Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  He stared for a time at his younger self, back when he’d been Quill and knew how to laugh; at the young Mieka, back when he’d been clear-eyed and quick and clever and beautiful. Their fifth year on the Royal—that was the one where the hate really started to show in Cade, the coldness. The proverbial heart of stone. The seventh Royal, though, that was the worst, the one he loathed most.

  The imager had posed them wearing black clothes and oversize white silk roses in their jacket lapels, sitting one behind the other: Jeschenar cross-legged on the floor, Mieka on a footstool, Cayden on a chair, Rafcadion on a barstool. Cade had to dig his fingers into Mieka’s shoulders to keep him from falling over. The imager called out adjustments in the pose and their expressions until at last she got what she wanted. Rafe: cool, sardonic. Jeska, looking like a fallen Angel. Himself, grimly smiling, daring anyone to interpret that smile. And Mieka, playing the sweet innocent, a mockery that made Cade want to slap him when he saw the finished imaging.

  But there’d been another imaging, quickly done without their knowledge a few minutes later. The woman had had only a few moments to capture them with her magic inside the withie, but capture them she had. Every time he saw this seventh Royal medal, it was that other imaging he remembered, and that was why he hated it so much. Jeska, stiff and weary, had closed his eyes. Rafe was stretching a cramp from his neck, grimacing. Cade had no expression on his face at all—for Mieka had hunched a shoulder and turned his head to rest his cheek on Cade’s fingers. What he hadn’t seen until the finished imaging—and thank the Lord and Lady and all the Gods it had come to him first—was the look in those eyes: lost, hurt, miserable, the genuine innocence still at the core of him all too clear in his face.

  Cade had torn the imaging to shreds and ordered that there be no engraving of it ever made so that no one else could ever see it. But he remembered it every time he saw this Trials medal.

  “It was only some redthorn, Cade! I had to sleep!”

  “And you had to wake up, so you took—”

  “Fuck off! You self-righteous snarge—like you never pricked thorn in your life?”

  “Not three and four at a time, while drinking a bottle of brandy! You’re turning into a thrall, Mieka! You can’t sleep without redthorn and you can’t get out of bed without bluethorn! Look at your hands shake! You’re more likely to stab yourself with the withies than—”

  “What the fuck do you care? You can just have me stitched up again like after you crashed a glass basket over me head!”

  “I already apologized for that a hundred times—and you’re the one we’re talking about, not me! Look at yourself! You can’t hardly function—and the liquor is making you fat, Mieka. You’re slower, and heavier, and you’re getting sloppy, and by the end of a show you’re completely knackered—”

  “I’m as good as I ever was—I’m better! I’m Mieka fuckin’ Windthistle of Touchstone! I’m the best glisker in the Kingdom and I don’t need you tellin’ me how t’live me life! I don’t need you!”

  Had it really been only a week later that he’d turned his head to rest his cheek against Cade’s hand, his heart in those sad, soft eyes?

  When the bell sounded downstairs, he flinched so violently that he almost dropped the bottle. Who would be coming round at this hour of the night? He took the bottle with him. The steps seemed to have multiplied. As he passed his wife’s bedchamber door, he heard an impatient rustling, and knew he would hear about this tomorrow at coldly condemning length. Hurrying, lurching a bit, he made it down before a fourth ring could wake the children, and yanked open the door.

  Lord Kearney Fairwalk had exquisite taste in footmen. One of them stood there on Cade’s doorstep, gasping with exertion, his plum-colored livery jacket unbuttoned at the throat to show the deep blue shirt beneath. Cade didn’t recognize this boy; he never did. Kearney hired them and sacked them with dedicated regularity, almost as quickly as Mieka went through women.

  “Do you know what the fuck time it is?” Cade demanded.

  The boy flinched, then held out a piece of paper. “I ran all the way here—His Lordship’s orders—”

  He focused his eyes with difficulty on Kearney’s scrawl, cramped and hasty below the oak-leaf emblem.

  Mieka was taken to the Princess’s Sanatorium tonight.

  “Again?” Cade muttered, and took a pull at the bottle.

  He collapsed at the Kiral Kellari. When the physicker arrived, he was barely breathing.

  It had happened before. He’d had messages like this before.

  The physickers sent word to me, and I was there within the hour.

  Nice of His Lordship to interrupt whatever he’d been doing with this pretty young boy and see that Mieka’s name didn’t get into the scandal broadsheets. Again. Yes, he’d seen all this before. But what came next—that was something he’d never seen before.

  I sent for his parents.

  The bottle slipped from his fingers to the carpet at his feet. Silently. The silence was suddenly so huge, so powerful.

  Mieka died a few minutes after midnight.

  The horror was cold and raw and completely sobering. Into the silence his own voice said, “But I’m still here.”

  He shut the door in the boy’s face, went into the drawing room, found a chair. He could hear his wife’s voice raised in irritated demand from the top of the stairs. He sat, staring at Kearney’s words, at his own scarred fingers. Wondering why, on this night of all nights, the blood didn’t show.

  He stared at his hands again, there in the memorial garden of Clinquant House, while Mieka’s ashes were placed into an exquisite glass urn. Blye had made it: swirling black and green and brown and blue and an elusive flash of gold, all the colors of those eyes. The urn was then buried and the carved marble headstone placed atop it. Surely that little hollowing of earth was too small to contain a spirit as vast and wild as Mieka Windthistle’s.

  He couldn’t face any of the family. He got back into his carriage and told his driver to find him a tavern. An hour later, he was seated in murky corner, drinking himself stupid.

  Mieka—oh Gods, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—

  I know, Quill. Stop blaming yourself. I know you tried.

  Not hard enough. I got tired of fighting and then I stopped. How could I do that? How could I just give up like that? This isn’t the way it should’ve been. I–I wanted so much for you to be happy—

  You gave me your words and your magic—trusted me with them—and that made me happy. And you were always there.

  I should’ve done more, I should’ve done anything to keep from losing you—“When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul”—I tried to dream it better, Mieka, I tried to make the Elsewhens better—

  Shush. Not even you can make dreams real, Cayden.

  You did. You made my best dreams real—everything I am, everything I’ve written—it wasn’t until you showed up that first night—

  That was a night, wasn’t it!

  None of it would’ve happened without you—believing in me, making me want to be the best because you’re the best—it was only after you found me that I even dared think I could—

  You bloody great fool. Whatever you are, you would’ve been, no matter what. It was always in you. And you made me part of it. To be dancin’ behind me glisker’s bench with you watchin’ me durin’ a show meant all the world to me. I guess I just ran out of time before I thought I would.

  I miss you. I don’t want to be here without you, Mieka. There’s no place I want to be if you’re not—

  Shut up! Don’t you dare even think it!

  There’s times when I can’t think of anything else.

  Well, don’t! You stay here and raise your children and write your words and make two thousand people scream every time you walk onstage—and you bloody well better behave yourself when the King gives you that knighthood—

  Are you still on about that? You silly little Elfling!

  You haven’t called me that
in a long time. But I guess I haven’t been your Elfling in a long time, have I? I’m sorry, Cayden. I’m the one as should’ve tried harder. But I promise I’ll be waiting—at the end of it all, I’ll be waiting. Now, go sleep this off. And one day write me something—nothing big or grand, just—write me happy, Quill.

  “Time, me lords! Time now, gentlemen!” called the barmaid. He opened his eyes, and pushed himself to his feet, and went to sleep it off.}

  And woke up weeping.

  This future was possible. It was all possible.

  Elsewhen.

  Chapter 1

  He couldn’t breathe. His chest was tight, his head aching. His hands shook as he rubbed his tear-streaked face, terrified that he might have cried out and woken someone—

  By the Lord and Lady and all the Angels and Old Gods, please let him have cried out and woken someone in the vastness of Fairwalk Manor.

  By the time he recovered his breath and his heart stopped thundering, he knew he had stayed silent. There was no one to knock on his door, call out his name, come into his room, exclaim with shock at what he knew must be in his eyes. There was no one.

  Brishen Staindrop had promised him dreams to fire his imagination and make his writing richer, deeper. He ought to’ve known. Blockweed hadn’t worked on him the way it was supposed to; neither had this, whatever it was. All he wanted was a few hours spent someplace beautiful that danced and sparkled, someplace safe. What he got instead was horror.

  And he would have to remember it, wouldn’t he? It was part of him now. To tuck it all away and forget the words that unlocked it would be to lose something of himself. If he was true to his own arrogance, he would have to keep this Elsewhen as he had kept all the others.

  Pushing himself to his feet, he made his slow, aching way to the hearth and half-fell onto his knees, reaching for logs to stoke the fire. There was no clock in the bedchamber—Kearney Fairwalk forbade clocks at his residences, with the splendid disregard of a very rich man for such mundane concerns as being anywhere on time. Cade might have lingered in bed and rung for a servant to replenish the fire for him, but the frantic need to see another living being had faded. He didn’t want anyone to see him like this.

  To be in possession of a suite of rooms at Fairwalk Manor was a privilege not accorded many. Touchstone had been invited for the fortnight preceding Trials. After their first grueling Winterly Circuit and dozens of shows in and around Gallantrybanks, all four young men were in need of time off. But rather than visit Fairwalk Manor, Jeska had chosen instead to escort his mother to a seaside town where he’d taken a month’s hire on a cottage for her, and stay for a couple of weeks. Rafe and his new wife, Crisiant, had accepted His Lordship’s generosity as a welcome escape after the strains of putting together their wedding celebrations. Cayden, determined on other forms of escape and certain that Fairwalk Manor was precisely the location for them, hadn’t blushed a single blush when he got into a carriage the morning after Rafe and Crisiant’s wedding and betook himself to Fairwalk Manor. In fact, he hadn’t seen the couple at all. Not only was the tall, sprawling house gigantic, but orders had also come down from Lord Fairwalk to his servants to give his guests whatever they wanted whenever they wanted it, and do this as unobtrusively as possible. What Rafe and Crisiant wanted was exactly what Cade wanted: privacy.

  Cade knew exactly how they were spending their time. He spent his exploring the library, the grounds, the stables, and the little blue leather roll of thorn he’d purchased from Mieka Windthistle’s Auntie Brishen.

  He’d always thought Mieka would be with him when he did this. Don’t worry about going too lost, Quill, I’ll always come find you, he’d written in the note accompanying that first little green wallet of blockweed. But Mieka was in Frimham, pretending to stay at a seaside inn while really staying with the girl whose existence made the thorn necessary.

  Cade was supposed to be working on various playlets, polishing those that Touchstone might have to present at Trials and crafting his own ideas into performable shape. He arrived at Fairwalk Manor fully intending to do his duty by his group and his talents. Instead, the afternoon following his arrival, he took a long walk about the sculpted grounds, ate an early dinner, and told the servants to leave him alone. And they had done so; even if he had cried out, no one would have come. He got out the roll of thorn and stared at it for almost an hour before deciding which little packet of powder to use.

  He hated what was in his mind. He had to find some way of enduring what he knew was to come. If thorn helped, then he’d use it.

  Elsewhens, Mieka called them: visions while he slept and sometimes when he was wide awake of futures that might come to pass. Cade had neglected far too long the orderly categorizing of what he’d foreseen. The memories of things that hadn’t happened yet were crowding his head, and he knew he had to discipline them or run mad.

  The Elsewhens about Tobalt Fluter in the Downstreet, talking to some reporter about Touchstone—those didn’t count now, not since the tavern had burned. He didn’t have to worry about them anymore. He didn’t have to think about hearing Tobalt say, “His mind’s cold, but his heart’s colder” or “Touchstone is still together after twenty-five years.” Whatever futures Tobalt had referred to, they would be different. Cade could rid himself of the despair of the first—and the determination not to let it happen. He had to let go of the joy of the second—and the fear that now it would never come true. The futures would be different, and those dreams didn’t count.

  But as he went through each in his mind, reviewing them before locking them away, he noticed something strange: the lutenist in the second vision. With a soundless bark of laughter he suddenly recognized Alaen Blackpath—twenty-five years older, his reddish curls turning silver—

  —just as he’d seen Mieka’s black hair silvered in a single tantalizing flash, lines framing his mouth and crossing his forehead; older, yes, but still bright-eyed and laughing and beautiful.

  He wanted so much to hold on to that one. It was still possible, wasn’t it? Just because Tobalt could no longer sit in the Downstreet and say that Touchstone was still together after twenty-five years, it didn’t mean that Cade would never see Mieka like that.

  No. He had to be ruthless. He couldn’t keep that one just because it made him smile, because it comforted him. He had to get rid of at least some of these Elsewhens crammed into his brain. Not that he’d ever done it before, except the once.

  “Once you’ve learned it, the technique will in all probability save your sanity,” said Master Emmot. “If only by convincing you that there is an order to things, an order that you may impose upon them. Organization is a desirable thing. When we can accomplish it, in whatever area of life, it is to be cherished and defended. To impose order on the chaos of living, on the potential chaos of your own mind—what else is language, and the division of the world into separate nations, and even the ordering of time itself into hours, weeks, months, years? Thus, too, it must be with your foreseeings. And just as words are used to identify time, places, things, you may use a series of words to classify each separate dream.”

  To think he had actually been intrigued: learning how to select a couple of words or a phrase that encompassed a particular foreseeing, how to think of his mind like a trunk with an ever-increasing number of locks, each giving access to a little compartment where a dream was kept.

  “It’s very like what men used to do when they wanted to memorize large quantities of information, such as the solar or lunar calendars, or an epic poem cycle. They would construct whole houses in their minds, and furnish them from front doorway to attic roof with items that prompted memory of a particular thing or things. The four vases on a table in the vestibule, each containing flowers of a different season, might be reminder of the dates of the phases of the moon. Perhaps the railings of the staircase each depict a particular tree, like the old poem that describes the attributes of each. Yes, I know you’ve read it—but could you memorize it in perfect or
der and then tuck it away, to be brought out again when you look into your mind and see those railings? In our day, we are a literate society, so we don’t have to use these techniques to remember and pass along information. We have only to go look it up in a book. There are those in this world who still practice this method of memory with images as their keys. But you are, as we both know, someone to whom words are of paramount importance, so the only image you will use is that of a large locked trunk. Make it as plain or as ornate as you wish. The keys will not be made of brass or iron, but of words.”

  To think that he had actually found it interesting: creating the trunk, dividing it into sections according to subject (one of them pretentiously labeled THE KINGDOM OF ALBEYN), choosing a primary word for each section and then more words for specific identification. He’d actually enjoyed it.

  “Remember the whole of the experience, as I’ve taught you. Assign your key to it. Then lock it away until you wish to review it again. Or until you wish to be rid of it forever.”

  But he’d done that only once, just to prove to Master Emmot that he could indeed do it. His reasoning had not sat well with the old Sage.

  “You tell me, Cayden, that if a man is the sum total of what he has learned and experienced, then to rid yourself of even one foreseeing would be to take away a portion of who you are. But did you hear what you just said? What a man has learned. What he has experienced. Those things are in the past. What you see is the future. Once a future becomes impossible, for whatever reason, you would be doing yourself and your overactive mind a favor by getting rid of it. Right now you are fifteen. What if you live to be eighty or ninety? Moreover, what if your turns as you get older become more frequent, or lengthier, or more detailed? They might do, you know. The brain grows and changes, and does not fully mature until the age of twenty-one or -two, perhaps longer for one of mostly Wizarding blood. My advice is to clear your mind of things that are no longer possible. Don’t clutter up your life with irrelevancies. But the choice is yours, of course.”