“Good hunting for the townies at the Feast of Follies,” Vii said to Ileth, quietly.
“We’re performing as soon as the musicians are ready,” Ottavia said, over and over again. “We invite your attendance.”
An artist from Vyenn hastily captured the scene on easels, sketching rough to be filled in with paint later. Ileth watched in astonishment as he made three different sketches of the bridge scene facing different directions from his carefully located stool, each in what had to have been but a minute or two.
The dance began as soon as they finished their procession and the musicians signaled that they were ready. Ileth was at the back with Vii, who kept falling out of line to greet friends. Ileth helped Preen light the footlights ringing their watchpost-stage. Dax and a few musically minded apprentices were warming up. There was another man with arms like a blacksmith, perhaps a local friend of Dax, who supported an awkwardly stringed instrument that must have been difficult to haul around. As he stood with his bow, ready to play it, he looked like he was dancing with a rich man’s coffin. His only bit of costuming was a hat tied on upside down.
Dax had outdone himself. He displayed a bizarre outfit made to look like he was upside down, walking around on his hands. A mannequin head hung down from his backside, hair dangling almost to the ground. She wasn’t sure where his head was hiding in the rigmarole (she finally decided he’d built a wire box around his head), but she saw hands tuning the impeller partly hidden by false footwear. Perhaps he could see a little through the stretched-tight fabric in front of his face.
Ottavia gathered them up and arranged them in performance order. Peak helped Vii with her costume. She’d managed to catch it on something and tear away a part during one of her embraces.
“Remember, it’s no different from the dragons,” Ottavia said. “Make eye contact. Pick someone out in the audience and look at them. If you engage with one, you engage with everyone. And smile!” She nodded at Dax and the music started.
She waited her turn, feeling she would be a bad follow-on to the other dancers.
Seemingly before she could draw breath, it was her turn. She made it through her solo, to some polite applause, nothing like what the opening number with five dancers had. She forgot to make eye contact. She wasn’t even sure she smiled, but she did keep her head up and kept in time to the music, even if Dax sped tempo up on each run-through to give her an extra challenge and keep the audience interested. By the second slide of her third repeat, she was ready to turn him upside down for real. But she finished.
The drill demo with Preen went easier. Ottavia explained the routine as a set of exercises her dancers used to train their muscles and perfect their posing and then stood off to the side. She talked about the delicate balance the troupe tried to maintain, so the performers worked with muscles hot and loose, yet not exhausting themselves, by rotating them on and off the floor for rest and water that would keep the sweat flowing. Having her present, like a protective mother hen keeping watch while her chicks pecked about, gave Ileth the confidence to examine the audience.
The drill began. She recognized Dath Amrits (who had a tapped keg of something hanging at his gut like a mother in her ninth month of expectation) and Hael Dun Huss standing next to him. Amrits in particular seemed to be enjoying himself. Or perhaps he was a cheery drunk.
Dun Huss pointed straight at her and leaned over and said something to Amrits. He chuckled and waggled his eyebrows at her. As Dun Huss shifted to hear Amrits say something, she recognized Rapoto Vor Claymass behind him, standing next to Santeel Dun Troot, who was hardly visible in the crowd, just a bit of her face white like the moon behind mountains.
The sight of Rapoto caused her to flub a leg lift. She recovered and caught up.
Vii’s hand tapped the side of Ileth’s head as they flung themselves left and right, arms rising and falling in synchronization. Ileth glanced over at her and saw that Peak’s repair on Vii’s costume had come undone. Vii’s daringly abbreviated top’s shoulder strap had fallen down her arm and only sweat was keeping the material over her left breast.
“Tit,” Ileth said to Vii out of the corner of her mouth.
“Cow,” Vii whispered back.
“Your top will fall,” Ileth managed through her smile-grimaced teeth.
Vii fixed it in a flash, showing more deftness and skill than Ileth would have believed. She seemed to make it part of the drill. She rewarded Ileth with a smile and a nod.
Rapoto must have seen the byplay, even if he didn’t understand the words over the music. He smiled at her. Santeel leaned close to whisper something in his ear. Ileth picked a different audience member to watch.
It was over just as she was getting comfortable with the idea of performing in front of a crowd. This time there was more applause. “If you are interested in a challenge and working right under the noses of the dragons, we do have vacancies in the troupe,” Ottavia said. “I hope a few of you will consider it. We don’t wear elaborate costumes all the time. And it is an excellent way to get to know some of the dragons.”
Ileth politely waited until the finale, smiling so widely she felt like her cheeks would split. The dancers in the finale took their bows; then Ottavia called the musicians and the rest of the troupe up onstage for a final bow and it was done.
Food, at last. She hurried across the Long Bridge and its festoons of lights.
Her first spot was Caseen’s cold soup. Caseen was messier still; he seemed to be getting one serving in four on himself. The cold soup was tomatoes (how he got them this late in the year she couldn’t imagine; perhaps someone in town jarred them, but they didn’t taste stewed) and spices and mint and something crunchy that was probably dry crumbs, she wasn’t sure, and most miraculously for the end of the year, ice, but the sharp acid chill was welcome to her thirst.
“I hear you’re finding your feet with the dancers, Ileth,” the Master of Novices said as he poured a bowl for Preen.
“I wish I could lose my feet again, sometimes,” Ileth said. “They get very tired.”
“How are things down with the Lodger?”
So he knew about that.
“Yes. He’s much better . . . I-I think.”
His tortured face relaxed and he stared off at something only he could see. “He’s a great old dragon. I’m not sure we’d have our Republic if it wasn’t for him. The first Alliance of Kings about did us in. My grandfather and all three of his brothers died then.”
“Caseen, save some soup for the bowls, would you,” Dath Amrits said, pushing through. He turned to Ileth, and she had to pull back to avoid being knocked flat by his barrel of a belly. “Hear you brought Old Stripes back to life. He talk your ear off about the Imperial Rock? Or has he only worked his way through ten thousand years of ancient dragon history up to now?”
“He’s teaching me some Drakine.”
“Costume’s a daring one, Ileth,” Dun Huss said. He gracefully drew another soup-eating apprentice out of the way before Amrits could bowl him over.
Ileth shrugged and tried to guess what Dun Huss had done as an example of folly. He looked much as he did other times she’d seen him. She realized he had the middle buttons undone on his tunic and his sword-frog was only hooked in two places on his belt, not all three. The madman! What if the Master of Dragoneers saw him like that?
“You two never change,” Caseen said. “Where’s the Borderlander?”
Amrits slapped the keg on his waist. It gave a sloshy, half-empty wet sound, making Ileth think he was sampling his own costuming. “He and Catherix are on watch in the flight cave. You know that worn hunk of old boot leather: only way to get him to attend a party would be to chain him in a box like the Great Efreent and haul him to it in a cart. He’d probably escape even quicker.”