King of Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page A

He’ll hurt himself!”
    There was complete silence in the theater for a moment, a dangerous silence. Then Arby said, very quietly, “Warmun, I am directing this play, for this century, and you will all do exactly what I tell you.”
    It was a weird thing to say, but there was absolute authority in his voice. Nobody said anything.
    â€œIt’s your cue, Oberon,” Arby said.
    So Gil went on with the scene, until the point where Demetrius comes on, pursued by unlucky Helena (who loves him), ungratefully trying to get rid of her as he hunts the eloping Hermia (whom he loves) and Lysander. And I went backstage to wait for my next entrance.
    It’s Puck who causes most of the trouble in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After Oberon has squeezed his magic herb’s juice on Titania’s sleeping eyes, so that she will fallin love with the first thing she sees when she wakes, Puck finds the mechanicals rehearsing their play in the wood, and changes Bottom’s head into a donkey’s head. Bottom’s friends run away, terrified—and guess who Titania first when she wakes?
    Oberon has seen Demetrius being mean to Helena, and felt sorry for her, so he tells Puck to squeeze the magic juice on his eyes too, so that he’ll switch from Hermia to Helena. Unfortunately Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and instead of sorting out the lovers he makes things worse. Pretty soon neither girl has the right guy in love with her, each of them is mad at the other, and the men are threatening to kill one another.
    I had a great time leading each guy about the stage in the dark, putting on a deep voice to make him think I was the other one—until at last by the end of Act Three, which Arby had chosen as the place for our intermission, all four lovers were asleep and things could be sorted out by having Lysander fall back in love with Hermia.
    I said, squeezing the juice on his eyelids:
    Â 
    â€œWhen thou wak’st
Thou tak’st
True delight
    In the sight
    Of thy former lady’s eye;
    And the country proverb known,
    That every man should take his own,
    In your waking shall be shown:
    Jack shall have Jill,
    Nought shall go ill.
    The man shall have his mare again,
    Â Â Â Â and all shall he well”
    Â 
    And these last three lines I said out to the audience, or rather to the empty theater where the audience would be, and they jarred me suddenly out of my happy time, my acting time. All shall he well. I knew as I said it that it was a lie, Shakespeare’s lie, because I knew from my own life that all does not go well, but that terrible things happen to people and cannot be put right, by magic flower-juice or by anything else in this world.
    As I stood there on the stage, for the third time that day there was the weird blurring around me, as if I were underwater, and a buzzing in my head like the voices of a crowd, and through it a faint thread of music. The stage pillars and the galleries beyond them seemed to tilt and sway, and I felt myself stagger.
    â€œNat?” said Arby’s voice from out front, inquiringly.
    Gil must have been watching me from behind the upstage curtain, because suddenly he was out on the stage, holding me by the shoulders, looking down into my face in concern. “What’s wrong, kid? Are you okay?”
    â€œSure,” I said. And sure, yes, I was okay, for as long as the play would last. Until I got back to real life, where nothing could ever really be okay again.
    Gil and Rachel walked me back to the Fishers’ that afternoon, even though the giddiness was gone again in minutes, just as it had been before. Everyone seemed to be treating me like some fragile piece of china, even Arby—though I guess that was understandable because he didn’twant anything to happen to his Puck. Eric was my understudy, and his voice projection was better than his tumbling.
    I felt healthy enough, all through supper with Mr. and Mrs. Fisher and