by Melanie Rawn
The final two Rules were not neglected. Their very last day on the road, Mieka chose a moment when the coachman was signing the usual voucher regarding the horses, stood at the coach doorway, unbuttoned his trousers, and pissed out the window. That took care of Indecency. As for Theft of or damage to His Gracious Majesty’s property—he was the last to leave the coach in the Palace courtyard, and when he finally jumped down it was with the framed list, wrenched off the door, tucked under his arm as a souvenir.
Cayden wished he could have found any of it funny. He couldn’t stop thinking about that little boy’s eyes.
Cade’s homecoming celebration was delayed a day because the afternoon he arrived back at Redpebble Square, he wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. It was ridiculous that a strong, healthy, almost-twenty-year-old man should be so knackered by work that he loved. He slept until the following noon, when Derien could bear it no longer and woke him up, demanding to be told absolutely everything. A quick wash, fresh clothes, and a weary trudge down the wrought iron stairs later, he walked into the kitchen to find Mistress Mirdley had made a gigantic lunching and invited Blye to share it. Of Lady Jaspiela there was, naturally, no trace.
Later that afternoon, once he’d talked about everything except what was really on his mind, he walked Blye back to the glassworks so she could show him the loving cups she’d made for Rafe and Crisiant. The usual design, whether in glass, pewter, silver, gold, or even humble carved wood, was two cups with a handle each, shaped to meet and match. There were obscene versions, of course, but the most popular form was that of a heart made whole when the cups were fitted to each other. Blye thought this inelegant. What she had designed for Rafe and Crisiant was of flint crystal, curved on the handled side but flat on the fitted side, with the deep cuts made in the crystal locking the two together. She showed them to Cade, anxious for approval. He smiled and told her they were perfect.
And wondered how soon she’d be making another set, for a girl with bronze-gold hair and a man who would knock her to the floor while she was carrying their child.
Blye knew him much too well. “I know you’re tired, Cade, but I might’ve expected a little more—I don’t know, triumph? You’ve just finished your first Winterly, you were a colossal success, and I can’t go three blocks without Touchstone staring at me from one of those placards.”
“In other words,” he translated wryly, “what in all hells is my problem?”
She replaced the loving cups in their padded wooden box. “I know you’re not going to tell me about whatever dreamings you had,” she said, low-voiced. “But it’s my guess that some of them were pretty awful.”
“One or two,” he allowed. “Most of the time I was too tired—or too cold!—to dream. Or at least I didn’t remember them when I woke up.”
“But those one or two…”
He shrugged.
“Cade—” Just then a piteous Mew! sounded at the door into the glassworks, and Blye ran to open it, returning with a tiny lump of purring white fur in her arms. “This is Bompstable,” she said, “and a more dedicated cozener never begged his way into anyone’s life.”
Cade let the cat sniff his finger, then stroked the silky ears. “He’s too pretty to be a stray.”
“Jed gave him to me.”
Had he been a little less exhausted, a little less heartsore, he might have teased her. All he did was smile, and she blushed, and that seemed to communicate everything.
But there was something he needed to say. “It’s all right that you told Mieka.”
She glanced up, startled and guilty and then defiant. “You should’ve told him yourself.”
“I know.”
Blye had been prepared for an argument. That he so readily agreed seemed to confuse her for a moment. “Were the awful ones about him?”
“There’s nothing I can do, Blye. It’s already too late.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, that’s all.” He ran a finger over the lid of the box. “These really are beautiful. I knew they would be.”
“You know everything, it seems.”
“I know enough,” he replied stiffly.
He knew, for instance, that he’d had a flashing turn as he got dressed earlier, just a glimpse of the girl. She’d been sewing a short length of blue-violet silk that he now knew was the color of her eyes. A second bit of the same cloth, as yet unsewn, lay on the table beside her. She was murmuring, chanting, as she worked. The words were unknown to him, and frightening.
Over the next few days, he visited the Threadchasers, and Mistress Bowbender, and went to have a look at the gutted ruin of the Downstreet. There would be no decline into squalor, with Tobalt sitting at a scarred table, saying that when the Cornerstones lost their Elf, they lost their soul. Neither would there be plaques on the wall to attest to all the players who’d got their start here, and Tobalt would never say, “But Touchstone is still together after twenty-five years.”
Sometimes at night Cayden listened to the two words in his head, noting the vital difference. Cornerstones—the first stones of a new building, holding things together but unconnected. Tear the whole structure down, each of them would survive; pull one cornerstone out, the whole structure would collapse. But Touchstone was a singular. A thing they four made together, of which they were each a part. If Mieka was their soul, then Rafe was the backbone, steady and strong. Jeska: the eloquent voice. Cade himself … he wasn’t sure. The mind, perhaps. Not the heart. He wrote from the head and sometimes the guts, but he kept his heart to himself. “His mind’s cold, but his heart’s colder.” Yes, that was him, right down to the ground. The heart of Touchstone was Touchstone itself, the whole they four created together. Take away a fourth part of that heart—that part that was their very soul—and the three who were left would … survive.
And if there was a fleeting impression of words hastily scrawled on paper, terse terrible words he didn’t want to read, and a hollow echoing voice that was his own saying, “But I’m still here,” it lasted only an instant.
Touchstone opened their stint at the Kiral Kellari, where the management had wisely replaced the hundreds of new mirrors on their walls with framed flat panes of glass that were much cheaper. Annoyed, because the crashing mirrors had been a wonderful effect, Touchstone shattered every glass at the bar instead. The management glared, gulped, and absorbed the loss, for Touchstone was the biggest draw since the Shadowshapers.
The Shadowshapers were, in fact, in the audience that first night, and afterwards, in the artists’ tiring-room with the four blue couches, they sat and drank, and traded stories and laughed until their throats were raw. An innovation in the Kiral Kellari’s program had a musician or two perform before and after a play, and when the young man finished and came back to greet them, Cade recognized him and Mieka recognized his lute. Alaen Blackpath, slowly making a name in Gallantrybanks over the winter, had also been booked at the Downstreet, and now had no idea how he would support himself. Rafe immediately engaged him to play at the wedding, both during the ceremony and after it at the feast. Cade mused on what it might be like to depend only on one’s own talents, and for a few moments wished that the Lord and Lady had made him a musician instead of a tregetour.
That wish wasn’t the oddest thing about that night. When Alaen first came into the tiring-room and was introduced all around, Cade felt a slow lurch that wasn’t quite a turn when the lutenist’s fiercely blue eyes met the equally intense blue gaze of Sakary Grainer. Cade held still, waiting for an Elsewhen to happen, and perhaps tell him why, but it didn’t. After that first moment of mutual wariness, the two got on splendidly.
Not even that was the strangest thing that happened, though. Nothing could surpass the bewilderment of seeing dozens of girls outside the tavern, braving the jeers of the male patrons and, Cade realized, their infuriated parents when they got home, for none of those girls looked older than seventeen or so.
“What are they doing here?” he asked
as their hire-hack pulled up in Amberwall Closure, near the ginnel that led to the artists’ entrance.
“Fuck if I know,” Rafe muttered. He was in a bit of a mood. He and Crisiant had had words that afternoon about his wedding clothes. She wanted him to wear one of the pie-frills that had turned out to be exactly what Kearney had said they were: the absolute latest in fashion. The words had included Not if you held a knife to my throat, Don’t tempt me, I won’t wear it, and You will if I say you will and there’s an end to it!
“They must know that women aren’t allowed inside a tavern where there’s theater being performed.” Cayden paid the driver as Rafe and Jeska stepped down.
Mieka had been peering out the open door, and now gave a little crow of laughter. “Trust me, Quill, they’re not interested in theater. And I’d scarce call them women. Those, my friend, are girls. For all that you lived like a Nominative Brother in a Minster all during Winterly, surely you remember what girls are.”
“Clearly and distinctly,” he snapped, following Mieka out of the hack. “Just because I don’t go running after anything in skirts, like you and Jeska—”
“Move it!” Rafe called. “We’ll be late!”
Mieka had stopped to wave at the girls. He was rewarded with giggles and simpers and a few shrieks. Grinning, he fairly danced past Cade into the narrow passageway.
The plate with the spigot had been taught to recognize all four of them now, and the wall opened readily to the touch of Cade’s hand. “But why are they here?”
“Us.”
This made no sense to Cade. “Us?” he echoed stupidly.
“You, me, Rafe, Jeska. Touchstone!”
“I don’t understand.” It pained him to admit it, and pained him even more when Mieka’s howl of laughter resonated through the back hallway. “We’re players, we’re in the theater, they can’t go inside and watch, so what’s the point? Why are they here?”
“Gods, Quill, are you really that innocent? Listen to me carefully now. They are girls. They are not here to see the show. They are here to see us.”
“But we don’t do anything outside the theater!”
“We could if we wanted to tonight—and with as many of those charming little dovies as we pleased.”
“The placards,” Rafe said suddenly. “They’ve seen the placards, so they know what we look like.”
Mieka laughed again as he swung open the tiring-room door. “And now they want a much closer look—as close as they can get!”
It seemed Kearney’s innovation of an imaging rather than an engraver’s drawing had been true inspiration. What he deemed appropriate and even necessary to a placard advertising Touchstone’s engagements allowed the female population a glimpse into the theater that they’d never even thought about before: it was inhabited by some very good-looking young men.
Cade had noted that the faces of the Shadowshapers were appearing on placards, too. Not that they needed the publicity. But no one had ever accused Romuald Needler of being slow to grasp an advantage. He had written to Cade after Tobalt’s article appeared, commending his bold opinions about allowing women to attend the theater. Cade instantly understood that an increase in the audience meant an increase in the number of shows, the price of the tickets, or both. Needler had chosen his imager well, and the portraits were eye-catching. Rauel was adorably handsome, Vered looked moody and proud, Sakary glowered attractively, and Chat was endearingly homely.
But the girls outside the Kiral Kellari that night had come to look at Touchstone. At Jeska, for certes; at Mieka, absolutely; at Rafe, which would be reported back to Crisiant and earn him an hour’s acid interrogation. None of the girls would be looking at Cade, and he knew it, so he was utterly baffled when, at Mieka’s urging, between playlets the four of them went to a window overlooking the square to wave at their admirers outside, and one of the girls waved at him. At him. Looking directly up at him, smiling, eyes bright with excitement in the warm spring evening.
Of all the things he had hoped might come to him with Touchstone’s success, admiration in the eyes of pretty girls had never even occurred to him. Not that he took advantage of it. Not that night, anyway.
Mieka seemed more unpredictable than ever as the wedding approached. He fidgeted through rehearsals, was perfectly crazed during performances, and Cade would have suspected frequent indulgence in bluethorn except that it was a different sort of excitement in those eyes. He didn’t understand it, and wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Another lie. He understood very well what eager anticipation looked like on Mieka’s face. He was waiting for something, expecting it, and it would happen the day Rafe wed Crisiant.
Unless Cade said something. Warned him. Oh, yes, he could just picture it: taking Mieka by the shoulders and telling him that this girl was a poison worse than tainted thorn. “You’ll end up hating each other, and as for what it’ll do to your son—”
It was the only thing that could make him even think about saying something. The look in that little boy’s eyes.
Yet that brought up an entirely new question, one he’d never encountered before. If Mieka believed his warning, then that little boy would never be born, nor the brother or sister the girl was carrying when Mieka knocked her to the floor. If Cayden spoke, those children would never live. But only if Mieka believed him.
He might; he’d believed what Blye had told him on little if any evidence at all. He might believe this, too—
—only he wouldn’t believe it. He’d say it was only a possibility, and now that he knew, he’d make sure it never happened. He’d assure Cade that he’d make a change here and there, decide one way instead of another, ever alert to the possibility that he could end up drunk and thorn-thralled and beating his pregnant wife.
Variations on How can I change this? had been torturing Cayden for years. He could cope with it. Barely. But Mieka, creature of impulse and impatience and instinct—it would either drive him mad or make him banish the whole concept from his mind when what he thought he might have to do conflicted too strongly with what he desired.
He desired this girl. Should Cade manage to convince him that it was potential disaster and he gave her up, it would remain between them the rest of their lives. And that would be poisonous, too. Mieka must make his own decisions, choices, even mistakes. His life wasn’t Cade’s to manipulate.
The night Cade decided this, he had the most horrible and most selfish dream of all. Mieka, sad-eyed and scared, not their lively, laughing Elf at all, hands reaching out, pleading with him: “Don’t let go—please, Quill, don’t ever let go—” His answer was to shake his head and turn away, feeling nothing. Nothing, for the one who had said to him, “It’s not in you to be wicked, Cade, nor cruel,” who had written to him, Don’t worry about going too lost, Quill, I’ll always come find you. Feeling nothing, he could become the man who looked at stark cold words on a scrap of paper and say, “But I’m still here.”
“His mind’s cold, but his heart’s colder.”
And then one morning he was standing in the portico of a High Chapel overlooking the Plume, wearing his finest clothes and his little silver falcon pinning his neckband (dazzlingly white silk, plain and unadorned, unlike the embroidered and pleated extravagance knotted around poor Rafe’s neck). He did his duty and cordially welcomed each guest—Threadchaser and Bramblecotte family and friends, Blye and Derien and Mistress Mirdley, Jeska and his mother, Lord Kearney Fairwalk, the Shadowshapers with their ladies—smiling and bantering with everyone as it was his role as bride’s patron to do. The man who stood beside a future husband wasn’t there for him: he was there on behalf of the future wife, his very presence reminding her bespoken that if he didn’t live up to his promises, there was someone around who’d set him right in a hurry. This was naturally the source of a thousand jokes (and quite a few playlets, most of them obscene) and by the time Rafe and Crisiant arrived, Cade had heard all of them at least twice. Crisiant’s three sisters were Cade’s counterparts, who
would advise her if they considered her lax in her duties as a wife. The fate of anyone daring to give Crisiant advice about anything didn’t bear contemplation, but tradition was tradition.
Rafe sauntered over to Cade, who stood at the closed doors leading into the High Chapel. “Everybody here?”
“Almost. We’re waiting on the Windthistles and your mother—they’re probably fretting the last-instant arrangements.”
“Cakes, pies, pastries, and alcohol for all this mob—remind me to have daughters, not sons. That way, all I’ll have to do is show up and when the Good Brother asks, ‘Who gives this maiden?’—”
“—you’ll say, ‘For the sake of my sanity, take her!’”
They were still grinning at each other when the outer door swung open and Mieka gamboled through, pausing to bow before Crisiant with a flourish of the peacock-blue cloak that covered him throat to boots. He spoke a few words that actually made her smile and blush. Hurrying over to Rafe and Cayden, he exclaimed, “I’ve never seen her look so lovely! Whatever did you do to deserve her?”
Rafe shrugged. “I’m me.”
The Good Brother approached then, with some question about the loving cups. True to his word, Rafe had chosen Mieka to present them during the ceremony. He would also be true to his word if Mieka dropped them.
“Isn’t that right?” he said, turning to address the Elf—who had vanished. “Where in all hells has he got to?”
Cade looked around.
The girl had her back turned. Mieka plucked the ivory-colored cloak from her shoulders, draped it over his arm with his own. She was a tiny thing; she could fit right beneath Mieka’s chin. Twisted in the bronze-gold hair tumbling down her back was a blue-violet silk scarf, a match for the neckband tied at Mieka’s collar.
“Quill!” he called suddenly, voice high with excitement. “I want you to meet someone!”
The girl turned, and met Cade’s eyes, and smiled. There was no sudden curiosity, no puzzlement or shock or indignation at what he knew must be scrawled all over his face. What he felt didn’t matter. He didn’t matter. The smile curved sweetly on her mouth that was soft and innocent as a child’s, and in her eyes was triumph and greedy possession as she looked at Mieka.