by Melanie Rawn
Rafe said, “We showed them the whole story of ‘Treasure,’ but putting in the words that condemned the Archduke’s father—that makes for a different sort of resonance. Both in emotions and in thoughts. It’s there every time we perform it.”
Cade gave a self-conscious little shrug. “It seemed right to do it that way.”
“It was brilliant and you know it,” Mieka told him.
“Whether it was or not, you’re right that it is different from the way Vered works. I want them to understand. To think about what they’ve experienced.”
“Changing the world?” Rafe asked softly.
“I was drunk when I said that. Tobalt never should’ve printed it.”
Jeska glanced over to the door as it opened and let in a burst of vehement conversation. “Talking of whom—and I mean not just Tobalt but also the Shadowshapers and the Sparks—”
As the new arrivals piled into the taproom, calling for drinks and food, Cade looked almost panicky. Mieka patted his arm. “No worrying. I’ll get Tobalt so drunk, he won’t be able to hold a pen nor remember a single word you say.”
7
Although Tobalt Fluter hadn’t even brought a pen that evening, and didn’t get quite drunk enough to forget all he heard, whatever was said featured not at all in the long article he wrote for The Nayword. The pages (two and a half of them) of his report about Trials detailed each performance according to its eventual importance (the Shadowshapers, as First Flight on the Royal, got the most space, but Touchstone wasn’t far behind). There was a stark description of Black Lightning’s new piece, but no commentary. This didn’t surprise Cayden. That last night in Seekhaven, Tobalt had said quite frankly that he didn’t know what to make of the thing and would have to see it again before he could form an opinion. That this was a tacit invitation to make his own opinion known did not escape Cade, but all he did was smile and say he looked forward to reading the broadsheet once Tobalt had made up his mind and written a review of “The Lost Ones.”
Cade had an opinion, of course. He didn’t intend to share it with Tobalt. And though most of the talk that night was about Black Lightning, he didn’t share his thoughts with anyone else, either. Just Touchstone; just the people he completely trusted. Looked at sidewise, that meant that he did trust Mieka with the truth of his thoughts, in spite of what the Elf revealed to his wife about the Elsewhens. Mieka hadn’t meant to do that, and even if he had meant it, Cade would have forgiven him. Chances were that he’d forgive Mieka anything, and he considered himself mature enough at twenty-one to realize that this probably wasn’t good for either of them.
Reconsidering the Elsewhen where the old woman snarled about how drunk and angry Mieka had been when he’d betrayed Cade’s secret, Cade understood something else: that if Mieka felt himself to be included in Cade’s confidence, there would be no more similar episodes. Treat him like a child, and he behaved like a child. Trust him, and he was trustworthy.
Or so Cayden had to believe.
If he accepted that Mieka was Mieka, and trying to change him was doomed to failure, then perhaps he’d never become angry enough to batter that beautiful Elfen face to a bloody ruin. The Archduke could believe about the Elsewhens or not; that didn’t matter much to Cade. What did matter, what he feared, was the violence that could come of fury.
It wasn’t the actual coming to blows that frightened him. He’d slugged enough other people in his life—and been clobbered in turn for it—that he knew whatever scrapes and bruises or even broken bones that ensued would heal, given time and a good physicker. (Or, he thought with a reminiscent smile, Mistress Mirdley, who had patched him up when one of the local boys needed lessoning about keeping his slurs about Goblins to himself. Not that Cade had done the teaching; it was Blye who’d got in a good swift kick where it mattered most after the boy had blacked Cade’s eye. They’d been six years old.) No, it wasn’t physical damage he feared. It was what losing control would mean inside, in his heart and in his mind. It would mean that he’d given up. And that, he would never do.
But Mieka wasn’t his main worry on the drive back to Gallantrybanks. The subject occupying his mind was something he’d overheard in a Fliting Hall corridor just after their performance of “Treasure” at Trials. He was fully aware of the hypocrisy of keeping this to himself while deciding he ought to share everything with Mieka and Jeska and Rafe. Still, he wanted to think it through before he spoke—something he would never as long as he lived expect Mieka to do. But that was simply the way Mieka was.
What Cade overheard had startled him at the time. Later, once he had the chance to ponder a bit, it made him furious.
“Do you s’pose that’s the true way of it?”
“Was that meant for a joke? How could he possibly know what really happened?”
“There was a lot of detail, and it felt true.”
“They’re players! It’s meant to feel true! And Cayden Silversun, he’s a writer, isn’t he? Makes up stories all day and half the night. All of them do. It’s what they’re paid for.”
“But—”
“But bollocks! It all came out of his head. He imagined the whole thing. It’s no more real than the so-called Rights of the Fae. Dreamshine, that’s all it is.”
Once he’d thought about it, and got beyond anger, he realized something that he finally shared with his partners the morning after they left Seekhaven.
“Nobody really believes us, you know. About the Treasure.”
Mieka and Rafe glanced up from their card game. Jeska came out of a half-doze in his hammock, mumbling, “What? Are we there?”
“There’s no proof,” Cade went on. “They think it’s naught but a story I made up.” He set aside the book he’d been pretending to read. “We didn’t identify the exact place with a name. We never called it Nackerty Close. We’ve never been there in person, so we couldn’t show them anything they could recognize through visual clues. We didn’t put in a damned thing that makes it believable, that convinces people that it’s a real place and those were real events and that it all really happened the way we showed them it did.”
Mieka was scowling. “Briuly and Alaen—”
“—can’t be bothered,” Rafe finished for him. “The one’s too busy being an Artist, and the other’s too busy being forlorn over Chirene.”
“So let’s go find it ourselves! That’d show everybody!”
Jeska said, “We’ve been through this before. It doesn’t belong to us. We can’t be the ones to find it.”
Cade shocked them all by saying, “We may have to.”
“Just to prove you’re right?” Rafe slapped his cards onto the table and leaned back in the low, soft chair. “You’d diddle two friends and their families out of whatever the King would pay to have the Rights in his own hands, just to bloat your reputation?”
He felt his face burn crimson. “I didn’t say we had to keep it.”
“Why not?” Mieka demanded. “If we’re the ones to find it, then why not?”
“Because it isn’t ours,” Jeska said again.
“Ooh, and isn’t it just the most upright honorable little subject of His Majesty!” Mieka sneered. “We’ll split your share, then, if you’ve such scruples!”
Cade ought to have known any attempt to talk about this would degenerate into a verbal brawl. He sat there listening to them squabble, looking only at Rafe, whose disapproval stung.
Jeska and Mieka shut up only when Yazz roared from the coachman’s bench. “By Gods, have done!”
Mieka unhooked his hammock, fastened it into place, and didn’t bother with the mattress. “Wake me when we’re home,” he growled, and turned his back on them.
Nothing was said for another hour or so, not until Yazz stopped to give the horses a breather. Cade descended the wagon steps, stretched, and walked a few paces down the road. Rafe was right behind him.
“So you want to show everybody, like Mieka said.”
“I want them to know it’s the truth.”
“Why?”
“Because it is. Because the truth is important.”
“You already gave the Archduke one in the eye, quoting those words at the end of the play. What is it you’re really after?”
“Just what I said. That everybody knows it’s real.”
“What does that get you, besides a swelled head?”
He turned to confront his old friend. “If the truth doesn’t matter to you, fine. I’m not made that way.”
“Oh, and which part of you will you credit with this devotion to what’s real and true? Is it something in your Elfenblood—which, thanks to Black fucking Lightning, we all know now that I’ve none of? Or mayhap the Troll? The Fae? That must be it. Going to claim the Rights for yourself, are you? By reason of exalted heritage?”
“Damn it, Rafe, you know that’s not it!”
“Then tell me what it is.”
Jeska said behind them, “He wants everyone to know he’s right. It’s that simple, Rafe. He wants to find the carkenet and crown, with independent witnesses to confirm how and where he found them, and then he wants to hear it proclaimed the length and breadth of Albeyn that he was right.”
“And what does that gain him? Not the money.”
“No.” Jeska kicked at a rock in the road. “I doubt he’s thought it out this far, but what it really gains him is a thousand people at his door, wanting him to find a missing this or long-lost that. Another thousand who want to show him jewelry what’s been in the family forever, with appropriate old stories, and have him say it’s Fae-wrought. The Royal Librarian will want him to rake through every ancient text in the Archives, searching for clues to any other little dibs and daubs nobody’s been able to figure out before. And then there’ll be those who actually do some thinking about it.” He gave Cayden an upslanting smile. “The ones who’ll want to know how you knew, and won’t take scholarship or research for an answer. And then you’ll really be in the shit, won’t you?”
No, he hadn’t thought it out that far.
“Leave them lie, Cade,” Rafe said. “If Alaen or Briuly want to play the bright lad and go looking, fine. Content yourself with good reviews, can’t you?”
He usually had plenty to say about just about anything. He had no reply for this. They returned to the wagon and occupied themselves in individual pursuits—Jeska with totting up his own bank account, Rafe playing cards against himself, and Cade with a book he didn’t read. Mieka was sleeping, or still in a snit pretending to be asleep. It didn’t matter. They were only a few hours from home.
Yet home was not the refuge of solitude, high up in his fifth-floor room, that it had always been. They had exactly four days before they’d start out on the Royal Circuit, and in those four days, there were at least four hundred things to be done.
Packing. Making sure there were withies enough and to spare. Finalizing their portfolio. Playing a last show at the Keymarker before they left Gallantrybanks for the summer. And a long consultation with Lord Kearney Fairwalk in strictest privacy.
He had no intention of leaving before he’d arranged the transfer of his grandfather’s legacy to a new account, nice and legal, with only two people having access to it. Kearney was all agog at his explanation of the bargain he’d made with his mother, but the look Cade gave him when he was about to ask why Lady Jaspiela’s name would not also be on the account guaranteed that the question was not asked. They paid a visit to Kearney’s lawyer, and then to the bank, and all was put in order. Bills for Derien’s school and books and suchlike would be sent to Kearney’s clerks, and anything questionable—payment demands from Lady Jaspiela’s favorite dressmaker, for instance—would be forwarded to Cayden or His Lordship to be approved… or not. The final papers were signed the day before the Royal Circuit started. And, as things had taken a bit longer than anticipated, Cade had Kearney drop him off directly at the Keymarker. He watched the carriage move cautiously down the narrow street, then remembered something and ran after it.
“Did you arrange for horses along the route?” The huge white animals belonging to the Shadowshapers would not be available to Touchstone, for of course the Shadowshapers would be using them all.
“Everything perfectly in order,” His Lordship assured him, leaning out the window of his carriage. “Don’t fret, Cayden, I know what I’m doing!”
“I know, I know—it’s just—”
“You can’t help yourself. You worry about your art, my dear boy, and let me take care of everything else. Hurry, now, or you’ll be late for the performance!”
He wasn’t late, but it was a near thing. Because of their early start on the morrow, the show tonight would be an early one. The placards announcing it read: THE DOORS OPEN AT SIX. THE TROUBLE STARTS AT SEVEN!
“New barmaid,” Mieka commented as they took the stage. “Not their usual. Must be a cousin or something who needs the work.”
Cade glanced over the settling crowd and picked out the new girl at once. The Keymarker had recently decided to specialize in leggy redheads. This girl wore the same black skirt, green blouse, and white apron as all the others, but she was a pocket-sized blond with a thick braid swinging down her back to her waist. As the barmaids finished delivering orders and gathered along the back wall to watch the performance, the new one looked ridiculous amidst all the tall, lissome young women with masses of red hair. Mieka must be right: cousin or niece or friend-of-a-friend needful of a job, or filling in tonight for one of the regular girls.
He did his usual survey of the audience as Rafe and Mieka set up the beginnings of the magic. Nobody here was particularly sensitive, so he relaxed. In spite of what Mistress Mirdley had said about various combinations of bloodlines producing unpredictabilities (such as Cade himself), he tended to agree with Sagemaster Emmot: Whatever magic each of the old races had, each generation saw it diluted just a little more. The play they were doing tonight was a perfect demonstration. “Dwarmy Day” involved a haughty Wizard who refused to pay the bridge passage fee to an understandably irate Troll. The spells they used could still be found in reference books, but nobody Cade had ever heard of could conjure them for real nowadays. Lack of skill, lack of education, or lack of sufficient specific magic?
Traditionally this was a “glisker’s choice” sort of playlet. No group attempted it that did not trust absolutely in its masquer’s ability to improvise. Accordingly, Cade had primed the withies with all sorts of things for Mieka to play with, and Jeska did his partners proud.
The first gambit was a cloud of grayish smoke called by the Troll so that the Wizard couldn’t even see the bridge. Jeska made a great show of coughing and waving his arms about, then took in a huge breath and blew the cloud out over the audience, where it turned to sparkles like glass shards. Triumphant, he spit into his hand. A swirl of moisture rose from his palm and became a rain cloud. It hovered briefly over his head while he grinned—but before he could use it, the Troll’s laughter (Rafe, over at his lectern) boomed through the theater as the cloud burst and the Wizard was drenched in his own spit. The audience chortled—Mieka had evidently decided to save the sensation of being soaked to the skin for the end. Sure enough, he could hear Mieka chuckling to himself as the infuriated Troll finally stomped out from his den beneath the bridge. When the Elf was feeling especially playful, he gave the audience not just the feeling of water but sopped undergarments as well when the Wizard hit the river. Tonight he had the audience squirming.
The play ended, a couple of withies were shattered in midair between Jeska and the glisker’s bench, the applause began, and Cade was about to walk out from behind his lectern to join his partners in their bows when he sensed a snag in the magic. Frowning, he looked immediately to Mieka. If the Elf had been drinking too much again, or pricking some new kind of thorn—
But those changeable eyes were very nearly sober. Not Mieka, then. Cade glanced at Rafe and nearly tripped over his own feet. Calm, laconic Master Fettler Rafcadion Threadchaser was as close to sizzling furious
as Cade had ever seen him.
They bowed, and again, but Rafe didn’t stay for a third. He was down off the stage and striding to the back of the room, where the barmaids had dispersed to refill glasses.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jeska asked.
Mieka raked sweat-damp hair off his face. “Thirsty, mayhap? I know I am!”
Cade’s progress through the crowd was delayed by compliments and backslaps. When he finally found Rafe over near the side door, the fettler was pointing a long finger in the blond barmaid’s face.
“—d’you think you were doing, girl? Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to twiddle about with magic? And don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing, neither!”
“I won’t tell you that because it wouldn’t be true,” she replied coolly. “You know that as well as I do.”
“Then what in the unholy fuck was all that?”
“There’s a girl here tonight who’s barely twelve. Right on the verge of her magic. So she’s a little delicate.”
“Girl? What girl?”
“Her older brother sneaks her in dressed as a boy. Not the first time, probably not the last. I’ve had words with him, but he’s responsible for her—if you can call it that—while their parents are out at work until midnight. He’s sixteen and perfectly besotted for theater, so whenever he can, he slinks into the Keymarker by working an hour or two carrying crates up from the cellar.”
Cade nodded his understanding. “He brings his little sister along with him to sit in a corner out of the way, and when the place starts to fill up, everyone’s too busy to keep an eye on either of them. So he sees a show for free—no, he actually gets paid, doesn’t he, for the work done beforehand? Smart lad! And then he scarpers as quick as may be, to get home before his parents.”