Thornlost (Book 3) (40 page)

“While the nobility sneers,” said Mirko, “and compliments itself on its superior taste. The Sparks, we never introduce anything new at Trials. We wait until we’re out on the Circuit, and by the time word gets back here about how good it is, the highborns have been outwitted.”

“You’re assuming they have wits to be outed of,” said Cayden. “My mother’s one of them, I ought to know.”

“So’s my cousin,” Longbranch admitted. “A right pain in the netherparts, is His Lordship. Keeps reminding me who paid for my first withies.”

“No objections to your profession, then?” Rauel asked, fully aware of Lady Jaspiela’s attitude. Cade had whined to him often enough about it in the old days.

“As long as it keeps me away from his daughter,” Longbranch said with a cross between a grin and a grimace, “he’s thrilled.”

“Ah!” sighed Mirko. “The lovely Lady Lellia Longbranch!”

Trenal responded with a laugh—a trifle forced, in Cade’s opinion—and a warning finger like a threatening arrow. “You stay clear of her, too!”

Tobalt was uninterested in gossip. “Why is it that some people are so opposed to any alteration in how things have always been done?”

“We all resist change,” Cade heard himself say. “One way or another, most of us want things to stay as they are. Familiar. Comforting.”

“Society intends us to resist it.” Vered ran a finger round the rim of his glass. “Wouldn’t do to have everybody questioning
why they have to do what’s always been done, would it?”

“But in theater,” Tobalt said rather desperately, “your introduction of two masquers at the same time, in ‘Life in a Day’—”

“That wasn’t innovation,” Vered told him with a shrug. “Plays started out with one actor, changing characters with actual masks. Color was used as a prompt, as well—physickers always wear green, f’r instance, and Mother Loosebuckle’s always in a red skirt. Then they added another actor, and then another—until some brainy little git thought of putting magic into it, so we only
need
one person onstage.”

“After that, all the old plays—the really old ones—were probably rewritten back to their original forms,” contributed Rauel. “Undoing the changes—”

“Bloody Hells!” exclaimed Mirko. “You mean we’re not just doing
old
stuff, we’re doing the oldest
versions
of the old stuff?”

“Yeh—gruesome, ain’t it?” Vered grinned. “So what we did, putting a second masquer onstage—nothing radical about it, not at all.”

“And yet,” said Longbranch, “it’s truer to your vision, and moves theater in a different direction. Cayden’s right, we cling to what we’re leaving behind, and making the changes is often painful—”

“But sometimes it’s the necessary choice,” Cade murmured.

“To turn back,” he went on eagerly, “to forsake change—that’s a betrayal of what we know we need to become.”

“But why must it be painful?” Rauel asked, his big soft eyes honestly forlorn.

“You only know you’re growing when it hurts,” Cade told him, hearing Mistress Mirdley’s voice in his head, and his own voice telling Mieka the same thing. And in Rauel’s next words he heard echoes of what he knew Mieka would reply.

“But what about being happy? Doesn’t that have anything
to teach us? Can’t we learn from contentment, from laughter?”

Vered shrugged. “If you have to ask yourself whether you’re happy, most likely you’re not.”

“Gods!” cried Mirko. “You two would depress the Angels!”

“Talking of Gods—and the Lord and Lady and so on,” Vered went on wickedly, “let’s do discuss how theater is the communal experience that Chapel is
supposed
to be.”

Cade laughed and shook his head. “I’ve stumbled down that road before, my friend.”

“And now,” Rauel announced, “he’ll draw the difference between the emotions and the intellect, and how rational belief is superior to instinct, and—”

Vered interrupted him. “It’s no good kindling emotions just to see the pretty flames. That’s religion at its worst. Using imagination in the theater to stir up the fire—that’s just encouraging illusions.” He smiled again, and in him Cade could suddenly see not Wizard or traces of Elf or Goblin but deliberate malicious Fae, intent with not-quite-innocent glee on making as much trouble as possible. “Of course, the first plays were based on tales from
The Consecreations
, so maybe it’s all one and the same: imagination, illusion, religion, theater—”

Tobalt gulped audibly. This portion of Vered’s remarks would not make it into any articles. Dancing close to blasphemy, he was. “But the emotion created by the imagination, by a tregetour and glisker in a play, is just as real as any other.”

“Which wouldn’t be so bad,” Vered went on, “except that most people are scared half to death of their own imaginations—
and
their own emotions. So they feed off ours!” He toasted Cade with his brandy glass. “And we’ve had this talk, too, you and me. Bleedin’ Vampires, players and audiences alike!”

He felt it then, an Elsewhen hovering closer, closer, and resisted it. There was no danger to giving in, not when he was safely seated amongst friends, but he had no intention of
arousing their curiosity or their alarm by turning all blank-eyed and distracted, and then having to explain himself somehow. Besides, if what he saw and heard was even half so horrific as some of the other Elsewhens had been… he was no masquer, to contrive a convincing face and manner on the turn of one word in a play.

Vered was still talking. “I read somewhere that there’s actually something immoral about imagining yourself into different times and places—”

“That musty old book of Chat’s?” Rauel asked. “From someplace on the Continent,” he explained to the others. “The point of it was something like, ‘You are who and what and where fate and fortune placed you, and imagining yourself as something or someone or somewhere else is an offense against the All Mighties—’ ” He shrugged and smiled. “Whoever and Whatever they might be. I’m not terribly clear on their religion.”

“Which only makes Vered’s point,” Cade said, “about theater doing what religion used to do, or is supposed to do.”

“We make people feel, and we’re supposed to feel guilty about it?” Mirko scoffed. “They come to us for exactly what we give them!”

Again the Elsewhen nagged at him; again he pushed it away.

“Not all of them want the same thing,” Trenal remarked. “Some want to be taken by the hand and led through the whole thing, with signposts along the way.”

Mirko nodded agreement. “Everything explained on the instant, everybody’s background and motivations given right up front, and when the villain shows up, they want him to be wearing a great big placard written in bright red letters—
I’m the frightful nasty person come to fuck everything up
.”

This was a bit much for Tobalt. “But don’t people trust the playwright to know what he’s doing?”

“
You
might,” Rauel said glumly.

The slamming of a door to the lobby turned all their heads. “This is a private event!” Tobalt called out.

“But Vered and I have no secrets.”

The woman’s voice was high and light and what Cade could only describe to himself as pinched, as if each word had been constricted like glass blown into a mold. Vered’s dark skin rarely showed a blush, so it was the widening of his eyes that gave him away. He leaped from his chair and down the side steps of the stage, heading into the dimness of the theater aisles. Rauel, for his part, shut his eyes briefly and drew in a controlled breath, then smiled for all he was worth.

“You said nine,” she went on, loudly enough for the rest of them to hear. “It’s almost ten. I was lonely.”

“Bexan?” Mirko whispered to Trenal.

“Bexan,” Trenal whispered back.

Before Cade could ask who Bexan was, she and Vered were back. Shaking out her heavy black skirts, she sat in his chair and picked up his brandy glass and turned to Tobalt with a look that expected nothing, revealed nothing. She was little and dark, pretty in a moody sort of way, with plenty of crisp curls and a faint bluish cast to her very white skin that spoke of Piksey in her blood.

Rauel played the well-bred gentleman and fetched the chair that had been set aside when Thierin Knottinger hadn’t shown up. He was still smiling a trained masquer’s smile. If Vered noticed, he didn’t care. He took the seat his partner had brought him, filled Bexan’s glass, and only with difficulty took his eyes off her and introduced her all round.

“Umm… yes,” Tobalt said rather blankly, then finally pulled himself together. “Welcome, Mistress Quickstride. We were just discussing—that is, I hope you won’t be bored by—”

“Never,” said Vered, fondly, proudly. “Where were we?”

Cade decided to be helpful. “Tregetours and trust.”

“Oh. Of course.” Tobalt thought for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure if I’m understanding correctly, but it seems to me that tregetours
must
imagine themselves into the minds and lives of a thousand different sorts of people. It’s part of the job. You can’t write about them if you don’t understand them. You have to feel what they feel, and—”

“And think for them,” Vered interrupted. “Emoting all over the place is all very well, but a play’s naught but rubbish if it doesn’t come from the intellect, too.”

“How sweet of you,” Mirko purred, “to give us all official license to feel!”

Cade hid a smile. This really was turning into quite the entertainment, especially with the addition of an uninvited guest. He said, “By putting ourselves into other people’s hearts and minds, and then presenting the results onstage, aren’t we providing the experience of other people’s lives for the audience? And isn’t that ultimately a moral good? To help them understand—”

“To let them see that there are different people in the world with different sorts of thoughts and dreams,” Longbranch broke in, then looked embarrassed.

Cade nodded for him to continue.

“I only meant,” he said more diffidently, “that you’re right about the communal experience, and it even goes beyond that. We’re all connected, we can all identify with and understand each other in some fashion. Sorry, Cayden, I didn’t mean to barge in.”

Vered grinned. “Trenal, old son, if we let Cade talk uninterrupted, we’d be here until Trials. What theater does, showing people different lives and ways of thinking—”

“—and feeling,” Rauel threw in.

“—we’re also showing them how similar we all are. It’s not just the connection made amongst the audience at the play. Nobody in Lilyleaf will ever battle a dragon, but if the thing’s worked right, they not only get an idea of what it would be like
but they realize that someplace inside them they
understand
what it would be like. And that creates a unity of—”

“Did you just say that
Cayden
talks too much?” Mirko drawled.

Longbranch soldiered on. “I worry sometimes, though, that we impose upon people things they wouldn’t ordinarily feel.”

“That’s where we get to the question of authenticity in imagination,” Rauel said. “Cade’s ‘Doorways’ play is a good example. All those different lives behind all those doors—what glover seriously considers the notion of becoming a lawyer arguing a case in court? But when he looks at that portion of the play he sees that what’s going on inside that door is a true thing. Cade imagined what it would be like, how it would feel, and pulled the truth out of it to show onstage.”

He could hear Mieka’s voice then:
You have to do their dreaming for them Quill.

“And that final door,” Longbranch said, “the one he chooses—‘This life, and none other’—”

“
There
you have the religious experience!” Vered leaned forward eagerly. “What Chapel is supposed to do, and doesn’t, much—it’s only words and motions, rituals and mouthings, it doesn’t make the connections anymore.
We
, on the other hand, can leave audiences feeling all warm and lovely and pleased with themselves. Oh, stop squirming, Cayden. It isn’t only you. We do the same thing with ‘Dancing Ground.’ Whatever someone most desires, that’s what we give them at the end when the Knight tricks the Elf Queen into giving him what he wants.”

Cade had squirmed because he hadn’t intended the piece to be seen like that—he’d wanted to make the point that people
did
choose the lives they lead, whether they were aware of the choosing or not. He’d never meant to put people happily in their places, or give them everything they wanted, or make them cease striving—or dreaming—because they left the theater contented
with their lives. He wanted them to think about the choices they made, the way he had to think. Had been
forced
to think, because of the Elsewhens. He wanted them to understand that if they didn’t like the life they were leading, they could choose to change it.
You’ve got it wrong
, he wanted to say,
you’re not understanding what I meant.

And this led him a step or two down a different path, one all hung about with questions concerning who decided what a play really meant, and whose fault it was if the author’s opinion diverged from the general understanding, and whether a play’s purpose was to satisfy the audience or the author—or both. Or, he suddenly thought, mayhap
neither
. Did a work exist because it wanted—no,
needed
—to exist, independent of everyone, including the person who wrote it?

Longbranch, having taken a big enough swig of brandy to renew his pluck, said, “It seems to me that a play shouldn’t be so much a new experience as a remembrance. A thing you always knew but perhaps didn’t know that you knew. And both of those plays do that.”

Cade quoted softly, “ ‘You may look into the water and see deep visions, but in truth, in fact, the pool is naught but a mirror.’ ” He smiled. “That’s not original. I read it someplace.”

“Druan Stitchinggrass,” said Bexan Quickstride.

“Well—yes,” Cade agreed, trying not to appear surprised that she had read the ancient poet. “And here’s what I think about ‘authenticity,’ Rauel. When you put the words onto paper, it’s as real as actually having the experience. The thoughts and emotions of imagination are just as real as any other. But there’s something more. When you write it down, not only is it as real as having the experience, it’s an experience of its own—and the experience
demands
to be written down.”