by Melanie Rawn
Satisfied, Mieka watched him go, then settled back to think during the drive over to Waterknot Street. He didn’t get much work done on his thoughts, though. The bluethorn of late this morning had worn off, and all he really wanted was some privacy and his thorn-roll, replenished by Master Bellgloss—complete with glass thorns—until Auntie Brishen could send him his usual.
21
Each night since the abrupt departure of Lord Kearney Fairwalk from Number Eight, Redpebble Square, Cayden had gone upstairs to his room, opened his thorn-roll and stared at it.
There was a certain gloomy fascination in knowing which little twists of paper contained thorn that brought lunatic energy, or painted ordinary objects with bizarre and throbbing colors, or stimulated dreaming, or tossed his thoughts into a steep spiral like a water-whirl in a draining sink, ending in a mind emptied of all but sleep. The precise meanings of the various markings were a mystery to him, but Brishen Staindrop had been supplying him for so long that she knew what worked on him and how—and that very little worked on him the way it did other people. He knew that blue plus green was one thing, and yellow was another, and three purple lines with a white dot was something else, and blockweed—his first foray into thorn and still his favorite, for its dreamless sleep—was in the paper twists with blue edges. It was rather like the colors of their withies, he mused, and as familiar to him by now. Perhaps Brishen had other codes for other people, the way each group coded its withies; he knew only what she sent to him, and only she knew what it was.
Mieka’s request for thorn hadn’t surprised him. He knew how much he’d been using, and Mieka’s consumption was at least half again as much as his. The difference was that Cade was capable of rationing himself and Mieka was not.
Cade had also remembered, on the way to Frimham, to send a letter to Brishen so that more thorn would be waiting for him in Gallybanks. The package had been sent to his flat, of course. He didn’t want to think too much about Mistress Mirdley’s reaction when she found it. The fleeting hope that she hadn’t known what it was died almost before he hoped it. Mistress Mirdley knew everything.
Yet it had been waiting for him, unopened, in his fifth-floor room at Redpebble Square, ready to be used, and to be shared with Mieka.
Neither did he think too much about what Mieka would be like if completely deprived of thorn.
Now, tonight, after dining with his brother and Mistress Mirdley in the kitchen—Lady Jaspiela had been invited to the Palace, of all places, to dine with her husband, of all people—and helping Derien tell most but not all of what had happened at the North Keep that day, he joined the Trollwife in chivvying Dery up to his room. He would return to the King’s College in two days, the fees having been found (with Mieka’s help), and there were books waiting to be read so that he could catch the other students up without too much difficulty. When Dery was gone, grumbling, Cade relaxed into the deeply padded chair by the empty hearth with a cup of hot tea. Mistress Mirdley bustled about, cleaning up after the meal, wrapping extra food, saying nothing.
Cade pulled out today’s Elsewhen for examination.
{ If they hadn’t been outside, strolling through the gardens, they would have died.
He knew this at the very instant the Keep behind him shattered and the sound of it deafened him and the shock of it knocked him down onto the grass. Dust clotted in his lungs, stung his eyes and throat. He could hear nothing but what seemed an endlessly repeating echo of the explosion, timed to his rapid heartbeats. Pushing himself upright, he turned to where the Princess had been. It was difficult to see through the billows of dust, but the butter-yellow of her gown was a bright splash on the green lawn. She sprawled with her baby daughter beside her.
He groped his way towards them, knelt, touched her shoulder. Shook her. She flinched, coughed, raked her hands back through her straggling hair. He pulled the baby free of her mother’s arms and lifted her up. Levenie was screaming lustily, but Cayden couldn’t hear it.
Sense had come back into Miriuzca’s eyes, and she reached for her daughter. Her blond hair straggled about her forehead and neck, and there was a slice on her cheek that bled freely down to her lacy white collar. But she was alive and otherwise unhurt, and with her child clasped to her shoulder, she looked up at Cayden, then at the North Keep. Shock drained from her face. Fury replaced it. He spared a moment’s admiration that she didn’t succumb to panic, that her immediate reaction was rage that anyone could have done this horrible thing. He wondered how he would ever be able to tell her it had been her own brother.
He hauled her to her feet and pointed to the river. He didn’t bother to shout. He knew she wouldn’t hear him. His own ears buzzed and hummed as if his head were filled with a million swarming insects, a million times worse than the brief deafness outside Prickspur’s inn. And just as had happened then, just as he’d feared, there was smoke in the air now as well as dust. The fire would be contained inside the Keep for a time, until windows burst with the heat. The safest place he could think of was out on the water. So he pushed her towards the river, where the dozens of boats always sailing past would come in and take her and the baby away, safe—unless they were terrified of having the North Keep collapse into the Gally River, the way Mieka’s little turret had done at Wistly Hall. No; this was their adored Princess; they would do anything to save her. She paused just long enough to say her son’s name—he understood it by the movements of her lips—and he nodded, and she ran with her daughter in her arms.
Cade squinted frantically through the clouds of dust and smoke, stumbling to the place they’d left Megs. She had held back with little Prince Roshlin as they climbed the half-dozen tall steps from the lower garden to the upper. The boy had been frustrated by the stiffly embroidered blue silk longvest he wore, and Cade couldn’t blame him. The thing was beautiful, but it came to his toes and he kicked at it, furious when the adults smiled at him. So as Cade and Miriuzca went ahead with Levenie, Megs paused halfway up the steps to help Roshlin out of his longvest, kneeling to undo the score of buttons.
Cade’s ears were still throbbing and his vision was smeared. He coughed, wiped his eyes, and finally saw a scrap of blue silk trailing out from beneath a hunched and huddled green gown.
He ran towards her, fearing that Roshlin had been not just protected but smothered. But somehow Megs had managed not to fall atop the child. She looked as if she’d been knocked forwards and then toppled to one side, her back curved over the little boy, trying to protect him. Cayden clawed the swathing green gown aside and picked Roshlin up, and as he did so, Megs slid into a limp heap. Shards of glass, some thick and some needle fine, protruded from her back and her neck. She was dead. He paused a terrible moment, touching her cheek. What he didn’t notice until he stood up with Roshlin in his arms was the blood on the boy’s forehead where he’d hit the hard stone step.}
It took him several minutes to recover from seeing it again. He didn’t understand why knowing what he would see had made it even worse. Calming himself, he put this Elsewhen together with that other one, the one in which Tregrefin Ilesko had decided on black powder rather than magic. Scant wonder that on recovering from his turn in the garden of the same Keep, he’d said, “Don’t. Don’t do it.”
“And so,” Mistress Mirdley said, and he looked up. “What was it this time?”
He waited until she had refilled his teacup and settled in the opposite chair with a cup of her own. Then, slowly, finding the words with difficulty, he began.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before. There were things almost as bad—like when I saw what would happen—what did happen—to Briuly and Alaen that Midsummer Day. Things that might happen to Mieka if—” He broke off, shaking his head. “Not that I really remember them anymore. I got rid of them all. I unremembered them. And I refused to see anything more.”
She didn’t bother to ask why he’d refused the Elsewhens, or why he’d accepted them again. “But you saw this.”
“Mieka … per
suaded me. It wasn’t just that I might’ve seen what happened at the Gallery, how Jez was injured. I’m not sure I would have seen. What could I have done to change it?”
“Any number of things. That’s not the issue here, though, is it? You say Mieka persuaded you.”
“Yeh. What convinced me … he said that without the Elsewhens, I’m not completely myself. And he’s right. It’d be the same if I decided I wasn’t going to write anything ever again, not even inside my own head. It wouldn’t be me walking around, it’d be—just portions of me, nothing that could become what I’m supposed to become because parts of me would be missing. Like in that reworked play at Seekhaven—oh, I forgot you didn’t know about that.”
“I know about it. Whose idea was it, to have the man’s soul be worthless because it had never grown up?”
“I don’t remember.” He smiled briefly. “You’d think I would, but I don’t. I guess it just seemed the right way to end it. It could’ve been my idea—telling myself something, like Mieka said. But I honestly can’t recall if it was me, or Vered, or Rauel, or Mirko, or maybe one of the others. It doesn’t really matter. Because Mieka was right.” He paused. “That damned crazy little Elf was right.”
“How inconvenient of him.”
“He said I can’t cripple myself. So I started seeing the Elsewhens again. But none of them was ever like this. It’s always been small things—not great doings or an event that would affect Albeyn. I’d see people I knew, or people I’d soon meet—I saw Kearney Fairwalk a time or two, did I ever tell you? I didn’t know who he was, but I saw him. Not as a warning, nothing awful at all. The strange thing is, I never saw Mieka, not until after he showed up that night in Gowerion.”
“His choice, to seek you out.”
“And I had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t up to me. But this is. I saw it, and when I came back, I said, ‘Don’t do it,’ and Jeska covered for me. But he and Rafe and Mieka and Blye—and Jinsie, too, maybe—she knows that it happens. I’m not sure she recognizes when it does. But that doesn’t matter. They knew. I haven’t told them yet. Mieka’s coming by tomorrow morning, and I have to tell him. But I don’t know what I can do about it.”
“You haven’t yet said what you saw.”
He blinked in confusion. “Didn’t I? Oh. I was at the North Keep, in the gardens with the Princess and her children and—and Lady Megs. There was an explosion. I pushed Miriuzca and the baby down towards the river. It took a little while to find Megs and Prince Roshlin, when I did … Megs was dead. I picked up the Prince and I’m not sure but that he might have been dead, too.” He remembered the stark staring deadness of those lovely green eyes, and the sharp straight line of her nose, and—
“And now—” The Trollwife’s interruption of his thoughts was more welcome than he could ever have told her. “—you know who’s responsible.”
“Miriuzca’s brother. I saw him—in an Elsewhen, I mean—with a couple of Nominatives. They were helping him, and they’d messed up using magic to explode the new Gallery—I know I’m not being very clear about any of it, but—”
“I’m understanding enough. I’m surprised he’d use magic for anything.”
“It was supposed to show how dangerous magic can be. But for the North Keep, he wanted to be absolutely sure, so he decided to use black powder. And he did—I mean, he will, unless I stop him.” He shook his head. “His own sister! And her children! And all those people—they’re all going to die unless I do something.” He met her calm, quiet gaze. “But what? How do I prevent it?”
“You’re thinking that you haven’t the power to stop him.”
“I don’t.”
“You know people who do.”
“Not Miriuzca. She’d never believe it. He’s her brother, and she loves him.”
“Who else?”
“My father? That’s a laugh. And not Mother.”
“Nor Fairwalk.”
That road was forever closed—and it wasn’t as if the man had much real influence at Court, anyway. “It has to be somebody who knows about the Elsewhens, and that they’re true visions of what might happen.”
And the one person who knew, and was powerful …
“No,” he blurted. “I can’t. Not him.”
The Trollwife frowned slightly, and he remembered that she couldn’t know what he was talking about. So he explained how Mieka, very drunk, had let it slip to his wife about Cade’s foreseeings, and how the girl had told her mother, and her mother had told the Archduke.
“For the longest time I convinced myself that he didn’t believe her. It’s a bit much, isn’t it? The notion that somebody can see what might happen in the future. And then I thought, even if he does believe, and wants me to see the Elsewhens for him, if I didn’t see them anymore, then there’d be nothing about me that he could use. And that’s why I crippled myself, I think. One reason, anyways. It just—it hurts so much sometimes, I can’t describe how much it hurts.”
She was silent for a time. The tea grew cold in the cups, and the clock in Lady Jaspiela’s drawing room chimed midnight. At last she spoke again. “You could let it happen.”
Cade recoiled in his chair. “No—no!”
“You say you saw yourself save the Princess and possibly both her children. That’s worth whatever you care to name from a grateful King Meredan. Title, land, income—”
He could see nothing but the dead eyes of Lady Megueris. “Gods, no!”
“Whereas if you tell the Archduke, it would put him by way of being the hero. He’d never let you take credit for stopping this—not unless he was prepared either to make up a convoluted story about overhearing things you couldn’t possibly have overheard—”
“—or telling what he knows about the Elsewhens,” he finished for her. “And he’d never do that. It’s a secret he wants to keep to himself, for reasons of his own that we can’t yet understand.”
“I don’t doubt that one day we will. But not yet.”
“If I tell him, he’ll believe it. You’re right, he’d take the credit, and that would make him beholden to me.”
“A thing you might need at some point.”
“Just in case.”
“Just in case,” she agreed stolidly.
“So tomorrow I’m off to Great Welkin? Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Shall I wake you early, so you can avoid the Elf?”
“Early? Mieka?” He snorted a laugh. “Don’t bother. But I ought to get out there as soon as I can.”
“You might make it in time for the Archduchess’s daily devotions.”
“With Princess Iamina attending? She certainly made a show of herself that day at the Gallery.”
Mistress Mirdley shrugged her uneven shoulders. “There’s a fashion in piety these days.”
“Not much fashion, if Iamina is the standard. I’ve seen her in her gray robes.”
“And not much piety, either, unless bruised knees and eyestrain are indicators. Falling onto one’s knees in Chapel,” she explained, “and reading broadsheets printed in type so small that a fly landing on the page blocks out half a paragraph.” She sloshed the teapot, scowled to find it empty, and asked, “Did you want more? Or a tot of something other than blockweed to send you to sleep?”
He felt his cheeks burn with shame. “You don’t know what it’s like out there on the circuit. The night we get used to the hammocks swaying, that next night we’re sleeping at an inn. Or trying to sleep. As for priming the withies and performing—”
“I’m not judging you, boy. You’ll all four of you do what you feel you must, and it’s a good thing all four of you have somebody to piece you back together again.”
“We take care of each other, out on the road,” he mused, then amended, “mostly, anyways,” thinking of the shouting and the arguments and the practical jokes and the days one or another of them wasn’t speaking to anyone else. And he also remembered not being able to breathe, and what Mieka had done—had that insane little Elf really saved
his life? He probably had. And what had Cade said to express gratitude? “Now you know how it feels.”
Gods. What was wrong with him?
Aware that Mistress Mirdley was watching him with a frown, he said, “But I think the hardest thing isn’t not getting enough sleep, or working up the energy for a show when it’s the fifth in as many days. We love what we do. That’s not in question. I’d never want to do anything else. But the hours afterwards, with the applause still ringing in your ears … and maybe you’re staying another night and maybe you have to get back to the wagon because you’re due someplace else in a couple of days, but either way you can’t settle. You’ve just been out in front of hundreds and hundreds of people, and now it’s just the four of you, and you can sit and stare at each other, or try to get some sleep, or go down to the taproom and drink half the night—and there’s the other thing, the drinks keep coming, because there’s always somebody there who’ll stand a round for the famous players. Sometimes,” he finished, embarrassed that he’d rattled on so long, “it’s a wonder any of us can stand up, leave alone walk.”
She was thoughtfully silent for a time. “Tell me more about being onstage.”
“Haven’t I ever said?” He smiled. “And all those nights I came back here after a show at the Downstreet or the Keymarker! Surely you noticed!”
“What I noticed was that you came home later and later, and sometimes not at all, once the girls started clustering round the Artists Entry,” she said dryly. “And now that girls are actually allowed into theaters—tell me, O Great Tregetour, do you spend part of the time you’re onstage picking out which little birdie in the audience will be making cow-eyes at you in private later on?”
“A bird making eyes like a cow.” He shook his head sadly, to tease her. “Mistress Mirdley, you would never make a writer.”
“Did you understand what I meant? All right, then. I noticed in your recital of things to do after a play, you didn’t mention the girls. Oh, I’m not criticizing that, either—though I can only hope you have more discretion and care than that silly little Elf, and don’t risk bringing home anything I’d have to cure you of.”