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Since the moment they all got out the paint brushes, Hal had had the urge to paint Bolaire instead of the pariah blades. The pink could be a blush on his cheeks. The red could be lipstick. The dark gray could be stripes to turn Bolaire into the haughty gray tabby that he was.
Putting magic paint on a magic mask would be a terrible idea, of course. But after Murray and Azune left, and he and Bolaire were cleaning up backstage, he found himself with soot on his hand, and gave into the urge to play with Bolaire like he used to.
“Some days,” Hal said, “you just have to embrace the absurd.”
I never expected Hal to touch me again after last night in the sewer. He’s seen the worst of me now; surely he must fear to touch me. But his soot-covered fingers are light on my upper lip, and he smiles.
Hal expected Bolaire to hiss like an affronted cat at the crude mustache he’d just drawn, as he had at so many of Hal’s little teases over the years. But instead, his eye-lights danced.
“I’ve always wanted facial hair,” Bolaire said.
Hal cleaned his hands with a rag and laughed at the sight of Bolaire, the elegant crafted lines of him with Hal’s sooty mustache with its twirling ends. He reached out with the rag to wipe it off, but Bolaire batted his hand away.
I haven’t always wanted facial hair, of course. I’ve just fancied it ever since I saw Sir Clynheld with his neatly trimmed goatee in the very first play I witnessed as audience. I smack Hal’s hand away before he can clean it off.
“Leave it. Maybe the boy will see it in the morning and have a chuckle. He could use one,” said Bolaire.
Maybe it was the late hour making him loopy, but Hal was filled with so much fondness in that moment that he threw his arms over his friend’s shoulders (not his friend’s shoulders, but he couldn’t think about that) and leaned the side of his face into the mask, the closest to a hug for Bolaire he could think of.
People don’t touch me except to put me on or take me off. I suppose someone might have touched me in my dormant state, but people like to keep me in a box so they don’t have to touch me or look at me.
All of this was true until I met Halandil Fang.
At first he touched what he thought was my body: shoulder thumps, handshakes, hugs. But then he made a point of touching me, a cup of his hand on my cheek. I once overheard him tell Hero that it didn’t matter why I wore a mask, that I was a friend who he accepted exactly as I am. It made me wince, because I knew it wasn’t true.
But now, Hal knows what I am, and he has his ear pressed to me like I’m a seashell with all the wide ocean inside of me. Part of me wants to use a hand to hold him there, but I don’t want to remind him of what we did last night, of why I have this hand.
Hal’s ear pressed against Bolaire’s glossy surface. There was no earth-shattering applause, like he’d heard within Bolaire last night; only the sound of breath, which didn’t feel quite as warm against his skin as it should. He had so many questions still. Bolaire trusted him; that was more than clear. But Hal didn’t quite know how to trust him back.
Maybe he could start by asking something small. Something where a lie wouldn’t really matter. He pulled back and rubbed a thumb down Bolaire’s right tear track.
Hal pulls away and rubs a thumb down one of my tear tracks. I can feel him on me in a way I can’t feel with my puppets. Mortal bodies are difficult and far away, but I can feel the shape of Hal’s lyre callus on my tear track.
“What are you made of?” Hal said. “You and your… your sister. You’re so shiny.”
“I don’t know.” Bolaire’s lips twisted. “At the time I was made, I was not the sort of thing that asked questions. My best guess, based on all I’ve learned about artifacts, is bone clay.”
All I’ve learned about artifacts. Did Bolaire get his job so he could learn more about himself and his siblings?
One time, I stood before a mirror holding a bone clay artifact from my secret archive, and compared the way we shone in the light.
Hal’s thumb brushes the corner of my mouth.
Hal said, “You pulled a piece of glass out of your mouth. What… what’s back there?”
Bolaire smiled a little; Hal felt his lips curl under his thumb.
“There’s more to me than this glossy facade. There’s a place where the people who wear me go. And then there’s the place where my props and my lights are. Call it Backstage, if you like.”
Hal reacts to the mention of the theater of the mind where even now I hold a man captive. But that isn’t fear on that beloved face. It’s excitement. Curiosity.
Suddenly, more than anything, Hal wanted to go Backstage. He wanted to rummage around and find every prop, every set piece, every secret. He stroked his thumb at the edge of Bolaire’s bottom lip.
“May I?” Hal said.
I am not accustomed to thinking about the boundary between my inside and my outside. It’s easier to consider them separate. This is part of the difficulty with food: it must cross the threshold. I don’t like it. But Hal? Of course Hal can go Backstage. He’s the producer.
I push my puppet’s mouth far, far Backstage, and open my lips.
The stage lights behind Bolaire’s eyes blinked. He opened his mouth in silent invitation. Hal pressed down on the center of his bottom lip, once, then pressed in.
As his thumb presses inside me, I remember that this is technically a mouth, and Hal will have certain expectations. Besides, I can’t leave a scene partner hanging. I summon a prop tongue.
It felt like… nothing. Not cold, not empty, but neutral, like a bath the same temperature as his skin. He pressed in deeper, well past the point when he ought to be feeling the face of that Crow Keeper. Still nothing. Then, he felt smooth concave glass meet the pad of his thumb, like a dry, slick tongue.
Hal’s breath stuttered. His eyes came into focus, stared at Bolaire. The body he wore was very still and calm, but his stage lights had expanded to twice their normal size, his brows were turned up at the inner corners, and his nostrils flared like he was trying to take in everything.
Hal’s breath catches. He stares at me, and I swear that even his scent changes, though I don’t know what it means. All I know is that he’s Backstage, he’s inside me and outside me and not even remotely under my control, and that’s never happened before, with anyone.
He made this tongue, Hal thought, pressing down on it hard with his thumb. His other hand came up to touch Bolaire, cupping the side of him. Like he made that sliver of glass. He wants me to feel this. He slid his thumb out, then back in. It was shaped like a real tongue, but too smooth, too dry.
The thumb of his other hand brushed the edge of Bolaire’s left eye, felt where the bone clay ended there. Hal pressed that edge into his left thumb. He stared into those distant blue lights and felt dizzy.
The thumb of his other hand brushes the edge of my eye, streaked with dried gray paint. That hand was so dextrous wielding a brush. I feel his hand on the border, poised between Backstage and the true world. The bone clay of me is the boundary, but my eyes are always open.
“May I?” Hal asked again.
He felt Bolaire’s nod beneath both hands. He took a breath, then pressed his left thumb into Bolaire’s eye.
It felt the same as his mouth. Exactly the same, for the glass tongue disappeared the moment Hal entered Bolaire’s eye, as if he were too overwhelmed to keep it up. Without the tongue to distract him, Hal did notice something in Bolaire’s mouth: the stir of tepid breath. Was it the Crow Keeper’s, or Bolaire’s? It didn’t feel warm enough to be human.
Hal pressed his thumb deeper into Bolaire’s eye. It looked obscene, like Hal was goring or torturing Bolaire. But Bolaire’s lips sealed gently around his right thumb, and the one stage light Hal could see was bright and blue and round, and the lines of his face were as relaxed as if this were a caress. At this point, Hal’s left thumb was deep enough that he ought to be touching that stage light. Hal’s left fingers tightened in Bolaire’s wig as he realized that the stage lights were farther back than he’d thought: they appeared closer because they were big.
(There hadn’t been lights in Termina’s eyes, like there were in Bolaire’s. What did it mean?)
Hal’s thumb blots out half of the lanterns backstage. Green whorls fill my sight, then shadow. I feel a prey’s fear, and I cannot maintain the prop tongue. Hal’s fingers clench in my wig, grounding me. I am not Hal’s prey, and even if I were, I accept his right to destroy me.
A frisson passed through Hal—fear or awe, one of those two, surely. He slowly withdrew his thumb from Bolaire’s eye. He felt something between his thumb and Bolaire’s cheekbone. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger and held it up.
It was a glass teardrop, a blue light glowing within it.
The thumb withdraws. The outer world expands. I hold onto the thumb in my mouth to remind myself that Hal is still here, Backstage.
For a moment, Hal could scarcely breathe. Then he laughed.
“Are you this dramatic on purpose?” Hal said. “Or can you not help it?”
Does he expect an answer? I suck at his thumb and give him a look, because I won’t let him go until he chooses to.
Bolaire’s eyebrows rose, and his lips sealed tighter around Hal’s thumb, reminding Hal that he was making it hard for Bolaire to answer. Hal pulled his thumb out of Bolaire’s mouth, slowly, feeling the change from breath-stirred nothing to glossy bone-clay lip.
“I am dramatic on purpose, my dear storyteller,” said Bolaire, “but the tears do just happen. On occasion.”
Does he understand how true it is that he is my storyteller? I am a story, and he crafted the best of me.
“What makes you cry?” Hal said softly.
“Until now? Your plays,” said Bolaire.
My first Halandil Fang play was Sons and Daughters, the story of three veterans who had served in the same battalion, all trying to parent their children after the war. I thought the feelings I felt about the wars I fought, the ones where I served my purpose defeating tyranny, were simply signs of defect, of a weapon carrying on after its main purpose had been served. Sons and Daughters taught me that, at least in this, my feelings were no different from those of the Rungjani.
That revelation still rocks me sometimes.
Hal pressed his face right up against Bolaire. Somewhere inside him was applause so grand it could remake the world. Hal wanted it. He wanted it so much. If the part of Hal that spun truth from lies on the stage could reach the part of Bolaire that was the greatest audience in Aramán, it felt like they could do anything, even face down the Lady of a Sundered House. Hours ago, in Bolaire’s secret archive, he had very nearly done it. He had been so frightened of Lady Cormoray, and he’d thought that he wouldn’t be so scared if Bolaire had been with him, truly with him, Bolaire’s inside to Hal’s outside.
But the only way to find out was to wear Bolaire. To put his life in his friend’s hands.
Bolaire was ready to do that. Hal wasn’t. Not yet.
Hal stared at the tear caught between his thumb and forefinger, then at Bolaire’s eye, glowing with the same blue light.
“Should I… put it back?” Hal said.
Puffs of hot breath against my clay. It takes me a moment to remember he means my tear.
“Keep it if you like,” Bolaire said.
What did Bolaire like? What did he want? He knew what people wanted; it was why he could write plays. But what did Bolaire want?
Bolaire is a person. He’s a scary person you don’t understand, but he’s a person. He loves Shadia and Hero and Alogar. He has a sister he hasn’t seen in decades, and his voice shattered like his sister when he finally found her again. He’s only ever cried at your plays until now. This is a gift. He wants you to keep it.
I am not a person. I am a story. A dream. A thing. But I am his, if he wants to keep me. Let my tear in his pocket remind him of that.
Hal nodded and put the glass tear in his pocket. It would be a reminder. Of what, he wasn’t exactly sure.
“I should go,” Bolaire said softly. “The boy will need food in the morning. And he insists that I empty the trash every day.”
The mustache was nothing but a vague smear on Bolaire’s face by now. The mask was no fit guardian for a traumatized student, but right now, neither was Hal. At least Bolaire was trying. He liked the boy.
Hal would be much better at looking after Demodus than me, but he can’t shoulder that burden just now. I try to treat him the way I treated Alogar at his age, not the way I treat the brutes and scum that I wear.
“Goodnight, my friend,” said Hal.
Hal fell asleep on a battered couch backstage, curled up around a brightly painted pariah blade.
It wasn’t the weapon he truly wanted at his side.