Touchstone

by Melanie Rawn

  “Subtle as a thunderstorm,” he said. “All the pages are there, by the bye. While I was thumbing through it—and you were having an apoplexy—I took a good look. And for my brilliance in securing it for about the price of a bath each, you now owe me a good lunching. Wrangling the price down was hard work!”

  Cade bought food and drink on the way back to the roadside, where they sat on the ground and ate while watching the traffic. More people were arriving, setting up tents, searching for their booths, lugging their wares. Cade wanted desperately to return to the castle with his book, but Mieka had plans for the rest of the money Cade owed him.

  “A sign back there said there’s two whole rows of ales in competition for first prize. Who better than us, with our Kingdom-wide experience, to give an opinion?”

  It was a cheap way to get drunk. Cade called a halt after the dozenth quarter-pint each—not all of which they had to pay for, it turned out.

  “It seems they know who we are, sort of,” he mused, bewildered by the smiles and nods and free drinks. “How’d that happen?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. It’s prob’ly me charming manners and adorable smile.”

  “No,” he insisted, “some of them, they looked like they recognized us.”

  Mieka shrugged and plucked at Cade’s sleeve. “Still thirsty,” he whined.

  “You’ve had enough. Lord and Lady know I’ve had enough.” He fought down a belch. “Back to the castle, I think—”

  Mieka suddenly gave a crow of laughter, and pointed. Down at the intersection of aisles was a big placard framed in rough wood. Cade blinked to see his own face, and Rafe’s, and Jeska’s, and Mieka’s, looking at him. Printed in stark black on white, there were no shadings at all, which told him that either the engraving for printing plates had been done quick and cheap or that Kearney wanted the imaging to be as dramatic as possible and therefore had done away with fine detail. The placard bore four words along with their severely unsmiling faces: TOUCHSTONE running up the left side, and CASTLE BIDING FAIR at the bottom right corner.

  “Look at us! We’re gorgeous!”

  Mieka was already scampering to take a closer look. Cade followed more slowly, still clutching the book to his chest. Perhaps it was all that ale putting a blur into his eyes, but he had to admit that he really did look rather presentable. There was a bit of an insolent glare to his eyes, he thought, that he hadn’t noticed after the imager had done his work but was somehow brought out by the austere print. Thinking back to that day, he remembered that he’d been nervous about what he’d just said to Tobalt; that must be the source of the expression in his eyes. Odd; he didn’t know he looked like that when he was feeling defensive. The engraver had chosen to include the little silver falcon that Cade had pinned to his collar that day. He smiled, thinking that Dery would indeed be thrilled when he saw it.

  Then he realized that placards just like this one would be all over Gallytown by now. His mother would have six fits.

  Mieka stood next to the placard, trying with inebriated obstinacy to keep his face as solemnly like the imaging as possible, waiting for people to look at it and then at him and make the connection. Cade walked up to him, laughing, and tugged him away.

  “Milk it till it moos! Don’t anguish yourself, you’ll spend the next six days being recognized.”

  “Really? With free drinks?”

  * * *

  The afternoon show went very well. The theater was packed, and the applause began when they walked onstage, something that had never happened at a first performance before. Once word got round a Winterly stop, they could usually count on a nice welcome for the remaining shows. But this was the first time their first appearance was applauded.

  Cade was satisfied that they earned it. They were using Castle Biding to run through every single one of their pieces, to begin the process of deciding which to do for the Gallantrybanks shows before Trials. Kearney had engaged them to play the Kiral Kellari three nights a week, and they’d insisted that he include a weekly show at the Downstreet for gratitude’s sake (also because at both places there’d be trimmings, which they didn’t receive in a real theater).

  Mieka vanished after the show, and didn’t join them for dinner. He was on time to the evening performance, just barely. He took off once their bows were done, with a smile and a wave for his partners. Cade would have suspected he’d made his selection from the serving girls and maids back at their tower lodging, but all of them seemed to be accounted for (one of them by Jeska), so he must have found entertainment elsewhere.

  Cade went up the stairs slowly, again putting off the pleasure of opening Lost Withies. This afternoon he’d left Mieka at the fair and trudged back up castle hill to their bedchamber, the book clutched like a lover in his arms, but he’d been too sleepy with the drink and the warm sunny day to do anything more than caress the cover. There was a certain delight in anticipation, especially with books, that he’d learned could dissipate all too quickly—but Lost Withies proved the exception. From the instant he untied the strings holding it together and opened it to the title page, he was enthralled. Mieka was right; no pages were missing. He tried to go carefully through the whole thing, to examine the woodcuts first and not stop to read the chapters, but his attention kept snagging on a description here, a detail there. He skimmed biographies of tregetours and fettlers, masquers and gliskers and glasscrafters, dipped into summaries of significant playlets, traced with wonder the diagrams describing how magic rebounded from ceilings, walls, support beams, solid rock. It was the one book his grandsir’s library had not contained. There were rumored to be only a half-dozen copies left in the entire kingdom. And he was holding one of them.

  He wasn’t aware of falling asleep with the cumbersome tome on his knees. But he heard it crash to the floor, and jerked awake to find Mieka standing beside his bed, a lit candle in one hand, his face as white as the linen of his nightshirt.

  Or at least he thought it was Mieka. For an instant he had trouble recognizing him. The Mieka he’d just seen had looked so different—

  “Another one about me, was it?”

  Cade sat up, leaned over to rescue the book. It seemed undamaged. “Just a nightmare,” he said. “Not one of the—the Elsewhens.”

  The boy said nothing until Cade had straightened up and looked at him again. His jaw was rigid, his lips tightly compressed. But it seemed he couldn’t keep himself from speaking—just one word, thick with anger and betrayal.

  “Liar.”

  After a terrible, frozen moment, Cade set the book on the bedside table and pulled up a blanket, turned his back, and closed his eyes. The dream replayed in his mind without his having called it up, without any promptings or applications of the disciplines Sagemaster Emmot had taught him to use.

  {It was quite large for a thatched-roof cottage, six rooms at least, with a finished upstairs, not just a loft. Smoke billowed from a fine brick chimney into the moonlit darkness, but the whitewash between timbers looked at least a year too old, there were a few cracks in the plaster of the upper floor, and the arching lintel stones were chipped.

  The man was sniggering, drunk, his eyes wild with thorn. He had the girl by the wrist, pulling her not-quite-roughly through the front door, kicking it shut behind him. He tripped on a richly colored rug, swore vilely.

  “You’re home, are you?” The woman’s voice was not quite a shriek, and it came from beyond an open doorway where firelight glowed.

  “Shut it!” To the girl, he said, “G’on up, second door onna left—I’ll be up inna minnit.”

  She balked. “You never said nothin’ ’bout no wife—”

  “How dare you bring your whore into my house!”

  “Go on!” he roared, pushing the girl towards the stairs. She twisted free and yanked open the door, and fled into the night. He swore again, and lurched into the golden glow of the sitting room.

  The woman was throwing things into the fire. With every vicious little movement, a thin gold
bracelet gleamed from each wrist. As he threw off his cloak, a similar bracelet made of heavier links glinted below his shirtcuff.

  “What’re y’doin’?” he demanded.

  She half-turned, her face still in shadow, and in her hands was an old green wyvern-hide folio, open, with loose pages that she crumpled in her fist and flung into the flames as if avenging herself on each.

  He staggered as if the sight was a physical blow. Then he gave a wail of agony and lunged for her, tore the folio from her grasp. Pages scattered onto the scuffed wooden floor. “You bitch!” he yelled, and slapped her. “That’s mine—”

  “You’re mine, or so you said when we were wedded!” She turned, one hand covering half her face where he’d hit her. Her other fist lashed out hard, connecting with his jaw. “Seven years it’s been, seven years!”

  “You took everything else from me—by all the Gods, you’re not takin’ that, too!”

  He struck her again, so brutally that she cried out and collapsed onto the floor. Both hands and her tumbled bronze-gold hair hid her face. There was blood on her fingers. But she struggled to her feet and when he straightened, holding the green folio, she sent her fist right into his stomach. He doubled over, retching, his curses gasping and incoherent as he fell to his knees. She stood over him, screaming at him, both hands on her pregnant belly.

  Shadows shifted on the stairs. The child was perhaps five or six, a little boy, peeking out from between the railings, fingers wrapping them white-knuckled—unusual hands, the ring fingers and little fingers almost the same length—a very beautiful little boy with elegantly Elfen ears. His eyes were the dark blue of irises, and they were solemn, and old.}

  It was the look in that child’s eyes that terrified Cade more than anything else. They would haunt him, those eyes, forever.

  He’d had trouble recognizing Mieka when he woke. But he hadn’t recognized him in the dream, either. Seven years, the woman had said—twenty-five, he’d be, looking ten years older, the perpetual youthfulness of Elfenkind despoiled by the coarsening of overindulgence in liquor and thorn and rich living. The hollows below his cheekbones had filled out, there were pouches beneath those eyes, his shoulders were heavier, his belt and shirt buttons too tight. Worse, though, was the cruelty in the lines of his mouth, the grating rasp of his voice—the hand that had struck his pregnant wife. Twice.

  It was beyond believing. It had been a nightmare, as he’d told Mieka, not a real foreseeing dream. It had to have been a nightmare.

  He hadn’t fooled Mieka with the lie. Neither could he fool himself.

  He knew that bronze-gold hair, those beautiful hands that had clawed through the pages of Touchstone’s folio. He still hadn’t seen her face. But he’d seen the blood on her fingers after Mieka hit her. He’d seen the fury and contempt in her eyes—very dark blue eyes, the color of irises. And that reminded him of the little boy again, and he squeezed his own eyes shut against tears.

  Why now? Why had the—the Elsewhen, as Mieka termed it—why had it come now to hack at his heart? After hearing the warm, familiar “I knew you’d be here” up on the battlements, after sharing the magic of the moonglade, after so much laughter at the fair, after so dazzling a start to their performances here at Castle Biding—after “This life, and none other—”

  What had happened? What choices had been made over which he had no control? How could he fix this, prevent it, keep that look from that little boy’s eyes?

  The next morning, after dragging clean linen from his satchel, and gathering soap and razor and comb from the dressing table, he was about to head for the garderobe down the hall when he heard Jeska’s shocked voice echoing up the stone stairwell.

  “Cade! Cayden, you’ll not believe it!”

  The door burst open almost in his face. He stumbled back, caught his balance, glared at his masquer. Jeska didn’t notice.

  “Tobalt’s just been here with word—the Downstreet burned to the ground last week!”

  He heard someone—him?—ask quite calmly, “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, but it’s gone, Cade, it’s naught but ashes.”

  He nodded. So that was it. That, and whatever had happened yesterday after he returned to the castle and Mieka had continued wandering the fair. Had he met her yesterday? Was that it? Or would one of the nights they’d been meant to play the Downstreet be the night he met her? And now that the Downstreet was ashes, would they play somewhere else, and would that be the night he’d meet her?

  He would never know. And there was the distinctive, specific hell of it. He would never know, and there was nothing he could do.

  “We’ll need other bookings, then,” he told Jeska. “Get Kearny onto it, would you?”

  Chapter 25

  Only seventy or so miles separated the two great university towns of Shollop and Stiddolfe, but over 150 days lay between Touchstone’s appearance at the former and the last shows of the Winterly Circuit at the latter.

  That final show on that final night caused a near riot. Touchstone’s reputation had been growing all winter, and of course, the students at Stiddolfe wanted to outdo the students of Shollop in their appreciation. They did. Ardently. The largest of the bothy halls, residences where only young men were supposed to set foot, held a revelry that included as many girls as could be found willing to risk constabulary wrath. If some were unwilling, sufficient alcohol convinced them. This wasn’t what Cayden had had in mind when he talked about how unfair it was that women weren’t allowed the communal experiences available to men. When university officials finally acknowledged themselves helpless and sent for the constables, getting the girls out before the law could get in became anarchy. Local physickers, chirurgeons, and their medical students were busy well into the next morning, patching up cracked heads and stitching up gashes in well-educated hides.

  Touchstone never made it back to lodgings at all that night. By the next noon they assembled listlessly in the front hall of the inn, wincing, greensick, and positive that the coach ride home to Gallantrybanks would finish them all off.

  It didn’t, though in Cayden’s case it was a near thing. His headache was agonizing whether he thought or didn’t think, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the last few weeks. He couldn’t summon up so much as a smile when Mieka borrowed his pen to draw a line through number seven on the list, saying as he did so, “I’ll not endanger the horses, and I like the coachman too much to risk him, but, fellow passengers, we and the citizenry and the peace of the Kingdom barely survived last night!”

  After spectacular shows at Castle Biding, they’d gone down to Frimham, a seacoast town that, after its harbor silted up, had reinvented itself as a health resort. Instead of Lilyleaf’s ancient indoor baths, there were wide beaches of gritty sand where each tide refilled brick-lined pools; pleasant enough in summer, supposedly good for the constitution in spring, though nobody ever quite managed to explain the benefits of wading or swimming in frozen salt water with the rain pouring down. The sea and the sea air were much touted as worthwhile for one’s health. The Atrium, Frimham’s theater, was generally agreed to be the ugliest venue in the Kingdom. It was also the draughtiest. Mieka didn’t bother creating a breeze during “Sailor’s Sweetheart,” because the hall did it for him. One afternoon, while they were returning to their lodgings after a performance, the wind decided to mock Cade by blowing loose a placard advertising Touchstone smack into his shoulder. The bruise lasted two days.

  He hated this place, because Mieka was loving it so much and so obviously. He’d known the glisker was keeping a secret on that last morning in Castle Biding, when he saw him writing a letter that didn’t go into Rafe’s regular envelope to Crisiant before they left. Indeed, while the rest of them were loading up the coach, Cade saw Mieka give one of the servants a little package and a coin.

  So he had already met her, Cade thought numbly. She and her mother had been sewing in the other Elsewhens—perhaps they’d had a booth at the fair. Perhaps he’d even seen her himsel
f, while he and Mieka were browsing. No—he would have recognized her hair, her hands. But she might have been gone from the booth for a time, and Mieka might have gone back, looking for something to give his mother or sisters, and she had been there, and—

  Useless to speculate. It had happened. It mattered for naught when or how. He found it bitterly amusing that the book he had so coveted had been the pivot point. He’d taken it back to the castle, and Mieka had gone on exploring without him. If only he had stayed, if only—

  Useless. There was nothing he could do.

  Mieka appeared on time for the shows in Frimham and vanished directly afterwards. On their day off, he was out of his and Cade’s bedchamber before Cade woke up, and didn’t return until nightfall. What time he did spend with his partners at meals or rehearsal, he sported a mindless grin that Cade wanted to slap from his face. And he wore the little charm in his ear every single day, the golden topaz that caught the elusive glint in those eyes. Cayden hadn’t seen him wear it since the night of his Namingday at the Kiral Kellari.

  Yes, he had met her, and she lived in or near Frimham. He knew it the way he knew Mieka would decline Kearney’s offer of his country home for some leisure time before Trials. They’d have two weeks between their last show at the Kiral Kellari and the trip to Seekhaven. Cade didn’t expect to see Mieka during that time.

  Rafe, however, accepted the invitation with pleasure, for he would be married to Crisiant by then and it would be the perfect hideaway after the wedding. Kearney had been busy in that regard, as well, securing a lovely little High Chapel in a district near Wistly Hall. The stained glass, statues, and even the carvings over the doorways would all be magicked for the occasion by the Good Brother and Good Sister who would preside over the ceremony. Both sets of parents were in awe; Rafe’s were trying not to show it. The Windthistles offered their riverside garden for the celebrations afterwards. They’d taken a liking to Crisiant, who gave them all the details of the Winterly that their son so conspicuously neglected to mention.