Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  “I’d like to meet her,” she repeated. “Nobody here is much fun. They’re all either terribly old, like the Tregrefin and his friends, or very young, like my lady’s little brothers and sisters.”

  “I have a little brother,” he said, groping desperately for a safer subject.

  “Lucky! I have five sisters.”

  And abruptly he realized why she’d talked about gowns, and what she’d meant by her earlier teasing about his being a pauper. In the nicest possible way she was letting him know—if he had the wit to perceive it—that whatever her title might be, her family was not rich, and with six daughters to provide for there would be little or no dowry.

  “They’re all married,” she went on, shattering his conclusions as neatly as a spent withie, “and that’s why I’m extra. Superfluous. But it also means I can do as I like, and I can’t wait to see your Kingdom.”

  “I–I’d be pleased to—” He bit back personally show you round every inch of it. “—tell you whatever you’d like to know.”

  “You are very gracious, Master Silversun.”

  Whatever confidence was remaining to him while the mask was on his face crumbled like stale pastry.

  “My lady asked me to find you. ‘The tall one with the gray eyes,’ she said. She wishes for a nice long talking with you. Your work the other night was an amazement, and she’d love to know more—if you’ve time, of course.”

  “Glad she liked it,” he mumbled.

  She was silent a moment, and when he managed to meet her gaze she smiled. “Even if she hadn’t told me to, I would have sought you out on my own.”

  He heard himself blurt, “Why?” and wanted to go drown himself in the lake.

  “There couldn’t be as many words in the piece as usual, most of us being ignorant of your language. But the words you did use—you made them a dancing.”

  All the instruments made a raucous noise, and then there was silence, and a bell rang. Everyone in the great hall laughingly snatched off masks and veils and kerchiefs, and there were squeals of mock outrage as ladies pretended to discover they’d been dancing or flirting with entirely unsuitable men. Cade’s new friend kept her golden mask on and stepped lightly behind him to reach up and undo the ribbons securing his. It dropped into his hands and she returned to face him. Her mask was gone. The heart-shaped face presented for his inspection was appealing rather than beautiful, with strong cheekbones that weren’t quite even and heavy straight brows. It was a face full of humor and just a touch of defiance, as if she knew she couldn’t compete with the stunning beauties in the room and was daring him to make a false compliment.

  It was a reassuring face. He liked it.

  “Do you know what I want right now?” he asked with a smile. “Your name, and a dance.”

  The smile she gave him in return was everything a man could desire. “Vrennerie, and of course.”

  Cayden returned to Touchstone’s upstairs chambers just shy of dawn. He spun the black mask around by its ribbons, humming tunelessly as he shut the door behind him, and started for his bed.

  “And just where have you been, young fellow-me-lad?” Rafe demanded.

  “Out carousing, I’ll be bound,” came Mieka’s voice, “drinking too much expensive wine, breaking ladies’ hearts left and right, dancing holes in his shoes—”

  “—forgetting we’ve a performance tonight!”

  “I wasn’t carousing,” Cade began.

  “Frivoling, then, and frolicking. Shamelessly!” Mieka sat up in bed with his arms wrapping his knees. Those wide, merry eyes inspected him head to heels in the daybreak dimness, and suddenly he let out a hoot of laughter. “In love, he’s in love, just look at him!”

  “Shut it,” he growled.

  “Is she pretty after all, beneath her golden mask?”

  “How did you—?”

  “I see all and know all—and what I see and know right now is that you’re deep in it, you are, right up to your eyebrows!”

  He sent a look of desperate appeal to Rafe, then realized he could expect no help there. Back when they were boys, and Crisiant had come along, Cade had been merciless in his teasing. But in his friend’s blue-gray eyes was an indulgent kindness, and only a hint of amusement quirked the mouth half-hidden by his beard. Marriage must have a mellowing effect, Cade mused, and wondered if Mieka would undergo the same change.

  “We have a show tonight,” Rafe said. “Shut up or get out, Mieka, and let him sleep.”

  The Elf spluttered with outrage. “But—but—”

  “You’d like a third choice? I could stuff a shirt down your throat.”

  He flung back the covers and reached for his trousers. “You are no fun!” he announced, and within moments was dressed and out the door.

  Cade had meantime removed shoes, jacket, shirt, and trousers, and crawled into bed. Pulling the covers up to his nose, he turned his back and waited. When all was silent, he ventured, “Rafe?”

  “I won’t say be careful, because you already know you ought to be.”

  He thought that over. “I’m not in love with her.”

  No response.

  “Truly. She’s just—I had a good time tonight.”

  More quiet.

  “I’m not in love with her.”

  “Get some sleep, old son.”

  * * *

  “But there’s too many words,” Jeska said, bewildered. “Hasn’t Kearney said all along we’re not to use too many words?”

  Cade ground his teeth.

  “They don’t understand more’n a few anyways,” Rafe said with a shrug. “What’s a few dozen more? As long as we get the feelings right, it won’t matter.”

  “But—”

  “Just put the damned words back in!” Cade snapped, and stalked off to keep his appointment with the Tregrefina. It might only have been his imagination, because it certainly wasn’t an Elsewhen, that he heard Mieka laughing softly behind him.

  He was escorted to a bower of woven branches down by the lake, where the Tregrefina sat in the shade, alone. Nearby were benches and chairs occupied by servants, not quite out of earshot. But that didn’t much matter, because two of her brothers were playing tag with their servants all across the lawn, and the ruckus would be adequate cover for their conversation.

  Miriuzca rose as he approached. He hadn’t expected that—he was barely above the rank of servant, after all—nor the wide confiding smile she gave him along with her hand. He bent over but did not press his lips to her wrist.

  “It’s very kind of you to keeping me company, Master Silversun,” she said, and her voice was light and soft, more delicate on the consonants of his language than they would have been on her own.

  “An honor, my lady,” he said. “Touchstone enjoyed performing for you the other night.”

  “Oh, it was wonderful! Even if I wasn’t supposed to see!” She laughed and gestured to the chairs, and they sat, and a servant hurried up. When they had been provided with iced drinks, the man effaced himself and Cade found himself as alone as he would ever get with the girl who would one day be his Queen.

  She plied him with eager questions about “Hidden Cottage,” which he answered without a single hint of irony. She’d seen the sincere version, not the farcical one. As she praised Jeska’s voice and Rafe’s skills and Mieka’s renderings of scenery and Cade’s own flair for words, he dismissed all thought of Mieka’s aggravation about the pig. She asked what play they would present that evening, hoped she wasn’t keeping him from his work, simply couldn’t imagine how much effort it must take to do what they did so effortlessly, and in general made him feel like a shit for what he had unwittingly done in performing “Cottage” last year for Prince Ashgar. For she admitted, eventually and blushingly, that it made her feel so close to her future husband, to have experienced the same play that had moved him to tears. “Communal experience,” mocked his own voice in his head.

  Their drinks were refilled by a servant who cleared his throat in a meaningfu
l way. She ignored the hint. When the ball her brothers were flinging about rolled over to the table, she hiked up her skirts enough to kick it back to them without blinking an eye or missing a syllable. She further charmed him by laughing at his jokes and listening wide-eyed to his every word.

  Finally he remembered what was in his jacket pocket, and said, “If you’ll permit, I have a gift for you from a friend.”

  She blushed, and he realized she thought he meant Prince Ashgar.

  “A friend of mine, I mean,” he added. “She makes glass.”

  “Oh.” Recovering herself, she asked, “You mean like those baskets and the—what are you calling them?”

  “Withies. Yes.” Hearing what he’d just said, he hurried on in a minor panic, “She doesn’t make those. She never makes those. Nothing hollow, especially not withies. I’ll explain it sometime.” He seemed destined to imbecility around pretty ladies, he told himself, and shut his mouth. All this while he was digging into his pocket, fingers fumbling with the little package, thumb catching in the ribbon that tied one of Lady Jaspiela’s best white silk pocket-kerchiefs—stolen by Derien for the purpose. Blye had been so careful about making it look nice, fashioning a bow of many loops, and here he was about to ruin the whole thing. At last he set it onto the table, the bow only slightly lopsided. “She made this specially for you, and it’s for keeping something in that you don’t ever want to take out.”

  With a child’s smile of delight, she undid the sea-green ribbon and unfolded the silk. Revealed were ten pieces of glass: two of them square, eight rectangular, all crenellated along the edges. She set them out one by one onto the table, then looked up curiously. “I am not understanding, Master Silversun.”

  “You fit them together.”

  “But how will they stay put?”

  He only smiled, and watched her work it out—each square toothing four sides to make two equal-sized pieces that would fit together as a box. When she had correctly assembled the first half, a tiny flash of greenish light made her snatch her fingers back and catch her breath. It was a lovely little display of Goblin magic, something Blye had adapted from Cade’s own Affinity spell.

  “Wh-what was that?” she whispered.

  “Magic,” he whispered back, smiling. “Now do the other one.”

  She did, cautiously, and when it was put together, the same subtle glow sealed the crenellations. She looked up at him in wonder.

  “I’ve never seen magic doing.”

  “Of course you have—the other night, at our performance. Even if you weren’t supposed to be watching!”

  “But not just for me.”

  “I’m honored—and so will Blye be. That’s her name, the friend who made this. I know it’s not very large, but one day when you find something you want to keep in it, send for me and—”

  “And you’ll seal it up with more magic?”

  “Exactly.”

  She turned each half over and over in her fingers—long fingers, thin and delicate, but though the nails were neatly filed and buffed, she had bitten them almost to the quick. “It isn’t evil, is it? All my life I am only hearing awful things about magic, how it can make you do what you don’t want to do, and destroying things and people—and in your country—my country soon,” she corrected herself, “the most terrible example of what magic can do was happening in the war.”

  He’d never heard it put so bluntly before. He’d never heard magic called evil like this. Carefully, he said, “A hammer can build a house or break someone’s skull. Is it the hammer that’s wicked, or the person using it?”

  Her blue eyes blinked wide. “Oh! Then you’ve heard about the razers?”

  “The what?”

  “I don’t know if you have a special word for it, but that’s the meaning in our language. Magic leaving—left—from hundreds of years ago. Terrible magic.” She leaned closer to him, her voice low. “A chip of wood or a stone once part of a building all at once is making the building all over again. There’s no reason for happening that anyone knows, it just happens. And then you have to send one of the Guild for stopping it, and for destroying the magic once and for all.”

  It was his turn to be shocked. “But—if it’s a building, and it rebuilds itself, why waste it by destroying it? Why not let the buildings stand? People could use them—”

  “Oh no! Nobody knows what might be inside! They’re magic!”

  “And therefore evil?” He gestured to the two halves of the little glass box.

  “Well … I am supposing this is different.”

  The servant was back with more cold juice and more harrumphing. Once more he was ignored. When he left, she touched the glass box and sighed.

  “This is such lovely magic. I didn’t know it could be lovely like this.”

  Cade heard himself say in a tone too curt for Royalty, “What’s the Guild?”

  Suddenly she looked worried—not frightened, he noted in puzzlement, just anxious. “You won’t tell anyone I’m saying things? It’s not talked about. It just … is,” she finished helplessly.

  “You mean like the vodabeists in the river?”

  Now she did look scared. “You know about—but how could you know? They were told to be careful!”

  “Careful to make sure all of us were dosed to sleep every night so we wouldn’t notice?”

  She pulled back from him, twisting her fingers together in her lap. “My father … the lord who owns the Guildman is owing him a favor, so instead of coming crossland—” She glanced up, pleading. “It was so much faster, and much more pleasant, yes?”

  “Charming,” he rasped, and set his glass on the table. “So someone owns those things, and the man who controls them with magic? Is this part of what this Guild does?”

  She took refuge in something that sounded straight out of a book. “Magical folk are all having certain skills, and use them in service to—” She stopped, and gulped, and blushed again.

  “They serve ‘normal’ people, you mean?” Cade was too disgusted to bother with manners. “They come round to destroy houses that build themselves, or they tease those water-things with light, or—what else do they do ‘in service’ that nobody talks about?”

  And then he considered the weathering witches at home, and how they worked their feeble magic and were gone, and nobody thought about them at all unless they hadn’t cleared the snow or dried up the puddles. And what about himself? Useful only as one of the King’s curiosities, like the dancing, squawking birds in the Royal Aviary.

  The Tregrefina looked so miserable that he was ashamed of himself. “Your Highness—”

  But she was smiling at him, fingering the halves of the little box, and saying, “I’m being so grateful to your friend, Master Silversun. Perhaps if it’s not much trouble, I might meet her one day?”

  His glass was still in his hand. He hadn’t really asked about this Guild. In some Elsewhen, though, he had. He needed to get away from here, sort this out. Was any of it true? He knew it hadn’t been real. Not in this world he inhabited right now, with a pretty girl smiling at him.

  He needed a drink.

  “I’m sure she’d be honored,” he managed to say. “And I’ve taken up far too much of Your Highness’s time.” Getting to his feet, locking his knees to keep himself from falling over, he bowed. She gave him her hand, he dredged up a smile from somewhere, and when he felt able started back up the lawn.

  By the time he reached Touchstone’s assigned chambers, his head was splitting. He was in no mood to encounter Mieka, pacing and fretful and waving a letter in his hand. Rafe lounged by an open window, sipping wine, observing all with one eyebrow raised.

  “—only knew to send her letter here because her mother heard it from a customer just arrived from Gallybanks—” He spied Cade and rounded on him with a ferocious challenge. “How could none of my letters reach her? Do you understand it? Do you?”

  “Not now, Mieka,” Rafe said. He poured another cup full of wine and Cade took it grate
fully, downing most of it in two swallows. “Bad one this time?”

  “No. Just—unexpected.”

  “She thinks I’ve forgot her!” Mieka exclaimed. “She thinks—”

  “Not now,” Rafe repeated, helping Cade into a chair.

  “I need paper and pen and ink,” Mieka insisted. “I have to write to her—”

  “We’ll be home before the letter arrives,” Rafe pointed out. “Hers was weeks behind us. The marriage is tomorrow, and we leave the day after.”

  “But I have to do something!”

  “Go get drunk. Go prick some thorn. Whatever you do, do it someplace that isn’t this room!”

  “Fuck you, then!” Mieka snarled, and stormed out.

  “What’s he on about?” Cade asked, not really interested. His head hurt too much.

  “She sent a letter—heartbroken, why doesn’t he love her anymore, all that.” Rafe refilled the winecups and hitched a hip onto the windowsill. “Reeking of her perfume, too—I’m surprised you didn’t smell it halfway down the stairs.”

  “So he’s wild to get home, and right now.” And Mieka hadn’t even noticed that Cade had experienced an Elsewhen.

  “Mostly because he feels guilty. Been flirting, hasn’t he, and quite a bit more than flirting in the maids’ upstairs tiring room. The little redhead, I think. I’ve seen her looking at him all cow-eyed. I’m glad you came back—I’ve heard half an hour of he’s a bastard, he’s chankings, not worth the dirt that they’ll bury his ashes in when he’s dead, you know the sort of thing. He’s a thoughtless, faithless, useless shit, and she’ll find someone else and leave him.” He gave a shrug that dismissed Mieka’s panic. “What did you see, or don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “Later. It’s just this damned headache—oh, Blye was right about the glass box.” He made an effort. “Just the thing to introduce her to the kind of magic she’ll be seeing at home. All she’s ever heard is that magic is evil. And remind me to tell you about a Guild or something they have here—”