Intermission Scene IX
In spite of Jude’s protests, I win the argument that we need to take shelter for the evening.
I slip into an apothecary on the way. Much as he refuses to admit it, whatever injury Jude suffered in his fight with Dorian is slowing us down and making his breathing labored. I study the way he’s holding his arm for a moment before selecting a healer’s kit with a suture needle and catgut.
We stop at an inn for the night. Jude’s picked another pocket, I guess, because he has no trouble handing over someone else’s coin for our stay. He Mimics a man we passed on the street, and I know something is wrong when he doesn’t flirt with anyone at the front desk.
Luckily, our room sits at the very end of the dingy hall. Unluckily, there’s a floorboard painted with shimmering Eleutheraen gold at its threshold.
Jude rolls his eyes and steps right over it, shedding his Mimicry. “Not even real,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe how often that’s the case. Too expensive to use true Eleutheraen gold. They just like to make their patrons think they’re safe.”
“It isn’t real?” I poke at the gold floorboard with my foot.
“Wouldn’t matter if it were. Painting doorframes—it’s all myth that it keeps us out.
” He kicks off one of his boots. “A sealed circle of pure Eleutheraen gold, which is rare, will do it. But not some random bit of gold across a floorboard. How do you think we crossed the Cut?” Discomfort pinches his expression when he leans on the other leg to kick off his second boot.
“Damned nuisance to move the Playhouse through, but any Player could traverse that pitiful moat.”
“Players can cross the Cut?” Gods, of course they can. It was never sealed with pure Eleutheraen gold. “What about the treaty—”
“The treaty kept the Playhouse out. Not named Players. How could it? None of the original Players are around anymore to be named in a treaty. Sil doesn’t let us leave the grounds anyway.”
I stare quietly at the paint. This too? Question marks prod at my mind. The wall was never fully sealed. The Three Compliments Rule is complete fiction. Mimicry—fortunately—doesn’t involve skinning a victim to take their shape.
How many lies did we foolishly accept as truth? How many more are there?
Jude collapses onto the bed without bothering to remove his jewelry, making himself at home, long legs dangling off the mattress. But his breaths are uneven, ragged. Wincing, he lifts himself to shrug off his coat.
My eyes widen. His sleeve is soaked through.
Jude curses as he inspects the wound. “Don’t tell Cora, will you?” he says. “I made her restitch this shirt a week ago.”
“Don’t mess with it,” I say, retrieving the supplies I bought. “And take that off.”
“Such excuses.” Jude frowns at his ruined sleeve. “If you want me to undress, you can just ask nicely.”
I toss the healer’s kit at him. “Fine. Suffer.”
“All right. All right.” He laughs on a wheeze, putting his hands up and wincing again at the movement. “I’ll quit teasing.” He goes back to working the buttons on his shirt, muttering about how Cicero will probably punish him with hideous costumes as vengeance.
I ignore the butterflies in my stomach as he tosses his shirt aside and unpack the healer’s kit—making a stern point of not giving him the attention he’s always after.
But by the heat that floods my cheeks when I glance up at the wide expanse of Jude’s shoulders, the contours of muscle laced with golden veins, I think I fail extravagantly.
I clear my throat and avert my eyes to the gold coin that hangs from a thin chain at his neck—a beaming Comedy mask pressed into its face.
But when Jude twists to get a better look at the cut on his arm, the coin turns, revealing Tragedy’s sullen mask on the other side.
Head down, I lay the gauze out on the mattress beside a long cloth bandage and a small linen pouch of coiled catgut. There’s an astringent made of what might be vinegar and honey, but one glimpse at the wound makes me pretty certain none of it will do much.
The mattress sits too low, so I angle my knees on the floor and soak the cloth in the mixture before setting to work on cleaning the cut, ignoring Jude’s accusations that I’m trying to torture him.
“Are you still not going to tell me what that is?” I ask of the gleaming gash I spotted on his opposite shoulder when we left the Playhouse. Since then, it’s created a mapwork of golden veins down his chest and back. Whatever they are, they clearly aren’t related to this cut on his arm.
And they’re spreading.
The disturbing image of Gene Hunt’s skin nudges at my mind.
He shakes his head once. “There’s no mending that kind. Don’t worry over it.”
The laceration Dorian gifted him cuts deep into the muscle, closer to bone than I think either of us wants to admit. And the blade clearly didn’t rake clean across his skin—in fact, it looks like it was hacked into it in a brazen attempt to relieve Jude of his arm.
“Eleutheraen gold?”
“Gilded with it, maybe,” he says, making a face at his arm. “If it were pure, I’d probably be practicing my penmanship with my other hand right about now.”
“How did—” I sit back, suspicious. “You didn’t have any weapons.” I’m not sure I mean that as a question, but he answers it like one.
“Rib cages tear open easily enough without weapons.”
I almost drop the bronzed, curved suture needle I’m threading as my stomach turns. Best not ask questions I don’t want answers to, I guess.
“And get that away from me,” he adds sourly.
I blink. “What, a needle? You’re afraid of needles?”
Jude makes a show of looking deeply insulted as I break into laughter, until he grumbles at me to get the stitches over with.
“Here I was, thinking Players didn’t fear anything,” I say, pulling the first clumsy suture through while he does his very best to appear sad and noble. I roll my eyes, wondering if he was this melodramatic before becoming immortal.
“Where’d you learn this anyway?” he asks miserably. “Or do you just specialize in victimizing poor Players like me?”
The brown sutures leave a trail of uneven, spiderlike stitches across his skin, which Jude is none too pleased about.
“I was going to study healing. At school. Spent so much time looking for ways to fix whatever was happening to me, I thought I’d be good at it.
” I omit that I’ve never actually had to stitch anything up before, since I’m sure he’d dive out the nearest window.
Becoming a healer sounded fine enough, but I never imagined needing to mend a Player.
I never imagined one showing up to help me, either.
I tug on the needle and thread, forming another misshapen X, and Jude groans—from pain or vanity, I’m not sure.
“We do, by the way,” he says a moment later. “Players. We get scared, too. And maybe you’re right to call me a coward for it.”
I flinch, pausing with the needle raised again. That accusation ran out of my mouth a little impulsively, but I never expected him to agree with it. The astonishment must read on my face because he adds, “You don’t believe me.”
An angry lump forms in my throat, bitterness festering under my skin—toward him, toward the Players I grew up fearing. Toward whichever one broke my family. “I don’t see what Players have to be afraid of.”
His attention moves to his open hand. He closes it into a fist, lets it fall open again. “I didn’t want Lead Player, never wanted the standing that comes with it. My entire life these days, it seems, comes down to reputation.” He exhales.
“You didn’t want to be Lead Player?” I reply, startled by his sincerity and even more curious.
I put my focus back on aiming the needle through his flesh and pull it through.
He’s the face of the Playhouse, granted more power and prestige than his castmates.
Sil seems to rely on him like a second-in-command.
He doesn’t even notice the pinch of the thread now as I sew up the last of the wound, seemingly lost to his own thoughts. “I came to the Playhouse like you did. Angry and powerless. Hell-bent on vengeance at the time. The worst part is I got what I wanted.”
I shudder at the idea, giving up your humanity for revenge. “Is it worth living in a cage?” Forever, I don’t add. Until someone kills you for your place.
“Well, it’s a very nice cage,” he defends. “Nicer when someone isn’t rattling the bars of it, too.” He throws me a pointed look, and I snort. “There are worse things than being trapped.”
“I don’t think that’s true. It seems awful.”
A sharp edge of concern cuts into Jude’s expression, but it vanishes too quickly to be sure if I imagined it. “It’s safer,” is all he says.
Damn, that suture is crooked. He’s going to throw a fit about that later. But the flimsy flicker of the oil lamp on the table offers little light to see what I’m doing.
“Was it enough? To be able to let it go?” I snip the end of the thread and tie it off, then reach for a bandage. “Revenge.”
“I’m still waiting to find out.” Something about the way he says it sets a chill in the air.
Mattia’s warning calls to my mind. Be careful of Jude. All he knows is winning.
“Immortality takes from you,” he says. “It’s a slow taking. And power. Gods, power takes more. Power breaks you into pieces you never knew were there. It all comes at a cost.”
My hands work the bandage into a knot, a question on my tongue. “What was the cost?”
Jude watches the floor, blank. “Freedom.”
My mind conjures the gates of the Playhouse, that golden cage. All the Players kept inside like expensive birds. “Was it worth it?”
His eyes flicker up. “Life is a game of playing the cards you’re dealt and then justifying them so you can sleep at night.” He bites down on his jaw, like he didn’t mean to let those words escape.
“Do you sleep at night?” I tease to lighten the moment, securing the bandage.
He tilts his head, a spark sliding behind his eyes. “What, are you looking to find out? My dressing room is usually unlocked, you know. You’re welcome anytime.”