“Are you all right?” Alexander whispered. “What happened?”
“He hit me right in the ear!”
“When?” James’s voice.
“When I stabbed him, he turned around and smashed me with his elbow!” A bolt of pain so acute it felt solid had lodged in my skull like a railroad spike. I perched on the locking rail, leaning forward on my knees. A warm hand landed on the back of my neck; I didn’t know whose.
“That’s not the blocking,” Alexander said.
“Of course it fucking isn’t,” James said. “Breathe, Oliver.”
I unclenched my jaw and inhaled. James’s hand slid to my shoulder. “Did he try to snap your wrists again?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He glanced toward the light slanting in between the downstage legs. Colin had finished his speech and was conversing with a servant.
“Is he doing this shit on purpose?” Alexander said. “He about took my head off when I stabbed him but I thought he’d just gotten carried away again.”
“Have you seen James’s arms?”
James hushed me but unfastened his left cuff button and peeled his sleeve back. Even in the gloom of the wings we could see blotches of blue and purple on his skin. Alexander let out a string of obscenities all in one breath.
James shook his cuff back down. “Exactly.”
“James,” I said, “we have to do something.”
He turned, the light from the stage turning his face a sickly malarial yellow. It was nearly time for intermission. “All right,” he said. “But we leave Frederick and Gwendolyn out of it.”
“How?”
There was a growl in Alexander’s voice as he said, “If he wants a fight, let’s give him a fight.”
I tugged at my earlobe. A faint, shrill ringing pestered me like a fly. “Alexander,” I said, “that’s suicide.”
“I don’t see why.”
“He’s bigger than all of us.”
“No, Oliver, idiot. He’s bigger than each of us.” He gave me a very pointed look.
The lights onstage were suddenly doused, and the audience erupted into applause. All at once people were rushing by. In the darkness it was impossible to tell who was who, but we knew one of them must be Richard. Alexander pushed me and James both back against the line sets, and the heavy ropes wobbled and groaned behind us like a ship’s rigging. His hand was a vise on my shoulder, the audience thundering in my ears. “Listen,” he said, “Richard can’t fight off all three of us at once. Tomorrow, if he tries anything, instead of assassination we give him a righteous ass-kicking.”
“Here is my hand,” James said, after a split second’s hesitation. “The deed is worthy doing.”
I hesitated also, a split second longer. “And so say I.”
Alexander squeezed my arm. “And I and now we three have spoke it, let the stupid bastard do his worst.”
He let go of us abruptly as the house lights came up and the audience all rattled to their feet on the other side of the curtain. A few first-year technicians in black had already hurried onstage and were cleaning up the mess left after the assassination. The three of us shared a grim look, and said nothing else, but went single file to the dressing room. I trailed after James, limbs tingling with the same restless feeling from the week before, both eager and uneasy.
SCENE 7
Apart from Richard’s unnecessary roughness, opening night had gone well, and the following morning praises were lavished on us in the hallways. The choral and orchestral students remained aloof—unimpressed by anyone who didn’t have the discipline for something so refined as music—but the others regarded us with wide-eyed admiration. How could we explain that standing on a stage and speaking someone else’s words as if they are your own is less an act of bravery than a desperate lunge at mutual understanding? An attempt to forge that tenuous link between speaker and listener and communicate something, anything, of substance. Unable to articulate it, we simply accepted their compliments and congratulations with the appropriate (and, in some cases, entirely contrived) humility.
In class, we were easily distracted. I barely listened to Frederick’s lecture and my mind wandered so far during one of Camilo’s balance exercises that I let Filippa knock me over backward. Alexander gave me an impatient sort of look that clearly meant, Get your shit together. As soon as we were dismissed, I retreated to the Tower with a mug of tea and René Girard’s Theatre of Envy, hoping to distract myself from a dozen distressing premonitions of the night ahead. By then I felt no sympathy for Richard—the relentless, catchall antagonism he’d practiced over the last few weeks left a deeper impression than three years of placid friendship had—but I knew that no retaliation on our part would go unpunished. Any impartial observer would have dismissed it as a grandiloquent grudge match, but when I tried to persuade myself that that was all it was, Frederick’s voice quietly reminded me that duels had been fought over less.