The hours in the theatre before the play began were easily the most surreal in Toris' life. As soon as he walked back through the doors, he was mobbed with greetings, well wishes, demands as to where he'd been these past days, demands for help with costumes, set, did this lighting make the lead's face look washed out...
Ivan. Saying how much he'd missed him, and wasn't today exciting; though it was a shame Prince Ignatius had a cold and was unable to attend they had been told.
He scarcely caught either of his parents alone for a moment, but though they too put on brave faces and tried to act normal, he knew that they knew, Marianne having arrived ahead of them and filled them in.
Marianne had also apparently picked up a change of clothes en route and was the Fantastic François again.
Toris, Feliks, Arthur and François were to hide in the wings and wait, and watch, and try not to get in anyone's way. The magicians' presence was explained to the rest of the cast and crew and something to do with the royal visit.
Natasha slipped quietly back into the prompt's seat and no one seemed even to notice.
The time came. The doors opened. It was a packed house, and the audience would have taken a long while to file in even without the additional issue of getting the royal party separately into the front stalls. The extended entry music was beautiful. Toris couldn't really appreciate it properly.
He scanned the front row.
"Princess Hedvika," Feliks whispered, and there was no doubt it was her: a girl with brown hair half-back and a nice, ordinary face, dressed in a green velvet dress and what was probably a very simple type of crown for day wear. She was smiling bravely, but looked worried, as well she might: she would know perfectly well her brother was not ill with a cold and was in fact missing without explanation. Next to her sat—
"That must be General Zima..." Toris breathed.
Arthur grunted in affirmation. "I can get a decently clear shot," he said under his breath, "but I wish she wasn't sitting so near by..."
The play began. Nerves, on stage, seemed to quickly evaporate and the actors were on top form. Even the sword ballet went off without a hitch. Toris saw Princess Hedvika's eyes light up a little with a smile at this point and thought, distantly, Bet will be pleased, I'm glad we brought that back. Mostly, he kept his eyes on the tall, brisk man with the silvery hair sitting to her left, who never smiled at all.
Continually intruding into his thoughts was the nearer fear that Feliks, despite what he said about having it well under control, would disappear into a cat any moment—and the still more nightmarish fear that despite what Arthur and Marianne, not to mention François, had said, this time he would be unable to turn back. He reached for Feliks' hand in the dark. Feliks gave his hand a squeeze and held it.
Towards the end of the third act, by which time they were all nearly sick with tension and nerves, it happened.
Ivan, who had been shifting scenery in the blackout, had stayed crouched behind a flat representing a Tree of Wisdom. Just as the heroine knelt before the fairy ruler of the forest downstage, he stepped out.
It took a moment for anyone to notice, engrossed as they were in the excellent performances of the actors.
Once they did—it wasn't so much a murmur of disquiet, less than that, only a shifting in their seats, glances aside. The lead actor caught the mood and stumbled in her lines.
By that time General Zima was on his feet, speaking unintelligible words, and the shifting in the stalls had become a murmur indeed.
In the centre of the stage, the air shimmered, bellied and bulged like a bubble.
"Stop him!" Toris cried, as Ivan took a step towards it—
—as everyone in the wings rushed forwards at once—
—as Zima seized the Princess from her seat next to him and called in a resounding voice, "Nobody move!"
Nobody moved. Except Feliks, still propelling himself onto the stage now shouting: "VIKA!"
"She won't be harmed," Zima was continuing, "and she will remember none as this so long as—that's the Prince Ignatius! Seize him!"
To Toris' dumbfounded horror, bolts of magic shot from batons of two sober suited palace officials to either side of Zima and Hedvika, and Feliks was knocked sprawling.
And Feliks was... the missing Prince Ignatius?!
Without thinking, Toris barrelled forwards—at his side so did Arthur and François. They smacked straight into something like a wall unyielding and invisible around the stage.
"You are joking me," Arthur said thickly, his nose bleeding.
The palace officials mounted the stage steps, apparently unaffected by the magical boundary, and hauled Feliks, fuming and swearing worse than Arthur, to his feet between them.
All this took about four seconds.
The bubble of magic, whatever it was, had grown almost to the height of a person now.
"Now!" General Zima rasped to Ivan, not loosening his hold on Hedvika for an instant.
Ivan seemed for the moment as paralysed as the rest of the crowd. With a seeming effort he shook himself and looked at the growing hiatus in the stuff of the air, eyes wide.
And then Toris heard the last thing he expected. His mother's voice. Clear and strong projecting all the authority of years of directorial experience across the tense silence of the theatre from the balcony.
"Ivan Braginsky, clear the stage! This instant. What do you think you're doing?"
This seemed to surprise Zima too, and evidently he had no one to hand on the balcony. He gestured and another grey suited official dashed for the doors, footsteps ringing. But it would take him a minute to reach upstairs, and the crowds were not making it easy for him.
"What did he promise you?" Justyna shouted. "Kingship? Really? He's betraying the love and memory of his dear friends the old king and queen, he's killing their son to set you up in that place, do you think for one moment that—"
"SILENCE!" roared Zima, whirling around and Toris guessed trying to see where she was speaking from.
"DO YOU THINK THAT HE WOULD HESITATE to replace you the very instant you fail him in the slightest? No, why should he wait? Why should he keep you for one day after you've served your purpose this afternoon?"
Listen, Toris willed. For once in your life listen to her!
General Zima shoved Princess Hedvika at yet another lackey—how many of them were in on this?!—and thundered up the steps to the stage.
"IVAN! NOW, you idiot boy!"
"Do you think he cares about you?" Feliks yelled, "He will throw you away just as easily!"
Ivan stopped hesitating.
He leapt at Zima, snatching up a sword which he held to general's throat.
Again, everything happened once.
Hedvika and Feliks stumbled free—the invisible wall collapsed and volleys of spells fired from not only Arthur and François but from at least twenty members of the audience—most went far wide, but the two guards on stage were stunned instantly and the Tree of Wisdom came unearthed with a crack of planking straight onto the head of General Zima who was then immediately jumped on by the entire cast and Darius. "You fools!" Zima screamed before another spell silenced him, "IT WAS A PROP SWORD!"
Toris held onto the side curtain to stop himself collapsing. He was dizzy, over-breathing, laughing hysterically. Everyone was taking hostages!
Prop sword or not though, he thought, more sane now, as a tech fixed Zima's hands to his sides with the spell they usually used to secure lighting cans to the rig in the ceiling: Ivan probably could have crushed his windpipe.
Ivan was on the ground, panting and clutching his side like he'd been running for a long time.
"Right," said Arthur over the chaos, "we may need witnesses later same as they did, but I think what we need now is a little CALM!"
The word rang out and Arthur flung his arms wide. Toris seemed to see everything outside of the lighted stage as through wobbly glass. Nothing out there moved. The entire auditorium was frozen in time.
François gave him a look that seemed to say, "Really, Arthur?"
He shrugged. "I wont deny I've been spoiling for a fight since that invisible wall nonsense. That was a cheap shot."
Everyone on stage breathed out.
Toris looked at the person he had been calling Feliks, or Lucky, for three days, and who turned out to be the Prince of the realm and a total stranger.
"You're the Prince?"
"Toris I can explain—"
"May I suggest we leave further explanations until later?" François cut in, "The thing to do now is to restore Prince Ignatius to, uhm, man's estate."
And François and Arthur turned to Toris.
"Me?" he said, and his voice sounded pathetically small in the unnaturally silent theatre.
"We don't need to bother about that now though, do we?" said Feliks, but he looked like he was concentrating hard on holding back hiccups again.
"Actually we do," Arthur said gently. "It's always best to undo magic that was done first... first. This spell," he indicated the magic bubble, "is conventional magic and we should be able to deal with it, but I don't want to risk dissolving this spell while the prince is still in his current... situation."
"Whether it was Zima or someone else," François explained, "whoever worked that cat spell was using your kind of magic, Toris. We can't do anything with it. You can."
"I... I can't," he said weakly, and found himself babbling, "I can't do magic—I've never been able to do magic, I can't even do the lighting effects, I..."
"You can," said François. "You can do this—you already have. Toris, when you appeared at my door and fed a cat a piece of food that turned him human, actor though I am, there was nothing fake in how impressed—how astonished—I was."
Then his father pushed through the muddled crowd of actors and crew towards him.
"Clare's right," Darius said, and if Toris hadn't had so much else on his mind he might have laughed at the way his father apparently saw right through the marvellous Marianne and the fantastic François to the girl who was the star of the Fortune all those years ago, "if it was your food that turned Feliks—sorry, Prince Ignatius, his Highness I mean—human again, that was real strong magic."
"Try to think back," Arthur suggested, "what did you do?"
"I don't know," Toris insisted, but as he did so he remembered:
Standing at the stove, putting the ham and spinach pie into the oven, "I wish you could tell me what's bothering you," he'd said.
As he worked with the food and listened to the ingredients as he always did... Was it as simple as that?
Odd socks and bodkins! he thought to himself, remembering Feliks' phrase: a wish as vague as that, it was pretty darn lucky it took the form of something so helpful!
But I still don't know... he thought. "How can I..." he muttered to himself.
And then: "Toris. It's alright," said Feliks, ten feet from him, his voice bright and brave, "don't worry about me, I'll be fine!" Only he was Prince Ignatius not Feliks at all, and it was all a lie...
Toris couldn't deal with facing the feelings this brought up right now so he closed his eyes.
Without distraction he seemed to see in his knapsack the remnants of the—rather stale now—food, glowing like the magic bubble, or a little alive like a plant, spelled with his wish.
And now he knew what to look for, realised it was magic, he turned his attention to Feliks and he could see—although it wasn't really seeing—the web of the spell all around him. And he could see too how his wish spelled to the pie had worked on it to dissolve or burn it or unravel just a small section which gave Feliks a chance to escape its clutches for a while before it regrew around him.
Now he saw what he had to do to attack and dismantle the spell directly. He reached out with mind and pulled it up from the roots. The strands writhed a moment, and withered away.
He opened his eyes.
"I... I've done it, I think."
There wasn't so much as a flash of light. He felt very tired and quite hungry.
François squinted at the Prince. "That you have," she said.
"Well done, Toris," said his father, and enfolded him in a hug.
"So, how do you feel?" Toris asked a moment later. "Still like you're about to hiccup back into a cat?"
Prince Ignatius stretched and rolled his jaw experimentally "A—a little? But I think that's only like how you feel when you've cured the hiccups and you're not quite sure you really have, you know? Wow, it's going to be weird not turning into a cat all the time!"
Toris laughed weakly. "I suppose."
"...Toris," Ignatius began.
But Toris saw a movement over his shoulder, and felt his own blood freeze in his veins.
Ivan was on his feet, walking shakily towards the spell that was still bellying and swelling the patch of shimmering air centre stage.