Elsewhens (Glass Thorns)

by Melanie Rawn

  He sighed, and nodded, and Cade reminded himself to spend part of this evening relegating the Elsewhens about this house to the Never Will Be portion of his mind. Though he knew others would take their places, he could only hope that none would include wandering through a house Mieka had abandoned. It had been like picking over a corpse.

  They ate the meal Mistress Mirdley had packed for them, then gave in to Derien’s plea and told the driver to take the long way round back to Redpebble Square. It was the last day of school holidays, and he was determined to stretch it out as long as possible, for he had a pile of books waiting for him at home in preparation for his first classes on the morrow. Cayden knew that as a good, conscientious elder brother, he ought to get the boy home in time to do some work, but it was a lovely day and he was so grateful about the house that he, too, wanted to make the afternoon last.

  Of such fond and innocent indulgence of a younger brother were Elsewhens created.

  It lacked three hours before twilight, and they were still eight or ten miles outside the edges of Gallantrybanks, when Derien pointed to a stooped old man pounding a sign into the dirt. The sign read SELLING AUGHT. Beyond it was an oddly sprawling fieldstone cottage: one level, a central square with slightly shorter wings to the left and right, thatched roof, two chimneys, a trellis above the lych-gate overrun with climbing yellow roses. Surrounded by a three-foot fieldstone wall, the property included a wooden outbuilding almost big enough to qualify as a barn. Bricks that matched the chimneys were set in a swirling pattern from the gate to the front door. Windows gleamed in the afternoon sun, dazzling Cade’s eyes.

  {He had no idea what he’d find here—well, no, that wasn’t strictly true. Mieka would be here. Exactly how drunk or thorned-up he’d be was the uncertainty. He told himself to prepare for anything. As if that were possible, with Mieka Windthistle.

  Everything looked normal, even charming under the light dusting of snow that glistened the winter morning. Tidy stone wall, trellis arching above the lych-gate, brick walkway and chimneys, stone cottage with shining windows, wooden “Lodge” as Mieka had named it when he turned the little barn’s hayloft into a hideaway reminiscent of his tower lair at Wistly. Cade descended from his carriage and told his driver to come back in an hour. He waited until the clatter of hooves and wheels faded up the road, then pulled his cloak more closely around him and opened the gate.

  He was halfway up the walk before he heard noises from inside the Lodge. Yes, that was where Mieka would be: hunched in one of the velvet chairs, filthy and unshaven, bottle in one hand and thorn-roll in the other as he tried to decide what to use next.

  Biting both lips together, Cade strode through the cottage yard and was within steps of the Lodge when its door burst open and Mieka hurtled into him.

  “Quill! Run for it!”

  He was laughing, a maniacal grin splitting his flushed face, those eyes bright and wild. Cade was dragged along by an elbow to the front of the cottage, where Mieka pressed him against the wall and peered around the corner.

  The Lodge exploded.

  “Ha!” Mieka roared, clapping both hands together. “Brilliant! C’mon, Quill, let’s do the rest!”

  “The rest—?”

  Mieka dug into the pockets of his greatcoat and within moments Cade’s hands were full of trailing coils of fuse rope and packets that trickled black powder onto the snow. The Elf held up an elegant engraved silver flint-rasp and clicked it a few times, sniggering as Cade spluttered and backed off in case the sparks hit the powder. “Come on!”

  “Mieka—you can’t just—”

  “Can’t I? Watch me! Everything worth anything is gone. Whatever’s left, I still own it—for the next few days, until the law courts come after me—and I can do as I fancy with it—”

  “And you’ve a fancy to blast it all to bits?”

  “I always knew you were a bright lad, Quill! I’m glad you’re here—it would’ve taken hours to set up all by meself.”

  “Mieka, I won’t—”

  “Yeh, you bloody well will!” Merriment turned to fierce rage with a swiftness that startled even Cade, who was long used to Mieka’s reckless emotions. “Drove all the way out here to see if you could do anything to help, didn’t you? Well, help me!” Another dizzying swerve, another dazzling impudent grin. “Look at it this way—help me do it right, and you won’t have to worry about picking random bits and pieces of me from the wreckage!”}

  Mieka had left the hire-hack and was talking animatedly with the old man. Derien had climbed atop the fieldstone wall, polite enough not to run about where he hadn’t been invited but itching to leap down and explore. As Cade caught his breath and subdued the queasy wambling of his stomach, he saw a grin break like sudden sunlight across Mieka’s face.

  He’d helped Mieka stash the powder charges and light the fuses. He knew he had. He remembered feeling a sudden upsurge of turbulent joy in potential destruction. And in this Elsewhen, plotting the annihilation of his own house, Mieka was alive.

  So when Cayden climbed down from the hire-hack, he was able to smile when Mieka yattered on about how this house was made of stone so there wouldn’t be any mice, and the thatch was only a year old, and weren’t the roses beautiful, there were three bedrooms and a sitting room and a big kitchen, and the price is just about what the other one was, and let’s go inside and take a look, Quill, shall we?

  The village lawyer was sent for. Rafe could have haggled the price down much better than Mieka or Cade, and it didn’t help that Derien was racing all over the place, begging them to come see this or that marvel, especially the view of the woodlands descending into a dell at the back of the house. Cade knew he ought to caution Mieka to have his brothers come out and take a look at the place before he actually agreed to purchase it. Perhaps something impetuous remained inside him from the sight of all that black explosive powder. This wasn’t the other house—it was all he could think, that this wasn’t that other house. He’d help Mieka buy this one because sooner or later he’d help him get rid of it, and whatever mutilation of a life he’d live here with her.

  By the time they got back into the hire-hack, the local Minster chimes had rung five, and Mieka was the rapturous new owner (provisionally) of a rambling cottage, an almost-barn, and half an acre of land. Moving in would have to wait until the old man had packed up all his belongings for the relocation to his grandson’s house outside Lilyleaf, but that would also provide time to purchase and deliver a few basics of furniture.

  Cade wasn’t at all surprised when Mieka directed the driver to head for the shops near Redpebble Square. He was puzzled, however, when the Elf ignored all the furnishers in favor of a draper’s shop, just about to close up for the night, and came back out within five minutes chortling over a dozen blue silk tassels.

  * * *

  Amazingly, Mieka and his new wife moved into the house within a fortnight. Each day was spent in packing, organizing, shopping, and preparing; almost each night was spent at the Kiral Kellari, the Keymarker, or another tavern playing a show, which meant that the shows themselves had to serve as rehearsals. They had precious little time left before the start of the Winterly Circuit.

  Cade spent his days in his room or at the Archives. Kearney had ordered relevant books from his Fairwalk Manor library sent to Redpebble Square, and provided the equivalent of a Royal Writ, signed by some functionary indebted to His Lordship, for free access to whatever moldy old tomes and documents Cade thought might aid him in writing “Treasure.”

  It wasn’t going well.

  On the nights Touchstone wasn’t working, Cade sought inspiration in thorn. He dreamed, right enough, but they were dreams, not visions, and cumulative frustration made him surly. For some reason known only to the recalcitrant inner workings of his mind, almost all he could think about was the old man seated at the prow of that barge on the Vathis River, conjuring purple-gold light that teased and taunted those massive monsters surging through the water.

  Pra
ise be to the Lord, the Lady, all the Angels, and the Old Gods that he didn’t dream about that. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. Often, and usually in the middle of copying down a few possibly relevant sentences from some worm-eaten volume it had taken an archivist three hours to find, he’d see the hulking yellowish shapes and the light that goaded them, or hear the echo of their screams.

  Should he try to merge the two concepts in some way? Use the image of vodabeistes and what he was increasingly sure was the reality of Fae regalia together somehow? He had to write “Treasure”; he had a commission; if he didn’t write it, he and Touchstone were fucked. Yet the luring swirls of fire kept nagging at him.

  The others weren’t any help. After a show, Rafe went home to Crisiant. Jeska went out prowling. Mieka went home to Wistly—and this was another sore point. His new house was too far to make the round-trip every time they had a booking. So he’d turn up just in time (and more often late), sleep at his parents’, stay for the show the following night, then the next morning return to Number 39, Hilldrop Crescent. This went on for more than a fortnight, until he flatly refused to make the daylong journey to Sir Teveris Longbranch’s country home for a private performance.

  “We have to go,” Cade said. “It’s a day there, and a show, and a day back, but—”

  “Fine,” Mieka snapped. “I’ll be there—for twice the fee.”

  “Twice!” Kearney squeaked.

  “We’re Touchstone,” Mieka said flatly. “We may still be on the Winterly, but everybody knows we were bully-rooked and deserve the Royal. The Princess herself wanted us. Not the Shadowshapers, not the Crystal Sparks, not Black fucking Lightning. So Sir Thingummy can bloody well pay for the privilege.”

  “But—but—the fee was agreed, it’s in writing, don’t you see—”

  “Then unwrite it. Rewrite it. I don’t give a rat’s fart. I’ve a wife and mother-in-law to support and I want the money.”

  The old woman had moved in with them. She was out of a job, Princess Iamina having decided she had enough frills and furbelows for Court festivities. Cade had silently wished them joy of her presence and looked forward to the day when he and Mieka would detonate the whole house, wiping her and her daughter out of their lives forever.

  But as he listened to Mieka argue with Kearney, he stayed silent, too, about a thing he was thinking: that it had been Mieka who’d insisted that Touchstone must apologize in person to those tavern owners they’d disappointed by their absence on the Continent. That sort of thing didn’t seem to matter to him now. Nothing mattered but his wife. And the money. Cade took Kearney aside and murmured that he’d forgo his own share of their pay in order to accommodate Mieka. Thus was the matter settled.

  “Bad enough I’ll be gone when she has the baby,” Mieka said later. “If we’d got what we earned, the Ducal or Royal, we’d be off on the Circuit now, and I could be there with her then. It’s Fairwalk’s fault, and he can mend it.”

  “I understand.” He also understood something else: that the work meant less to Mieka, and even aside from the danger that posed to Touchstone, it was perilous for Mieka’s own well-being. What he had realized so suddenly about the Elf while talking with Lady Vrennerie was even truer than he’d known at the time. Mieka needed to perform. Jeska loved it, Rafe found satisfaction in it, Cade craved it—but Mieka needed it.

  Chapter 22

  Expected back in Gallantrybanks to perform (at great expense) for the public celebrations of the royal marriage next spring, Touchstone began the Winterly Circuit two weeks early. Places where they had played five or six shows last year, they would do only four. If the schedule of performances was relentless, the travel was brutal. Had their horses not been hired (at massive expense) from Romuald Needler, they would never have made it. It turned out that whereas one of these huge white monsters fit between the shafts of the King’s coaches, two would not; so Touchstone had ended up (at colossal expense) hiring the Shadowshapers’ wagon, long since refitted to accommodate these horses.

  The first time Mieka stretched out on one of the bunks, knowing it would be his alone for the whole trip, he announced, “Definitely I want one of these!” Kearney assured him that with all the money they’d be making, he’d be able to order one built for them by next summer. They still hadn’t been paid the balance of their fee for the trip to the Continent, but Kearney was working on that, and they dreamed up their design accordingly.

  It became their project for at least two hours of every day they spent in the wagon, and it soon seemed that the only time they weren’t in the wagon was when they were onstage or collapsing into beds upstairs at an inn. Gallantrybanks to Shollop, Shollop to Dolven Wold, on to Sidlowe and Scatterseed—people wanted to see Touchstone, and Touchstone gave everyone what they wanted to see at an accelerated pace, and if they hadn’t been nineteen and twenty and twenty-one years old, they wouldn’t have lasted a fortnight.

  Thorn helped.

  Bearing in mind that Mieka was leaving his pregnant wife behind, he was in remarkable spirits. This puzzled Cayden, who had expected him to be surly and fractious. But after the first fortnight or so, he realized that it was further confirmation that Mieka needed to perform. Lacking that emotional outlet, the Elf was unmanageable. Behind his glisker’s bench, though, Mieka could use everything that was in him, focus it on the work. Nothing distracted him from creating his distractions, as it were. In the strangest way, this made their friendship one of equals. It never showed up more clearly than onstage: the magic Cade primed into the withies, the imaginings and dreamings and coldly calculated effects, Mieka used with an immediacy and intensity that left audiences gasping.

  Snow came early and heavy that year. It bothered the huge horses very little. Within the wagon, the firepocket and Auntie Brishen’s whiskey kept Touchstone warm enough. Their coachman, on the other hand, was constantly exhausted. Nephew of last year’s driver, he was barely thirty and powerfully built, but even his abundant young muscles wore out controlling these horses. So when they reached Homage Knoll, just the wrong side of the Pennynines where a blizzard had closed the pass and the weathering witches hadn’t yet cleared the road, he took to his bed for two solid days.

  It was said there were attractions to Homage Knoll not readily discernible to the transient visitor. The only thing it had ever been known for, as far as Cayden knew, was that on a hillside nearby (nobody recalled exactly which hillside, and thus all the local landowners vied for precedence, though none could substantiate his claim), a hundred or so rebellious nobles assembled to pledge fealty to King Somebody-or-other, who had defeated them in battle. That he had promptly lopped off all their heads had given rise to the tale that Lord So-and-so’s hillside was the authentic site, for there were about a hundred more-or-less skull-sized boulders strewn about the field below. All of His Lordship’s competitors were certain that some ancestor of his had collected the rocks and salted the field with them in secret, then claimed to be astonished by the “discovery.” Whatever the truth, whichever miserable, windswept, snow-clogged mound it had been, this was Homage Knoll’s sole claim to historical note.

  Yet its residents persisted in praising its other virtues. They said quite seriously that one had to linger a while to appreciate the place. By the third day of Touchstone’s involuntary residence, Cade had yet to discover anything worth looking at or doing, or even worth asking about looking at or doing.

  This might have been a consequence of his current petulance. Well, his ongoing petulance, truth be told. He just couldn’t seem to make “Treasure” cooperate with what he had already decided it must do. At Sidlowe he had asked around again about local legends, and especially about a lake—unsure if it was a real clue but taking the chance anyway—and been frustrated at every turn. Having Rafe point out that getting stuck like this was usually his own damned fault helped not at all. He was tired of everything’s being his fault. He was tired of being responsible for everything from making sure Mieka actually got out of bed in the mo
rning to making sure Jeska was in his assigned bed at night. They needed Kearney Fairwalk to be here instead of in Gallantrybanks, here to sort things so that Cade could get on with his work. How could he liberate his mind to create when daily life kept a stranglehold on him? He was an artist, damn it.

  Mieka’s mood, on the other hand, could not have been cheerier. Yazz had appeared out of nowhere their second night here, and the Elf and the Giant had been happily exchanging news, rambling the snowy hills, and visiting Yazz’s local relations. They made the oddest possible pairing, Cade thought as he watched them set off that third morning. Yazz had another purpose to his visit besides congratulating Mieka on becoming “rich an’ famed” (relatively speaking, anyway): He was courting a distant cousin. The romantic rituals attendant on the process included a lavish outdoor picnic—even in the middle of winter. Mieka had certainly dressed for it, having commandeered Rafe’s new wolfskin coat and Jeska’s thigh-high boots, adding a badger-fur hat borrowed from the coachman. He looked like a fat, fuzzy, overgrown puppy as he gamboled along beside his huge companion. For a man who loved his comforts as much as Mieka did to be braving a luncheon in the snow was a tribute to his affection for Yazz. That, or he’d been promised excellent food or fantastic liquor or both.

  Cade turned from the windows of the taproom and wondered what he was going to do with himself all day. Rafe was writing yet another letter to Crisiant; Jeska was off chatting up the local shopgirls. He could hear their coachman coughing in an upstairs room. Bored, restless, and knowing that nothing would come out of his pen today but additions to a rather obscene series of ballads, Cade wrapped himself up in every woolen garment he’d brought with him, tunic to socks, and threw on his father’s old gray overcoat and a cloak atop it for good measure before setting out to walk off some of his funk.