JUDE: “Sil—”
The director cuts him off with a dismissive wave.
SIL: “Look below.” There’s a smile in his voice. “You can run from this anger you harbor. You can lock it away. Or you canuseit. Leash it and make it do your bidding.”
RIVEN: “I’m not angry.” My voice shakes.
I am angry.
SIL: “All my Players are angry. But more importantly, they are allsomething. Often, not what you would expect. Titus, for instance. He lives and speaks and moves out of fear. My darling Parrish’s bones are racked with envy. Arius, always seeking to mend the world around him because he cannot mend himself. And Jude here—”
JUDE: “Enough, Sil. She understands.”
I am angry.I am angry.
SIL: “Do you want to know a secret, Alistaire?” His voice rises, echoing. “That anger you feel. That bitter thing wrapped around your heart. It may not be directed at what you think.”
A dam I didn’t realize existed rumbles in my head. For a moment, I think I know what’s coursing on the other side of it. The thought vanishes.
But the anger doesn’t.
I am angry. I am angry. I am angry.
“Stop pushing back,” Sil roars, his voice now pounding in my ears. “You’re angry, Alistaire! Be angry!”
I am angry—
The thought ceases, and something else fills the space.
I am alone.
The dam in my head breaks. It floods my senses, washes over my skin until it feels like it’s on fire. The feeling spreads, sinks into my heels. But Sil was wrong—it’s too much to leash or contain. It fills me with the urge to run, to bolt from the stage.
But when I try to move, the weight in my heels is too much, and I fall. The palms of my hands crash into the glass stage, so violently that it cracks, and I brace my body to plummet into the watery sea of darkness below.
But the fall never comes.
Instead, my palms sense something warm. I crane my chin up, and the glass doesn’t look so dark anymore.
Instead, a multitude of golden tendrils crawls out from beneath the stage, like a sea beast with a thousand tentacles.
“Bind it, Alistaire.” Jude’s voice. “Now.”
I draw on the feeling, and the tendrils reach up, summoned, wrapping around me, weaving and locking together. Gold seeps into my hands, my clothes, my feet. Craft rises fiercely to the surface, everywhere, seeking a way in.
Before I can stop it, before I canthinkto, I let it.
Craft washes over the platform, brilliant and warm and gold, the gap of darkness closed. Every beat of fury locked away for years pulses through me, reaching up my wrists, my calves.
“Extraordinary,” Sil marvels from somewhere behind me.
For a moment, it feels like I’ve been traveling a thousand nights only to catch a sunrise.
“A bridge,” I hear myself utter, feeling those threads of gold pulse with power. A thread not just to me—those same tendrils connect to the place Jude stands. Elsewhere in the Playhouse, the same Craft must follow the other Players, a shared web that sews their cast together.
The Players.Right. This is a loan of power. This is something tonotget used to.
A hand lowers into my vision as I try to pick myself up. I stare at it for a moment, follow the arm up to Jude, and then grasp it, my legs shaky as he pulls me to my feet. “On three, yes?” Jude says and counts down.
