Thornlost (Book 3)

by Melanie Rawn

  “ ‘Silly superstition’?” Cade quoted back at him.

  “Yeh, well—it surprised me a bit,” he admitted. “Still and all—”

  “Who put it there?” Rafe growled. “Who’d like to throw us off our stride?”

  Given a mystery to solve, Cayden forgot about the significance of the feather’s meaning and occupied himself with sussing out the significance of the feather’s presence. Mieka hid a smile and kept walking.

  “Oy, Mieka!” a voice called from behind them. Turning, he peered at the three servant boys carrying the crated glass baskets—no, two boys and a young man of about his own age. A young man he knew: tall and thin, though not so tall as Cade, with badly kagged ears and a hint of Goblin about his uneven teeth.

  “Dak?” Mieka was abruptly embarrassed that this person he’d once performed with was now fetching and carrying for him, the Master Glisker.

  Dak revealed all his teeth. “What’s been, mate?”

  Cade said pleasantly, “Oh, we’ve been here and there. Introduce us, Mieka.”

  “Erm—Daksho Webholder. We—uh—”

  “We were players together,” Dak said, hefting the crate casually higher in his arms, bouncing it a little. The crate with the precious glass baskets Blye had made—

  “And who are you with now?” Jeska asked, all politeness.

  Dak ignored him, his brandy-brown eyes fixed on Mieka. “Had a show, didn’t we, one night in Gallybanks, and there we all were, everything wonderful about us—except for lack of a glisker.”

  “Rough luck,” Rafe commented.

  “Never told you, did he? Bloody little snarge!”

  “Told us?” Jeska inquired, still cordial.

  Mieka could stand it no longer. “The night in Gowerion! That very first night! I know it wasn’t right of me, Dak, but—”

  Now the Goblin teeth were displayed in a sneer. “We were gonna be famous! We—”

  “No, you weren’t.” This from Cade, looking down his considerable nose. “That was more than two years ago. If you had the goods, you’d’ve found another glisker by now and been invited to Trials.”

  Ruthless, pitiless fact. It was one of the things Mieka most disliked about Cade, this cold and brutal instinct for cutting to the bone with no concern for the blood loss. He’d known the sharp side of Cayden’s tongue often enough himself; now, used against somebody who didn’t really deserve it—all Dak had ever wanted was what Touchstone now had.

  And then he remembered those boys on the Continent, the ones who’d stolen a withie. They’d thought the glass twig would make them players. But it wasn’t in them—the ability, the magic—any more than it was in Dak. Not really. Cade was right. As usual. And that was probably the most annoying thing about him.

  It was a confusing mixture of compassion and disdain Mieka felt as he said, “I’m sorry, Dak.” Sorry, because it was more than the magic and the withies and even the skill and the talent and the ambition. “I really am sor—”

  “Shut it, Mieka.” Cade hefted the crate from Dak’s startled grasp. “Perfectly lovely of you to stop by. We’ll take it from here.”

  “Fuckin’ Touchstone!” Dak shouted, and the two boys carrying the other crates and withies flinched. While Rafe and Jeska relieved them of their burdens, Dak went on, “Greatest in the Kingdom, swigging tea with the Princess! Oh, I was there, I saw you—I’m a player, but here I am toting trays from the castle kitchens! It shoulda been me there, it shoulda been me!”

  “It would never have been you,” Cade told him.

  The cruelty of it didn’t strike Mieka the way he thought it probably ought to have done. It was only the truth. Ruthless, pitiless fact. Cade’s instinct. Part of what made him brilliant. Just as Mieka’s instinct had compelled him to skive off the show in a tatty Gallantrybanks tavern and head for Gowerion, certain sure that he was good enough, that he was their missing piece. Ruthless. Pitiless. Monumentally arrogant.

  At bottom, he and Cade were a lot alike.

  He became aware that his partners had walked off, leaving him and Dak and the two frightened boys, all of them empty-handed. Mieka dug into his pockets and came up with a dozen or more coins, which he pressed into Dak’s palm. A terrible struggle showed in the man’s face: fling the money contemptuously onto the grass, or keep it because he needed it?

  “Bastard,” Dak said, and kept it.

  “I really am sorry,” Mieka mumbled, and made his escape.

  They were waiting for him by the castle gate. Jeska gave him the velvet bag of spent withies and said, “Webholder. Not Spider Clan, I’m thinking.”

  Rafe snorted. “Think I’d be caught dead related to a third-rate fritlag like that?”

  “Nothing to do with your clan,” Cade soothed. “Webholder is one of those names like Jeska’s. Foreign soldier, stayed here, took a name people could understand—”

  “Like in that play, the one about the battle!” Jeska exclaimed. “The siege engine—there’s them as loads it, and them as pulls back the netting that holds the rocks or fireballs—”

  Rafe interrupted with a question directed at Mieka. “Was it him?” When Mieka stared at him stupidly, he said, “The peacock feather. He obviously has access to the Pavilion. Does he hate you enough?”

  “I don’t know.”

  At the same time Cade said, “Who gives a shit?”

  “You know all the stories,” said Jeska. “Peacock feathers are hideous bad luck in the theater. Everything from withies the tregetour forgot about priming to men in the audience run mad.”

  “None of that happened, though, did it?” Cade tightened his hold on his glass baskets. “Besides, it couldn’t have been him behind it, even if he was the one who put it there. Where would he get a peacock feather? How could he afford one? Isn’t it plain who’s responsible?”

  “Y’know,” Rafe muttered, “I really consider hating you when you’re smug.”

  “The Archduchess,” Cade finished. “Not her husband’s favorite play, not her husband’s favorite players—how charming if there’s a cock-up! And in front of the Queen, too!” He gave a harsh, haughty laugh. “A try at—what’d you call it, Mieka? Talking to the Archduke that time, you remember! Comparing various players’ techniques to various methods of murder.”

  “How adorable of you,” Rafe drawled. “What are we?”

  “Slow poison,” Mieka told him. “But him—a knife in the back.”

  Cade nudged Jeska with an elbow. “All she could manage was a peacock feather. Not so scary now, eh?”

  Later, back in their room after a few celebratory drinks, Cade shut the bedchamber door, turned to Mieka, and said with absolute seriousness, “Don’t ever apologize. Not ever, not to anyone, for going where your dreams take you.”

  “Wasn’t nice, though, what I did to Dak and the rest.” He stripped off his jacket and shirt, unwilling to look at Cade. When there was no reply for a time, only the sounds of water splashing in the basin, he finally had to turn. “And it’s not like your Elsewhens, is it? You can’t help having them. Me, I made a choice, to find you in Gowerion.” Although it hadn’t felt like a choice at the time. It had felt… inevitable.

  Cade reappeared from behind a towel. “What I meant was that you shouldn’t be sorry for something there’s no fighting against. What we have, it’s not kind to other people. It can’t be, I think. Not if it’s honest.”

  Ruthless. Pitiless. It took more than magic and talent, ambition and desire, or even instinct. It took the supreme arrogance of a belief so powerful that nothing and no one could shake it, not for an instant. Yes, he and Cade were a lot alike.

  “And talking of honesty,” Cade went on, “I’m sure you’re just bursting to know about my grandfather.” He picked up his nightshirt and began pleating the fine linen between his fingers. “Kiritin vanished towards the end of the war. Killed, probably. Maybe suicide. Nobody knows. Her husband, Isshak Highcollar—he wasn’t involved in the war at all, or so everybody in the family says loud and
clear if his name ever comes up, which it doesn’t, much. The King let him live, anyway.”

  “Wizard?”

  “Mostly.” He sat down, shoulders rounding. “He made a bargain with the King to save himself and his daughters. They could live a nice, quiet life in the country—part of the deal was he could keep one of the ancestral estates, the worst of them, as it happens, awful old pile on the side of a windy moor. But the price of survival was their magic.”

  “Their magic?” Mieka echoed foolishly.

  “There’s stories about what spells were used and who used them, but the fact of it was that he wore the steel rings—you’ve heard of those?” When Mieka nodded, he went on, “His daughters had hinderings put on them, and whatever magic they might’ve had…” He finished with a shrug.

  “What’s a hindering?” Mieka shivered. It sounded grisly.

  “Imagine that you’re outside a shop, looking in the window. You can see everything—good food, warm clothing, shoes, a soft bed—but you can’t go in. Ever.” He paused. “No, that’s not right. You’re not outside looking in, you’re inside a place with a big window, looking out at life all around you—all the people and colors and trees and wind and everything, just everything—but you can never touch any of it. You can put your hand to the glass but you’ll never feel the warmth of the sunlight. You’ll never hear people laughing, or taste the rain. It’s all there, you know it’s all there, but you can never get at it. That’s a hindering.”

  “Gentle Gods,” Mieka whispered. “And somebody did this to your mother?” He began to understand why Lady Jaspiela was the way she was. And had he really thought there would be no surprises at Trials this year?

  “And her sisters. It happened with other families, too.”

  “But not the Archduke.”

  “Once he got to be a little older than Dery, they started testing every way they knew how. But he has nothing.”

  Mieka thought about all this for a few moments. “What was your grandfather’s magic? The Steward made it sound something special.”

  “Not very, not in everyday life, unless you like to amuse yourself watching other people thrash about in bed.”

  “Quill, make sense.”

  “It was useful enough to the Archduke’s father. If he tried hard enough, Isshak could see through stone walls.”

  “Oh, right,” Mieka scoffed. When Cade was silent, he reconsidered. “He could? Really truly?”

  “As I said—useful. The family all deny it, of course, but I’ve heard one or two things. You needn’t bother putting spies in a castle when you’ve got somebody can look right into the courtyard and count the soldiers. Took a lot out of him to do it, though. Once he decided that Lady Kiritin had chosen the wrong side, it’s said he started pretending that he’d worn himself out, so knackered that he couldn’t hardly stay awake, much less do magic.”

  “He couldn’t just lie about what he saw,” Mieka reflected. “Easy enough to catch him at it. Compare notes after the battle was lost, and all that.”

  “He didn’t exactly work towards the victory of the King’s forces, but at least he stopped helping the Archduke. Which was taken into account when the war ended, and why he got to live, and his daughters with him.” He snorted a laugh. “You think you’ve got interesting relations—my darling aunties are the original Gorgons.”

  “Still out on the mists of the moor?”

  “One of them. The other married a local lordling and spends her time making life a foretaste of one of the nastier Hells for him, her four sons, the girls unlucky enough to be married to them, whatever children they spawned, and anybody else in a ten-mile reach.”

  There wasn’t much to be said to that. They made ready for bed: shucking off clothes, having a quick wash in the basin, donning nightshirts, sliding between the sheets. A warm breeze through the half-open window brought the scents of flowers and the nearby river. Mieka knew by the sound of Cade’s breathing that he wasn’t anywhere near sleep. But he said nothing, because waiting for Cade to share what was on his mind had worked so far today. Patience was boring, but sometimes it was worth it.

  Finally: “Don’t you want to know if I’ve any more secrets stashed away?”

  Mieka grinned to himself, but kept it from his voice as he said, “Did I ask, just then? No. I did not.”

  “But you wanted to.”

  “You always tell me things eventually, Quill. Because you know I always know when you’re lying.”

  “Not being able to lie isn’t the same as not telling the truth.”

  “Isn’t it?” he asked innocently. “Sweet dreaming, Quill.”

  6

  Done with Trials and onto the Royal Circuit. Done with performances for the judges and the ladies. Done with two appearances at High Chapel (which also counted as performances, in a way, at least for Mieka—keeping a pious and reverential face on wasn’t easy, and Cade had absolutely forbidden him to play any of his tricks to get them out of it). Done with everything at Seekhaven except one last thing.

  “C’mon, Quill. Don’t you want to see what they’ve got?”

  “No.”

  “You know you want to.”

  “Not interested.” He turned a page in the book he’d picked up someplace or other in Seekhaven. A new book, A Natural History of Dragons or some suchlike. Mieka supposed he’d say it was for research and accuracy—as if Touchstone didn’t already do the biggest, finest, scariest, most spectacular dragon ever seen onstage. Or offstage, for that matter. He reminded himself to borrow the book so his mother could read it to Tavier, his dragon-mad littlest brother.

  Jeska came into their room, dressed to the tips of his kagged ears in a sky-blue silk tunic belted in purple leather. “Isn’t he coming with?” he demanded, seeing Cade lounging in the window seat.

  “He says not.” Mieka gave a shrug. “You’d think,” he went on, suddenly remembering what Yazz had advised on the drive here, “that he’d want to see them. Evaluate the competition, like.”

  Cade snorted and turned another page.

  Their masquer bristled. “As if Black Lightning could compete with us on the best day they ever had while we were drunk to the eyeballs!”

  “Well, of course, they’re not real competition,” Mieka soothed. “It’s just that they think they are.”

  Rafe returned from the garderobe, straightening his belt. “Is he ready yet?”

  “He says he’s not going.”

  Rafe glared at Cade. “But don’t you want to see what—”

  Cade glared right back. “I do not give the tiniest pile of warm wyvern shit what they’ve got, or think they’ve got, or indeed have anything to do with them at all.” And he made an ostentatious show of writing a few notes on the sheet of paper at his side.

  “Hm.” Rafe inspected his fingernails. “It innit so much that, is it, as what everybody else thinks they’ve got.”

  Cade put down his pen. “What d’you mean?” he demanded.

  Seeing Jeska hide a smile, Mieka wondered what was going on. They’d both known Cade longer than he had, of course. Still, he couldn’t quite see where this line of attack would get them.

  “This is their first big show for the gentlemen of the Court, right? Grand expectations, and all that?” Rafe picked at a loose thread on one cuff. “Everybody’s already seen their ‘Dragon,’ and they did all right with the Twelfth this year.”

  “At least it wasn’t as awful as that ‘open things and things will be open to you’ drivel,” Mieka remarked, trying to be helpful.

  Rafe ignored him in favor of polishing the buttons of his jacket with a careful finger. “But everybody’s seen all that. They have to do something new tonight, something original. Something to astonish every man in the audience—the way the Shadowshapers do.”

  “The way we do!” Mieka couldn’t help but exclaim.

  Once more Rafe ignored him. “People know what Black Lightning has done in the past—but now they’re expecting something way beyond that. Som
ething to set people chavishing all the way back to Gallybanks. Something to make Tobalt Fluter write a whole page about them in The Nayword.”

  Cade looked bored. “What would my presence at this show have to do with any of that?”

  “We could laugh in all the wrong places,” Mieka suggested, earning himself a stern frown from Jeska. Rafe, who seemed to have all this well in hand, went on ignoring him.

  “If you’re there to see it for yourself, you can have an opinion.”

  “Why should my opinion matter?”

  “No idea, personally. But other people seem to think it does. Tobalt’s rather substantial readership, for instance.”

  “And so?”

  “So if you aren’t there, you can’t have an opinion. And people will want to know why. Lacking any other explanation, there’s those as will be eager to speculate.”

  “About what?”

  “About maybe you didn’t attend the show because you’re scared of them.”

  “Me?” Cade was on his feet, the book tumbling to the floor. “Me, afraid of them?”

  And that, as the saying went, was that. Mieka grinned his congratulations at Rafe. Jeska was already out the door. Cade grabbed his jacket, hauled it on, and followed.

  Halfway to the castle, Cade snarled at Rafe, “Don’t think I don’t know when I’ve been cozened.”

  “All I did was give you an excuse to do what you wanted to do anyway.”

  Mieka decided to be helpful again. “Just think how sweetly condescending you can be when Tobalt asks your views on their performance.”

  “Right!” Jeska smirked. “Printed up in The Nayword for everyone to read and ponder.”

  “Not ponder,” Mieka scolded. “Marvel at. The whole world knows that Cade is a thinker.”

  Rafe nodded. “So long as he does it in words everybody else can understand, and leaves the dictionary of pompous vocabulary at home. We do want them to get the point, after all.”