by Melanie Rawn
Of decoration there was very little. No placards advertising Touchstone, no tapestries, no paintings, no imagings. His Trials medals—two Winterly, three Royal—were in glass boxes on the bookshelves, and Mieka had the feeling whenever he saw them that the only reason they weren’t stashed in a drawer somewhere was that Blye had made the boxes. The counterpane made by Mieka’s wife and mother-in-law was crumpled at the foot of the bed. The only color in the room was the rug, its greens and blues like a forest pond in the middle of the city. The peacock feathers, fanning out in a jar or vase, would be an improvement.
Derien ignored Cade’s mood, putting on a smile and wishing his brother a happy Namingday. Cade expressed his gratitude indifferently. Mieka busied himself clearing off the table and setting out Mistress Mirdley’s tea. The search for a kettle took some time, and he kept his expression carefully neutral as Dery tried to engage Cade in conversation. Mieka went out to the landing where the spigot was, and encountered Rumble coming up the stairs.
“Anything to report?” he asked the cat, who curled around his ankles a few times before stepping lightly into the flat. “Big help you are,” he muttered, and hoped that Dery could coax Cade into some semblance of good manners.
No such luck.
When he got back, Dery was reading bits from The Nayword. “There’s something in here about Briuly, too.” Before Cade could say he didn’t care, Dery read out, “‘Still no word on the whereabouts of Master Lutenist Briuly Blackpath. His family is initiating legal proceedings to have him declared dead so that his estate can be sold to pay his debts.’”
“You’d think,” Cade mused, one finger scratching idly at his pathetic excuse for a beard, “that Lord Oakapple, his esteemed cousin or whatever he is, would pay up Briuly’s debts just to keep the family out of the law courts. But I never did get exactly how they were related, so perhaps it doesn’t signify.” He turned to Mieka. “How was Lilyleaf?”
“Fine. Croodle sends her best.”
Nodding to the new silver bracelet on Mieka’s wrist, he said, “Very nice. What did you give your lovely lady?”
“She saw a pink pearl in a shop. I had it made into a pendant.” It had cost a bloody fortune, too, but that was a small price for peace in his household.
Derien was the one who conjured up Wizardfire to heat the water. There was an iron ring for the kettle above a small iron cauldron, and the glances the boy gave his brother told Mieka that this was a new skill. Cade didn’t comment on it at all. In fact, nobody said anything while the water had boiled and the tea was brewed. The three of them sat there like polite strangers who have exhausted every topic of conversation and could find no reason to keep up any pretense of being interested in one other. As Cayden bestirred himself to pour out, Mieka considered various methods of shocking a reaction out of him—any reaction at all. But he’d been trying that, hadn’t he, for going on two years now, and with what results? Rarely, a response of the Do that again, and I’ll feed you your own balls marinated in plum sauce variety. Mostly, a look of mild contempt for his childishness. It was infuriating.
“Uncle Dennet died.”
Cade looked up from pouring out. “I hadn’t realized he was still alive.”
“Well, he was,” Derien went on. “And now he’s not. First we learned of it was when the Shelter sent his ashes to Redpebble.”
Mieka searched his knowledge of Cade’s family tree, and came up with Dennet Silversun, elder brother of Cade’s father Zekien, mad as a sack of snakes.
“Wasn’t he the one wounded in the war?” Mieka asked.
“What a refined way of phrasing it,” Cade observed. “He was seventeen and got in the path of somebody’s spell. He’s been in a puzzle house ever since.”
“Almost forty years,” Derien added. “It’s called the Shelter and it’s supposed to be very nice, very clean and kindly—”
“—as insane asylums go,” Cade interrupted. Then, with a nasty little smile, he said, “That’s our fate in the theater, Mieka. Forty years surrounded by madmen.”
Mieka eyed him thoughtfully. “Y’know,” he said at last, “you’re being a right pain in the ass. You’ve been being a right pain in the ass for a long time, and everybody’s tired of it. Write yourself some new lines, why don’t you?”
Cade’s smile spread fractionally. “I prefer to improvise.”
Mieka paid no heed to the pleading look on Derien’s face. He’d had enough. Long ago, he’d had enough. Setting down his cup, he snatched up a slice of carrot bread and made for the door. “Rehearsal tomorrow at the Kiral Kellari,” he said by way of farewell, and took the stairs three at a time.
Emerging into the thin spring sunshine, he found himself in luck at last: a hire-hack was just pulling up at the building’s front door, which meant he wouldn’t have to go searching. He signaled the driver with a raised hand, but the man shook his head.
“Hired to return,” he said, just as a boy of about ten jumped out and, on seeing Mieka, demanded, “Cayden Silversun?”
“Top floor. What’s the worry?”
“There’s been an accident. Mistress Windthistle sent me to fetch him at once.” He yanked open the front door.
“Wait—which Mistress Windthistle?”
But the boy had vanished.
Mieka’s mother, his sisters, his wife, Blye—all of them and plenty of others besides were Mistress Windthistle. He dithered in place for a moment, then asked the hack driver, “Where’d you come from?”
“Originally? Ambage Road. In this case, Lord Piercehand’s new gallery.”
“The woman who hired you—was she little and blond?”
“That she was. Bit of the Goblin about her, mayhap, but nothing to notice outright.”
Blye. Something had happened to Jed or Jez. “Cayden!” he shouted. “Cayden!”
* * *
It took forever before he and Cade and Dery were in the hire-hack driving towards the river. The traffic leading to the bridge was maddening. Even if a gallop had been legal, carts and riders and other hacks were so thick that only a walk was possible—and even so, their progress was in fits and starts. The boy Blye had sent was up top with the driver, yelling, “Make way! Make way!” every so often, which had no effect except to infuriate everyone else, all of them going nowhere in a hurry.
The interior of the hack was silent with the tension of ignorance. Cade had explained tersely that on the walk downstairs he questioned the lad, who knew nothing except that there had been an accident and Mistress Windthistle had sent him with orders to bring Master Silversun.
Finally, with the Gally River in sight, Mieka could stand no more. “Get out,” he ordered Cade and Dery. “We’ll hire a boat. It can’t help but be faster.”
Scrambling down the embankment, they ran for a dock. Mieka dug in his pockets for coin, cursing himself for spending so much on those damned peacock feathers, coming up with enough to hire a craft that looked more or less able to hold the three of them plus the boatman. He forestalled the man’s attempt to haggle the price by saying, “Double when we get there. Just hurry!”
“Double? Easy enough to say, young sir!” Then he took a closer look at tall, Wizardly Cade and short, Elfen Mieka. “I know your faces from someplace, don’t I?”
“They’re half of Touchstone,” Dery put in. “They’re famous and they’re rich—please, I promise we’ll pay you double if you just get us there quickly!”
“Touchstone.” After further scrutiny, during which Mieka strove to look as much like their placards as possible (though, truth be told, there was never any mistaking Cade’s nose), the man gestured them into the boat.
Mieka hated boats. By the time they reached the site—a nice plot of land beside the river, nothing but the finest for Lord Rolon Piercehand—he had chewed his lower lip almost raw. Dery leaned forward in the prow, the way a rider leaned into his horse’s neck to urge speed. Cade squeezed in beside the boatman, took one of the oars, and rowed white-knuckled. By the time they r
eached the site, Cade’s hair and shirt were damp with the sweat of effort.
A gift to the Kingdom of Albeyn, it was, this new gallery to display a selection of Piercehand’s foreign plunder. Castle Eyot wasn’t big enough to hold the jumble of wonders and oddities and some genuinely beautiful things collected by His Lordship. On progress a year ago, Princess Miriuzca had professed herself enchanted with the place and very prettily persuaded him to share his haul with the public. The Palace would be lending certain of the Royals’ own hoard of paintings and statuary. Whether or not the Princess had also managed to steer some of the contracts for building the place to Windthistle Brothers was a matter of conjecture, but it remained that Jedris and Jezael were doing the wooden parts of the building and Blye would eventually be making the windows.
The foundation and exterior stones were golden yellow, with two curving grand staircases leading up from the street to the main entrance. Scaffolding laced the stone shell together: a few walls, unfinished interior columns, steel support beams. Arches and balconies abounded, some completed and most not. But the most notable feature was a tower, tall and spindly, made of stone and rising two hundred feet into the air. Word had it that when the gallery was finished, the tower would be topped with a solid gold statue brought back from some remote land by one of Piercehand’s many ships.
Currently the only decorations were clouds of dust.
“Right,” said the boatman. “So where’s my double the fare?”
Mieka and Cade scrambled up a few stone steps to the embankment as Dery snapped, “What you already have is all you get! My brother did half the work!”
Mieka blinked; for just an instant, the boy sounded like Lady Jaspiela. In the best possible way, of course.
“Rich!” the boatman sneered. “Famous! Rich and famous coggers is what you are! Come back here and honor your word!”
They left the boatman cursing unoriginally behind them. The crowd was all streetside: a mass of craned necks, like astonished cats peering out a window. Mieka got a good grip on Cade’s elbow and an even better one on Dery’s, and forced a route through the tangle. As he pushed and shoved, Mieka heard snatches of conversation, none of it pleasant. Speculation about how the scaffolding collapsed; contention that the scaffolding was intact but the stonework had crumbled; assurances that both wood and stone were to blame; estimates of how many had died. He wished he had Cade’s height, because then he might have seen the two red heads that were his only concern.
Suddenly they were at the Human barrier that kept the crowd from pressing forward. Not constables, but Lord Piercehand’s own liveried guards, dozens of them linking arms and looking grim. Mieka confronted the one directly in his path.
“I’m Mieka Windthistle—”
“Good for you.”
“But my brothers are—”
“Nobody gets in. Not until the physickers arrive.”
“They’re not here yet?” Cade demanded. “All these people, and not a single—?”
“Some ugly old Trollwife is tending the injured, that’s all. Stand back.”
“Cayden!”
It was Blye, dusty and frantic, running through the maze of stacked stone and cut boards. Cade tried to push through. The guardsman snarled. Cade snarled right back. A brief tussle ensued, during which Derien ducked down and darted between guards. Mieka tried to follow, and got a knee in the ribs. As he doubled over, Cade’s snarl turned to a roar.
“Stop it!” Blye shouted. “I’m Mistress Windthistle and these are my brothers! Let them by! Damn it, let them by!”
In the end, it was not a raised voice or angry words that got them through. It was Hadden Windthistle, in a calm, soft tone, saying, “Gentlemen, would you allow these young men through? Much beholden to you.”
A sliver of space was made. They slipped through. Mieka looked in wonderment at his father and asked, “How’d you do that?”
Hadden only shook his head. But as they jogged towards the building, Cade leaned down and whispered, “Didn’t you see that guard’s face? Your father magicked him!”
2
All told, in later years Cayden Silversun would remember very little about his life from Midsummer on that second Royal Circuit until the day he finally realized how trite his life had become. For quite a long time he subscribed to that most unoriginal of ideas: that if he didn’t feel, he couldn’t be hurt.
Strangely enough, his work didn’t suffer. But his work was all he had. On it he lavished every emotion he refused to experience personally. Audiences applauded (with one mortifying exception). Accolades accumulated (with one mortifying exception). And during it all he gave a very good impersonation of an ordinary man with all the conventional and expected feelings.
Everyone was fooled. Even him. Especially him.
He laughed with his friends when something funny was said. He rejoiced with Rafe and Crisiant at the birth of their healthy baby boy. He was eloquent in his expressions of sympathy when misfortune occurred: the collapse into the river of Mieka’s little tower at Wistly Hall, injuring a boatman unlucky enough to have been passing below it; the ugly divorce of Vered Goldbraider that deprived him by law of the right to see his sons and daughter, because his former wife’s new husband was an influential justiciar and his own new wife had no interest in raising another woman’s children. Cade frowned worriedly when it seemed warranted and smiled in all the right places. He attended the performances of his friends and of any new groups that looked promising. He went to dinner at Wistly Hall and was always welcome at the Threadchaser bakery. He attended charmingly on Princess Miriuzca whenever she requested the honor of his company at lunching or tea, and had guested last Wintering at Eastkeeping Hold for many pleasant days in the company of Lord Kelinn and Lady Vrennerie and their two children.
He took back to his flat any girl who happened to strike his fancy. They never refused him; he was Cayden Silversun of Touchstone. If those girls had names, he never recalled them.
He went over to Redpebble Square as seldom as was decently possible. It wasn’t his mother he was avoiding, for she had always done most of the avoiding for him. No, it was Mistress Mirdley’s sharp and all-too-knowing gaze he dreaded. He never went to Hilldrop Crescent at all.
The sole exception to his removal from emotional life was his brother. Derien grew tall, good-looking, self-assured, a favorite everywhere he went for his sunny smiles and gentle manners. Not that the streak of mischief had been blotted out, not by any means. He participated in, and quite often personally organized, enough trouble at the King’s College to embarrass Lady Jaspiela and reassure Cade that Dery hadn’t turned into a prig. He was the only person always welcome at Cade’s flat. His was the only hand other than Cade’s that would trigger the unlocking of the door.
As for that other young life, the one Cade had sworn he would protect … Jindra Windthistle was not his concern. She had no claim on him. She wasn’t his. She was her parents’ responsibility. Whatever might happen to her was not his to influence. Whatever might happen to her was not his fault.
Whatever happened, to anyone or anything, it was not his fault. How could it be? The Elsewhens had stopped.
Nobody knew. He’d never been particularly forthcoming about his foreseeings, anyway, and things were going rather well for Touchstone professionally and personally, so why worry about it? He refused to worry about it. None of it was his responsibility; none of it was his fault.
He still dreamed. He knew he did, because he remembered them when he woke up. Anxious dreams, bewildering dreams that scared him with their bizarre juxtapositions of scenes or people or events or conversations. A trifle awkward, for instance, when people who were dead showed up—it would be terribly rude to point out to them that they couldn’t possibly be walking around alive. A few times he had wings and could fly, and woke sweating and shaking in the middle of a hideous fall. In one horrible heart-pounding nightmare he was being chased through the waters of the Flood by shrieking yellow vodabeists.
There were no more Elsewhen dreams, and neither were there any daytime turns. No glimpses of futures. Nothing.
He was just like everyone else.
Whether or not an Elsewhen could have warned him about the disaster of “Turn Aback,” he had no idea. He didn’t care to speculate. The fact remained, however, that the play had been a total failure. He’d worked so hard on it, muscling it past the doubts expressed by Jeska and Rafe and Mieka—which, truth be told, weren’t all that emphatic. His partners trusted him. Rafe asked the day after the inaugural performance whether he hadn’t seen it coming. Mieka had most conveniently spared his having to explain by coming robustly to his defense.
“He did his best—if he saw anything at all like this, I’m sure he worked to prevent it. I mean, who’d want to be him, standing there last night after we finished the thing? It’s just that you can’t ever tell with audiences. Isn’t that right, Cade?”
Mieka hardly ever called him Quill anymore. He felt a twinge every time he realized it, and then deliberately pushed the sensation aside, much as he pushed aside the Elsewhens when they threatened him. And they didn’t threaten all that often anymore.
But today, his twenty-fourth Namingday, he couldn’t push aside the assault of this chaos of men slumped on heaps of stone or sprawled on the ground with other men kneeling beside them, holding rags to their wounds. The dust of collapse mingled with the smell of blood. The forecourt was a welter of planks and saws and overturned buckets of nails, fallen scaffolding, and the snarled ropes of rigs for lifting stone.
“Jed!” Mieka flung his arms around his brother, standing tall and unhurt and with one hand firmly gripping Derien’s shoulder. “Where’s Jez?”