Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  Cade the Eminently Quotable wasn’t the first to leave the celebration, but as soon as he was certain his absence wouldn’t be too much remarked, he mounted the stairs to his and Mieka’s room. Even with the door closed, the noise from the taproom invaded every plank of the floor and every stitch of his blanket. Blockweed beckoned. He was just about to search for it when Mieka arrived, kicking the door shut behind him and holding aloft two beer tankards.

  “Thought you might be gettin’ thirsty again,” he said, stepping up onto Cade’s bed and sinking gracefully down cross-legged with his back to the footboard. Thus arranged, he handed over one of the tankards, took a sip from his own, and cocked his head to one side. “Well?”

  “Beholden,” Cade muttered, and took a healthy swig of what turned out to be brandy. Choking, coughing, eventually able to breathe again, he glared at his glisker. “You might’ve warned me!”

  “Sure, I might have,” Mieka agreed, unrepentant. “But I was thinkin’ that mayhap it would give you a start on bein’ ireful with me, because what I’m about to say ain’t anywhere near bein’ close to what you want to hear.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “I saw your face when the Flights were announced.”

  “So?” He took a defiant swallow of brandy.

  “We won, but we didn’t really win.”

  “I’d sussed that out for myself.”

  “You’d rather beat the Shadowshapers in a fair contest, not because they broke the rules and got kicked out.”

  “Well … yeh,” he admitted.

  “And now you’re thinkin’ that we’ll never have the chance to beat ’em fair.”

  “They’ll never be asked back to Trials.”

  “Mm.” Mieka sloshed liquor around in the tankard, frowning thoughtfully. “Is it just at Trials, I wonder, where we compete with them?”

  “What do you mean?” Cade asked suspiciously.

  “Oh, nothin’.” He drank again, and Cade began to consider reaching over to shake him by his ears. “It’s only … I mean, there’s other ways of measuring success, right?”

  “Money.” As he said the word, his lip curled, and Mieka glanced up in time to see it and smile. “Well, it is vulgar, isn’t it? To judge someone by his bank account?”

  “Wasn’t thinkin’ of that, not at all.”

  “What, then? That someday we’ll be in the same town at the same time with performances on the same night? They’d outsell us in tickets, you know they would.”

  “No, that’s not it, either.”

  “Mieka, if you don’t get to the point—”

  “It’s nothin’ much. Just this.” He flashed a look at Cade, then returned his gaze to his drink. “In all the Elsewhens you ever told me about—not that there were that many!—you never once talked about the Shadowshapers.”

  “What of it? How could anything I do have any influence on what any of them do?”

  “The one I liked best,” Mieka went on, “was the one where we’re old. It’s your forty-fifth Namingday but you forgot, and there was a party just starting, and I had a diamond earring. I know you don’t remember it, because you deliberately got rid of all the Elsewhens, but that was a good one, Quill, a future to look forward to.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. But what I’m thinking is this,” he went on, then paused for a swallow of brandy.

  Cade noted suddenly that the gs were firmly attached to Mieka’s words again and those eyes were brightly alert, though half-screened by heavy lashes. He sounded and looked, in fact, much less drunk than he ought to.

  “After a few days of watching Vered and Rauel have it out over this play we did tonight, do you really think that with all their snarking and sniping, they’ll still be playing shows together when they’re forty-five?”

  10

  On the way from Seekhaven—with no stop in Gallantrybanks to celebrate their triumph—the sight of the Tincted Downs was usually an inspirational delight. In spring and summer, the gently folded hills bloomed, seemingly every fortnight, with different flowers: crimson, yellow, blue, orange, pink, purple, as if throngs of drunken Pikseys had danced through the fields flinging gallons of paint across the green carpet of grass. This year a violent wind had blown through, ripping all the petals from the flowers, leaving bare broken stems and not much else. The green undergrowth still clung to the ground, huddling as if hoping the wind wouldn’t notice it, but all other color was gone.

  Mieka refused to be depressed by the sight of it, or the bare-naked trees in the orchards, or the villages with the cottages’ bones pitifully exposed now that all the thatching had blown away. Cade and Rafe and Jeska thought he was depressed, because he wasn’t saying much. The truth of it was that he was working something out in his head, and before he said anything about it, he wanted to be certain sure he had it right.

  In the scant weeks since Cayden’s Namingday, he’d felt by turns stunned, furious, ashamed, and disappointed by this refusal to see the Elsewhens. Stunned, because they were so much a part of Cade—and to Mieka, that deliberate forgetting really was a bit like murder. Furious, because Cade might have seen something that would have prevented what had happened at Lord Piercehand’s Gallery. Ashamed, because he hadn’t even noticed that no descriptions of any Elsewhens had been forthcoming for almost two years. And disappointed because he’d thought Cayden was braver and smarter than anyone else he knew.

  These emotions scraped and scratched at him in no particular order at night when he was supposed to be sleeping. Eventually they resolved into simple worry, which lingered, expanded, proposed all sorts of troubling things that struck him anew almost every time he looked at Cade.

  Mieka knew that he couldn’t rightly question himself on why he hadn’t noticed—why none of them had noticed. He already knew why. They hadn’t noticed, because it took too much effort to notice. It wasn’t that he didn’t give a damn, nor Rafe nor Jeska, either. It was just so much easier to trundle along on the Royal Circuit, in Gallantrybanks, rehearsing and gigging and saying nothing to overset anyone’s balance. He supposed they had all reasoned that if Cade had seen anything interesting, he would have told them. He’d begun telling them before that terrible night in Shollop, when he’d seen Alaen and Briuly find The Rights of the Fae. And hadn’t that piece of Cade’s that wasn’t really a play, “The Avowal,” come from an Elsewhen? If there’d been something interesting or puzzling to tell about an Elsewhen, he would have told it. Or so they’d all thought, and hadn’t considered it any more deeply than that.

  It wasn’t as if all of them didn’t have problems of their own. Rafe’s constant fretting about Crisiant until Bram was born had turned to a blissful blindness to just about everything and everybody else now that he had a son. Jeska’s long, frustrating courtship of Kazie, with all its attendant vexations, had become, now that they were wed, a silent pining for her when Touchstone was on the road. As for Mieka … well, he could refuse to admit even to himself that his marriage wasn’t perfect, but the facts of its imperfections were there for anyone to see if they looked just an inch or so beneath the surface. And the surface—of anything—was as far as any member of Touchstone had bothered to see for a long time.

  Mieka saw things now. He couldn’t not see them. Thorn and whiskey took the sharp edges off his worry, but he had grown up enough to know that there wasn’t enough thorn or whiskey in the world to let him avoid things forever. The fact that he’d tried to avoid things didn’t shame him; it was that he hadn’t even noticed what went so wrong with Cayden.

  And yet … was it wrong? Surely the Elsewhens were Cade’s to see or not see as he chose. He’d been their victim for so many years, taken by them with heart-stopping suddenness. His mind was his own, wasn’t it?

  Of course. But the Elsewhens were part of the way his mind worked. Look at what had happened with “Turn Aback.” They’d all tried to talk Cade out of it, pointing out this difficulty and that, but he had been adamant, and they’
d shared a shrug amongst the three of them, thinking that he’d seen its success in an Elsewhen.

  Time and again during long nights in Seekhaven, with Cade sleeping in the next bed with the help of blockweed, Mieka heroically forbade himself the redthorn that would knock him out for the hours until dawn. He had to reason all this out with a clear head. And time and again he concluded that it just wasn’t right of Cade to refuse the Elsewhens. They were part of him, part of the way his mind worked. Without them, he was as blind to the futures as anybody else. Without them, he wasn’t really Cayden Silversun.

  They had left the sadly un-Tincted Downs and roofless cottages behind, bypassed Gallybanks, and were well on the road to Shollop when Mieka finally decided what to say. The clever and mad that Blye had advised might work in other circumstances. Not now. Not that he had any hope of being as logical and disciplined as Cade with his arguments. But at least he now knew what those arguments would be. His trouble would come in being serious; in convincing Cade that he was indeed serious, and had indeed thought deeply about this. At times it was something of an affliction, having a Kingdom-wide reputation for artful foolery.

  But if there was one thing Cade always took seriously—sometimes too seriously—it was his work. Mieka couldn’t help a secret grin when he realized that while Cade and Vered and Rauel and Mirko had been congratulating themselves on being so very clever in their response to the Continental players’ play, together they’d given him the perfect means to make his point with Cade.

  Since the Shadowshapers wouldn’t be needing their huge white horses for the Royal Circuit, and there were in fact enough of them in Romuald Needler’s stable now to supply (for a fee) anyone with a private wagon, Touchstone was making excellent time. Yazz, as much in love with the beasts as ever, was plotting how to persuade Needler to part with four or more of these beauties permanently, though Kearney Fairwalk blanched at the expense. Leasing them, Yazz pointed out, was more expensive in the long run than buying them outright. As for stabling, there was the mews at Wistly Hall, there was the barn at Hilldrop Crescent, and there was Fairwalk’s own manor house in the country, so it wasn’t as if they’d have to pay for anything but the feed. Mieka had no idea how much a year’s worth of nosebags would cost, but surely it couldn’t add up to more than they were paying Needler for the use of the horses. Negotiations might get somewhere, Mieka thought, now that the Shadowshapers could no longer count on the guaranteed income from the Royal—though none of them seemed worried. They probably had enough in the bank to last them through the scandal until people began to realize they could hire the best theater group in Albeyn pretty much whenever they pleased. Rafe was of the opinion that whereas the merchant and craft guilds would be lining up with buckets of money, the higher nobility would avoid the Shadowshapers (for the next little while, at least) for fear of offending the King.

  “After all,” Rafe had concluded, “he must be rather annoyed that he doesn’t own them anymore.”

  “Own?” Cade had asked in a dreadful voice.

  “Own,” Rafe repeated. “For the length of the Royal Circuit, he owns us. Hasn’t that got through to you after all these years? We do private giggings along the way, yeh, but on whose authority do we play for the Honorable Brotherhood of Nose-Pickers rather than the Singular Order of Ass-Scratchers? They pay the King for the privilege, he takes his share, and then he pays us. But the King—or, rather, the Master of Revelries—decides who has the privilege of presenting us. And that, my dear old lad,” he concluded, “is what the Shadowshapers have escaped.”

  Cade had looked as if he was beginning to contemplate a similar escape, but nothing much had been said about it since. Mieka was still musing on this topic one afternoon just outside Shollop as he walked beside the wagon to stretch his legs. He kept well away from the gigantic white horses that were costing Touchstone a small fortune to lease, and told himself sourly that he didn’t want to speculate on the Shadowshapers’ nightly fee.

  Money. Bothersome subject. His wife had been hinting for over a year about finding a flat in Gallybanks so that she didn’t always have to stay with his parents. That she had expected him to present her with the signed lease on her twenty-first Namingday this winter, he was well aware. The trip to Lilyleaf had been an inadequate substitute as far as she was concerned, but he simply didn’t have the coin to support both a house and a flat. He knew she had ambitions to set herself up in society, and one could hardly receive the sort of ladies she wanted to entertain in the cheerful chaos that was Wistly Hall. Suppose one of the less presentable cousins traipsed downstairs in the middle of afternoon tea, or someone decided to go for a swim—naked—during lunching on the river lawn? Mayhap Touchstone ought to do what the Shadowshapers had done. He tried to calculate how much they would be making this summer as opposed to what Touchstone would be paid as First Flight on the Royal Circuit, but numbers were Jeska’s specialty, not his.

  “Deep dark thoughts?”

  He turned to find Cayden catching up to him. “Not really.”

  “When you put your fists in your pockets and walk all hunched up like that, you’re always anguishing yourself about something.”

  He pulled his hands from his trouser pockets and straightened his spine, then rotated his arms like a windmill. “Better?”

  Cade smiled and fell into step beside him. “Nice breeze out here. It’s hot in the wagon.”

  “Mm.” Mieka fought a mild skirmish with himself, then decided that now was as good a time as any. “I’ve been wondering. How bored do you get, not seeing any Elsewhens?”

  “Bored?”

  “Yeh. What I mean is, with you not really being all of you, just part of the you that’s really you, the you that you are must get tired of not being really you, and you rather miss the parts of you that the you that’s really you is used to being.”

  By the end of this speech—carefully thought out during a sleepless night in Seekhaven—Cade’s jaw had dropped open and his gray eyes had gone blank. Mieka smiled sweetly.

  After a time, Cade gave a gusting sigh of defeat. “Why did I try to find a way through that maze? Would you kindly explain what in all Hells you’re talking about?”

  “Unless you like it when you’re bored,” Mieka went on, frowning thoughtfully. “Do you?”

  “Bored?” Cade echoed again, then with a slightly strained laugh: “Around you? Never!”

  “Nice to know I’m so entertaining,” he snapped. “Any favorite jokes you’d like me to tell? I’m afraid I’m no great dancer, but mayhap you’d care for a song or two? I work cheap.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  Mieka nodded as if mollified. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “About being bored?” Cade shrugged his shoulders. “It’s more peaceful than boring. Quiet inside my own head.”

  “Sounds deathly dull,” Mieka remarked, kicking at a rock in the road. It shied sidewise into the dried mud of the bordering ditch. “You mean you don’t chase down words or plots or ideas or anything anymore?”

  “No, that still happens.”

  “But no visions. No dreamings. No Elsewhens.”

  “No.”

  They walked on in silence for a time. Heat shimmered the wheat fields, the feeble breeze bending a leaf here and there in trees clustered beside a farm house. Insects buzzed and clicked, the horses’ harness jingled, Yazz hummed tunelessly to himself up on the coachman’s bench.

  “Don’t you miss it?” Mieka asked.

  “No.”

  Well, that was a lie, he thought. “Must’ve been an adjustment, though,” he mused. “Being like everybody else.”

  “I rather like it. Being ordinary.”

  Another lie. Cade was the most arrogant man Mieka had ever met. His talents with words, his magic, and his Elsewhens made him more than special. He was unique. Mieka decided it was time to laugh. He did, and Cade shot him an irritated glance.

  “Sorry,” Mieka said, not meaning it. “It’
s just trying to see you as ordinary is a bit of a stretch, even for a man with my prodigious gifts of imagination.”

  “I don’t see the Elsewhens anymore, because I want to live like a normal person and not have to keep wondering when the next turn is going to take me, and what it will show me, and what I should or shouldn’t do to change it or not change it, and—”

  “What makes you think you could ever be normal, even without the Elsewhens?”

  Cade gritted his teeth for a moment, staring at the dry dirt road ahead of him, digging his boot heels in with every step. “Blye said something like that once.”

  “And she’s right, just like I’m right. I’m not ordinary, either—”

  The retort came lightly, but with obvious effort. “And just look at the trouble it’s got you into!”

  Mieka refused to let him joke his way out of this. “—but can you see either of us with a job in the Royal Archives, or—”

  “I think I’d enjoy that,” Cade broke in. “I can see it would be a problem for you, though. You’d have to learn how to read.”

  It was an insult Vered had flung at him once, and Cade had lost his temper over it, and now here he was using it himself. Mieka glared at him and went on, “—or a clerk in a bank or a business, or a server in a tea shop—”

  “No, that wouldn’t suit either of us. For one thing, you’d have to learn how to count.”

  “—or a courtier like your father?”

  He’d saved the best (worst) for last, and it worked. Cade stopped in his tracks and swung round as if to return to the wagon.