Act II Scene VII #2
“Well then, I’ll have to do. Jude’s no use at this. Lines his eyes like a sailor,” she mutters. “There! Beautiful.”
Parrish offers an encouraging smile before vanishing down the corridor, leaving me to puzzle out the idea of beautiful and my face in the same thought. I turn the slightest glance to the mirror to examine her work—and gasp.
Not at the makeup but at the scrawl of amber gold that crawls beneath the ochre of my irises, there and gone in an instant. The makeup palette in my grip clatters to the floor, and I clap a hand over my mouth. Craft. Player magic.
Not only that but—my reflection. For a moment, I don’t recognize it. There’s color in my face. My shoulder bones aren’t sticking out like my skin is a sheer curtain anymore. And something looks…different. I can’t put my finger on why. Something has changed.
The Craft binding is responsible, no doubt.
“Five minutes!” Sil’s voice.
“Don’t worry yourself, Alistaire!” Arius calls, interpreting my panic for stage fright. A funny expression falls across his face as he pulls that throat spray from his pocket on his way to the wings. “You look different.”
“I— Parrish helped me…” I gesture vaguely at the makeup but don’t dare look at myself in the mirror again.
He shakes his head once. “No, not that, I think.”
“Places!” Sil shouts.
Moments later, I’m sipping shallow breaths of dread as Arius leads me backstage, where murmurs from the audience stir on the other side of the curtain. Thousands of Revelers, I think nervously. How did I end up here?
SIL: “Welcome, welcome! Dear patrons, we are honored to present to you a tale of old, in celebration of our most beloved treaty’s impending end. Let us not forget how it was formed! Tonight, we perform for you Act One of The Cast Trade—”
I tune out the uproarious applause as Silenus introduces the show: a brutal reenactment of the trade between the Playhouse and mortals that started the treaty five hundred years ago, when Silenus traded peace for the life of his captured Player.
No doubt this performance is designed to evoke pity for the Players.
But all I can think about is how warm the stage is when I step onto it, how guilty that makes me feel. And that strange inkling of Craft, squirming around my pupils, warming the place behind my eyes.
“Methexis,” I breathe, feeling my bridge lock into place beneath me, but my mind stays focused on the big picture: on capturing Jude.
On delivering him to the council and stopping the Playhouse’s terrifying plans for the North.
Of getting back to Cassia and my brother.
I almost have all the pieces. I just need to hold out a little longer.
Then the curtain rises, and the world fades away.
The boom of applause shifts into the slap of rain and thunder. Smoke fills my sinuses, though I thought I smelled perfume a moment ago. I blink down curiously as the white marble beneath my feet cracks, mud and dirt bleeding through until I can no longer see the floor.
It occurs to me I cannot remember my name. Come to think of it, I don’t have one.
Above, the voice of a god falls from the sky, offers explanation to a vicious conflict unfolding between black-and-silver uniforms wielding rudimentary weapons, and the rest—golden-eyed Players clad in white and scarlet.
I move through the world, the beat of a drum pulsing in my blood. Every word that falls from my lips doesn’t feel like a line but like a part of me. Each movement deliberate, intentional.
I gasp as I exit stage left, my entrance finished. My mind grapples for reality. On the platform, Mattia and Arius have broken into a violent argument that I’m only half certain was scripted.
Tig, Linos, and Phileas crow lines from the chorus, then disband and pass me as they flee into the wings.
“How are you doing?” Jude asks over my shoulder, and I jump. He’s drenched from the rain onstage, hair falling over his face in dark tresses. The shoulder of his costume is torn.
“I’m fine,” I say, not sure that I am. This isn’t how rehearsals felt. “Are you stalling?”
“Absolutely, I hate this scene,” he whispers. “And between you and me—” He shakes some of the water dripping from his sleeves. “I’ve never cared for Tragedies.” Then he moves for his next entrance.
The scene onstage shifts as Jude stumbles onto the platform, throwing furious looks over his shoulder as Titus’s character pursues him, wielding a golden blade.
I know it’s paint—not real Eleutheraen gold—but even my heart clenches at the sight as Jude ducks, dodges, and forces the blade back on Titus so hard, he nearly slits his throat as they toss carefully rehearsed lines back and forth.
Eventually, Titus’s character gets the high ground and succeeds in hitting him on the back of the head. Something twists in my chest as Jude’s dragged away while the crowd shrieks and wails.
This is just a performance. And even if it weren’t, I would not care.
But I decide I’m with Jude on one thing. I prefer the Comedies over this, by far.
A crack of thunder summons me for my next cue. The world vanishes. Whatever magic blooms on the stage sucks me in as time moves in strange spurts of battle and heated conversation. My name slips my mind again.
Then someone knocks me out, too, and everything blackens. The stage lights come up—
No. Lightning. Flashes of it illuminate the canvas tent around me. Mud cakes my boots. There’s a man on a bench beside me, blond, brown-eyed, oddly familiar. He repeats questions I won’t answer. Where are my other castmates? he asks. What are our weaknesses?
I say something he doesn’t like, and he answers with a blade aimed at my throat.
A shock of pain rolls from my neck to my heart. My mark.
My bridge to Craft severs, seems to drop right through the floor, out of reach.
As if awoken from a dream, my consciousness jolts me out of fiction, reality pressing hard on my skin.
I’m onstage. This isn’t real. The warmth of the stage fades, ice dissolving the bond between the performance and me. I recognize the Player beside me, holding a prop knife. He hasn’t hurt me with it. It’s just Arius. Arius—
My heart freezes painfully in my chest. I can’t breathe.
The fourth wall shatters. Whatever strange shield prevents actors from noticing—realizing—an audience is there is gone. The eyes of the audience are everywhere, blinking, beginning to clear, to realize this is a performance.
Downstage, Titus and Mattia fire lines of dialogue at each other.
Between them, Jude is watching me in abject horror.
A word falls from his mouth, and warmth presses on my skin once more, clouds my mind.
The stage vanishes. I’m in the tent again.
I can’t remember why I’d thought of the name Jude. It doesn’t sound familiar.
Exit! It’s time for me to leave. Impossibly drawn to a strange passage leading out of the tent, I run. I’m almost out, almost offstage when—
I freeze. My eyes fix on the arrow trained on my heart, tracking its razor point up to the woman aiming it. A stranger.
Her eyes are wild and wet. Gold trickles down her neck from a wound on the side of her head, nestled in tresses of rich brown that fall from her scalp in gnarled tangles. Most disturbingly, the skin of her arms and hands is ripped open, revealing flecks of gold beneath.
The woman stands under a curtain of darkness a little ways off. She’s in the wings, I think, curious and confused. But the thought is fragmented, colliding with reality.
None of this is so frightening as the fact that she looks so familiar.
The stranger seems to mouth something to me as she releases the arrow. I don’t catch what she says—a hard shove from my right knocks me to the ground.
Then I’m coughing, my lungs filled with smoke and the scent of blood in the air as I take in the riggings above. I’m backstage.
Embracing the ice-cold arms of reality, I register the shouts of the audience as the principal roles battle across the platform. Vaguely, I remember this is a scene; it ends in a dramatic standoff between the two leads.
I roll onto my side, searching for the woman who shot that arrow—the stranger. She’s gone.
Jude is yelling something that sounds like Stay here! as he runs back onto the stage. I blink up at the ceiling, confused and disoriented. My head hurts.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand to attention. I’m offstage, but the feeling of being watched hasn’t left me. Lifting myself, I steal a glance into the darkness of the wings and go still.
Two bright, menacing eyes watch me. A dirty, torn white dress hangs on a tensed figure. She reaches a hand out to me, hooks a finger in my direction.
I do not believe in ghosts. But the woman from the portrait in my room has climbed out. She’s cornered me here.
Gene Hunt.
The dead Player brings a finger to her lips as if to say, Hush. Then flutters back into the dark like a pearl in the ocean.
ARIUS: “Alistaire!” He flies into the wings, casting a bloodied blade into the prop armory. “Are you all right? Jude saw, too— Gods, I haven’t seen that happen in ages.”
When I look back to the hall, Gene Hunt is gone.
RIVEN: “I— What?”
ARIUS: “My friend, you nearly broke our illusion!” He scratches the back of his neck anxiously. “How did you manage it?”
MATTIA: “What the hell was that?”
Mattia tears backstage, the other Players at her shoulders. I can see every single gold vein in her neck. By the thunder of applause outside the curtain, I surmise the show is over.
Somehow, according to the clock, six hours have flown by.
“Who did that?” she demands again as Arius peers sidelong at me, concern constricting his soft features. “Who broke the illusion?”
Some quick math brings me to two conclusions: One, no one else noticed the dead Player aiming arrows at me from backstage. Two, they most certainly did notice me break the illusion when Arius brushed my ruined mark.
TITUS: “Interesting that you assume it couldn’t have been you who made a mistake, Mattia.” He works on the straps that bind two broadswords to his back. “But by all means, accuse one of the auditionees who’ve been here less than a week of somehow doing so.”
Before Mattia can question further, Jude strides into the wings. Judging by the blood running from his temples, Titus hit him awful hard onstage. “Calm yourself, Mattia. It was my fault. I slipped.” He throws a warning look at me. Don’t say a word.
Mattia watches him, flabbergasted. I pretend not to notice Arius staring between Jude and me, open-mouthed.
MATTIA: “Why did you run offstage?”
TITUS: “Run offstage? He tackled poor Alistaire to the ground; didn’t you see?”
JUDE: “She forgot to exit on time. Very clumsy of her.”
I turn my eyes toward the skene that stands at the back of the stage. There, ingrained in its side, an arrow—the one Gene Hunt aimed at me.
The moment breaks at the clapping of hands. Sil emerges from the dark corridor. “Well done, everyone!” His mild-tempered smile simmers into something else—a stiffness to it. “Jude, a word?”
A collective dread shrouds the other Players at the director’s tone.
ARIUS: “There was a lot of chaos onstage, Sil—and a long time since we’ve performed this piece. We all might have slipped a bit.”
Mattia moves to argue, but the director cuts her off.
SIL: “Were one of you to slip, it is my Lead Player’s job to preserve the illusion before an audience glimpses anything beyond the curtain. Correct, Jude? And gods above, running offstage like that.”
Mattia’s face tightens. “None of us slipped. Something cut through it.”
“And who could have done that?” Sil gestures to me.
“Perhaps a new, inexperienced actor? Come to think of it, I don’t see your contender, Mattia.
” He feigns a glimpse around the wings, and I find myself looking around, too, trying to remember what happened to the others onstage.
I can barely remember what happened to myself.
“If I’m not mistaken, it was Linos who fled the wrong side of the stage early and took the whole chorus with him, wasn’t it? ”
Mattia says nothing, baring her teeth. But her eyes land on me, and they stay there as Sil turns for the hall, yelling, “Curtain call!” over his shoulder. “And would someone please collect the damned chorus?”
I don’t know what overcomes me. My mouth drops open. “It was Gene Hunt.”
Sil stills, along with the Players. Jude’s eyes are pleading with me.
Slowly, the director turns. “Alistaire, I do hope you aren’t in the habit of blaming deceased Players before admitting fault. That was an awfully late exit you made.” He glares at me, waiting.
“Jude saw her, too. She was here—she was backstage and—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Jude says coldly, expressionless. “I made a mistake. The illusion slipped.”
Sil and Jude look to be locked in a silent debate until the director mutters, “Curtain call. All of you,” and vanishes down the hall. Where I know Gene Hunt stood just moments ago.
In my time in the Playhouse, I have gathered that Gene Hunt is a great many things, and none of them is dead.