by Melanie Rawn
“Not if I can help it,” Blye repeated.
She finally convinced him that it really was important for him to be at the meeting. He felt better about it as he slipped in through the kitchen door of Redpebble Square. Two drinks with Jed had helped. They gave him the self-assurance he needed to carry through a certain plan.
After bestowing a smacking kiss to Mistress Mirdley’s cheek, he sailed into the parlor with a cheery, “Greetings, all!” and sat himself down on the carpet near Cayden’s chair. “Frightfully sorry to be late. Is it tea time already? Jeschenar, worthy son of your wonderful mother, be a dear and pour me out a cup, won’t you? Ever so beholden!”
“Nice of you to join us,” growled Cade, but Mieka didn’t turn to look at him. If he did, he’d break into laughter before he’d done what he intended to do.
“We were just discussing things, don’t you see,” said Fairwalk, looking nervous—but didn’t he always? “Lord Broadflock was giving his opinion—”
“And valuably, I’m sure,” Mieka interrupted, recognizing the Steward as one of those who’d been most in favor of Black fucking Lightning last year at Trials. Good; that would make this more fun. He accepted a cup from Jeska, whose face was a study in conflict. Amusement, uneasiness, a spark of eagerness in his eyes at what Mieka might be planning, for Jeska knew him well enough to be certain he was planning something. From this expectancy Mieka judged that Lord Broadflock had not made a favorable impression. He glanced quickly over at Rafe, whose lips were twitching beneath his beard; further encouragement. Not that he required any.
“As I was saying,” Lord Broadflock harrumphed, “much depends on the nature of the plays presented. Their length must be such that three groups can perform in one evening, and as there are three nights of celebrations, culminating of course in the performance of the Shadowshapers on that last evening—”
“Of course!” Mieka said brightly.
“Brief but powerful is what you’re looking for,” Fairwalk interjected. “Lively, amusing, thought-provoking, demonstrating all that Touchstone is known for—”
“We promise not to shatter anything expensive,” Mieka contributed, and reached into his jacket pocket.
“Beholden,” said Lord Broadflock in a forbidding tone of voice.
Fairwalk said, “I was just informing His Lordship that Touchstone’s will be an entirely new piece, and I don’t yet know what its length might—Cayden, have you timed it out yet?”
Mieka uncorked a squarish, flattish blue bottle and poured some of its contents into his tea. Then he set the bottle on the carpet so that its white label was clearly visible to Lord Broadflock, and took a long swallow from the cup.
Only Cade couldn’t see the label, though Mieka was sure he’d recognize the bottle by its shape and color; almost everyone knew this brand, either from having used it or seeing it advertised or passing by its manufactory down past the Plume. He had a quick look at Jeska, whose elegant brows had arched, and the crown of Rafe’s head as he bent to hide his face. Fairwalk looked paralytic. The Steward seemed to have something caught in his throat.
Mieka used The Eyes. “Oh, I’m so sorry—I do cry your pardon—did you want some? Shocking bad manners not to share, me Mum would string me up by me ears.” Leaping to his feet, and with his most winsome smile, he poured a bit into the Steward’s teacup and sat back down again on the floor.
Lady Jaspiela, he reflected, would not approve of her best porcelain being rattled so on its over-hasty way to a tabletop. If not an actual break or crack, surely a chipping might result. He hadn’t considered that. Ah well. She’d forgive him. He sipped from his own cup again, and when it became clear that no one else was possessed of the powers of speech, said, “We were talking about Touchstone going on directly before the Shadowshapers, weren’t we? Excellent! And quite an honor, innit, Cayden? Beholden to Your Lordship!”
“Before th-the Shadowshapers,” Lord Broadflock managed, and got to his feet, and within moments was out the door, Fairwalk trailing along behind.
Mieka was unable to believe his luck. This had worked even better than he’d intended. Delighted, and grinning from one side of his face to the other, he finally turned to Cade.
“What’s in it?” Cade demanded.
“What’s in what?”
“The bottle.”
“What bottle?”
“That fucking bottle!” Cade roared.
He peered at the label. “Blacksaddle’s Equine Liniment? I thought it tasted odd.” All at once he coughed, then choked, and clutched at his throat, and was about to topple artistically onto the carpet when Cayden kicked him. “Ow!”
“Whiskey,” Rafe said in a strangled sort of voice. “It’d have to be whiskey.”
“Of course it’s whiskey!” Mieka sat up, rubbing his leg where Cade’s boot had got him. “And it worked! I got us placed right before the Shadowshapers!”
Jeska said, “You did, that. C’mon, Rafe, let’s go tell Crisiant.”
It wasn’t until the pair were in the vestibule that they finally started to laugh. The door slammed shut behind them, and Mieka turned a wounded look on Cade. He suddenly understood why the others had left in such a hurry. He’d never seen Cade this angry. This cold.
“You clown,” he said in a low, lethal voice. “You think you’re so fuckin’ funny—you never take a breath unless it comes out as a joke. You think everything is just one huge prank, all of life is only there to be laughed at. Well, take me off the list of things you make fun of. I’m done!”
“Oh, settle down! Stuffy old twiddlepoop like that, he needed taking down a peg. Besides,” he said, earnest now despite himself, “the Stewards cheated us at the last Trials, giving the Ducal to Black fucking Lightning when everybody knows Touchstone deserved it. And he was in their favor, you know he was! So I mucked about with him a little, just to get some of our own back.”
“And what if he’d left? Did you think of that? What if he’d got fed to the back teeth with waiting for you to get here, and crossed us off the list altogether? What if he’d been so offended by what you said—leave alone what you did!—that he—”
“Not in a million years. The Princess likes us.”
“And the Archduke hates us, or as near to as makes no difference!” His voice began to rise in pitch and volume. “You and your damned jokes—is there anything in the world you take seriously?”
Mieka suddenly heard himself saying things he’d never said to another living soul.
“You think I don’t know why I am the way I am? The audiences—onstage and off!—they want the laugh. They don’t want real. That’s the business we’re in, innit? Making unreality. I told you a long time ago, somebody has to teach these people how to dream. Show ’em there’s more to life than goin’ to work and goin’ for a pint and goin’ home—they don’t want real from us, they get enough of real in their own lives. We go to work, too, only we work in places that don’t exist. For them, we don’t really exist.”
“That’s not true! What we do—it’s real when it’s onstage and—”
“And who had to argue you into being honest in your work, into putting more of yourself into it? You don’t want them to see who you really are any more than I do!” Mieka sprang to his feet again and started to pace the carpet. “What you do when you write, and prime the withies, there’s so much more of you than there used to be—d’you remember when we talked about that? But there’s not many who truly understand what they’re seeing and hearing onstage—Tobalt, maybe, he’s a bright lad—Gods damn it, Quill, they don’t want real!”
“Mieka—you have to be real to someone—”
“Not to them. And it’s easy for me, y’know. Look at me. How many people like me are rollin’ round the Kingdom? I’m all Elf to look at. Tall enough to be Human, and me teeth came out squared off instead of pointed, but the rest is Elf to me fingertips. They see me walk onstage and they know something mad and clever’s about to happen. But I’m the first thing they see
that isn’t real to them. They don’t want me to be real. I’m a laugh when I’m there and the echo of a laugh when I’m gone. And that’s the way I want it. Except—” He paused, and wrapped his arms around himself, and shook his head. “Except sometimes I do that to me friends, the people I care about, the ones who don’t want just a laugh, they want me. Just like I am. Well, sometimes I lose that, I forget that. The walls go up all by themselves and I forget how to get round them. I forget sometimes that there’s people as want who I am. It scares me. You scare me. The thing about you is that the walls might as well not be there. To you, they’re invisible. I can’t do anything about that and it scares me even worse. So if I end up throwing a couple of bricks in your face, that’s why.”
Cade sat there staring at him, gray eyes blank with shock. Not the Elsewhen kind, but honest fist-to-the-guts gobsmacked. Furious with himself for revealing so much, Mieka shrugged and turned for the door.
“Send round when you want to rehearse. I’m done here.”
“Do you know what scares me?” Cade whispered, and Mieka stopped cold. “That one day, all that’s left will be the echo.”
This infuriated him anew. Those damned Elsewhens. Cade still didn’t trust him to make his own decisions. He could have recited example after example of his instincts guiding him correctly. Instead, he swung round on one heel. “Don’t you want to know where I’m going? I’m for the shops—to buy me a yellow shirt.” He had the satisfaction of seeing Cade turn white to the lips. Unable to resist, he taunted, “What was the exact color again? Lemony, or p’rhaps more of a buttercup? Daffodil? C’mon, Cade, give us a hint! Oh, but you don’t do that, do you? That would be telling. Well, I’ll just have to use me own judgment, then—but that scares you even worse, doesn’t it?”
“Go on, then!” Cade shouted. “Go drink yourself cross-eyed! Go stick thorn in your arms until you kill yourself! I don’t fucking care!”
“Yeh, you do,” he jeered. “You’re afraid of that more than anything else, and we both know it. Every time you have an honest feeling, you turn tail and run like it’s a dragon with poison dripping from its teeth! Look at that girl you wanted, and she wanted you, only you started feeling things for her, didn’t you? Real things—honest things! So she’s set to marry somebody else now, and all because you were too scared—”
“What?”
He froze. “I–I thought you knew.” It had been in the broadsheets, and when he’d read it he’d felt both sorry for Cade and angry with him. But the news had appeared while Cade was at Fairwalk Manor. “It’s—she’s bespoken to Lord Eastkeeping—I’m sorry—I thought you knew—”
“Get out.” The long body unfolded from the chair, and even from a dozen feet away Cade seemed to tower over him. “Now.”
He turned and fled.
* * *
It was warm in the springtime darkness of the river lawn, and he felt himself to be wrapped inside one of his own creations. He could feel the cool damp of the grass beneath his bare feet, and the slightly splintery arms of the chair. City sounds reached him only vaguely from across the water. Wistly Hall was quiet. A few crickets, birds flying past with a chirp or twitter. There wasn’t light enough from the lamps along the riverwalk or the boats plying the river by night; he would have added a half-moon to emphasize the scene. He wasn’t onstage, though, and this wasn’t a scene, and Jeska wouldn’t be stepping from the shadows to recite his opening lines. But it wasn’t reality, either, naked and unadorned. It was him, and a chair, and the wet grass, and a mostly empty bottle. And whatever had been in the thorn he’d used earlier. He didn’t remember, and didn’t care.
Whatever it was, it made the Elf-light lanterns across the water dance in rainbow colors. Quite pretty, really. A while ago, a few of them had bloomed like flowers, and that had been even prettier. Rather like a more benevolent version of the thorn Pirro Spangler had slipped him way last year. He liked this sort. It was pretty.
“Mieka?”
He didn’t glance round as his wife spoke his name. He heard her footsteps hissing through the grass.
“It’s late, dearling,” she whispered, and knelt at his side, her beautiful hands clasping his knee.
There really ought to be a half-moon. The faint shine of lights from the opposite bank and the drifting boats didn’t gleam as they ought to on her hair.
“There’s a chill in the breeze. Come up to bed.”
He upended the bottle over his glass. “When I’m ready.”
“What troubles you, dearling?”
“It’s not my fault the girl’s marrying someone else.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Cayden!” he spat. “Master Cayden bloody great Tregetour! Thinks he’s the best thing to hit the Kingdom since—since—” He couldn’t find the words. Small wonder. He wasn’t the bloody great tregetour, was he—just the glisker, the one who used the magic but couldn’t prime it into the withies.
“Mieka, what’s wrong?”
He shrugged. “Oh, everybody sayin’ how fuckin’ brilliant Cade is, how clever—figurin’ out ’bout the Treasure an’ all—” He squinted to see her in the darkness, the pale and perfect face, the gorgeous eyes. “Y’know what, about Master Cayden bloody great Tregetour Silversun? I was there when he saw it! I gave him the thorn! Without me—” He snapped his fingers and felt her flinch.
“Dearling,” she said again, “why don’t you come up to bed now?”
“Dearling,” he mimicked cruelly, “me glass is fuckin’ hollow, innit!”
“There’s more in the dining room—”
“Then go get it!”
While she was gone, he glowered at the river. The pretty lights were just lights now, yellow and boring. Cayden bloody Silversun, most brilliant mind ever to grace the theater, best writer in a generation—two generations, three—
He raised his glass in a spiteful toast, and was both infuriated and glad that there was no drink to drink. He opened his mouth to shout for her, but she was there beside him all at once, a bottle in her hands.
“All he ever does is stand there,” he snarled. “Who is it does all the work, eh? Who is it ends up wrung out every fuckin’ night?”
“I know how hard you must work, Mieka,” she whispered.
“But you don’t know, do you, because you’re not allowed to watch! No women in the theater! I’ll do something about that, I will,” he vowed, and gulped more brandy.
She knelt beside him again. “They need you, they need you so much, they wouldn’t be where they are if not for you.”
“Too bleedin’ right! And Cade wouldn’t have the first notion about the Treasure if not for me! D’you know how he got it figured? All those books, that’s how they think he did it, reading himself half-blind, and then piecing it all together, and a story from the Fae—” He snorted. “’Twas thorn what did it, thorn I gave him! He saw it, like he sees a million other things—not that he ever tells me! I always know when it’s about me, there’s a look he gets—but he never says a fuckin’ word. Have to make the decisions, he says, live me own life, can’t choose for me. In one of them, he hated me. He saw what’s to come and he hated me—and he won’t even tell me what I did to make it like that! An’ there was another, only this was a good future, it was his Namingday and we’d got old and I was there—I was still there—”
A boatman called from the river, and she flinched again, her head turning, and the faint glow of the Elf-light across the water lit her face. He could see in her eyes that she didn’t understand.
“He knows what will happen,” Mieka told her, speaking very clearly so the words would be the right ones. “He dreams it. He sees what will come. Never breathes a word of it—but he knows. He knows!”
“Mieka—”
“It’s how he knew about the Treasure! Gods in glory, girl, are you thick in the head? He sees the futures—all of them, hundreds of them!” He drained his glass and hurled it across the lawn. With it went the last of the thorn and his ene
rgy. He couldn’t seem to move. “I’m tired,” he mumbled. “Gods, I’m so tired.…”
“Come up to bed, dearling.”
He was muzzily aware of hands helping him up, guiding him, half-carrying him back up to the house. There were lights burning in the family dining room, and from somewhere he heard a baby crying.
* * *
The Keymarker had got Touchstone cheap, because every other important group was back in Town and that meant every important place was booked. The Palace still hadn’t come through on payment for the trip to the Continent. The Keymarker wasn’t a step down, but it wasn’t the Kiral Kellari, either. That stage was currently graced three nights a week by Black fucking Lightning, at half again as much as Touchstone would get for the Keymarker. But they needed money, and the Keymarker had offered, and here they were.
A new sign had gone up. No words, just a huge iron key hanging over the sidewalk. Master Ashbottle had been busy inside, as well. There was a great metal key painted gold on either side of the stage, and one up over the bar, and Rafe was worried about the bounce of the magic. Mieka didn’t care about that. He was angry that they weren’t all made of glass so he could shatter them.
The artists’ tiring room backstage was more nicely appointed than he remembered, with a selection of nibble-food and their favorite beverages. Mieka downed a glass of very good whiskey—Auntie Brishen was right to be worried about this new distillery—as he took off the boots he’d walked over in and prepared to pull on the soft-soled leather knee-boots he preferred for work.
And then he caught Cade looking at him. That look. The Elsewhen look.
Just a flash, just a brief turn, but Mieka was at his side and grasping his arm before it was over. Roughly he yanked Cade outside into the corridor, through the Artists Entrance, into the back alley.
“Unless you tell me exactly what you just saw—”
“I–I can’t—”
“Gods fucking damn you, Quill!”