I should say that being an eighteen-year-old in Cresdon means that you’ve been a man for at least half a decade already, even if you’ve made your living in a dress. I can’t compare it to other places, and I’m sure there are kids my age whose comfort and happiness are still carefully engineered by other people, but unless you’re gentry where I live, you pretty much have to claw your way into manhood, and there’s plenty who don’t make it. Kids starve, or they get beaten to death by their so-called benefactors, or they get sold into slavery. I’m not trying to shock you or convince you that I’m some kind of hero for making it this long; but I don’t want you thinking you’re going to get a tale about some blue-eyed tyke with a heart of gold in a world where good triumphs over evil. You’re not, I’m not, and in my experience it never does.

Just so we’re clear.

Anyway. I lived less than half a mile from the theatre, but one of those impromptu markets which Cresdon’s residents seem so fond of had spontaneously appeared right outside the goldsmith’s on Aqueduct Street. I was soon up to my armpits in goats and cheese and bales of smelly wool imported by the equally smelly herders from the Ashran Plains, north of the city. By the time I reached the backstage entrance of the Eagle Theatre, I could already hear the bugles finishing up, which meant they were halfway through what passed for a musical introduction: a florid-faced idiot called Rufus Ramsbottom and an instrument (in the loosest possible sense of the word) which he claimed was an Andastrian bagpipe but which sounded like three cats and a chicken tied together in a sack. Not that anyone took any notice. This was strictly background noise to make the paying public feel that something was starting, thus encouraging them to focus on the crucial business of buying one last pint and fighting each other for seats.