The Buccaneer's Apprentice by V. Briceland

“It’s remembering what normal and happy are like when you feel anything but, and saying lines you must instead of the words you want. We do it in the flames of footlights. You’ve done it by the light of day, every day of your life. Some have a better knack of it than others. Trust me, Nic, lad, you could do it. I have an eye for talent.” He laid a finger aside his nose and winked. “I have the eye.”
    Though he understood what Armand meant, Nic was still dubious. “I still think it’s different,” he said. It was still a novelty to be able to disagree with one of his masters. “On the stage, you have to know where to enter and exit. There’s props. There’s business.”
    “My poor lady,” said his master, pointing at the stage. Ingenue and the Signora were carrying out a complicated bit of business in which the Signora was supposed to be concealing a love letter to Ingenue from Hero, so that Ingenue would assume that Hero was no longer faithful and true. Only tonight, the Signora had forgotten the letter. Her hands dug into her bosom where it should have been, and kept coming up empty. She continued to say her lines as she dug more deeply. When it became obvious that she would have to do without the folded paper, she continued on as smoothly as if she’d had it. Did the craftsman and apprentices in the audience notice? If so, they didn’t show a trace of distraction, as absorbed as they were in the summer night’s proceedings.
    “She’s improvising, though,” Nic said. It had been a neat piece of business.
    “And getting away with it. She’s a professional, that woman. Better than Knave.” Signor Arturo whistled. “You should see how very bad he is without a script. Oh, the stories I could tell, lad. Why do you think she’s getting away with it, though?”
    Nic thought for a moment. “Because she didn’t falter,” he had said at last.
    “She looks like she knows what she’s doing. She appears to be in authority,” said Armand.
    “People believe that?” Nic wanted to know.
    Signor Arturo laid his finger alongside his nose once more, and then pointed at Nic. “That’s all acting is. You take a deep breath. You stand straight. You become the person that you want them to believe in. And then you go on.”
    It was a night that Nic had reason to recall, stranded in the Dead Strait. The fire warming them was much smaller than the one that had been blazing before the makeshift stage in Fero. But it was just as dark beyond the edges of its flickering light, and the stars were in nearly the same position as the summer before. While he wasn’t exactly treading the boards among the footlights, he was having to act—specifically, act like the man that Jacopo Colombo treated him as, instead of a lost servant adrift in the most remote reaches of the Azure Sea. “What I’m about to share with you, Niccolo, is confidential,” the old man was saying. By the crackling fire, the man sat with a posture that would not have seemed amiss at the dinners of the Thirty. Still, for all his dignity, he still appeared to be immensely frail. “Have you heard my name before?”
    Jacopo’s daughter watched Nic’s every reaction. Her eyes reflected the flames of the small fire—or else they blazed on their own while she studied his every slightest movement. Self-conscious of her appraisal, yet still attentive, Nic shook his head. “No, signor.”
    “The name I gave you is my own, but it is not my title.” Jacopo’s daughter shot him a warning look. He quelled her with an upraised hand. “Among some circles, I am addressed as Nuncio. No,” he added quickly, after noticing Nic’s reaction of surprise. “This is not the place for bowing or whatever you’ve been taught to do.”
    “If,” said the girl suddenly, her Azurite accent strong, “he has been taught to do anything.”
    “Darcy.” Jacopo’s brow furrowed. Nic was offended, but not very deeply. People of privilege thought the worst of him