Page 61 of Play of Shadows
Shoville looked stricken. ‘The mob won’t let us take her down. They fear reprisals from the Iron Orchids, and the city guard are refusing to disperse the crowds. I sent word to the duke, informing him that we had no choice but to abandon the play—’ He reached into his shirt and produced a rolled-up piece of parchment with a broken wax seal on it. ‘His Grace’s reply was delivered by that woman– the spy or assassin or whatever she is.’
I took the little scroll and unfurled it to find just two lines, written in a fine hand in rich black ink. The first line read, ‘From his Grace, Duke Firan Monsegino, his heartfelt condolences.’
The second was even shorter: ‘The show must go on.’
Chapter 29
The Warning
‘I want to do something a little different tonight– give the punters a bit of a show. Something to talk about in their salons in the morning.’
Roslyn’s words wouldn’t stop echoing in my head. Every time I glanced around the crowded rehearsal hall, I expected to find her spectral form floating above us, a ghostly queen crowned in iron, the spikes protruding from her skull warning of the fate awaiting any actor foolish enough to believe their art made them special. Safe.
The air inside the hall tasted heavy, ashen, as if Grigo, our grizzled one-handed pyrotechnics expert, had been setting off smoke-pots and flash-jars for a battle scene. But Grigo was sitting hunched in a corner, wiping away tears with his forearm, his mumbling lost amid the general cacophony of shouting, wailing and clomping of feet. The Knights of the Curtain shuffled about like confused horses whose newly dead riders had not yet fallen from the saddle.
‘Why haven’t the city guard taken her down yet?’ Teo demanded, slamming his fist into his palm as he stared out of the window at Roslyn’s bare feet swaying back and forth like a clock’s pendulum.
‘She’s just hanging there like a sack of meat,’ Cileila said. Her voice was oddly airy for a woman nearly as tall and broad as Beretto. The carpenter hadn’t appeared to notice that her big, strong hands were clenching and unclenching, almost of their own volition. ‘Can we not pull her down ourselves? We have ladders– I could fashion a coffin for her. We could make sure she’s decent before her family sees her. . .’
It was the longest speech the notoriously taciturn carpenter had made all year.
Her words were answered by a bottomless growl: Abastrini was standing beside the window, looking ridiculous and impotent in the golden Prince Pierzi armour he’d donned for the rehearsal. ‘The Iron Orchids hide among the witnesses,’ he said, upper lip curled as he stared at the crowds below. ‘They wait to mark any who would dare desecrate their art.’
Cileila stamped a heavy-booted foot against the floor. ‘What do you mean, “desecrate their art”? How can you call what they did “art”?’
Abastrini gestured towards the back wall and the auditorium beyond. ‘Last night we put on our production.’ He tapped a finger against the window. ‘Today they have offered their own in response.’
‘Saint Birgid-who-weeps-rivers protect us,’ Grigo swore, still crouched in the corner. A dozen others took up the futile prayer.
‘Why is this happening to us?’ Bida cried, wiping her tears with her long blonde hair. She was barely twenty years old and far more of a match for the Ajelaine depicted in the histories than Roslyn had ever been. We all knew how precariously close Shoville had come to casting her in the role.
‘This was my fault,’ the director whispered.
‘On that we finally agree,’ Abastrini said. His voice was cold, callous, utterly devoid of his customary melodramatic delivery. He left the window and began walking slowly towards the manwho had once been a brother to him, if the stories were to be believed, just as Beretto was now to me.
‘The lives of the cast and crew are in the hands of the Directore Principale,’ Abastrini said, visibly baiting Shoville. ‘You should have hired bully-boys to guard Roslyn last night, but as usual, you penny-pinching pustule, you did nothing.’
The accusation struck me as unfair– who ever heard of an actor being given a bodyguard? But Abastrini’s pace was increasing as he approached Shoville, a siege-engine about to crash through gates too old to resist.
I stepped between them, fully expecting to be bowled over by Abastrini’s bulk, but in the end it was only words that he hurled at Shoville. ‘You damnable canker!’ he bellowed. ‘You allowed our Roz to play Lady Ajelaine not as the chaste, demure, devoted wife of Prince Pierzi the audience demands, but as a wanton slut– nay, a whore!’
‘Roz was no whore,’ Shoville answered back, even as he withered under Abastrini’s towering bulk. ‘She played the part true and I’ll not have it said otherwise—’
‘Youknow that andIknow that, you blasted dung-weasel!’ He swung an arm out to point at the outer wall of the rehearsal hall. ‘The nobles of this city who name their daughters after the virtuous Ajelaine? The Iron Orchids who claim her favoured flower as their symbol?Theydon’t know that! What they saw last night was an actor portraying their sainted heroine as the illicit lover of a rebel and a child-slayer—’
‘O may the Gods of Love and Craft forgive me,’ Shoville begged, falling to his knees. ‘What have I done?’
It wasn’t you, I thought.It was me.
A choking silence fell over the hall as we drowned beneath the unbearable truth of Abastrini’s words. Roz had meant her performance to be a mischievous wink to the crowd’s more salacious fantasies, a ribald jest to lure chuckles and lightlydisapproving tut-tutsfrom the audience. Nothing more would have come of it, had I not unexpectedly transmuted her pantomimed lust into something purer, something far more dangerous: a kind of testimony. . . testimony someone in this city would not abide.
‘Roslyn’s death was a warning,’ I said. ‘Whoever commands the Iron Orchids wants our play stopped– that’s the price for our safety.’
The doors at the end of the hall slammed open as Beretto stormed in. ‘Which is precisely why we must continue,’ he thundered. ‘We will show these jumped-up thugs what happens to those who threaten the players’ art!’
To me, it was as if the great God War himself had descended upon us.
Others were less awed.
