by Melanie Rawn
Something that might have been laughter scraped out of his throat. What had he seen? What hadn’t he seen? What more would his “gift” from the Fae show him?
A challenge. A dare. A taunting to his own mind. He had no illusions that he’d seen the worst that the futures could offer. If there were more horrors in store, he wanted to know them.
And so they came, one after another: Elsewhens, all of them possible, all of them because of his choices, his decisions, crowding into his dazed mind, silent glimpses and sudden visions and long scenes like in a play, weaving in and out of each other as if in competition to find out which could stun him the most. But these were no stage productions, no excursions of imagination and ideas. These were the futures. His futures.
{Mieka looked up, those eyes bewildered, hurt, the eyes of a child betrayed by everyone he had ever trusted.
“How did this happen?” he whispered. “I don’t—I can’t understand how this happened.”
Cade felt his lips move, the vibration of air in his lungs, his throat, heard his own voice say with flawless coldness, “You made it happen.”}
He struggled uselessly against those words. No, it wasn’t you—it was me. My choices. My decisions. My fault—
{Mieka plucked the spectacles off Jeska’s nose and peered through them. “Lord and Lady save us! Why not just strap a pair of bottle bottoms to your face?”
Jeska tossed aside the broadsheet he’d been flipping through. “It may come to that.” He took back the spectacles and tucked them in his pocket. “Please tell me the snow has stopped. Stuck here for two days, and us not on the Winterly these twenty years and more!”
“Up to the eaves by morning, Yazz said.” He sat at the table across from Jeska, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. At a far table in the taproom, Cade and Rafe were playing cards with Yazz, who as usual was winning.
The masquer waited patiently for a few moments, then frowned. “Something wrong?”
“D’you ever—does it worry you? I mean, we been doing this for more’n twenty years now, and—”
“We’re still selling out every show, ain’t we? We still have a good time onstage, Cade’s writing is better than ever—” He broke off. “What’s worrying you?”
“Nothin’. Everything’s fine, nothin’ to worry ab—”
“C’mon. What’s really wrong?” Then, with a frown: “Twenty years—” A tiny smile curved his lips. “Oh, Mieka! You think we’re finally too old to work the stage, don’t you?”
“You ain’t. Nor Cade nor Rafe, neither.” He gulped, then admitted, “It’s me. I’m still quick enough, but what happens when I’m not? If I’m not everything I’ve always been, Cade’s work suffers. And I won’t have that. I just fuckin’ won’t.”
Amusement faded from the beautiful face framed in curls touched here and there with silver. “You really mean it. Have you talked with Cade?”
“Oh, right. That’ll happen.” He hesitated, then rushed on, “Never occurs to him, does it—two hours a night, three if it’s Bewilderland, five nights of eight on a tour like this one—how do I give the audiences everything they came for if I’m not quick like I was at twenty? That’s when we worked out some of these pieces, Jeska—and I ain’t seen ‘twenty’ for over twenty years! The minute I slow down, the minute I’m tired in the middle instead of at the end—that’s the night I’m finished as glisker for Touchstone.”
“Mieka—”
“I don’t give a shit if they start sayin’ the Elf’s getting’ pudgy, getting’ gray, lookin’ his age. I—”
“You don’t. That’s the best part of Elfenblood.”
Mieka brushed that aside. “What I never want to hear ’em say is that I’m not livin’ up to the work anymore.”
“Talk to Cade,” Jeska urged. “He’ll understand.”
Mieka laughed without humor. “He’ll understand that he can’t write what he needs to write, because his glisker’s too old and feeble to perform it.”}
“Shh,” Jinsie was whispering, “calm down, Cayden, it’s all right, everything’s all right—”
Mieka, he tried to say. All that emerged from his throat was a muffled groan. Where’s Mieka—?
{“Where is he?”
The woman shrugged. Then she looked up into his face, his eyes. She took an involuntary step back, made an involuntary glance towards the stairs.
He pushed past her, up the dark stairs, through a double door discreetly labeled DIVERSIONS. The room within was littered with little girls. Little girls in schoolgirl skirts and deep red lip rouge and makeup thick and heavy and black on their eyes. Little girls in miniature silk gowns cut low over flat chests. Little girls in boys’ trousers, corkscrew curls cascading down neatly tailored jackets as they moved about the room with silver trays of prepared thorn. Little girls draped across velvet couches, posing with glasses of wine in one hand and skinny knees poking from between the folds of silken chamber robes.
A burst of raucous laughter directed him to a hall, and a muffled giggling shriek took him to the third door down. Inside, Mieka sprawled naked and fleshy on the bright blue coverlet of a bed hung about with shimmering crystal ropes, as if someone had captured rainbows to drape around the bed. Within reach were bottles, glasses, and three girls. Not little girls, praise all the Angels; these girls were sixteen or seventeen, with breasts and hips.
Those eyes, bleary and hazy, caught sight of him. “Cayden! Do join us, dear boy! These three are mine, but I’m sure we can find a few for you!”}
The horror of it was that in the Elsewhen he was neither sickened nor shocked. This was usual, this evening in a whorehouse, even normal—not just for Mieka, but for him.
He turned his head feebly, saw the penstrokes of silver light from the full moon along the wall. Like a moonglade through the gaps in the shutters, and he grasped desperately at the image, remembering a moonglade Elsewhen where Mieka had been gentle and whimsical and happy, and oh Gods how he wanted that Mieka here beside him now—I’ll make your moonglade for you, just as I promised, I’ll do it, Mieka, I swear I will—
{“You daft little cullion,” Jeska said, reaching across the table to hold tight to Mieka’s shaking hands. “You think you’re the only one scared? I’ll be forty-five next spring, and you needn’t think it’s any easier for me than it is for you. What if my knees crack in the middle of a speech—that’d be good for a laugh, right in the middle of Window-wall! And that’s not even considering my voice. The shouts aren’t as loud, and the whispers get gravelly by the fifth show out of five, and as for everything in between—how do I make Cade’s work everything it should be if I lose the shadings?”
Mieka looked thoroughly ashamed of himself. “Gods, Jeska—I’m sorry. I shoulda realized.”
“None of it’s gonna last forever,” he said softly. “We’re lucky it’s gone on as long as it has. We’re still the greatest players in Albeyn.”
The Elf was silent, staring at his hands, and then said, “I always knew it’d get harder as I got older. I just—I can’t just sit there, that’s not how glisking works. Not mine, anyways. One day I really will be too old, I won’t be quick enough anymore, I won’t be able to last through the whole show—and now here’s Cade talking about adding another sequence to Window-wall and what if I don’t have it in me anymore?”}
“Cade, please! Tell me what’s wrong! Tell me what to do—”
Nothing to be done. Nothing. He had opened himself to the Elsewhens and they were taking him, claiming him, possessing him. And he had invited this. He had dared his own mind to do its worst.
{“Beholden for the invitation,” said Tobalt, bowing the exact degree required by her rank. “Though it wasn’t unexpected.”
“Wasn’t it?” She gestured for the maid to leave them alone in the pretty little parlor, an elegantly feminine room that was obviously hers alone from the flowered carpet on the floor—irises, the purple-blue matching her eyes—to the painted plaster foxes chasing each other above window
s looking out onto the gardens.
“I’ve been waiting to hear from you, in fact. Ever since I announced that we’d be doing chapbooks on Touchstone, one for each of the founding members.”
She smiled. It was a charming smile in a face hardly touched by time and certainly not by trouble. Her second husband had kept her well. “I read the chapbooks about the Shadowshapers. Impressive.”
“Much beholden, Your Ladyship. Of course, I’m intensely interested in anything you want to tell me. May I take notes?” A mere formality, a conventional politeness; she was obviously eager to have her side of the story chronicled.
“Shall I begin at the beginning?” she asked when he was seated.
“Anywhere you like.”
“Then I’d like to start at the end.”
Tobalt glanced up, surprised.
“The night he died, all my fingernails turned black and split down to the quick, and by the next day had fallen off. I don’t know how he managed it, but there was some sort of spiteful spellcasting put upon me, his last bit of cruelty. He always said I had the most beautiful hands.…” She held them out so he could admire them: lovely indeed, slender and graceful, the nails pink and shining. “I wore gloves to the Chapel service, of course. Over the bandages. The bleeding hadn’t stopped.”
“It was surprising,” he said carefully, “your making such a long journey so swiftly to attend. A forgiving gesture.”
“I owed it to my daughter. And to his poor dear mother and twin sister, who always adored me.” She leaned forward and spoke in a low, confiding tone. “Mishia told me later that it broke her heart to see him—her beautiful boy, and he really had been beautiful, you know—covered in thorn-marks, reeking of whiskey, with a pouch of dragon tears almost empty—”
Tobalt said flatly, “He never touched dragon tears.”
“Is that what everyone’s saying?” The suggestion of a smirk twitched her lips. “It was one of those gold velvet bags so familiar to everyone from Alaen Blackpath’s tragedy. The ones people bought at the Finchery.”
“But Mieka knew he was too much Elf, that dragon tears would kill him.”
“I don’t suppose it mattered to him anymore.” A tiny shrug. “They’d been threatening him. Especially Cayden. That if he didn’t stop all the thorn and the alcohol, they’d throw him out and find another glisker. Have you spoken with the others yet? The rest of Touchstone, I mean, and all the other wives?” She gave a little glittering trill of laughter. “I know what that sounds like—as if I still consider myself one of the wives. It’s a thing you never escape. Ask Jeschenar’s first, and second, and third—I’ve forgotten, is he on his fourth or his fifth by now?”
“Fourth,” Tobalt said.
“Well, as I say, ask all the others. And the ‘lightly loved,’ as Cayden so delicately put it in Stolen Torches. One thing I’ll give him, he can be very eloquent about other people’s suffering.”
“You never liked him much, did you?”
“I never really knew him. I only know what my husband was like when he was around Cayden—that’s how the thorn started. He never would have become thornlost if it hadn’t been for Cayden Silversun.”
“I’ve heard it was the other way round. That Mieka introduced Cade to various things. At Cade’s request,” he added.
“And see who’s the only one still here to tell the tale of it!” she replied sharply. Then, recovering herself, she gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I’m sure you’ll be hearing a different version from everyone.” She held out her hands again. “All my fingernails,” she murmured. “I can still remember how much it hurt.”}
“Stop,” he breathed. “No more… no more…”
“I don’t understand. Cade, tell me how to help you!”
There was a sudden rush of cool air into the room as the door opened. Mieka’s voice—oh praise be to all the Old Gods, Mieka’s voice—
“Quill, I’m sorry, you were right, it was stupid—” An abrupt gasp. “Jinsie! What in all Hells—?”
“I don’t know! I heard him from the hall—like a wounded animal—”
Cade watched, wide-eyed and not daring to blink, as Mieka crouched beside the bed. He felt thin, warm fingers holding on to his hand.
{He held gently on to thin, cold fingers, smoothed thick silver hair, tucked it behind delicately pointed ears. “You feel up to it? You’re sure?”
A nod. A suggestion of a smile tugging his lips; a familiar brightness shining in those tired eyes. Still beautiful; still Mieka’s beautiful eyes.
Within a few minutes the chamber was crowded. Jindra nearest the bed, her husband directly behind her—}
“Oh Gods,” Mieka whispered. “How long has he been like this?”
“What’s happening to him? Mieka—”
{Scant weeks after Cade’s Namingday—his fortieth, Gods help him—Mieka escorted Jindra across the sun-soaked river lawn of Wistly Hall and gave her in marriage to her bashfully ecstatic Master Imager. Cade watched, smiling, remembering another wedding long ago in this very spot. Almost everyone who had seen Blye marry Jedris was here today, and dozens more besides. Still, despite constant and dedicated circling amongst the huge crowd of family and friends, Cade was unable to avoid Jindra’s mother.
“Cayden,” she said, and he turned, and there she was. “I don’t need to ask how you’ve been—you look very fine.”
“So do you.” He smiled as sincerely as he could. In her summery green silk gown with a spray of roses pinned to the bodice, she was almost as beautiful as she’d been at sixteen. “I’m glad you could be here. I know it means a lot to Jindra.”
“So do you.”
He cast about for something else to say, something neutral, innocuous, polite, impersonal—
“Years ago,” she said, “I told myself that if I ever saw you again, I’d thank you for letting him go long enough for us to have Jindra—but you never really let him go for an instant, did you?”
“No.”
“And you never will.” Her words were measured, calm. “We would’ve been all right, you know, the two of us. We would’ve gone along in our way. But we never would’ve been happy.” She looked up at him again. “Take care of each other, Cade. I don’t suppose we’ll ever meet again, so I wanted to be sure to say that.”
All he could do was nod. She had been far more generous than he ever could have been—which he knew was quite small-minded of him. After all, he’d won.}
“Quill, look at me. Please. Just look at me.”
“Is he thornlost? Is that what—?”
“Quill, please!”
{The office was familiar: wood furniture and books and framed first pages and various trinkets given by friends. The girl behind the desk was perhaps eighteen, plainly dressed, with ink-stained fingers that tapped the stack of scrawled notes before her.
“How much of it was true, Da?” she asked.
Tobalt paced the cramped office. “There are things I believe—Mieka’s threats to her second husband, for instance, because I’ve seen the constable’s reports and there were quite a few witnesses. But not the dragon tears. I know that for a stone cold fact. He never went anywhere near the stuff. As for her fingernails falling out? Nonsense. A stupid and clumsy lie.”
“How do you know?”
He smiled grimly. “Because it’s an appalling insult, if not actual sacrilege, to wear gloves when the Good Brother or Good Sister clasps hands during a service. I was seated one row back from her, and I saw her take off her black gloves and I didn’t notice a damned thing wrong with her hands. No bleeding, no bruising, no bandages.”
The girl shook her head. “By now she probably thinks she can say anything about him and be believed.”
“She can tell herself she won,” he agreed with a nod. Then, bitterly: “The legend of Mieka Windthistle. There are so many stories, why not add one or two more?”
“This came today from Cayden,” she said, reaching for a folded sheet of paper. “He’ll talk about his wor
k in an interview, if you like, but not about his glisker. Here—” She read aloud. “ ‘My emotions for and about Mieka Windthistle were too complex and too personal to be put on display.’ ”
“That’s Cade,” Tobalt said with decades of resignation. “The only feelings that matter are his, you see.”
“What I can see are the icicles dripping off the page!”
“You noticed the past tense, didn’t you? His emotions for Mieka were. Not are. His mind’s cold, but his heart’s colder.”
“He wasn’t always like that. I remember when I was little, and he’d come round to the house for dinner—Da, he wasn’t always like that.”
“No.” He hesitated, then said, “About ten years ago, when he was still pricking dragon tears, he told me that sometimes in the morning just before he opens his eyes, for just a moment Mieka Windthistle is alive and the world is wonderful.”
“And then he wakes.”
“Yeh. When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”}
Warm fingers stroked his hair. He couldn’t see Mieka’s face but he could hear terror shaking his voice as he said, “Quill, it’s all right, I’m here. You’re safe.”
Don’t leave me, he wanted to say. Please, Mieka, please don’t ever leave me—
{—Jindra and her husband, their girls, their husbands. Blye and Jed and all the brothers and sisters, Rafe and Crisiant, Jeska and Kazie. Mistress Mirdley was outside in the garden, taking care of the great-grandchildren. Cade could hear their games through the window open to the warm summer air, and the sounds of life and laughter were the best sounds in the world, especially today.
He knew it would be today. In the scant fortnight since Mieka’s Namingday, there had been unmistakable changes. It would be today. He needed no Elsewhen to tell him it would be today.
He felt thin little fingers move restlessly in his palm. “What is it, Mieka?”
“How…” He tried to sit a little higher against the pillows, but there was no strength left in him. Those eyes looked in bewilderment at all the people gathered in the room. “How’d all this happen?”