by Melanie Rawn
Cade smiled. “Oh, Elfling, didn’t you know? You made it happen.”}
“Go away, Jinsie. Go away!”
“Not until you tell me—”
{“Tell me, Cayden,” said his mother, “are you truly so blind?”
He waited her out.
“It’s only that I don’t want to see you hurt.”
When had she ever worried about his hurts? “What do you mean?”
“When he moves on. And he will, you know. Elves are notoriously capricious. He’s worse than most. Everything you’ve built in the last few years, your career, your ambitions, your art—” She bit off the word as if it had a rancid taste in her mouth. “You’ve come to depend on him and I’m only saying—we’ve had our differences, you and I, but I never thought you could be such a fool as to depend on that vile little Elf!”
Although he was aware that Mieka had forfeited all Lady Jaspiela’s goodwill, he hadn’t expected this intensity of venom.
She had control of herself again. “You’re of age, and how you live your life is beyond my influence. But no matter how little you care what I think, I don’t want to see you break your heart over this Elf when he leaves Touchstone. And he will leave. Mark me on this.”
“He has a name. Mieka Windthistle. Even if you won’t say it anymore, you’d best get used to hearing it said in the same breath with my name for the rest of your life.”
“His name is rather the point. You’ll no more be able to hold on to him than you could the wind.”}
“No,” Cade breathed. “No more… please…”
“Quill, I’m here, it’s all right—you’re safe—”
{Jeska looked up at him with weary compassion, and even wearier sorrow. “You just threw him away with both hands.”
Nonsense. Mieka had been throwing his own life away for years. Cade had given up trying to hold on to him. He didn’t want to feel this much. He couldn’t feel this much; it would kill him. Mieka had always made him feel too much. Care too much. It wasn’t wise, it wasn’t safe, that sort of feeling.
He’d tried for so long to hold on with one hand and let go with the other. Mieka’s life wasn’t his to live. The decisions, the choices—they weren’t his to make. If Mieka had made all the wrong ones, that wasn’t Cade’s fault. He refused to be responsible. He refused to hang on with both hands. It would hurt too much.
Could that be any worse than the pain that stalked him now, waiting for an unguarded moment?
Well, it was simple enough. There would be no unguarded moments. He would feel nothing. He would keep himself to himself, and to Hells with everything and everybody else.
He still had his work.
The work was all that mattered. The work was all he had.}
“Mieka, what’s happening to him?”
“Nothing,” her brother retorted in a voice that shook. “Bad dreams.”
How noble of him to keep the secret of the Elsewhens. A little late, but perhaps it was churlish of Cayden to make note of that. Obviously Mieka wasn’t drunk or thorned enough to blither on without caution.
That would change. “You made it happen.” Nothing anyone else did would make a difference.
Cade opened his eyes. His heart was slowing from its frantic pounding. He felt cold with more than the sweat drying chill on his skin. “Oh, come on, Mieka,” he said quite clearly. “Why not tell her?”
“Quill!” He smiled, relief shining from those eyes. “You’re back. It’s all right, it’s gone now—” But he faltered to a stop, confused.
Cade twisted his fingers away from Mieka’s. “You told your wife. Why not your sister? Tell everyone. What does it matter?”
Mieka recoiled, caught his breath, lost his balance. “No—I didn’t—” he breathed. “I couldn’t have—”
“But you did.” He curved his lips into something resembling a smile. “I didn’t see you do it, but I saw what resulted. He knows, Mieka. The Archduke knows. You were drunk and you told her, she told her mother, and her mother told him.”
“Cade—no—”
“Yes. You told her. He knows.” He supposed he ought to feel sorry for the Elf, sitting there on the rug with his jaw hanging open and horror in those eyes. Gods, those eyes: muddy-dark with fear, glancing this way and that as if searching for an escape. Cade looked at Jinsie, standing now beside the bed. He didn’t remember when she’d let go of him. It didn’t matter. Not much mattered, he found, except one thing. “Find Rafe and Jeska. Tell them Briuly and Alaen are going after the Rights at dawn on Midsummer. I saw them. They have to be warned off.”
Jinsie scowled. “What d’you mean, you saw them?”
“Nothing,” Mieka said swiftly. “He didn’t mean anything.”
Cade almost laughed. “Oh, c’mon! How do you think your brother and I made all that money off a bet on the Archduke’s daughter? I knew, Jinsie.”
Mieka was staring at him, horrified.
“I watch the futures happen inside my own head, like a play,” he went on, relentless, brutal. “There are dozens of them. I watched the Archduke write a letter the night his daughter was born, a letter about how he plans for her to marry Prince Roshlin, so I knew Miriuzca would have a son. But it’s not legal to bet on the Royals, so—”
“Cade,” Mieka whispered. “No. Stop.”
“Well, mayhap you’re right. She’s got quite a lot to be thinking about, hasn’t she? My dangerous secret that you blabbed to your wife. The point is, Alaen and Briuly are about to go after the Rights of the Fae, and they have to be stopped.”
Mieka—trusting Cade’s Elsewhen, desperate to run away, or both—said, “I’ll do it,” in a voice like death, and scrambled to his feet. As he hurried to the door, yelling for Rafe and Jeska, Jinsie turned to Cade with more irrelevant questions.
It really was a pity, he told himself, that life was not a play where the only words spoken were those necessary to advance the plot.
EPILOGUE
Only Mieka still clung to the hope that they could get a message to Alaen and Briuly at Nackerty Close. It was too far. It couldn’t be done. Mieka knew that. But as he stood with Rafe and Jeska in the lamplit upstairs hall, conferring in low tones, every time he told himself it was hopeless, he thought of the staring gray eyes and the stricken, almost contorted face of the man on the other side of that closed bedchamber door.
A door, he told himself, into a life Cade had no choice but to live. This life, and none other—complete with Elsewhens that this time had tormented him near to madness.
“It can be done,” he said again, stubbornly.
Rafe shook his head. Jeska said the same thing he’d been saying for the last ten minutes in the same soft, reasonable voice.
“Midsummer is the day after tomorrow. Nobody could get there in time. It’s too far, even changing horses every fifty miles or so, and that’s assuming we can find enough money to convince the stable-masters along the way to part with their best horses.”
“Or find somebody we can trust with the message,” Rafe added. “Mieka, it’s two hundred miles from here, maybe more.”
“But if somebody rode crossland,” Mieka said stubbornly, “taking shortcuts and not sticking to the roads, it won’t be as far or take as much time.”
“And how would you like to gallop a succession of horses across open country in the dark?”
“It’s a full moon—” Abruptly, absurdly, he wished for a river and Quill beside him to watch the moonglade.
“Listen to me,” Jeska said tiredly. “Even if the impossible happened and a rider got there, there’s no telling whether he’d be able to find Alaen and Briuly.”
“Or that they’d listen,” Rafe said.
And that, Mieka knew, was unanswerable. He wanted so desperately to be able to tell Cade that they’d give it a try, at the very least. But he knew it was impossible. This was an Elsewhen that would haunt Cade all his days. This one would happen for real. Cade had solved the mystery of the Treasure, and chosen to pester Ala
en about it—and now there was nothing Cade or anyone else could do.
As for that other Elsewhen, the one that made him writhe inside… what had Cade seen? It couldn’t have been Mieka’s fault. There were any number of ways the Archduke could have found out that Cade was—was—
There was no other way. No one else who knew would be so careless with this crucial truth. So it had to have been him. Just as Cade had said: telling his wife, who’d told her mother, who’d got word to the Archduke and been believed.
Mieka had discovered this winter that he didn’t like having to feel guilty. Or ashamed. No, he did not like either of those feelings at all. They hurt too much, and he was afraid of them. But it was nothing compared to this terror that sent rivers of sickness through his body in place of blood.
He tried to tell himself that Cade must have only just seen it. He couldn’t possibly have known all these months. But the Elsewhens didn’t work like that. He saw futures, not pasts. It had been weeks since they left Gallantrybanks, and longer than that since Mieka was forget-everything drunk around his wife. Not since the night he’d slapped her. He didn’t trust himself.
Cade had been so patient about what had happened that night, neither lecturing him nor railing at him nor going all cold and superior in that spiteful way Mieka hated. Cade had taken him to Ginnel House—a pathway from one life into another, he saw that now—and let him realize for himself. Helped him to do that painful bit of growing up. He hadn’t drunk more than a glass or two of ale when he was with his wife since that night. He didn’t trust himself. Why in the name of anything holy did Cade still trust him? After such a betrayal, how could Cade stand to be in the same room with him?
Either Cade had forgiven him—a thing he knew he didn’t deserve—or Cade had been playing a part better than Jeska ever could do onstage.
Cade wasn’t that good an actor.
“Mieka!”
At Jinsie’s call, he lunged for the bedchamber door, panicking at the thought that Cayden had slipped back into the Elsewhens.
“Quill? Are you all right?” Quite probably the stupidest thing he’d ever said in his life.
Cade was sitting up in bed, perfectly calm, perfectly cold. “I’ve just realized,” he said, “that it’s impossible. Nobody could reach them in time.”
“We can try.”
“No. It’s all quite useless. Even if they were found, it wouldn’t change anything. They wouldn’t believe it.” A twitch of a smile. “The people who ought to believe almost always don’t, and the people who shouldn’t know at all are the ones who believe right off. That’s called irony, Jinsie.”
“That’s called ‘I have no idea what in all Hells you’re talking about,’ ” she returned angrily, and betook herself out of the room.
“Quill…” Mieka approached the bed slowly. “I’m sorry. For all of it.”
“You always are.”
“And you always forgive me,” he said without thinking—which after all was most of his problem, wasn’t it?—and was immediately scared by his boldness.
“It would seem so.”
“Quill—” Get mad at me, he wanted to beg. Yell at me, call me every name you can think of—I deserve them all—just please don’t sit there like you’re made of ice!
Cade shrugged it all away. “Never mind, Mieka. I’ve learned something. People will do what they’ll do, and there’s no stopping them. Things happen and there’s no changing them. Nothing anybody does or says makes any difference—because how can anybody know what’s going to come of any single action, or even a single word?” He raked his hands back through his sweat-damp hair. “So I’ll give up anguishing myself about it. There’s nothing to be done. None of it matters, anyway. Nothing matters at all.”
There was so much that Mieka ought to be saying. He was certain sure there must be words somewhere to bring Cade out of this frightening indifference. When the wintry gray eyes finally met his again, he took an instinctive step back.
Cade noted it with a grim little smile. “You wrote to me once,” he said, “that you’d always come find me if I got too lost. How do you like what you’ve found?”
“Quill—!”
“Don’t worry, Mieka. You needn’t ever come looking again.” He shifted in bed. “I’m tired. I need sleep.”
But not dreams. Mieka silently begged the Gods to send Cayden no more dreams.
* * *
“And so the excursion to Vathis was a success, and trade is picking up?”
“Of course. They’re all greedy little thorn-thralls, but they know their work. Thought it beneath them until I explained the advantages of encouraging customers to favor one sort of rumbullion over another. Rolon Piercehand is overjoyed.”
“He’ll make yet another fortune to spend on inanities for his castle. Pity Your Grace couldn’t persuade him to part with his library.”
“Knottinger tells me there isn’t much of interest.”
“He has only a sketchy idea of what would be… interesting.”
“True, for now. But the books are safely in a tangle at Castle Eyot. I’ll send that imbecile Wordturner to sort them out. And to take what I might want, even if no one but his family can read them anymore.”
“An excellent thought, Your Grace. Now, what of Goldbraider? If that play of his is anything to judge by, he has more than a suspicion about things that are interesting to us. And he’ll wish to satisfy his curiosity, as well as produce something even more shattering to amaze the world and gratify his own exalted opinion of himself.”
“He doesn’t concern me as much as Silversun does.”
“I have told Your Grace again and again that the way to him is clear enough.”
“The Elf. Yes, I know. But if he could be persuaded, rather than owned—”
“Delicacy is required—oh, not regarding the Elf. He’s no more subtle than a flash flood in Weltering Gorge. But with Cayden… if he ever suspects your involvement in Windthistle’s ruin… and that remembers me, Your Grace. How does the Caitiffer woman?”
“Sullen. Unwilling to honor the ancient pact except as it benefits herself. Fortunately, her current desires are monetary, and easy to satisfy.”
“That will change. Touchstone is vastly successful… forgive me for mentioning it, but I don’t understand why you’re laughing.”
“As long as Kearney Fairwalk has control of their finances, her wants will remain easy to satisfy. Oh, it’s none of my doing. Entirely his. I give it another year, two at the most. Although I wish I’d known before I attempted to entice him with the Wordturner boy.”
“There are times when the path is already prepared for us, and all we need do is walk down it. On a pleasanter matter—I trust your lady wife is well?”
“How kind of you to ask. She and my daughter are thriving. Did you believe the rumor that Panshilara was so shocked by the events at the Downstreet that she went into labor?”
“Of course I didn’t believe it. Though I do believe the talk of her efforts to have Touchstone and the Shadowshapers arrested for inciting public indecency, and if not all of them, then at the very least Mieka Windthistle.”
“A show of indignation seemed appropriate. Ah, Emmot, now I have made you laugh! I admit that she is not subtle, either. But she is useful.”
“Yes. She establishes both of you as pillars of tradition while winning sympathy for herself. At the same time, more and more women are now attending theaters, exactly the outcome you desired.”
“And none of my doing at all! I believe it’s now time to get started on my own theater in earnest.”
“So you have thoroughly abandoned Touchstone for Black Lightning.”
“There seemed no other choice. Regrettable, of course. But it will take some years to prepare them.”
“And the theater. But why go to all the trouble and expense yourself, when you can get Princess Miriuzca to do it for you?”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“The girl is theater-m
ad. Just as you were at that age, although she is not pretending.”
“I’ve learned to value the art.”
“Doubtless. Build your theater in Gallantrybanks for Black Lightning to caper about in if it amuses you. But what I have in mind, now that the Princess has shown herself so cooperatively unconventional, is something rather more… interesting.”
THE PLAYERS
(most of them, anyway)
Bellgloss, Master purveyor of thorn
Blackpath
Alaen lutenist
Briuly Alaen’s cousin; lutenist
Bowbender
Airilie Jeska’s daughter
Jeschenar masquer, Touchstone
Challender, Mirko tregetour, Crystal Sparks
Coldkettle, Lord Prince Ashgar’s private secretary
Crowkeeper, Herris fettler, Black Lightning
Czillag
Chattim glisker, the Shadowshapers
Deshenanda his wife
Daggering, Lederris masquer, Crystal Sparks
Eastkeeping
Lord Kelinn Vrennerie’s husband
Lady Vrennerie lady-in-waiting to Princess Miriuzca
Emmot Sagemaster; Cade’s teacher, now retired
Fairwalk, Lord Kearney Touchstone’s manager
Fluter, Tobalt reporter, The Nayword
Goldbraider, Vered tregetour and masquer, the Shadowshapers
Grainer
Chirene Sakary’s wife
Sakary fettler, the Shadowshapers
Henick, Cyed Archduke
Panshilara his wife, the Archduchess
Highcollar
Lord Isshak Lady Jaspiela’s father
Lady Kiritin Lady Jaspiela’s mother; born Blackswan
Kevelock, Rauel tregetour and masquer, the Shadowshapers
Knottinger, Thierin tregetour, Black Lightning
Longbranch, Trenal tregetour, Hawk’s Claw
Mistress Caitiffer Mieka’s mother-in-law
Mistress Gesha Trollwife at Shellery House
Mistress Luta Trollwife in Seekhaven
Mistress Mirdley Trollwife at Redpebble Square
Mistress Tola Trollwife; friend of Mistress Mirdley’s