So if she could stay with them until Syan, what then? She was grateful for their fellowship, but she couldn’t imagine any of the players could help her in Tessis. Besides Teodoros, the soft-spoken but sharp-eyed eminence of the group, the troop was named for Pedder Makewell, Estir’s brother, the actor who liked his wine (and, according to Teodoros, also handsome young men). Makewell’s Men had chosen him as their figurehead because he had a reputation for playing the great parts and playing them loudly and well. The groundlings loved Makewell, Teodoros had told her, for his bombast but also for his tragic deaths. “His Xarpedon gasps out his life with an arrow in his heart,” Teodoros had said approvingly, “and although this mighty autarch has put half of Xand to the sword, the people weep to hear him whisper his last words.”

The playwright Nevin Hewney was at least as well known as Makewell, although not for his acting—Teodoros said Hewney was a middling player at best, indifferent to that craft except as a way of attracting the fairer sex. He was, however, infamous for his plays, especially those like The Terrible Conflagration that some called blasphemous. But no one called him an indifferent poet: even Briony had heard something of Hewney’s The Death of Karal, which the royal physician Chaven had often claimed almost redeemed playwrighting from its sordid and sensational crimes against language.

“When he found his poetic voice, Hewney burst upon the world like fireworks,” Finn Teodoros told her as they walked one morning while the man in question limped along ahead of them, cursing the effects of the previous night’s drinking. “I remember when first I saw The Eidolon of Devonis and realized that words spoken on a stage could open up a world never seen before. But he was young then. Strong spirits and his own foul temper have blunted his genius, and I must do most of the writing.” Teodoros shook his head. “A shame against the gods themselves, who seldom give such gifts, to see those gifts squandered.”

Makewell’s sister Estir was the group’s only female member, and although she did not play upon the stage she performed many other useful services as seamstress and costumer, and also collected the money at performances and serviced the accounting books. The giant Dowan Birch had the beetling brow and frown of some forest wild man, but was surprisingly kind and intelligent in his speech—Teodoros called him “a quaffing of gentlemanry decanted into a barrel rather than a bottle.” But for his size and looks, he seemed distinctly unfit to play the demons and monsters that were his lot. The other leading actor was the handsome young man Feival, who although he had ended his dalliances with Teodoros and Makewell years earlier was still youthful and pretty enough to treat them both like lovesick old men. He seemed not to take advantage of this except in small ways, and Briony decided she rather liked him: his edge of carelessness and his occasional snappishness reminded her a little of Barrick.