Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

  He didn’t, not really. They both knew it. But whereas Cade didn’t lie to him, neither did he reveal what Mieka already knew to be the truth about his dreamings.

  He was an accomplished teller of tales, was Cayden Silversun. Mieka could see and hear and feel all of it. Eloquent words, yet impersonal, as if detailing the proposed plotline of a new and original playlet. Mieka had been wrong about the defeat in Cade’s sigh; it was Mieka who had lost, yet again.

  But he listened. He would always listen.

  On the night after thirteen-year-old Cade spilled a pot of ink all over the workroom floor—it was supposed to go into the printing press, but his hand “accidentally” slipped—Number Eight, Redpebble Square, was graced by the presence of a very distinguished dinner guest.

  Sagemaster Emmot had spent many years with the stern brethren of Culch Minster, and it showed. Just what he had done for the Archduke during the war was unclear, but whatever it was, he had served his sentence, the brethren had pronounced him cleansed, the Crown had forgiven him, and by the summer evening of his visit to the Silversun home, he had been teaching young Wizards for ten years. It escaped no one who saw him, however, whether they knew his name or not, that he had indeed been detained at the pleasure of the Crown, and for offenses relating to misuse of magic. For it had also pleased the Crown to lop off his thumbs.

  Neither did anyone know why Emmot was allowed to teach. Most people assumed it was because he had proven convincingly that he had rethought his position on various issues, and was being given a second chance. The brethren at Culch Minster vouched for him. Some suspected a wealthy and influential but anonymous patron. There had been rumors at one time that he had been permitted an audience with the King, before whom he had promised on his knees and on pain of instant death that he would teach nothing that might ever be used in war. (This was discounted as absurd; Emmot had never been important enough in the Archduke’s forces to merit personal royal attention.) A few considered it part of the amnesty granted those who had fought on the losing side, a demonstration—cynical or not—of the Crown’s generosity.

  Whatever the circumstances or the reasons, Sagemaster Emmot had been freed, had become a teacher, had established his own academy in a tiny seaside village, and had arrived at Number Eight, Redpebble Square, for dinner.

  Cade was never permitted to come downstairs when there were guests. So he was caught unawares when Mistress Mirdley called up from two floors below that he was to get dressed in something clean and present himself in the drawing room at once, and don’t forget to comb your impossible hair! Scrambling off the bed, where he’d been reading an old copy of Twenty-two Troll Tales, he skittered into the drawing room just as his mother was pouring wine for a tall, skeletal, bald old man who took the stem of the glass between the first and second fingers of his right hand.

  “Master Emmot,” said his mother, catching sight of Cade in the doorway, “this is my son. Come in and make your bow, Cayden.”

  He did, unable to keep his eyes from the maimed hands. Master Emmot seemed not to notice his rudeness, and nodded kindly when Cayden gave a gawky version of the Court bow his father could perform with such effortless grace.

  “Done service at Wintering, have you?” the old man asked.

  “Once,” said Lady Jaspiela. “He was eleven.”

  Cade felt every muscle in his body constrict, as if instinct ordered him to make himself as small as possible. He remembered that night.

  “His looks, of course,” she continued, apologetically. “His father had to plead with the Good Sister, and even then he was only allowed in the back hallways. We had thought to set him on the path to the Minster, or at least a place at a Chapel somewhere, but…” She ended with a shrug.

  “Ah.”

  The silence lingered, and Cade stole a glance at his mother. She seemed caught between attitudes, she who was always perfectly secure in whatever pose she selected. Honored, but also nervous, as if she didn’t quite know how to behave to this formerly caged Wizard. But there was also something of excitement in her eyes, and Cade didn’t understand it at all.

  “My husband sends his regrets,” Lady Jaspiela said at last. “He’s detained at Court tonight.”

  “I’m sorry to have missed him.” He kept looking at Cade with eyes so dark a blue they were almost purple, like irises.

  “Prince Ashgar often keeps Zekien with him for those long, involved conversations men so adore—”

  “Your pardon, Lady,” the Wizard interrupted, “but I was given to understand you’ve another son?”

  “Why, yes. A year old. His name is Derien.”

  “Then you don’t really need this one.”

  Cade could have told him that.

  “The point being,” Master Emmot went on, when it became obvious that Lady Jaspiela was having trouble finding words, “that he needs me. I’ve established an academy. I think he might do very well there.”

  Cade held his breath. To leave here, to escape, to learn magic more resonant and complex than the simple spells of the local Wizarding school—

  —but to leave here, the only home he knew, to leave Mistress Mirdley and Blye and Rafe—

  —but … magic—

  “Tuition will be waived, of course,” Master Emmot said. “And I’m certain we can settle on a reasonable charge for room and board.”

  “I’m certain we can,” said Lady Jaspiela.

  “In a year’s time, then.”

  “No!” Cade exclaimed. “I want to go now!”

  “Cayden! Be silent!”

  “Why do I have to wait? Why don’t you want me now?”

  Master Emmot arched a brow at him, then turned to Cade’s mother. “He’s only thirteen.”

  “I’m tall for my age—and I know things, I can work spells other boys can’t—please, let me go now, Mother—”

  Careful of the fine glass, Master Emmot set down his wine. “With your parents’ permission, boy, and if you truly want to—”

  “Please, Mother—” As she hesitated, he warned recklessly, “I will if you say I can or not!”

  “Don’t dictate to me, boy,” she snapped. “Get to your room. Now!”

  He did. He packed. Huddling in a shadow by the ridiculous rose-filled urns that marked the entrance to the house next door, he waited until a hire-hack drew up outside his own front door, hoping Master Emmot would be a gentleman and discourage Lady Jaspiela from escorting him outside. When he heard the door open and shut, he peered between the roses and saw the old man making his way alone to the hack. Straightening to his full height, he stepped from behind the urn and presented himself in silence.

  “Said your farewells, have you?”

  He nodded. A glance in his baby brother’s room, a quick hug for Mistress Mirdley—who swept everything edible she could find into a knotted string bag and thrust it onto his arms—that was all. He felt bad about Blye and Rafe, but he’d asked Mistress Mirdley to explain.

  Sagemaster Emmot gestured with a maimed hand to the door of the hack. “Climb in.”

  They were well on their way north to the seacoast before the old Wizard spoke again. “You’ll be wondering why, of course. I’ve seen you. Not in the way most people see, or mayhap I ought to say ‘look’ because so few people really see anything at all. Once I was sure, I came to find you. But the decision had to be yours. You’d either make the break yourself, as you did tonight, or stay and never learn, never develop. Never become what you most truly are. Tonight you overcame whatever fear you have of leaving familiar surroundings, of parting from the people you love and who love you. You also overcame your fear of the depth of magic you know very well you’ll be learning. Tonight was, in fact, your first lesson. It’s in your power to shape the future. To make it happen.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the old man, the crags and furrows of his face emphasized by the light of candles within glass chimneys mounted either side of the door.

  “For example, I saw you coming out of Maste
r Honeycoil’s shop, and looking very pleased with yourself, I might add.” For the first time, Cade saw a smile twitch the gnarled face. “What exactly was it you did to earn his wrath?”

  “Mixed up an order on purpose.”

  “I waited a while, to make sure it wasn’t a quirk, but a few weeks later I saw you again, and a few weeks after that as well. Time was required to make arrangements—I’m not a wealthy man, but recently I received a most agreeable donation. And now here you are. And of your own choosing, which is the most important part.”

  Mieka didn’t relinquish Cade’s gaze even once during this story. The silver moonlight was almost gone by the time he finished. The room was colder now. A freshening wind outside fingered the pines and reached in through the cracks in the plaster. He pulled the covers more closely around them, burrowing down.

  “Master Honeycoil?” he said, trying to prompt the words he’d been waiting for these many months.

  “I—I worked for him, for a while. He’s a wine merchant. It ended the same way the bookbindery job ended.”

  “You made a mistake on purpose.” He waited, but the words did not come. The words of honest confession did not come. He nudged a little more. “I don’t understand. Why would something like that, dreaming about what happened that night, make you so afraid? You were shaking in your dream, Quill, I know you were scared.”

  “It’s what came after that … when I had to tell him what had happened at Wintering, when I was eleven.…”

  “You don’t have to tell me.” Please tell me, please tell me.… That he didn’t want to was clear in his eyes. Mieka put a hand on his shoulder, confirming the tremors that had come back into the long bones. “Some other time. It’s too fuckin’ cold.” He smiled as Cade relaxed beside him. “Want me to warm us up?” Not waiting for an answer—answers were things he wasn’t going to receive tonight, if ever—he sneaked a hand out from under the blankets, gesturing at the second bed. “Hold your breath,” he advised, “and hope we don’t suffocate before I sort it out. Never had the benefit of a really good school. Not that I would’ve paid any attention anyways!”

  Cade spluttered an apprehensive protest. A moment later suffocation was indeed a possibility, for not just the blankets but the mattress zoomed over and fell on top of them. By the time they struggled out from under, dumped the second mattress onto the floor, and wrapped themselves in the quilts, they were close to suffocating again, this time from laughter.

  In a little while they were warm. The moon was gone, and it was dark and quiet in the bedchamber. Mieka inhaled softly of Cade’s scent: his breath that smelled of whiskey and his skin that smelled of Mistress Mirdley’s pure white soap scented with sage, the same scent that clung to his nightshirt. There was a faint tang of clean sweat, and a hint of woodsmoke in his hair. And perhaps an elusive touch of paper and ink, though that might have been his imagination making an instinctive association. Eyes closed, Mieka breathed him, and slowly realized that to him, Cade smelled like magic.

  “What scared me first,” Cade murmured, as if there had been no interruption in the conversation, “was something he said later. I guess I dozed off, because suddenly I was awake again and he was talking. He said I’d shown myself willing to turn my back on what was familiar, the certainty of a roof over my head and food in my belly, on whatever love and friendship home could offer, so that I could chase knowledge. He told me that I’d already discovered that the learnings of the mind are more important than the promptings of the heart.”

  Mieka couldn’t help but interrupt. “That’s not true, Quill. People need both. And he was wrong about you, anyway, you’d never—”

  “Wouldn’t I? That night, I did. I turned and walked away. Derien, Mistress Mirdley, Blye, Rafe.… I left without a moment’s hesitation.”

  “But that’s not abandoning them, you just—”

  “I sent Blye a letter. I’m fine, hope you’re well, off to school, see you next summer. She sent it back to me inside an envelope, in shreds.”

  “I just bet she did!” Mieka couldn’t help a snicker, and struggled not to end it on a coughing fit. “I’m surprised she didn’t shred you once you got home.”

  “I didn’t go home for almost two years.”

  He considered this. “Were you lonely?”

  “I was too busy learning to be a great Wizard, just like Lady Jaspiela wanted.”

  The self-mockery angered him. “Anybody can be a great Wizard. You’re a great tregetour, the best, and soon everybody’s gonna know it. Even your mother.”

  “What’s important to me and you doesn’t mean anything at all to her. Or my father. I think my grandsir would’ve been pleased, though.”

  “The fettler? The one who left your father that mirror?”

  “Yeh. It’s been dead even longer than Grandsir has.”

  Mieka wasn’t so sure about that. He didn’t like glancing into that mirror over the Silversun hearth, because whenever he did, he felt as if his teeth itched. “I’m glad you didn’t become the kind of Wizard your mother wanted. If Master Emmot’s idea of being a great Wizard was to teach you how to walk out on whatever or whoever got in the way of what you want—”

  “But it’s in me to do that, Mieka. I proved it that night.”

  “Would you do it? Could you turn away from me and Rafe and Jeska? When you look at us, is all you see just three people who are useful to you?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “All right, then.” It spoke well of Cade that being told such an awful thing about himself had scared him. But Mieka didn’t say so aloud.

  “After that was when he made me tell him about Wintering.”

  Mieka wanted badly to see Cade’s face. But he knew that the prospect of being watched while he talked would shut Cade up quicker than the front door on a beggar at a Spillwater mansion. So he didn’t ask for a bit of light brought to the bedside candle. What he said was, “That was the first time he saw you, wasn’t it?”

  “Saw me?”

  “You told me he’d had glimpses of you. He was a Longseer, wasn’t he?” Again he gave Cade the chance to clarify, for Mieka was fairly certain Master Emmot had come to Redpebble Square because he had the kinds of seeings Cade had.

  “That’s one of the things he could do.”

  The disappointment was so severe that Mieka felt the sting of frustrated tears behind his eyes. He wanted so much to be trusted by this man, to be told what Jeska and Rafe already knew. It just wasn’t fair—

  “He hadn’t seen me inside the Minster, though. Just outside in the yard, emptying slops.”

  Mieka bit both lips together to keep himself silent as the story unfolded. Cade certainly knew how to organize a narrative, he thought bleakly, even when the story was his own. Mieka truly became that eleven-year-old boy, trimmed and garnished in velvet clothes, the elegance so laughable a contrast to his homely face that not even his mother’s triumph at finally seeing her son in service at Wintering could survive the sight of him. Mieka saw her expression wane from pride to dismay, saw her wave him out of the house as she would a stray insect. He felt the cobbles under the soles of thin shoes as he walked across Redpebble Square to the waiting hire-hack, smelled horse and leather and the pine bough for luck that decorated the driver’s bench, saw the lights of the Minster loom bright and then brighter and then so brilliant that his eyes hurt. He knew the humiliation of being banished to the back halls, to fetch and carry for the boys, the good-looking boys, who were allowed to serve at table.

  Everyone else was stealing tidbits off tray after tray of delicacies, but he had no appetite. The other boys were sneaking drinks, too. When dinner was over and the entertainment began in the hall, he was the only one not staggering drunk. So he saw it all, from the sparse shelter of a half-closed door, peering through the gap between wood and stone, unable to move, unable to look away.

  “They all wore costumes, disguises. Some of them not very good—I recognized several of my mother’s friends. I even
saw the King’s sister. That’s when I knew why Lady Jaspiela wanted me to serve at that particular Wintering.

  “Do you know what really goes on there? Most people don’t, not unless they’re invited to a Minster for a highborn celebration. They send the boys home once dinner is over. But one of the cooks ordered me outside with a cauldron of slops, and it was very heavy, and I spilled some as I was emptying it. The clothes I had on were borrowed, so I had to clean up as best I could. By the time I got out of the garderobe, everyone else was gone. I couldn’t find anyone to tell me how I was to get home. I heard the singing still going on in the hall. But I’d only opened the door partway when the procession began.

  “Their costumes represent all the races. Harpy, Gorgon, Faerie, Elf, Pikseys and Gnomes and Goblins. Even Trolls, though they’re hard-put to convey the concept while still looking as elegant as possible. They wear wings of gold or silver tissue, and false coverings on their teeth, and twist ribbons of all colors together to make a Gorgon’s hair. I even saw one couple dressed as Merfolk—they had to carry them in chairs, of course, because the costumes ended in fishtails and they couldn’t walk. Everybody circled round and round the hall. I think there was music, but I don’t recall the tunes.

  “When they’re all arrayed along the walls, that’s when it happens. The Woodwose is shoved in, and—”

  “The what?”

  “The wild man of the woods, all covered in hair—”

  “I know what it is,” he said impatiently. “What’s it doing at Wintering?”

  Distracted from his story, Cade asked, “Elves don’t celebrate that way?”

  “Of course not. How barbaric! We banish the old year by singing and dancing. Just before the feast, the lights all go out, one by one. That’s the old year dying. Then somebody comes in dressed as Spring and lights everything up again, and hands out flowers—”

  Skeptically: “In winter?”

  “Preserving flowers is a specialty of the Greenseed Kin. How else d’you think Rafe managed to have roses sent to Crisiant for her Namingday last week? Told you I had connections, didn’t I?”