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Old 04-07-2011, 03:41 PM   #165
Anguirel
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
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Sador had spent the afternoon still kept to himself, although he remained with part of his concentration attentive to the frenetic movements of the various Players past and around his room. At one point he had heard a tentative knock, and half risen to his feet, before listening to someone retreating far too quickly for him to arrest their departure. Almost certainly then, whoever in this company had come to talk was as nervous about him as he was cautious about their band, conceivably more so. He had shrugged and settled back down to his desk, though sometimes he let himself be entertained by the goings-on of the young Player-maid and Ingold's barely older relative. Perhaps that had been it after all; not a matter of trepidation, but a childish prank.

He mulled them over singly, doubly, as an ensemble, what he thought he had detected so far. Celebrindal - Brinn, as he had already overheard enough to gather she was really called - with her oddly impressive mien, added to rather than reduced by her present injury. An effect, he thought wryly, unlike that of his own. Rollan, the coarse comedian whose geniality Sador suspected could hide a streak of temper and bad nature. Well, they would see about that.

Asta, Brinn's sister and lieutenant, and the child, presumably the company's main Player-Perian, she had gripped onto so hard and corrected so sharply; Sador saw them as amusingly similar specimens, a similarity unbeknownst, probably, to each other; and he had caught the same essential look from both, wary, hostile, as regarded his twisted leg a little repulsed, and when it came to his superior standing and his intentions towards them, prepared for the worst. Amdir, that intelligent and steady pair of hands whom his father had forced into opposition to gratify a whim...

And then at last he thought of Aldarion; that fair-featured, raven-haired apogee of the elegant stage figure, whose light, easy courtesy seemed to demonstrate a mercurial but vigilant intelligence. He would repay inspection; he would get that inspection. For Aldarion seemed to lead a pleasant life; no doubt many would like to inhabit it. As he laid down yet another of his strange, ever-blotted and reworked screeds of manuscript, stuffed it into the secrecy of his satchel, and dragged himself up out of the room to mix among the others at last, Sador wondered if even he yearned sincerely after the player-scribbler's destiny.

He tried not to attend to the increasingly uncomfortable answer to that question. The light was dying now; time to prove the tongue - despite his regrets and doubts - yet mightier than the pen...
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