“Hoy, Tim.” Feival was already pulling his shirt over his head as he squeezed into the cramped wagon. “You look stuck—do you need help with your dress?” As the company’s principal boy he was more familiar with putting on a gown than Briony herself, who had always been assisted by her maids.
She shook her head, almost relieved. The workaday had returned to push out other things, no matter their importance. “No, but thank you. I was just thinking.”
“Good house today,” he said, stepping out of his tights with the indifference of a veteran player. Briony turned away, still not used to seeing naked men, although it had not been an infrequent experience since she had been traveling with the troop. Feival in particular was lithe and well-muscled, and it was interesting to realize that she could enjoy looking at him without wanting anything more.
Maybe I really am boyish, as Barrick used to say. Maybe I’m just fickle of eye and heart, like a man. There was no question, though, that she wanted more in her life than simply a handsome man at her side. She could feel it some nights, different from the yearning she felt for her lost brothers and her father: she did not want a particular person, she wanted somebody, a man who would hold her only when she wanted, who would be warm and strong.
But sometimes when she had such thoughts, she saw a face that surprised her—the commoner, the failed guardian, Ferras Vansen. It was exasperating. If there was a less appropriate person in the world for her to think about, she could scarcely imagine it. Who knew if he was even alive?
No, she told herself quickly, he must be alive. He must be fit and well and protecting my brother.
It was odd, though, that Vansen’s not-so-handsome face kept drifting into her thoughts, his nose that bore the signs of having been broken, his eyes that scarcely ever looked at her, hiding always behind lowered lids as he stared at the ground or at the sky, as though her very gaze was a fire that would burn him... She stopped, gasped in a short breath. Could it be? “Are you well?”
“No—I mean yes, Feival, I’m well enough. I just...I just poked myself with something sharp.”
It was madness to think this way. Worse, it was meaningless madness: if Vansen lived, he was lost—lost with her brother. The whole of that life was gone, as if it had happened to another person, and unless she could somehow find help for herself and Southmarch, nothing like it would ever come again. Her task now was to be a player, at least for today—not a shareholder, even, but an assistant to the principal boy, working for meals in a tavern yard in Tessis. That was all. She knew she must learn to accept that.
“We are not in the March Kingdoms any more, so speak your parts loudly and broadly,” said Pedder Makewell, as if any of them did not know that already. “Now, where is Pilney?”
The players were all crammed into a little high-walled alley behind the tavern because there was not room for them all in the tiring-room and the yard was filled by their audience, a large group of city folk finished with work and eager for the start of the Kerneia revels. One end of the alley was bricked off, the other sealed with a huge pile of building rubble, so the spot was fairly private, but a few people in the buildings that backed on the alley leaned out of their windows to stare at the crowd of actors in their colorful costumes. “Where is Pilney?” Makewell asked again.
Pilney, younger even than Feival Ulian but far more shy and not half so pretty, raised his hand. The heavyset, red-faced youth was playing the part of the moon god Khors, and although this had thrown him much together with Briony, he had scarcely spoken a word to her that Teodoros had not written.
“Right,” Makewell said to him sternly. “You have spattered me quite roundly with blood the last two performances, boy, and you have spoiled my costume both times, not to mention my curtain call. When you die today, do me the kindness of facing a little away before you burst your bladder, or next time you’ll die from a real clubbing instead of a few taps with a sham.”
Pilney, wide-eyed, nodded his head rapidly.
“If you have finished terrifying the young fellow, Pedder,” said Finn Teodoros, “perhaps I might essay a few truly important points?”
“It is an expensive costume!” said Estir Makewell, defending her brother.
“Yes, the rest of us, in our rags, have all noticed.”
“Whose name is on the troop, I ask you?” Pedder demanded. “Who do they come to see?”
“Oh, you, of course.” Finn made a droll face. “And you are right to warn the boy. Otherwise, tavern gossip all over Syan would whisper that in the play about the death of gods, Pedder Makewell, at the end of the particularly bloody slaughter of his archenemy, was seen to have blood on him! Who would pay to witness such a ludicrous farce?”
“You mock me. Very well. You may launder Perin’s fine armor, then.”
“Or better yet, Makewell,” called Nevin Hewney, “we could dress you in a butcher’s smock, which would suit both your swordplay and your acting!”
“Quiet!” shouted Teodoros over the bellows of outrage and amusement, “I would like to get on with our notices, please. Also, I have a few changes.
“Feival, in the first act, where Zosim comes to Perin to describe the fortifications of Khors’ castle, instead of ‘Covered in shining crystals of ice,’ could you say, ‘In shining ice crystals covered,’? It suits the foot better. Yes, and lordly Perin, the word is ‘plenilune,’ not ‘pantaloon,’—‘My foeman smite, and cleave the plenilune,’—it means full moon, and, needless to say, gives the speech quite a different import.”
Over laughter, Makewell said with returning good nature, “Plenilune, plenilune—I trow he has invented the word just to trouble me. The fat ink-dauber has choked many an actor in his day.”
“Yes, good, good,” said Teodoros, staring at the rag of paper on which he had scratched his reminders. “All three brothers must turn together toward the Moon Castle when we hear the trumpets, we spoke of that. Certes.” He turned the bit of paper over. “Ah, yes, in the second act, we must see Khors truly grab at Zoria when she flees him. Pilney, you have already seized her and dragged her to your castle. Now you must clutch at her as though you mean to keep her, not as though she has dropped something in the street and you have retrieved it.” As Pilney blushed and mumbled, Teodoros turned to Briony. “And you, young Tim. Do not shake him off when he grabs you, no matter how whey-faced his manhandling. You are a virgin goddess, not a street bravo.”
Now it was her turn to blush. Shaso had taught her too welclass="underline" when a hand encircled her arm she threw it off without thinking. The first time they played the scene she had pinched Pilney’s wrist hard enough to make him gasp. She suspected it was one of the reasons he had kept his distance.
“And where is Master Birch? Dowan, I know your knees pain you, but when Volios is struck down by Zmeos, the earth shakes—that is what the stories tell. You cannot let yourself down so carefully.”
The giant frowned, but nodded. Briony felt sorry for him. Perhaps she could find some spare cloth and make him thicker pads for his large, bony knees.
Teodoros went on to change much of the blocking at the beginning of the siege to obscure the fact that Feival and Hewney had to scramble out of their Zuriyal and Zmeos costumes and into armor, then appear from the tiring-room to portray the gods and demigods Perin was leading against the moon god’s fortress. He changed a few of Feival’s lines in the fourth act when the youth portrayed Zuriyal, the goddess who was Zoria’s jailer while her brothers Zmeos and Khors fought against Perin and the besiegers.