Alberich and Myste lingered after the end of the last act, assuming that Laric would seek them out as soon as the audience cleared out. It was a reasonable assumption; both of them assumed he would not have interrupted his urgent work to send up a boy if he hadn’t intended to get to Myste as soon as he could. It wasn’t comfortable, sitting out there in the cold, on the hard benches, but both Alberich and Myste had the feeling that it just might be worth the wait.

And they were right. As soon as the actors took their final bows, the audience began to shove its way out. Once the actors were gone, the audience lost interest in what, to Alberich, was actually more interesting than the play itself. In the torchlight, there had been a certain—something—that had given an illusion of reality to the play. Now the illusion was coming apart, bit by bit, and it was fascinating to Alberich to see how it had been put together in the first place.

First, the lamps at the edge of the stage were blown out and gathered up, and the stagehands began clearing away the properties on the stage, carrying them back behind what had looked like a false front of several buildings made rather solidly of wood. But it was now apparent that it wasn’t wood at all, nor solid, but another canvas backdrop of the same sort that the troupe had used during the Festival. With no one being careful about how they moved around it, the thing rippled and waved as people went behind it. Two other bits of business that stood on either side of the canvas, hiding the edges, looked a bit more solid. They were only a single story tall, though they had a pair of doors in them that the actors had used to come and go. As two stagehands hauled off the “horses” that the hero and heroine were to have escaped on, Laric dashed out of one of the doors in the scenery onto the edge of the stage, and peered up at the balcony. “Heyla!” he shouted, and waved at her. She waved back. “Myste! Stay right there for a bit while I tie things up!”

Myste nodded vigorously; evidently that was enough for Laric, who dashed back through the false door again. “Tie things up, hmm?” she said cheerfully to Alberich. “I hope that isn’t literal.”