  Only Touchstone sat together for the whole process. True, Cayden had brought with him a detailed outline and commentary that he’d written on his own, and he read it out to his partners, but in contrast to the other groups, there were suggestions, protests, additions, and corrections from fettler, masquer, and glisker. Cade might not have the total control that Mirko and Lederris did, but neither did he have to compete with another tregetour the way Vered and Rauel had to. If he had to define it, he would have said that Mirko and Lederris told the others, We’ve decided that this is the way you’ll be doing it; Vered and Rauel each would say, My way’s better and here’s why; and as for Cade himself—What do you think? How should this be played? He had his own ideas about all of it, of course, but he also knew that he was playing with the best fettler and the best glisker and the best masquer in the Kingdom. He had to acknowledge and respect that—and nothing could have lessoned him more convincingly than the disaster of “Turn Aback.” They’d told him what was wrong with it. He hadn’t listened. It was a mistake he would never make again.

  With three masquers working at the same time, the details of blocking out who got which portion of the stage (so the gliskers didn’t overlap and confuse the fettlers) took the rest of the morning. The hour for lunching was long gone by the time they’d run through the piece with much-muted magic, and when Baltryn Knolltread came in to tell them that the hall was needed for someone else, they were astonished to find it was nearly time for tea.

  “No wonder I’m starving,” Mieka grumbled as he tied up the velvet bag of withies. No one had used more than a fraction of what would be done for the real performance; Cade had worried that in the effort to impress one another, the tregetours would prime, and the gliskers use, the withies more forcefully than was standard in a rehearsal. Evidently the importance of what they would perform prevailed over any petty, if playful, swanking.

  “One more go-through on the morning of the night we play it,” Mirko said as they left the hall, “and that should make everything right.”

  Rauel laughed. “Or at least as not-totally-wrong as we can make it after only two real rehearsals!”

  “We’re professionals, we are,” intoned Vered, purposefully pompous. “We’re knowing what we’re about.”

  “And if we don’t,” Mieka said, “we can sham it so professionally that the audience won’t notice!”

  “The Stewards would,” Lederris mused.

  Brennert, his glisker, gave an elaborate shrug of skinny shoulders. “Ah, but we’re not being judged on this performance, are we?”

  Cade saw the Shadowshapers trade smirks and significant glances. They were plotting something, he felt sure—and for just an instant wondered if an Elsewhen might have warned him what it was.

  He hadn’t long to wait for the solution of the mystery, but Touchstone was compelled to wait for nearly an hour after the Shadowshapers finished at Trials.

  They’d been scheduled to do the Second Peril. They didn’t. They performed “A Life in A Day” instead. And such was the power of Chattim’s glisking, and Sakary’s fettling, and the magic that Vered and Rauel had primed into the withies, that no one in the audience stirred an eyelash until it was all over.

  Cade, finally enlightened about that sly look the four had shared, stood with his partners in the wings of Fliting Hall, listening as murmurings became commotion, and commotion became all-out uproar.

  “Oh, dear,” Jeska sighed. “I’m guessing it will be a bit of a while before we can be going on.”

  “My thought exactly,” Mieka replied. “Anybody else for a drink?”

  The Shadowshapers entered the tiring room just then, grinning all over their faces, to be bombarded with questions by roughly half the twelve other groups there assembled. Vered caught Cade’s eye and winked. Rauel was laughing a wild and excited laugh, rather as if he’d just pricked a little too much bluethorn. Sakary replied with stony silence to anything anybody asked him, and pushed through the crowd to the array of drinks in the far corner. Chat paused to supervise the three boys who were carrying glass baskets, lecterns, and withies to a safe place, then headed for Touchstone.

  “Well,” he said, blue eyes dancing, “we’ve been and gone and done it now, ain’t we?”

  “I like the choice of play,” Cade remarked. “Subtle.”

  “We were wondering how many people would catch on.”

  “With your main character agonizing over a life blindly spent and mostly wasted?” Cade chuckled. “An elbow in the ribs along with a middle finger under their noses!”

  Vered joined them, slinging an affectionate arm over his glisker’s shoulders. “Free as a bird, that’s what I’m feeling right now! Master of me own fate!” He slugged back a gulp of beer and laughed.

  “Did you see poor old Rommy?” Chat asked. “We’ve been telling him and telling him we’d do it, but he had a seizure anyway!”

  Mieka arrived with all his fingers and both thumbs wrapped around the handles of seven glass mugs of beer. “Drink up, old son,” he said to Chat. “You deserve it. And it’s probably the last of the King’s free beer you’ll ever taste!”

  “Listen with those sharp little Elfen ears of yours and tell me if you can hear my heart breaking.” Chat relieved him of a mug and drank deeply.

  “What I’m hearing,” said Mieka as he distributed the rest of the drinks, “is the Stewards shrieking themselves raw in the throat.” He contorted his face into a horrible scowl and using six different voices in succession said, “They were magnificent—but they didn’t do their assigned piece—no, but they were magnificent—yes, but they didn’t do their assigned piece! But they were magnificent and how do we justify not giving them First Flight on the Royal? But they didn’t do their assigned fucking piece!”

  Jeska’s brows arched. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

  Mieka bowed his gratitude. “I watch and I listen and I learn.”

  “You’re in no danger of losing your job to him,” Vered said to Jeska. “The voices were all right, but he’d never stand for that pretty face of his to be concealed behind magic.”

  “I manage,” Jeska said.

  “And brilliantly, too.” The Elf smiled serenely. “Still, it’s my feeling that since the Old Gods in their ancient wisdom made me the way they made me, hiding me would obviously be a sacrilege as well as a shame.”

  Rauel came over to them, trailing a few astonished young players who were still trying to get their minds around what the Shadowshapers had just done. He bestowed his most adorable smile on Touchstone and said, “Dreadfully sorry you’re having to wait. Shouldn’t take them much more than another hour or two.”

  “No worrying,” Cade replied. “Going out on your own this year, I take it?”

  A couple of the new young players gasped. Rauel eyed them sidelong and they all blushed.

  “We’re not going through the insult of Trials anymore. Neither will we be locked into a circuit. We’ll make our own giggings when, where, and as we please. Nobody owns us except us.”

  “Succinctly put,” approved Vered. “Once Rommy’s recovered himself, he’ll calm them down. Wretched old crambazzles, they’ve been shocked out of their skins!”

  “Yeh, the pity and
remorse just drip from you, don’t they?” Rauel teased.

  “What about the King’s celebrations in the autumn?” Jeska asked. “For the Royal and Ducal, it’ll be the last show of the circuit, and for the Winterly, it’ll be the first. But if you’re not First Flight—”

  Vered smiled sweetly. “If King Meredan wants us, he’ll have to pay us.”

  This might well have been sacrilege, to judge by the reactions of the younger players. But Touchstone and the Shadowshapers—and the Crystal Sparks, who’d wandered over carrying their glass baskets and withies—laughed themselves silly, and drank more beer to toast freedom.

  Touchstone, and especially Cayden, ceased to be amused after about an hour of standing about like office clerks waiting for the Gallybanks morning coach while Romuald Needler settled the Stewards. Rafe was just muttering that it would be midnight before the Thirteenth was played and they all learned their places on the circuits when Needler trudged into the tiring room, tall, thin, and drooping.

  “You’re up,” he told Cade, then gathered the Shadowshapers to him with a glance. “Time for some talking amongst us, lads.”

  Touchstone performed the Third Peril with poise and skill, much to the relief of the Stewards—who were wondering what in all Hells they’d do if the Shadowshapers’ shocking rebellion spread. Cade privately conjectured that Touchstone might have been given a few extra points just for sticking to their assigned play.

  The rest of the performances went smoothly, though a couple of the newest groups were a trifle shaky or somewhat overly emphatic in execution—the Blazing Hornets in particular, who sported little polished brass pins flaunting their name. Well, Cade thought magnanimously, they were young. Still, the rest of the Thirteen Perils were played, and the Stewards huddled together in the front corner of Fliting Hall, and for the first time in the history of Trials at Seekhaven, the results were not given the same night. When it was announced from the stage that the Flights would not be decided on, Vered and Rauel shared a triumphant grin.

  Speculation and rumor rampaged through Seekhaven for two days while the Shadowshapers sunned themselves in Mistress Luta’s garden. On the final evening of Trials, Hawk’s Claw graciously relinquished the last performance in Fliting Hall, though it would be their first time for this coveted place. Cade never knew what persuasions were used on them—though he suspected that two pairs of big puppy-dog eyes (Mieka’s and Rauel’s) had had very little to do with it. Trenal Longbranch and his partners weren’t fools. More likely was the fact that they’d traded the last-night performance with the one given the night before that for the ladies at the Pavilion. Few and far between would be the groups who turned down the chance to go on in place of the Shadowshapers. Hawk’s Claw made a good showing of it, or so Cade had heard the next day. For himself, he spent the whole evening with the Shadowshapers and Crystal Sparks, working on their new play.

  Rumors had got out, of course. Thirteen groups of Trials-invited players in one theater-mad town made for rapid relay of gossip: better, faster, but less accurate than a Gallybanks broadsheet. The rehearsal hall was always empty after the Thirteen Perils had been performed—so what were the three best groups in Albeyn doing there two mornings in a row? Baltryn Knolltread was let in on the plan, and guarded the door against all comers. Pirro Spangler very nearly got in, however, pleading for a brief moment of Mieka’s time; it seemed he’d lost a withie somewhere and because the Royal and Ducal would start immediately after Trials, with no return to Gallantrybanks for resupply, he wanted to borrow one. Baltryn didn’t let him in. He waited for a pause in the proceedings, then approached the stage.

  “Lederris, old son,” Mieka warned, “you get betwixt me and Jeska one more time and I’ll—What is it, Baltryn?”

  He explained. Mieka pretended chagrin as he claimed he hadn’t a withie to spare, and Baltryn withdrew.

  “The cheek of it!” Brennert shook his head. “Lend him a withie, indeed!”

  “Gettin’ careless, he is,” Chat mused. “Too much thorn and not enough attention to counting his withies.”

  Cade very deliberately didn’t look at his partners. Was it madness to believe that he had a good idea of what had happened to that withie?

  9

  To the collective shock of the Stewards (who were having rather a rough time of it this year) the Shadowshapers, Touchstone, and the Crystal Sparks all showed up at Fliting Hall a mere ten minutes before the final performance at Trials. They didn’t use the front door. None of the players did—and of course every single one of the players contending for a place on the circuits was there, because the places on those circuits had not yet been announced. The Shadowshapers, Touchstone, and the Crystal Sparks went in by the artists’ entrance and enlisted the help of a few friends to lug in three sets of glass baskets, three velvet bags of withies, two glisker’s benches, six lecterns, and an armful of wood that, unfolded and assembled, turned into supporting frames for Touchstone’s glass baskets. All this was set up onstage in a complicated arrangement while the tregetours—Vered Goldbraider, Rauel Kevelock, Cayden Silversun, and Mirko Challender—made it quite clear to the nearly apoplectic Stewards that everything was quite in order, and Hawk’s Claw had graciously ceded their place tonight for a special, one-time-only performance. Trenal Longbranch was shouted for, and found lounging in a corner of the tiring room. Appealed to, he confirmed the arrangement. The Stewards were compelled to accept it, for there were upwards of six hundred people in Fliting Hall waiting for a play, and whereas the other three members of Hawk’s Claw were also present, they had neither withies nor glass baskets to perform with.

  Rauel smiled his adorable big-eyed smile at the furious Stewards. Vered paused to blow them a kiss over his shoulder before walking onstage. Cade sketched a flourishing bow, Mirko waved cheerily, and all twelve players assembled in carefully calculated positions behind the curtains. A quick run-through of the play that morning had revealed a snag or two, easily corrected. Everything they had jeered at a few days ago, about the deadness of the atmosphere and the silliness of all those slapdash backgrounds, they would make happen with magic. Cade knew the timing was still a little off—they’d not worked it out as tightly as it really ought to be, but for the effort of a couple of days, it would be quite good. Not the polished, perfect performance all three groups were accustomed to giving, but it would make their point.

  Besides, even if they did experience a hitch or three along the way, they had an option the Continental players did not: They could cover it up with magic.

  He worried about the spread of that magic over the audience, though. The three gliskers would work with their own masquers as usual, and it would be up to the fettlers to control what and where and which one would dominate at any given instant. Brennert Copperboggin was much like Rafe and Sakary: as taciturn and watchful in his private life as he was onstage. What he lacked was a sense of humor, as far as Cayden could tell. Earnest and even grim at times, he also seemed to lack the quickness, the agility that made Rafe and Sakary the best in Albeyn. Well, Cade thought to himself with a shrug, as long as he stuck to the plan without trying to elbow aside everyone else’s magic so that Lederris shone more brightly than any of the other masquers, things would be fine.

  The play had been the easy part. It was the notations for performing it that had proved problematic. Each of the three gliskers had his own little code by now, incomprehensible to anyone else. None of them had studied with the same master, so there was no shared foundation to build on. At length they decided to work the way they always worked, each using his own code, marking the scripts in that code with warnings about which of them would take over at various points in the play.

  Cade watched with a smile twitching his lips as Baltryn Knolltread made a respectful bow to his elders in the wings and sidled his way through a break in the curtains. A few moments later his voice rang out to announce the players and the play—and surely it wasn’t just Cade’s imagination that supplied the buried laughter in h
is voice.

  “Your Majesty! Your Royal Highnesses! Your Grace! My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen! The Master of the King’s Revelries is pleased to welcome the Shadowshapers—and Touchstone—and the Crystal Sparks—in a special performance of a new play! ‘The Soul-Snuppers’!”

  So that’s what we’re calling it, Cade thought, wondering who had come up with a title. Somehow, in all the discussions and deliberations, wrangles and analyses, not one of them had thought to name the thing. He thought he detected Vered’s sardonic sense of humor; snup came from snap up, as in grabbing something valuable at a bargain price.

  Baltryn had included Ladies in his greeting, so there were more women here than just Miriuzca, who could be counted on to attend any performance she possibly could. Only one Your Majesty meant the Queen was not in attendance. Queen Roshien had dutifully sat through several plays at the last Trials and a few Court performances since, but, it was said, had decided that although theater was charming enough, she wasn’t particularly interested. Everyone knew, however, that she had the intellectual prowess of a teakettle and didn’t like theater, because she didn’t understand it.

  The plural Highnesses meant that both Ashgar and Miriuzca were here. Iamina, of course, would not demean herself by coming to a play. And, because there were two Your Graces in Albeyn and only one had been mentioned, neither would the Archduchess Panshilara be present. The newfound piety of Princess and Archduchess demanded renunciation of theater and other crude amusements. And, if the stories were true, abandonment of personal ornamentation as well; Iamina’s famous yellow jewel had been given to the new little Princess Levenie as a Namingday present, and Panshilara’s bulky and vulgar wedding ring had gone into her husband’s coffers—possibly against the day when their daughter, Belsethine, would be old enough to wear it, possibly for the future bride of their son, Boltris. It remained that neither woman wore much by way of jewelry these days, which, in its way, was as ostentatious as the gaudiest finery.