Bear Boy put on a sullen face. “I am not craven,” he boasted. “And I am not your boy. I am near a man already.”
“You should be in terror, if you fear Hell. This place is its gateway,” replied the fellow in a disarmingly mild voice, even as he loomed over them, a big man with a bullish head, his face hairy and pock-marked. His left eye turned out. It wandered like a planet when he was drunk. He grabbed Bear Boy’s jaw and squeezed. “A man you say? Yet this hairless chin is damp. Milk from your mam’s tit it must be.”
Dancing Bear woofed, laugh-like, around soggy shreds of bread. The boy flushed. Here was the Script Master who ordered the Players and told them their lines, who owned the wagon and the stage planks and directed his little company from town to town.
He gathered up all the coins but one and pocketed them along with the knuckle-bones. “You and your ratty friend can brawl over what’s left.” Then he lowered himself onto a stone as if it were his singular chair. The Script Master was the sort of man who repurposed every surrounding to his own benefit, as his own stage. “Are you here seeking the Baneful Hand, my little magic-makers?”
Shifting ever so slightly, a movement like melting, the Beggar changed how she sat until Bear Boy realized she mimicked his master. She transformed from the mouse to the hawk. Her shoulders seemed to lift and broaden, her knees splayed wide, her head took on that bullish tilt, and her overall posture filled with coiled energy. Even her left eye appeared unfocused.
The Script Master waved his arm, and the Beggar duplicated it. He raised his eyebrows at the child, and she raised hers back. He blew her a kiss, and she responded with the same insolent disdain. His brow creased in anger. She glowered as well. Suddenly the man lunged. The Beggar lunged identically so the two collided. The Script Master swooped the child into the air where he shook her like a fruit tree at harvest time. Then he dropped her and reseated himself as if nothing had happened. It took a moment for the bruised Beggar to recover, but she sat up as her child self with no trace of the mouse or of the man.
Bear Boy looked on with wonderment. Now the two, Script Master and Beggar, appeared at ease and, oddly, as if equals in each other’s presence. What had he witnessed? He dared not ask.
“What Baneful Hand?” the boy inquired instead.