Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  “It wasn’t just him. Jeska and I agreed with him. So did Rafe.”

  “Everybody but me. All of Touchstone except me. You let me rehearse something that meant something, and then for the real performance you—”

  “I’m sorry,” Cade repeated. “We were wrong not to tell you.”

  “Yeh, you were. But I’m beholden to you. For showing me what I’m worth. Find another glisker. I’m through.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Don’t I?”

  “We need you.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll stay through the invited shows, but then I’m off.”

  Thin, powerful fingers dug into his shoulders. “Mine you are, and mine you stay.”

  “Are you going to hit me now?” Mieka sneered, and Cade let him go as if scalded. “Beat me bloody to prove that you own me?” Turning, he saw anger in Cade’s tightened lips and fear in Cade’s pallor, but what made him want to laugh was the stricken hurt in Cade’s eyes. “Go ahead!” he taunted. “C’mon, it’s what you want, why not do it? Only have a care to those precious fingers, won’t you—don’t bruise them too bad, might interfere with writing your next piece of nice, safe, comfortable crap!”

  “Mieka!”

  He ignored Rafe’s warning growl. “Me, I can’t wait to read it! Can’t wait to put it out in front of an audience and watch their eyes fog over like windowpanes!” And that reminded him of another way to hurt Cade. “What d’you think Blye will say when she finds out about this? That you listened to that mincing fribbler Fairwalk—”

  Cade was no longer listening.

  By now Mieka knew what an Elsewhen looked like in Cade’s eyes. “Don’t you fucking dare!” he shouted. “No escaping for you, no running off to hide in one of your dreamings! Come back here and take it, Cade!”

  Rafe pushed him away and put an arm around Cade’s shoulders. “Leave him be. He can’t help it.” His voice was soft, his blue-gray eyes intent on Cade’s empty gaze. “He’ll come back when he can.” Then, angrily: “And you’re not going anyplace. Have your tantrum as you like, you’re impressing nobody—”

  All at once Cade sobbed aloud, and slumped against Rafe for a moment before shoving free. He staggered towards the walls and Mieka cried out, grabbed for his arm before he could lose his balance and tumble over the side onto the courtyard cobblestones far below.

  “Quill!”

  Sense returned to the gray eyes. Mieka was aghast to see tears in them, and dampening his thin cheeks. “So … so I’m Quill again, am I?”

  “What did you see? And don’t say ‘nothing’ or I really will leave,” he threatened.

  “It’s that dream I kept having … the same one, over and over.…”

  “The one where you hated me.”

  He nodded.

  “Why? You have to tell me why, Quill—”

  “Don’t make me tell you, Mieka, I can’t, I just can’t—” He almost touched Mieka’s face but then jerked his hand back, as if touching would hurt—or as if he feared that Mieka might not be real. “Don’t leave,” he whispered. “Please.”

  “Rafe!” Jeska called from the doorway. “They’re finished, they want us downstairs! Now!”

  Cade seemed not to have heard. “Please.” Fresh tears smeared his face.

  Mieka threw his arms around him, and felt him trembling. “I won’t, you know I won’t. You just make me so damn furious sometimes, Quill—c’mon, it’s all right, we’re fine—what you saw, that’s never going to happen. I’m still here, and we’re still us.”

  “Y-you promise?”

  “I promise.” Remembering what Blye had said last year—clever and mad—he gave Cayden his most impudent grin. “No yellow shirts, not ever!”

  Back in Fliting Hall they learned that safe, comfortable, and traditional had scraped enough points for first flight. On the Winterly.

  Black Lightning, with their garish and vulgar “Dragon,” had won third flight on the Ducal.

  There was a reception in the torchlit courtyard from which it took half an hour to disentangle themselves. Eventually they made it to the gates, and across the moat, and back into town. Elf-light glowed golden from each corner streetlamp; Mieka made it his mission to kick the metal base of every single one.

  “Two points,” Rafe kept muttering. “Two lousy, gods-damned, stupid, miserable, miscreated, fucking points—”

  “And I know exactly how they got those points,” Mieka fumed as he assaulted another lamppost. “One for each breast.”

  “Stop that,” Cade said absently. “You’ll break a toe.”

  “I don’t think it was just the tits, Mieka,” Jeska said. “One for them, but one for that glimpse of her—” He broke off and mimed sudden extravagant enlightenment. “Good Lord and Lady and all the Angels! Do you think it wasn’t hers at all?”

  Mieka caught on at once. “Gods, Jeska, you’re right! It wasn’t hers, it was Kaj Seamark’s!”

  “Loose, I’d wager,” Rafe contributed.

  Cade nodded wisely. “Poxed, too.”

  It set them to laughing—not that any of them felt like laughing, but it was better than screaming, at least until they got back to their inn’s taproom and into several bottles of brandy.

  “You down there!” someone yelled from an upper window. “There’s decent folk what’s tryin’ to sleep!”

  A voice from the end of the street shouted back, “And we’re indecent folk what’s tryin’ to find a drink!”

  Vered’s long white-gold hair was unmistakable by lamplight. The other Shadowshapers were with him.

  “Oy, Miek! We’re buying!” Chat called out.

  Mieka glanced quickly at Cade, saw him nod, then called back, “Beholden, Chat! Our digs, then! Best brandy in Seekhaven!”

  They spent the rest of the night getting as roundly drunk as if they’d all won first flight on the Royal. Their innkeeper and his wife and their Trollwife were horrified that “their boys” had been cheated, so along with the free brandy came dinner for eight, and to hells with the vouchers. They ate, drank, and sang—and complained—long into the night, and to hells with protests from the neighbors, as well.

  The next morning, Mieka came to in the back garden, curled on a blanket on the grass, sun dappling down through a beech tree overhead. Nearby was the sound of someone being very sick into the bushes. Mieka sat up, and regretted it.

  “Absolutely no head for liquor,” said Chat as he levered Vered upright and gave him a glass of water. Catching sight of Mieka, he asked, “Alive, then, are you?”

  “Matter of opinion.”

  Vered groaned and bent over the bushes again.

  Chat left him to it, ambling over to where Mieka sat holding his head between his hands. “Twenty-four years old, he is, you’d think the idea might’ve got through by now. You’ll come to our show tomorrow night? We’ll leave word at the door. No other group but Touchstone gets in, and the best seats. You have to be there, Miek.”

  “Beholden. Why?”

  “We’re all agreed. We—” Hearing another moan, he hurried back to Vered, who had swayed to his feet. There was a delicate greenish cast to his dark skin as he half-fell into Chat’s arms, and his long, pale hair was matted around his face. “Steady on, mate. A prickling of Master Bellgloss’s best, and you’ll be fit again. Sorry, Mieka, must get something into him or he’ll be neither use nor ornament for days.”

  Mieka waved them away. Once the gate latch snicked behind them, he indulged himself with a low whimper. A bit of bluethorn and he’d be lively enough by the time of their show for the ladies tonight, but this headache was like to a wyvern clawing its way out his eye sockets.

  “For such a scrawny little thing,” said a voice high above him, “you can guzzle more brandy than anyone I’ve ever known.” A hand appeared in front of his face. He grasped it and was hauled to his feet. The change in altitude was sick-making. “Can you walk, or do you want Rafe to carry you the way he just did Jeska?”

  It w
as tempting, but— “Point me to the stairs.”

  Cade chuckled and slung a supporting arm around his back. “You really oughtn’t to get quite so paved, y’know. You miss quite a bit. Like Kearney coming by earlier—”

  Surely it couldn’t be more than slightly past dawn. The angle of the sunlight said otherwise. He felt as if he hadn’t slept more than a few minutes. “There was an ‘earlier’?”

  “Several hours of it. Anyway, a certain man had a word with a Crown servant who talked to a Steward who sent another servant to speak to one of Kearney’s new footmen, who—”

  “Out with it!” he snapped.

  “We have a commission.”

  “A what?”

  “In the arts—painting, sculpture, poetry, and the like—when someone pays for a particular work in advance, it’s called a ‘commission.’ And we have one, from Lord Oakapple his very own self. We’re to write and perform the real version of the Treasure. And be paid for it!”

  Mieka squinted upwards just as they were coming out from the shadow of a tree. The sunlight stabbed right into his brain. “Tell me this again when I can care.”

  Chapter 5

  Opportunity, Cayden called it. No greater compliment, no better indication of Touchstone’s growing importance than this commission from Lord Oakapple.

  However Mieka might try to look at it from different angles—and admittedly he didn’t try very hard—he could see it only one way: Lord Kearney Fairwalk was attempting to become the fifth member of Touchstone.

  What he did for them as their manager ought to have made Mieka feel grateful, he knew. But the man was being paid, wasn’t he? Tenpence of every hundred Touchstone earned, that was Fairwalk’s share. He saw to the private bookings on the Circuit and the contracts with venues in Gallantrybanks, took care of transporting them and their equipment, made sure they had decent lodgings and food, doled out regular portions of their money to their families, arranged for publicity, and—this was the thing Mieka truly was beholden for, though it had nothing to do with earning money—arranged for the Crown to cancel the contract held by that Prickspur snarge up near Dolven Wold, the man who had refused to allow Mieka under his roof. There had been legal terms for it, and a mortifying afternoon this spring when Mieka had had to give evidence to a Crown attorney, but King Meredan took the comfort of his players personally. Not only had the contract been canceled, but Prickspur had also been ordered to return all the money. The route had been changed, other accommodations had been found, and the upshot was that Prickspur now had another reason to hate Elves. Without His Lordship’s Court connections, Prickspur would still be counting up coin while forbidding anyone of Elfenblood inside his doors. And for Fairwalk’s intervention, Mieka truly was grateful.

  But Fairwalk had begun insinuating himself into the group’s performances. It had been his suggestion that they do the traditional version of “Treasure” rather than the one Cade had been working on. Their reputation as innovators had suffered. Mieka stubbornly believed that Cade’s version, with the text altered to fit the oldest form of the poem, would have put them onto the Ducal, perhaps even the Royal. Now Lord Oakapple had commissioned them to write and perform the work Cade’s way. Fairwalk’s involvement in this handsome offer was a bit murky, and Mieka suspected there were things he wasn’t saying, and that it hadn’t been so indirectly accomplished as he made it out to be. Mieka knew he oughtn’t to complain, or even think about complaining, but this was another example of Fairwalk’s well-kept fingers twitching strings he had no business even touching.

  The long and the short of it was that he was beginning to tell them what to do and how to do it. Worse, Cayden was heeding him.

  Mieka approved of the way His Lordship encouraged Cade, who for all his arrogance could be so appallingly insecure about his work. The opinion of an educated, cultured, titled gentleman was precisely what he needed to buck him up when he began to fret. Telling him that his work was good, however, was vastly different from telling him what that work ought to be.

  And why, Mieka grumbled to himself as they walked to Seekhaven Castle to perform for the ladies of the Court, couldn’t Cade find support enough within Touchstone itself? They didn’t jeer at his sometimes peculiar schemes—well, mayhap they did, a little, but it was all in service of making the work the best it could be. It wasn’t as if the rest of them had ever flat-out refused to play a piece the way he wanted it done—well, Jeska sometimes rejected the interpretation of a line or two, and on that very first night in Gowerion, Mieka had turned the stale old “Sailor’s Sweetheart” into a rollicking comedy (which they still performed, Mieka’s way, to thunderous applause). Still, that was how it should be: contributing, participating, not standing humbly about waiting for Cade to pull strings and make them dance the way he wanted.

  Now it looked as if Fairwalk was busy tying strings onto Cade. Mieka didn’t like it, not one bit.

  Tonight’s performance was a chance to soothe their bruises. The ladies of the Court had invited them to the Pavilion, a huge open-air structure of thirteen columns holding up a vast copper cone of a roof. Over supper in the back garden of the inn, Jeska had argued that they could use the show to redeem their reputation as original and daring performers. Mieka had said simply that if Cade gave him the magic to do it with, he’d blow the roof off the columns. Rafe had agreed, with one of those steady, piercing stares that usually ignited defiance in Cade’s eyes before he relented with a nod.

  There had been plenty of defiance this time, but no nod. They wouldn’t be doing “Doorways,” because it wasn’t yet perfect.

  “Perfect in whose opinion?” Mieka had snarled. “Fairwalk’s?”

  Mieka had once observed that he and Cade had a talent for saying exactly the wrong thing to each other at the worst possible time. Cade threw a plate of sausages across the yard and stormed upstairs. As quickly as if conjured, a pounce of cats appeared to devour the sausages.

  “That’s us later, then, innit?” Jeska muttered, nodding to the feast. “And in case anybody was wondering, I don’t mean the cats.”

  Rafe turned to Mieka. “What’s left in the withies? Anything you and I can use tonight?”

  He considered. “I’ve two from the ‘Doorways’ rehearsal. A bit lingering from ‘Treasure.’”

  “Thunder and lightning?” Jeska snorted. “Fine, if all the doors lead into rainstorms.”

  “Yet only think about what he primed into them this afternoon for ‘Hidden Cottage,’” Rafe suggested. “Jeska’s fool of a lordling goes a-wandering, doesn’t he?”

  Mieka felt a smile tug the corners of his mouth. He knew, and Rafe knew, and Jeska knew—and Cade should have learned by now—that Mieka had enough magic of his own to do more than tweak a withie. Suddenly they were all grinning at one another. Jeska went back to the kitchen for more beer, and over new pints they planned the further education of Cayden Silversun.

  They had done “Hidden Cottage” last year as a straightforward piece for the lords and gentlemen of the Court (boring Mieka witless in the process: not a laugh, leave alone an idea, in the whole agonizingly sincere production). This time Cade had planned to make it their more accustomed interpretation. The basics of the plot remained: arranged marriage, kidnapped girl, fleeing young lord, long journey, forest cottage, love at first sight, triumphant return. The emphasis, however, would be on the comedy. The journey portion always let Mieka indulge himself with creating fanciful landscapes while Jeska tripped over everything in sight, including, eventually, the pig that Rafe had suggested could be the poor kidnapped girl’s company in her captivity. Sometimes Jeska played the young man as so nearsighted that he addressed half his lovelorn lines to the pig. Mieka had grown quite fond of that pig. Whatever they decided to do with the playlet on any given night, audiences roared.

  That wouldn’t be happening tonight. “Hidden Cottage” was what Cade thought they would do. He’d primed the withies to provide appropriate scenery, sensation, emotion. But by using the magi
c within these, and leftovers from others, Touchstone would be giving the ladies something entirely different.

  Many things were the same as last year. Footmen showed up to carry their glass baskets and escort them to the “secret” performance. (Everyone knew what was going on, but everyone pretended it was rash and daring for women to view theater, so there were masks and other silly disguises.) Little redheaded Lady Torren was again their guide, though the golden bracelet on one wrist proclaimed that she was now bespoken; Mieka eyed Cade to see how he felt about this, for last year Her Ladyship had been warmly disposed to the tall, lanky tregetour. Cade didn’t even seem to notice her beyond a smile of greeting. He wouldn’t come back to the lodgings reeking of her lavender scent again; that was for certain sure. Mieka wondered if Princess Iamina would disrupt things the way she had last year, but one glance from the stage as he set up the glass baskets showed him the famous yellow pearl-and-diamond flower prominently displayed on an intoxicated-looking hat that sported a veil across her face. She was seated fifth-row center with her ladies, and seemed disposed to behave herself. He rather hoped she’d give him an excuse to terrify her the way he’d done last year with the dragon—and then he decided he didn’t need any excuses, and he’d play it full out no matter who was in the audience. He and Rafe and Jeska were about to be wading through shit so deep with Cayden that even Royal outrage would be like unto skipping across a meadow of sweet clover.

  The three of them traded one last confirming glance as the crowd settled. Yes. Nobody announced them; everybody knew they were here to see Touchstone. Before Cade could draw breath to announce the piece, Rafe sent a quiver of magic swirling round the Pavilion. Startled, but only a little, Cade flattened his palms to the inlaid wood of his lectern, smiled slightly at Mieka, and readied himself to watch.

  If Mieka had had any lingering doubts, the reminder that Cade would only ever watch drowned them like gnats in a rain shower. One day, Mieka vowed as he selected his withies, one day the man would experience the whole of something. Mieka didn’t know how he’d accomplish it, but if necessary, he’d use Cade’s own magic to force him into it.