by Holly Lisle
She was wasting her own life, too; holding herself in a relationship she did not truly want because as long as she had Solander she did not have to face the truth that she really had nothing, and because she felt guilty about the pain she would cause him when she left. Well, she’d earned her guilt, hadn’t she? She deserved to feel guilty. But she could not stay and still be the woman she needed to be. She’d pretended her way through friendships, through her education, through the tedious covil meetings and their stultifying bureaucracy of the bored and the pretentious; had accepted money to which she’d had no right in order to keep her cover as one of the overseas family; and she found, facing herself in the quiet and being brutally honest with herself for the first time in a long time, that she did not like the woman she had become.
So she had to make changes.
Leave Solander. Get a place of her own, and pay for it on her own. Gently break her ties with the Artis family and the Artis name. Figure out what her life meant—what she was supposed to be about.
She had a place to start, anyway. While, as a stolti, she could not hold a job in someone else’s employ, she could create a business and have that business pay her. She had learned from sitting around the long table at dinnertime how such businesses might be created, how the money from them might be invested, and how the money, once invested, might be made to work for her.
And from the covil she knew a stolti woman of about her own age who might be persuaded to join her in an interesting venture—a little business in which the two of them might screen, train if necessary, and employ musicians and send them around to perform at the parties of the stolti. She considered the idea and discovered she liked it. Live art—a thing like that which Wraith was creating in the theater. Perhaps the two of them could rent Wraith’s theater in the hours when no play was being performed and offer concerts of their best musicians for the people of the Belows. The people of the Belows had their own entertainment after a fashion—but she thought something live might work well. She had not really considered the idea to have real merit until she saw what Wraith had done. If his work had imperfections, it also … well, it breathed.
She determined that, on her way home, she would drop by Caywerrin House to see if Jyn wanted to sign on as her partner.
Once she had a partner and a start on giving herself an income that she had created, she could find a place to live. And after that, she could tell Solander that the two of them were through. She dreaded that. Above everything else, she dreaded that—partly because when Wraith made his break from them and especially from Velyn, she had seen the panic in the back of Solander’s eyes. She had felt his anxiety when he mentioned Wraith; he would be bracing himself for her to leave him for Wraith— but he would never think that she would simply leave him, without anyone to go to, because that seemed completely outside of her nature.
She closed her eyes, dreading the days and weeks that were going to follow this day, and let the aircar take her home.
Velyn looked over the final contracts her parents had forwarded to her, checking off each clause she had requested and looking for loop-holes in wording that either they or their advocates might have missed or thought unimportant to a woman in her position. When she finished, she calmly signed her name to a document that, in essence, merged two fortunes and two families. Luercas tal Jernas would be returning from an extended overseas stay, where according to his family he had finally found a medical wizard who had been able to return him to perfect health and perfect form.
She had managed to talk with him once by long-distance viewer two days previously, and she thought the medical wizard had been far kinder than nature. He had never been particularly handsome before his accident; now, however, she thought his beauty a perfect counterpart to her own. They would have attractive children, and they would live well. That they did not love each other—that they did not truly know each other—mattered little to either of them. The contracts offered significant room for outside interests once they had their two legitimate children to carry on the family fortunes and family businesses.
Luercas held a good place in the Council, as the head of Research. He had a reputation for brilliance, and for the sort of ruthlessness that created wealth and that would secure his own position and the positions of those who dared follow him at the expense of the timorous. He advocated increased magical use but also increased magical efficiency; he wanted the expansion of the Empire into areas currently held by other powers: Strithia, the Western Manarkan Dominance, the resource-rich Protectorate of the Ring of Fire. He had real goals, real plans, and real ambition. He wasn’t trying to save fat, insensate fodder as his life’s work.
Perhaps burning souls for fuel was wrong in the grand scheme of things, but it created and held together an empire, and the more she thought about it, the more Velyn thought the magnificence of the Hars Ticlarim and all it stood for rose above petty concerns about the sources of the Empire’s magic, or magic’s cost. Without magic, the Empire would not exist—and that would be the greater tragedy.
The last of the snows had passed, and around the New Brinch Theater the wondrous aroma of blooming kettlebushes and sweetbriars promised the advent of spring. Light began reclaiming its territory from dark, and the streets filled with people out for the sweetness of the air and the gentleness of the breezes. They wandered to the New Brinch, drawn by the exotic scents on the breeze and by the sounds of music and laughter, and they discovered outside the theater a free street show— men and women dressed entirely in either red or gold who acted out little tle pantomimes with delightful accuracy and clever wit. These actors directed the bystanders to the entry of the New Brinch, where tickets for the upcoming shows had gone on sale.
The prices for the cheap seats were quite low, and the bystanders, fascinated by the mysterious entry to the theater with its beautiful paintings and hanging ornaments, and wanting to see more, paid their pittance and took home their tickets for any of three day shows or three evening shows.
At the same time, in the higher circles of the city, an art critic friend of Wraith’s published an intriguing little review of the play’s dress rehearsal. He was careful to neither praise the play nor to criticize it, but only to mention in several different ways that it was completely different from anything he had ever seen, and that, because of its complete departure from conventional theater, it was apt to disappear as quickly as it appeared. He noted that seats were extremely limited, that some of the best of them already could not be had for any price, and that, with a showing of only six days, only a very few would have the privilege of witnessing this rare and surprising performance.
He might as well have told the rich and powerful of the city that he had the secret elixir of immortality but only the first fifty people who applied to him would get any.
The expensive seats outsold the cheap ones, and the clever who had bought more seats than they needed were able to resell their extra tickets for prices that ranged from the extravagant to the obscene.
Word of the rush for the best seats trickled to the lower classes, who discovered that their tickets were suddenly worth much, much more than they had paid for them. Most—but not all—sold them at a profit that made not just their month but, in some cases, their year.
Wraith, from his place in the theater’s inner office, watched the money pouring in with some amazement. Before the first show, he had the money to pay all of his actors for the run he actually planned—one month, not six days—maintain the sets, and start to work on the next production.
Every one of his six announced days was a sellout a week before the first show—but no one had yet seen A Man of Dreams. Everything depended on what happened when people actually saw the play. If the stolti gave the thing good word of mouth, then everyone would keep coming—the other stolti because they did not want to miss something, and the lesser classes because they would take any opportunity to be seen with the stolti in social situations, and few such opportunities existed. But if they
were horrified by what he had done, they would find a way to shut him down, and that would be the end of the experiment.
“You look like the puppy that cornered the bear,” Meachaan, one of his “trees,” said as she scrubbed makeup off of her face. They’d finished up the last dress rehearsal; the first real show would come that night.
“If I felt half as confident as the puppy, I’d be doing well.”
“You’ll be fine. You’ve done something good here,” she said. “They’ll come; it won’t be what they’re expecting, but it will be truly good, and truly thought-provoking. I’m guessing most of them haven’t had their thoughts provoked in a long, long time.”
“You’re better off not thinking about consequences when you’re stolti,” Wraith said, tempering the sadness in his voice with a little smile. “If you think about consequences, you have nightmares.” He shrugged. “Maybe they’ll see themselves in this, maybe they’ll see someone else that they know … or maybe they’ll just see a fantasy story with no meaning beyond what it says on the surface. I don’t know. Now that we’re here, this seems like such a stupid, piddling way to try to change anything. What difference can it possibly make? Who will be affected by it? Who will be changed?”
Meachaan laughed. “You can’t know that, and you can’t worry about it. You’ve put the food out. Now others must eat—and how they eat is not for you to say.”
“But I want this to lead to the freedom of the Warreners. I want this to lead to the end of the misuse of magic.”
“You want what you want, and you want it now … but life doesn’t work that way. One man can move the world, but to do it, he needs a long lever and a lot of time.” Her smile to him was enigmatic. “Just wait. Tonight is the first drop of rain. Tomorrow is the second. Rain carves rivers and wears away mountains. Your changes will come; you’ve started the storm.”
He looked at the box of money, at the list of seats sold, and at the longer list of requests for seats that had come in. He’d started the storm—but who could tell whether it would be a sprinkle that didn’t even dampen down the dust, or if it would be a typhoon that washed away the city? Certainly not him.
Dafril Crow-Hjaben took his seat next to Velyn, who had somehow managed to acquire two seats in the very best section. He’d accepted her invitation to be her escort; everyone knew that she was preparing for her nutevaz and needed to be seen only with trusted male escorts for a while—and since he and Luercas were close friends, that put him in the position of trusted escort. This amused Dafril; he hadn’t had her in years, but he certainly knew his way around her terrain. But he’d act perfectly respectable; he gained no glory from claiming as a conquest a woman as comfortable with her virtue as Velyn.
He found Jess Covitach-Artis seated to his left and immediately felt luckier. He’d heard rumors that Jess and Solander had parted company, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Jess had never had another companion, either serious or casual. He’d always found her pretty, clever, amusing … and distant. He got the feeling that she didn’t like him very much, and that intrigued him.
So he leaned back in his seat, trying to find a comfortable position, and discovered that whatever the seats had been designed for, it hadn’t been for comfort. Velyn had glared once at Jess and turned away; Jess had looked at Velyn with an utterly blank expression, then stared stonily ahead at the stage. Interesting. Velyn had stopped seeing Gellas, the producer of this whole charade, some months earlier—and everyone knew that Gellas and Jess had been friends since they’d arrived on the Artis doorstep with their apprentice papers in hand. He found himself wondering if the bad blood between Velyn and Jess came from a conflict over Gellas.
Gellas had been absent from Artis House for almost a year. Dafril didn’t pay much attention to most of the Artises, but something about Gellas had always struck him as off. Dafril knew Gellas had come to Artis House from one of the territories to avail himself of the opportunities to which he was entitled by birth and kin ties. But in spite of being best friends with that weasel Solander, Gellas never pursued the single path for which the Artis family could open every door—magic. He’d chosen instead to pursue some sort of philosophical nonsense, when the Artises had no ties to any of the many priesthoods or monasteries where philosophers held sway, and he had ended up here, doing theater as if he were one of the covil-ossets, who spent their lives taking trips to dig in the ruins of Fen Han and Crobadi, or producing books of each other’s poetry, or translating the lost literature of the Mehattins. Powerless dilettantes, all of them—and Gellas, who had the right connections and the name, was acting just like them.
And Gellas couldn’t even get the gods’-damned seats right.
If Dafril couldn’t sleep, though, at least he could chat with Jess. She looked like she would rather be anyplace in the world but where she was; he knew this feeling intimately.
“So, Jess—couldn’t find an excuse not to make opening night?” he whispered, leaning close to her.
He was startled by the intensity of dislike in the gaze she turned on him. “I’m delighted to be here,” she said. “I was tremendously grateful to get such a good seat. Now, though, I think I’d rather change places with one of the people in the cheap seats.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything to you.”
“You’ve shown a real taste for bad company,” she said.
He dropped his voice lower. “Velyn. My mother talked me into taking her. Her prospective vowmate hasn’t returned from the islands yet, and her family wants her to be seen in the company of … well, friends of her vowmate until he gets back.”
The change in Jess’s face astonished him. She lit up like sunshine. “She’s taking vows? With whom?”
“Luercas tal Jernas. Her distant, distant cousin. He spent a few years at Artis House, but I don’t know if you know him. On the Council of Dragons, the Master of Research, has ties through the tal Jernas family to most of the really big businesses in Oel Artis and a lot of foreign connections, too.”
“The one who got … melted? Back when Solander’s father died? That Luercas?”
Dafril nodded.
“They’ll make a lovely couple,” Jess muttered.
“He finally found a wizard who could undo the damage. He looks good. Better than before, I think.”
“Does he know about her?”
Dafril grinned and chuckled softly. “You mean about her … hobbies? Is there anyone who doesn’t know about those?”
He saw Jess glance toward the stage, then back to him, almost too quick for the eye to see or the brain to note. Almost.
So Gellas hadn’t realized his woman had been almost everyone else’s woman, too? How hilarious.
Just before the play started, Dafril noted three men who looked out of place among the happy, excited theatergoers. He knew only one of them—a terrifying wizard named Grath Faregan, who in the years since his removal as one of the Masters of the Department of Security, was rumored to have gotten involved with a criminal organization. But here they were, with programs in their hands and tickets that they checked as they worked their way up the aisle. Faregan’s eyes met Dafril’s as he passed, and Faregan glared, and Dafril shuddered. So Faregan hadn’t forgotten or forgiven. The three of them ended up with seats two rows behind him.
Dafril could feel sweat sliding between his shoulder blades. His mouth went dry and his bowels knotted. He kept his arms clamped tight to his sides while his testicles tried to crawl back up into his belly, and he prayed that this was just one of those silly coincidences that happened from time to time. He could hear the three of them talking about a rumor that this stood a chance to be nominated for the Delcate Sphere, and that tickets were going to get harder to come by rather than easier.
But Dafril wasn’t soothed. He’d made the mistake of laughing at Faregan when he discovered the wizard had been removed from his post—he’d laughed about old men getting caught with underage girls, and how mu
ch of an idiot a man would have to be to make that mistake. And now the man and two vile old cronies were right behind him, and Dafril could feel their eyes on the back of his neck.
When the lights went down and music began to play, Dafril breathed a tiny bit easier. But he didn’t bother trying to talk to Jess anymore. He didn’t pay any attention to Velyn, either. He simply sat there, waiting for the ordeal to end, hoping that he would be able to get out the exit before Faregan could catch up with him.
Except that, as the play wore on, Dafril found himself caught up in it—and not in a way that pleased him. He began to see an anti-magic sentiment carefully couched in marvelous dancing, clever dialogue, humor, pathos, and wonder at the terrible situation into which the poor wizard had gotten himself. As the main character’s life went from bad to worse to truly awful, Dafril could see the audience’s sympathy going more and more to the lost souls, and less and less to the suffering wizard.
These were people who had been raised from birth to think that magic would be the answer to all their problems—people who had been carefully trained by every controllable factor in their society to look to the wizards for answers. And yet, in the blink of an eye, their sympathies turned away from magic and all that it represented.
That worried him. He didn’t think for a moment that any of these people were going to give up their aircars or their fine houses or their magic-run appliances or anything else that made their lives easier—but he found their fickleness deeply disturbing. It made him think that the ground upon which he had stood so trustingly and for so long had a fault line running through it, one that could open up at any moment and turn on him and devour him.
In producing this work by—Dafril checked his program—an unknown named Vincalis, Gellas had taken a strange stance for a stolti. Very strange.
