A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

Eleondora swung in Rain’s direction, beseeching hands extended, her bedraggled pink chiffon contrasting with the black overalls and dresses the other children wore. She always wore her costume to rehearsal; it would have to be cleaned and mended before the actual performance. Rain started to scold her for treading on her hems, when memory pierced her—herself at just this age, playing music hall in her mother’s tatty, camphor-scented velvets and furs. All five of them were staring at her, their united focus like a battery of guns, and she knew she couldn’t avoid making a judgment. “At this stage, interpretations aren’t really important. Nor should we be concentrating on any one scene—it’s easy to fall into that trap, but you’ve got to remember that at this early stage the logistics of the whole production are what matters. Everyone has to work on their entrances and exits, and I want you to be more creative onstage. You can’t just stand there looking at each other. Try improvising.”

  They looked disappointed. They were justified, she knew. When she was nine her idea of “character” had been a scrap of fabric pressed onto a ball of clay, and she wouldn’t have known an “interpretation” from a sour plum…but these children had the elements of acting down better than many professionals, not just because they’d had instruction, but because no matter what the art, they absorbed it like nourishment and regurgitated it looking better than it had in the first place. They were almost too polished. Unlike the professionals of the road, who defined acting (if they thought to define it at all) as faking reality, the offspring faked fakery—or to put it another way, instead of playing roles, they played actors acting roles. And they pulled it off. Laypersons saw no difference. The only thing the children couldn’t fake was physical maturity, and their audiences, composed of Sisters and tolerant neighbors, allowed for that.

  Maybe that was why they honestly thought of themselves as adults. Every time she forgot and treated them like children, they held it against her. They divided their “aunts” into two camps—neutrals and enemies—and since she introduced them to theater, she’d been in the former category, but she still had to watch her step. Sisters who logged too many offenses against their dignity were sorry, though nothing could ever be traced back to the children. They were too canny for that.

  “Ex fussenfie alt ex! Two inco point nine oh down—” someone hissed.

  Rain said, “And of course, it goes without saying that your lines have to be perfect.”

  “I have my lines down word for word,” all five children said nearly at once, contemptuously. “That’s the easy part.”

  They threw each other murderous glances, clearly detesting their own synchronization. “Slash aitch point three four. Screw shut now,” whispered Alessandro. It was he who’d spoken before.

  “No, Aless, ‘cause you’re right! We shouldn’t go any farther until we’ve addressed the problem. Julijo ought to be the Squire’s Daughter.” Petryan, age ten, pointed at Julijoanna, daughter of Sister Moonrise. Julijo was a seven-year-old with the face and personality of a street pigeon. Her gray skin tautened to parchment transparency over her bony nose, and the useless wings under her blouse had bowed her into a permanent stoop. Petryan radiated calm authority. His unconscious mimicking of his mother, Sunlight, was a source of private amusement to the younger Sisters. “Eleo’s playing against type. She’d be a lot more convincing as Aless’s sister. We haven’t cast the sister yet, Aunt Rain.”

  “That’s ‘cause the sister only appears in one scene and only has about two lines!” Eleondora howled as loudly as she could.

  “I don’t want to play the Daughter.” Julijoanna bobbed her head back and forth. “I like being Duella. She’s a lot more interesting.” She bobbed toward Rain, her arms stiff at her sides, her toes turned out. “Isn’t she, Auntie? I’ve been getting into her really well, haven’t I?”

  “No humility,” Mogglebone remarked, gazing at the ceiling, as the others erupted into argument.

  Rain clapped her hands. “None of you are ever going to make it as professionals—” and that’s that, she thought, no matter how convincing you are onstage— “if you can’t accept the parts you’ve been given. Playing against type is an opportunity to challenge yourselves, and I give you such roles on purpose. When I was touring, I would have welcomed the chance to be allowed to play characters other than those the troupe manager had decided were my ‘type.’ Secondly—”

  “What was your type, Aunt Rain?”

  They were inching toward her, sliding their feet across the flags one at a time. Worshipful fans—or a pack of hounds stealthily closing with their prey? She regarded them. “Harlots. Mistresses. An occasional helpless heroine. In The Seven Falcons, I was the sister who marries rich, whom Petryan wants Eleondora to play; but I’ve already decided, Petry, that part’s going to Heloisandra.” Heloisandra, nearly twelve, couldn’t act for peanuts and displayed little interest in the theater, but since she was venerated by the younger set, Rain expected them to protest her being given a role that was little more than a walk-on. They might as well not have heard. They pressed around her.

  “Aunt Rain, Aunt Rain, Aunt Rain,” they cooed. “Auntraaaaain.”

  None of them came up past her waist. All offspring grew fast at first, then slowed down after their fifth or sixth year. At this age they were smaller than normal children. Their legs were nearly as long as Rain’s, but they had tiny puff-chested torsos like song birds.

  “Tell us about your touring days.”

  “Tell us about before you came to the Enclave.”

  “Tell us.”

  “Tell us about Ferupe.”

  “Tell us about the desert.”

  “Tell us! None of the other aunts will. Geography is just placenames and distances. It doesn’t mean anything!” Eleondora entreated.

  “Split blue day point one nine three,” Alessandro said in a warning voice that came out so loud in the silence the other children glared at him. Rain seized her chance.

  “And secondly, if we can’t have rehearsals without disagreements, we won’t have rehearsals at all.” She shook herself free and stepped back. “So think about that, and if you decide among yourselves that you can leave your differences outside this room, I’ll see you tomorrow at the same time.” She made a shooing gesture. She was trying to instill a sense of obedience in them. No one went. Eleondora pleaded:

  “Auntie, can’t we do the scene for you one more time? I promise we’ll get it right!”

  “No. Now go take off your costume and fold it in the tissue. The rest of you put on warm things, it’s cold and wet and you’re not allowed to catch anything until the babies are all over the flu. Get out, dammit, I’m sick of the lot of you!” she shouted, abruptly losing her patience, and the children recognized their own parlance: they stared at her for a second with delight, then fled, giggling wildly.

  She let out a breath. The low ceiling seemed to echo back their laughter, and the rainy twilight was as much inside the room as outside, and patches of wetness seeped down the walls from the windows, across the flags.

  On her way upstairs to see Breeze, she literally stumbled over Alessandro. He lay curled on the landing, his tiny body as stiff as a fetus aborted in snow country, his cheeks stretched with dry sobs. Get the children together and they were a billowing, amorphous entity that rolled away, laughing merrily when you tried to poke a hole in it, but get any one of them alone and he or she was a sickly, needy, emotional baby.

  Rain knelt down and prised Alessandro’s arms away from his head. He gasped. “What’s wrong?” she asked gently.

  He wailed, “It was all—my fault—”

  “It wasn’t your—” It did no good to soft-soap them; they were too clever for that. “I mean, it wasn’t all your fault. You shouldn’t have picked holes in Eleo’s performance. But Moggie made things worse, and then Petry—it was all of your faults.”

  “They all—hate me—”

  “How silly you are. Why do you think that?”

  “Because you—wouldn’t tell us—a
bout touring—and it was my fault!” He wailed, scrambled away, and pressed himself shuddering against the wall.

  Rain settled herself on her heels, tucking her skirt in, and stroked his cropped, shocking pink head. Offspring seemed inevitably to inherit their fathers’ coloring. She supposed it made sense that Royal genes would dominate merely human ones. But Alessandro with his lilac skin and hollyhock hair had had especially bad luck in the normalcy lottery. “I know I’m just a stupid grown-up. But I still don’t understand why they blamed you.”

  Alessandro screamed with frustration. He wrenched around and flung himself into her lap. “Because you heard me!” He buried his face in her skirt. “You heard me talk kid. You don’t like it when we talk kid. Mother doesn’t like it either.”

  “Oh, Aless,” Rain said sadly. “Tell Moggie and Eleo and Petry and Julijo—”

  “It was Petry.”

  That explains it, Rain thought. Petryan’s mother Sunlight had a bee in her bonnet about the children’s private language; she wanted any child caught mouthing an “ex,” a “raspberry,” a “slash,” or a “no count” to be punished with solitary confinement. Rain knew punishing the children would just incite them to slyness. And she had her own reasons: she’d never tried to learn a foreign language before, but she did know that if she had no opportunities to hear it spoken, she wouldn’t get far. “I’m not allowed to tell stories about Ferupe,” she said. “You know that perfectly well. It had nothing to do with your talking—kid. When we’re rehearsing, what I want is for everyone to communicate and feel comfortable with what we’re doing, and if using—kid language—makes it easier for you all to agree, you can talk it as much as you like. Tell the others I said so. Of course”—she put a smile in her voice—“now and then you might have to translate for me.”

  Alessandro trembled. “Do you mean it, Aunt Rain?”

  “Of course I do. But—”

  “Then that’s good! Goody-good!” He wriggled onto his back and embraced her forearms, a grin transforming his face. “Then we prob’ly won’t have to talk it as much around you. We mostly talk it around aunts we don’t like.” Even on the dark landing she could see trust shining from his face. “We like you, and now I like you more. I know you’d tell us stories if Aunt Cloud let you.”

  “—but there’s something I’d like you to do for me in return, if you can.”

  Alessandro’s face closed. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said in a forced casual tone. “Just that I’d like it if you and the others didn’t talk kid to Jonny.”

  “Little Jonny? Your Jonny?”

  “Yes, my Jonny.” Rain tried to keep the edge out of her voice.

  “But he’s too…but…oh, I see, you don’t want…but it won’t…” Alessandro was thinking faster than he was talking. She saw the workings of his inconceivable mind flit across his face. When he sat up with a manufactured smile, she knew she’d gone too far.

  “Don’t worry, Aunt Rain, he won’t learn kid from any of us…” His voice trailed off, and he glanced upward. Offspring ears were sharp; a moment passed before Rain heard halting footsteps. A sweep of black cotton descended around the twist in the stairs and then a pale blue, sorrowful face poked down. Fantinora put out her hand to the banister groove in the wall and struck a tragic pose. “Rain.” Omitting either Aunt or Sister, she came off accusatory.

  “Hello, Fanny. I was just—”

  “I’m running away to become a playwright starving in a garret, and it’s all your fault for putting the idea in my head.”

  “Don’t be absurd.” Rain glanced at Alessandro, but, with incredible stealth, the boy had got up and slipped away. She glimpsed a black shirttail vanishing downstairs. “All right, Fanny.” She sighed. “What is it?”

  “I’m not joking!”

  Rain felt a pang of fear. Fanny might actually be capable of doing what she threatened—or at least giving it her best shot—and if she did, Rain would be blamed. Fanny was too old to act alongside the younger set, so Rain had encouraged her to try her hand at writing plays instead. No one could fairly have linked Fanny’s pubescence to her literary frustration, but all the same, Cloud held the girl’s increasing unmanageability against Rain.

  Fanny swayed from the waist. “Can you come see in my room? It’s finished. I’ve scribed a clean copy.” She smiled, and her corpse-blue cheeks appled, making her for a moment attractive.

  Rain thought of Breeze, just two floors overhead. A wave of physical longing curled through her. Not sexual desire, just the desire to hold Breeze’s poor drained body in her arms, to have one more chance to plead with her. “Are you really going to let me see it at long last?” She forced a teasing note into her voice. “Or is this a ploy to get me to help you pack your bags? I warn you, I’m an expert at running away. Everything you think you need, you don’t really.”

  “Don’t you want to see it?”

  “Of course I do.” Rain got up, brushing down her skirt. Her head hurt worse than ever.

  22 Fessiery l900 A.D. 11:56 P.M.

  A soft slow relentless rain fell into the courtyard, onto the roofs, and into the cisterns of Kherouge. Rain slicked the backs and dripped from the horns of the stupefied cattle and hogs in the abbatoir stock pens. Rain glistered the docks and wasted itself in the sea. This month the city had grown used to such bounty, and it slept as if drowned.

  She had been renamed for rain. She’d been grateful because the word sounded so much like her own name it hadn’t been hard to get used to. Now, however, she wondered if the Founding Sisters had intended deeper symbolism. Maybe they’d sensed even then that, like rain in Kherouge, she tended to extremes. She’d thought the Enclave would be her salvation from herself. She’d thought patriotism of the Sisters’ sort was a way of altruism, moderation, contentment. But Breeze’s plight demonstrated that the end of the road wasn’t contentment. It was oblivion. And even making allowances for the Royals’ insatiability, oblivion seemed the poorest sort of reward for what had started out as altruism. It mocked every concept of justice.

  She slid soft-footed into the sick bay. Breeze slept immobile, her black pajamas rucked up around her neck, framing a face as still and pale as if she, too, had been drowned by the damp air.

  Earlier, while Rain helped prepare supper, Breeze had ghosted through the kitchen on her way downstairs. Five minutes later, Rain made some excuse—ignoring her Sisters’ exchanged glances—and followed her. But Breeze managed to evade her in the tunnels. Rain, on the other hand, was no earthly good at evasion. Claws caught her sleeve, swung her around against iron bars, and a moment later her hand was on the lock and she was inside, and he was inside her, the Royals got straight to the point, you could say that for them, they dispensed with all the absurd human preambles; and when he’d finished she cleaned herself with her petticoat and stumbled back upstairs shamefaced, weaker than a survivor of a shipwreck. Everyone knew she had violated protocol, and they didn’t look at her. Chopping winter squashes, her hands shaking so badly she nearly chopped off her own fingers, she felt herself flushed with specious emotions, foremost among them the desire to see her children. She needed to be reminded why she put herself through this. She needed reassurance that she wasn’t unrecompensed.

  Jonajonny! Estellesme!

  After dinner she couldn’t hold out any longer.

  But of course the children were as good as their fathers at draining your lifeblood. They were just subtler. It was easy to get into the dorms after lights-out, nearly impossible to get out. Rain got caught up in their guessing games and relay-race stories, caught up like a conspirator in Jonny and his friends’ plot to stay awake as long as possible. Crouching between giggling bedfuls of them in the dark, she’d eventually been discovered by Cloud, and scolded as if she’d been the ringleader.

  “She practically dragged me out on my ear,” she said to Breeze’s sleeping form. “And then sent me to join the girls on late laundry duty. She pretended the rotas had already been altere
d, and she just hadn’t had a chance to tell me; but I know it was punishment. I think she hates me.”

  Tears of self-pity welled up in her eyes.

  But then, I hate her, she reminded herself. So why shouldn’t she hate me back? I can’t get all tearful just because she has the authority to act on her hatred! I wish I did, too, that’s all. Stupid self-satisfied bitch.

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and moved around the bed. She sank onto the chair. With the toe of her shoe she nudged Breeze’s supper tray across the floor. No one had bothered to remove it. Maybe they reasoned the leftovers would do for the invalid’s breakfast. Several breakfasts: it didn’t look as though Breeze had so much as picked up the spoon. Rain bent and listened for Breeze’s breath. In her peripheral vision, the crack under the door glowed like a pulsating, fiery abyss. A strand of her hair drifted across Breeze’s pale face. Breeze twitched her nose. Her breath smelled like a forge.

  “Fanny’s play,” Rain said, leaning back. “It would be a hit if it could ever be produced. If any manager bothered to read it before laughing her out of his office. She’s like the rest of them, she won’t stand being lied to, so I had to tell her the truth. It would be physically impossible for any company except maybe the Royal Opera to put it on. The sets—a mountaintop with a gale blowing, the deck of a galleon, a ballroom, the Princess’s bed chamber (the heroine is a princess, of course)—you’d have to ransack the Kherouge Treasury to build them. The plot’s cleverer than dueling daemons. Her characters are caricatures of stereotypes of archetypes, and there’s dozens of them. The songs…she sang them to me, or at least the choruses, and I realized in short order the reason they were so catchy was because she’d lifted all the tunes from productions I’ve done with the children. That’s what the best modern playwrights do—steal judiciously from the traditional dramas—and she didn’t even know it; her ambition is so genuine, so realistic, and so hopelessly incongruous with her station. I couldn’t say anything to her apart from I’m sorry.” Rain gestured helplessly. She knew she was talking to herself. “And I do feel sorry for her,” she whispered. “Her face got stonier and stonier. By the time I’d finished she looked like a gargoyle. It’s as if it were my fault. Of course it is, in a way—but it’s not my fault that a fourteen-year-old with a blue face couldn’t get any play produced by any company unless she paid them and probably not then! She’s never seen a professional production, she thinks it’s all the Royal Opera out there, and the doors are open to her. And she’ll never know the truth, because if it’s up to her mother, she’ll never set foot outside the Enclave as long as she lives. Cloud couldn’t stop Aurora letting Omar go out to work—but she’ll let Fanny do the same over her dead body.”