"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 though she and Maleva had saved his life twice. Still, his feelings toward the clergy of Selune had mellowed since his meeting with Dhauna Myritar, and he was curious why Feena had returned. He met her at the rail.
"Well met," he said, hoping the common greeting would hold true this time.
"Well again," she said, glancing at his face only briefly before casting her eyes down at the rail. She did not seem shy so much as uncomfortable, and Tal was pleased to know he wasn't alone in that. "Sorry you didn't get the part you wanted."
Her reminder of his failure annoyed him, especially since he found it hard to believe she was truly sympathetic. "It's good not to get everything you want," he said. "We spoiled rich children have trouble with that."
"I didn't say a thing!" said Feena. She turned to Chancy for corroboration. "Did I say a thing?"
"She didn't say a thing. I'm pretty sure she didn't."
Tal took another of the deep breaths that were becoming the punctuation marks of his life. As he let it out, he said, "You're right. I'm sorry. I must be a little more disappointed about the audition than I thought."
"That's no reason to be sarcastic."
"No," he agreed. "It's no reason at all."
"All right, then," she said.
"All right."
"This could be a long conversation," observed Chaney, "if the two of you keep repeating each other."
They both turned to glare at him.
"Of course, I could help by butting out, couldn't I?"
"Are you-hungry?" asked Tal. "Care to join us for dinner?"
Feena shook her head and opened her mouth to decline, but then she changed her mind. Perhaps it was as difficult for her to be civil as it was for Tal. "Yes, please. I would like that."
They made an unusual spectacle as they strolled west down Sarn Street, two of Selgaunt's most eligible bachelors on either side of an uncultured young woman who might have fallen off a milk wagon. Tal wore Perivel's sword at his side, and even Chaney went armed with a slender blade. After the fight on the High Bridge, they were both more careful not to travel alone. Going armed made them look like bravos, especially when they swaggered down the streets in mockery of their more popular peers.