Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

Cade laughed silently. He was about to suggest that, since he wasn’t “most men” either, they might find a way to prove their uniqueness to each other again. But then she said something that left him blank-brained with shock.

  With a fingertip she traced the line of his jaw from ear to chin, scratching gently at his morning stubble, and murmured, “You’re nothing like your father, you know.”

  After a moment he heard himself say, “I know.” But he didn’t want to hear a catalog of the differences. He most particularly didn’t want to know if his father had auditioned her for Prince Ashgar. Giving her a smile that was nothing more than a stretching of his lips from his teeth, he sat up and reached for his clothes. The new gray-blue jacket was hopelessly wrinkled, as was his shirt; he’d have to beg the Trollwife at their lodgings to steam the creases out before the performance tonight. Ah, yes—the performance. The perfect excuse. The performance before the King and his nobles … and Prince Ashgar and his attendants … including the First Gentleman of the Bedchamber.

  “I really ought to be going,” he said.

  {“Oughta be goin’,” he mumbled as he struggled into his shirt. “Workin’ t’morrow.”

  “There’s no hurry.”

  He shook his head and gulped half a glass of brandy, not wanting to look at her. He buttoned his shirt up wrong, and had to redo it.

  “You’re very drunk.”

  He waved away her concern. “Been drunker’n this an’ played ‘Windows’ from start to finish. Great reviews the next day, too.”

  “Oh, top score tonight, if that’s what you’re asking. Both times.”

  His jacket was around here someplace. Ah—here on the floor, sprawled atop a garish bright rug, black-bordered shapes like a demented stained-glass window. “You should come to our next show,” he managed.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He looked up. “Why the fuck not?”

  She raked long dark-blond hair from her eyes and regarded him with something that wasn’t quite contempt. “Who do you think you are?”

  He swept her a sardonic bow that nearly toppled him. “Cayden Silversun, Master Tregetour of Touchstone.”

  “You wear that like the scars on your hands. And speaking of your hands—that ring. It’s like a tag pinned to your shirt so people know where to return you, when you go lost.”

  Don’t worry about going too lost, Quill, I’ll always come find you.}

  “You needn’t leave so soon.”

  He looked at his hands. No scars. And no parchment, either, with scribbled directions and that promise to come find him. He blinked down at the girl, confused. None of the colors were right—her hair was red, not blond, and the blue curtains were green leaves, and the gaudy rug was nowhere to be seen. And everything, including him, reeked of lavender. He supposed that was better than stinking of brandy.

  “It’s just dawn,” she coaxed. “Surely you can stay a little longer.”

  He shook his head to clear it. “We’ve another show tonight. For the King.” He concentrated, and envisioned the colors of the sea-green and silver ribbons, the brown wax seal on the invitation. The parchment that didn’t promise that Mieka would come find him. “And—and we still haven’t decided what we’ll do. I have work, priming the withies for my glisker. I’m beholden for last night, Lady, forgive me for hurrying off.”

  The path back through the castle grounds was long and frustrating, and rather sweaty, for the softer mornings of spring had given way to the full sun of summer. Before he reached the gates into town he was longing for that huge bathtub in the garderobe of their lodgings, and was half-tempted to plunge into the moat, or maybe the river, except that he couldn’t swim. He checked his pockets for coin enough to have the servants carry up water to fill the tub. But it turned out that his wish had been anticipated.

  Mieka was sitting in the kitchen, making himself useful with knives and whetstone while he gossiped with the Trollwife. He smiled when he saw Cayden, and broke off a conversation about Prince Ashgar’s dreary matrimonial prospects to say, “Mistress Luta made muffins! They’re in the warming oven, ready for when you finish your bath.”

  “My—?”

  “You’re in rather fragrant need of one, Quill. Though I must say, the lavender perfume is rather intriguing. The little redhead, I take it?”

  The Trollwife shooed Cade out of the kitchen. “Go on with ye, laddie! Take that jacket and shirt off first, they’re wrinkled as a raisin.”

  Half an hour later, it was Cade’s skin that had started to wrinkle. He was just about to pull the plug that let the water drain down to the elm trees when Mieka strolled into the garderobe.

  “Oh, that’s much better,” he announced after taking a deep, experimental breath. “I don’t know what Mistress Mirdley puts into that white soap of hers, but it’s much nicer than the lavender stink you were wearing when you came in.” Cocking his head, he watched Cade’s eyes for a moment before asking, “So you’re feeling better, now you’ve washed the scent of her off you?”

  There may have been possible replies to this; Cade couldn’t think of any at the moment. So he shrugged and said, “Tell me what I owe you for the bath.”

  Mieka waved it away. “’Twas for me own comfort, not yours. How could I work tonight with you over there by the curtains, whiff as the Royal Gardens? Want something to eat? I brought tea and muffins.”

  “You mean you didn’t eat them all on the way upstairs?”

  “I thought about it,” he replied seriously. Then, gaze roaming down Cade’s chest, he added, “But Mistress Mirdley will string me up by me poor fragile little ears if you come home even skinnier than when you left.” He caught up a towel and tossed it to Cade. “Rafe has a mind to do ‘Feather-heart’ tonight, so you’ve some adjusting to do on the withies—” All at once, he snapped his fingers and cursed, digging into a back pocket. “This came for you this morning, early. Lord Coldkettle’s office, looks like, by the seal and ribbons.”

  “But we already received the Court invitation. Do they want us to do a second show?”

  “This is for you, not Touchstone. Open it!”

  He did, not caring if he dripped bathwater onto it, because he recognized the handwriting. “It’s from my father.”

  “Really?” He half-turned from examining his fading bruise in the mirror. “That’s right nice of him, to congratulate you on First Flight of the Winterly.”

  “He doesn’t have anything to say about that. We’re to be particularly good tonight, and do ‘Hidden Cottage,’ because the Prince is entertaining ambassadors from six different countries.”

  “I’ve heard it muttered that there might be an exchange of players next summer, diplomatic goodwill and all that.”

  “Nothing to do with it. Ashgar is shopping. We’re supposed to be extremely impressive tonight so they’ll see that it’s a refined, cultured kingdom their princess or duchess or whatever would be queen of one day.” He tossed the letter onto the tiled floor and levered himself out of the bath.

  “Cade … d’you think your father was the one as got us the booking tonight?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  He wrapped the towel round his hips and reached for another to dry his hair. “Why?”

  “I don’t care to be beholden to people who don’t—” He broke off, then finished in a rush, “I mean, how can they not understand how lucky they are, to have you for a son?”

  Had he been thinking only recently that Mieka could enrage him more swiftly and more easily than anyone else he’d ever encountered? Looking down into those troubled, resentful eyes, he had to smile. “My father had nothing to do with it. I found out last night from Lady Torren. She commended us to Lord Coldkettle herself.”

  “She told him to book us before you bedded her?” He whistled between his teeth. “Gods, Quill, how good are you, that they favor you before they’ve even known your favor?”

  “I do all right. And it wasn’t a bed, exactly,” he confid
ed. “A few blankets, a lot of pillows and ferns.”

  Mieka laughed and threw him another towel. “And she didn’t even give you breakfast? Scandalous! Wait’ll I tell Blye!”

  “Don’t you bloody dare!”

  When Cade was dried and dressed and fed, and Mieka had stolen only one of the muffins, he leaned back on his bed with a pillow between his spine and the wall and frowned at the Elf. “You’re in a mood this morning. I was sure you’d go find Princess Iamina after the show and—”

  “—mend her manners for her?” He shrugged. “Auntie Brishen understands there are many sorts of emergencies. ’Twas only the thought of a greenthorn kept me out of the castle quod. Though I find I like the purple better. One doesn’t get quite so silly. We were to have a discussion, weren’t we, about that? Tonight, p’rhaps, after the show—if you haven’t already promised Her lavender-scented Ladyship a repeat performance.”

  “A one-night special engagement,” Cade replied.

  “Good. You’ll like thorn. It’ll be fun, Quill.”

  It wouldn’t be like going lost all by himself. Mieka would be with him.

  Chapter 13

  During the ten days of Trials, the presence of any particular nobleman depended on a variety of factors. Relationships—if any—to or with the royal family; ability to afford the journey, the clothes, and the lodgings (an invitation to stay at the castle could be more expensive in the end than hiring rooms in the town); the current political climate; whether or not other nobles with whom one had been at daggers drawn for generations would be at Seekhaven; and, last on the list for almost everyone, a liking for the theater.

  Since reaching his majority at the age of sixteen, the Archduke had never taken into consideration anything but his own enthusiasm for a good show. Early on, when he was scarcely more than a child and his regrettable father was dead, the royals had decided to be magnanimous towards the boy, and invited him to Trials every year. What harm could there be, after all, in a five-year-old—especially when all his tutors and servants were in the royal employ? Much better to be seen as generous and forgiving, and to impress on the child that his future and indeed his life depended on loyalty to the king who had vanquished his father.

  That they were all cousins had something to do with it. Not because of any sentiment; His Gracious Majesty was not a fool. He was a student of his forebears’ actions (which happened to be one reason Touchstone had done so very well at Trials; their speculations on what it must be like to be continually reminded of one’s ancestors’ valiant deeds had impressed the king very deeply, and he had let his appreciation be known to be judges). King Meredan decided to follow a many-times-great-grandfather’s plan, and keep the enemy’s son close, so that when the opportunity arose, the boy could be married into the royal family, merging the different lines and negating all other claims to the throne. This would have worked out admirably, except that Princess Iamina had done the stupidest possible thing by running away to marry Lord Tawnymoor, a thing she regretted within three days of having done it. The Archduke remained unwed, though not for lack of offers both subtle and blatant. What precisely he might be waiting for, no one could have said, but though his preference was unambiguous—he liked women, the blonder and curvier the better—no lady had yet snared his lasting attention or his genuine affection.

  Informed speculation was that the Archduke was biding his time until Prince Ashgar finally chose a bride, and that his plan was a match between the next generations. But when Cade glimpsed both young men in the audience that evening, he decided that whoever was doing the speculating was not as well-informed as rumor had it. Though ambassadors from eight different Continental nations were indeed present, not all of them clustered around the Prince.

  The piece Touchstone performed in Fliting Hall for the gentlemen of the Court was one they usually did for a laugh. Tonight they played it straight, though Mieka could be seen to roll his eyes every so often as Jeska declaimed the stock phrases from that most sentimental of romances, “The Hidden Cottage.”

  The plot could have been predicted by a child of three. Beautiful maiden (pastoral variety) with ambitious mother. Handsome young lord (poverty-stricken variety) with avaricious father. Could anyone doubt the inevitability of a marriage contract agreed upon by the respective parents, especially as the girl and the young man had never even met? Throw in two jealous sisters, a kidnapping, the young man’s rebellious flight on the day of the wedding, a cottage deep in the forest …

  The opportunities for comedy were endless. Jeska had a particular fondness for giving the young lord a dreadful sense of direction, and his clumsy wanderings gave Mieka plenty of scope for creating whimsical scenery as the mood took him—and sometimes he took the young lord halfway around the world before allowing him to blunder upon the cottage. (His rendition of certain landscapes was perhaps less than accurate, but every time Cade insisted that none of the books mentioned lilacs in any of the newly explored deserts, Mieka defiantly made the flowers bigger, brighter, and smellier.) The mutual love-at-first-sight sequence, the discovery of their true identities, the return to the girl’s home to find the nastiest of the sisters had married the young man’s father and they were making each other magnificently miserable—it was the low comedy of “The Sailor’s Sweetheart” with more characters and on a more lavish scale, and audiences howled with laughter.

  This night, however, every time Mieka looked as if he might indulge himself, Cade fixed him with a glare. He sulked, but kept his sense of humor under control while providing Jeska with the most innocently lovely of young girls and the most nobly handsome of young lords.

  With all those emissaries to entertain, Prince Ashgar wished to present himself as a sensitive, cultured, kindhearted man who, like the young lord of the playlet, would fall instantly in love with whichever girl was lucky enough to become his bride. And indeed, as the lights glowed brighter in the glass globes over the doors and around the ceiling once Rafe allowed all the magic to fade, the Prince could be seen brushing a tear from his cheek.

  Cade rather thought he might vomit.

  No sooner had the applause begun than Mieka started their next piece, a rollicking Mother Loosebuckle farce that had everyone roaring with laughter. Cade and Jeska had debated whether or not to include the more obscene puns, then shrugged at each other and decided to keep them. Explaining colloquialisms to the foreigners wasn’t their problem.

  But whatever any of these men had heard about Touchstone—indeed, if they’d heard anything about them at all—Rafe made sure the evening was remembered. At the playlet’s raucous conclusion, before Mieka could lay a finger on a spent withie to toss into the air, Rafe had blasted carefully controlled spurts of magic at half a dozen of the glass globes over the doors. After some shocked gasps, the applause and laughter were even more enthusiastic. Touchstone had given them the show they’d come to see.

  Cade, who was watching Prince Ashgar, barely noticed. For a fleeting turning of time he saw a young blond girl of about sixteen, not quite a woman, with the promise of striking beauty in her high-boned face. Tall and long-limbed, she gripped her skirts in her hands as she ran across a plowed field towards a manor house, wild excitement in her deep blue eyes. Cade glimpsed a range of sawtoothed mountains looming above a thick pine forest, white peaks stabbing into a painfully blue sky.

  Then it was gone: the girl, the field, the manor, the mountains, all of it. Mieka was perched atop the glisker’s bench, ready to leap over the glass baskets as had become his habit; Rafe was coming out from behind his lectern; Jeska was waiting for them and for Cade so they could take their bows. Hastily he tucked the vision away in his mind and joined his friends, and even though both Rafe and Jeska knew about him, neither saw in his face or his eyes what had just happened.

  It was Mieka who frowned a little as he looked up at Cade, thick brows quirking a question that Cade answered with a smile and a shrug. No answer at all, of course—and the boy knew it. Soon, Cade knew, he would have to
explain at least some of it. But not yet.

  Touchstone left the stage to the Shorelines, who performed their signature piece, “Breakers and Blue,” which they’d been doing so long that everybody knew every nuance. Cade lost interest halfway through and left the wings for the artists’ tiring-room.

  Rafe was already there, propping up a wall with one shoulder, gazing skeptically down at a squat, Gnomish young man whose every extravagant gesture endangered a thirteen-light brass candelabrum taller than he was. For the second time that night Cayden was reminded of his Fae heritage. This time it wasn’t a turn but the memory of a foreseeing dream. He’d seen this little man before. He’d been waiting for him to show up.

  Rafe caught his eye and nodded him over. Cade paused along the way to snag a glass of ale, then approached, heart racing. This man would be important to Touchstone, he knew it. He knew it.

  “—organize your travel schedule, keep track of the equipment, see to it that portions of your earnings are regularly distributed to your families, all that sort of thing. And set up bookings not just for your time off but for your return to Gallantrybanks before Trials next year. That will be important—”

  “I know,” Cade interrupted. “The Shadowshapers played a show at the Kiral Kellari last month, to try out new material and keep their name current in the city. Cayden Silversun,” he added by way of introduction.

  “Kearney Fairwalk. Your servant, sir.”

  It was a standard politeness, that. But Cayden had never had it spoken to him by a lord before. All the years of grim practice at keeping his countenance served him well when he heard the name. What the man hadn’t mentioned, and didn’t need to, was the ancient lordship that went with Fairwalk Manor. There was an expression of mingled embarrassment and gratification on the nobleman’s round, dark face. It was as if he took pride in the name, knew very well that everyone recognized it, and appreciated the doors it opened for him. Yet in other ways he regretted the instantaneous judgments inherent in so illustrious a name and title. Cade realized at once that Fairwalk’s situation was closely akin to his own: a desire to make the name known because of his own efforts, not any prior associations. This thought made him smile as he held up his palm. It was a greeting unused amongst any but the nobility, one to the other; Cade’s antecedents allowed it, and his own pride demanded it.