Thornlost (Book 3) (39 page)

T
obalt Fluter had made his name at roughly the same time the Shadowshapers and Touchstone were making theirs. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: he was a writer, and they gave him something to write about.

Tobalt Fluter wanted more.

“It’s something you said, Cade,” he confessed one afternoon at Redpebble Square. Weary of wrestling with a play that simply wouldn’t come right, Cade welcomed Tobalt with gratitude for the distraction. Mistress Mirdley gave them tea in the kitchen and withdrew to her stillroom. Derien was due back from school any moment. Considering the rate at which Tobalt was going through muffins and pastries, the boy would be left with nothing but buttered bread to eat.

“Something I said?” Cade passed the seedy cakes.

“About theater and changing the world. I want to know what all of you think. I want to do an issue of
The Nayword
that’s nothing but theater, nothing but tregetours. I’m giving a little dinner next week and I’d like you to be there. You and Vered Goldbraider and Rauel Kevelock, of course, Mirko Challender from the Sparks, and the tregetour from Hawk’s Claw, Trenal Longbranch, he’s got some interesting ideas—”

“I agree. I’ve talked with him a few times.”

Tobalt beamed at him. “So you’ll be there!”

“I didn’t say—”

“They’re letting us have the stage at the new Downstreet,” Tobalt went on, and gulped the rest of his tea, and got to his feet. “Hoping you’ll be so impressed that you’ll agree to play at the grand reopening, of course.”

“Tobalt—”

“It’s to be a real theater now, and an inventive design it is, too.” He pulled on his coat. “There’s an outer hall with a bar at either end, and instead of one layer of seats”—a painfully colorful woolen scarf was knotted around his throat—“there’s a sort of wide balcony with yet more seats, so they didn’t lose anything by putting in the hall out front.”

“Have I said yet that I’ll be—”

“They’re saying that capacity will be six hundred! Of course, the wife had to change the room she used to keep her little shrine in—”

“It was destroyed in the fire that burned the place down.”

“Ah, but she’s had another one made for the upstairs. She says none of her boys would know what to do with themselves if there wasn’t that bit of stone and fire and water to allow for upstairs. ‘Her boys’ of course being you players, because she has only the two daughters of her own—”

“Tobalt!”

“—and the elder girl’s had to postpone marriage because of the fire and lack of money, so her mother’s more than eager for everybody’s success at the new Downstreet. Anyways, we’ll be dining onstage.” He dug into his pocket for gloves and pulled them on. “You’ll have the chance to get a feel for the place. Perfectly splendid that you’ll be there, Cade! Can’t wait! Beholden to your Mistress Mirdley for the tea!”

“By the Lord and Lady, you talk more and faster than
Mieka! I don’t think I’ll be—”

But as Derien came in the back door, Tobalt took the opportunity to go out. Cade was left sitting there with teacup in hand as Tobalt called over his shoulder, “I’ll send round with the day and time!”

“Day and time for what?” Dery wanted to know.

“It seems I’m invited to dinner.”

The boy pounced on the scanty remains of tea and through a mouthful of apricot muffin mumbled something about Jinsie.

“What about her? Swallow first, smatchet.”

He paused long enough to say “Glassworks,” before attacking the tea tray again, with a piteous cry to Mistress Mirdley for more seedy cakes.

Cade entered the shop to find Jinsie gossiping with Jed and Blye, and marveled again that Mishia and Hadden Windthistle had produced four such totally different sets of twin offspring. Jed and Jez were tall, redheaded, entirely Human to look at. Mieka and Jinsie were all Elf, and reverse images of each other: he was black-haired and white-skinned, she had pale golden hair and a dark complexion and blue eyes. Cilka and Petrinka were Piksey-sized and Piksey-dainty; Tavier and Jorie were more Elfen in feature but growing so fast that it would likely be only a couple of years before they were looking Cilka and Petrinka in the eye, and Cade suspected that they would both turn out more Wizard than Elf. The vagaries of heredity, he mused, and smiled a greeting as Jinsie finally noticed him.

“Oh good, you’re here,” she began briskly. “Mieka says you’ve some notion about taking elements out of a performance—getting rid of the emotion, or doing a play without any words at all. I want to talk to you about that.”

“You don’t approve?”

Evidently he hadn’t quite kept all the sarcasm out of his voice, for she made a disgusted face and replied, “Nobody has
the right to an opinion but you tregetours, is that it? Well, it so happens I
do
approve. Only what I want you to do is craft a performance for people who are deaf. If you’re going to do it anyway, why not do it so it’s actually some use? I have a friend whose sister is losing her hearing and nobody can figure out why. All the physickers just shrug and say, ‘Something in the blood,’ meaning of course that they’ve no idea and want to blame her ancestry. Who knows but what they’re right—but the point is that she wants to go to a play. She reads all Tobalt’s articles about Touchstone and has copies of all your placards. So we’ll come as boys to a show sometime this spring, I’m not sure when, but why can’t the deaf go to theater performances meant just for them?”

The magic that produced visuals and sounds was on a different order from the magic that seeped into people’s senses to provide taste and touch and smell and emotion. None of it was real, but making pictures and noise was distinct from techniques used to touch the other senses and evoke feelings. It was where
glisk
had originated, in fact. Plenty of magical folk could conjure up visual and auditory images. It took real skill and subtlety and training to be a glisker.

“But would it be possible?” he asked aloud. “To put the sounds directly into someone’s head—I mean, it might be a similar process to how we do taste and scent and all that, but—I don’t think I’d know where to begin.”

Blye was shaking her head. “Not cause someone deaf to actually hear, but leave sounds out altogether. Base the experiencing of the play on everything
except
sound.”

“But what about the words?”

“Ah, now you’ve pierced him right where he lives!” Blye laughed.

“It could work for the blind, too,” Jed offered. “No images at all.”

“Mieka won’t like that,” Cade mused.

“Consider what it would be like,” Jed went on, “being blind from birth and never having seen
anything
. And then all at once there are all these shapes and colors and things confusing your head—you wouldn’t know what to do with it, would you?”

“It would be terrifying,” Blye said. “Like when Bompstable was a kitten, and he’d never heard thunder.”

Jed nodded. “He didn’t come out from under the bed until the next day, poor little thing.”

His sister suddenly grinned. “And how do
you
know he was under the bed all night? By the time you were married, he was a grown-up cat!”

With all the absolute—and absolutely spurious—innocence of their brother, Jedris said, “She told me, of course.”

Cade shared an eye-roll with Jinsie, then said, “At Master Emmot’s Academy we had to learn how to organize things inside our brains. That’s what we do with sight and sound when we’re infants, I suppose—learn to recognize patterns and such. It’s the same with music, or learning to read. Finding out what the letters mean, and how they go together to make words, and—”

Jinsie interrupted. “I’d love to hear your theories of learning—some other time. Will you at least think about it? When Mieka said you were mulling over doing a play that leaves out one of the usual aspects—” She shrugged delicate shoulders. “I’ve been writing to some scholars at Shollop about it, who’ve been investigating causes of deafness. Leaving aside cases of accident, of course—something to do with the structure of the ear, tiny bones that grow together or something. It’s all too complicated for me. When you’re at Shollop next summer on the Royal, why don’t you look them up?”

“I think I’d like that. Beholden, Jinsie.”

“Now you’re here, Cade,” said Jedris, “would you have a look at my plans for the frames for your glass baskets?”

Mieka had been complaining recently that because all glisker’s
benches were different, setting the baskets atop them constituted a clear and avoidable danger. So Jedris had proposed a set of wooden supports. Cade spent a fascinating hour discussing the designs, suggesting changes, and deciding that combining wood and nails into a useful object was rather like combining a story and words and magic to produce a play. Everyone had his own tools. Tomorrow, he vowed, he’d polish up his particular set and get to work with renewed determination.

When he got back home, a letter was waiting for him. “Tobalt doesn’t fribble away any time,” he remarked, and explained Tobalt’s proposal to Derien and Mistress Mirdley.

“Will you go?” Derien asked. “Who’ll be there?”

“I won’t be within five miles of the place if he invites Thierin Knottinger.”

“All the more reason to be there,” Dery urged. “Betwixt you and Vered and Rauel, he’ll be demolished. There may be some bloodstains left on the brand-new stage, but demolished all the same.”

“They can have a fine time doing it without me.” He made as if to toss the invitation in the kitchen fire.

Dery reached out a hand to stop him. “You have to be there, Cade. It’s good advertising. And nobody will read the article if you’re not in it.”

He laughed and ruffled his brother’s hair. “What makes you think I’ll get a word in sidewise? Vered and Rauel will both be there, competing for attention!”

“And column inches,” Mistress Mirdley observed.

In the event, Knottinger didn’t show up. Many apologies, many regrets, many excuses—Tobalt read the note aloud, said, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and everyone promptly forgot all about Black Lightning.

The new Downstreet was indeed a marvel. Cade thought briefly about the Archduke’s proposed theater, and decided
he could do much worse than this. Mieka Windthistle, in fact, might have been the advisor regarding the bars at either side of the wide lobby, sparkling with mirrors (Blye’s work) and expensive glassware (not Blye’s work)—expensive because Touchstone wouldn’t be shattering it. Reflected in the mirrors were dozens of square, squat, colorful bottles of brandies, dozens more tall green bottles of wine, and half-barrels of various beers and ales. As for the theater itself, there were two levels of seating and the stage was huge. Hanging from support beams were three large branch-lights like upside-down trees, brass polished to gleaming gold—nothing for Touchstone to shatter there, either. The beams were painted black in contrast to the eggshell color of the ceiling, which angled upwards to allow for the upper rows of seats. The swagged stage curtains were off-white velvet, as was the covering of the glisker’s bench. A table set with silver plates and fine crystal looked terribly lonely in the middle of all that polished oak planking between the curtains.

“Welcome all!” Tobalt sang out from the front of the stage. “Come in, step up, sit down!”

When Cade arrived, Vered and Rauel were already present, strolling down the middle aisle to the stage steps. Trenal Longbranch was—most professionally and quite unnecessarily, for he’d have the chance well before Hawk’s Claw played the Downstreet—pacing off the distance between the back doors and the front rows. Mirko Challender of the Crystal Sparks slouched in a few minutes after Cade, looking elegantly bored.

When they were all seated, dinner was served by a pair of teenaged boys whose hands gradually stopped shaking with the excitement of being in the presence of so many celebrated players. The food was excellent, the sweets especially good: lemon custard flavored with clove, and elderflowers simmered in honey and poured over bread pudding studded with berries.

Like Vered, Cade drank very little—not because, like Vered,
he was especially susceptible to liquor, but because Tobalt was making note of every word said. He remembered only too well other times he’d been drunk and Tobalt had had pen and paper to hand. And tonight there was no Mieka here to distract everyone with his clowning.

Mieka would have been welcome, Cade mused. Everyone seemed rather edgy. Each man present was aware of the others as competing playwrights, and even more aware that they were expected to say fascinating, startling things, unsure if they were to be baited like bears in a pit or encouraged to dance like lapdogs in ruffled collars. So all through the meal nobody said much of anything except for polite conversation about wives and offspring and the latest in fashionable boots and shirts. Several toasts were raised to the new little Prince, born a few days ago, named Roshlin for his grandmother Queen Roshien.

Tobalt started them off, once the dishes had been cleared and they were left with bottles of brandy. “I hear from my sources,” he said with an arch smile at Vered, “that your new play is so long that it’ll take up a whole evening. Not even a break in the middle for a drink?”

Vered wore a
Wouldn’t you like to know?
expression. “I never listen to rumors.”

Rauel wore his most charming, wide-eyed smile. “Changing theater is what we do, isn’t it? The Shadowshapers, I mean—though I’m sure all the rest of you are talented innovators as well.”

Cade had known both of them long enough to know they were each in a mischievous mood. He settled back in his chair, sipped brandy, and prepared to enjoy the show.

Trenal Longbranch, a good-looking youth with the shoulders of a dockworker—or mayhap a Troll—and just a bit too much chin, was taking everything much too seriously, including his drinking. He filled his glass yet again and said, “It takes the Shadowshapers to get away with it. Any of us others, we change
so much as a line in one of the Thirteen and we’re booted off the stage. Except for Touchstone, of course,” he added hastily, with a glance at Cade, who acknowledged him with a gracious nod. “It’s the Stewards and the nobility who want everything just as it’s always been. You take something new to anyplace outside Gallybanks, and they eat it up with a spoon.”