Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  That Jeska had had no inkling that his wife was pregnant was scrawled all over his face. He managed to keep his feet, but had to be guided towards Kazie’s laughing embrace and then into a handy chair. Cade instantly decided that tonight, rather than the tragic “Silver Mine,” they’d be doing something light and funny. Bubbling-full of elation as Jeska was, it would be simple kindness to let him express it in a rollicking Mother Loosebuckle farce—or mayhap “Hidden Cottage,” so Mieka could have fun doing his beloved pig. He also decided to make it a short night so that Jeska could spend as much time as possible with his wife. He would have done the same for Rafe if Crisiant had shown up unexpectedly, and his mood was such that he might even have done the same for Mieka.

  Lilyleaf was also the location where Cade began to lose track of things in general. So many performances in so many places in so brief a period of time compared to the usual round of the Royal Circuit—and so much thorn and alcohol to get him through it all—it was no wonder that on the morning they arrived at Coldkettle Castle he was convinced that Yazz had made a wrong turn and they were at Castle Biding instead. Later on, priming the withies was more difficult and took more energy than at any time in his career. And that night, even though he was bone-tired and they had been invited to stay in comfortable rooms within the castle (real beds that didn’t sway and rock even when the wagon wasn’t moving), he could get no sleep. So he put on a shirt over his nightshirt, gathered up pen and paper, and left Mieka snoring in the other bed, careful to close the door quietly.

  It was a gorgeous summer night, warm and clear, the full moon so huge and bright that Cade had plenty of light to write by. He chose a corner of the upper walk that ran two-thirds of the way round the castle, pushed up his sleeves, and sat down. No table, no chairs, but the crenellations were such, and he was tall enough, that he could comfortably sit cross-legged at the wall and use the stone shelf as a desk. “Window Wall” had been nagging at him ever since Castle Eyot, though he couldn’t have said how many days or how many performances ago that had been. If he couldn’t sleep, he may as well write.

  He had no idea how long he’d been there when a voice spoke behind him and he gave such a start that he nearly lost the ink bottle and his scrawled-upon pages over the wall.

  “I suppose that when inspiration commands, you’re quite a slave to it. Or is it just that you have so little time to yourself, while you’re out on the circuit?”

  Megs—Lady Megueris Mindrising, whose father was richer than any other ten nobles combined—stood there, looking badly put-together as usual. In fact, she looked as if someone had rather sloppily packed her away for the journey from Gallybanks, unpacked her in haste, and forgotten to shake her out and iron her. Her blond hair straggled from its braid, her plain white shirt was coming untucked from her plain brown skirt, and the fringed turquoise shawl bunched around her shoulders could have done duty as a table-drape. And she was barefoot.

  Scrambling to stand up, awkward as ever, the scrape of uneven stone on one ankle and his own bare feet reminded him that he was even more ill-clad than she. A shirt due to be washed, a nightshirt the same—and his legs bare from the knees down. Her amused glance made him grit his teeth.

  “Do you often wander about other people’s castles at strange hours of the morning?” He tried to keep the question casual, fully aware that in the wrong tone of voice, it could be very rude.

  Rude or not, she didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, quite often, yes. I like getting up early, even before the servants are awake. Don’t let me interrupt your writing.”

  “No, I was finished,” he lied. Then, ridiculously: “I didn’t know you were here. At Coldkettle, I mean. Not here on the walls. Here at the castle.”

  “I’m on my way to Lilyleaf.”

  “To see Croodle?” He seemed to remember something about her getting lost as a child and somehow meeting Croodle; he wasn’t sure how.

  “Just for a week or so. The Princess is organizing part of the celebrations, and wants me back at the Keeps, or I’d stay for a month.”

  Celebrations? Oh, yes—the reason why they were tearing around the country at a breakneck pace. They had to be in Gallybanks for King Meredan’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. If he worked very hard, he might have “Window Wall” ready by then, or, rather, the two plays that the piece had become. He’d realized tonight that he had to chop it in half, with the first part telling why the boy was imprisoned behind the glass, and the second getting him out of it. Could they have both plays ready in time?

  He became aware that he had said nothing for at least a minute, probably longer. Not holding up his end of the conversation; deplorable manners. What had she been talking about? The Princess, Croodle, Lilyleaf—

  “May I plead a favor?” he heard himself ask, not quite sure what he was about to say. His brain seemed to be lagging behind his mouth. He waited until she nodded permission, and flogged his thoughts to catch up. Ah—yes, of course. “Jeska’s wife is Croodle’s cousin, and—”

  “Oh, yes, I know. She’s with child. How did he take the news?”

  “Stunned, staggered, and stupefied,” he told her with a grin, and she laughed.

  “If you’re about to ask me to escort her back to Gallybanks, you’re too late. That was the plan from the start.”

  “I am very much beholden to you, my lady. And so will Jeska be. Your carriage will be much more comfortable than one of the post coaches.”

  “It’s not the slightest trouble at all.”

  And with that, they both ran out of things to say. Cade wondered why he was glibness personified with the girls who clustered backstage in tiring rooms, but around highborn ladies, he invariably made a fool of himself. Unmarried highborn ladies, he corrected himself, thinking of Lady Vrennerie. And that gave him something to say.

  To his inquiry, Lady Megueris replied, “Yes, Vren’s with the Princess. And serving dreadful duty, I’m afraid. Tregrefin Ilesko is forever underfoot, and Miriuzca is constantly busy with the celebrations, so Vren is delegated to keep him entertained and out of the way.”

  “We—Touchstone, I mean—we had lunching with him and the Princess at Seekhaven.”

  “So I’m told. She says you were all exquisitely polite, even though Ilesko was exquisitely rude. Betwixt you and me and the wall over there—and your ink bottle—she’ll be as pleased to see the back of him as all the rest of us.”

  “Flirting with you, is he?” Again words had popped out of his mouth before he could think. Paralyzed by his own tactlessness, he flushed crimson and couldn’t even begin to stammer out an apology.

  She only laughed again. “Once he found out how rich I am! For now it’s funny, but I have a plan if he becomes a bother.”

  “Magic,” he said.

  “Magic,” she agreed. “Obviously. He’s rather ferocious on the subject, isn’t he? I wish I’d seen that play you and the Shadowshapers and the Sparks did at Seekhaven. He’s still frothing at the mouth.”

  “Good,” Cade said, and they smiled smiles of perfect accord.

  A few moments later she said, “Well, it’s getting on for morning, and we’re leaving today, so I won’t be seeing your show tonight.” A slight frown darkened her bottle-green eyes. “Do try to get some sleep between now and then, won’t you? There’s a tale making the rounds that the Kindlesmiths’ tregetour rode thirty miles there and back to visit his mother, and barely returned in time for the night’s performance—and instead of ‘The Princess and the Snowdrop’ he primed the withies for some obscene thing they used to do at some of the more raucous gentlemen’s guilds.”

  “I’m careful.” He hid his annoyance. He was a professional, for fuck’s sake. He knew what he was doing. He could prime withies perfectly for anything in Touchstone’s folio even when drunk to the earlobes. “I’m always careful,” he said again, trying not to sound belligerent.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that you aren’t. But one can’t help noticing those.” She gestured to his right a
rm, where the rolled-up sleeves of shirt and nightshirt revealed a dozen or more slightly reddened thornpricks.

  He bit his tongue between his teeth, not daring to open his mouth for fear of what might blurt its way out. Something angry and insulted and guilty and rude, something unforgivable, he was sure

  She looked up at him, and whatever she saw in his face thinned her lips. “Good morrow, Master Silversun,” she said coldly, turning for the stairs. “My thanks for your time.”

  The word made him flinch as perhaps nothing else could have. Beholden was the usual, ubiquitous expression of gratitude (sincere or not). But it implied a debt, whereas thanks was considered payment enough, nothing owed beyond that single syllable. Nobody he knew used the word; it was more common among those who had so little to their names that they tended to avoid even the polite implication of indebtedness that beholden suggested.

  Years ago Cade had explained to Mieka why a shopkeeper’s assistant had no business saying beholden to Kearney Fairwalk: that there was no conceivable service such a person could possibly perform for a highborn, wealthy lordship that could compare to the simple honor of his presence in the establishment. But Megs had deliberately disdained using beholden, for she was so wellborn and so rich that her thanks was a reward in and of itself. And the Lord and the Lady forfend that she should even imply that she was beholden to somebody like him for anything.

  Oh, yes, it was a splendid morrow. Just the sort he liked: no sleep, Mieka in a snit because the girl he usually slept with at Coldkettle had got herself married this spring, Jeska fretting over Kazie, and Rafe—Rafe just looked at him with those too-perceptive blue-gray eyes. And besides all that, half the pages he’d written made little if any sense. He’d thought them quite brilliant while scribbling. How lovely it would be, he told himself, if Auntie Brishen could come up with a mixture of thorn that stimulated his creative mind and his interior critic.

  Their next stop was Castle Biding. There was no fair to swell the local audiences, so they were mercifully spared having to perform more than twice. Then they were off to Frimham.

  Cade remembered only one thing about Frimham, and it occurred on the day they left. They were in the wagon, half a block down the lane from the inn they’d stayed at, when Mieka leaped to his feet from his chair and bellowed, “Yazz! Stop!”

  “What?” the Giant yelled back. “Why?”

  “I forgot! We have to go back!”

  It was impossible to turn the wagon in this lane. Mieka jumped out the back door and ran. Cade roused himself to follow at a more leisurely pace.

  Rafe called out the window, “What’s he doing? Did he leave something behind? The withies?”

  “How should I know?” He ambled along to the inn and was in time to hear Mieka call out from the upstairs window.

  “’Ware below!”

  Cade took a second to react, and then lunged beneath an awning that belonged to the shop next door. The contents of a chamber pot, followed by the chamber pot itself, came flying out the window onto the street. Nobody was hit, either by showers of shit or shards of ceramic, though in some cases it was a near thing. Mieka came racing out the door, saw Cade, grabbed his arm, and hauled him back to the wagon. When they were inside, he shouted, “Let’s go!” before collapsing into his chair with a wide, satisfied grin.

  “What in the unholy fuck did you do that for?” Cade demanded.

  The grin widened. “I’m Mieka Windthistle—what’s your excuse?” When Cade frowned at him, he relented. “Don’t you remember that great long gabble of a lecture the innkeeper’s wife gave us about emptying the chamber pot ourselves every morning? That she and her maids weren’t our adoring wives or our doting mothers, to clean up after us?”

  Cade remembered nothing of the kind.

  “I was just doing what I was told,” Mieka finished, vastly pleased with himself.

  “That’s a first,” Rafe commented, and ostentatiously opened a book, fully prepared to ignore them all.

  Cade had had enough. Enough of Mieka, of Rafe, of Jeska, of the wagon, of performing, of not knowing what town he was in, of having no time and peace to write, of everything. He hopped out the back door with the wagon still rolling and ran up to the front, where Yazz, startled but amenable, reached down a massive hand and hauled him up to the coachman’s bench.

  “Naught but Stiddolfe,” he said by way of comfort.

  Cade grunted assent and settled himself on the padded leather seat, one hand on the railing. Stiddolfe would be their last stop before Gallantrybanks. The university town, rival to Shollop for several hundred years, was full of brilliant students and even more brilliant teachers. In the past, he’d felt himself intellectually inferior to the young scholars who were his own age; now he was older than all of them and still an academic straggler. Imposter was more like it, he thought glumly. Oh, he could hold his own in conversation, and he was accustomed to their admiration, but that regard had altered subtly in the last couple of years. Those first Winterly Circuits, the students had looked upon him with awe. He’d found this embarrassing at the time. In retrospect, and in all honesty, he rather missed it. Now they treated him with respect—as if he were eighty and had threescore publications in learned journals to his name, instead of twenty-four and at the very least a mention, and often a whole article, in every issue of The Nayword for the past five years.

  Cheer up, he told himself sourly. If that Elsewhen was correct, then by the age of forty-five, he’d be a Knight and they’d have to call him Sir Cayden—if they dared speak to him at all. Or had any interest in speaking to him, age-weary old relic that he’d be, and losing his hair besides.

  He regretted leaving the interior of the wagon, where the whiskey and the thorn were.

  To distract himself, he asked Yazz if he’d had a nice time with his friends at … at that place with the mud puddles, he couldn’t recall the name. The Giant nodded. In another attempt at conversation, Cade said that the wagon had behaved very nicely this circuit. Yazz nodded again. He was trying to think up something for his third and final venture when Yazz cleared his throat, a sound like a gravel landslide.

  “Skinny, all of you,” he said. “Mistress Kazie worries.”

  Cade reflected on this idea. It was true that all four of them had taken in their belts a notch or three. Scant wonder, when they survived on thorn and whiskey and little else for six or seven days of each fortnight. “We’ll rest up before the celebrations.”

  “And after?”

  “I’ll have to ask Lord Fairwalk to hold back on the giggings this winter. Now that you mention it, Yazz, I could do with a rest.”

  During the next few miles the sun’s heat and the rhythmic cuh-clop of hooves lulled Cayden to a doze, and that was all he remembered about Frimham.

  He would just as soon have forgotten Stiddolfe, too.

  It was their second night there—or mayhap the third, he wasn’t sure and didn’t bother to ask later on. Jinsie and Jezael Windthistle were waiting for Touchstone at a nice, respectable little inn on the outskirts of town. Jinsie was there to consult with some scholarly friends about a project she had in mind for teaching the blind and the deaf. Jez was there not because his sister required an escort but because he had had it up to the eyeballs with their mother’s coddling. He used his cane only sparingly, the injury having healed quite nicely under Mistress Mirdley’s supervision. But he did bring along the cane for the sake of his leg when he got tired, and the little green pillow his niece Jindra had helped to sew for the sake of sentiment.

  They all met for dinner—Touchstone, Jinsie, and Jez—on that second night (or mayhap third), and when Jinsie asked Cayden if he’d be willing to meet with her friends, he rolled his eyes and said, “Only if nothing even remotely resembling the philosophy of anything is discussed.”

  “Snob,” Rafe commented, helping himself to more lamb stew.

  “Not a bit of it,” said Mieka. “He’ll talk enough if there’s a reporter there to note down his every golde
n utterance and publish it all in the next day’s broadsheet.”

  “Quat,” Cade said.

  “So will you or won’t you?” Jinsie asked impatiently.

  Before Cade could reply, Mieka said, “He’s been thinking great thoughts for weeks now—a new play, don’t you know. Angels forfend that anything or anyone should interrupt him while he’s being matchlessly brilliant!”

  Cade heard the note of resentment and frowned. It was true that he was working on the two plays that “Window Wall” had become, and not having more than a couple of hours a day to himself for writing annoyed him. But he knew what Mieka referred to: an incident at Castle Biding. Mieka had burst in on his solitude, wild-eyed, a polishing cloth bunched in one hand and a withie held by the crimp end in the other, babbling about how the withies had all grown thorns. The only thorn in question, of course, was whatever Mieka had pricked that afternoon. Cade told him so. In a fury, Mieka threw the foot-long glass twig at him. He caught it, wrapped his fingers round it, then set it on the table and held up his palm to show Mieka that there was no injury and thus there were no thorns. Mieka insisted that he was wrong. Losing patience, Cade told him to get out and stop bothering him with such nonsense. Mieka swore at him and stalked from the room, and didn’t speak to him for two days.

  Mieka was glaring at him now, renewed hostility in those eyes. Cade opened his mouth to snarl at him, but all at once he couldn’t seem to get any air. His heartbeats thundered irregularly in his ears. He felt cold all over, as if his skin had acquired a riming of frost that thickened with every passing moment. He heard someone say his name and could not reply. Blearily, his vision swirling with wisps of fog, he saw Mieka race from the taproom. And wasn’t that just like that fucking little Elf, running out on him, vanishing just when he was needed? What he could be needed for was unclear to Cade and he couldn’t track down the thought, because his brain was slowly revolving inside his skull and his heartbeats had subsided to one thump and a long pause, one thump and a longer pause, and of all the times for an Elsewhen to slide into his head, this was undoubtedly the worst—but it wasn’t just one Elsewhen, it was four, a dozen, a score, he couldn’t tell how many, because they all overlapped, versions of himself at various ages all moving within his vision, uncounted numbers of Archdukes and Rafes and Blyes and Jeskas and Miekas and Princesses and different rooms and an exploding tower and the burying ground at Clinquant House but how could he know that because he’d never been to the Windthistles’ Clinquant House and what was Megs doing there, and there, and there again, and if only he could get some air into his lungs he’d be able to sort all these cascading Elsewhens—