Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  “Is that what it means? I’ve been looking all over for a definition.” He scribbled it down as he went on, “Jez told me what ‘klunsh’ is—a mixture of mud and dung used for building about three hundred years ago. Though it’s usually spelled with a c.”

  “My brother knows how to spell? And they don’t use it anymore, do they?”

  “He said not. Somebody discovered how to make good, reliable bricks at an affordable price, and—”

  “All right, all right,” Mieka said hastily. “Enough. But how does that get us forrarder?”

  “It’s a starting,” Cade defended. “The wall tumbles down, making a mess of whatever shiny things it’s falling onto. And that’s the mudslide, right?”

  “If you say so.” Mieka shrugged. “Next line?”

  “’Ere morning brighted the field,’ which is obviously dawn, but what field?”

  “The sun’s up, anyway, and the rain seems to have stopped.”

  “It goes on, ‘Regal bells had pealed’ and that’s always been taken to mean the bells in a Royal castle, which is where it really gets confusing. The specific castle is never named. It’s s’posed to have been someplace around Sidlowe, but I talked with some people there last year on the Winterly and the only place belonging to the Royals is a hunting lodge. All the Royal castles of the time have been considered as the location. Nothing was ever found. But the thing of it is, the Oakapple family didn’t hand over Feazings Keep until later—”

  “They gave away their castle?”

  “To the King, as reparation for the theft. Why do you think the family got so poor? A nobleman needs land to support him. Especially back then, when it was degrading and even shameful for a lord to be involved in trade. Even now people like my mother look down on people like Lord Piercehand for his fleet of ships—”

  “They’re all just annoyed that they didn’t think of it first. But I know what you mean. Everybody knows Piercehand makes another new fortune whenever his ships dock, but he keeps saying they’re only exploring, finding new lands and countries, and the goods they bring back are secondary.”

  “Naught like a nobleman for glossing over the truth with a fresh coat of varnish. Anyway, I was about to say that all versions of the poem agree on ‘Regal bells,’ but what if they were the bells from a Minster established by royalty?”

  Mieka gave him a look that was amused and admiring all at once. “My Gods, Quill, how do you keep your head from exploding? If I had all those brains inside me poor little skull—”

  Eyeing him narrowly, Cade said, “I’m going to buy a really, really stout pair of boots, and then I’m going to throw them at you.”

  “Shush that talk, or you’ll have an Elsewhen about shopping on Narbacy Street. What’s the rest of the poem?”

  “It goes, ‘’Ere morning brighted the field / Regal bells had pealed / To wrongly doom the thief.’ Wrongly! I got that out of your book, and I nearly fell over when I read it!”

  “Somebody innocent was executed for the theft?” Mieka whistled softly between his teeth. “His Gracious Majesty won’t like that.”

  “He didn’t do it, he wasn’t personally responsible, so what does he care? It’s the truth that matters.”

  “If it was all a mistake, then he might have to give the castle back. Is that what Lord Oakapple is after? Feazings Keep?”

  This gave Cade pause. “That would be part of it, I suppose. That and the family honor. But only if I could prove it. Anyway, the poem finishes up, ‘Condolement there be none / Long shadows scrape the throne / O’erset and e’er cast down / Spun carkanet and crown / Ever hidden, never found.’ So there’s no consolation, that appears in all the variants in one form or another, but what throne?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s overturned and likely destroyed, right?”

  “That’s how I read it, but whose throne are they talking about? Not the King at the time—he’d been robed and crowned. So whose throne does it mean?”

  Mieka shrugged. “You’re the one with the brains and the books. What’s a carkanet?”

  “A necklet. As for spinning—you can spin anything from glass to thread, no help there. And the last line is the same in all the poems, with the necklet and crown forever hidden and never found.”

  Mieka scooted across the polished wooden deck, the glass thorn ready in his fingertips. “Hold those thoughts,” he murmured, and Cade settled back into the bunk, extending an arm. He felt the tiny piercing at his wrist, watching the excitement in Mieka’s opalescent eyes. It would work, he was sure it would work. He’d sink into the thorn—he could already feel the flush of heat spreading up his arm—and he’d see what he needed to see. He heard the rustle of paper, and then Mieka’s soft voice reciting the poem.

  No night bedarked as soonly

  As athwart the crumbling wall—

  Dream, imagination, Elsewhen—it didn’t matter, so long as it led him to the truth, a truth he could use the way he used everything else, picking it apart, analyzing it, discovering how it worked, putting it back together the right way round, the way only he could envision.

  But it felt so different. A chill replaced the heat in his veins. He could feel it swirling through his chest, down his body, up into his brain—no Elsewhen had ever felt like this, no dreaming while he slept or sudden turn while his eyes were wide open. Not even his purposeful imaginings had ever felt like this.

  … as athwart the crumbling wall—

  {And there it was, backshadowed by the setting sun that slid down to a notch in the farther hills beyond the lake and rested there for a small fraction of eternity. He ran through the snow, competing with the shadows in a race he had to win. Skidding to a stop, gasping for every breath that laced his lungs with ice, he wanted so badly to touch the wall, find out where the throne had been—he could see how stone had once mated with stone, strong and solid, but there was nothing resembling a throne here amid the ragged tumble of rock and mud and snow.

  It was so cold that the tips of his ears had gone numb. All at once the sunshaft from the Westercountry pierced his eyes and he stumbled to his knees. When he could see again, it was summer. And before him the brilliant shine of gold and silver threaded through spun glass: a chain of a hundred perfect links and a crown that was a circle of sunbursts and crescent moons and diamond-studded stars. The Rights rested on a flat rock that formed the seat of the throne, its back the stone wall. Whole, immaculate, glowing like rough-carved chunks of moonlight sparkling in the new morning sunshine at his back.

  Triumph sang in him. He would take up the carkanet and crown, and sit upon the throne, and the suns and moons and stars would ignite to proclaim a True King. How dazzling bright it would be, no paltry yellowish Elf-light nor sickly blue Wizardfire nor red-gold glower of a Caitiff’s spellcasting, but the pure silver and gold radiance of the Rights—

  —but they were coming now, he could hear them, they had followed him despite all his caution, and they were hunting him down. He could hear the hoofbeats of their horses and the belling cries of their dogs and if he didn’t hurry himself gone, they would find the Rights and the throne, and they must not, they must not—}

  “Cade? Cayden, come back!”

  He blinked up at a white, frightened face. And smiled. “It’s still there,” he whispered. “Mieka, it’s still there!”

  “Gods, Quill, you looked—” But then he turned away, scrabbling for pen and paper. “Tell me, quick, while you remember it clear—let me write it down—”

  He laughed softly. Silly little Elf! The images were there in his mind, waiting to be locked away until he needed them. He didn’t have to write them down; how foolish. He watched Mieka’s slender, swift fingers nervously smooth a fresh sheet of paper onto the floor, dip the silver-nibbed pen into the ink bottle—

  {They were not Mieka’s hands. He knew them all the same. Narrow, long-fingered, but not the smooth young hands that had sewn the iris-blue neckband Mieka so often wore. These hands were older, with knotted veins, the n
ails ridged and brittle. Not her hands; her mother’s hands.

  —a secret knowledge about Master Silversun, was all he could read before a final word was scrawled at the bottom, and a flourish added; sand from a pottery shaker strewn and blown free; fingers trembling slightly as they folded the paper in on itself. Purple wax, heated with an oddly red bit of fire, the color of a fox’s tail; no seal. Direction printed carefully on the other side, and this he could read, the large firm letters spelling out His Grace the Archduke—URGENT.}

  “Quill!”

  He opened his eyes and immediately turned his head away. “It’s all right,” he said mindlessly. “I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Nodding, he propped himself on his elbows and forced a smile. He called up the images of snow and stone and abrupt summer, thinking about them and nothing else. “Didn’t expect to fall back into it, that’s all. D’you want to hear?”

  Still looking worried, Mieka said, “You told me ‘It’s still there.’ What’s still where?”

  “The Treasure, of course.”

  Chapter 12

  Pacing the deck was Mieka’s solution for the next days of boredom. Unsatisfactory as it was for Mieka, Cade was grateful. He was left alone in their cabin. He most certainly was not bored.

  Mistress Mirdley had told him several times that any sort of disruption in his life seemed to bring on more Elsewhens. She hadn’t used that term, of course; that was Mieka’s word for what happened to him. In the main, she was right, and an orderly routine with few surprises usually caused his own mind to let him live and work in peace. But the life he’d chosen—couldn’t help but choose—was one of necessary commotion, and he was aching for some quiet. Two weddings, two visits to Fairwalk Manor, Trials, the commission from Lord Oakapple, preparing for this journey—all had produced not just Elsewhens but an intense need to sort them. Yet now the journey itself was most unexpectedly giving him time to breathe.

  The problem was that it was also time in which to think.

  He was starting to understand Mieka’s frustration with shipboard life: There was nowhere to go, and precious little to distract him from his thoughts. Their lessons in protocol had been mercifully brief, as they were not expected to mingle much with the highborns. Play when and where they were told, and otherwise disappear and cause no trouble; if he had his doubts about that last bit, he kept them to himself. He could have spent more hours working on “Treasure,” of course, but there was something bothering him about what he’d seen, something he didn’t want to confront just yet.

  That night had provided diversion in the form of Briuly Blackpath, who had taken his lute down to the common sailors’ quarters. Cade was no musician, as Hadden Windthistle had confirmed, but he knew brilliance when he heard it. From just after dinner until well after midnight, Briuly had played everything from the tenderest of ballads to the lewdest of tavern songs. Jeska and the sailors had roared along with the lyrics, and in Jeska’s case contributed a few songs to everyone’s acclaim. Except Briuly’s, Cade noted with interest; the lutenist didn’t half enjoy not being the absolute center of attention. He could almost see the calculation in the man’s eyes: Jeska had looks and the talents of a masquer, so why did he need to upstage someone whose only gift was his music? Cade had the impression that Briuly often considered life to be grotesquely unfair.

  Rafe was feeling much better, so Jeska slept in their cabin that night. Cade had forgotten that Mieka snored. Whenever the strangling-a-goose noises woke him, all he had to do was reach up and push at one of the slats supporting the bunk above, jostling it enough to make the Elf roll over. Nevertheless, he did spend a lot of that night gazing at those slats by the faint glow of an oil lamp by the door.

  He could barely admit it, even to himself, but for a second or three he’d been tempted to go along with Jinsie’s demand. Destroy any letters Mieka might write to the girl … it would certainly put a crimp in any plans she might have. Surely she’d heard about the journey. Everyone in the Kingdom must know by now. There’d been no letters about it from Mieka, of course. Jinsie had seen to that. But what if there were no letters from the Continent, either? Would she give up?

  It had been hideously tempting.

  But then he’d had a brief, instants-long turn, there and gone so quickly that he might have lied to himself, might have convinced himself he’d imagined it. He’d seen Mieka, crimson with fury, heard him scream, “You bloody bastard! I’ll fucking kill you!” And he knew that as afeared as he was of the girl and what she might mean to the futures, he was even more frightened that Mieka would come to hate him.

  Letters. He’d seen a letter, and he knew whose hand had written it. He knew to whom it had been—would be—addressed. But had he seen it because a part of his mind had been thinking about those letters Jinsie stole, or because he’d seen Mieka with pen and paper and ink? Had his brain imaged him a thorn portrait that wasn’t real?

  It hadn’t felt like other Elsewhens, but it hadn’t felt like a dream, either. Auntie Brishen’s thorn made it feel different somehow.

  And that meant he couldn’t entirely trust it.

  And that meant that he couldn’t entirely trust that other thorn vision, the one where Mieka had surprised him on his forty-fifth Namingday.

  So what about the things he’d seen pertaining to the Treasure? He remembered being so cold that he couldn’t feel the tips of his ears, and his hearing had seemed abnormally acute, and surely that meant he’d had the pointed ears of an Elf. In the thorn dream, he’d been someone else. That had never happened to him before. It had to have been his imagination showing him the result of all his researches, giving him the scene as it had to have been, shaped by hearing, in some portion of his mind, Mieka’s voice reading the poem. His mind had gathered and stored information, working on it with logic and instinct, and the thorn had released it all as a narrative he could use. The sudden slip into summer dawn from winter sunset convinced him that his imagination had been the source of that dream, for surely such a shift was impossible.

  And mayhap that the other dream, the one that had tormented him with its visions of Mieka’s decline into thornthrall and death, had been imagination, too.

  He wanted to be home. He wanted to commandeer Kearney’s carriage and spend the summer searching out every Minster that dated to that time period and had been established by a member of the Royal family. Near one of them was a lake, and a ruined wall that caught the last rays of sunlight on the evening of Wintering. And somewhere beneath that tumble of stone and mud and cow-shit glowed a necklet and a crown.

  But whose?

  Shortly before noon the next day, Mieka rousted him out of bed for lunching. He got dressed, rubbed his stubbly cheeks and chin, and decided that shaving with a straight razor was not something he wanted to try on board ship. He envied Rafe his beard, and envied even more the Elfen blood that gave Mieka and Jeska thick but slow-growing hair. And that reminded him.

  “Mieka, how cold does it have to be before the tips of your ears go numb?”

  After a momentary blankness, the Elf hooted with laughter. “It was winter, wasn’t it? When you saw the Treasure, it was winter! And you were an Elf!”

  He was treated to a lecture about woolen caps versus fur hoods, and how much alcohol effectively countered frozen ears. Almost to the deck, Cade realized something. He stopped and put a hand on Mieka’s arm.

  “I wasn’t an Elf. I had the ears, but I wasn’t an Elf. I was too tall.”

  “So you could only have been Fae.”

  How stupid of him not to have guessed. “That’s what’s been missing out of this whole story!” He bit back sudden excitement and lowered his voice. “The rendering everyone always does includes all the races except one. It talks about Goblins, Gnomes, Elfenfolk, Humans, Wizards, Trolls, Pikseys, Sprites, even Merfolk and Harpies and Vampires. But it never mentions the Fae.”

  “Was it their necklet and crown?”

  “I don’t know. We’
ll talk about it later.” He pointed out to their left. “We seem to have arrived.”

  Not quite, but close enough to look at something other than the Ocean Sea. Fishing villages along rocky shorelines, green fields rolling into the distance, tidal inlets where tiny houses perched on stilts, and at last a spit of land with a thin stone lighthouse at its end.

  “That’ll be the Vathis Beam,” said one of the other passengers, a young man dressed in Prince Ashgar’s brown-and-buff livery. “Entrance to the river. Won’t be long before we’re off this tub. It can’t happen too soon for me!”

  Cade glanced over at him—lanky, brown-haired, as tall as Cade but Humanly so, with nothing of Wizard about him. All of Ashgar’s servitors on this trip were fully Human to look at. Suddenly he wished there were a way to disguise Mieka’s ears.

  “Seasick?” Cade asked, just to make conversation.

  “I’m one of those tiresome people who’s only happy on horseback.” With a respectful dip of the head, he added, “Drevan Wordturner—which would be more apt to you, wouldn’t it, Master Silversun?”

  Cade smiled. “Wordtwister, perhaps. Are you with His Highness’s Master of Horse, then?”

  “If only that were so!”

  Drevan Wordturner was on loan from the Archduke. His ancestor had come to the Kingdom with the very first Archduke, and his name reflected five generations of the same occupation: translator. There was a whole library of books at His Grace’s main residence that only the Wordturner family could read nowadays. They also kept the spoken language alive, which explained Drevan’s presence on this journey.

  “The farther eastwards one goes, the more these Continental languages have in common. The Tregrefina is said to speak our language quite well, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m here. I’d rather buy myself a place in the King’s Cavalry, but…” He trailed off with a shrug.

  Cade knew what it was like to aspire to a profession not approved by one’s family. “Surely there must be brothers or cousins to take your place.”