Llewyn lurked nearby, waiting his turn in Roni’s chair.He never had any lines, but when extra bodies were needed, particularly for battle scenes, Damon and Afanan twisted his arm until he agreed to go on stage.Fortunately the make-up defrayed some of the agony of so many strangers’ eyes.
‘Why not add to this one?’Afanan suggested, organising the stones she would deploy in the night’s performance—none more than a single-faceted chip, carrying little power.She kept her more potent magics—the gem that bound the greater half of the raven fiend among them—under lock and key in her wagon.‘After Abal defeats the monstrous horde, he spends some time at the green tower before riding home to his castle, and is greeted by cheers and roaring applause.You could bring the audience into it.Have Jareth walk through them to the stage, turn them into Abal’s liberated subjects.’
Damon frowned, eliciting a tut from Roni and a reminder to keep his face still.
‘That wouldn’t be accurate,’ he mumbled, trying to move his mouth as little as possible.‘Abal already had the power of the Old Stones when he won his victory.’
Afanan looked up from her table with a soft smile.‘Ach, my boy, no history is accurate.A map cannot be as vast as the territory it depicts, can it?There must always be details left out, others added, to suit the use and purpose of the mapmaker.’
‘Entertainment is paramount, but not at the expense of honesty.I strive for accuracy, even if they are just plays on the stage,’ Damon said firmly, eliciting a pinch to the ear from Roni.
‘An admirable goal,’ Afanan said.‘But every history is only a tale we tell ourselves.For comfort.For context.Or, yes, for amusement.We shape them to justify cruelty or motivate kindness, or to explain the present world.Perhaps the First Folk, in their immortality, wrote true histories.But their tales are lost to us, alas.’
The tent flap whipped open as Siwan burst into the room, dressed all in black lace.
‘Ta-da!’She twirled, making the layers of her skirt spin around her knees.Roni paused in painting Damon to applaud.Harwick followed suit, prompting Spil to pinch his ear until he sat still.
‘It looks lovely, dear,’ Roni said.
Siwan beamed at her, then at Damon.‘What do you think?’
Damon’s make-up did little to hide his blush.Llewyn suppressed a smile.Though he had never experienced such affections himself, it amused and delighted him to witness the feelings that moved between Siwan and Damon—so obvious to the adults of the troupe, though neither youth had yet acknowledged them.But a worm of worry always gnawed at his mind.However adorable their budding romance, if Damon broke Siwan’s heart, the consequences might be far more dire than bruised feelings and fractured bonds.The raven fiend had nearly broken free of Afanan’s spell before, and at far less provocation.
‘Gorgeous,’ Damon sputtered at last.‘The dress, I mean.How long did it take?’
‘Oh, a while.’Siwan shot Llewyn a meaningful look.‘I’ve been waiting for this night forages.’
‘And the mask?’Llewyn said.
She rolled her eyes, then crossed to Roni’s foldable sewing desk and retrieved it with a flourish.A construction of paper, rags and paste, lightweight but layered for strength.Unlike the other masks in the troupe’s wardrobe, its eyes were clouded by hemispheres of darkened glass to hide the yellow tint to her sclera.The mask had been dyed with ink until it was black as a moonless night—nearly as black as her hair.Raven and crow feathers swept down to cover her cheekbones and jaw, leaving only her mouth and chin exposed.
‘There,’ she said dryly.‘Is that enough?’
Of course not.The mask was a glamour, but every glamour could be broken.No defence would ever protect her fully from the searching eye of the Grey Lady.Nor from the dogmatic brutality of the Mortal Church, nor the grasping hands of those sorcerers and druids who would see her only as a font of power or a threat, and not as a young girl, once bright and bubbly, slowly clawing her way back from the shadowed depths into which her father had cast her.
‘You think she can do this?’Llewyn asked Afanan.‘Without…?’
Afanan sighed, as though his fears were not perfectly founded.‘Siwan, if you start to get overwhelmed…?’
‘Pause, keep playing, take slow breaths.’Though the mask hid her expression, Llewyn could hear the aggrieved boredom in her voice.‘Calm myself down, then launch into the next verse.’
‘No one will notice anyway,’ Damon offered.‘They’ll just think it’s your own spin on the song.A little tweak for personal flavour.Ayden does it all the time.’
Llewyn didn’t care a tin bit for the audience’s reaction—only for Siwan’s safety, and that the monster bound to her soul did not wake.
Another tent-flap flew open.‘What are you lot waiting for?’Jareth fumed through the lines of his make-up, all artfully placed to accentuate his jaw and the heroic planes of his face.He pointed at Damon with his prop war hammer.‘There’s a crowd of dozens waiting out there, and you’re still inmake-up?You have the opening soliloquy, jackass!’
Minutes later, they were all in their places: Roni still in the tent with brush and needle and thread to repair any smudges or tears; Siwan with Ayden and Mirelle in the musicians’ pit; Llewyn lingering anxiously, while Damon strode out to scattered cheers and applause and one drunken shout of ‘Finally!’
Afanan lingered a moment backstage.She touched Llewyn’s arm, gently.‘You should be proud of her,’ she said.‘And of yourself.Fear so deep-set in the body and mind is no easy thing to overcome.’
A protest came to his tongue—that he had far from overcome his fear, that it gnawed at him constantly.But she winked and was away to her place behind the stage.
Siwan and the other musicians played a few bars of a heroic theme to quiet the audience, then Damon launched into his opening speech—a harrowing account of the days of chaos that had gripped the world in the wake of the First Folk’s Vanishing: the fading of what gifts they had left to mortalkind; the unleashing of the weapons, plagues, and monsters they had created and abandoned without guard; the wars and ruin as would-be kings and emperors battled to fill the void left by their absent power.Gradually the account narrowed on the northwest corner of the world, on Abal the Protector and his desperate band of survivors as they fled the rampaging hordes of the Beast-King of Galca, seeking a new home in what would, in time, become Parwys.
The play proceeded as it had the dozens of times the troupe had performed it before, with Jareth as Abal in his bear-skin cloak rallying the petty lords of the land against the encroaching Beast-King.The other actors took their turns on the stage, each initially resisting Abal’s rule, only to be won over to his cause.Tula, her lithe acrobat’s limbs well framed by Efred of Forgard’s martial tunic, gave in, at last, to an appeal to honour.As it always did, Harwick’s tree trunk of a bicep burst his shirt sleeve—along a weak seam placed just for that purpose—as Abal bested Vangar of Cilbran in a contest of strength.Spil dabbed his eyes with one of his juggling kerchiefs to portray Warryn of Afondir weeping for his daughter’s death at the Beast-King’s hands.And lastly, Trick, the jester and Damon’s former tumbling partner, elicited the loudest laughs of the evening with his Barwon of Glascoed, agreeing to an alliance only after Abal outdid him in a game of wordplay.
The sealing of each alliance provoked an attack from one of the Beast-King’s generals, all of whom Llewyn played, donning a different costume and mask to depict each terrible monstrosity.One costume—that of Ulik Four-Axes—even involved a system of ropes and wooden dowels by which he moved a set of false arms mounted on his shoulders.Roles that featured no lines, but a great deal of guttural yelling, and which involved a mass of fabric, make-up and masks that defrayed the discomfort of so many eyes on him at once.
