by Melanie Rawn
The hint was not taken. The second man smiled blandly and rendered ink onto paper with a delicacy unsuspected in such thick fingers. “You said you first met them after their rather sensational appearance at Trials.”
“I didn’t see the performance, but I knew somebody who did, and he tipped me that they might be something very special. They were, of course. But no one ever really understood until he was gone.”
“Did they ever admit to it?”
“Rafcadion came closest, two or three years ago. Said he missed him.” He reached over and appropriated the other man’s ale, took a swig. “But a week or two later, he gave another interview saying he didn’t miss him at all, when it came to the performing. As a friend, yes. Not as an artist, a partner onstage.”
“He was lying,” the other man suggested.
“Oh, yes. Jeschenar’s never said anything about him at all, but I’ve spoken with Cayden a few times since it happened.”
“And—?”
“Full of himself, he is. The meaning of this and the significance of that, what art must do and artists must be in society, all sorts of bilge. But he’s a cold unfeeling bastard and it’s no wonder his wife finally left him.”
“Unfeeling? Forgive me, Tobalt, but—”
“I know. He emotes all over everything, doesn’t he, in his work. But the only feelings that matter are his, you see. It’s only important if he feels it—and he expects unconditional compassion that he’s feeling that way. Not that he expects understanding, because nobody could possibly understand him, he’s unique, and an artist, and all that rot. And he’d never let anyone help him find his way out of whatever mood he happens to be wallowing in.” Tobalt leaned forward. “What isn’t readily obvious in the work is that although he does feel these things right enough, he also stands apart from them so he can slice them up like feast-day mutton and then use them. His mind’s cold, but his heart’s colder.”
“He wasn’t always like that, was he?”
The rest of the ale was swallowed, the tankard slammed down onto the table. “He has to be that way, now. Got no choice, has he? He’d go mad, otherwise. Because he knows. He’ll never admit it, but he knows. When the Cornerstones lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”}
“Cade.”
The snifter almost dropped from his hand. Blye was looking at him as if she’d been looking at him for quite some time—waiting for him to rouse from whatever vision was playing itself out inside his head. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“Stop apologizing! I’m not your mother.” She held out her near-empty glass. “Might as well finish it.”
He thoroughly agreed. They sat quietly for a time, sipping fine liquor that tasted of oak and golden apples. At last he made an effort. “How’s your da? You haven’t said.”
“No better, no worse. He got in a few hours of work today, actually.”
“Anything usable?” He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. Her dark eyes flashed angrily, and then her face became a mask quite as good as any he’d ever worn himself, or magicked into a withie for Jeska to wear. But he knew better than to apologize again; she’d only snap at him again. Instead, he asked, “Want something to eat? Mistress Mirdley was making dumplings earlier.”
“No, I’m fine. I know better than to drink on an empty stomach—which is more than can be said for you.”
“I’ve had practice. Say you’ll come tomorrow night.”
“So I can meet him and adore him?”
The image of the Elf came into his head. He flinched. Their soul, the man had said, he had been their soul, and when they’d lost him—
“That bad, was it?” Blye murmured. “I think it’ll take more than half a bottle of brandy to get you to sleep tonight.”
“I slept fine in Gowerion,” he heard himself say.
“Was she pretty?”
“Was who pretty?” Then he tumbled to what she was saying, and saw the teasing glint in her eyes, and groaned. “Don’t, Blye! You know Jeska always has first pick—and in Gowerion, there wasn’t a second pick, nor a third.”
“We need to find you a girl, Cade.” She swallowed the remaining brandy and set the glass on the counter. “Somebody to warm your bed and keep her mouth shut—oh, except when you want her to open it, that is!”
“Blye!” he exclaimed, scandalized.
“You’re always so intimidated by Jeska’s looks,” she went on, shaking her head with disapproval. “Rafe has a nice, smooth line of chatter when he takes the trouble, and when Crisiant isn’t around to hear, and that daunts you, too. As for this Elf—Lord and Lady save us, he’s gorgeous even when he’s passed out. Or pretending to be passed out, now that I think on it,” she finished broodingly. “So he’ll be yet another excuse for you not to try, even if a girl does look thrice at you.” All at once she made a face at him. “I know, I know!” In the high-pitched, die-away tones of the upper classes, she said, “The most they evah mahnage is twice—just to make sure they’ve seen what they’ve seen, dontchaknow.”
“Now you do sound like my mother.” Then something occurred to him, and he asked, “Blye, is there anything wrong with my clothes?”
He ought to have guessed that she’d make the connection. She knew him very well indeed. She laughed at him as she took the two glasses into the back room for a wash.
“The Elf thinks so, is that it? He’ll be turning you into a prancing peacock inside of a month, I see it now! A shirt first, a tunic thereafter, and then a coat with embroidered sleeves—you’ll be frustling your pretty new feathers every chance you get!”
Picking up a clean towel from the stack beside the sink, he agreed amiably, “So now we really do have to find me a girl—preferably one who can sew!”
Blye started listing the girls they’d known at school and the girls who worked in various nearby shops, but when she got to the daughters of his mother’s friends, he growled a playful warning.
“And how would you know any of those useless little twitchies, anyway?” he demanded.
“They come in and break the glassware, don’t they? And say it jumped off the shelves all by itself, and leave me to explain to Da why a set of eight goblets now has to be sold as a set of six. But all’s not lost, oh not a bit of it, for we can send out the seventh as a sample.”
The seven could not be made eight again, because her father wasn’t capable of making a new glass to match the old anymore. It was one reason custom had fallen off at the shop lately: no one really wanted to buy a suite of highly breakable objects if replacements were out of the question.
“But we’ll be wanting scores of withies,” he burst out, “and once people learn that it’s you as made them for us—”
“Sweet Angels of Mercy, don’t even whisper it!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know what the Guild would do to me if they found out?”
“It’s not fair. Why should it matter that you’re a girl?”
“Same reason it matters if I try to walk openly into a tavern where you’re working, or board the public coach on my own, or attempt any profession but weaver or seamstress. No good reason at all.” She returned to the shop front to replace the snifters.
Following her, he said, “You know I don’t think that way.”
“That and a penny and my hair hidden under a hat will get me a drink tomorrow night at the Downstreet to watch you perform. Get the light, won’t you? I don’t want to come down tomorrow morning and have to clean up after your magic.”
He waited until she had gone back into the glassworks, and doused the lamp with a tired gesture. She was waiting for him by the door, arms folded, fingers drumming.
“Blye—Mieka says we’ll make you rich, and he’s right. It will happen—Guild or no Guild. We’re using only your withies from now on, and when everyone else wants to know where we got them—”
“Just so long as you don’t mention who made them,” she muttered. Then: “Wait a moment—did you say Mieka? The Windthistle boy?”
“Yes. Di
dn’t I say his name before? He’s my glisker.”
“Everybody’s glisker, you sapskull! He’s worked with more players than you’ve got teeth—for all of a week at the most! I heard last year that he even approached the Shadowshapers and asked if he could join them! He’s your new glisker?”
So that was how he knew Vered and Rauel, Cade thought. “Yes,” he repeated. “My new glisker.” He heard the voice again, from his dream of that morning: “You said you first met them after their rather sensational appearance at Trials.” Mieka would be with them through Trials at least—three months from now. But then that other voice echoed in his head, the bleak and bitter one: “When the Cornerstones lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”
Blye touched his arm lightly, hesitantly. “Cade?”
“Mine he is, and mine he’ll stay,” he said without thinking, heard his own words, and amended swiftly, “Ours, I mean. He’s our glisker now.”
{Mieka was laughing, young laughter in an older face: lines framing his mouth and crossing his forehead and his black hair going silvery, but those eyes were bright with the joy unique to him, and he was still the mad little Elf of all those years ago, gazing up at Cade and laughing—}
He blinked, and saw Blye’s frown. Before she could voice the worry in her eyes, he nodded a good night and headed for his parents’ back door, and the warmth of Mistress Mirdley’s kitchen, where no dreams had ever touched him, not since the dreaming began. It was the only place in the world, including his own private bedchamber, where he felt truly safe.
Chapter 4
Eventually Mieka showed up for rehearsal, and blamed his lateness on Cade.
“Didn’t tell me where Rafe lives, now, did you? I’ve been wandering like a stray breeze, asking after anyone who knows anything about anybody in the fettling way.” He stripped off a pair of very fine and very flash gold-embroidered gloves, shoving them into a pocket of his cloak. This, too, was eye-catching, woven with a dark green warp and a black weft, with crosswise threads of blue and gold, so that every time he moved, the material seemed to change colors. Cade, wearing old brown wool trousers, a plain white shirt, and a black tunic with a frayed hem, began to understand what he’d meant about the clothes. “I’d still be drifting round Beekbacks if I hadn’t bethought me of the delightful Mistress Blye, who not only gave me directions but the pleasure of her company.”
He stepped lightly from the vestibule doorway, removing the cloak with a flourish as if drawing aside a stage curtain, to reveal Blye hanging up a shabby gray coat. It was the ankle-length one she always borrowed from her father when she didn’t want to be bothered with the jeers and insults that always assaulted any girl past age twelve who wore trousers. She half-turned, startled, and shrugged as she recognized the annoyance in Cade’s eyes. Not that he entirely understood why he was annoyed, but it had something to do with the pair of them walking over here, talking about only they knew what.
“I brought a cap,” she said. “We can just go from here to the Downstreet, can’t we?” A cap to hide her hair and enough of her face so that when she removed the coat people would think her a boy. “The nice one,” she added.
Cade knew the cap she meant. Blye had made a half-dozen child-sized pretend withies for Derien, and he had insisted on giving her his best cap in return, the sapphire velvet one with the puffy black feather. Being a shrewd little boy as well as a generous one, he’d told Lady Jaspiela that the wind had blown the cap into the river. As her ladyship was in company with Blye perhaps five times a year, and never deigned to notice her anyway, the chance of her seeing and recognizing the cap was nonexistent. That Dery so easily lied to their mother bothered Cade a little, but he shrugged it aside, knowing that if the boy was to have any kind of life of his own, he’d have to learn how to lie to her, and lie convincingly. That Dery had begged Cade for the withies, even if they were just pretend, after Lady Jaspiela reacted with horror to his request, told Cade that there was a nice streak of rebellion in his baby brother. And he grinned to himself every time he glimpsed Dery in his big bedroom on the third floor, solemnly declaiming “magical words” to bespell the glass twigs or waving them gently as imagination turned him into a Master Glisker. After twelve years of being the only child, pinched and pushed to fit a mold of his mother’s devising, Cade was rather wickedly looking forward to watching Derien stand up to her the way he himself had done. She deserved it.
“Blye, dearling!” Rafe’s mother, large and stout and loud, held out her arms to welcome the girl. Overwhelmed by a cinnamon-scented embrace—as Cade had been half an hour earlier—Blye hugged back. “You’ll be going with the boys tonight? Sweet Angels, I do wish I still had the figure to do the same! But that’s what being a baker’s wife will do, and it’s a fact not to be argued with. Come, leave the boys to their plotting. You and I will go into the kitchen and make their tea, and you can tell me how your dear father is these days. And don’t let me forget to send you home with a dozen of those little seedy cakes he likes.”
Even as she bustled with Blye through the kitchen door, her eyes sought the Elf with a look more suited to a woman half her age. Surely she was promising herself a much longer look later on. Rafe had noticed his mother’s sidelong glance; his jaw dropped slightly and his gray-blue eyes blinked wide. Cade hid a grin by turning his back and pretending to examine the magnificent inlaid chessboard hanging above the hearth. He’d learned to play on that board. Master Threadchaser’s pride and joy, it had been handed down from father to son for five generations, and an offer to take it down for a game was a signal that he liked you. As Cade examined for the hundredth time the delicate spiderweb patterns decorating its wide border, he had the thought that it was rather emblematic of the two families—that above this hearth was a symbol of intellectual skill, and above his mother’s was an empty looking-glass drained of magic, in which one could look only at oneself.
“Jeska, please tell me your house is easier to locate,” Mieka whined, and Cade decided it would waste too much time to remind the Elf that he’d been very clear about the location. Even if he hadn’t, all anyone had to do was ask about for a door with a spiderweb carved above it, proclaiming the family’s clan.
“Middle of the block, right after Marketty Round, can’t miss it,” the masquer replied absently as he scanned the evening’s performance charts. He was agonizingly meticulous, for he’d always had difficulty reading, which made him work all the harder at memorizing his lines. But he’d rarely got a word wrong in the year Cade had worked with him. “I think I’ve got this now, Cade, but I’d like to run through the whole thing at least once, just to make sure.”
Seating himself on a ladder-back chair with a glass basket of withies at his feet, Cade said, “As many times as you need, Jeska. We’ll be doing the ‘Sailor’ again tonight, and then ‘The Princess and the Deep Dark Well’—how are you at echoes, Mieka?”
“Excellent. But don’t you have something original? That’s such a boring old drudge of a thing.” He sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs, looking disgruntled.
Still without glancing up, Jeska asked, “Hadn’t you noticed? Cade puts in things of his own all the time.”
“But not enough to make people realize it!”
“We’ll make a splash some other night,” Cade said. “We made this booking with another glisker, you know—somebody who works traditional.”
“They don’t know I’m coming? Get ready for a drenching, then, because it’s no mere splash we’ll make. The Downstreet is almost a real theater, you know. The stage was specially built, not just nailed together with spare planks. Big enough so I can really work!”
Rafe caught Cade’s glance and rolled his eyes. Was there no limit to Mieka’s arrogance? But what Rafe said had nothing to do with stemming the boy’s vanity. “You’ve played the Downstreet before?”
Incautiously, still caught up in his vision of their triumph, the Elf said, “Sat in with Vered and Rauel and Sakary one night, when Chattim took ill.”
“You what?” Jeska exclaimed.
“Good reason to think well of yourself, then, have you?” Rafe snarled. “Quite a downcoming, playing with quidams like us!”
Stricken, Mieka stammered, “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to say that—I mean, I’m not hiding anything, it was just one show and—” He looked an appeal at Cade. “Quill, it’s not like it sounds!”
So that was how he knew the Shadowshapers. Blye had mentioned that he knew them, but it turned out that Vered and Rauel had trusted him with their work. Only because their own glisker had been ill, but—Mieka had actually played a show with the Shadowshapers. Cade was all for interrogating him about what it had been like, and the pieces they’d done, and a hundred other things. But anger touched his tongue first, and he demanded, “Why so bloody eager to join up with us, then?”
“Sakary couldn’t cope with me, all right? I can’t help it when I don’t like the taste of someone’s magic, and he had a stranglehold on me and—and I fought him, I couldn’t help it! We got through the show and he hasn’t spoken to me since! He’s a good fettler, one of the best, but I couldn’t work with him—”
“Because he couldn’t cope with you?”
“Leave him be,” Rafe said suddenly. “You know the trouble they had finding a glisker, before Chattim. Like us. Just like us, Cade. Call it the taste or the feel of the magic, or puzzle pieces locking into place, or instinct, but you and me and Jeska worked strong together from the first. We fit.” Pointing a long finger at Mieka, he finished, “And so does he. With us. Not with them, nor anybody else. Us.”
Mieka cast him a grateful glance, then turned back to Cade with his shoulders slightly hunched, as if he was anticipating a fist to the jaw. “Cade?” he ventured. “I’m sorry I didn’t say anything earlier. But Rafe’s right, isn’t he?”