Thornlost (Book 3)

by Melanie Rawn

  Damn it to all Hells!” Mieka whined on their walk back. “The paving’s hot enough to burn holes in me feet!”

  “Should’ve thought of that, shouldn’t you?” Cade asked with no sympathy whatsoever. The sunshine was in full spate by now; they’d stuck to the shady sides of the streets on the walk here, but now there were no shady sides. He just hoped the magic lasted long enough to get Mieka upstairs at Croodle’s. “You lied.”

  “I’m known to do that, on occasion.”

  “About the withie.”

  “Among other things.”

  “Cousin Miekanna?” Cade asked pointedly.

  “Miekella,” he corrected. “I only lied that she looks like me. I’m much prettier.”

  He kept his gaze on the paving stones directly in front of him, as if he might be able to judge which would be cooler than the rest. The absurdity of his little jumps from one to another was getting him stared at by passers-by. Cade told himself he ought to be grateful they weren’t staring at him for other reasons.

  “And you don’t want to meet her, believe me,” Mieka went on. “Dreadful creature. She lives at the Clink now, with Granny Tightfist and Uncle Breedbate.” All at once he gave an exclamation of delight and jumped into the gutter, feet splashing. “Ooh, that’s much better!”

  Cade glanced up ahead of them and finally broke down laughing. Mieka looked up and wailed aloud. The small gutter river was the accomplishment of a fat gray horse who, by the looks of the production, hadn’t taken a piss in at least three days.

  13

  Just this one last show in Lilyleaf, Cade told himself, just another few hours to get through, and he could laugh himself silly all the way to Castle Biding. He had not the slightest confidence, however, that he or Jeska or Rafe would be able to get through tonight without collapsing every time they even glanced at Mieka. Throughout the afternoon somebody broke into sniggers every few minutes, and on the walk over to the Baths for the performance, Mieka made them laugh apurpose when he slunk along the sides of the buildings as far away from the gutters as possible.

  They were still grinning when they took the stage.

  All humor was gone by the end of the first two minutes of “Dragon.”

  Someone was mucking up their magic again. Cade sensed it, knew Rafe and Mieka and Jeska did, too, and fought it to the final lines.

  A few nights ago, the muting of the magic had been general, spreading over the whole audience. That time at the Keymarker, when Megs had been protecting the young girl (or so she’d said), the obstruction had been specifically localized. This leaped all over the theater, from group to group with no anticipating where it would be next. The audience saw the Dragon spread its great wings, smelled its fetid breath; heard the rasp of the Prince’s labored breathing, tasted the copper of blood and fear on his tongue, felt the heft of the sword in his hand—all these things were as usual. But the effects were deadened by that leaping, infuriating barrier.

  Cade called up everything his grandfather had ever told him about fettling, everything he’d observed Rafe do over the years, everything he’d ever read about technique. He kept seeking the source of the obstruction, trying to track it back from the area it affected to its origin, and could not. What he found he could do, after a while, was to scare it off, pitting his own magic against it, projecting strength and a lethal threat. It would falter, then vanish, only to rise in another part of the theater. Cade began to be distracted by fear that Rafe and Mieka, frustrated and angered, might pour more emotion into the piece and concentrate it more keenly to get past that infuriatingly skipping barrier, and overwhelm the audience to its peril and their own exhaustion. Still, as furious as both of them were, they were professionals. They had to get through the play, and somehow they did.

  And although they were wrung out by the futile effort to find and negate the muffling magic, they agreed backstage amongst themselves that they owed the audience one more playlet. Nobody would be expecting it, so there was a good chance that whoever had set up the strange, frustrating barrier had left the theater. So had a goodly number of other patrons. A little over half of them lingered, complaining about Touchstone’s undeserved reputation or arguing that they’d been superb the other night and this was just a fluke, everyone had off days.

  When the manager stepped onstage to announce a second play, there was applause, of course. The theater had been packed to bursting, patrons doubtless drawn by the glowing review in that morning’s Lilyleaves. Those who had stayed were getting twice the value for their money—although many of them would have said they’d not yet got much for their money at all. So there was also jeering, and Cade flinched when he heard it.

  “We’ll have to give them ‘Doorways,’ ” he said. He expected groans of dismay; what he got were curt nods. “And if any of you sense anything, anything at all, we stop right in the middle of whatever it is and—”

  “—and demand to know who’s trying to fuck with us?” Rafe shook his head. “No weakness, Cade. We do it. Whatever happens.”

  At the glisker’s bench, Mieka had selected the withies for him. “I need whatever you can give me,” he said quietly, those eyes narrowed and furious and grimly determined. “We can sleep it off all the way to Castle Biding if needs must. But it has to be a spectacle, with all the flash we’ve got, and powerful enough to overwhelm the bastard if he’s still out there.”

  “Do it fast,” Jeska put in nervously. “He might’ve gone, then heard we’re doing another play, and be coming back.”

  So Cade primed the withies as quickly as he could, and with more than he’d thought he had in him. He’d never been so tired in his life as he was when he trudged back to his lectern. If Mieka had brought his thorn-roll to the theater, they could have pricked some bluethorn and got through this. Where Rafe and Mieka and Jeska would dredge up the energy for this without thorn, he’d no idea. He only knew—they all knew—that it had to be done.

  The Sleeper began to dream. The doors lay before him. He opened some, backed away from others. Scenes of home, family, richly ripe fields; despair, degradation; idleness and apathy; accomplishment and wealth and fame. All the effects were there. The tastes and scents of fresh bread and butter, of sour wine, of flowers and rotting fruit and spring air. The feel of rough sacking, smooth silk; the sounds of lutes and Minster bells and maddened dogs and happy laughter and terrified screams. And the emotions: smug satisfaction, colossal boredom, elated triumph, drunken befuddlement, quiet pleasure—with an undercurrent of dissatisfaction beneath it all, until the last door opened and Jeska spoke the final line, and vanished into This life, and none other.

  The audience got what they came for. The volume of the applause was all out of proportion to the number of people still in the theater. No one had attempted to dampen down the magic. The intensity of what Cade had put into the withies, and that Mieka had extracted to make the scenes within the open doors, Rafe had tempered and adjusted to spread evenly throughout the hall without hindrance. There’d been more anger than usual in the mix, and mayhap the images had not been so precisely detailed, but there’d been no snags. They were Touchstone, and by the time they walked offstage, every man in the place knew it.

  Jeska took care of them on the way back to Croodle’s. He steadied them when their steps faltered, hired a couple of lads to carry the glass baskets and withies, demanded a pair of hire-hacks to convey them all, yelled for Croodle and Kazie to help them upstairs.

  “What about you, then?” Cade heard Kazie ask worriedly.

  “I’m fine. Not much for me to do in ‘Doorways’ except remember the lines. They did all the work.”

  That wasn’t strictly true. Tonight Jeska had added what Elfen magic he possessed, and edited the play as it had progressed to shorten it as much as he could without damage. He’d run the show tonight, with Mieka and Rafe taking their cues from him rather than the other way round, as was usual with “Doorways.” Cade kept putting one foot in front of the other up the stairs, one arm arou
nd Mieka’s ribs and the other draped across Croodle’s strong shoulders, mindlessly grateful for a masquer who was a true artist and an even truer friend.

  He fell across his bed and felt somebody haul off his boots. Croodle said something about food. The mere mention of eating made his stomach heave.

  He must have groaned, or maybe whimpered, for Jeska said hastily, “Not just now. In the morning, maybe.”

  “You have a good long lie-in,” Kazie advised. “We’ll keep the place closed until noon.”

  “But—”

  Croodle interrupted him. “You boys will be needing the quiet more than I’ll be needing the morning drunks.”

  Cade tried to rouse himself enough to express his appreciation for this generosity. All he managed to do was get his eyes open. Standing there, arm in arm, were Jeska and Kazie. They made a striking couple, his limpid-eyed golden good looks the perfect contrast and complement to her darkly exotic beauty. There was a steadiness about them, somehow, a feeling of stable ground underfoot. He’d never seen this expression on Jeska’s face before, and all at once he envied it ferociously.

  Stability? In the life of a traveling player? Gods and Angels, he must be getting old.

  As his eyelids slid shut and he plummeted into sleep, he tried to understand how a day that had been so much fun at noon could become such a nightmare by midnight. This life, and none other… He grimaced, thinking what a Hell this life could sometimes be.

  * * *

  Cade went to sleep exhausted and woke up angry. So did his partners. It wasn’t quite noon when they met downstairs for something to eat before piling into the wagon for the journey to Castle Biding. Cade forced himself to make the usual polite farewells, to which Croodle merely arched a brow before giving him a hug that nearly snapped his backbone.

  “You stay safe,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ll get word to you if anyone else has to go through what you boys did.”

  It was the first time it had occurred to him that whoever this was, he might have other quarry in mind besides Touchstone. Mulling this over took him out into the courtyard and into the wagon. He glanced out one of the windows in time to see Jeska kiss Kazie in full view of anyone who cared to watch. She was wearing the green scarf he’d lent Cade at Coldkettle.

  “Serious, then,” Rafe murmured beside him.

  “Looks to be.”

  “We’ve a spare chamber over the bakery,” he said enigmatically. “Or there’s always room somewhere at Wistly.”

  Cade frowned at him. “Jeska has his own place now, so she can—oh,” he finished lamely, as it finally struck him that this was not one of the masquer’s many dalliances. If Kazie came to visit in Gallantrybanks this winter, it would all be proper and respectable. Because it was serious. Memory of how Jeska had looked last night confirmed it.

  Mieka climbed up the wagon steps, moving as if he were older than his great-great-grandmother. Hefting a huge basket into a corner, he said, “Lunching,” hooked up his hammock, crawled into it, and curled up to sleep.

  As urgently as Cayden wanted to discuss what had happened, he didn’t begrudge Mieka the rest. Yazz had scarcely got the wagon moving when Jeska and then Rafe follow the Elf’s example. Cade made himself comfortable in one of the cushioned chairs, but did not sleep. Because of their late start today, they’d have to travel relentlessly in order to reach Castle Biding in time for the Summer Fair. The horses were fresh, but Yazz would never overstrain them; they’d arrive at Castle Biding when they arrived at Castle Biding, and there was an end to it. For himself, Cade was still so weary and empty that he didn’t much care if he ever stood on a stage again, though he knew that this feeling would pass. What would not go away was the need to figure out who was doing this to them, and why.

  It was midafternoon when Mieka rolled over in his hammock, squinted at Cade, and said, “Stop all that bloody thinking and get some sleep.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I know. Try anyways.”

  He smiled, and shrugged, and said, “Maybe in a while.”

  With a grunt of disgust, Mieka extricated himself from the hammock and went to the washstand to pour out some fresh water into the glass bowl and splash his face. “It’s too hot in here. Let’s walk for a bit.”

  The wagon wasn’t moving quickly enough to make it difficult to jump down from the back door. Cade jogged forward to alert Yazz that they’d be on foot for a while so he could keep on giving the horses a breather; the Giant nodded acknowledgment and returned his attention to driving.

  “Somebody’s out to get us,” Mieka said without preamble.

  “Mayhap not just us.” Cade told him what Croodle had said, and added, “But when you put it alongside the peacock feather, I tend to doubt it’s anybody but us they’re after.”

  “Still think it traces back to the Archduke?”

  “He doesn’t much like us, for several reasons. We turned him down about the theater, we used words in ‘Treasure’ that were the same as condemned his father—”

  “We spoiled his plan to take Blye’s glassworks,” Mieka reminded him.

  “I’d almost forgotten about that.”

  “Jed wrote,” he said, scuffing dust up from the road with the toe of one boot. “The Glasscrafters Guild came round again, checking the stock to be sure Blye’s not making anything hollow. ’Twas a bit of a rush-about, hiding the withies and such—did you hear she’s making them for Hawk’s Claw now, too? I don’t know any of them much, but Chat vouches for their glisker.”

  “Good enough for Blye, good enough for me,” Cade said, reminding himself to learn as much as he could about Hawk’s Claw anyway. Just in case.

  “The Guild didn’t find anything. Problem is, come Wintering tax time, she’ll have to explain how she makes the money she makes without making things she’s not s’posed to be making.”

  Cade nodded slowly. That first Wintering after her father’s death, Touchstone had been Blye’s partner in the glassworks and shared payment of the taxes. Their wedding present to her and Jedris had been the majority of their shares in the business. Kearney Fairwalk’s clerks had managed to trick up the books, first to hide that Touchstone took its share of profits in illegally made withies, and then regarding the transfer of ownership and the value of the business.

  “We still have an interest in the glassworks, all of us,” he mused. “Kearney’s people can play around with the numbers, like they’ve been doing.”

  “If the Archduke is behind it,” Mieka warned, “then backspanging the accounts, no matter how clever they do it, won’t put them off. And Chat mentioned that there’s been a bit of talk about where they’re getting their withies, now that they don’t use Master Splithook anymore.”

  “Well, as long as nobody finds out she makes them—”

  “You’re not listening. Jed’s pretty well certain they’ll demand a look at her books. At the very least, there’d be a fine.”

  “We’ll pay it.”

  “At the very worst, she could lose the place.”

  They walked for a time in silence. Then Cade asked, “Why are you telling me this now? How long have you known?”

  “Forgot to read the letter,” Mieka admitted. “I only remembered it when I was looking for clean stockings yesterday.” There was a brief reminiscent flash of a smile.

  Cade snorted a laugh. “They’ll never be the same.”

  “Chucked ’em, in fact. Total loss. But that’s when I found Jed’s letter.” He sprang ahead a few steps, turning to walk backwards as he talked, but the usual energy was missing. “It’d been such a good day, all in all, y’see. Everybody laughing…” He sighed. “I didn’t want to spoil it.”

  “No, other people are perfectly capable of doing that. But why mention the letter now?”

  “Because we can’t do sweet fuck-all about whoever’s trying to ruin us. Blye’s problem is something we can solve. And not just for this year, but all the years to follow.”

  “I’m not understandi
ng you,” Cade complained. “What could we possibly—besides Kearney’s clerks, I mean, there’s nothing—”

  Mieka had tilted his head to one side, a little grin playing about his lips. Those eyes were suddenly dancing with mischief.

  “What?” Cade demanded.

  “The Princess is having a baby.”

  “And?”

  “The baby needs a present.”

  * * *

  Mieka spent the whole evening composing a letter to his brother by lamplight in the wagon, pausing to think every so often while chewing on the end of Cade’s pen. Cade didn’t admonish him. If what he was scheming up helped Blye, he could chew the pen to splinters for all Cade cared. Besides, it was only something his parents had given him, and easily replaced.

  Meantime, Rafe and Jeska discussed with Cade what they had done last night and how they could do it better if it ever happened again, which none of them doubted it would do. When Mieka finally finished his letter and joined in, he had a further suggestion.

  “This winter, on the nights we’re not playing, I’ll make the rounds of the taverns.”

  “How is this different from your usual nights off?” Rafe asked.

  “Snarge! I was thinking that after the amateurs finish, I can buy them a drink, like, and move the talk round to fettlers needing work.”

  “Ah,” Cade said. “So you were listening to what Tegs said.”

  “Megs,” Rafe corrected. “And how are they to know that Touchstone isn’t looking for a new fettler?”

  “Hmm.” Mieka considered. “Hadn’t thought about that. But you’ll admit that once word goes round regarding what’s been happening, they’ll all be thinking that a new fettler isn’t such a bad idea—” He cringed back, laughing, as Rafe lifted a threatening fist. “Joking! Joking! You can come along with, and make sure nobody thinks any such thing!”

  Rafe made a face at him. “Actually, it might be a good idea to hint that you are looking for a new fettler. If the purpose behind this is to put us all wrong-footed, then a rumor here and there would get back to—”