by Melanie Rawn
“I didn’t.”
Cade stopped near a streetlamp and grasped Mieka’s upper arm. For a long moment he looked down into those eyes—sullen, dark, and guilty—as Elf-light crackled softly within the heavy glass lamp close by.
“What was it, then?”
A shrug, but no attempt to break free of his hold. “He was tired. I fixed it.”
He waited.
“He had enough whiskey to get to sleep tonight—you saw it, he could hardly keep his eyes open—”
“What does drink have to do with anything?”
“It’s the offset, innit?”
“The offset to what?”
Another shrug of thin shoulders. “You take it when you need it, and when you don’t need it, you don’t take it.”
“And you decided Rafe needed it, so you gave it to him. What was it?”
“Bluethorn. A bit in his tea yesterday, a bit in the ale he had before the show. He was tired, and then he wasn’t.”
“Bluethorn?”
“Nothing serious. He’ll’ve slept it off by tomorrow.”
“Will he need more?”
“If he does, I won’t give it to him without telling him first, all right?”
“What happens when somebody starts to need it—really need it? That happens to some people with alcohol.” Notoriously, sometimes; he flicked the thought of his father out of his head at once.
“So? You stop for a while. Ease up, Quill—it’s all right.”
“What other things do you know about?”
“What do you mean?”
He couldn’t believe he was saying this. “Just for instance, if somebody wanted to … to dream.”
“Waking dream or sleeping dream?” Mieka searched his eyes, then shook his head. “You Wizardly types call it going lost, Trolls call it blocked, and if somebody’s got too much Gnomish blood they just call it dead, because they can’t take anything at all. My folk have gathered up recipes since forever, and people like Auntie Brishen make a life’s study of Thornlore.”
“I thought she distilled whiskey.”
“That, too. There’s some things as make a Goblin sick for a week, and some that turn a Wizard wicked crazy until it wears off, and what dragon tears do to an Elf isn’t anything you want to know. A lot depends on how much of what blood you’ve got in you. The Human in me lets me drink—something me old fa can’t do, by the way, without he goes all grinagog and silly with it, and after that he’s snarly for three days. The Elf and the Wizard and the Piksey are too strong in him, y’see. You’re a bit of almost everything, so you can probably take anything you fancy.” He paused, placing a hand over Cade’s where it rested on his arm. “What’re you hiding from, Quill, that you want to go lost?”
“Nothing.” He was lying, of course, and Mieka knew it. “I just—if it’s safe, I’d—I mean, I think it’d be interesting, y’know—to find out.”
“Blockweed for a beginner like you, I think. Tomorrow night after the show?”
Cade nodded. They had a few days off before next week’s three-night booking at the Downstreet. He’d use the time to rest, respell old withies and work new ones to replace those broken tonight—and see what sort of dreams blockweed could provide. What foreseeings he could go lost in. He should have been appalled by the whole notion. But he wasn’t.
“How can you be your age, and live in Gallytown all your life, and not know about any of this?”
“From the time I was thirteen until I was almost eighteen, I lived—elsewhere,” he finished awkwardly, not yet ready to admit certain things to someone he’d known less than a week.
“You’ll tell me someday,” Mieka said softly. “Just like you’ll tell me what happened last night, when Blye wanted to know if you’d come back. You can trust me, you know. I promise I won’t disappoint you, Quill, or hurt you, or laugh at you.”
He wondered if that was true. He wanted it to be true.
“We were good tonight,” Mieka offered suddenly, kicking at a pile of snow. “We’ve some rough edges yet, but those will polish down. Another month, I think, and we’ll be sharp as the shoulders on the King’s Guard. There’ll be none to touch us, Quill, none at all.”
“The new standard,” he heard himself say. “The standard everyone else is measured against. The touchstone.”
Mieka caught his breath, a smile beginning on his face. “Is that what you want to call us, then?”
Startled, he could only stare down at those eyes. They were green and brown and gold, shining with barely repressed excitement.
“More than a bit nervy, that,” the boy went on teasingly. “Setting ourselves up as the mark for everyone else to beat! Touchstones, all of us—”
“No.” Gruffly, his voice a rasp he hardly recognized, he said, “What you told that trull tonight—about all of us or none? We’re a knot of four ropes. Everyone else calls themselves a plural—Shadowshapers, Wishcallers, Shorelines—they’re not together, do you see what I mean? There’s no unity. They’re still separate parts, even when they’re performing. It’s why Vered and Rauel could even consider doing a show with a different glisker—”
“I didn’t suit them, I told you that. It was the worst possible fit—”
“I know. It’s us three you fit with. But we’re not a plural. We’re separate people, but when we work together we make a whole, a single thing. Touchstone. Just that. Not a collection of things but one single thing, all of us together.”
Mieka watched his eyes for a long time before saying, “All of us together. I’ve never before belonged to anything worth belonging to.”
It was only as he trudged wearily up the five flights to his room that he remembered the word’s other definition. A touchstone wasn’t just the metaphorical standard by which something was judged. It was a real thing that existed in the real world: the stone that was the test of truth.
Chapter 6
Once Rafcadion slept off the bluethorn, and Cade figured he wouldn’t be too dangerous when he got angry, he mentioned—in private—what Mieka had done.
Rafe didn’t get angry.
“Right little cogger, innit he?” the fettler drawled. “Does he plan on doing it again?”
“Not without asking first.”
Cade scrutinized his friend, puzzled by his attitude. They were seated in Mistress Threadchaser’s kitchen, sampling various tarts judged not quite perfect enough to be offered for sale in the bakery shop. The crusts were slightly too brown, or the filling had settled slightly uneven, or something else was slightly amiss that Cade had never been able to see and didn’t care about as long as it resulted in sinking his fork into the best pastries in Gallantrybanks. Having had his fill of pear-walnut, he dug into custard flavored with some kind of citrus, looking a question at Rafe, who grinned and shook his head.
“You’ll be wondering why I’m not swearing a holy vow to rip his lungs out. I would, except for this. What he told me about the ceiling, it made all the difference. If I hadn’t known, the magic really would have got out of my hands and there’d be more than glassware broken.”
“So the bluethorn he gave you that made you almost lose control is canceled out by the information he gave you that meant you didn’t lose control?”
“One can always count on a wordsmith for a fine, concise summary,” Rafe observed. “Whatever would we do without you to explain us to ourselves whether we want you to or not?”
“Let’s stuff a gag in his mouth and find out.”
Crisiant Bramblecotte let the door to the bakery swing shut behind her, and Rafe leaped up to take the heavy stack of trays from her hands. As he did so, he leaned down for a kiss. She was tall, sharp of feature and sharper of tongue, her perfect creamy complexion emphasized by thick black curls, straight black eyebrows, and long black eyelashes that proclaimed Dark Elf just as surely as her stature spoke of Wizard. Cade had known Crisiant as long as Rafe had. The local littleschool for Wizardly children shared a playground and some generalized classes (ar
ithmetic, history, reading) with a school for those lacking magic, and he remembered the precise moment he’d turned to throw a ball to his friend and found Rafe staring slack-jawed at the laughing girl running towards the nearby swing sets. To hear Rafe tell it in afteryears, one glance from those amber brown eyes had been enough to render him helpless for the rest of his life. Crisiant always retorted that having a ball knock him in the head half a second later might have had something to do with it. She tolerated but had never much liked Cade, for reasons he understood well enough: the life of traveling players, agreed upon when the two boys were barely fifteen, would take Rafe from her almost half of every year. They had never spoken about it, but Cade knew. He also knew Crisiant had never and would never ask Rafe to give up his work, his dream, this thing he was so good at, this thing he loved so much. Cade didn’t mind that she resented him; better she should blame him than Rafe.
He smiled his sweetest and said, “One of what you just gave him would shut me up just fine, y’know.”
She snorted. “Keep on with the hallucinations, Cade, and they’ll chuck you into Culch Minster. Rafe, your mother says your da won’t be back for another se’ennight. I’ll stay to help her in the shop, shall I?”
Rafe laughed a singularly suggestive laugh and kissed her again, for staying to help in the shop meant staying overnight upstairs, a convenient floor down from Rafe’s bedchamber. Cade hid his face behind his teacup, but not because he didn’t want to watch them kissing. Hallucinations—Gods, if she only knew.
He’d had another turn this morning, fortunately a very brief one and while he was sitting on his bed, but the abrupt vision had lingered to taunt him all day. The girl again, the one with bronze-gold hair and beautiful hands, seated before a hearthfire, sewing just as her mother had been doing in the first foreseeing. He stood behind her, trying to get a look over her shoulder at the work in her lap. He knew it wasn’t a skirt or a bodice she worked on, but something else, something she was bespelling, because although he still couldn’t catch a glimpse of her face, he could again hear her voice. She was murmuring, almost crooning a song, to the soft dark fabric in her hands, as if it were a living thing to be coaxed and cajoled and soothed. He recognized none of the words. That scared him.
Still, what was he supposed to do? Take Mieka aside and warn him? “Listen, one day you’ll meet a girl, probably the most beautiful girl you’ve ever seen in your life. But be careful. She and her mother want to ‘tame’ you. I heard them say it. They want to trap you and own you. So if you see a girl like that, run like all hells in the opposite direction.” Yes, it would be dead easy to present it to him just that way. Simple as peeling a turtle.
“Time you two were going, I think,” Crisiant said once Rafe allowed her the use of her lips again. “You’ll be coming back here as usual for some supper? Your mother’s experimenting with that new spice Lord Piercehand ships home from—” She paused as if searching for the name, then shrugged. “—from wherever it is. I can’t keep up with all these faraway findings.”
“I’m glad I’m not in school anymore,” Cade observed, “and having to learn them. Every ship as docks nowadays, a week later there’s a broadsheet announcing five more new places with names nobody can pronounce.”
“You keep up with it all, though, don’t you?” Crisiant asked, frowning.
“I like the imagings,” he admitted. “And Dery likes the maps.”
“But how much of those imagings can be believed?”
He shrugged. It was a strange art, that of the imager. It wasn’t like the magic of a painter or sculptor, ancient skills with hundreds of practitioners ranging from the brilliant to the hopelessly inept. There’d been a boy at Sagemaster Emmot’s academy who’d had the knack for it, and if all the students there had been odd, Arley Breakbriar had been downright weird. His big blue eyes would go all hazy and dreamy as he stared at whatever had caught his attention, while his fingers twitched over a single withie for many long minutes. Finally he’d wake up again, and shake himself, and smile a shy, rueful smile. Later on he’d release the magic, and on paper or parchment, or sometimes the walls of his chamber, there would appear an exact rendering of whatever he’d seen. Just how the images went from his eyes to his head to his fingers to the withie to a finished picture was something Cade didn’t understand and never would—he’d tried it a few times, under Arley’s stammering guidance, and whereas he might have thought it similar to the process whereby he imbued a glass twig with magic for the stage, he’d never managed to transfer an image onto paper. It took a glisker to render Cade’s magic.
The painters and the sculptors, they could guide and modify their visions—just as Cade could do. But an imager was limited to reproducing precisely what he saw. The technique had been developed over the last fifty years or so, and its practitioners were rare, and especially coveted on voyages across the Ocean Sea. The last Cade had heard, Arley had signed on for just such a journey. One reason he kept track of the broadsheets was in hopes of seeing his friend’s name. But he hadn’t, not yet.
“Anyway,” Crisiant was saying, “Jeska has a good appetite for new things, and your mother would like his opinion.”
Rafe had been listening to this with an indulgent twinkle. “Why don’t you just say it?” he teased. “No need to excuse it with a new recipe.” When she smacked him a good one on the arm, he laughed and told Cade, “She wants to meet the Elf. See if he’s really as mad as I’ve made him out to be.”
“I’m sure the description didn’t do him justice,” Cade said. “P’rhaps some night next week you and Blye can come to a show? Mieka’s sister wants a look at what we’re doing, as well. You could all sneak in together. You know how good Blye is at dressing up like a boy.”
Crisiant shrugged. “I’ll sit in on a rehearsal, if that suits. I waited too long to grow a figure to want to hide it.”
“And it’s a lovely one grew onto your scrawny bones,” Rafe assured her with a grin. “See you later tonight, sweeting.”
“Unless,” Cade remarked with entirely specious innocence, “you were the last one through the door yesternight, in which case—”
“Your servant, lady,” Rafe told Crisiant, kissed her one last time, and hauled Cade out into the alley with flakes of pastry still on his chin.
They met up with the other half of Touchstone on Beekbacks, and didn’t take the shortcut down the Stroll. Mieka teased Jeska about the crushing disappointment he was dealing the luscious Ferralise, until the masquer finally threatened to shove a withie up his nose. Cade exchanged grins with the Elf, and as Rafe and Jeska walked ahead, hung back a bit.
“He’s not angry—about the bluethorn, I mean. Just don’t ever try anything like that again.”
“Promise. Did you decide about the blockweed?” Not waiting for an answer, he went on, “Me, I’ve just a little bit of a blue thornprick going tonight. You can try some if you like. I’ve extra.”
Cade shrugged and shook his head. He wasn’t scared, exactly; more like he wanted to be in private when he went lost for the first time. To lose himself someplace where the ugly or frightening dreams couldn’t get at him … to lose awareness of the rest of the world for a while and dream as he pleased …
There was a capacity crowd at the Downstreet. Word had spread. Jeska responded as all masquers did to the audience’s excitement, and was even better than usual. All three of them were. Jeska’s nuanced performance, Mieka’s wild energy, Rafe’s stern and subtle control—but as Cade watched from stage right, he noted something apprehensive in the fettler’s eyes. The control was too rigorous. Rafe was being cautious—which meant that what the people had come to see tonight wasn’t going to happen.
So Cade did it himself. The other three actually flinched as glassware shattered along the bar. It was an interesting little exercise, Cade thought, unleashing just enough power to break a full pitcher of beer held aloft by a startled and horrified barmaid. To choose a target, to focus, to direct the magic as narrowly and
precisely as he could, like a flying needle—this took skill, and he was delighted by the results. The drenched barmaid was the one who had sneered at him the other night after the show, and tried to serve him blashed whiskey.
Then he heard the splintering of glass onstage. Cade swung about and saw Mieka poised atop the glisker’s bench, throwing spent withies into the air and deliberately bursting them as they fell. Tiny shards of glass rained down, just missing the infuriated Jeska. The audience gasped, cheered, shouted encouragement. He took a bow, then another, and tossed an intact glass twig into the crowd for a souvenir.
“It was only the flawed ones,” he protested half an hour later as he and Cade and Rafe made their way back to the bakery. “Had to replace them anyway, right?” Laughter rang out and he danced a few steps down the icy cobblestones. “Why should Rafe and you have all the fun?”
The rage was as sudden as it was frightening. And it wasn’t in his power to fight it off. Without conscious thought, Cade reached out and grabbed him by the front of his tunic. One look into those huge eyes told him he’d never be able to say this to Mieka’s face; he spun him round and took him by the scruff of the neck and pushed him against a lamppost. “Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!”
Cheek to cold metal, tremors running through him, Mieka whimpered softly but stayed still, making no move to defend himself or to escape.
“I’d ask where you went to school, turning out this ignorant,” Cade hissed, “but it’s bloody obvious you never went to any school at all—and even if you did, you never paid attention. But you’ll pay attention now, and remember every word. Those lovely glass sticks you throw about are strictly controlled by the law. Wizards aren’t allowed to make them. Glasscrafters who do are inspected.” As he felt muscles tense along Mieka’s back, he shook him. “Did the one you threw to the audience have a hallmark? Did it? Or maybe there was magic still lingering inside—did you think of that? Did you? That’s why Jeska stayed behind tonight. If we’re lucky, he’ll find whoever caught the one you threw and get it back. But whatever he has to pay for it, you’ll pay him back double.” Another flinch of protest; Cade pushed him harder against the post. “Be glad I don’t make it triple.”