by Melanie Rawn
The day was warm, but with just a breath of autumn in the breeze to keep things pleasant. Miriuzca herself, lithe and lovely in her own forget-me-never blue, approached the stage to greet them, then turned and clapped her hands together twice for silence—and introduced them herself. It was an honor they hadn’t expected.
And then it was time for that wonderfully silly Introduction to Theater that Cade had literally dreamed up. His instincts had been correct. The patter was eagerly received, Tobalt played his part, and Mieka had a lovely time throwing magic at Jeska that included a horse, a sheep, and a four-foot-tall baby dragon (for Tavier, of course). And then they got down to the first performance of “Bewilderland.”
They had all agreed that play would include sights and sounds only. No need to confuse or scare the little ones with tastes on their tongues or sensations on their skin, though Mieka had been voted down on doing a scent here and there. “Horses and cows and sheep? Smelly!” Jeska had said, his perfect nose wrinkling. Especially were there no emotions evoked. At fourteen or so, a child would understand that it was magic at work; at seven, it would be weird at best and frightening at worst.
The laughter as Jeska wandered about, plaintively trying to find his pig’s oink, drew people from other parts of the garden and the Palace itself. Gardeners and grooms, maids and cooks, secretaries and minor nobles—and at last Queen Roshien herself, tiptoeing to the outskirts of the crowd, giggling and clapping her hands as enthusiastically as the children all around her.
At last all the animals had lined up onstage, with Jeska and his pig in the middle, and as he pointed to the goat and the horse and the squirrel and the lamb and so on, the children roared out whatever sound was appropriate and Mieka echoed it in the animal’s voice. When that was done, Jeska took a step forward.
“I am so very much beholden to all of you for helping me! Now, just one more time, just to make sure—I want all of you to call out the sound made by your favorite animal. Take a moment to think about it. Are you ready? One—two—three!”
The noise was deafening and hilarious, like a gigantic barnyard gone utterly mad. Mieka, who was contributing absolutely nothing to it, knew that Tavier would be trying to sound like a dragon—which was not one of the animals included in the search, having been judged too scary even in miniature form. Jeska began to applaud the uproar, took another step forward, tripped, and purposely fell off the stage, did a somersault, and landed on his bum. While everyone was laughing at him, all the magical animals ran off behind the apple trees and vanished. They’d had a time figuring out how to clear the stage without upsetting the children, and it would have been easier with curtains for the animals to disappear behind, but it was managed here without causing alarm.
Miriuzca was on her feet, clapping her hands crimson. All the rest of the audience—quite the crowd by now—joined in.
Triumph. Another triumph to add to Touchstone’s already impressive list. Not much money to be had from this performance, but Mieka felt much better, certain that Cade had been right about this investment in the future.
Afterwards there were refreshments for the children in another section of the gardens while Touchstone packed up lecterns and glass baskets and frames and withies. Miriuzca stepped up onstage as they worked, and Mieka grinned to himself as she turned as if to look out on an imaginary audience.
Turning back, she approached them and said, “Oh, I’m having not one word to tell you how wonderful! Beholden, beholden!”
“Our pleasure,” Cade replied with a smile.
“Were you seeing the Queen? I had no idea she would come! And to be loving every instant of it, too!”
Evidently she lost her grip on Albeyni when she was excited. Mieka finished fastening the glass baskets into their padded nests—the same ones Cade had made for Blye’s work years ago, respelled every now and then by Mieka for protection against bumps—and said, “I’ll be glad when the Prince and Princess are old enough. And my own little girl, of course.”
“I have something for you—a surprising—I mean, a surprise. Come! Someone will take all that back to the Palace, don’t worry. Please come! I want for you to see my present for the King!”
They went. The grounds were extensive, and that twelve-foot wall went all around them. Trees, shrubs, elaborate knot-beds of flowers and herbs, little rock grottoes tinkling with waterfalls, vast swaths of grass—everything, in fact, except the hedge sculptures for which Cilka and Petrinka were becoming famous. Mieka reminded himself to remedy that—after all, it was in Miriuzca’s father’s own gardens that he’d first seen them, and brought the idea back to his sisters. Miriuzca chattered gaily with Cayden the whole while they were walking. But again Mieka was concerned, for her merriment seemed a trifle feverish.
At last they entered a back wing of the Palace, down a rather dark hallway to a pair of double glass doors. Mieka inhaled deeply the smell of newly sawn wood, familiar from his brothers’ work. His jaw simply dropped open when the doors slid aside into the walls and Miriuzca proudly flung out a hand to show them what she’d had made as a present for the King.
A theater. Not a very big one—it would hold perhaps one hundred—but a real theater all the same. Brown carpets on the floor, sea-green velvet seats, rich tapestry curtains drawn back on either side of the gorgeously planked and polished stage. A huge candle-branch hung from the ceiling, with crystal drops and brass fittings. When Cade, obviously feeling impish, waved a hand and set the candles alight with soft blue Wizardfire, Miriuzca clapped her hands together and looked as if she’d throw her arms around him and kiss him.
“Well? What do you think?”
“I think,” Rafe said in his slow, deep voice, “that this is a sight as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen in all my days—except, of course, for the sight of my wife emerging from her bath.”
Miriuzca laughed. “Lady Megs helped me with it, the planning and designing and things. She’s been to so many theaters, and she took the best of all of them for this.”
Cade asked, “Is this where we’ll be performing tomorrow night?”
“It is! And many, many times in the future, I am hoping—I hope,” she corrected herself. “No longer must any of us wait for Trials to come round each year to see theater—”
“Or show up disguised in young men’s clothes someplace in Gallybanks?” Cade said softly, gray eyes twinkling down at her.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said at once, then giggled. “Come along, I’m sure you’re thirsty and hungry. I cannot be joining you, for there is so much to do still—but I had to show you this!”
Mieka knew that Rafe and Jeska and Cade were memorizing the dimensions of the theater, judging the possible ways the magic could bounce, possible slapback, all the things that needed to be understood about a new place. To give them some more time, he engaged the Princess in conversation—how long it had taken to build the theater, whether she’d chosen the seats after testing them herself—
“Of course! Master Glintlark had several chairs to choose from for me, but none were right for a theater. I didn’t know that until I sat in them and imagined myself looking up at the stage, and when I couldn’t imagine it, I said he would have to design something new.”
“He did very well,” Mieka said. He chose a seat in the last row and plopped himself down into it. “Oh, yes, very nice indeed,” he went on after bouncing a few times. “Comfortable without being sleepy. Would it be wrong of me to guess that the Gift of the Gloves is in Master Glintlark’s future?”
“It is possible,” she admitted. “Do you like the lights, with all the crystals shining? Can you guess who made them?”
“Not Blye! Blye? She never said a word!”
“And all the wood for the floors and walls, that was your brothers!”
No wonder the smell had been familiar.
And the loathsome thought occurred to him that since they had all been paid a pretty sum for their work, they might lend Touchstone some mone
y.
“The crystal drops, she made them from an idea of Master Silversun’s,” the Princess was saying. “See how they spark rainbows?” She wagged a finger at him. “And you’re not to break them, Master Windthistle! Not a single one!”
Pretending to pout, he said, “Nobody lets me have any fun anymore!”
“But the play this afternoon—you didn’t have fun?” She looked anxious.
“Of course I did!” He smiled. “I hope we do ‘Bewilderland’ again and again and again!”
“I so much wanted my brother to come see it,” she said, abruptly sad. “But something happened—perhaps I’d better not say.”
“He’s all right, isn’t he? Not ill or anything?”
“I suppose not. I don’t know. He—he left for the Continent this morning.”
Mieka stood up. “He didn’t stay for the celebrations? I thought he’d be here another week or two at least.”
Her beautiful blue eyes darkened and the sweet curves of her lips thinned. “He was not allowed.”
He knew he shouldn’t be asking questions, but he couldn’t help it. He hoped she would take it for concern and not a rampaging curiosity about what the Archduke had done. “But he’s your brother.”
She looked ready to burst with the explanation. He begged the Old Gods to occupy Cade and Rafe and Jeska for just a few moments more.
“He—” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “They say they found him late last night, waiting by a garden gate with one of his servants—and opened the gate to another of his servants and someone dressed as a Good Brother but wasn’t, and they had a huge crate they were carrying and it—it was black powder, like that which is putting into cannons to fire them and make explosions.”
He regretted the sudden tears in her eyes, but not that he’d got the information out of her. “Who told you this?”
“My husband, the Prince. The guards who caught Ilesko came to him, not wishing to be bothering the King, and—and my brother was not denying it! That is what they told me. I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it. What would he want with black powder?”
“No idea,” Mieka lied. “What happened then?”
“I saw him, and asked him, and he would tell me nothing. He only said he would leave this morning and gladly so, he was sick of Albeyn and hated everything and everyone here, and especially me because—because I have been straying from the true religion—” She choked, near to sobbing now.
“Sweetest lady,” he said softly, putting a hand on her shoulder, “my dear Miriuzca, your brother is very young and very proud, and proud young men do and say some very reckless things sometimes. I say this because it’s not so long since I was his age, and do you know what I did? I went all the way to Gowerion one night, just to see Cayden and Rafe and Jeska with their old glisker, who was very bad at his job, and I took the crazy chance of telling them I was so much better than this glisker, and they—because they weren’t that much older than me, and just as crazy, I think!—they gave me the chance to work with them, and now here I am! I was silly and arrogant and a complete quoob—”
The bizarre word—one of Uncle Breedbate’s—distracted her more than his babbled tale had done. The tears dried up and her brows arched, and he gave a rueful little shrug.
“A quoob is an eccentric fool, and that we most certainly were!”
“What a ridiculous word!” A tiny smile played around her mouth, and in her eyes he saw that she knew he had diverted her attention on purpose, and was grateful for it. “Where did you learn it? From Master Silversun?”
“Oh, no. I have an uncle who spends his life being more Elf than the first Elf ever, and that includes using words that are about a thousand years old that nobody knows anymore or cares to, just to prove he’s keeping up old traditions—like his clothes, a dagged-hem tunic and trousers bloused at the knee over pointy-toed boots, usually yellow, and I can’t even begin to describe how silly he looks!”
“A right quoob!” she said, and laughed.
At this opportune moment Cayden came up to them and said something about not taking up any more of her time. A footman escorted them to a small chamber overlooking the main courtyard, where food and ale and a lovely fat purse were waiting for them. Mieka didn’t dare share his new knowledge with the others where they could be overheard, and told himself to wait until they were back at Wistly. Yet when he and Cade and their glass baskets were safely loaded into a hire-hack, and Jeska and Rafe with the lecterns and withies and wooden braces were in another, he turned to his partner and the whole of it tumbled out in no particular order but, to judge by Cade’s expression, comprehensibly enough.
When Mieka had finished, Cade asked, “Did they stitch him up, d’you think? Lure him into it? Probably not, not if it was his own servant who went out for the black powder. So I guess they caught him fair and square. I wonder if they found the Good Sister’s cousin in the Firemaster’s unit. Where do you get yours?”
The blunt question startled him. “Quill! I haven’t bought any black powder in—well, not years, exactly, but months, certainly.”
“Where did you get it?” Cade persisted, frowning.
“A cannonneer in the King’s Guard who went to littleschool with me,” he admitted. “He’s Wizard enough to light the stuff with your sort of fire. But he was promoted and now he’s responsible for every grain instead of putting a bit to one side for me in exchange for something Auntie Brishen makes that nobody else does—”
Horrified, Cade gripped his arm. “Please tell me that he doesn’t prick thorn when he’s in charge of the cannon!”
“We prick thorn when we work,” Mieka pointed out, annoyed.
“That’s different!”
“Is it? The magic in the withies, spreading out across an audience—how is that less dangerous than some black powder and a big round cannonball? And what does it matter, anyways? The Tregrefin is still in one piece, and gone, and everybody’s safe. D’you realize what that means?”
He looked confused. Mieka reflected that despite that big, complicated brain, and all the thoughts roiling around inside it, and all that reading and studying, he really could be hopelessly dense sometimes.
“It means,” Mieka said as the hire-hack pulled onto Waterknot Street, “that the Archduke did exactly what you told him to.”
A corner of Cade’s mouth quirked wryly. “And you think that means I’m powerful?”
“I think it means that he still owes us a favor. Let’s let that hang over his head for a long, long time, shall we? And when we finally do collect, let’s make it a really big one!”
* * *
At Wistly Hall, site of all Touchstone’s celebrations, Mishia had taken advantage of the warm summery weather to serve dinner out on the river lawn. Once everyone loaded their plates inside, they went outside to sit on blankets and quilts. Mieka sat with his own little family—his wife, her mother, and Jindra—thinking that his choice bit of gossip about the Tregrefin would have to wait to be told, and toned down a lot when he told it. That the boy was gone under mysterious circumstances was all he would say, and not unless someone else brought up the subject.
“She greeted me, you know,” his wife was saying for the third time to her mother. “She was so kind, and so lovely in her blue dress! And she asked about you, my moppet,” she told Jindra, tapping the child on the nose. “You’re not that much older than her daughter, and perhaps someday you’ll be asked to go play with Princess Levenie at the Palace or the North Keep!”
All at once his imagination called up the scene Cayden had described of explosion and flying glass. He wanted to scoop Jindra up in his arms and take her away to Hilldrop Crescent and keep her safe. He knew, of course, that he couldn’t wrap her in silk and stash her away from all harm. He knew that. But he couldn’t help wishing that it were possible.
“Well, Jindra, when you do,” Mistress Caitiffer said, “remember to let the Princess win.”
Mieka laughed at his daughter’s stubborn scowl and ju
tting chin. “Every so often, anyways,” he told her. “If she’s half as smart as her mother, she’ll know it if you let her win all the time.”
“Is her brother that smart as well?” his mother-in-law asked.
He met her innocent gaze. “You’d have to ask Cayden. He’s closer to the Princess than I am.”
“Ah.” She smiled with a contentment that set his teeth on edge. “Mayhap I will.”
Jindra was only about a year older than Prince Roshlin. The woman couldn’t possibly think—no, not even she was that ambitious. Besides, to hear Quill tell it—before he’d stopped seeing the Elsewhens—Roshlin was destined for the Archduke’s daughter, Belsethine. It might be funny, though, to watch this woman scheme and plot to get her granddaughter wed to Royalty. As long as Jindra didn’t suffer for it, and kept her sense of humor about it all. Mieka refused to see her hurt or humiliated. Perhaps Mistress Caitiffer’s connivings wouldn’t be so amusing after all.
Why had he never asked Cayden whether or not he’d seen Jindra in any of the Elsewhens? Such a simple, obvious question, and he’d never asked it. Years of Elsewhens were lost to Cade’s stubborn desire to live like an ordinary person, though Mieka flattered himself that he had talked him out of that silly notion for good and all. But—Gods and Angels, why had he never asked?
“C’mon, sweeting,” he said, gathering up his daughter and lifting her to ride on his shoulders. “Let’s go see what Auntie Threadchaser has brought us for cakes and pies!”