Chapter 1075: A Young Heart
No one spoke.
The letter sat on the edge of the desk and the silence around it grew until Bernis broke it in the way that people break silences — not because they had something worth saying, but because the silence had become heavier than the words.
“I knew we shouldn’t have expected too much from him.” She kept her voice low, but not low enough. “Everyone said who Prince Roland was, before. His habits. His haunts. I thought becoming king had changed him, but—”
“Hush.” Egrepo put a hand on her arm. “Half the nobles who still come to the theater are his people. Even the ones who aren’t will perform loyalty for anyone who might be listening. Be careful.”
Roentgen sat down on the arm of the settee. “We’ll never make it to Neverwinter.”
“We’re well-regarded everywhere else.” Egrepo moved to the center of the room — the position he occupied when he was trying to hold a group together. “Kajen Troupe is first-rate in every city but Neverwinter. We can sustain ourselves. We’ve been sustaining ourselves.”
“Magic movies will come to every city eventually.” Kajen’s voice came from the window, where he had been standing with his back to them. “I’ve been reading May’s scripts. All of them share something — they’re set in a world His Majesty is building toward. An ideal world. A policy in narrative form. He’s not making them for Neverwinter’s audiences. He’s making them for every audience, everywhere, once the war ends. When they arrive here, what do we have to offer against that?”
The room had no good answer.
“We could go elsewhere,” Egrepo tried. “The Kingdom of Dawn has theaters that would—”
“No.”
Kajen turned from the window.
“I’m going back to Neverwinter.”
The silence this time had a different quality — less gravity, more shock.
“Mr. Fels.” Egrepo’s voice had taken on the particular care of a man addressing someone who may have just made an error in public. “The round trip alone is a month. During that month, the troupe earns nothing. The new members, the apprentices — they can’t absorb a month without income. They’ll leave.”
Kajen knew this. He had run the arithmetic while still standing at the window. The troupe in its current form could not make the journey together — not without a host theater in Neverwinter, not without the infrastructure that required a connection he did not yet have. Loading the full company onto road wagons and arriving unannounced was the kind of thing that ruined troupes.
“I’ll go alone,” he said.
The silence stretched longer this time. Then Roentgen said, very carefully: “What are you going to do in Neverwinter, Mr. Fels?”
“Try to become a magical movie actor.”
He watched them process this. The disbelief came first — visible, undisguised, the reaction of people who had built their professional identities around his identity, who had spent years in the long shadow of a playwright considered preeminent in the world they inhabited. Then came something more complicated: the recognition that he was serious, and the vertigo that followed.
“His Majesty said these movies will become widely available in time,” Kajen continued. “He didn’t say when. Ten years. Twenty. If it’s five years, it’s too late — Star Flower Troupe will have five years of experience and we’ll be starting from nothing. The time to enter a new form is at the beginning, before the conventions solidify, before the hierarchy establishes itself and closes.”
“But Star Flower Troupe already has His Majesty’s attention—”
“Star Flower Troupe has May and Irene.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Two people cannot fill a film schedule by themselves. Production creates demand for more production. If Neverwinter wants to reach every city, every region, they’ll need volume. And if I can identify a genre May’s troupe doesn’t work in — a farce, something physical, something that doesn’t suit her range — there may be room.”
Egrepo stared at him. “You’d play in a farce.”
“I’d play a walk-on in a production of three lines if it got me in front of the instrument.” Kajen said it without embarrassment. “Life is about trade-offs. I’ve spent thirty years understanding this at a distance. I’ve been unable to write a play since I saw the magical movie, and I’ve been pretending that the problem is temporary. It’s not temporary. The thing I knew how to do has been replaced by something I don’t know how to do yet, and the only way to learn it is to go where it exists.”
He had not quite articulated this to himself until the words were already out. That, too, was familiar — the way a decision clarified itself through its own expression, the way saying a thing made it real.
“If His Majesty turns us away again, I’ll try to join Star Flower Troupe directly. As a member. Any capacity.”
The silence was absolute.
He understood it. He remembered his own shock, the first time an actor he admired had told him that certainty was not a resource that lasted — that every ten years it had to be rebuilt from something smaller and less dignified than what came before. He had been twenty-three and the advice had seemed relevant to other people.
He was not twenty-three.
He could not move quickly on a stage anymore. His memory for lines, once infallible, required work now, required the kind of effort that only showed in performance when the effort itself became visible, which was the one thing you could not allow. Whatever role he played in a magical movie, it would be small. There would be people who recognized him. Who had seen him in the great plays. Who would say things, privately, in the way that private things travel.
He had considered all of this at the window.
“Egrepo has been with the troupe longest,” Kajen said. “He knows how to run it. When I’m gone, he runs it in my name — and I mean that both ways. The name still draws. Use it.” He looked at the younger faces. “You’ve all gotten better this year. Faster than you know. Give the new people room. The audience will come as long as the work is worth coming to.”
“Mr. Fels—”
He raised a hand. Not harshly.
He had made the decision. The decision was made. That was enough for today.
He had not felt this way in thirty years — not since the first night he ever walked into a theater and understood, in the way that understanding sometimes arrives before knowledge, what his life was going to be organized around. The feeling was not confidence. Confidence was a thing you built. This was something else — something that came before confidence, the raw substrate of it, the sensation of a direction existing where before there had only been open ground.
He was not young. But the feeling was.
Neverwinter had produced its first napalm bomb.
It had taken less than a week from the discovery of the gel to functional prototype — a timeline that said less about the Ministry of Chemical Industry’s speed and more about how completely Kyle Sichi had done the foundational work. The production problems were already solved. The remaining task was engineering, and Retnin was an engineer of the old school: meticulous, systematic, and deeply invested in the names of things he made.
A dozen iron cylinders, each one meter tall and thirty centimeters across, stood on the test platform in a row. Their fuses ran together into a single junction. The arrangement was tight and deliberate, three distinct layers in each cylinder — snow powder at the base, combustion-supporting compound in the middle, gelled fuel on top — so that ignition would travel upward in sequence, the first layer driving heat into the second, the second feeding the third, the whole process resembling, Retnin had noted, a volcanic eruption in miniature.
He had used an electric detonator and a delayed ignition system to ensure the cylinders fired independently in sequence, each detonation timed to avoid interference with the others. The engineering was sound. Several of the decisions impressed Roland.
Retnin’s enthusiasm for the project had been evident since the first design meeting. He was the former Chief Alchemist of the old king’s city’s workshop, a position that had guaranteed him seniority and very little creative latitude, and the move to Neverwinter and the Ministry of Chemical Industry had opened something in him. He talked about explosives and incendiaries with the specificity of someone who had been thinking about them in silence for years.
He called the bomb Burning-City Thunder.
Roland had reservations about the name. He kept them to himself — naming rights over active weapons were his by convention, and he would exercise them when the weapon graduated from test to deployment. For now, Retnin’s name served its purpose, which was to make the alchemist feel that his creation had weight.
“Shall we test it, then?” Roland said.
Retnin’s expression could have lit the fuse by itself.