Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

  “You don’t have to—I mean, I can find enough money—”

  “Did we or did we not tell you to keep it shut?” Rafe snarled. “We can see Blye safe, so we will.” Then, head swiveling as the kitchen door slammed: “Oh, shit—Fairwalk.”

  Cade would have said exactly the same thing, but His Lordship was now within earshot, escorted out into the garden by the landlord—bowing, stammering, almost fluttering. And the landlord was nervous, too. No one of such rank had ever graced his premises. As Fairwalk seated himself, and Jeska politely asked if he’d care for tea, the landlord glared at Cade as if wanting very much to shriek at him for the lack of warning.

  “G-good morning,” said Fairwalk. “I know I’m early, scandalously early, but—I just couldn’t, don’t you see, really truly—”

  “Nothing to signify at all.” Jeska smiled his most dazzling smile. “Before we start, though—do you know anybody with a fast rig can get us home to town by tomorrow night?”

  Chapter 14

  Keeping his mouth shut had never been Mieka Windthistle’s specialty. It wasn’t that he was untrustworthy, exactly, or that he lacked respect for other people’s private business. He’d found as he got older that if it was important enough, he could keep his silence, and sometimes without even having been told to do so.

  It was just that sometimes he couldn’t help it—it was so much fun to shock, to provoke, and occasionally to avenge himself or someone he cared about. He had a true gift for outrage, and he knew it, and usually it was enough to keep him entertained without spilling other people’s secrets. But every so often it was irresistible, the prospect of revealing a not just surprising but downright shocking bit of information.

  His own secrets, however, he knew very well how to keep. Life in a crowded home with all those brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, and occasionally people he didn’t even recognize, had taught him how to give the appearance of blithe and innocent transparency while clutching his real feelings close and hidden.

  Vered Goldbraider had no such restraint. As Mieka waited politely in the cozy, sunlit parlor of a very nice inn on the river while a servant went to find Chattim Czillag, he heard Vered’s distinctive down-province accents from the taproom. Come to think of it, he reflected, he’d rarely encountered Vered without receiving the impression that the man not only lacked several layers of skin, but that the skin he did have was always scraped raw by one thing or another. Gods, he was worse than Quill.

  Rising from his chair in the entry hall, Mieka ambled towards the taproom doorway. Vered had warmed up and was now shouting at the top of his lungs. There were few people around to listen, but Mieka knew Vered wouldn’t have cared if the entire Court and its collected retinues and all their miscreate children were within earshot.

  “Gods be damned to him, then! Won’t have him nor nobody else commandin’ me words, nor yet tellin’ me so much as what shirt I’ll wear or not wear! D’ye be hearin’ of me, then?”

  Not just his accent but also his speech patterns had departed south without leaving a forwarding address, he was that angry. For a few moments Mieka thought he was railing at something Rauel had done—again—but then Rauel himself began yelling much the same thing.

  “Who the fuck does he think he is, eh? Sendin’ some lackey round here, tryin’ to buy us—do we look like whores to you?”

  A third voice, unfamiliar to him, spoke in low, soothing, yet slightly frightened tones. He didn’t catch the words as he crept into the taproom. It was gloomy in here, the low ceiling latticed with heavy black oak rafters, the murk eased somewhat by a variety of leafy plants in big iron cauldrons. Mieka wove his way amongst these towards the voices coming from the far corner.

  “No!” Vered snarled. “Not now, not ever, and ye take that answer back to His fuckin’ Lordship and shove it up his bumhole!”

  Mieka’s attention was snared by a pungent odor coming from the bizarre tree at his elbow. Whatever fertilizer they were using to keep this oddity alive, he didn’t care to speculate. A spindly thing, just a few feet of pale trunk with a froth of spiky leaves at the top, it looked like an imaging from one of the broadsheets Cade was always showing him so they could augment the usual scenery with strange foreign plant life.

  “You heard him!” Rauel’s voice had gone shrill with outrage. “There’s an end to it!”

  Mieka was intimately familiar with the sound of shattering glass, but it turned out that it rather startled him these days when Touchstone wasn’t responsible for it. The young man who scurried past startled him even more, for he was clothed in the orange-and-charcoal livery of the Archduke. Vered came stomping right after him, caught sight of Mieka lurking behind the skinny tree, and actually bared his teeth. They looked very white and very sharp in his dark face.

  “You’ll be next, boy!” he sneered. “Write that down—you’ll be next!”

  And with this inexplicable announcement, he stalked out of the bar.

  Mieka stood there, too dazed to move, until Rauel called out, “Somebody there?” and he jerked as if the sound had been a knifethrust.

  “Rommy?” came Chattim’s voice.

  “N-no, Chat, just me.” He stepped out from behind the tree. “I’ve come to say we’re heading back to town today—”

  “Did you bring any money with you?” Sakary Grainer had never been exactly friendly, not since the nerve-shredding night Mieka had sat in for Chat, but this was surly, even for him.

  “A bit,” Mieka replied cautiously.

  “Get on in here, then. Vered took all the coin with him, and I need to get drunk.”

  Mieka approached their corner of the bar. The girl behind it was wide-eyed and rightly afeared of the three remaining Shadowshapers, but she also held her ground until Mieka tossed his last remaining se’en-pence pieces onto the bar. As she drew pints, he glanced at Rauel, then Sakary, then Chat, and wondered what in all hells he’d walked into.

  The ale was half gone before Rauel spoke—in conciliatory tones, temper spent. “He’s a quick foul drunk, our Vered, we all know that. No head for it, none at all.”

  Sakary pondered his glass for a few moments, then replied, “Woulda said the same if he’d been sober.” Gulping back the last of the pint, he slid off the barstool and grimaced at Mieka. “Beholden. I owe you one, back home.”

  Perhaps recent experience of Cayden in a similarly sullen mood kept Mieka’s mouth shut. He neither accepted the debt nor dismissed it as unimportant. Sakary grunted, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and left the taproom.

  “Where to, d’ya think?” Chat asked Rauel.

  A shrug. “You know them, they’ll each find someplace to sit and seethe.” Finishing his own drink, he glanced at Mieka. “You’re heading home, you say? So early?”

  “A friend’s father died.”

  “Sorry to hear it. We would’ve enjoyed the trip back in our wagon, were you four there. Now—” He winced eloquently. “See you at the Downstreet, maybe, before the Royal starts.”

  When he was gone, Mieka turned to Chattim, suggesting, “I’ll be off, then, shall I?”

  “No, bide a bit, if you would. Another round, darlin’ dear,” he coaxed the barmaid, and Mieka dug into pockets, hoping he had a few pence stashed someplace. “I’ve got it,” Chat told him. “I only said I didn’t because the rest already had enough. Let’s go sit out back.”

  Rightly interpreting this to mean he didn’t wish to be overheard by anyone, not even the barmaid, Mieka took his first and second glasses with him and followed Chat into the back garden within view of the river. They sat at a small table, the barmaid unbent enough to bring out a bowl of spiced walnuts, and when they were quite alone with the elm trees and the river and the summer warmth, Chat heaved a sigh.

  “Good thing you’re leaving town, or you prob’ly would be next.”

  “For what? The Archduke?”

  “Saw the flunkey, then, did you? Himself sent round to command a private word with us. Rommy’s off visitin
g his old mum in some village south of here, so he couldn’t stop it before it started. Always a mistake to let Vered drink before noon, and even worse when there’s business talked of without Rommy around.”

  “P’rhaps all the Archduke wanted was a private performance.”

  “If only.” Chattim ran a fingertip round and round the rim of his glass. “A scandal and a shame, it is, that we’ve got so soft we can’t none of us direct a man to the door when he very much needs and requires direction.”

  Unable to contain himself any longer, Mieka asked, “But what did he want?”

  “Us.”

  “I’m not understanding you, Chat.”

  “His own private theater group. Oh, we’d still be on the Circuit, but in his employ.”

  “I’ve heard he’s right daft about the theater, but isn’t that taking it a bit far?”

  “They do it all the time on the Continent. Rich nobles buy up the contract of whatever group they fancy, and hire a manager to do the everyday things, the bookings and suchlike—”

  “But why? To make money?”

  “Not that much in it. No, it’s for the standing. The brag. Count Such-and-So’s Players, the Grand Duke’s Own Men, that sort of thing. There’s a court or three that buys up a group for years, and when they get tired of them, buys up another. It’s just something the nobility do, that’s all.” Despite their privacy out here in the garden, he lowered his voice, and Mieka leaned closer. “Nobody that side of the Flood’s half as good as even the worst players in this whole kingdom. It’s why I’m here and not there.”

  Mieka nodded as if he comprehended. And he did, in a way: better to be equal to if not better than your peers than be thought utterly brilliant amongst incompetent bodgers. “Where you come from,” he suggested, “they don’t have people like Cayden,” then added swiftly, “or Vered or Rauel.”

  “Not a one that I ever met. The bloodlines are blashed—like this ale,” Chattim added, directing a frown at his glass. “Watered down. Nothing like what we can do, you and I, with one eye only half-open. They manage well enough with the simple things, but—” He transferred his frown to Mieka’s face. “Don’t you know?”

  Mieka shook his head.

  “Where I come from—” He broke off as the girl came out again, bearing a tray with yet another round and, this time, a plate of bread and fried cheese. “Gettin’ on for lunching, is it, darlin’?” Chat said, smiling his lopsided smile. “Give us another bit of a while, and we’ll be gone so you can set up.” When she paused and searched his eyes as if judging the honesty of the statement, he smiled even wider, his comically uneven face acquiring a wry charm—but his deep blue eyes were ocean cold. Once she was gone, his lip curled with annoyance. “Never stayin’ here again, that’s for certes. Rauel heard it from Thierin that it’s very nearly the best place in town. You know Thierin Knottinger, right?”

  “To look at, not to talk to. Rauel thinks Pirro Spangler should join up with him, I hear.”

  “Rauel is, at bottom, a moron. Oh, he’s pretty as a Chapel Angel and he could charm the scales off a snake, an’ he’s clever and talented enough—but he’s got the brains of a coney and the morals to match. He likes Thierin because Thierin’s even more his opposite than Vered is.”

  Mieka didn’t quite comprehend this, either, but it didn’t interest him at the moment. Neither was this the time to broach the subject of Blye’s withies. “Tell me what the Archduke wanted, and I’ll stand you a lunching at our place if you’d care to come back with me. Mistress Luta’s cooking is a foretaste of heaven.”

  “We’ve a show tonight for the ladies, and somebody’s got to go find Sak and Vered for rehearsal, or I’d join you with pleasure.” He eyed the glass the girl had just brought out, then seemed to think better of it and reached for a chunk of bread. “What was I saying?”

  “Where you come from,” Mieka prompted.

  “Oh. Well, I’m not usual, not at all. That’s why I’m here and not there,” he repeated. “Our kind, not just Elfenkind but Wizards and Fae and Goblins and every other sort of person with magic, we’re looked at sidewise most places. Where d’you think the chirurgeons go to learn how to kag an Elf’s ears or file down his teeth? The panic when one of the traits shows up—” He shook his head. “You ask your masquer sometime, he can tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Mieka was more bewildered than ever.

  “What’s his name, then? Bowbender. Had it from his father’s father, wouldn’t he—and when the Archduke’s War started, what did the King import from elsewhere? Soldiers. Mercenaries. Men with names nobody here could pronounce, so they put names on ’em according to their craft.”

  “So … so Jeska’s father got nervous when his son turned up with Elfen features—”

  “Because he’d learned how to fear from his father. Whatever that man had in his own ancestry, two generations of this kingdom’s girls and—” He circled a forefinger with a flourish at his own pointed ear. “And I bet you don’t even know why he thought like that, do you?”

  Again Mieka shook his head.

  “Didn’t you ever go to school? Or don’t they teach what happened two and three hundred years gone?”

  “If they did, I wasn’t listening,” Mieka conceded.

  He was given a brief and shocking history lesson. Chattim talked of magical folk of all kinds, pushed into enclaves and then pushed out of countries entirely. He spoke of waves of intolerance that coincided with hard times or plague, difficult times that required someone to blame and someone to punish. He told about how if the magical folk fought back, they were only confirming the worst suspicions and fears of ordinary Humans. So they left, when and as they could, for more congenial places.

  “Your King at the time of the First Escaping, he was Wizardly himself through his mother, and he gave welcome. So after that, no matter who was throned, settlements were established here where more could come when they needed to. I’ve heard that voyagers to the new lands across the Ocean Sea actually meet up with magical folk who originally came from all over the Continent. I’ve half a thought to go see for myself, if any of my long-lost kin—” He broke off as Mieka snorted with laughter. “Funny, you think?”

  “You on board ship? Very funny, Chat, you know it is! You can’t even look at a seashell without turning greensick!”

  The other glisker sniggered. “Make a hobby of sailing, do you?”

  “We’ll all have to, won’t we, if this scheme for—what’re they calling it? ‘Artistic trade,’ that’s it. If that’s set up, then it’s over the Flood in leaky little boats for us players, and then—” He broke off as Chattim looked bewildered. “You didn’t know? There’s talk all over Seekhaven of sending groups over to the Continent—”

  Chattim slammed a fist on the table. The dishes and glassware rattled, and the little brass lantern jumped a foot. Mieka darted out a hand to steady it.

  “I knew it! I knew it! Selling us like wool! Sending us places where they’ve never seen a real performance, not the sort we can do! No wonder the Archduke wanted to buy us!”

  It came clear to Mieka then. Anyone with a stake in a celebrated theater group would have a cut of whatever was earned on the Continent if this scheme went through. Chat had been wrong about its being mainly for prestige, this ownership of players’ contracts. Highborns and guilds of other countries would vie madly to present players who actually knew what they were doing; the potential earnings were enormous. But if what Chat had said about throwing out magical folk over the centuries was true, then the likes of Wizards and Elves who not only didn’t hide what they were but used all the magic at their command in their work hadn’t been seen on the Continent for years.

  “We’ll be freaks,” Mieka blurted. “They’ll come to gawk and gape at us like—like when the King sent samplings from his bestiary garden on tour through the provinces!”

  “And we all remember what happened when he did.”

  Mieka repressed a shudder. At Bexmarket, on
e of the gigantic dappled cats had reached a paw out from its cage and sliced open the cheek of a boy who’d ventured incautiously close. The subsequent riot had resulted in the deaths of four townsfolk and the escape of the cat—who was rumored to be roaming still in the rugged mountains.

  “They’ll be warned off us,” Chat went on bitterly, “just as people were warned not to come near the wild animals.”

  “And they’ll come anyway, and dare each other to bait us, poke sticks into the cage—Gods, and to think I was lookin’ forward to it!”

  “When I was a bantling,” Chat mused, “we lived in a twenty-stride village—well, maybe thirty, if you had short legs. Been there for generations. There were the Wizards with their earthenware manufactory and the Goblins who ran the kilns for them, Trolls at the post stables and store, some mostly Humans who farmed, and Elfenbloods like us who did the leeching and the brewing and the grinding at the mill. Then the old baron died, and the new one married, and his wife bore stillborn son after stillborn son. She took it into her head that not only was the leech incompetent with his potions, but the midwife was strangling every child before he could draw his first breath, the Wizards had poisoned the plates she ate off, and the Goblins were burning corn-plaits of her babies in their fires. Oh, and the Trolls were mislaying her letters a-purpose at the post, so there’d be no town-bred Human physicker to come attend her. She even thought the poor farmers were in league with my grandsir, giving the baron’s kitchens only mold-rot flour. So all of us left before the baron could gather up his kin and come kill us.”

  “Kill you?” Mieka stared at him. “You don’t really mean they would’ve—”

  “Killed us. And in the nasty ways, nothing so simple as a hanging or beheading. My grandsir, he had cousins in one of the big cities, so we lost ourselves there in the crowds. But when I turned up able to do what I do, there was a choosing to be made. Sell me for what the ambitious lordling up the street was offering, or lose me to him anyway for no money at all.” Chat picked up the full glass of ale and drained half of it down his throat. “So you’ll be seeing that I’ve been sold before. I don’t much like it.”