Act II Scene VI
A spotlight claps on overhead as we cross the stage. The auditorium is empty, our steps echoing into the abyss of scarlet seats as I follow Jude to the center platform.
“Watch your step,” he says. “There’s a trapdoor there at the center of the stage. I’ve fallen through it twice by accident.”
RIVEN: “I’m not performing in one of your wretched shows.”
He turns to face me.
JUDE: “I can’t put you onstage at all until you do a Craft binding.”
RIVEN: “Whatever that means, I’m not interested.”
JUDE: “You’re tethered to reality. That mark may be gone, but there’s still enough Eleutheraen gold in your blood to give you away onstage.” He shakes his head, and a cuff of silver peeks out at the top of his ear, between tousled locks of dark hair that fall into his eyes.
Yeah, I probably wouldn’t have been able to knife one of those hairs for Marigold no matter how subtle I was. I bet he counts them before he goes to sleep.
JUDE: “Craft binding is a loan of power. A link between your life and mine. I’m going to teach you how to create a bridge to that Craft—between you and what you will become.”
Become?
He takes a few long steps back, until there’s a wide berth between us. He gestures at the emptiness. “This is the gap. Imagine it as a bottomless abyss, and that you, as you always do, desperately want to reach me—more than anything in the world.”
RIVEN: “I think I’d rather fall into the bottomless abyss.”
JUDE: “This gap is what you face when going into character. But we can’t reach across such a gap, now can we?
You need a bridge between actor and character.
The tie between reality and story. It makes everything else possible—Mimicry, Compulsion.
Without a bridge to summon those things across to you, what are your options?
Your Craft would have to jump back and forth over the gap. And you’re already exhausted as it is.”
I frown. “I’m not playing a character right now.”
Jude grins. “Alistaire, we are all of us playing characters. Even when the character is ourselves.” He gestures between us again. “But without a bridge to close this gap between reality and story or the energy to jump across it…” He looks down at me and arches an eyebrow as if to say, Go on. Guess.
I don’t.
JUDE: “You fall.”
The words echo off the stage, striking a nervous, hollow feeling in my stomach. Maybe breakfast wasn’t a good idea.
RIVEN: “And if I simply don’t create a bridge across this imaginary gap?”
JUDE: “Not imaginary, Alistaire. If the Playhouse identifies something that doesn’t fit in a scene onstage—reality, for instance—it eliminates it.
Craft—” I balk at the word. Player magic.
“Craft is the thing that cloaks you, a lifeline that connects us onstage. So if your Craft cannot reach you and something unplanned happens—” He carelessly slides a finger across his neck to indicate lights out.
I roll my eyes. “I seem to have survived your Reality Suspension just fine without it.”
“And you can consider yourself lucky I managed it,” he says, frowning. “That’s the difference between carrying someone across a bridge and jumping over a cliff with their weight on your back. That wiped me out for the rest of the day. So, for my sake, let’s try, yes?”
Well. If he’s going to make me feel guilty about it.
JUDE: “Repeat after me.” The air grows warmer, the ground thrumming beneath us. “Methexis.”
There’s a rising warmth beneath my feet, the marble heating as if the stage has just woken up. It brightens around me, shimmering gold and white. With little fight left in my tired bones, I shut my eyes, bite my tongue. The word tastes strange, though I can’t place why. “Methexis,” I repeat.
The center of the stage feels like it’s sinking beneath me, and I tense.
JUDE: “Good. Now open your eyes.”
When my eyes flicker open, I swallow a scream.
I’m still standing in the auditorium. Everything is the same—except the stage itself.
Beneath my feet, the marble now looks like glass, sleek and translucent. Under the clear floor is a tumultuous sea of shadows, dark and wild.
I tear my gaze from the darkness beneath, looking to Jude across from me.
The glass is different where he stands. Amid the roiling shadows beneath him, a luminous tendril of gold rises upward. Its glow cuts through the darkness like the line of an anchor thrown into the ocean, and Jude is the ship. The light ends at his heels, a thread that sews his flesh to the stage.
He steps forward, and the tendrils of gold follow him beneath like strings on a marionette.
RIVEN: “What is this?” My voice echoes back a hundred times over. I clap a hand to my mouth.
JUDE: “A place the audience cannot see, just outside the bounds of reality.” In its departure from reality’s restrictions, Jude’s voice takes on a thunderous edge, reverberating off every nonexistent slat of marble. He gestures to the roaring sea of darkness churning under the glassy stage.
Then I see it. Through the darkness, what seems like miles below: light. Brilliant and gold like the sun, like the threads holding on to Jude. It can’t reach me, and I can’t reach it.
“Craft,” I say to myself. My eyes shoot up. “This is yours?”
“I’m its keeper. Craft is what connects the cast; we channel it from one another. It’s why a Player can’t be brought back if they fail to suspend their reality during an onstage death—your life has to go to another Player, through the binding.” Craft binding.
“Craft isn’t a matter of quantity,” he says, curling his hand into a fist. Below, threads of gold respond, drawing closer to the surface, humming with power. “You can think of it as a weapon. A blade is only as lethal as the hands that wield it.”
I’m probably going to regret asking this, but I say, “How do you wield it?” I can’t seem to take my eyes off the gold swirling below the stage. It almost seems to be alive, breathing.
“All Players have a driving force, a motivation that binds them.” Jude’s steps stop short. “What is it that drives you, Alistaire? Picture a desire. Follow that thread.”
Something tugs in my chest. I’m pretty sure I desire to reach those coils of gold at the bottom.
Cautiously, I lean down to press my palm to the stage.
Just as quickly, a sizzling pain of warning grabs at my throat, seems to choke the air from it. Below, the gold dives deeper into the shadows. I flinch and skitter back, ready to bolt into the wings.
Jude utters something, and the real world solidifies again, the white of the marble flooding back over the stage and disguising what lies beneath it.
My blood freezes cold, pulses that awful ice through my entire body.
Jude studies me with pressed lips. “You’ll endanger both yourself and me if you let that happen onstage. Reality is slippery. You’ll fall right back in if you lose your focus like that.”
“Oh? I’ll suspiciously die onstage, then.
Like Gene Hunt,” I pant, fuming. The convenience of her death has prickled my mind since the Players brought it up.
I gesture broadly at the stage. “She was Lead Player and just forgot to suspend her reality for her own death scene? Conveniently leaving her role open for you?”
Jude looks at me like I’ve slapped him. “She didn’t forget, Alistaire—”
RIVEN: “Then why did she die?”
SIL: “Did it on purpose! Haven’t you heard the stories?”
We both startle as Sil wanders down the center aisle.
“Drank a glass holding as much poison as it did wine. Right onstage, too!” Sil shrugs, climbing the steps of the stage.
“Her death wasn’t even scripted. She didn’t suspend her reality.
Wildly unprofessional of her! Talented girl, incredibly.
Too dedicated for anything to be done, though. ”
There it is, that cold politeness again—the same that accompanied his visit to Thyone last night. Like death itself is little more than an inconvenience to his theatre.
Wariness overcomes Jude like a shroud as he sets his eyes on Sil.
SIL: “It has, of course, given birth to endless rumors. ‘The Ghost of the Playhouse’! Spirits and nonsense. Many now believe a Player must be killed in the arena to die a true death, or else haunt the halls of my theatre.” He sighs.
“But Gene, disappointingly, didn’t die in the arena. She died right where you’re standing.”
I shudder, unconsciously taking a step back.
I’ve heard the story—everyone has at some point—but never much thought about it.
I was always more concerned with what followed Gene’s final performance: my father standing from the audience as she died and running like mad for the exit.
His body being found on the Playhouse steps only moments later.
Then, as if Sil had just finished commenting on the weather, he turns to Jude. “You’re approaching Alistaire’s Craft binding all wrong.” The director’s gaze turns on me, assessing. “I hate to hear how much trouble you’re having after such a bold performance in stage combat yesterday.”
I casually tuck my hand over my shoulder, covering my throat in a way I hope doesn’t look like an injured bird.
SIL: “What Jude often forgets is that not all actors are in want of something, nor will they do anything to get it, and therefore build a bridge to it. Some actors, you see”—he claps a hand on my shoulder that nearly sends my fist into his face—“are not building a bridge in pursuit at all! Alistaire, what is the common thread among all actors?”
Jude’s face grows apprehensive, like he doesn’t want Sil to answer the question.
SIL: “You are all running from something. And it is almost always the same thing you are made of. So, tell me! What are you running from?”
Cold indignation courses through my expression until Sil chuckles.
SIL: “Close your eyes, Alistaire.”
“No.”
Sil’s gaze widens in surprise, and Jude’s in warning. I’m left to wonder again why Jude seems so scared of him.
The pivot of Sil’s heels sets my nerves on edge as he walks circles around me, studying me through those silver spectacles as he taps his chin.