by Melanie Rawn
Chat and Sakary parted from the other guests, Chat holding a withie in one hand. White latticework sprang up from the grass to arch over the couple’s heads, and vines began to swirl up each side, covered in white rosebuds and purple thistles. It was a lovely illusion, and Mieka was irked that he hadn’t thought of it himself.
A Good Brother and a Good Sister officiated, but as usual Mieka wasn’t listening. When he wasn’t busy imagining the lawn crowded with friends and family for another wedding, he was scanning the gathering. Chat was here with his wife, Deshenanda, who was hugely pregnant. Next to her was Sakary’s new wife, the poutingly lovely Chirene, who had pinned half a garden of daisies in her black hair to highlight her gown, a vast billowing of yellow so ruched and frilled and gathered that she looked rather like a walking plate of scuffled eggs. Vered and Rauel had sent regrets, and gifts, from their holiday cottages in, respectively, a village on the eastern coast and Romuald Needler’s new horse farm.
As for the other guests—there were Rafe and Crisiant, Rafe’s parents, Jeska (though not his mother, still seaside), those amongst the uncles and aunts and cousins that Jed actually liked, and some of Windthistle Brothers’ favorite clients. (These included a wine merchant whose rotted roof had been sussed out in Jed and Jez’s instinctive fashion; he’d paid for the repairs with three cases of the finest Frennitch Colvado brandy, and Mieka had endured a blistering lecture from his mother when he’d tried to swipe a bottle in advance of the wedding.) A few of Master Cindercliff’s old friends were here as well. The Threadchaser–Bramblecotte wedding had been a business occasion as much as a family celebration; Jed and Blye were doing much the same thing on a smaller scale; Mieka was glad that his own wedding would be reserved for those he loved.
Lady Jaspiela Silversun had also received an invitation. Mieka had bluntly inquired of Cade whether he wanted Mieka to charm her into accepting or rejecting it; he was capable, of course, of either. Cade had only laughed. “Can you seriously imagine my mother gracing the nuptials of someone barely a cut above a servant? She’s already declined.”
Blye was removing her white lace gloves with the grace of an accomplished glasscrafter. She gave them to the Good Sister. Jed was having trouble peeling off the plain white silk gloves Jinsie had sewn for him, and cursed under his breath as a stitch ripped. At last he gave them to the Good Brother, who placed them in the little brass bowl on the grass between himself and the Good Sister. He struck flint, and when the flames had steadied and burned low, she poured water from a little silver pitcher. Thus the pair came to the marriage with clean hands, all their past graspings burned away. Blye and Jedris then clasped hands, fingers intertwined, and smiled at each other. Mieka heard a sob and knew it was his mother. She’d wept buckets when Rafe married Crisiant; with eight children of her own to marry off, there was a real danger that her tears would get tired.
Cade reached into a pocket, which was Jezael’s signal to do the same, and the silver necklets were handed over. Blye stood on tiptoe to drape the plain silver links around Jed’s neck, and Cade moved to take each end in his fingertips. There were Good Brothers and Good Sisters who officiated at weddings and sealed bracelets or rings or necklets so often that their fingers showed the scars of even these tiny bursts of magical fire. But Blye had wanted Cade to do this, and he did—quickly, gently, first Jed’s and then Blye’s.
And that was when all the glass flowers in the keepsake nosegays and all the real flowers on the trellis unfolded into full bloom. Mishia Windthistle had done the first, but the second was the work of Chat and Sakary, with a wafting scent of roses in the sunshine and a delicate pealing of silvery bells.
The gasps of surprise, the scattered applause—the delight on Blye’s and Jed’s faces—these things were almost as good as and in some ways better than the accolades of an audience of four hundred. Mieka decided that in the unlikely event that he ever tired of life on the Circuit, he and Rafe could hire themselves out for weddings. For although it was Chat’s magic in that single withie that had produced the effects, it was Sakary’s graceful handling of that magic that spread joy and laughter through the air.
Mieka suddenly realized that Cayden was wrong about the true significance of theater and magic. It wasn’t the example a play could provide that the striving was the important thing, or the communal experience that let each man in the audience become a part of the same connecting event. It was the emotion. To make fifty or five hundred people laugh, weep, flinch in terror, cry out with joy—the plot wasn’t the impetus for the feelings, it was the other way round. The emotions had to be real for the story to work. Otherwise it was all illusion forced on people who knew what they were feeling but didn’t know why they were feeling it. Mieka and Rafe could make an audience experience anything they chose; but if Cade’s words from Jeska’s lips didn’t serve those emotions, it was all empty.
This was Black Lightning’s mistake. What had Thierin Knottinger said about their very name? Rafe had coolly observed that a flash of black in a night sky made them rather invisible, and Thierin had replied, “You’ll never see us coming.” Their audiences never saw the connections. You didn’t pummel audiences with feeling just because you could. They had to understand why and how the story led to specific emotions. Otherwise it was like conjuring up a bell that rang with the sound of a dozen barking dogs, or roses that smelled like burnt toast. Interesting, mayhap, but ultimately a journey through a bewilderland that only rankled an audience and left them, in the end, unsatisfied.
A bright flash in the summer sun brought him back to the wedding. The Good Brother and Good Sister were holding aloft the loving cups to be admired by the guests before they were filled with consecrated Chapel wine. It was the first time Mieka had seen them, and he stifled a giggle, telling himself that his much-loved but generally unimaginative brother Jedris must have some creativity rattling round his brain after all. The cups weren’t the fine cut crystal one might have expected of a glasscrafter. Each was one half of a thistle, the bases and stems made of stone and the flower-cups of silver. The joke usually was that the more breakable the loving cups, the less likely they were to be used as emphasis in a marital spat, but that wood or metal was just begging to be flung at an offending spouse. Mayhap it was nothing more than a pun: the thistle of Jed’s name, the cliff of Blye’s. He reminded himself to ask later on—and whether Jed intended the loving cups to survive their arguments even if he didn’t.
The couple drank, received the blessings, and exchanged their first kiss as husband and wife. Jed hoisted Blye up into his arms and she wrapped one leg around his waist. They were both laughing. The Good Brother and Good Sister looked slightly scandalized.
“All right, all right!” Mieka yelled. “That’s enough! You’re wed, it’s legal, so let’s get this party started!”
Ten minutes of laughter and hugs later, Mieka was applying a large flagon of ale as a cure for his thirst. One more, mayhap two, and then he could get down to the delightful business of getting drunk on that superb Colvado brandy. Then he caught sight of two new arrivals and knew that all five barrels of ale plus every bottle of brandy would be insufficient to remedy what had just intruded on the wedding.
“Great-grandmother!” Hadden Windthistle exclaimed, striding to the top of the lawn where an inconceivably ancient, wizened, twisted specter had appeared, escorted by the preposterously Elfen-garbed Uncle Barsabian. Not that Sharadel Windthistle, born Snowminder, was any the less “classically” attired, for an Elf; a vivid green gown, heavily embroidered about the hem with gold and silver squiggles presumably mysterious and arcane, was topped with a bright yellow jacket sporting a diamond-studded silver snowflake pin the size of a dinner plate that looked to overbalance the old ghoul at any instant. Atop thinning yellow-white hair, scraped back to show off emphatically pointed ears, was the sort of spry little red cap that Mieka conjured for Jeska when they did one of the “Elfen Mischief” farces. Below the velvet cap was a face so warped with age and spite that to l
ook at it was to grimace. She stumped angrily from the terrace, leaning on Barsabian and a gnarled walking stick that dug deliberate chunks out of the velvet-smooth lawn. Cilka, who was clever with plants in the way of the Greenseed side of the family, had worked very hard to make the river garden perfect. Mieka caught a glimpse of her in the crowd; the poor darling was near tears.
Alaen and Briuly Blackpath had been wandering the outskirts of the garden together, playing for the guests. Their complicated duet faded into a few startled, forlorn plucked strings. And the silence was complete as Sharadel Windthistle screeched, “Where’s the ghastly Goblin girl?”
Jedris turned slowly from receiving the Threadchasers’ congratulations. Mieka decided his elder brother must possess a truly vivid imagination after all, for in those sky-blue eyes were promises of permanent and painful injury, inventively inflicted.
“I hope, Great-great-grandmother,” he said, “that you are not making a reference to my wife.”
She wheezed in an outraged breath. “Wife?” Then, craning her neck to squint up at Barsabian, she demanded, “You said we’d be in time to stop it!”
“Did you honestly think you could?” Jed asked.
“The money’s mine, boy!”
“I’ve my own,” he snapped, then added with scrupulous politeness that was like a slap in the face, “beholden all the same.”
Barsabian was practically hugging himself with glee. “Did I tell you? Did I? I knew she’d find some way to claum on to one of us! Good thing it’s only one of the Human ones—but still, a Windthistle mating with a Goblin! It’s beyond belief!”
Cade moved closer to Blye, who had turned as white as her dress. Mieka was torn between protecting her and joining Jed and Jez in what he knew would be satisfying violence. The conflict rendered him effectively paralyzed for a crucial few moments.
“Here’s an ending to it!” shouted the old woman, waving a rolled-up piece of parchment with a large purple wax seal and many ribbons depending from it. “Not a clipped penny to any of you! This tumbledown pile may be yours, Hadden, but the money goes to the only truly Elfen Windthistle left!” She gestured with the other claw at Barsabian.
Hadden laughed in her face. “At last!” he cried. “It took him long enough! This house, as you say, is mine—” His face hardened like cooling glass. “—and you are about to leave it. Permanently.”
Jed turned slightly, bowed to Blye, and said, “Pray excuse me a moment, love, there’s some rubbish as needs to be removed before it causes any greater stink.”
“Jed,” she whispered. “Please—don’t—”
He gave her a tight little smile and started forwards. So did Jezael. So did Mieka. But Jeska, consummate street fighter and collector of vanquished opponents’ teeth, was closer and quicker. He grasped Barsabian by one pointed ear and marched him down the grass to the river. The old man’s squeals were literally drowned when Jeska shoved him into the water. He emerged, drenched and incoherent, fists flailing impotently against a foe no longer there: Jeska had started back up the slope for the house. Barsabian staggered from the shallows, spitting—and then screaming, for Chat had a bit of magic left in the withie. He and Sakary sent it in the form of a swirling of wasps that appeared out of nowhere to swarm around Barsabian’s head. The stings might be illusory, but the pain was real. They were half of the Shadowshapers, and very, very good at their work.
Jeska joined the three eldest Windthistle sons and their father in a grim advance on the shrieking crone. But they weren’t fast enough. Jinsie had snatched up a chair. She set it behind the old woman just in time for it to catch her as Mishia gave her an unambiguous shove. There was nothing left for the men to do but hoist the chair and carry her, kicking and howling, back into the house—after Mieka had relieved her of her dangerously flailing stick.
When they had set her outside in the street near her boxy antique of a coach and slammed the front door on her, Mieka grinned. “That was fun!”
“Wasn’t it?” his father laughed. Then he glanced towards the stairs, and farther up at the gallery above. Dozens of relations—curious, horrified, scared, approving, confused—looked down on them. “Well?” Hadden snapped. “You heard her! There’s no Windthistle money and never will be! So any of you not liking the looks of the future at Wistly Hall can clear out and go beg house room of Barsabian and that pustulant old horror! Now!” he bellowed, and flung the front door open.
Mieka supposed he really shouldn’t have been surprised by the sudden scurrying. He lingered in the entryway with his father and Jez—Jed and Jeska had vanished, probably to collect Uncle Barsabian for ejection. Within minutes, a ragabash of Windthistle relations was trudging down the stairs carrying bags and boxes, and armfuls of clothes.
“Fa,” Mieka whispered, “they might be taking—”
“I don’t care,” he snarled. “As long as they’re finally out of my house, I don’t give two shits! As for which of them is responsible for her coming uninvited—” To a middle-aged cousin trying to sneak past: “Was it you, Mander? Or mayhap your bitch of a wife? You’ll not get her past the front doors of Clinquant House unless you lie and say her ears were kagged when she was born!”
Mieka traded amazed glances with Jez. Neither of them had ever seen their father more than mildly annoyed; this level of rage, and so cold a rage at that, was unprecedented. They stood together and watched as twenty and then thirty people of all ages slunk past, some of them shamefaced, others defiant, a few openly scornful and muttering about sordid alliances with Goblins. Granted, Mieka had never kept track of who lived here as long as they left him alone, but he could have sworn he’d never seen some of these people before in his life. Wistly wouldn’t exactly echo with their absence—there would be at least forty or so assorted relatives remaining. But good riddance to these. Blye’s cat Bompstable evidently thought so, too: he had stationed himself beside the front door, hissing.
“Gracious me,” drawled Jinsie as the last stragglers went out the door into the street. “I knew we should’ve let them come to the wedding.”
Mieka nodded solemnly. “Dangerous, these social snubbings.” He glanced over at Derien, who had been guarding a table of gifts not yet unwrapped. “Remember that, when you’re a Lord High Ambassador.”
The boy wrinkled his nose. “I’ll remember it when I want to get rid of somebody!”
“When I’m grown up,” announced Tavier, who had hitched a ride on Rafe’s broad shoulders, “I’ll send me dragons after them all, I will, for being so mean to Blye.”
“Aroint!” shouted Uncle Barsabian. “Unhand me, you clumpertons!”
Jed and Jeska were hauling the sopped and furious old Elf by the elbows. When he saw through the open door that outside was a substantial collection of persons who might or might not be related to him milling about the hideous old-fashioned coach, he turned an even deeper shade of crimson.
“You won’t be lonely, Uncle Breedbate,” Mieka assured him.
Jinsie nodded. “Though how he’ll stuff them all into that rig back to the Clink might make for an entertainment.”
“Ah, but he has the money now, doesn’t he?” Jez murmured, poisonously sweet. “He can hire a whole convoy of hacks to carry them.”
“Gleets, every one of you!” shouted Barsabian.
Mieka frowned. “Does he mean us or his new houseguests?”
“Oh, take that old pillock out of here,” said their mother. “He’s dripping on my carpets.”
Hadden had called it aright: Great-great-grandmother, still in the chair, was inspecting each refugee for acceptable Elfenness. Mander had somehow talked his wife into her favor, and they stood with the more obviously eared. As the rest of them shuffled forwards in a line to be judged, Mieka heard someone say, “I may not have the ears, but look at these hands and feet! Look at my teeth! I’m Elfen, no denying it!”
He looked at Jinsie. “Nice that there’s a few independent witnesses. Nobody would ever believe this.”
�
��Not off a stage,” she agreed. “It’s disgusting. C’mon, let’s get the taste out of our mouths.”
“What a scathingly brilliant idea.”
He slammed the door shut and looked round. His mother was arm-in-arm with his father, looking more in love with him than ever. Mieka wondered why his father hadn’t done this years ago.
Cade had joined them, and in his hand was the gnarled walking stick. “Anybody have any use for this?” When no one said anything, he nodded. “Excellent.” And with that he flung the thing into the air as if it were a withie to be shattered, and halfway to the rafters it caught fire. There were gasps of surprise, and then laughter and cheering.
Mieka exchanged grins with Cade as naught but ash drifted to the floor. “That’s me Quill,” he announced happily. “Now it’s a party!”
* * *
“’S jus’ like th’old Winnerting song,” said Briuly Blackpath to his cousin. His tongue might be slurring and his eyes might be blurring, but his fingers were flawlessly steady on his lute strings. Mieka, sprawled in a drawing-room chair with a bottle of brandy cradled to his chest, knew a kindred spirit when he saw one: a man who could get drunk everywhere but his hands.
Alaen was considerably more sober than his cousin, whom he resembled not at all. Alaen was brown and golden, long-mouthed and sharp-chinned; Briuly had black hair, dusky skin, a high-arched nose, pointed Elfen ears, and a certain spidery fragility about his thin limbs. They had the same hands, though, Mieka noted idly: too big for a glisker’s quickness, but they made up for it in the nimbleness of the fingers. Briuly struck an introductory chord. His singing voice wasn’t drunk, either.