Chapter 1
 

Predictably, the girl was willing to draw the pint only when the coin was glinting on the bar. Cayden stretched his lips in a parody of a smile as she scooped up the money with one hand and pulled the tap with the other. No glass for him, oh no; leather tankard instead, sealed with tar and riveted with brass and bound to taste of both.
Well, it was alcohol, and that was all that mattered. But if that fool who’d had the bollocks to claim himself a glisker had been any good, Cade would be knocking back whiskey right now, and plenty of it—from a real glass, and with coin to spare for something to eat. Decent drink and his supper had walked out of the tavern a little while ago, jingling in the incompetent’s purse. Glisker, he’d termed himself. Experienced, even. Cade snorted. Probably had about as much Elfenblood in him as the dirty rag the girl was using to mop up the bar. At least he was paid off and gone, and nobody was any the worse for the performance.
Yet when Cade thought about what might have been, if he had the right glisker, one with real talent and real magic—
“Wuzna too gude, wuzzee?”
The accent was excruciating—especially as Cayden had worked so hard to soften his own, distorted during years of schooling not twenty miles from here. Eyeing the young man beside him at the bar, he noted a confusion of features that proclaimed an ancestry so diverse that probably even he didn’t know what to call himself.
“No, he wasn’t too good.” He had to admit it. Honesty was the hallmark of a real artist, or so his Sagemaster had told him. Or maybe it was “truth” that mattered most. They weren’t the same.
“Gotz me a chum c’n do ooshuns better,” the rough voice continued.
“Do you?” Cayden smiled politely and returned his attention to his ale.
“Domn near purely breeded Elferblud, an’ tha’s fact. Givvem withies next show, whyn’t ya?”
Yet another aspiring glisker. Splendid. What was he, the audition manager for every amateur in the kingdom?
Still … they’d gone through four gliskers this year alone, not counting the idiot tonight, never finding the right mix, never finding anyone Cayden could trust with his visions and Jeschenar could trust with his skin and Rafcadion could trust with his sanity. They weren’t anywhere near good enough even to seek Trials, and it was all because they didn’t have the right glisker.
What would it be like, he wondered, to experience that effortless balance of talent and energy and magic that this was supposed to be? It was what all the greatest players had known, what he sensed was going on with the Shadowshapers now that they’d hired Chattim Czillag away from his old group. That nobody had ever heard a name so outrageous, nobody knew where he’d come from or his lineage or the name of his clan—if any—or indeed aught about him mattered not at all. Chattim fit. With the right glisker, a performance became an event, a distinction.
Hells, what was one more tryout, anyway? It wasn’t as if anyone would ever hear about yet another botched playlet, not in this rickety old tavern only half a step inside civilization.
Cade shrugged to himself and glanced down—way down—at the youth beside him. “All right, send him up for the next show.”
Breath hissed between ragged teeth—a sign of delight in a Troll, and of an impending brawl in a Gnome. As he hurried off to find his friend, he moved with the rolling shoulders and splayed knees peculiar to the former, thereby settling the question of his primary ancestry as surely as Cayden’s long-boned height proclaimed his. Watching the little man, recalling the quirks of his accent, for an instant Cade felt a twinge of longing for home. Not for his parents; a bit for his little brother; mostly for their Trollwife, Mistress Mirdley. She’d been strict and kind to him, when all his mother knew how to be was neglectful and harsh.
“Oh, pity the poor little Wizardling!” jeered the Sagemaster’s voice in his head. “How horrid to be you!”
A small commotion behind him jostled him into the bar, and he turned his head to snarl. One more trite old playlet tonight for this unsophisticated crowd, and they could get out of here, get some sleep in the hayloft, and then tomorrow be gone entirely from this village of sour ale and foul manners. And really lousy trimmings, he thought with a gloomy sigh; two nights of this, and they’d barely made enough for the coach fare home. He thought with longing of the brand-new private coach his friend (and rival, though nobody but Cayden knew that yet) Rauel Kevelock had so gleefully described last month, painted in swirling colors like a demented prism, with SHADOWSHAPERS in stark black on both sides. It had bunk beds for when they got tired, and a firepocket for when they got cold. True, the group still had to hire horses from the post stations, but at least they were no longer at the mercy of worn-out springs and a coachman who drank his wages in full before clambering up to take the reins, and—
Someone bumped into him again, knocking his hand against his leather flask of ale. He half-turned and shoved right back. Spindle-boned Cade might be, but Jeska had taught him how to use his fists efficiently rather than his magic haphazardly, and he was just frustrated enough right now to relish the prospect of a punch-up.
Then he saw what had knocked into him.
Even for someone with plenty of Wizardly blood, Cayden was tall. The man whose chest was on a level with his eyes—this man was at least half Giant. Maybe more than half; there was very little mitigating intellect visible in the red-rimmed eyes glaring down on him.
“Uh—sorry,” Cade managed. “Thought you were somebody else.”
“Did ’ee, now?” The depth of his rumble rattled the bottles on the shelves.
Oh, shit.
“Yazz!” exclaimed a light, cheerful voice. “Don’t break him! He’s me new Quill, he is! It’s rich an’ famed he and me will be—but only if ye leave him all his wits an’ bones!”
A slow, fond smile gentled the massive face. Cade turned, wondering if he was more grateful for the rescue or annoyed by the glisker’s arrogance. Because a glisker this had to be, the one promised by the Troll. For an Elf, however, this boy had peculiar taste in friends.
And then all speculation—indeed, all thought—fled Cade’s brain, except for the sure knowledge that he would remember for the rest of his life the instant those huge, melting eyes looked up at him from beneath a shock of coal-black hair.
Those eyes: sparkling with what his Sagemaster called “front and effrontery,” a combination of awful nervousness and awe-inspiring conceit. Cade had been accused of it himself on occasion, but hard lessoning in the brutal school of his own family had taught him to hide any fear behind all the arrogance he could possibly project. This boy was too young yet to have perfected his mask.
Those eyes: a bit too bright with the alcohol downed to get his courage up, trying to hide apprehension that Cade wouldn’t think he was good enough, but not trying at all to disguise that he thought any group of players would be...