Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  Irrelevancies—perhaps every dream he had ever dreamed was now irrelevant. Perhaps he ought to treat them as if they were.

  He wanted so much to keep the one where he’d seen Mieka with those laughing eyes and that silvering hair.

  But what of the others concerning him, others about him?

  Watching the moonglade on a river: “Whatever I give you, you give back to me better than I could ever imagine it. You always do.”

  Watching the girl and her mother discuss their plans to tame him.

  Watching himself slam Mieka against an icy lamppost.

  Watching his own hand slap Mieka again and again and again.

  Watching Mieka beat his pregnant wife.

  Watching his own scarred fingers (when and how had those scars happened?) holding a note, reading the terrible words scrawled on it, hearing himself say, “But I’m still here.”

  He couldn’t rid himself of any of it. Each of those foreseeings, and a hundred more—they were part of him. They were his memories, even if they hadn’t happened yet, even if they would never happen. If he lost them, he would lose parts of himself.

  “Don’t worry about going too lost, Quill, I’ll always come find you.”

  To lose himself for at least a little while seemed a very good thing. But the thorn hadn’t done for him what it was supposed to do.

  “I don’t have the sort of dreams most people have.…”

  This new one had come in grim sequence, like a play. Or a fire set by a professional arsonist. The scene set and surveyed. The vulnerable points identified. The progress, inevitable and devastating, to the final taste of ashes: “Write me happy, Quill.”

  Perhaps it was his own instincts, his tregetour’s brain, that had given him that long plotline instead of mere glimpses. Perhaps there had been a dozen separate dreams that his trained mind had organized into a whole. Perhaps it had been the influence of the thorn. Perhaps he simply didn’t dream the way other people did.

  As if any of that mattered.

  He’d tried to fight his way out of it, truly he had, but the thorn was powerful in him by then and it was much too late. It would always be too late. If he saw a possible future, it meant that something had already happened that made that future possible. He couldn’t change it. He was helpless. He couldn’t control what other people did or said or thought or felt.

  So why bother anguishing himself about it? Things would happen the way they would happen. He had no power over futures decided by other people’s choices. Yet it seemed he was constructed inside in ways that compelled him to try. If a voice sounding remarkably like Master Emmot’s whispered, “How?” he refused to hear it.

  Over the next nine days at Fairwalk Manor, he used all the different thorn packets in the roll, daring them to do what they were supposed to do. Recklessly he gave himself over to the thorn, sometimes using just before he went to sleep, other times spending the whole day lying on a deep padded sofa in the shade of an apple tree, aware that anyone seeing him would think he was drowsing. He wasn’t. His eyes were closed so that the view of serene pasture and green hillside could not compete with the scenes inscribing themselves on his brain.

  Always it was the same dream, with variations that never made any real difference and occasionally with elaborations that gouged pieces out of his heart. The Elsewhen infected him like a wound gone to poison, suppurating into his every conscious thought. He knew why there were no significant changes. None of the decisions that would change it were his to make. He had no choices, none at all.

  But Sagemaster Emmot had always said that if he had no choices to make, he would see no futures. He’d seen this one, over and over again; therefore he must have made a decision that caused it.

  On the tenth night of his stay at Fairwalk Manor, having run out of thorn, he got drunk instead. The next morning he wrote a brief letter to Brishen Staindrop, asking what other sorts of thorn she could suggest. He spent that day and the next writing “Doorways.” He told himself that by calling it that, and keeping it a single play instead of the series of plays that Broken Doors had been in the dream, he was beginning the changes that must be made in order to render that future impossible. And as for Bewilderland—he vowed never, ever to write anything even remotely like it, nor use the title or any variation thereof. Senseless word, anyway.

  That last night at Fairwalk Manor, he had the dream about Tobalt Fluter again.

  {The office was strut and brag from the carved door to the wide window overlooking the river. The walls were thick with books on shelves, and copies of important front pages and broadsheet articles framed under glass, and imagings of the famous with their signatures, all inscribed to Sir Tobalt Fluter. Little trinkets glinted on every shelf, some of them the symbols of various clans—Pheasant, Lion, Scorpion, Elk—some of them punning on the names of those who had given them: an apple made of oakwood, a circle of braided gold, a bent bow, a green glass lily leaf from the guilds of that town. A very important personage was Sir Tobalt, his influence coveted and his interest courted by anyone who was anyone or wanted to be. He sat at his desk, angled so he could see the door and the window view, and arched his brows at the young man who hunched in a severe wooden chair before him, pen and notebook at hand.

  “I must’ve written dozens of pieces about them through the years,” said Sir Tobalt. “But I’d never talked to the people around them at such length before. Gods and Angels, what some of them are saying—”

  “Which people? The wives? Parents?”

  A shrug and a thin, shrewd smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Don’t think I’ll tell you my sources. All you’re here for is a tickle of what the chapbook biography will contain.”

  “So make me laugh,” the young man invited brazenly. “Set me positively howling. How much of what everyone’s saying is true?”

  “Nobody wants to admit to anything, especially concerning the Elf. You can’t print that, by the way.” He ran a fingertip along the trinket that had pride of place on his desk: a glass basket about the size of his cupped palm, with a little silver quill and a green glass withie propped inside along with a selection of the finest gold-nibbed pens. The gesture was lazy, at odds with the sudden vehemence of his tone. “Damned I’ll be, though, if I include all those lies Mieka’s wife told me. I hear enough of that muck from Cade.” He snorted. “Bewilderland—that’s what he’d like all of us to live in, some insane fantasy where his lies are the only truth.”

  “I don’t understand what lying gets him. I mean, after all these years, to keep telling the same stories that nobody ever believed the first time he told them—”

  “Got no choice, has he? He’d go mad, otherwise. Because he knows. He’ll never admit it, but he knows. When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”}

  No, Cade thought when he woke, he could never rid himself of any of the Elsewhens. They were part of him.

  At last came the morning of departure for Gallantrybanks. Cade nodded to the servants, thirty of them, all lined up to bid him and Rafe and Crisiant farewell. But he didn’t look directly into the eyes of any of the maids, footmen, cooks, grooms, gardeners, and sundry other staff standing there in the gauzy spring rain. He still felt too guilty. Cade’s parents rarely accepted invitations to stay at noblemen’s houses. His mother always begged off with the excuse that her husband’s duties at Court did not permit his absence from it, and she simply couldn’t think of going anywhere without him. In reality, the Silversuns hadn’t the cash to spare for tipping the servants as was expected at all the great houses. Lady Jaspiela had reminded Cade several times before this trip that he must do so, especially at the home of so exalted a lordship as Kearney Fairwalk.

  The housekeeper hadn’t let him. “Oh no, Master Silversun, no! ’Twas our privilege and delight to serve yourself and Master and Mistress Threadchaser! We’ve so few truly distinguished guests, not at all like in His late Lordship’s day—” She bit both lips together, as if she had said too much, th
en gave him a swift and sincere smile. “’Twas our pleasure, every one of us.”

  As he settled into a sprightly little carriage drawn by two high-stepping grays, waiting for Rafe and Crisiant to join him, he mused on the implications of what the housekeeper had said. So he was truly distinguished, was he? And comparable to those who had visited in Kearney’s father’s time? What sort of guest did Kearney invite down to Fairwalk Manor, that a tregetour and a fettler and the daughter of a man who built chimneys for a living were distinguished?

  The carriage door opened and Rafe handed his wife in. Cade smiled. Crisiant settled facing him, Rafe soon at her side, and as the coachman chirruped to the horses, they both looked at him for the first time in almost a fortnight.

  “Too weak to shave, were you?” Rafe asked.

  “It would probably be good manners to apologize,” Cade said, “for not even once joining you for dinner. But I can’t think of a single reason why I should. It’s not as if you missed me, is it? And I knew for certain sure you wouldn’t appreciate catching whatever illness I brought with me from Gallytown.”

  “We did wonder where you were,” Crisiant said. “The servants mentioned that you seemed to like the gardens—”

  “When I wasn’t yarking in the garderobe,” he lied with perfect glibness. He knew what he looked like: the haggard face that hadn’t known a razor in a week, the circles beneath his eyes. “Kearney’s people took good care of me, though, and now I’m well and ready to work.” He smiled again, and winked at Crisiant. “You can have your husband from curfew bell to lunching, but there’s Trials coming up so I have to steal him the rest of the day.”

  Rafe nodded slowly, still not quite convinced but, as usual with him, not pressing the point. “Jeska’s due back home tomorrow. Mieka—”

  Crisiant interrupted. “You may have to hire a regiment of retired guardsmen to drag him back from Frimham and—what was her name, again?”

  “Well,” Rafe mused, “the family name is Caitiffer, whatever that means.”

  “I thought she had a bit of a foreign look about her.”

  Cade glanced out the window and bit his lips against laughter. In a Kingdom where Wizard, Elf, Gnome, Goblin, Giant, Piksey, Sprite, Fae, and who knew what all else had all contributed their distinctive features—facial and otherwise—to the general bloodlines, it took a Gallybanker with Crisiant’s decided views to proclaim that anyone could actually look foreign.

  “But I don’t think Mieka’s ever mentioned her name,” Rafe went on.

  Cade said, “That’s because he doesn’t know it.” When they both stared at him, he grinned. “Jinsie told me at your wedding that her clan is fanatically conservative, and only the immediate family ever knows anyone’s given name.”

  Crisiant mulled this over. Rafe said, “Wouldn’t make much difference in bed, I’d expect—in my experience, a dearling here and a sweetheart there usually suffice—” His wife clouted him in the arm and he laughed. “—but it seems a bit much to have to marry a girl before you find out her name.”

  “Mayhap that regiment can threaten it out of the mother,” Crisiant said, “while they’re peeling that silly Elf off the daughter.”

  “No regiment required,” Cade assured her. “I’ll just send his brothers after him.”

  “If you can peel Jed away from Blye,” she retorted.

  “I’ve been wanting to ask how all that happened,” he said, and like every girl in possession of a happy and successful love story of her own, she was eager to detail the progress of a friend’s romance. Why was it, he mused as he listened—and kept track of each incident, because he really did want to know—that when people paired off they wanted to see everyone else paired off, too? He assumed it was a generous impulse, but all he could think of was that Elsewhen that had repeated over and over, and the unknown faceless woman who would become his wife and the mother of his children, and her total indifference to the fire that had begun by illuminating his soul and could end by destroying him.

  He spent so much time being afraid. Two afternoons later, when Touchstone gathered in Mistress Threadchaser’s sitting room, just like always, and Mieka bounced in as blithe and laughing as ever, he began to think that perhaps he hated the Elf for not even knowing what fear was.

  He sat back to watch and listen as news was exchanged. Jeska sported an enviable sun-browning from his weeks seaside; Mieka did not. This brought the inevitable teasing (“Why, whatever could you have been doing to keep you indoors all that time?”), which only made his grin all the sleeker, all the more smug, as if he’d done something very clever. Cade, sorting withies, wondered if the girl was already pregnant. Amazing, really, that she’d yielded her virginity more readily than her name. But he supposed that might be much of the attraction: the mystery of her, the wanting to possess everything about her. He banished the insistent vision of that sad-eyed little boy from another Elsewhen, grateful when Mieka turned to Rafe with mischief sparkling in those eyes, the look he always wore when about to tease.

  Rafe knew what was coming. Pointing a long finger at the Elf, he said, “Make a start with me, and I’ll tell Crisiant every word of it.”

  Mieka pretended to cower back in terror. “Gods, not that! Anything but that!”

  “Can we get some work done?” asked Jeska, fidgeting with the new pages Cade had given him.

  “Not before you tell us how many adoring ladies you left languishing behind you,” Mieka retorted. Then, to Rafe, in aggrieved tones: “Cade was there with you at Fairwalk Manor, so he already knows everything! Won’t you even tell me—?”

  “We didn’t see him the whole time.”

  “Oy, Quill! What’s her name, then?”

  Cade looked up from the glass basket. “Whose name?”

  Mieka was making a sly, smirking face. “The lovely birdie as kept you busy!” Then he fell back into his chair with a look of horror. “Holy Gods—don’t tell me you spent the whole while working?”

  “Not all of it.” He manufactured a smile, complete with suggestively arched brows, and tossed over a primed withie. A quick glance at Rafe showed him a frown, and too late he recalled that he’d said he’d been ill. Suddenly resentful that he was having to tell all these lies, he asked himself who cared what Rafe thought, or knew, or thought he knew?

  “Speaking of working,” Jeska said pointedly.

  Mistress Threadchaser entered then, carrying a teapot and four glass mugs. The familiar little ritual of pouring out occupied them for a time. When they had settled once more, Cade wondered if they’d ever recover the easy banter, the comfortable mockery they’d known on the Winterly Circuit. All those months when they’d been far from home, with no one but each other to talk to and rely on—it might have been expected that the intensity and exhaustion of performing and the long days of boredom in the coach would have had them at each other’s throats, but instead they’d grown even closer. Not a plural, like the Shadowshapers or the Crystal Sparks, but a single thing: Touchstone. A knot of four ropes that became tighter with every show they played.

  Yet he’d felt that connection loosening, once they had returned home to Gallantrybanks. Onstage it had been the same. The bookings at the Kiral Kellari had been brilliantly successful. But offstage, other people began to tug. Now, after a scant fortnight apart, Cade felt the difference in the mood and it scared him. It was as if they all had other places they’d rather be: Rafe with Crisiant, Mieka with his girl, Cade with his thorn … of them all, only Jeska was determined to get down to it, get some work done.

  So they started. A bit rusty at first, but things slowly came together. Cade had them run through bits of half a dozen pieces to introduce them to changes he’d made. When Mieka proclaimed himself hopelessly confused and threatened to smash the glass basket over Cade’s head unless they were allowed to do one playlet all the way through, Cade’s temper blew up like an exploding withie.

  “Which particular piece of rubbish would you like to do?” he snarled. “It’s all equa
lly shitty! I hate every word of it! There’s not an idea in any of it that means anything at all!”

  Jeska’s fists clenched as if throttling his own temper. “It’s your writing, ain’t it? It’s what we’ve been doing for more than a year now—”

  “That’s the whole fucking point! It’s stale and it’s boring—”

  “So write us something else!”

  “Keep feeding the beast? I put my guts into something new and original and you suck it dry, all of you, and then the audience does the same, like a whole belfry of fucking Vampires—”

  “What in all hells is wrong with you?” Rafe shouted. “This is what you’ve wanted since you were fifteen years old! Now you’re telling us it’s meaningless?”

  “Yes.” Mieka’s voice was lethally soft. “As pointless as searching for nipples on a chicken. He’s seen us work these pieces too many times. They don’t mean anything to him anymore. He’s not there inside them, working them the way you and me and Jeska work them. And he’s not the audience, neither. They don’t think it’s rubbish.”

  “Audiences,” Cade sneered. “What do they know?”

  “They know enough to know we’re good. Gods damn it all, Cade, we’re great and everybody knows it!”

  “Excepting him,” Rafe growled.

  “Why not join in one night?” Mieka taunted. “Watch us perform, be part of the crowd. That’s what you were telling Tobalt in that interview, innit? That men want to be part of a shared experience?”

  “I’m already part of something.” All at once all the anger left him, and he smiled. “Touchstone. I’m part of something worth being part of.”

  Mieka glared at him, then collapsed back in his chair, laughing helplessly. “Oh, Quill! You’re such a fraud!”

  Jeska looked bewildered, but Rafe was slowly succumbing to a grin. Cade shrugged, hands spread wide in the Wizardly gesture that meant You may trust me, and the fettler gave a complex snort before rapping his knuckles on the table beside him.