Tal winced at the accident and smiled a weak apology. The distraction almost caused him to miss the incoming attacks. He parried one blade and leaped over the other. When the guard swung again, he leaped up to stamp on the blade, trapping it on the wall. His kick missed the guard's face by less than an inch, and the man flipped backward to lay still.
'Your reign was not ordained, O faithless prince,' declared Presbart, brandishing his own sword.
The first guard grabbed a spear from the back wall and thrust at Tal's head. Tal parried easily, then bound the spear's shaft with his sword and thrust it into the baron's sword, blocking them both.
Tal leaped from the battlement to arch over both men. He twisted gracefully to land facing them from behind. Still distracted by his earlier blunder, he neglected to bend his knees to cushion the blow. The impact of his body sent a booming echo through the trapdoor room below.
Before his foes could turn around, Tal thrust his blade under the arm of the guard, who cried out, clutched his heart, and fell to the floor. The baron dropped his sword and ran to hide behind the stage right pillar. Tal followed, slashing first on one side, then the other, as the cowardly baron dodged.
'In faith, I am a prince no more than thou,' said Tal, 'As this, my final answer to your base demands will… oh, dark and empty. What's the line?'
'That's enough,' said Quickly from the floor. Her big arms were crossed over her chest, and she gnawed on the stem of her unlit pipe.
'I almost had it,' said Tal, walking to the edge of the stage. 'The sword going off the stage threw me. We should probably reverse that so it goes backstage.'
Quickly nodded. 'Right. Show Mallion what to do.'
'You're giving the part to him?'
Mallion was the most beautiful man in the Wide Realms troupe, and he knew it. Even at nearly thirty, he looked only a few years older than Tal and the other young players. They all teased him for spending so much money on skin creams, hair tonics, and eye cosmetics, but his flawless complexion and rich black curls garnered him a flock of adoring admirers after each performance. Worse yet, in Tal's opinion, he really was a fine actor with tremendous range. His elocution was second only to Presbart's rolling phrases, and he was one of Tal's few rivals for physical scenes.
Behind Quickly, Mallion buffed his nails on his chest. Beside him, Sivana flicked his ear and shot Tal a sympathetic wink. With Mallion and Tal, she was one of the most accomplished stage fencers in the company. Of them, only Tal had any real weapons training, but Sivana's lithe, androgynous figure made her a better foil for the slender Mallion. Both of them squeezed together would barely make one Tal.
'He's better for it, Tal. You know that.' Quickly beckoned him down from the stage. He leaped the rail and landed heavily on the ground. Walnut shells left by last night's groundling's crunched under his feet. 'Besides, one more vault like that one and you'll go straight through to the Nine Hells.'
'I can fall into a roll, instead,' he said. 'Or we could move the wall to curve around there, and…'
'I've made up my mind, Tal, my lad You're good, especially at the swordplay, but Mallion makes the better villain.'
As if to prove the point, the handsome actor leered menacingly behind Quickly. Without looking, she poked him in the chest with a beefy elbow.
'Oof,' he said with exaggerated injury. Then he smoothed his neat beard in a gesture that made Tal think of a cat cleaning itself.
'What about me?' said Tal. Hearing the whining in his own voice made everything that much worse.
'I was thinking of Maeroven,' said Quickly.
Tal rolled his eyes. He didn't want to play the bumbling cook. 'But I played the nurse in The Curse of Brynwater Abbey' he complained. 'People will start expecting me to wear a dress every time I get on stage.'
'You should have thought about that before you perfected her voice,' said Quickly.
Tal wasn't so distracted that he didn't catch the change in her tone. He was about to suffer a tweaked nose.
'What voice is that?' he asked innocently.
Both Mallion and Sivana were hiding their faces. They'd told her about Tal's Mistress Quickly imitation, which he was careful to do only well out of the troupe leader's hearing.
'You know the one,' said the brawny woman, slapping him on the bottom. ' 'No, no, that's all wrong! Say it with guts. With guts!''
Now the entire company broke into laughter. Sivana actually fell onto her back, kicking the empty air. She shook her head back and forth, sweeping the hard packed ground with her hair, which was black this month. No one could agree on its natural color, which was the source of speculation even among the majority of the company, whom she'd taken to bed.
'That's not it,' said Tal. 'It's more like, 'What's the matter with you street buskers? Leave your spines backstage? Stand up straight and tell me that!' '
The laughter turned to wails and gasps, and even Quickly herself was fanning herself with one meaty hand.
'You're a good play, Tal,' said Quickly with another sharp swat to his buttock. 'Glad you understand about the part.'
He did understand, but Tal still felt a strong pang of disappointment. For months he'd been pestering Quickly to give him a role in which he could show off all he'd learned at Master Ferrick's. Despite all his auditions, he always ended up with a supporting role, usually a comic foil or a character with a peculiar voice. He had no one to blame but himself for the latter, since he'd been mimicking the butts of his jokes since he was a small boy.
Quickly turned to address the company at large. 'All right, you bunch of street buskers…' She paused for the laugh. 'Back here tomorrow, in costume by noon. Don't forget your wands for the jig.'
Half the company moaned at the reminder. Since last summer, Quickly began adding a jig to the end of the tragedies. She said it was to give people a lift after all the death and despair. Sivana joked that it was to scare the audience out of the playhouse so the players had a fair chance to get a seat at the alehouses before the places were filled. Tal liked the absurdity of showing the dead princes and queens dancing merrily after their death scenes, shaking their skull-topped wands for the audience. It was a reminder that nothing was real on the stage.
'Hey!' called a voice from the first balcony. Chaney hoisted a pair of leather tankards and set them on the railing. 'I brought you something from the ale cart.'
Tal scrambled up a beam to the middle gallery. He was nowhere as nimble as Lommy, but he was becoming quite the climber thanks to all the time he spent helping Quickly repair the thatched roof after the winter storms. It gave him a workout as well as an excuse to avoid the tallhouse, where Thamalon had been sending him messages. Tal refused to read them. He was still angry about Thamalon's lecture about Larajin.
'Thanks,' he said to Chaney, taking the tankard and draining it in one long draught.
'Nice one! I thought you were taking it easier these days.'
'Special occasion,' said Tal, wiping the foam from his upper lip.
'So I see. You were pretty good up there, but I did worry you'd go right through that floor.'
'That's ridiculous. It's an excellent floor. I reinforced it myself only last month.'
'Well, there was that business with the sword, too.'
'Nobody was hurt.'
'And it might have helped if you'd remembered your lines.'
'All right,' sighed Tal. 'That part was a problem.'
'Want another drink? I think I've got a few fivestars left.'
'No, thanks. Let's get out of here.'
As they rose to leave, Chancy spotted someone on the far side of the gallery. 'What's she doing here?'
Tal followed Chaney's gaze until it came to Feena, sitting alone in the gentlemen's gallery. She wore a simple blue dress over a cream blouse, without the night-blue cloak she usually wore. Someone had embroidered the dress with bright green and yellow leaf patterns, and Tal wondered whether Feena had done the work herself.
Despite the efforts, she still looked like a country girl, but more like one visiting the city to see the sights. Tal almost expected her to dart away, as she did when she first began spying on him last winter. Instead, she walked up to the railing dividing the gentleman's gallery from the common seats.
Tal considered whether he should just walk away. He was in no mood for her arrogant preaching, even
