Page 33 of Play of Shadows

Ajelaine.

She was waiting for him– shehadbeen waiting for him, for hours. There had been a message– a promise – brought in secret by those whose loyalties they both trusted. As much as one could trust anyone these days . . .

‘What is he doing?’ a voice muttered.

I stumbled back a step, suddenly aware of the audience. Theygazed up at me like row upon row of unquiet ghosts believing the living had come to stage performances for their benefit, that they might while away the long hours of eternal damnation. When I looked down at my feet, I saw both the groundandthe stage. When I pressed down with the heel of my boot, I felt both the softness of the turf and the solid boards. I glanced up to find both a grey-blue clouded sky, just dark enough for the first stars to blink into wakefulness, and beyond it, the painted ceiling of the Operato Belleza, its hanging lanterns swaying gently from their chains.

And just a few feet away was Roslyn, in her cheap blue gown with paste jewels around her neck—

—and Ajelaine, who disdained such frippery, her leather riding trousers worn from much use, her own boots muddy, hair more chestnut than gold, tied back so as not to hang down upon the lute she held in her arms as she stared back at me.

‘Raphan?’ she asked.

In the script it was always ‘Corbier’ or ‘the Dread Archduke’ or ‘the Red-Eyed Raven’. But Ajelaine had just called me Raphan. . .

From behind me came another voice. ‘The line, lad!’ Shoville whispered urgently. ‘Give them the line: “I come for you, and none shall stay my hand.”’

I tried to comply, but my mouth refused to utter the words. I stayed where I was, hidden in the shadows of swaying trees, the leaves tickling the short black whiskers on my cheeks. I felt Shoville try to push me from behind to take my place at centre stage, but I didn’t move, because the scene playing out before me wasn’t the one Shoville had written.

Ajelaine wasn’t alone.

‘A woman of sorrows,’ I called out loudly, turning to the auditorium as I shifted into voca déosi, the voice of the gods, where one actor acts as narrator for the audience, rather thanplaying the scene on stage. ‘Every day she comes to this place. Every day she sings that same song.’

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Shoville from the wings, quiet enough that only I could hear him.

‘Two men,’ I declared, even louder. I pointed to the opposite side of the stage where Roslyn stood alone, masking her confusion by idly plucking the strings of her lute and waiting, as the others must surely be, to find out what on earth I was up to. ‘Loyal lieutenants of Pierzi’s personal guard,’ I went on, ‘confidants he trusts– not merely with his own life, but with beloved Ajelaine’s honour.’

‘Seven Hells,’ Shoville muttered, and I heard the clomping of his feet as he ran behind the back curtain to grab whoever he could find to take up the new roles.

Roslyn, bless her actor’s soul, picked up the cue without hesitation. ‘I know you’re there,’ she said, not deigning to look behind her. ‘You’re always watching, aren’t you?’

A moment later, Teo and Beretto, still dressed in their shoddy armour from the opening battle scene, walked out on stage. When I blinked away the sweat at the corners of my eyes, I saw in their place two very different men: refined officers, elegantly clothed in Pierzi’s colours. ‘We. . . merely seek to protect you,’ Teo mumbled awkwardly, even as the broad-shouldered man who shared his place on the stage, the one who’d walked upon the grass beneath the darkening sky, uttered words that were similar, yet infused with barely hidden scorn.

‘The forest is a dangerous place for a woman alone when night falls, my Lady,’ Beretto said more confidently. His own choice of words and demeanour were astonishingly close to those of his shadow, who also had a head of thick red hair, though with a considerably more neatly trimmed beard.

Roslyn refused to look at them, and so too did Ajelaine, who hastily slid a notebook covered with green leather into a canvasbag at her feet. Was this a diary she meant to hide from prying eyes?

‘A castle can be a dangerous place for a woman alone, too,’ she said. Or perhaps it was Roslyn who’d said it and Ajelaine had given a completely different response? It was becoming harder and harder for me to distinguish between events transpiring on the stage and those which had taken place outside that castle a hundred years in the past.

Perhaps the closer we match what really happened, the closer the two worlds will become. . .

In the past, Pierzi’s lieutenants were trying to step around Ajelaine to get a look at whatever she’d been doing. I tried to peer closer myself, to somehow pierce the veil and see what so troubled the two men, but was jolted back to the stage when Roslyn played the line for a joke, holding up her lute and with a laugh, saying, ‘Besides, I come here well-armed, my Lords!’

But next to her, the real Ajelaine had drawn a narrow-bladed smallsword from the scabbard at her side. ‘Here be all the defence a woman needs, my Lords.’

While Pierzi’s guards looked upon Ajelaine with a mixture of uncertainty and contempt, Beretto and Teo stared at me, waiting.

They need to know what to do next. . .

I turned back to the audience, wrenched in two as some part of me continued to gaze at Ajelaine. It was like being a puppet whose strings were being pulled by two different masters.

‘It is the game we all play,’ I announced to the audience, ‘one of subtle threats and promised punishments held in check until the return of the prince. For though all know Pierzi’s love binds him utterly to Ajelaine, what is less certain to those at court is her fidelity to him.’

Murmurs erupted from the spectators, floating like the mist above the grass. An urgency prickled at the back of my mind,warning me that this strange moment was coming to an end.

‘As ever,’ I went on, ‘the game ends with the two guards leaving Ajelaine alone, knowing that for all her defiance, she will soon return to the castle and to her private chambers, as much a cell as a refuge.’

Beretto and Teo began to turn away, but the two lieutenants in whose place they stood did not.

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