Act II Scene I
Someone is singing, soft and quiet. It’s a familiar, melancholy melody my mind itches to recognize.
No, that can’t be right. I don’t know any songs. Singing is banned in the North.
I feel breath in my ear. “He’s onstage. Hurry.”
My eyes snap open. Whoever whispered the words isn’t there when I turn my head. Maybe I imagined it.
Slowly my vision clears, tracing intricate patterns of gold leaf across the ceiling. If I’m dead, the underworld looks suspiciously like the Playhouse.
Confused, I search for the edges of the chaise I remember being laid on. My hands grasp cool layers of silk instead beneath a thick duvet. The firmness of the chaise has been replaced by a soft mattress.
I bolt upright, taking in the sleeping quarters of my dressing room, the four-poster bed. Embroidered throw pillows are piled around the dark wood bed frame beside a nightstand presenting a full glass of water. A footstool has been left to the side of my bed. It’s empty.
Did I drag myself in here, delirious from pain? After—after…
Somehow, my feet find the ground. A blistering sensation brings my attention to the bandage pressed between my collarbones. It doesn’t take more than a moment to remember why. What I’ve done.
A second cast is wrapped over the wrist that snapped when I fell, though it doesn’t hurt at all. How could that have healed so quickly?
There’s a line of ink scrawled across the cast: Go back to bed.
I nearly catch myself laughing before the seriousness of the situation takes hold. But the thought of my betrayal to the North is unbearable, so I focus on the second most crucial issue at hand: I need a weapon. And if I can’t get to that arrow yet, I need to find my father’s knife.
In an instant, I’m across the room and out the door, skidding into the vacant hall, buttoning my jacket up to the neck like hiding my ruined mark will somehow undo what I’ve done.
There’s a surge of applause somewhere in the distance.
A performance tonight. Jude will be onstage, away from his dressing room.
Which is next to mine and unlocked, apparently. Awfully trusting of him.
Or at least, that’s what I think until I swing open the door and a thin slip of parchment lodged behind the player jude nameplate floats to the ground. Suspicious, I pick it up and read:
I said go back to bed, Alistaire. You won’t find it. Nosy.
Chaining the door shut behind me, I quickly discover he’s right.
My knife isn’t in any of his suits or the sleeves I rip off them. It isn’t underneath the floorboards I pull up and toss into the fireplace. It certainly isn’t in any of the little makeup bottles I spill all over his vanity.
I’m writing a few choice words in eyeliner over his mirror when my eye catches an old playbill hanging on the wall behind me.
There, beside it, I see something—framed by fan letters signed with crimson lips.
Jude is overly sentimental, I decide, examining the wall of memorabilia.
But between a tattered playbill and a dated call sheet, a tour schedule is nailed to the wall.
It’s old and out of date by years. But if he has this one, he would have the current one, right?
I dive for his dresser and then the vanity drawers, rifling through them as I replay Titus’s comment this morning: Our schedule isn’t public, and their armies will never move fast enough.
But if the North did have their tour schedule…
My hands grip a newer page printed delicately with cities and tour dates for this season. This is it. With a little “aha!” I pull it from the drawer, and my attention snags on the newspaper clipping hiding beneath.
I should run. I have the tour schedule.
But something about the angry way the newspaper clipping has been frayed at the corners, with several words viciously underlined, piques my curiosity.
council rules: children not exempt from markings in the north, extends to district walls
It’s dated ten years ago, when marks widely took root in the North, a preventative measure as the expiration of the treaty grew closer.
The article includes comments from key council members, talk of extinguishing deception in the North and protecting our youngest members of society from trained liars—and preventing them from being lured in by the temptations of the Playhouse.
Thunderous applause echoes from the auditorium again. Curtain call.
A thought occurs to me, and I shove away the newspaper clipping. My eyes flicker to the mirror, only long enough to press my palm to it and whisper, “Galen Hesper.”
Please, Haris, I think, desperate as my palm meets the cool glass. What are the odds he actually delivered my message?
It happens faster this time, the glass swirling. “Galen?” I ask the glass limply as it darkens.
While I wait, my eyes flicker to the top of the mirror—to a message written in a line of crusted brown lipstick that I didn’t notice before.
If not in this one, then in the next, it reads. A prickle walks down my spine as I compare it to Jude’s message on my bandage—a sharp and vicious cursive. Then I glance back at the writing on the mirror. I’ll bet a fan wrote it. Maybe one of the “dalliances” he mentioned.
The thought of a fan being in this room sends a pinch of annoyance between my shoulders. Jealousy? No, definitely not. I have no reason to—
“Cassia!” my brother’s voice hollers in the distance, hard and frantic and pulling me from the distraction. “Cassia, it’s her!”
The darkness on the other side gives way to dim, flickering light as what looks like a curtain is pulled away from the other side. Wisely, they kept the mirror partially covered.
My brother’s quicksilver eyes peer back at mine through the glass as the curtain falls.
Thank you, Haris, I think, relief blanketing my panic for just a moment.
Galen doesn’t look himself. Dark rings line his normally bright eyes. He’s wearing the same pressed shirt as yesterday—only now, it’s wrinkled and battered. He looks like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him. Which feels like ages ago now.
“Galen,” I say in a whisper, throwing a look over my shoulder. “It’s me—”
“Prove it.”
I startle. His voice is colder than steel. He doesn’t sound like my brother at all. Behind him, Cassia materializes in what I recognize as the old study in her home. I can tell by the carved shelves lining the walls, thick with books I begged to borrow growing up. I look to Cassia, shocked.
“You heard him,” my aunt prompts, a little softer. But her face has paled white.
They don’t trust that I’m me. My eyes dart around. I’m standing in the dressing room of a Player, one who specializes in Mimicry.
I look down at my clothes, covered in blood. My own, but they don’t know that.
Why should they trust me?
I swallow. “I’m your sister.” His expression is unchanged.
“I—I hate it when people touch me.” Galen’s face softens just slightly.
My mind scrambles for something convincing.
“For my twelfth birthday, you wrote and mailed letters from my entire class wishing me well.” He’d have gotten away with it, too, if I hadn’t recognized the slanted Ts of his handwriting and asked him directly.
Unable to lie to me, he’d confessed on the spot.
That does it. His expression breaks, his lips parting in disbelief. Aunt Cassia lets out what sounds like a small cry on the other side. “The Reveler wasn’t lying,” she says, more to herself than me.
I definitely owe Haris that ring.
“We thought you went missing in the riots.” Cassia’s voice shakes when she talks. “The District went to hell after last night when the Playhouse vanished early—and Galen, we—”
“Do they know?” Galen’s tone slashes through Cassia’s, sharp and angry.
I don’t need to ask what he means: my mark. Do the Players know I’m marked.
Resisting the urge to press a hand to the collar of my jacket, to show them what’s happened, I clear my throat. My oath is broken; I’m no better than a common liar now. They’ll never trust me again.
“Just—” I pull in a breath. “Just one. One of them knows.”
“Which one?” Galen presses. “Tell me who took you. Which Player?”
I flinch. None of them are good answers, but I have a feeling some names are worse than others in this case.
“Riven—” he begins again.
“Their Lead Player,” I admit quietly. “I’ve been put in their casting call.”
Finally, the reaction I expect. A mask of unabated disbelief. I track Galen’s vision from the dried blood flecked on my cheek to the cast that reaches my hand. Like he can somehow see through the jacket concealing scars that should have been fatal. By the laws of nature, I should be dead.
“What’s he done?” he says. “If he tortured—”
“No, no,” I interrupt, the dark possibility humming in the silence between us.
I remember the year Galen went through that part of his training after graduating, taught to endure Player interrogation methods in the devastating case of capture.
It’s required of anyone of his rank—of anyone who bears information the North would not want the Players getting their hands on.
Especially when he can’t lie about what he knows.
Galen refused to speak of it when he returned home.
“This is from something…e-else,” I stutter, omitting the I got hit with a chandelier of it all. “He—he promised he could reverse what happened to me if—”
“He’s lying,” Galen says flatly before I can explain. “They lie, Riven. They aren’t like us.”
I hide a wince. I’m not like us, either, now.
But he’s right. I made a bargain with a liar. Jude probably has no intention of holding up his end of the deal—if he even can.
“Your Eleutheraen blade,” Cassia urges. “You have it?”
I shake my head, swallowing my frustration. “It’s gone.”
Galen swears under his breath. “I’ll get you out, Riven. I will,” he says. “But first, I need you to listen to—”
“No, I need you to listen,” I interrupt, speaking quickly. I’m not sure how much time I have until Jude returns and notices his tour schedule is missing. “I think the Players are going to cross the Cut or try to, at least—”
“He told you that?” Cassia questions sharply, her face blanching white.
“I’m holding their tour schedule.” I skim the list in my hands.
“They intend to cross the Cut in two weeks’ time,” I say, reading off the order of cities before stopping myself short and picturing the arrow that sliced through Titus’s ankle.
“I don’t understand. Why risk it? Most of the North is marked. There’s no audience for them there.”
The conversation in the dining hall this morning comes back to me.
Tell me how you expect to win them over.
We won’t.
“And why a Great Dionysia? Why now, when they’re years early—” My heart drops as I look back to the tour schedule. “They’re planning to cross the Cut right before the festival starts.”
The Great Dionysia festival lasts five days. Five days, during which all the Players are released from the Playhouse and allowed to roam freely.
They’re just biding their time until the treaty is up and the Great Dionysia begins.
And if the Players are after revenge, it’ll be slaughter.
Something in me counters the thought. Players don’t inherently desire bloodshed. If they did, they’d have killed everyone by now. Every mortal loss is one less patron in their velvet seats. They’re after something else.
I’m missing part of this picture. I’m certain I am. But until I know what it is—
“Take their schedule to the council. Maybe they can use it so that the North will know where to place their forces—and be ready to defend the Cut if the Players try to—”
“We’ll fight, but we won’t win.” Galen speaks up, breaking his silence. His voice is devoid of emotion, resigned. “None of this is news, Riven. We know what they mean to do.”
My jaw tightens. The North succeeded in barring the Playhouse from entry once. Why shouldn’t we do it again?
“What do you—” My brow falls. “What do you mean? If you send word now, the North can begin pooling its resources of Eleutheraen gold—”
“Riven, the North doesn’t have Eleutheraen gold.” Galen looks me in the eye, and the grim certainty there rattles me to my core. “We haven’t for years.”