by Melanie Rawn
Quill sees.
He doesn’t hate me.
He doesn’t much like some of the things I’ve done, but he’s never—
Yes, he has. The last time I got drunk.
It would have to be the last time.
He discovered that he was sprawled on the stage, not quite curled up in a ball but close to it. Unwinding his limbs, feeling a million years old, he picked up an unbroken withie. There was power in it: Cayden’s magic, and Blye’s. He regularly and delightedly combined their magic with his own to create wonders. It was clear to him right now that what he must do with it was destroy.
He was desperate for thorn. He needed the kick of energy. He was terrified that he wouldn’t have the strength to do this. He remembered what it was like, having all that lovely hot sweet power flowing through him, heightening his senses, making his dance with the withies almost impossibly quick—like Pirro, grabbing glass twigs and spewing magic from them, uncontrolled and wild, devouring Pirro’s own strength and will. Before the curtain had thickened, Mieka had sensed something muddied and foul about his former friend’s magic, how the bluethorn and whitethorn and the Gods alone knew what other kinds of thorn had replaced the essence of the man, mind and heart and soul. There wasn’t much left that was truly Pirro Spangler.
That could have been me. He’d said that aloud to Quill, though he couldn’t quite recall the circumstances. But it was true. There was so little between him and all the evils his own nature could surrender to, given the chance. The fear was absolute, crippling—until he realized that it could have been him if not for Cayden, for Rafe, for Jeska. Mieka would crave thorn for the rest of his life, but if he gave in, he would become either the hollow shell Pirro was now, or a monster. The kind of person who could put killing magic into withies, who could plot to blow up a castle with his sister and her children inside, who could order two innocent people killed just to see if the method worked and then use it to kill his own wife.
Mieka looked at the withie he held as he would hold a throwing knife: by the crimp, elbow cocked. Shifting the glass in his hand, he held it like a sword’s hilt. Better. He was about to do battle, after all. He was going to use his own magic and Cayden’s and Blye’s to slice holes in that curtain, and if they were tiny at first, so be it. Enough rents in the fabric, and he’d be able to tear it to shreds.
It took only a few moments of slicing at the thing to convince him that he couldn’t do it alone. Flinging a glance back over his shoulder, he saw that the shooting sparks of colored light had attacked the players as they were attacking the audience. The fight was clear in all those familiar faces; Rafe seemed to be winning, and Mirko. But none of them could help him. He wanted to discard the withie and seize the slight tears in the curtain and rip them wide open. But if he touched the magic with his bare hands again, he knew he’d be lost.
How had Cayden walked through it? What was happening to him, there where Thierin and Kaj and Herris and Pirro could get at him freely? They wouldn’t kill him. They probably wanted to, but they wouldn’t. The Archduke wanted Cayden Silversun and his unique, priceless Elsewhens intact.
Cayden Silversun.
Mieka heard himself laugh aloud. Why hadn’t anybody seen it?
Had Mieka believed that certain things were fated to be, he would have called it foretold, something they all ought to have realized long ere this. He didn’t believe in iron-clad destiny—no one familiar with Cade’s Elsewhens could—but he did take this as definitive proof that the Gods had a sense of humor.
Not iron or gold or bronze or brass, but silver: the only metal that was poison to the Knights. Sun: the source of light that scorched their skin and charred their bones and brought them certain death. What other name could Cayden possibly have borne?
Turning, he skimmed his gaze over the audience. No improvement, no surcease—though Jeska, before his return to the wings, seemed to have cleared hundreds of people from the upper rows. Baltryn and a friend stood guard in the side aisles; Megs was holding Miriuzca’s hands in her own. Which left thousands in the theater, almost all of them helpless before the magic that slithered through the air and captured their minds. Why not just kill them all? Mieka wondered, then shook the thought away and ran back to the wings, where tregetours and gliskers were clumped together, back to priming withies, their fettlers once more protecting them. He didn’t have to ask to know what sort of magic they were putting into the withies. Fury; outrage; hate; revulsion. But that curving curtain was woven of hate and evil; more hate and more evil could only make it stronger.
“We can’t use those,” he said flatly.
To a man, they stared at him.
“You just try a couple of these and find out!”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?”
“What d’you suggest we do—shatter them and throw the shards?”
“Then what will we use?”
Mieka smiled, a real smile this time, an expression that shocked them speechless. Rafe and Jeska returned his gaze with doubt and worry—things he’d expected, so it didn’t hurt that much. What had he ever done to deserve otherwise? Yet something had to have happened over these last years—Lord and Lady alone knew what—to make them trust him, because after a moment they, too, began to smile.
Clever and mad.
“Here, I’ll show you,” Mieka said, and pulled the knife from its sheath at his back.
Chapter 40
Expecting pretty much anything behind that glimmering wall of magic, Cade hadn’t expected to walk into his own play.
Passing through the shifting curtain of magic was the opposite of a curglaff: instead of an icy-cold shock on his skin, he’d felt a blistering heat in every corner of his mind. He would never know if the step he took out of it was a stumble or not; the important thing was that he moved beyond it and saw at once Thierin Knottinger, eyes open and laughing with scorn, the only other person on the stage. Which was impossible. But there he was: lean and dark, dressed in brown leather and red silk. Seamark, Spangler, and Crowkeeper were gone. Or hidden. Or something.
“About time you showed up. I knew you would, of course. You could never resist playing the Great Tregetour, always in control of everything.”
Cade took rapid stock of himself. Whole and without wound, but in control of nothing but his temper. His brain still stung like a festering thorn-welt, and it was all he could do to stand upright.
“You recognize this, I trust?” Thierin gestured with a flourish to the hallway of doors that Cade and Mieka had created so many times. “Why he won’t let us turn you at the same time as everyone else, I don’t know. But for some reason he wants you … functional.” He grinned broadly, the word obviously amusing him. “Choose a door, Cayden.”
Understanding now precisely why a Wizard could place lethal magic inside a withie and hurl it at his enemies, Cade decided to ignore Thierin instead. Neither would he give the tregetour the satisfaction of asking where his partners were. Someone had made the hall and the doorways, and whatever might be within them. For whom they had been made was clear. Clear as well was the one he was intended to walk through. It was the only one slightly ajar. He strode to it, opened it with a hard kick of his boot, but did not enter.
“Oh, go on!” Knottinger taunted. “You know you want to. Or is it only your Elf who gets distracted by shiny objects?”
There were none such in the scene beyond the door. Instead, blood-soaked footprints in a flat, snowy wasteland. They did not lead into the distance, but approached—as if he had already trod a path to the doorway.
The voice that addressed him now was not Thierin’s.
“You’ve left your mark behind you in blood, the blood of those whose deaths you might have averted, and of those who died.”
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. He didn’t turn to find its owner, nor search the scene before him with his gaze. The voice was familiar, even though he hadn’t heard it in more than a dozen years. He’d thought the man dead. He su
pposed this resurrection was meant to be a staggering shock. It wasn’t. Where else would this man be other than serving Cyed Henick?
Less and less as he’d grown older had he thought of Sagemaster Emmot’s lessons. He had applied them as he felt necessary to the life he was making for himself, and gradually the voice—this voice echoing all around him now—had faded inside his head. But those teachings existed; they were part of him, whether he willed it or no. Hearing this voice that had freed him from Redpebble Square, from being ordinary, that had revealed what he now realized was only as much as it took to bring forth and comprehend the Elsewhens—he was peculiarly unsurprised. What puzzled him was why, after all these years, Emmot still thought that he knew Cayden. Rather pathetic, really.
In point of fact, this image of blood-boltered footsteps could not catch at his conscience, for he had read the oldest of old plays in Lost Withies, which he always thought of as Mieka’s book. From it he knew that in ancient days, fallow farmland was drenched with blood to make it fertile and pleasing to the Gods. Should a light, swift snow fall before the blood was plowed into the soil, walking across it would seem as if one left bloody footprints. The play itself had been about a cataclysmic social change: using the blood of animals rather than the blood of children. The footprints had been those of the Goddess of the Harvest, who had seized power from an older, crueler God, lingering after she inspected and blessed the fields.
“Nice try, old man.”
“Something prettier, then? There are other doorways. There are always other doorways.”
True enough. He and Mieka and Jeska and Rafe had together thought up at least thirty as the play evolved over the years. The last door chosen was always the one giving each member of an audience that which they thought they most desired. This life, and none other. Emmot would have to do a lot better if he wished to rattle Cayden. Moving to another door, he grasped the brass handle and opened it.
Not just a pretty scene; a perfectly beautiful one. A green and flowery meadow backed by snow-capped mountains, a stream chuckling over boulders and fallen logs and between stepping-stones. The bluest of skies, the sweetest of birdsong. Tall pines, blossom-strewn shrubbery, and millions of brilliant butterflies that drifted idly here and there, opening and closing their patterned wings. Suddenly their bodies lengthened, grew vicious stingers at the tail, wings becoming the jaws of a forester’s trap, steel teeth snapping.
“I’m afraid I’m not quite understanding your symbolism here,” Cade said. In truth, he understood very well, and thought it rather silly. “Are these supposed to be all the plays I’ve written? Pretty to look at, but with a bite to them? If so, I’m beholden to you for the compliment.”
“Try another doorway.”
He smiled as he turned into the hall again, knowing Emmot would see it or sense it. “Where’s the one where I get the girl?”
“Perhaps you’ll get something you can’t admit that you desire.”
Opening a sleek bronze door, he saw Blye’s workshop and piles of withies—hundreds of them, each prickled with thorns and filled with liquid of a dozen different colors.
“Oh, you do enjoy your thorn, don’t you? You want them. You can feel them. Magic to enhance your own magic and make you invincible.”
Cade couldn’t help it. He burst out laughing.
“Or mayhap to create a world and live within it, dreaming anything and everything precisely as you wish it to be.”
“I like my life just as it is, though it’s thoughtful of you to offer.”
“So. The ugsome Troll-spawn has grown to be a man. I thought it thus, but I wanted to be sure. It will make what happens next all the more satisfying.”
Another door clanged open. Cade approached warily. Inside was a plain, comfortless room paved with white marble veined in blood red. The markings looked to him like words, like lines of type ready to be printed. They wrote themselves across the white stone and began to float up into the air and began of themselves to speak their own names.
He knew these words, all of them. They were his own. From every play he had ever written or rewritten, Jeska’s speeches recited themselves at him, simultaneously, overlapping, a tumult of words and words and yet more words spoken in every conceivable sort of voice, from high-pitched whine to gravelly growl. The blood-red words crowded one another in sound and sight until the turmoil became almost too much to bear.
Then the words silenced themselves and fell dead to the floor.
“You see how useless you are? Nothing but words. All you will leave when you die are piles of words.”
“Well,” Cade said, unimpressed, “if we’re all going to die anyway, why not leave, say, ‘Life in a Day’ behind?” He smiled again. “Or Blood Plight. Not an inconsiderable life’s work.”
Because it wasn’t just the words. It was the ideas and feelings they represented. Evoked. The words and what they meant—they would be his legacy, he knew, but they were also his weapons. His particular method of magic that didn’t require much magic at all. It needed only what was inside him that thought and felt and dreamed. Mieka had told him more than once that his dreams were important. Not just for himself; for those who couldn’t find words to make their dreamings come alive.
“But there could be so much more.”
This time, as a new voice spoke, he did flinch. Down at the far end of the ballroom, past the heaps of fallen, silent words, Archduke Cyed Henick sat in a large, overstuffed gray chair.
“Do come in,” he invited. “Yes, I’ve seen your ‘Doorways’ play. I always thought it nonsense. We are what we are because we can be nothing else. There are no choices to be made.”
Cade approached, stepping carefully around the dead words. “You’re wrong,” he said. “We all choose. I’ve proof of it. Mieka chose to stop using thorn. I’ve never seen anyone who used more or loved it more than he did. But he made the choice and kept to it.”
“The Elf. Always that damned little Elf.”
Henick rose listlessly to his feet. Cade had noted before that he didn’t look healthy; now he looked positively ill. A hand was held up, palm out, the greeting of one nobleman to another. The greeting of equals. Cayden glanced at the hand, then at the watery blue eyes. Nothing on or of or in this world could impel him to touch this man.
Henick shrugged and sat back down again. Reaching into the pocket of his dark gray jacket, he withdrew something that glittered as it dangled from his fingers. His smile was the slow unsheathing of a dagger.
The Carkanet. The Queen’s Right of the Fae.
“Midwinter sunrise, the year my late unregretted wife played her trick on the Elf. By all the Old Gods, what a breathtakingly stupid woman! You can imagine how furious I was.”
“I take it that you didn’t go after that shiny little trinket for her sake.”
“She hated you ever since the night you defended Miriuzca at the bedding ceremony. That’s quite a while ago now, isn’t it?”
“Did she deserve to die?”
“She shared my opinion that to destroy the Elf would be to destroy you. She tried to do so without my permission. She failed. Yes, she deserved to die.”
“Then why are you still alive? You’ve failed often enough.”
“You can’t know how long I waited for a reason to ‘learn’ about your talent. I couldn’t let on that I knew until somebody came and told me. How luscious that it turned out to be the Caitiff! Did you know she went to the trouble of a journey to—”
“To the Durkah Isle,” Cade interrupted, bored. “That wasn’t much of a success, either. You really ought to get some competent people around you, Your Grace.”
“I didn’t really need her. And it turns out that I don’t need you, either, to accomplish what will be done tonight. Black Lightning may not be as powerful in some ways, but they are far less trouble than you would have been.”
“You’ll keep me alive, though.” It hadn’t taken Thierin Knottinger to tell him that.
“Yes. You know as
well as I that you’re too valuable to lose. I’ll let you play your future out, pounding stages like a clown—but when I summon you, you will come. And you will tell me what the future holds.”
Cade pretended to consider. “Actually, no. I won’t.”
“Have you ever seen the future that begins tonight? The future where I rule Albeyn? Of course you haven’t. You see only things you personally can influence. The things that your actions can change. Believe me when I say this, Master Silversun: Nothing you can do will alter this future now.”
Cade only smiled.
“And what of your little brother?” Henick went on, relishing the words. “Do you ever see him in all these futures? You do not. And you won’t, ever.”
He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Harm him, and I’ll—”
“Oh, please. Cut out your own tongue, kill yourself, rather than tell me anything about your visions? You don’t see it yet, do you?” He leaned forward in his chair, the necklet swinging gently from his fingertips. “After tonight, you’ll want to tell me.”
It made sense then. It all made sense. Identifying each magical race. Targeting them specifically. No magic could counter or withstand what Black Lightning would do, was doing, to the King and Miriuzca and the Ministers and the justiciars and the nobles and even the purebred Human ambassadors of a dozen different countries. Had their every Royal Circuit performance prepared the rest of the Kingdom? Mayhap. But why go to all that trouble? With almost everyone of importance swayed to his side—turned, to use Knottinger’s word—why bother with the common folk?