Act III Scene XII
“You mean Jude has known who I am. All this time.” The arena echoes my voice back at me.
“But look what his knowledge has cost him!” Sil says, swinging an arm wide to take in the entire stage.
“He’s hanging on by a thread. Tearing his costume.
Forgetting his lines. We only needed him to last long enough to compete in the Great Dionysia and give you his crown.
Then his Player will shed him, too, and begin anew. ”
No. The very idea of Jude being torn from himself, being tossed out in favor of a new role, makes rage boil under my skin.
He’s more than that. He’s more than that to me.
My mind races. Everything looks different now. How he forgot my name. Couldn’t recall his own favorite color. Simple things that should be at the tip of his tongue.
His memory is only as good as my own, false and deceitful. Like a prettily painted house whose walls are filled with rot and decay.
Jude didn’t run into me that first night in the Playhouse. He was waiting. Barely clinging to his set storyline: that of a selfish Player seeking to reclaim his crown.
“Do we all know?” I ask, my voice hoarse. But I think I know the answer.
“Thank the gods, no!” Sil huffs. “Once a fourth wall is broken, it cannot be rebuilt. Characters will start dying from that point forward until the Player sheds them completely.”
A shudder racks my body. It’s begun. I feel it. “Only Jude.”
“Yes. You two have a most inconvenient tendency to find each other, no matter who you’re playing.
” The director scowls. “The more aware you become, the worse it gets. Jude is deteriorating quickly now, but we managed to keep him intact for fifteen years after his fourth wall broke. I’m sure we can at least manage the same for you. ”
He shakes his head. “We have to, Riven. For the sake of my Playhouse, for your cast. To claim what is rightfully ours: our audience. Your audience. Theatron, in its entirety.”
And I realize now that Sil will be satisfied with nothing less. None of us would. We Players feed off their attention; corpses can’t be entertained, controlled. And the bigger our audience, the stronger we’ll become.
We want them alive. We want them groveling. Willing and fooled.
Fooled by me.
So few of you left.
I survey the room where the other auditionees stood at one time. Only, now, I recognize them for what they really were: Players. Tig. Phileas. Thyone. Linos. All of them, just Players in the costumes of auditionees.
There were always more than five of us.
“There’s no casting call. No competition to become a Player.” I have the nerve to sound surprised. “It’s all a performance.”
“The Playhouse is no place for mere mortals, Riven. We entertain the hopeful actors who come through our doors and dismiss them when the first night is through.” He shrugs.
“The Great Dionysia is a beautiful thing. A good show! Let the mortals believe they’re in control.
Let them think they might reach our ranks themselves. ”
Each realization strikes me through the heart, though I can’t pretend I didn’t know, vague as the memories are.
Fate guides the feet of the willing and drags the heels of the defiant.
I shake off the words. I am more than the cards I am dealt. I have to be. Riven has to be.
I think I’ve even grown to like her.
“I am not just a role.” Anger radiates over my every word. “And I will not be shed.”
Concern bleeds into Sil’s expression as he glances down at the Script and back up at me.
“I will not lose another one of you.” He watches my eyes, looking for the thing under my skin that knows him.
It stirs when he grips my shoulders. “You are a character. And you will let my Player go after all is said and done. Do you hear me, Riven? This form is no more real than the characters you play onstage.”
Something wrestles within me at the reminder. Something alive and more aware than before. I smother it. But it’s there. Starving and angry and eager.
“You will let my Player go when it is time,” he repeats, angrier now.
My heart aches, but I don’t dare reach inward for it. Because it isn’t mine. I’m sharing it with a monster. My thoughts, my words, my actions, all of them coming secondary to an ancient creature’s desires to execute a script written long ago.
“The Great Dionysia begins tonight,” says Sil, short.
“A prelude to negotiations with the council in three days’ time.
” He throws his arms out, grandiose. “I want you to change the tide! To make them believe the daughter of a man who broke the bond between worlds can be Theatron’s redeeming grace.
You are the bridge between the Playhouse and them. ”
He smiles proudly. “History is easier to change than you think. All you need is enough people to believe it. And you will make them believe it.”
“They won’t forgive so easily,” I say quietly. And they shouldn’t.
“No, they won’t. But they will wonder. They will want to know why you chose the Playhouse over them.
And your performance will break their reluctance.
” His hand finds my chin, lifting it to face him.
“The heart is stronger than the mind, Riven. Humans abandon their stubborn truths so long as they feel strongly enough inclined to do so.”
His eyes are still that same soft blue, friendly and calm. Not hard or malicious. The relaxed expression of someone who already knows he’s won.
I shake from his grip. “No.”
Sil throws his head back, exasperated. “Do you know what theatre started as? You should. You were there.” He waves his hands.
“Moral plays! Simple Comedies and Tragedies. All designed to teach an audience the difference between right and wrong. You’d be surprised how often people get the two mixed up. ”
Something in me considers this, hesitates. “What gives you the right to determine which is which?”
He blinks, confusion dawning on his face. “That mark did mess you up, didn’t it?”
I don’t think it did, actually. I think maybe I’m seeing the world clearly for once.
Maybe Gene did, too.
“The audience doesn’t matter,” he states.
“They are on a ticking clock. One day, the clock will stop. Then I couldn’t tell you anything else about them, because no one remembers.
But they will remember you. They will come here to see you.
They come here to escape. For meaning and for excitement.
For you to explain to them what is right and what is wrong.
And do you know who is more eager to escape reality than even the audience? ”
I return a glare.
“Actors, Riven! That is what you are.”
“And what are you?” I demand, unable to hold the question back any longer.
Sil stares at me with that awful smile again, far too comfortable where he stands as I boil over with fury. I expect him to claim he’s a god. A monster. An evil, ancient spirit with limitless power.
His answer is none of these things, and somehow worse.
“I am just a man, Riven.”
When I say nothing, Sil goes on. “Not one from here, I’ll admit.” He chuckles.
A man. A man who pulled us out of the well, drained it of its Craft, caged us, leashed us.
My eyes fall on the book in his hands, feeling the thrum of its power in my blood.
With that.
Something awakens in me at the sight of the Script—more than just the lines written for us but a power that runs deep in the Playhouse, binds us to it. To a mortal who stole the power of a god. Part of me longs to grab it from his hands.
The rest of me fears the consequences of touching that book. Remembers the stark emptiness that blotted out the light in Thyone’s eyes when she did.
“It’s a shame, don’t you think, Riven? I offer humans all the entertainment they could ask for. Write them stories and songs and have my Players perform them.”
“You stole them. And us.”
“I improved your world,” he returns, a bitterness to his tone as he laughs sharply. “And so many of them would choose to live without stories at all rather than warm their hearts with the ones I so generously provide.”
Somewhere above us, the great lobby clock sings out a warning call, summoning me for my entrance. The Great Dionysia. The festival is about to begin.
The patience thins in Sil’s voice when I make no move to follow my blocking back upstairs.
“What I’m offering you, Riven, is a permanent escape. As a Player, you never have to deal with the pangs of reality again. You can be anyone. You will bathe in the glow of a spotlight every night. You will be loved by the thousands!”
When I don’t speak, Sil’s smile strains. “Let’s be honest. You aren’t here to avenge anyone. You aren’t here to destroy my Playhouse. You’re here to prove to yourself you hate it. But you can’t. You can’t prove to yourself you’re any better than an actor because you are so much worse.”
“I am better. I am not just an actor—”
The clock chimes again, insistent.
“You aren’t even an actor, Riven!” His voice claws with anger, but I know the desperation in Sil’s face. Not the condescending look of a director corralling an amateur performer, but the disbelieving grievances of a puppeteer arguing with his own puppet.
“You are a character. One that has gone severely off script. You were created for the Playhouse, and you will die in the Playhouse—because you are nothing without it. You are not real. When the Player is done with you, she will shed you and you will be nothing again.”
He takes an unsteady breath, lowering his voice to a warning whisper. “Characters that are too aware are of no use to me.”
“Then why tell me all this? Why make me even more aware?” I yell back at him.
He tilts his head. “Have you heard of deus ex machina, Riven? It’s the part of the story when the gods, higher powers, what have you, must drop in to fix things.
Necessary only when something in the story has gone so horribly wrong that there is no other way to mend it.
And you’ve been going constantly off script since you got home. ”
He walks a circle around me, and his eyes fall to my ruined mark, which gapes open with golden Craft.
“Because of that. That will always run in your blood. But I know you, Riven. Which is why you played your role in every way that mattered. Because deep inside, this life is what you want. You are far from finished here.”
I cup a hand over my mark, wishing it were still there. It was probably the strongest weapon I ever had against my own script. Against the thing inside me.
The clock chimes its final warning. I should be in costume by now, should be heading to the front doors with the rest of my cast.
“And if I fail? If the North doesn’t cooperate and I can’t win them over?”
His face darkens into an expression that plainly conveys, You know the answer.
Sil will finally give up on trying to win them. He’ll wipe them out.
He’ll unleash us to do it.
“They don’t deserve to be slaughtered,” I say under my breath. Though, when I think of Haris, I wonder if that’s more merciful than what will otherwise happen to them.
Sil’s face twists, that anger just inside yanking on its leash. “Then you had better be prepared to convince every one of the council rulers sitting in their seats, waiting for your performance. Because if a single one doesn’t open their gates the day after Dionysia—”
“Do not threaten me,” I bark. “You need me. The Playhouse is nothing without an audience, and your audience is wary of you.”
“Damn it all, Riven, I am simply giving you options. You think I want to see you hurt? You think I want to see any of my Players hurt? I love you. Every one of you.”
My gut twists. He means what he says.
“The game is over,” he announces. “I know every move you will make. I know every thought that will cross your mind. I know everything about you because I wrote it.”
The ruined mark between my collarbones twinges.
“Choose to forget about all of this, best you can,” Sil goes on. “Choose to go back to playing the role of Riven Hesper.”
Something hot stirs under my skin. Power—to persuade, to veil, to retell, desire for eyes on me, forever—I am built of it.
“There will be no leaving the Playhouse for you,” says Sil. “You will perform and win over your audience. You will finally have what you want.”
“And what do I want, Sil?” I dare him.
“Oh, Riven,” Sil says, pitying. “You want everything waiting for you at the end of this Great Dionysia. A cast that you fit into. A home that you belong in.” He clasps his hands together. “An endless audience that desires you.”
Years of disgusted looks and sidelong glances, of strangers whispering and moving to cushion more space between them and me, carousel through my mind. Then the audience singing my name, never tiring of my presence. My heart aches at the contrast.
A world where I am never alone, where I am always loved.
A world where my presence isn’t too much for the space around me.
A home.
The word sings through me, plays my heartstrings in perfect harmony. My heart swells in my chest, and I feel every word I’ve ever spoken on my tongue, every move I’ve ever made in my muscles. Everything I’ve ever done was designed to bring me here.
Suddenly, I want it all so badly, I think I’ll burn from the inside out. My heart longs for it. For home.
Would it be so bad?
“Or?” I croak at last. “If I don’t perform?”
“There is no ‘or,’ Riven,” he says. “There never was.”