I clutch my arms close to my waist, horrified at the state of my figure.
Jude curses under his breath.
Strips of skin have begun to peel like tree bark, gold glinting beneath. There’s a long, ugly line raised across my waist, staining my cream-colored shift. I tense, slowly lifting two fingers to a particularly tattered area at my collarbone, smoothing the skin back down.
“Don’t touch it,” Sil orders, emerging from behind the mirror with a box that he pulls a makeup palette from, slated with skin tones that look just like mine.
He extracts a brush from its base and runs it over the wound, roughly concealing where gold bleeds, right at the scars of my mark. I grit my teeth. Like makeup will conceal the fact that my body is peeling off me. “I’m not going onstage.”
“Youare,” he interrupts. “You will doexactlywhat is scripted for you or—” Sil grips a lock of my hair and pulls.
It falls right out, lands on the floor in a pathetic curl. I didn’t even feel the pull.
The curse,my mind thinks automatically. No, not a curse at all. A symptom of a dying character, of going off script. The irony of coming full circle feels like a slap in the face.
“Thiswill get much worse. If you have any love for your cast, Riven”—Sil meets my eyes in the mirror with meaning—“any of them,” he says again as Cicero flies in and begins sewing me into the gown, “you will go out there.”
“I have no love for my cast or this theatre,” I lie.
“Fine, then. If you have any love for these mortals like you claim,” Sil counters. He laughs to himself, like I’m a child concerned about endangering my imaginary friends. “Then you will stay on script. You will win them all over, and you will do it peacefully.”
“I won’t be here to do it if I lose in the arena,” I bite back. If Jude wins instead and ruins his little storyline. “Try me.”
Sil throws his head back and laughs. “Then you will die, Riven. And I will have my Player beneath all of you back. Andshe, I promise you, will have no qualms about destroying whatever blocks her path, as you’ve already demonstrated.” The smile curving his lips is cold. “I do hope we don’t have to resort to it. The world is your stage. Why should we burn half of it down, after all the trouble we’ve gone to in order to take it back?”
My heart sinks like an anchor in my chest. Sil is right. I’m a thin skin tying a monster down from destroying half of Theatron. I can feel her beneath me. She’ll obliterate everything that stands in her way.
I wonder if this is how Gene felt, why she held on for so long.
Sil plucks a gleaming crown from one of Cicero’s boxes, digging it so hard into my scalp that I yelp.
There. I catch it. A sudden twitch of movement from Jude at my call, just barely a crack in that icy exterior.
“We will see you at the doors, Jude,” Sil states, also catching this.
Jude blinks several times, like he’s struggling to remember something. I catch his eye in the mirror, and for a moment, I think I see a glimpse of him, hesitating. “Sil, perhaps I can—”
SIL: “We will see you out there.”
Fear blooms in my chest as that emptiness crosses Jude’s face again, and I wonder if I’ve lost him for good as he returns a tense look at us both before vanishing out the door, locking onto his script again. My mouth opens, as if to call him back, but the words can’t seem to escape my tongue.
He leaves me with Sil, who shoos out a confused Cicero and takes to lacing up the back of my dress himself. “No need to pit all your anger on Jude,” he says.
“He’s been lying to me all this—” I inhale sharply when Sil pulls the laces too tight.
He catches my eye in the mirror. “He is what he is. You may be my most resilient Player, Riven, but you had best believe Jude is my most loyal. He’s been protecting you.”
“Then he’s done a hell of a job, given where I’m standing right now.”
“Not protecting you from the Playhouse, Riven.” Sil snatches one of my hands and, in a single awful movement, pinches my thumbnail, ripping it clean off. My fingernail detaches easily, like it was glued on.
I buckle, swallowing a howl of pain. I didn’t feel the hair pull, but I feltthat.
“From yourself!” Sil goes on, circling around me where I’m doubled over. He grips my chin, forcing my gaze up to meet his. “You willnotthinkof the things you’ve learned about yourself. About the Playhouse. You will play the role of Riven Hesper, the first Player of the North, crowned triumphant in five days’ time. Do you hear me?”
My fourth wall quakes in my mind.“Methexis,”I whisper to myself as Sil circles around to my back again and feel my Craft beckoning for me from the earth, reaching up from the ground like shadows of gold only I can see below. I reach for it, searching for comfort, for power, forsomethingto make me feel less defenseless than Sil thinks I am.
But my fourth wall is broken now, and so I see what fills the abyss. What hasalwaysfilled the abyss.
