The Element of Fire, Martha Wells [books for new readers .txt] 📗

BEHIND THE WOODEN backdrop of the stage, in the small actors’ area curtained off from the glories of the gallery by dusty velvet drapes and a canopy, confusion reigned.

Ignoring the outcries and exclamations from the actors and clowns rushing around in the lamplit gloom and musty heat behind her, Kade had enlarged a hole in one of the dark blue curtains and was looking out at the rear of the gallery. The back wall was mostly paned glass, its windows looking out onto the terraces and a wide expanse of garden designed to provide a harmonious view.

She remembered that garden, though she could see little of it now through the glare of candlelight on window glass and the darkness beyond. She could have pointed to the stand of sycamore trees, or the hill with its classical ruins carefully constructed to look aged and abandoned. She had expected to remember the palace, but she had not expected its sights, textures, and scents to press in on her in such an overpowering way. The walls were stained with powerful auras of old battles, old anger, love, pain. They hummed with the revenants of the emotions and magics of long-dead sorcerers. She had left her own marks here, somewhere. She was not pleased at the idea of coming upon one of them suddenly.

Here Kade had learned her first real sorcery from Galen Dubell. He had taught her High Magic, with its slow painstaking formulas that used alchemy and the powers of the astral bodies to understand and compel the forces that governed the universe. Galen had been an excellent teacher, his instruction touching on everything from the simplest healing charms to the architectures of the Great Spells that eventually took on lives of their own. When he was banished for that teaching, Kade had been sent to the Monelite Convent, where she had learned about herbal poisons and the Low Magic of witchcraft from the village women. Later she had learned what she could of fay magic from her mother, but her human blood kept her from shape-changing and practicing many of the other skills that came so easily to the fay. It had been Galen’s teaching that had enabled her to survive. Human sorcery was painstaking and slow, but powerful, using numbers, symbols, carved stones, music, and other tools to explain the unexplainable, to control and direct the astral forces the fay only toyed with.

I shouldn’t have come back, Kade thought. Somewhere between here and the Mummer’s Mask, her courage had fled, leaving her to pick up the pieces of her plan alone. Not that it was a good plan to begin with. She felt an overwhelming desire to discard it and stay with Baraselli’s acting troupe for a few weeks. The gods of the wood knew the actors could use the help. Only one thing stopped her.

I might be able to stand feeling like a coward, but I can’t live with feeling like this much of a fool. And it would be foolish to turn back when she had come this far. But the more she thought about it, the more the idea of returning to Knockma or Fayre with nothing solved and facing the same old difficulties seemed worse than continuing on this course.

It had become apparent to her that she needed to go home, to the palace at the heart of Ile-Rien, to face her past. To face her half brother Roland, to see if it was really him she hated or the memories and the father he represented. And perhaps to face Ravenna as well, to show the Dowager Queen what that once-unlovely changeling fay child had become. To get her approval? Kade asked herself suddenly. I bloody well hope not. She bit her lip, fingering the frayed edge of the curtain. So it’s either stay with Baraselli’s troupe forever, or go on with what I came to do, what I said I had to do, she thought. A group of women passed by in front of the windows, the light glittering on their satin gowns, gems, and starched lace collars, their motions hampered by layers of underskirts, hip rolls, and fashionable puffed sleeves. Perhaps I’ll wait and see how the play does before I decide.

She turned back to the troupe’s frantic clamor as Garin hopped through the curtained stage doorway. He was immediately attacked by three other actors and their helpers, who began to tear off his Pantalone costume and wrestle him into the Brighella outfit. Kade picked the wig and cap off the floor and handed it to them, trying not to get her fingers torn off by their frantic grasping.

Baraselli peered through a gap in the backdrop. “Terrible,” he moaned. “It isn’t going well at all.”

“Damn it, man, I’ve done my best,” Garin snapped, his voice muffled because Uoshe was forcing a new shirt over his head. “If it isn’t good enough, then you get out there.”

Unlike other theatricals, Commedia had no playbook for the actors to learn. The plot was determined by the characters, and the actors learned only the standard lines for one role and supplemented them by whatever jokes or local gossip came to mind. Garin was doing the unfamiliar Brighella role more ad lib than usual and using the standard lines only when he could remember them; it was confusing everyone else terribly.

Garin had taken the extra role because the worst had happened. The Master of Revels and the Cisternan guards who examined entertainers for the court had refused to allow the clown who played Brighella entrance into the palace. The clown had a cousin who was on a list of participants in an illfated Aderassi independence revolt. The officials had been terrifyingly polite about the whole thing, and Baraselli, suspecting them all to be magicians of the blackest kind for knowing about it in the first place, had not dared to speak even a word of protest.

In the prisonlike barrenness of the questioning rooms of the St. Anne’s Gate Guard House, the troupe had been kept waiting for hours. Partly, Kade knew, to give those who had reason to be nervous a chance to betray themselves, but mostly to allow the clerks to look through the rolls of “undesirable” names that the King’s Watch endlessly compiled.

“And what’s your name, darling?” the Cisternan guard had asked Kade when it came her turn.

Kade knew the robed academician in the corner of the whitewashed questioning room was a sorcerer, using spells to search out hostile magic. As the guard asked her the question, Kade felt the sorcerer’s spell settle over her like a cold mist, invisible and intangible to anyone not trained in magic. It met the masking spell she had prepared and set around herself hours earlier, then slid across and away without friction. The sorcerer’s second and third spells did the same. He stopped there, just as her masking spell was beginning to fray on the edges. He might have cast five or six spells and caught her out; Kade, being Kade, had taken that risk. If the sorcerer had detected either her magic or that she was fay, she would have thought of something else.

In answer to the guard’s question, she had said, “Katherine of Merewatch. They call me Kade, short for Katherine.” Merewatch was a hamlet near the place she made her home much of the time, and so it was factual enough not to set off the truth spell that blanketed the whole room. It was a complex spell, older than she was, as intricate and detailed as the inside of a Portier clockwork toy. It had the combination of ruthless logic and artistry about it that marked it as old Dr. Surete’s work. Despite great temptation, she decided not to tamper with it.

The guard stared at her a moment. She had a minor qualm, wondering if they had really burned the only portrait of her, as Roland had claimed they had so long ago. But the man only said, “You ought to change that, you know. Could make trouble for you.”

“But it’s what my mum calls me.”

“Your lookout then. And how’s your mum’s family called?”

“She didn’t have one that I knew of. In Merewatch they called her Maira.” Also true; the deep northern brogue of the Merewatch inhabitants rendered Moire as Maira. Kade sensed a faint tremor in Surete’s truth spell, but her statement was on that very narrow line of truth and falsehood, and it didn’t betray her.

Neither questions nor spells had shown anything odd about the actor who played Arlequin, and that puzzled Kade.

She had suspected him of something, of what she wasn’t completely sure, but she knew the palace’s protections to be good ones. She had gotten through them with a substantial helping of fayre luck and the willingness to take a risk, and she knew that having been born inside the wards had let her pass them and any other traps Surete might have laid. It didn’t seem possible that an ordinary human sorcerer could accomplish it.

Perhaps he’s just an ass, she thought, watching the Arlequin now in the backstage confusion. He was sitting on a props box, watching the others with a grin, cool and unaffected by the frantic activity.

Kade lifted her leather Columbine mask and wiped the sweat off her face. She knew she should be going onstage again soon, but with all the Brighella confusion, she couldn’t tell if they were getting close to her part or not. Possibly overwhelmed with relief at sighting the end of the play, the others might skip her last entrance entirely.

Kade moved to where she could glimpse the front of the Grand Gallery through a gap where the curtain met the stage’s edge. There was a good view of the dais from here.

If seeing the palace again affected her, it was even more of a shock to see its inhabitants. Roland has changed—for the worse, she thought. Worse still, Ravenna hasn’t changed at all. Despite the new gray in her red hair, the Dowager Queen was still delicate, still lovely, and still ruthlessly