by Melanie Rawn
“The Archduke,” Cade said.
“We don’t know that for sure. But whoever it is would be pleased to think it’s all working.” He paused for a sip of his drink. “What about that lad with the peacock feather at Seekhaven?”
Mieka shook his head. “Masquer. And before you ask, the fettler went back to his ancestral pigsty north of Scatterseed a year or so ago when his father died.”
“Ask around anyway,” Cade said. He swirled liquor in his glass, staring at the last swallow and wishing there were enough left in the decanter to pour another. It had become their custom to save Auntie Brishen’s whiskey for late evening before they went to bed, and Yazz carefully siphoned out sufficient for two glasses each so the barrel would last. “Why does the Archduke want us ruined?” he asked suddenly. “Spite?”
“He wanted to own our glasscrafter,” Rafe mused, “and then he wanted to own us. I know what Chat says about great lords on the Continent buying their own pet players—”
“If you can call them players,” Jeska scoffed, “with no magic to their work.”
“—but there’s plenty of others to choose from. And it seems a thin reason, doesn’t it? Hacked off just because he can’t get the group he wants?”
“The Shadowshapers turned him down as well,” Cade said. “But I’ll take oath on it, Black Lightning will have accepted.”
“So why haven’t there been any rumors about the Shadowshapers? I can answer it,” Rafe went on. “They’re the best in the Kingdom—yeh, Mieka, even better than us, and everybody knows it. If they suddenly started snagging up their magic, nobody’d believe it. Nobody’d dare mess with them.”
“Then it comes back to Why us?” Cade said. But he knew. He knew.
“We could always ask him,” Rafe drawled.
“You do that, old son,” Cade told him. “You spend the next few nights working out just how to gain admittance to the hallowed Halls of Threne. It’s off the road to Stiddolfe, I’m sure we can make time for it, and he’s probably at home enjoying the glories of summer and his new wife. You can also decide how you’ll be persuading your way past the guards to the presence of Himself. And then when you settle on just what words to use, you can figure out how you plan to escape with a whole skin.” He tossed back the remains of his drink and stood, swaying slightly with the movement of the wagon. “And after you’ve made up your mind about all of that, you can tell us what we’re to say to your lady wife when we bring you home in more pieces than are generally recommended for survival. Yeh, you enjoy yourself working all that out. Me, I’m for some sleep.”
He had hooked up his hammock and was arranging the thin mattress atop it before Mieka broke the silence. “Eloquent, that’s our Quill. Sweet dreamings, all—though I dare you, after that little recital.”
“What’re you snarking about?” Rafe muttered. “I’m the one he just dismembered into component parts.”
* * *
The performances at the Castle Biding Summer Fair were maddening. Not that anyone interfered, not once during the five shows. It was the grinding dread of interference that sharpened their tempers and wore them out. Cade had learned on Touchstone’s two Winterly Circuits that towards the end, a kind of undercurrent of exhaustion dragged at them constantly, but surely he was much too young at twenty-one to feel this bloody tired all the time.
Bluethorn, as ever, helped.
Once again their schedule overlapped that of the Shadowshapers by a day, and Cade made no excuses for dragging Vered off for a private talk once the Shadowshapers’ performance had, as always, been applauded to the open skies. As at Coldkettle, the venue was outdoors. The stage had been set up in a corner of the fair’s sprawl. Ordinarily Cade would have looked forward to the opportunity to expand beyond the confines of a theater or guild hall. All he could manage was an inner wince for how weary he would be after priming the withies with magic enough for the extravagances the audiences would expect. “Dragon” would do very well here.
“What’s been, Cade?” Vered asked pleasantly enough as he was pulled along a torchlit path through booths shut up for the night. “Where are we off to? Have you discovered where they’re keeping the naked dancing girls this year?”
That such entertainment existed at all, outside some exceedingly rough taverns and a few exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in Gallantrybanks, was a surprise to him. But then, he’d only ever been at Castle Biding during the winter, when it was a bit chilly for that sort of thing. “If that’s what you’re after, talk to Mieka. He’s got an instinct for finding the prettiest girls within ten miles.”
“I thought that was Jeska.”
“The girls find him. No, I want to talk of the Knights you want to write about.”
He told it succinctly, not mentioning his source. Or, rather, his sources, plural; no need to let Vered in on the secret of his Elsewhens. When he’d finished, Vered sighed gustily.
“So the Knights were real, and it happened.” His long white-blond hair was almost luminous in the darkness. “Beholden, Cade. You’ve given me a lot to work from.”
“You have to keep it close,” Cade warned. “I’ll lend you all the books you like, but don’t go near the Archives. And especially don’t ask to search the library at the Halls of Threne or the Archduke’s city residence. He can’t know what you’re up to until you present it onstage.”
“Like you with ‘The Treasure,’ eh?” Vered chuckled. “But if I’m to compete with such distinguished historical precision—” He broke off when Cade didn’t laugh. “You’re serious.”
“Dead serious. And don’t ever come to any of our rehearsals. All my books are at Redpebble Square, you can get them and return them from there—I know, I know!” he cried, frustrated. “It sounds completely mad. But it’s just as mad that somebody’s been messing us up while we’re onstage—”
“Messing you up? How?”
Cade explained that, too, and why he suspected that the Archduke was behind it—well, some of why he suspected it, anyway.
Vered said nothing for a time. They had walked deep into the deserted fair, where torches were few and far between. Up ahead, Cade could just make out placards nailed to a booth: Touchstone, half-covering the Shadowshapers, with a wedge of the Crystal Sparks peeking out beneath.
“When I was starting out,” Vered said at last, “before Chat came along, even before I met Rauel and Sakary, we were playing one night in a village outside Clackerly, a tavern I wouldn’t send my precious old father to have a pint in—and he’s the one what stranded Mum without a clipped copper pennypiece before I was even born, so you can guess just how precious I hold him. I was doubling up, tregetour and masquer, just like now, only it was because our masquer had got himself into a right brawl and while his bones were mending… well, it was me priming the withies and acting the plays for a fortnight. So at first I thought I was just awearied. But what I’d put into the withies—costume and scene and such—I could feel it wasn’t coming out quite rightly. Some rude old so-called comedy, it was, and me capering about stage front, speaking lines to the audience while things went on behind me. They laughed, to be sure, but as I say, it didn’t feel right. I turned for a look—and instead of the pretty girl in a blue silk gown s’posed to be preening behind me, there was this horrible drazel-woman with a face on her that’d terrify small children and large dogs, and a green velvet hat sprouting three tattered feathers that the swan who’d grown them would be ashamed to admit. The fettler lost his hold on the magic, the glisker simply gave up, and everything just sputtered to a stop while I stood there all flummoxed. Then this farmer-type gets up from his chair, right at the front, and bows, slaps down his tankard, and betakes himself off out the door with everybody cheering. The innkeeper told me later that the fetching little charmer conjured up onstage was the image of the man’s wife, who’d died the week before, communally reviled, and this was his manner of bidding final farewell.”
Cade had run out of patience about halfway through this story, b
ut was hiding it as best he could. This was Vered Goldbraider of the Shadowshapers; one didn’t interrupt Vered Goldbraider in the middle of a story, no matter how little that story had to do with anything relevant to the topic at hand.
But even in the dark and off a stage, Vered could sense the mood of his audience. “Now, you’re asking yourself, ‘Why the fuck is he telling me this boring old fable?’ The point, mate, is that there are people out there who can mess with your magic whether you will or no. Most of ’em refrain. They’re not professionals, and they know it, and when they come to a tavern or theater, they’ve come for the show just like anybody else. This particular yobbo, he did it apurpose. Who knows where he got the magic from, or what he did with it—probably nothing, not in everyday life, though in his younger day he might’ve been an amateur player of some sort. There’s hundreds like him. But it’s like when you sing along under your breath whilst a minstrel’s playing—there’s people as don’t realize they’re doing it until somebody gives ’em an elbow and says ‘Shut it!’ So it’s possible that somebody in your audience was like that, using fettling magic without the full knowing of it.”
“No,” Cade said firmly. “This was too definite. Too deliberate.”
“All right, then. That’s why I told that story. Clear in your own mind now, yeh? There’s more to the tale, though. Whilst I was staring like a fool, I got a taste of the magic he was using. Bitter, it was, and sharp like an unripe plum.”
“Magic has a taste to you?” Cade asked, bemused. He’d recognized Mieka’s magic on their little foray to the Lilyleaves offices, but he’d thought it was because he was so used to working with the Elf.
“Sakary will tell you that we couldn’t work that well with Mieka because nobody can control him—nobody except Rafe, evidently. But you ask a little deeper, and he’ll admit that the taste of it wasn’t right for us. Rauel, he describes it in sounds, how things are in tune or not in tune. Can’t understand that, meself, because I’m like Sakary that way, I s’pose. I taste other people’s magic.”
All Cade could say was, “How?”
“What got taught in this swagger-and-strut Academy of yours, eh?” He nudged Cade with a shoulder. “How you do it—you just know. It might be that we all perceive it different, but the fact of it is that with some practice, you can identify the person using the magic.” He paused, taking Cade by the arm and turning him so he could peer into his face. “You didn’t know? Nobody ever told you this?”
Cade shook his head. Then, in a rush: “That first night Mieka played with us—Rafe said that he just fit.”
“Maybe he understands it in shapes. There’s them as knows it by the feel—rough, smooth, silk, wool carpet—and I know a girl who describes it as temperatures. She and me, we do conjure up some heat,” he added with a self-satisfied sigh.
Uninterested in tales of conquest, Cade said, “What’s mine like?”
“Not a clue.”
“But you’ve been to our shows!”
“Have I? Hmm. Don’t really recall.”
Outrage competed with sudden panic. The Shadowshapers had never seen Touchstone onstage? It was a warning about the abrasion of his nerves that it took him a moment to hear the wicked grin in the man’s voice. And, too, the stupidity of thinking that the Shadowshapers hadn’t seen them perform many, many times: Touchstone was, after all, the Shadowshapers’ only real rival, and the Shadowshapers knew it. Grateful for the darkness that he fervently hoped had hidden his reaction, Cade managed a casual, “Well, then, you must stay another day and watch us tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll learn something.”
“Winding you up is a lot of fun—no wonder Mieka enjoys it so much!” Then his voice changed, and he said seriously, “Understand, Cade, it’s your magic inside withies used by Mieka and adjusted by Rafe. I don’t know the taste of your magic, because it’s never just your magic, if you follow. I’d recognize Mieka’s. I worked with him once. See?”
“Yeh. Were you at Black Lightning’s Seekhaven show? Did you sense what they were doing?”
“No, and no. Heard about the play, but—”
“They’ve got some way to direct specific magic at people. Whether you’re a Wizard or Elf or Goblin or whatever—” He explained how, at the climax of the piece, everyone in the audience who had a glimmering of anything but Wizard or Elf had felt dirty and ashamed.
“Gods damn,” Vered breathed when he’d finished. Then, seeming to shake himself, he continued briskly, “You know what comes next, don’t you?”
“Next?” Cade felt stupid. Vered was one of the few people who could do that to him. Their minds worked differently, even though they were both tregetours; Cade often had the sensation that Vered was at least one step ahead of him, sometimes half a dozen. He’d never liked it much.
“Pinpointing what someone is, through magic—next comes magic directed right at those aspects of each man.”
Belatedly, Cade caught him up. “If somebody’s part Goblin, magic specific to Goblins can—do what?”
“Whatever. Give him a thirst for more beer, drive him gibbering into the night, make him piss himself in public. And it would be only those with a particular sort of background, y’see. Magic directed at specific—”
Cade interrupted. “Can you tell what someone is by the taste of their magic?”
“Not generally. Sometimes.”
“Teach me how.”
Vered laughed, startlingly loud in the darkness. “Are you always this gracious? D’you show your partners this level of refined manners? And you a sprig of the nobility!”
“Please,” he added, face burning with mortification.
“Teach you how to do it, add something new to your stash of tricks and skills—and you our biggest rival.” He snorted.
Cade ought to have preened himself over this open admission. He couldn’t be bothered right now. “I have to know. I have to find out who’s doing this to us.” Calming himself, he glanced sidelong at the white-headed shadow that was Vered. “Teach me how, or no books.”
“You already agreed—”
“And you said you’d owe me. Well, this is how you pay me back.”
“What’ll you do if you find the cullion and put a name to him?”
“Ask who he’s working for.”
“And then beat the shit out of him. All right, when we’re back in Gallybanks, I’ll have a go at showing you how to identify somebody else’s magic. But you may sense it different-wise than me, y’know.”
“Doesn’t matter. I just need to know how to do it.”
“Some people can’t. Chat, f’r instance. You might not be able to, either.”
“If not me, then Rafe or Jeska or Mieka.” But he was sure he could do it. He’d learned how to do so much—and abruptly he wondered why Sagemaster Emmot had never taught him how to do this. How to recognize an individual by his magic.
And then he wondered what else Emmot had never taught him.
He’d learned so much at the Sagemaster’s Academy. How to work spells appropriate to his gifts as Wizard and Elf. How to survive and organize the Elsewhens. How to structure a play, words and magic both, even going so far as to hire a retired tregetour for a few months to teach him the formalities and the techniques. How to ride a horse and flourish a cloak and prime a withie and the basics of glisking and which fork to use with the fish. But not this.
“I’ll learn,” he said. “I will learn.”
14
Only he didn’t learn.
To him, a specific individual’s magic had no distinguishing taste, color, shape, smell, temperature, texture, noise, or other characteristic of any kind. It simply was. He knew Mieka’s magic, and Rafe’s, and probably Jeska’s (though he’d never actually thought about it and Jeska didn’t use his own magic all that often). After an aggravating morning in his company, he knew Vered Goldbraider’s. But he couldn’t have said exactly how he knew, except for the fact that he did know. This was an offense to a mind that had been taught to anal
yze and categorize.
Mieka had said during the first week or so of their acquaintance that he and Cade saw magic in the same colors, and that would make organizing the withies easy. Evidently, Cade told himself in frustration, he saw magic itself in colors but couldn’t apply the theory to an individual’s magic.
“Instinct, mate,” was Vered’s conclusion. “Beholden for the books.”
Would he recognize the source of the hindering magic if it happened again? He had no means of knowing. The muffling barrier had not made an appearance since Lilyleaf. Which was just as well, because the rest of the Royal Circuit had been a soggy, rain-soaked wretchedness, except for the second night at the University in Stiddolfe when a cluster of admiring students took him out for a drink following the show. After the first few beers, it seemed that he had expounded on a variety of topics in a manner suited to a hundred-year-old retired tregetour lecturing aspiring stagecrafters and playwrights. The resulting article in the next day’s University broadsheet ran to four solid pages, and had Mieka in whoops of laughter.
Cade admitted, privately and ruefully, that it was good to have something to laugh about again, even if it was himself for being pompous. After Lilyleaf, and the subsequent tensions of every performance for the rest of the circuit, grins were few and far between.
For one thing, it rained. Nothing torrential, just slow, steady, monotonous, incessant rain that revealed the wagon roof to be not quite watertight. The drip-drip-drop-oh-Gods-damn-it! was maddening. Every so often Yazz rerigged some sort of covering that kept out most of the water, wrapped himself in a hooded cloak that could have served as a mainsail on the average cargo ship, hunkered down, and drove.
For another thing, Mieka became nauseatingly sentimental when they got to Frimham. If he had roamed the byways of the Castle Biding Summer Fair to revisit the exact spot where he first clapped eyes on his wife, Cade knew nothing of it. But in this town of his courtship, he was forever wandering off to some spot that held special memories, returning just in time for their shows with a sighing slump of an attitude that really was most annoying. Rafe finally snarled at him about it. Mieka’s reply was another sigh, and then a momentary kindling of those eyes as he replied, “You just wait. We still owe you about the towels.”