Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  —and suddenly he could breathe, in great greedy whoops that filled his lungs and spread precious air all through his body. The frost sloughed from his skin, his heart beat strongly and regularly, and the distant roaring in his ears faded.

  “—all right now, Jinsie, he’s breathing just fine.”

  Jeska’s voice. He turned his head and saw Rafe standing over him.

  “Wh-what happened?”

  At least that was what he thought he’d said. Whether it came out as he intended was problematical. Either Rafe understood the mumble, or he guessed what Cade wanted to know—an obvious query, after all.

  “Lost track, didn’t you?” the fettler said. “Blue, white, blockweed, who knows what all, with dinner and two pints of beer on top—and only you and Brishen Staindrop know what she cooks up for you special. That was thorn-shock, and if you ever scare us like that again, I’ll break your skull open and wash out your brains with lye soap.”

  “He should be upstairs,” Jezael said calmly. “Shall we call Yazz to carry him? I don’t think he can walk.”

  The Giant was duly found, and within ten minutes Cayden was in a soft, scented bed. He lay back and closed his eyes, and asked, “Mieka?”

  “He’s the one gave you the thorn that got you breathing again.” Rafe picked up Cade’s left arm and pushed back the shirtsleeve. “See? The fresh one. Right here.”

  He heard Rafe’s disgust at the number of tiny scabs and reddened marks on his arm. The humiliation was even worse than what he’d felt when Megs had had the same note in her voice. A feeble quiver of pride made him say, “You do it, too.”

  “I have,” Rafe agreed. “To get through a performance or to get some sleep. But this—this is insane, Cayden. It’s dangerous. I never would’ve thought you could be this stupid. Or—no, you are that stupid, now that I come to think on it. What I don’t believe is that you of all people could be so pathetically unoriginal.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Yes, it was true. He’d thought himself trite when he realized that refusing to feel was a thing thousands had done before him. This was worse. Using thorn and liquor so foolishly—wasn’t it precisely what he deplored in Mieka? And hadn’t he seen what thorn-thrall was doing to Pirro Spangler of Black Lightning? He suspected the same of Thierin Knottinger and perhaps Mirko Challender and Lederris Daggering of the Sparks. He knew for a fact that Vered Goldbraider, who reacted badly to more than one or two drinks, substituted thorn for alcohol and sometimes indulged quite lavishly. And here was Cade, so intellectually superior, so wise, so prudent—he was just like any other man who thought himself smarter than everyone else when it came to thorn.

  But he needed it. There was no conceivable way he could have got through this Royal Circuit without it. Thorn gave him energy, it helped him sleep.

  It made Mieka see the withies grow thorns.

  It had stimulated his mind to a score and more Elsewhens, all at the same time.

  It had nearly stopped his heart.

  When he opened his eyes at last, the feel of the bedchamber had changed. Rafe was long gone. Instead: Mieka, white-faced by the light of a single candle. He sat on the floor, knees hugged to his chest, staring at Cade.

  It took a moment for him to realize how terrified Mieka had been, how scared he still was. Cade knew that kind of fear. Shame warred with anger and a contempt that included both of them.

  “Now you know how it feels,” he said.

  Mieka flinched as if Cade really had hit him this time. Cade promised himself that if Mieka said anything, anything at all, any words of regret or apology or blame or any damned bloody thing at all, Cade really would hit him this time.

  Mieka said nothing. He got to his feet and doused the candle and closed the door quietly behind him.

  18

  After what happened in Stiddolfe, nobody talked to anybody else more than was strictly necessary for their performances’ sake. Rafe was angry; Cade was angry and humiliated; Mieka was angry, humiliated, and hurt; Jeska, who felt none of these things and wanted only to get home to his pregnant wife, decided that the wisest course was to keep his mouth shut.

  The atmosphere in the wagon, those last long miles to Gallantrybanks, became so intolerable that their second-to-last night on the road, Jeska went to the nearest posting inn and hired a horse and rode the rest of the way home by himself. Though Cade considered doing the same thing, he’d spent almost all the coin allotted to him for the circuit. The few private shows they’d had time to do had paid well, but the money had gone into the local branches of their bank to be credited to their Gallybanks accounts. For the first time he regretted not having played the weird old mansion outside New Halt. Payment for that had always come in the form of individual purses fairly bursting with coin.

  So he gritted it out those last two days, and when the wagon finally arrived at Wistly Hall, he slung a satchel of his personal belongings over his shoulder and went looking at once for a hire-hack. He knew Mishia and Hadden Windthistle would be puzzled and disappointed, mayhap even insulted, that he hadn’t joined in the welcome—hadn’t even stopped long enough for more greeting than a nod and a wave—but he simply couldn’t face several hours of the merry story telling that would be expected of him. Even less did he want to watch Mieka effortlessly fulfilling the role of family clown.

  It was getting on for dusk when he arrived at his flat. He had enough in his pockets to pay for the hack, with some left over to spend on two meat pasties and a bottle of beer sold by a street vendor. Had he gone to Redpebble Square, there would have been a hot dinner and clean sheets, and he couldn’t face Mistress Mirdley or Derien, either. So he trudged up the many flights of stairs, jerked down the door handle, and went inside.

  Empty.

  Not just empty of people other than himself. All his furniture and clothes and books and the glass dinnerware Blye had made for him and his Trials medals and those silly peacock feathers Mieka had given him on his last Namingday and everything else he owned was gone.

  He stood in the center of the room, stupid with shock, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, feeling the need of bluethorn as a quick insistent demand, he turned slowly round. Empty.

  Footfalls and gasps announced a new arrival through the open door. His landlord: red-faced with the climb, scowling, sucking in a great wheeze of air and using it to provide an explanation.

  “A fortnight and a fortnight again I waited to be paid, my fine young sir, and could I get in to my own property—my own property, sir!—what with that illegal lock you put onto the door? Yes, illegal, and well you know it, but that’s in the past, and so is your time here! All your belongings went to your mother’s house, and it’s lucky you are, young sir, that the Trollwife came along just a day or two before I would have found someone to un-bespell the lock and sold off the lot! She took on herself the packing and the moving of it all, and the cost of it, though I ought to’ve charged for those weeks and weeks of storage here, which deprived me of any income on the place at all! And what she’s done with your things I neither know nor care, and even less do I care what you do with yourself, sir, once you’re away from my premises! Great and grand tregetour famous throughout Albeyn, my ass! Naught but a bully-rook, a cheat, a lying young cogger! Away with you, now, and good riddance!”

  Cayden surveyed the room again. Rent unpaid. All his things back at Redpebble. He looked down at the landlord, wondering suddenly what had become of the cat. No, that was foolish; Rumble was at Redpebble Square, where Derien had taken care of him during the circuit. And Redpebble Square was the only place Cade could go. He didn’t question how this had happened. It didn’t matter. It was a fact. He had best get home before dark, because he’d run out of funds and would have to walk the whole way.

  “Well?” the landlord snapped. “Anything to say for yourself? Well, sir?”

  A thoroughly hilarious notion seized him to answer that one day, people would use that sir in earnest, for r
eal and true, in Royal recognition of honor and accomplishment. He started back down the stairs, munching on the cold meat pasties, and paused at the food vendor’s to ask him to pull the cork from the beer. His corkscrew was of course gone along with everything else to Redpebble Square. His big comfortable chair, the bed-and-desk Jed had made for him, his books—a shudder went through him as he realized how close he’d come to losing his grandfather’s books. He drained the beer down his throat, tossed the bottle and the remains of the food into the gutter, and started walking.

  It was full dark in Criddow Close when he knocked on the kitchen door of his mother’s house. Mistress Mirdley let him in without a word, but with eloquent eyes. Jeska was waiting for him, and soup and bread and wine. Derien must have been listening for the slam of the back door, because he flew into the kitchen, threw his arms around Cade, and hugged hard.

  He clasped his not-so-little brother close, meeting Jeska’s limpid blue eyes. All he could think of to say was, “Kazie’s well?”

  Jeska nodded. Derien drew away and looked up at him—not nearly so far up as when Cade had left in the spring, and how had he grown so much and so quickly?

  “All your things are in your old room, or down in the undercroft,” Dery said in a rush. “You mustn’t worry. That awful man didn’t steal anything. He couldn’t, because he couldn’t get into the flat until I came. And he was so horrible while we were getting your things downstairs that I shut the door again while the magic was still working so he couldn’t get in even after everything was out of there.”

  “I suppose he found somebody to bespell it open,” Cade said.

  There was an awkward pause. “You and Jeska have to talk, I know. I’ll get out of your way now.”

  “You’re never in my way.” He wrapped his arms around the boy and held tight. But only for a moment, for he was disgusted with himself: his defense against whatever was in Jeska’s eyes was a boy scarcely twelve years old. Letting go, he managed a smile. “But I’ll wager you’ve lessons to be done, yeh?”

  Dery shot a glance at Jeska, then at Mistress Mirdley. “Um—yeh, I do. I’ll just go upstairs, then.”

  Cade sat beside Jeska at the kitchen worktable. Pages were spread neatly across most of the surface. Many of them bore the remains of Lord Kearney Fairwalk’s ribbons and seal: deep blue ribbons, outlines of oak leaves pressed into broken plum-colored wax. Mistress Mirdley set fresh glasses of wine and a decanter within their reach and departed for her stillroom. She hadn’t yet said a single word. Jeska handed him a glass of wine.

  “I s’pose,” Cade said with a pathetic attempt at casualness, “I’m going to need this. You’re about to tell me why my rent wasn’t paid.”

  “And my rent, and my daughter Airilie’s support, and debts belonging to Touchstone as a whole and each of us personally.” He paused, then forced out the words, “And Derien’s school fees.”

  School fees … from an account that only he and Kearney Fairwalk could access … all his grandfather’s legacy, gone. He knew it even before Jeska said it. Emptiness spread through his body as Jeska explained what the figures and notations on all those pages meant. When the masquer finally stopped talking, Cade felt as hollow as the rooms that were no longer his home. His brain went slack, like loosened reins just before a horse surged to a gallop. It wasn’t possible. It just simply wasn’t possible that all the money was gone.

  Not just gone. Owed.

  The wainwright. The wainwright’s painter. The wheelwright. Imagers, engravers, paper-makers, printers. Tailors, shoemakers, glovers, hatters, drapers, mercers, and lacemakers. Goldsmiths and silversmiths and coppersmiths and jewelers. Wine merchants and greengrocers, butchers and fishmongers, fruiterers and florists. Blacksmiths, ironmongers, cutlers, coopers, stonemasons, brickmasons, glaziers, wallers, joiners, carpenters—he had the wild thought that the only profession that seemed to be missing was grave-digger.

  His mind skittered about, trying to avoid the disaster of it by finding something else to think about. Who had bought so many knives from the cutler? Whose walls had the wallers walled? Blye made panes of window glass, but it wanted a glazier to install them—and whose windows? Where? And talking of windows, what about the windows Touchstone had shattered in the Princess’s father’s palace—was there a bill here for those, too? Were carrots and lettuce and beans and celery really that expensive? Who had bought so much jewelry? How many placards had been ordered, that they owed so much to printers and engravers and papermakers? The only bills he accepted without question were from the wine merchants. They’d done a lot of drinking, these last few years ….

  The list was endless and terrifying, for all their creditors been paid just enough to keep them from seeking redress in the law courts. Individually, the bills weren’t much. Cumulatively, they were crippling.

  It would take Touchstone at least two years to pay them all off, and that was if every other expense was cut at least by half.

  A cold, sick panic began in his guts, replacing the hollowness, feeding off the hard lump of meat and pastry in his stomach. His mind scurried in every direction, desperate for a source of funds. What could he sell, where could he borrow, who could lend him money, how could he keep Derien in school—when would any or several or all of the creditors demand final and complete settlement of their accounts?

  He was no nobleman, like Kearney Fairwalk, to wave a lazy hand as he strolled out of any shop in Gallantrybanks with the assurance that his custom was worth more to the proprietor than actual payment of the bill.

  He owned nothing of sufficient value to sell.

  He had no wealthy relations.

  What he had was a thick folio of plays, and a beautiful lectern inlaid with dragonbone, and his Trials medals, and his books, and a little brother whose education would be calamitously curtailed if the school fees couldn’t be found.

  The fear spread all through his veins, thick and ice-cold, clogging his thoughts and stuttering his heart. What was he to do? How could he find his way out of this? A trapped rat at least had teeth to savage the cat that had cornered him. He had nothing.

  “Cade,” Jeska said quietly, “we have to do something.”

  A weakening wave of gratitude flooded him. At least he wasn’t alone in this: “We have to do something—” They were, Gods help them, in this together.

  Performances. Private performances that paid well. All this autumn and winter, when he’d hoped to work on Window Wall, they’d have to go wherever they must for whatever money people were willing to pay them.

  But they’d just come off the Royal Circuit—what if people had seen enough of them for one year? There’d been intimations and more of disappointment that the Shadowshapers hadn’t won First Flight on the Royal, and never mind that the Shadowshapers had won and rejected the circuit. Touchstone had felt the need to prove themselves time and time again. What if they’d failed to convince people that they deserved their position on the Royal?

  And what if no one wanted Touchstone’s particular kind of theater? If they’d been Black Lightning, patrons would be lined up the length of the Gally River from the Flood to the Westercountry, eager for the chance to experience over and over the dangerous turbulence of emotion, the blunt force of sensation—what had he said once? That Black Lightning was a group for addicts?

  Touchstone could outdo Black Lightning. Easy. It wouldn’t take long to establish a reputation for that kind of shocking performance. Touchstone could—

  —could betray everything they were. Could sell themselves. Could whore their art and their craft.

  “We know enough people now,” Jeska was saying, “to organize our own schedule. Kazie and Jinsie will keep track of it all for us. I’ve already spoken to them. I’ll have to give up my lodgings, of course, to provide for Airilie, but Kazie says she’ll be glad to live at Wistly, especially now that she’s pregnant, and Mishia says they’ll be glad to have her. Crisiant and Bram will go on staying with the Threadchasers. Crisiant runs the bakery no
w, anyways.”

  And Cade would have to live at Number Eight, Redpebble Square.

  And Mieka …

  “Mieka’s house is paid for—his father made sure of it—so his family will be all right at Hilldrop. Not that he’ll be there much, of course. We’ll either be traveling or in Gallybanks doing the rounds of all the theaters and taverns.”

  Of course. The Windthistles would adore having Jindra at Wistly, but as for the wife and mother-in-law …

  “What we have to decide, Cayden, is whether or not to bring suit against Fairwalk.”

  “He’s a nobleman,” Cade rasped, the first thing he’d said since Jeska had shown him the books. “D’you think we’d get a fair hearing in the courts?”

  “We might.” The cleft chin set stubbornly.

  “We’re nothing and nobody. We signed a contract. What he ended up doing with the money we earned—it’s our own bloody fault. That’s how the law court will see it, and I’m not sure but that’s the truth.”

  “We trusted the wrong person.” Jeska sighed. “We were young, yeh, and inexperienced—and he, as you say, is a nobleman. Well, we can decide later.” He gulped wine and set the glass down. “I haven’t yet sussed out exactly where all this went—but I’m guessing that a goodly clump of it went to Fairwalk Manor, and his own house here in town.”