Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

  Pirro sat at the end of Mieka’s bed. “I’ll be honest with you. They’d kill me for it, but—we are good, we just need seasoning—”

  “So does the average everyday soup,” Cade snapped. “If we let you go on as opener, everyone will think that we think you’re good enough. We’ve never even seen all four of you in the same room!”

  Pirro said, “If it’s the money, we don’t want it.”

  “I don’t give a damn about the money!” Cade glanced over to the door. “Black Lightning has a proposition for us, Jeska.”

  As he explained in the nastiest terms possible, Mieka slumped back into his pillows and thought as hard as his thumping head would allow. Several times on the Winterly there’d been someone to open the show—usually a musician of some sort. But this was another group of theater players, not some local lutenist.

  Pirro was cringing, Rafe looked annoyed, Cade was very near to a rampage, and Jeska’s face had gone unnaturally still. Finally the masquer said, “I think it ought to be Mieka’s decision.”

  “You do?” He sat up a bit. “I can’t deny I’m not up to strength, but—”

  “Please.” Pirro was looking desperate now. “Just one show.”

  Mieka glanced at each of his partners in turn. No help there. They really were going to make him decide. “We go back a way,” he told Pirro. “If you say you’re good, then you’re prob’ly not bad. One show.”

  “Beholden, Miek, absolutely beholden!” And he bolted from the room as if afraid Mieka would change his mind.

  “A favor,” Cade said in a dangerously soft voice. “He called it a favor.”

  “They’ll owe us, whether they want to admit it or not,” Jeska observed. “I’ll go talk to the theater manager, shall I?” And thus made his escape, neat as in a play.

  Cade turned to Rafe. “What d’you think about this?”

  “I think Mieka’s too sick to work two pieces today. I think he can probably get through one. But that’s all.”

  Mieka couldn’t disagree with him. Even with bluethorn, he’d be wrung out afterwards—and there was another show tomorrow night before they left for Castle Eyot and a seven-day rest. “Quill,” he pleaded, “Pirro’s a friend.” And then, because he was too weary to argue it out, he used The Eyes.

  A cynical smile told him that not only did Cade know what he was doing, but also that it had worked. “We go on at three. You’ll sleep until two if I have to knock you over the head.”

  As it happened, he could have slept right through until an hour before the show the next night. Black Lightning weren’t awful. They were loud, blatant, and derivative, but they definitely weren’t awful.

  And the audience of sailors and trulls dressed as sailors wouldn’t let them leave the stage when their playlet was done.

  Touchstone could do nothing but stand in the wings and fume. The theater manager, outraged at first but cozened into consent by Jeska that afternoon, was delighted with Black Lightning and intended them to open for Touchstone the next evening. When informed of this, Touchstone left the theater.

  Oddly, it was Rafe who spent the whole walk back to their lodgings muttering obscenities into his beard. Cayden was simply too furious for speech. Jeska mentioned something conciliatory about its only being what they themselves might’ve done in similar circumstances, caught the glare Rafe threw him, and thereafter joined Mieka in keeping his mouth shut.

  Back in their room, Mieka wrapped himself in blankets and curled on his bed. Jeska had stayed downstairs, and Rafe had lingered in the little sitting area on the landing to mutter into a pint of ale. Cade paced for a while, and finally burst out, “Did you hear that line of theirs? ‘Open things, and things will be open to you!’ Oh, that’s bloody profound, that is. Open it up, and—oy, look, it’s open! What a concept! What an insight!”

  Stifling a sigh, Mieka rolled over and figured he might as well get it over with and encourage Cade to express himself. Otherwise he’d be griping under his breath the rest of the day and half the night, and Mieka wouldn’t get any sleep at all. “I was wondering what they meant by it.”

  “It didn’t mean a fuckin’ thing! It’s the sort of pompous drivel that makes people think they’re hearing something deep and insightful.”

  “Now I really don’t understand.”

  “These are players, right? They’re supposed to be creative types. Thinkers, even. Some tregetours knot things up so complicated that nobody understands what’s going on—probably not even them. People who consider themselves fairly smart, when they don’t understand a line or even a whole playlet, they think that the tregetour must be really smart—so he gets a reputation for being wise when it’s naught but intellectual tricks.”

  “Could you untangle that for me, please?”

  “You know exactly what I’m saying. If it’s so complicated nobody understands it, then it must be profound, right? But these sapskulls, they go the opposite direction. ‘Open things, and things will be open to you.’ Gorgeously simple, innit?” He snorted. “Gorgeously simple-minded!”

  Mieka had been listening to this with a smirk teasing the corners of his mouth. Now he grinned. “Quill, you’re a snob!”

  “You bet I am,” he shot back. “Get some rest—because tomorrow night we’re gonna explode Black Lightning right off the fuckin’ stage!”

  “Find me an Elfen healer,” he countered, “and I’ll explode them into the middle of next week. I’ll not be swallowing that swill again, not if you tie me up and pour it down me throat!”

  Cayden scoured the streets of New Halt, finally returning for dinner with the assurance that he had found not only an Elfen healer, but even one who knew Mieka’s Auntie Brishen. The next day a tiny, shriveled being limped into their bedchamber at a repellent hour of the morning, chattering in a reedy voice about how if he’d had the courage years ago, he would have courted Mistress Brishen Staindrop, he would, an quite an honor it was to treat her nephew. Mieka squinted up at him; the man looked old enough to have courted Great-great-grandmother.

  Mieka groaned as he pushed himself upright amid the pillows and blankets, then flinched as a sudden shriek nearly fractured his already aching head.

  “Never call up fire around the brewings, boy! Good galloping Goblins, there’s things as pick up any stray magic and turn into you don’t want to know what!”

  “Sorry,” Cayden said from over by the door. “I only thought a bit of light might help—”

  “Keep yer fire to yerself, Wizard! Go on, out with you!” When the door snicked shut, the healer leaned very close to Mieka, peering at him. “Yes, yes, there’s a look of the Staindrop about you. But Human enough for a nuisance like this, aren’t you?” Poking and prodding in unlikely places with fingers sharp as glass thorns, the old Elf kept talking. “Yes, yes, got a swelling here, and a tender spot there—nose running, head stuffed with sheep’s wool, coughing fit to choke—”

  “I need to work tonight.”

  “Tonight?” Brittle shoulders twitched beneath layers of wool and fur wrappers. “Well, there’s ways and ways, if there’s no overdoing. After, it’s plenty of sleep and quiet—”

  “Just get me through tonight.”

  A little while later the old Elf had departed. Mieka had submitted to a prick of a rather large thorn containing a mixture of obscure powders. As it made him more and more sleepy, he reminded himself that bluethorn would be necessary tonight as well, even though the healer hadn’t mentioned it.

  Explosions had been promised for that night at the Mariners Guildhall, and explosions there were: one not-quite-spent withie and Jeska’s temper. It was uncertain which was more dangerous.

  Mieka, full of an excellent dinner, two pints, and various medicaments, worked the glisker’s bench like a madman, wringing sensation out of each glass twig until the things almost bled. The glass baskets shivered on the padded bench as he reached for withie after withie. Mindful of the way Pirro had bludgeoned the audience, nothing subtle about Black Lightning at all
, Mieka instead used Cade’s magic to coax and cajole, knowing that each physical and emotional nuance would be exquisitely controlled by Rafe. If the dragon didn’t actually snap people’s heads off, there washed through the audience again and again the fear that it might.

  He knew Black Lightning was watching. They’d done a repeat of the “Open things, and things will be open to you” playlet, a ramshackle piece as far as Mieka was concerned, essentially a series of poems about windows, bottles of brandy, virgin girls, and finally a casket. He gathered that this was supposed to be the profound part. As the four players exited stage left, Pirro threw him a grateful smile, which for just an instant softened his irritation. But when Thierin Knottinger and his masquer, Kaj Seamark, paused to grin insolently at Touchstone, and Rafe actually growled, Mieka’s resolve to make this a show to remember became a determination that Black fucking Lightning would have this show thrown in their smirking faces whenever Touchstone was mentioned.

  But at the end, with the entire hall on its feet and screaming its collective lungs out, and Jeska tossed him the spent withie that had been his “sword,” Mieka wasn’t quick enough to catch it. Groping frantically for another, his fingers closed around the wrong one, one with some magic left inside. And when he flung it in the air and shattered it, flashes of magic stung the air and the glass shards cascaded down and one of them got Jeska in the shoulder.

  The yelp of startled pain was lost in the renewed tumult of applause. Mieka stumbled in his jump over the glisker’s bench. Rafe had Jeska by one elbow and was talking rapidly into his ear. Cade grabbed Mieka’s wrist and they took their bows half the stage apart.

  “Not one fucking word!” Cade yelled as he dragged him into the wings.

  “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, Quill, I—”

  “Shut it!”

  Halfway back to their lodgings, Mieka had had enough. He shook off Cade’s iron grip and snarled, “I got you what you wanted, didn’t I? Nobody in that hall will remember that Black Lightning ever played tonight!”

  “You could’ve done it without thorn! I know that look by now, Mieka, I recognize it! You don’t need—”

  “How do you know what I need?” When Cade’s hands reached for him, he backed off. “Don’t you fuckin’ touch me!” Not that he really thought Cade would hit him; he’d seen the Elsewhen look the last time he’d raised a fist, and was certain that whatever it was Cade had seen, it scared him too much ever to allow that fist to connect.

  But this was rage, and beyond Cade’s power to restrain it. Mieka felt his shoulders taken in fingers like steel spikes, and he was shaken until his teeth rattled. “What if that shard had hit him in the head? What if it’d sliced his face open? What if—”

  “What if he’d fuckin’ moved out of the way!” Mieka shouted, and fought him off again, and ran ahead to the inn.

  He could hear Pirro’s woefully off-key voice in the bar, singing some mournful ballad or other. He paused long enough in the doorway to yell, “Fuckwits!” and then took the stairs two at a time. The wild energy of bluethorn sustained him all the way into the bedchamber, where the little fireplace was spitting violent sparks every color of the rainbow.

  Jeska turned, one hand holding a bandage to the bleeding cut on his shoulder. “Cayden told you don’t ever do it again. I just made sure you won’t.”

  In the fire lay the green wyvern-hide roll of thorn.

  The roar that came from his throat belonged to some feral creature. He went for Jeska with both fists.

  He woke up lying in his own bed, fully clothed, covered in a quilt, the left side of his face burning with pain and the towel-wrapped snow that was supposed to ease it.

  Rafe was the only one in the room with him, sitting by the fire rereading a letter from Crisiant. He glanced over when Mieka groaned, and said mildly, “That was foolish. You’re lucky, though. He won’t be adding one of your teeth to his collection. You fell down before he could really get started.”

  The next day, before the coaches left—one going south, the other north—Mieka cornered Pirro in the empty taproom. He spoke three words: “You owe me.” Ten minutes later he pocketed a single glass thorn and ten little paper twists. They would do him while he sent to Auntie Brishen for more. He didn’t need it for a show—they would be on the road for a few days and then at Castle Eyot for a seven-day rest. But he did need it.

  Chapter 21

  Once it became clear to everyone that the trip to Castle Eyot would be infinitely pleasanter if no one in the coach sulked, brooded, pouted, or otherwise sat around feeling sorry for himself, they began speaking to one another again. By late afternoon, Jeska had even volunteered to jump out of the coach and replenish the snow in the cloth Mieka kept pressed to the left side of his face. But he didn’t apologize. Nor did Mieka. Neither Rafe nor Cade was stupid enough to believe that either of them ever would.

  They were all on civil if not friendly terms by the second night. Even had they not been, it was only good manners to make the effort. The designated stop in Cloffin Crossriver was run by an elderly couple who had gone to a great deal of bother to make them welcome, astonished that they’d forgotten the date.

  Thus it was that Touchstone spent Wintering in a weather-beaten old inn. The holiday was strictly family-friends-and-home; no one was interested in the theater on Wintering Night, even if there’d been a place in town suitable. For a group of players on the Circuit far from their homes, it could have been a lonely evening of increasingly morose drinking, but it would have been churlish not to join in the songs and feasting laid on for them by the kindly old man and his fussing, smiling wife. The childless couple treated their four young guests and the coachman as family—which only emphasized for Mieka how much he missed his own home, especially at Wintering. Knowing it was ungrateful of him, he was just as glad to have the excuses of a black eye and a stubborn cold, and as early as possible went up to bed.

  The other three lingered downstairs a while longer. Mieka could hear them, and the festivities at the Minster down the road, as he lay there in the half-moon darkness waiting in vain to get warm. The thick, heavy quilt ought to have been adequate. By the time Cade finally came in, Mieka was still shivering.

  He pretended to be asleep. He even managed a snore, which prompted a stifled snigger. Eventually he could stand it no longer. Teeth chattering, stuffy nose still stinging from the sharp scent of the pine boughs decorating the bar downstairs, he gave in and gave up and got out of bed.

  “I’m freezing, Quill.”

  He could practically hear Cade think about refusing, but only for a moment. Wordlessly he twitched back the blankets, and Mieka plunged between them.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t steal the covers.” His back to Cade, he curled around himself to conserve whatever warmth there might be.

  “I’d only steal them back. I think it’s colder here than it was in Scatterseed.”

  There was a brief silence. Then, because it was dark and Cade had been sympathetic, he said softly, “I’m sorry. About Pirro, and Black Lightning, and especially for not being more careful of that withie.”

  “And for the thorn.”

  “And for the thorn,” he echoed dutifully.

  “I know Jeska’s sorry for throwing your little hoard into the fire. He’ll probably never say it, but…”

  “Any more than you’ll ever say sorry for screaming at me?”

  Another period of quiet. But he didn’t regret having said it.

  “All right. Sorry.”

  Mieka couldn’t help wriggling a bit, like a puppy under a head-pat. Then he settled more deeply into the pillow and whispered, “Dream sweet, Quill.”

  “You, too.”

  Tired and unwell, he was no more aware of finally being warm than he was aware of falling asleep. But he woke fully alert an unknown amount of time later, scared without knowing why until he heard Cayden whimper. He could only speculate that the all-night celebrations at the Minster were loud enough to disturb Cade’s sleeping
mind. He didn’t understand why. The same chants, the same songs, the same laughter, the same night of the year when people gathered for what was supposed to be gentle frivolling fun but sometimes turned to drunken carousing worthy of sailors in port after months at sea—it was only Wintering, and it happened every year, and he didn’t know why Cade should be shuddering with a dream.

  Yet he was, and Mieka saw that he only knew he’d been dreaming when he felt hands on his shoulders, holding him down against the mattress. The fear within his dream became stark panic, and he cried out.

  “Cade! It’s all right, settle down! It’s just me, you’re safe—”

  The last light of the sinking moon was enough to show him Cade’s white, frightened face. Then he slumped back into the pillows and turned his head away.

  “Don’t you dare apologize,” Mieka said all at once. “You can’t control what you dream. Nobody can do that, not even you.”

  “I should be able to. I should’ve learned by now.” A brief hesitation, and then: “I don’t have the sort of dreams most people have.”

  Mieka watched, holding his breath, convinced that the truth was about to be admitted at last. Gray eyes studied the cracks in the wall plaster, the decaying lathe slats beneath. A chill seeped through them into the room.

  “Look at me. Please, Cade.”

  He turned his head unwillingly.

  “I know I said your dreams are important, but not this kind.” He waited a while longer, silently urging, Please, please—

  The sigh might have signaled defeat. “It was about something that happened a long time ago.”

  “You’re only nineteen years old—how long ago can ‘long ago’ be?”

  He smiled a little. “All right, then, how about this: I try very hard to make it be a long time ago.”

  Mieka met his gaze steadily. “Tell me?”

  “You don’t want to hear it.”

  “Haven’t you learned yet not to tell me what I want and don’t want?” He settled into the covers, tugged them up to Cade’s chin. “Tell me,” he repeated. “You have to, Quill.”