Chapter Four: The Man Who Learned to Laugh

Sebastian Callaway had been waiting outside the musicians’ chamber for forty three minutes when the stool broke. It gave way beneath him with a crack. He caught himself against the wall, the lute case striking his knee, and looked down at the wreckage.

The palace steward stared. Sebastian lifted the detached leg.

“I assume this is the first trial.”

The youngest footman made a choking sound. The steward did not.

“Furniture is not ordinarily destroyed during an application for employment.”

“Then I am already distinguished.”

He set the broken piece on the seat. The steward’s gaze travelled from his scuffed boots to the dark hair refusing to remain behind his ears. Sebastian had tied it back twice that morning. Both attempts had failed. His coat was clean, his shirt mended, his lute worth more than everything else he owned.

He had considered shaving. Instead, he had decided that a man paid to be ridiculous could survive a little stubble.

“His Majesty has been delayed,” the steward said.

“So I gathered.”

“You may still be required to return tomorrow.”

Sebastian smiled. Returning tomorrow meant finding another bed, buying another meal, and explaining to the men awaiting news why twelve years of preparation had been defeated by a crowded royal schedule.

“Naturally.”

The steward glanced at the lute case.

“Can you occupy yourself quietly?”

“That has never been my strongest accomplishment.”

At nine, Sebastian had learned that hunger made certain sounds difficult. High notes were the first to go.

He remembered standing behind an alehouse with a fiddle too large for his hands while his stomach folded around nothing. His teacher, Tomas Bell, had listened to him miss the same passage three times before taking the instrument away.

“You cannot squeeze music out of a starving boy.”

Sebastian had thought this meant he was being dismissed. Instead, Tomas bought him bread.

For months afterwards, Sebastian stole crusts from his own meals and kept them beneath his bedding. He had not been born funny. At six, he had been solemn, suspicious of strangers, and inclined to cry when other children killed beetles.

At eight, he had watched soldiers take his father through the doorway. His mother followed before dawn. After that, being solemn accomplished very little.

Laughter bought supper. It persuaded innkeepers to overlook a missing coin. It made grown men lower their guard around a boy who ought to have been invisible.

Tomas taught him the fiddle, then the lute. A travelling singer corrected his breathing by making him lie on the floor with a book on his stomach. An actress taught him to change his voice without damaging it. A cardsharp showed him that an audience looked where it expected something interesting to happen.

The actress had slapped him when he called her lessons easy.

“Then do it while frightened.”

He had never forgotten.

By the time the steward returned, Sebastian had accumulated an audience. Two footmen stood near the door. A maid carrying empty candleholders had paused beside them.

Sebastian was playing the lute and telling them about a magistrate who attempted to outlaw rain.

“The decree was beautifully written,” he said, fingers moving beneath the words. “Unfortunately, the clouds had not learned their letters.”

The maid laughed.

“So the magistrate ordered the schoolmaster arrested.”

“And did it stop raining?” the younger footman asked.

“No, but examination results improved dramatically.”

The steward appeared in the doorway. The maid vanished. One footman discovered urgent business with a curtain. Sebastian stopped playing.

“His Majesty will receive you.”

“How unfortunate. I was just beginning to govern.”

“Bring your instrument.”

Sebastian closed the case. His fingers were steady. He checked them anyway.

The room was smaller than he had expected. For years, he had imagined the king surrounded by enough gold to make cruelty comprehensible. A monstrous room would have suited a monstrous man.

Instead, Henry Hawthorne sat beside a window with a document in his hand and an ink stain on his thumb. There were guards at the door. Sebastian bowed.

“Your Majesty.”

“Sebastian Callaway?”

“Yes, sire.”

Henry looked at the steward.

“Was this the man I heard outside?”

“I’m afraid so, Your Majesty.”

“Why are you afraid?”

The steward hesitated. Sebastian kept his eyes lowered. The king set aside the document.

“We have been without a proper fool since Martin retired.”

“A dangerous vacancy,” Sebastian said.

“Why?”

“Someone may have mistaken it for an opportunity.”

Henry’s mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“Can you sing?”

“When sufficiently encouraged.”

“Consider yourself encouraged.”

Sebastian opened the lute case. His father had once knelt before this man. That was what Rook had told him.

A petition, a request for time to answer the charges and a refusal delivered before witnesses.

Sebastian placed his fingers on the strings. The opening notes came easily. He began with a familiar ballad. It was a prudent choice, and he disliked himself for making it.

The song concerned a soldier returning home to discover his sweetheart married to a miller. Most performers made the soldier noble and the miller absurd.

Sebastian gave the miller a magnificent bass voice and the soldier an increasingly unreasonable opinion of his own worth.

By the final verse, even the guard nearest the window had stopped looking stern.

Henry laughed when the sweetheart explained that the miller possessed both a livelihood and all his limbs.

Sebastian let the last note fade.

The king tapped one finger against his chair.

“Not the version I remember.”

“War is difficult upon a song, sire. Things go missing.”

“Verses?”

“Usually the sensible ones.”

Henry leaned forward.

“What else?”

Sebastian gave him a shepherd’s pipe tune, then a passage on the fiddle the steward reluctantly fetched from the musicians’ chamber.

He shifted between voices. A pompous abbot, a nervous bridegroom, an elderly woman who had buried three husbands and remained dissatisfied with the workmanship.

He did not use the king’s voice. Not yet. When he finished, Henry regarded him in silence.

Sebastian could hear the faint rasp of his own breathing.

“You have performed for courts before?”

“Minor ones.”

“Where?”

“Wherever the dinners were better than the welcome.”

“That was not an answer.”

“No, sire.”

Henry waited. Sebastian named three houses whose hospitality could be verified. He had prepared for that question. He had prepared for most questions.

The difficulty was leaving enough rough edges to appear unprepared.

Rook had found him outside a theatre six years earlier.

At the time, Sebastian’s ambition extended to buying his own company a wagon with four functioning wheels.

The stranger knew his father’s name.

That had been enough to make Sebastian listen.

Later came documents.

A copy of a charge sheet. Accounts bearing unfamiliar signatures. A witness statement describing payments his parents had supposedly refused to conceal.

Rook spread everything across a rented table.

“Your father discovered where the money was going.”

Sebastian remembered staring at the pages.

“And my mother?”

“Would not testify against him.”

He had believed that immediately.

His mother had been many things, but never easily frightened into abandoning someone she loved.

Rook showed him an execution order.

Henry Hawthorne’s seal hung beneath it.

For several minutes, Sebastian could not make the letters remain still.

“Why bring this to me?”

“Because someone should remember.”

Later, remembering had become insufficient.

“Do you find me amusing?”

The king’s question brought him back.

Sebastian rested one hand on the lute.

“I have had limited opportunity to judge.”

The steward stiffened.

Henry did not.

“Then judge.”

It was an invitation with a blade concealed inside it.

Sebastian studied him.

The crown was absent. The responsibility was not. Papers covered half the table, and a cold cup stood beside the king’s elbow.

“You have appointed a man to tell you what is funny,” Sebastian said.

Henry glanced at the steward.

“Not yet.”

“Then there is hope.”

A short laugh.

Sebastian continued before caution could stop him.

“Although I understand why you require a fool. Everyone else must need permission to be wrong.”

The room altered.

Not visibly.

The guard by the door settled his weight.

Henry’s expression remained unreadable.

“And you would not?”

“I should require permission to continue being paid.”

The king looked at him for one long moment.

Then he laughed.

It was not a polite laugh. It came from low in his chest, surprised out of him.

Sebastian bowed his head.

There was nothing satisfying about hearing it.

The questions afterwards were worse than the performance.

Had he debts?

Not to anyone likely to arrive armed.

Had he a wife?

“No, sire.”

Children?

“None.”

Political affiliations?

Sebastian widened his eyes.

“I have performed for political men.”

“That is not quite the same thing.”

“I find they prefer it when I pretend it is.”

Henry dismissed the answer with a small movement.

“Any surviving family?”

There it was.

Sebastian looked at a loose thread on the steward’s cuff.

“No, Your Majesty.”

“How did you lose them?”

“My parents died when I was a child.”

“I am sorry.”

The words were ordinary.

That made them difficult to bear.

Sebastian lifted his eyes.

“Thank you, sire.”

Henry reached for a sheet of paper.

The interview was ending.

Sebastian waited to discover which direction his life would take.

Outside, somewhere beyond the window, a horse whinnied.

The king signed.

“Three months.”

The steward stepped forward.

“Sire?”

“A trial appointment. Wages, accommodation, meals. You will arrange the particulars.”

“Of course.”

Henry returned his attention to Sebastian.

“There are limits.”

“There generally are.”

“My household is not to be humiliated for your amusement.”

“Only for yours?”

The king pointed the pen at him.

“You see the distinction.”

“I shall study it closely.”

“And my daughters are not material for vulgar entertainment.”

For the first time that morning, Sebastian’s smile came without calculation.

“Then we agree upon something.”

Henry’s eyes sharpened slightly.

Sebastian bowed before he could ask what he meant.

His room lay beneath the western roof.

There was a bed, a narrow chest, a washstand, and a window overlooking a courtyard where kitchen boys were arguing over a bucket.

The mattress did not sag.

Sebastian pressed a hand against it, then withdrew.

A palace servant brought his livery.

Not bells, mercifully. A dark green coat with gold stitching at the cuffs, formal enough to remind everyone who paid him.

“You’ll be wanted at supper tomorrow,” the servant said. “Tonight, you’re to familiarise yourself with the household.”

“Every member?”

The man gave him an incurious look.

“Someone will fetch you.”

When the door closed, Sebastian stood without moving.

He had imagined this moment too often.

Triumph should have accompanied it.

Instead, the room smelled of clean linen, and he was suddenly tired.

He placed his instruments beside the bed.

Then he unpacked the only thing he had not allowed the steward to touch.

A folded copy of the execution order.

The seal had blurred with handling, but the name remained clear.

Henry Hawthorne.

Sebastian set it on the chest.

For a moment, he saw ink on a king’s thumb.

He turned the page over.

He went out before dusk.

A jester, apparently, could become lost almost anywhere without provoking alarm.

Servants directed him. Guards inspected his new appointment token. A woman carrying flowers told him never to use the eastern staircase when the queen was receiving guests.

He thanked everyone.

He remembered names.

Near the west gallery, he heard footsteps above him and glanced up.

A young woman had stopped at the balustrade.

Her light brown hair was pinned loosely, and she held a folded document against her skirt. She was looking towards the musicians’ passage, not at him.

There was nothing remarkable in that.

Then she lowered her gaze to the paper.

Whatever she read made her straighten.

Not happily, exactly.

With purpose.

“Princess Aurora,” the flower woman murmured as she passed.

Sebastian looked again.

The heir.

He had seen painted likenesses, all silk and patient eyes. None had included the small frown between her brows.

She turned away before she noticed him.

Sebastian watched the empty space for a moment.

Then he continued walking.

At the side gate, a delivery boy accepted a copper and a folded scrap.

No names.

Only four words.

The king likes laughter.

The boy tucked it away and disappeared into the service courtyard.

Sebastian remained beneath the arch while the evening bell began.

Beyond the wall lay the town, its crowded rooms and leaking roofs. Somewhere there, Rook would receive the message.

Inside waited supper, clean sheets, and a king who had apologised for a death he did not remember ordering.

Sebastian slipped the appointment token into his pocket.

Tomorrow, he would make them laugh again.

He had worked too long to fail now.