Playing to the Gods

by Melanie Rawn

  “Dery … about this map…”

  “I was curious! I wanted to find out if I could tell quantity and all that—”

  “Why didn’t you say anything to me about—”

  “It was just an experiment—once the Gallery was finished and everything, and I knew for sure how much gold was in the glass cases on the second floor, I could figure out what it felt like—how different amounts of gold felt, I mean—so I drew a map of a few neighborhoods, and—”

  “Hells with the map!” Mieka exclaimed. “How much gold does the cellar feel like?”

  “A lot. It feels all heavy and cold. Maybe ten times the coins in Father’s coffer.”

  There was a brief, respectful silence.

  “What’s he going to do with it, though?” Mieka mused. “Dole it out bit by bit to his creditors? Such as us?”

  “Yeh, that’s likely,” Dery scoffed.

  “Living in a piddly little flat,” Cade said slowly, “it’s perfectly clear that he wants to hide the gold, not spend it. He doesn’t want anybody to know it exists.”

  “What good is it if he can’t spend it?” Mieka reached for another cake. “Can you tell what it is, exactly? Coins or lumps out of the ground, or what?”

  Dery shook his head. “I don’t know. But whatever it is, he’d have to trade it for real money, wouldn’t he? Coin of the realm, and all that.”

  “The Goldsmiths Guild?” Cade guessed. “Where do they get their gold?”

  He glanced over to the door. Blye came in from the kitchen, carrying a fresh pot of tea in one hand and a mug in the other. Her cheeks were flushed with the cold—or perhaps her own kiln fire—and her pale hair was dampened by the rain.

  “Well, aren’t we the cheery little group.” She joined Mieka on the hearthrug and waited for somebody to speak. When no one did—unprecedented for this company—she stretched her lips in a purposely bright-and-shiny smile. “Frightful weather we’re having, isn’t it? Did you ever know such a chilly spring?”

  Derien hid laughter behind a cough. Mieka assumed a face to match Blye’s and looked expectantly at Cade. Cade, who had been trying to work out a way of asking if she knew anything about the Goldsmiths Guild without asking outright, wordlessly passed over the plate of muffins.

  “If you want me to leave, just say so,” Blye advised. “I started with the weather. It’s your turn. Court gossip, theater gossip, it doesn’t much matter to me so long as I can have a slice of cake before Mieka guttles it all.”

  With injured dignity, the Elf replied, “I have never done anything so vulgar as guttle. And as long as you’re here, make yourself useful. Where do the people who make jewelry get their gold from?”

  No hiding Dery’s laughter this time. Cade stifled a sigh. So much for subtlety.

  “Interesting conversational opening,” Blye observed. “Much better than the weather. The jewelers buy their gold in ingots of various sizes from the central stores of the Guild.”

  “Ingots?”

  “Sometimes my father would do up glass ingots for sale to other crafters—if they’d run out of a particular additive or something and needed the glass quick. The Guild would come round and register the ingots, and make sure they were stamped with a number. The Goldsmiths and Silversmiths do it the same way with their own raw material.”

  “Why?” Mieka asked.

  Derien answered, “Because it’s like diamonds. We had it in class—well, most of those boys have the family diamonds to worry about after they inherit. Anyways, if you flood the market with too many, the price goes down. So the Gemcrafters Guild regulates what shiny rocks the goldsmiths and jewelers can have on hand to make into goods for sale.”

  “Then what would somebody do with—” Mieka began, but a stern look from Cade shut his mouth.

  Blye’s gaze went slowly from one to the other of them. “Don’t mind me,” she advised. “Pretend I’m not here. It’s not as if you can trust me or anything.”

  Casting a defiant glance at Cade, Dery said, “Lord Fairwalk’s home and he’s got a secret stash of gold in the cellar of his old house. What we want to know is, how can he get rid of it?”

  She blinked once or twice, set her mug down, scowled, then spoke. “Even if he finds somebody who’ll buy it, he won’t get full value if it’s an underhand deal.”

  “The financial condition he’s in,” Cade said, “I can’t imagine he’d worry much about that. But somebody would guess, wouldn’t they, if a few goldsmiths started making more stuff than they’ve officially got gold for?”

  Dery asked, “Could he sell it to the Royal Mint? Whatever else he is, he’s still a nobleman. He might have connections.”

  “Didn’t get him anyplace decent to live, did it?” Mieka countered. “You said it before—why live in some rat-hole if he’s got all that gold? No, this is a secret stash. Who’s he friends with that’s powerful?”

  Blye narrowed her eyes and looked straight at Cade. “Who’s powerful enough to do something with that much gold?”

  They all knew the answer to that one. But as to exactly what the Archduke might do with it … that was another puzzlement entirely.

  A knocking sounded at the front door, and Cade cursed under his breath. “That’ll be Chat and Vered. They’ll all be here while we’re at the Keymarker tonight.” Realizing what he’d let slip, he shut his mouth with an audible click of his teeth.

  Blye said mildly, “Quite the social gathering place these days, is Number Eight. Should I hide behind a chair?”

  Another knock, more insistent. Mieka snorted a laugh. “For pity’s sake, somebody go let the poor sods in!”

  More tea, more muffins and cakes, more apprehensive significant glances, and some genuinely inane attempts at conversation while Blye sat there looking innocent and Mieka sat beside her looking delighted. Rauel entered by the kitchen door, saying as he came in, “Sakary’s about ten minutes behind me, with the bag of withies,” then saw that there was a person present who was not officially in the know, and winced.

  Cade gave up and laughed.

  Later, once the Shadowshapers were downstairs rehearsing and Blye had gone home, Derien found Cade upstairs and said, “I might be able to tell how much gold there is—get a better idea, I mean—when I go past the house tomorrow. Better still, if I could sneak into the cellar—”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “I could get in there, easy. One of my friends at school has a little brother who’s friends with one of the Scrapebolt boys—”

  “Do I have to tell Mistress Mirdley on you?”

  Derien sighed. “You will, anyways. I should never have said anything.”

  “Save the slippery stuff for when you’re an ambassador telling lies to a foreign king. I’m your brother.”

  “Yeh, and you used to be more fun.” Dery grinned. “How about this? If you won’t tell Mistress Mirdley about it, then I won’t tell Mieka!”

  Cade groaned. That was all he lacked: his brother and his glisker in quod for breaking and entering. “No. To all of it!”

  A day or two later, Cade was wishing he hadn’t been quite so stern about forbidding Derien’s expedition to Fairwalk’s cellar. This time the boy came home with the news that a competition would be held at the King’s College for three students to act as pages on the Continental trip planned by Princess Iamina and Archduchess Panshilara.

  Derien wanted to enter the competition.

  Of course he did.

  “How many times do I have to say no?” Cade snarled after half an hour. “How many different ways must I say it before you get it through your skull—”

  “I’ve only heard a dozen,” Derien retorted. “Pretty paltry for a tregetour!”

  “You’re not entering! That’s it! Final!”

  “How many times do I have to say that when I win, people will remember it for years, and when I get old enough for an important posting, I’ll be streets ahead of everyone else?”

  They were arguing in the kitchen. Mistress
Mirdley had wisely found something to do in her stillroom; Mieka was nowhere about. Cade glared into his brother’s furious brown eyes and decided he would never, ever have children. He had enough yelling, beholden all the same, in his professional life. He didn’t need it at home as well.

  “Are you scared I’ll win, and you won’t be the only Silversun with a name to his name?”

  Cade gasped. “No! Dery, how could you think—”

  “Not like Father, but people thinking good things when they hear—”

  “Apologize at once!”

  They both jumped when Blye roared the command from the back door. She came in, fists clenched and breathing fire.

  “What’s the matter with you two?” she demanded. “Mieka said you were at it hammer and tongs and I should come at once, but I couldn’t believe that the two of you would be that stupid! Now, say you’re sorry, both of you. Go on! Say it!”

  “Sorry,” Derien mumbled.

  “I don’t have anything to be sorry for!” Cade exclaimed, still hurt that his own brother could think so little of him.

  Blye took a threatening step towards him—which should have been ridiculous, as he was more than a foot taller than she was, but he retained plentiful memories regarding boxed ears and bruised ribs. So he set his jaw tight and stubborn, and glowered down at her.

  She glowered right back.

  Mieka poked his head around the kitchen door, then—evidently deciding that Blye was protection enough—came in. “C’mon, Quill. You owe him a sorry and you know it. This is his future you’re stomping on with those great huge feet of yours. Let him enter the contest.”

  Derien turned on him. “I don’t need his permission to do anything!”

  “As long as you’re in this house,” Cade began.

  “Silence!”

  This time the command came from Mistress Mirdley.

  She could do more with a single word than anybody Cade had ever met. He knew he was going to apologize, and rather than draw out the mortification, he started for the door, flinging, “All right! Sorry!” over his shoulder.

  Mieka caught up with him halfway up the stairs. “He’ll enter the competition will you or won’t you. But when he wins—and we both know he will—it isn’t as if he’ll actually go.”

  “And why do you think he has sense enough not to get within a mile of that ship to Vathis?” he snapped. “We’ll be at Seekhaven, or out on the Royal, I won’t be able to stop him.”

  They had reached the fourth floor, where Mieka’s room was. “Mistress Mirdley will.”

  He had to admit that the Elf had a point. Cade followed him into the bedchamber, where Mieka’s only personal possessions were his clothes and one of the candleflats Blye had made for him on his eighteenth Namingday. Jinsie still had one, and the third had crashed into the Gally River when the turret housing Mieka’s childhood aerie parted company with the rest of Wistly Hall.

  “I need to be certain,” Cade said with considerably less heat. “I saw something—did I tell you? The Archduke is sending his wife and Iamina to the Continent to get rid of them. And the look on his face … Besides, he said something to me, that time at Great Welkin. He asked if I’d ever seen my brother in the Elsewhens.”

  Mieka visibly paled. Then his chin jutted out and he said, “He was only trying to scare you. He couldn’t possibly know anything, not the way you do.”

  “He did scare me.”

  “It was a threat, yeh, but it was also a mistake. He should never have shown that he knows you love your brother, and that he’s the easiest way to get at you.”

  But Dery isn’t the only way to hurt me.

  “You’re on your guard now,” Mieka went on. “You know to protect him. But, Quill, the Archduke will expect Dery to enter the contest—if he’s kept up with the boy at all, through the governors of the College, maybe, he knows there’s a lot of ambition there. Hells, he might’ve suggested the competition himself! If Dery doesn’t compete, he’ll know you’re watching for mischief—but if he does compete, he’ll think you’re not worried. Like I said, asking you about Dery in the Elsewhens was a mistake. And anyways,” he finished, bouncing down onto his bed, “all that means is that you don’t have any choices or decisions to make that would affect Dery’s future.”

  “And I’m supposed to find that comforting?” He knew Mieka had destroyed his thorn-roll, and to ask him to procure from Auntie Brishen what Cade wanted would be a cruelty. Even to mention thorn would be heartless. He’d have to write the letter himself, requesting whatever it was he’d used a few years ago that had brought on an Elsewhen, rather than wait for their erratic occurrence.

  “What’re we playing tonight?” Mieka asked suddenly. “By which I mean, of course, isn’t it time for you to prime the withies?”

  On the nights when Touchstone had a gigging, Cade didn’t worry about Mieka and drink or thorn. It had been very hard for him at first, and Cade knew perfectly well why: after the paradoxically exhilarating exhaustion of a performance, after all that applause, it was difficult to regain one’s equilibrium. Onstage there was magic, constant magic, jubilant magic. A too-abrupt return to life offstage often felt like being pushed off a castle parapet. Nothing like liquor or thorn to cushion the fall … nothing, except having someone there to catch you.

  Mieka’s wife had been unable to do that for him, even if she’d understood why it was necessary—and Cade had no reason to think she’d ever understood. So: whiskey and brandy and thorn. Mieka allowed himself one after-performance beer these days, and Cade should have been worried sick that it wouldn’t be enough. But he’d been right about how essential performance was to Mieka. Through the magic, his emotions were used, expressed, calmed. What Cayden gave him in the withies, he turned to the service of the play. This rid him of tension, and that was where the exhaustion came in. The exhilaration was in the knowing that this was what he was made for, this was what he was meant to do, using the brilliance of his own magic to create.

  The danger for Mieka had always been the prospect of being trapped in a perpetual performance. As the days and weeks moved on, that seemed less and less of a threat. He was learning—slowly, to be sure, but learning—that not every moment of every day should be a riot of outrageous pranks and constant laughter. A thing Cade had noticed about him long ago was that he fidgeted only when bored or anxious. At all other times—except onstage—he was physically rather muted, sitting or standing without restlessness as he paid close attention to everything around him. Cade had always suspected that behind that quietness of body, his brain was working intensely so that he could at an instant’s impulse play the clown that everyone expected him to be. Yet as incredible as it was for someone as impatient as Mieka, who except for when he was performing always wanted to do tomorrow yesterday, his body at least knew how to be still. It seemed that somehow his mind and emotions were learning that lesson.

  Cade didn’t worry anymore on the nights Touchstone performed. It was the other times that were a danger, when Mieka didn’t have a gigging to look forward to during the day and to give his all to at night. Days when he went out walking and brooded about his wrecked marriage, his daughter, his promise to himself that he would never again touch thorn and would strictly limit his drinking. Nights when he simply couldn’t sleep, and sometimes went out walking, and showed up at breakfast the next morning looking a step away from death.

  Jindra and Kazie, after a private discussion with Cade, knew to arrange as many giggings as they could without overly wearying either Touchstone or the public. A tricky balance, it was; he appreciated their appreciation of the rigors of performing and the danger of oversating their audiences. It was Cade’s job to produce enough material to make every gigging special. This ought to have crushed him, but he found it oddly invigorating after two long years of writing only at odd intervals without the sustained and satisfying effort that made him lose all track of time and place. Now that their money worries had eased, the writing part of his job was glori
ous. There was no scratching of his pen; the ink flowed smoothly, soundlessly across page after page, leaving words in its wake. Leaving upon the paper pieces of his mind, and perhaps even of his soul.

  And when he thought about those years of bone-weariness and scraping for even the price of dinner—because the horses had to be fed first, after all—and that his father could have put an end to it by disgorging even half of what had been in that coffer … it made him more determined than ever to procure from Brishen Staindrop the special concoction that, as far as he could tell, actually stimulated the Elsewhens. He wanted to know what Lord Kearney Fairwalk, author of those two miserable years, intended to do with all that gold.

  Chapter 21

  Sometimes, Mieka was fully aware, he could be a complete idiot. Over the last few years, he’d had his faults presented to him on a succession of silver platters, usually by Cade. Moronic as he could be sometimes, though, he wasn’t stupid. And he had his pride. He wasn’t doing so well as Cade surmised and he spent a lot of energy hiding it.

  He didn’t reveal that some nights he sought physical weariness of a kind that didn’t involve walking at all—except upstairs in a tavern. He went to these places for the willing girls who were keen for a tumble. It would have been easier to direct his footsteps to Chaffer Stroll or any of the dozens of flatback houses where the girls were clean and the clients were of the upper classes, but he had never paid for it in his life and wasn’t about to start now. Besides, he enjoyed flirtation, the game of words and glances and smiles and teasing fingers necessary to woo the nonprofessional. He liked it when they succumbed to his looks, his wit, and his charm. And he was very, very careful, which they always appreciated. He kept his stockpile of lamb-gut sheaths as hidden from Cade and Mistress Mirdley as he had, when very young, kept his thorn-roll hidden from his mother.