by Melanie Rawn
“Sulking again.”
He didn’t look up as Mieka entered the cabin.
“Jeska was right. So was Fairwalk. And so was I.” He paused. “And so were you.”
“We had to get Briuly back here, I’ll go along with that. And you can applaud yourself all night for being clever if you please, I don’t give a damn. But how can you say that Kearney and I were both right? How can you knuckle under to orders that we don’t even know who gave them, and—”
“Did you note how nervous the bargemen are tonight?” Mieka interrupted. “No, of course you didn’t. You were too busy being self-righteous. They keep looking out at the water and muttering things. And there’s not a sign of the old man with the magic.” He searched through his satchel and came up with a wyvern-hide roll of thorn—a new one, Cade saw, dark purple and stamped along the edges with a repeating pattern of silver raindrops, seeds, candle flames, and at one corner MW.
He watched as a paper twist of powder was selected and one of five glass thorns was removed from its cushioning spell. Suddenly he wanted nothing so much in the world as to lose himself in dreams. Mieka was here, and wouldn’t let him get too lost.
“So,” the Elf said at last. “After I deliver this to poor Briuly, shall we go exploring again tonight, or do you want to sit here and cherish your huff?”
Knuckles tapped at their door, and a voice whispered, “Cayden?”
“Come in, Kearney,” he said.
His Lordship was not alone. Drevan Wordturner was with him—or, rather, supporting him, for Kearney was as unsteady on his feet as if he’d plunged into a barrel of Brishen Staindrop’s finest.
“Appalling imposition,” he said in the forcibly clipped manner of the very drunk who knew it. “Dreadf’ly sorry.”
“Master Blackpath,” said Wordturner, who was looking a bit fuzzy around the edges himself, “isn’t to be disturbed until morning.”
“Have the lower bed,” Mieka said at once. A little smile played about his lips as Kearney was maneuvered the three steps across the cabin and Cade got up to make way for him on the bunk.
“Fri’f’ly good of you,” Kearney managed, then turned onto his side and began to snore.
“The physicker gave Briuly something for the pain?” Cade asked.
When, after a moment’s thought, the young man nodded, Mieka sighed and replaced the packet and thorn. “Won’t be needing these, then.”
Belatedly recalling his manners, Cade said, “Mieka Windthistle, this is Drevan Wordturner—a librarian who’d rather be a cavalry officer.”
Mieka shivered. “There’s aught to choose betwixt the two?” Then, peering up at the young man’s face, he went on kindly, “You’re yawning like a mine cavern. D’you think you’d make it to His Grace’s barge without falling overboard? Let’s make sure he doesn’t, eh, Quill?”
Drevan protested that it wasn’t necessary. Mieka insisted. Cade went along with it, wondering what the Elf had in mind. They had just escorted Wordturner up onto the deck when a boatman caught sight of them in the gloom and gestured them back down.
“Just taking him to his bed,” Mieka said cheerfully. “One of His Grace’s men, and all that sort of thing—”
More gestures, and a lot of sharp words.
“What’s he saying?” Cade asked, and Drevan shook his head as if to clear it. “Can you understand him?”
“He—he wants us gone,” the young man slurred. Whatever had been in tonight’s wine was catching him up fast.
Mieka was nudging them towards the front of the barge. Cade opened his mouth to say that the one up ahead was reserved for the Archduke himself and his personal retinue, and couldn’t possibly be where Drevan belonged—and then realized what Mieka was doing.
They had reached the catwalk, which was barely wide enough for two people. Cade looked at it doubtfully. Mieka flung him a wide and challenging grin, white teeth flashing in the footlights glinting beneath the railing.
“Your Honors, Your Honors! Please return to cabins that are yours! Please!” It was the little man with the big silver badge. “Soon departing—a threat to stay above—”
“Just helping this gentleman along,” Cade said.
“Why is it a threat?” Mieka asked at the same time.
“I–I worded wrongly,” he amended anxiously. “I meant not safe, Your Honors, please—”
Drevan was swaying against Cade now, well and truly paved. “’S all right,” he muttered, “jus’ lemme sleep—”
“Yes, yes!” The little man nodded. “Sleep for you all, the best thing—”
Cade exchanged a glance with Mieka. “Mayhap a little more light,” he suggested, and balanced a flicker of blue Wizardfire on the tip of one finger.
Someone on the first barge bellowed words that made Drevan flinch violently against Cade’s shoulder, nearly toppling them both.
“What did he say?” Mieka demanded.
“M-magic—”
“I beg Your Honor, please, stop!”
“—no magic, no light—”
The yelling grew louder.
“—’specially light made o’ magic,” Drevan mumbled. “Pretty sure tha’s wha’ he said. Lookit up t’morrow, promise. C’n sleep now, yeh, Uncle Teremun?”
The lead barge surged forward. The catwalk broke in two. Someone came running past them and leaped the railing. Cade lost the Wizardfire in his astonishment—and lost hold of Drevan, who sagged to the deck and passed out.
The odd misty glow appeared ahead, larger and more intense, sparking with brighter lights. Once again Cade saw the outline of a man signaling with his arms, but frantically this time, desperately.
“Oh no, oh no,” moaned the little man, “please to all the Powers, don’t let them get loose—”
Between the glowing cloud and the man conjuring it erupted one and then three and then five or more gushes of water, spouting like fountains twenty feet into the night. The barges jerked forward again—like carriages, Cade suddenly thought, carriages collared to restive, bad-tempered horses. Yellow-pale, sleek-necked horses, with hawk’s eyes and carnivore’s teeth.
The river-horses screamed. Plunging towards the magical light up ahead, they surfaced and spewed water from red-rimmed nostrils and threw back their massive heads and screamed.
Into glass withies, Cayden had worked magic that made dragons roar. He had created the crack of lightning and the shrill cries of mythical birds and the deep solemn rumble of Minster bells. The screams were all these combined and a warning besides, and without conscious thought he hauled Drevan across the deck with one hand and grabbed Mieka’s wrist with the other and fled.
He didn’t even feel the bruises of their crazed tumble down steps, or the battering of his shoulders against passageway walls as the barge rocked and shuddered. Somehow they were back in their cabin, and Kearney lay sleeping on the lower bunk. He let Drevan lie where he and Mieka dropped him. All at once the Elf was tucked up against his side in the darkness, shivering. Cade put an arm around him: slight but solid, unseen but real.
They waited for the sound of doors closing, and the ebbing of worried, angry muttering. They waited in darkness for the snick of the lock on their door. Mostly they waited for the screaming to stop.
When it did, they crawled up to the top bed and huddled there for a long time. At last Cade whispered, “Are you all right?”
“No!” Mieka pulled away into a corner. “They’ll kill us for seeing that.”
“Don’t be stupid.” The barge was moving more smoothly now. Cade stretched out his cramped legs and said, “We didn’t see anything.”
“Didn’t we?”
“No.”
The sky outside the porthole was just beginning to pale and the barges had stopped moving when their door was unlocked and a small, wizened man entered, holding a lighted candle. He glanced round the cabin: Drevan Wordturner, still in a heap on the floor; Kearney Fairwalk, still soundly asleep. Looking up, he saw Cade and Mieka in the upper bunk.
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�Was you, yes?” he asked in a thickly accented voice that seemed much too deep to come from so scrawny a chest. “Magic yesternight.”
Cade nodded. He stumbled down from the bunk, joints stiff, head aching after two nights without sleep. Mieka slid down to stand beside him.
“Rule has reason,” the old man said.
“We didn’t see anything!” Mieka blurted.
A dry cackling chuckle. “Afeared? No need. Vodabeiste undanger—not danger,” he corrected himself. “Control is mine—” He smiled up at Cade again. “—until other magics. Wizard, you?”
Cade nodded.
“Vodabeiste feel it.”
“Rules have reasons,” Cade ventured. “The light I made last night—”
“Light was, also, before?”
He didn’t understand. Mieka did.
“No, that was a joining spell. The axle peg broke, and he mended it with magic. Did those—things—feel it?”
“Yes,” said the old man. He hesitated, then reached out a hand, almost touching Cade, head tilting to one side as if asking permission. Cade stood still. Thick, crooked fingers touched his arm, his shoulder, his cheek. “Wizard,” the old man sighed. Turning to Mieka, he brushed back the concealing black hair. “Kin,” he whispered.
Startled, Cade looked at the old man’s ears. Not pointed. No sign of having been kagged. Kin?
“Water Elf?” Mieka ventured in a very small voice.
“Voda, yes. And other.” The ringing of a bell up top seemed to be his signal to depart. He took his candle, blew it out, and put his fingers on the door handle. “Rule has reason,” he said again, with a twinkle directed at Cade. Then he opened the door and was gone.
Chapter 14
Even if Mieka had been able to phrase the questions, there was no one to ask about the happenings of the night. There was no sign of the old man the next day. (“Kin”?) Neither Fairwalk nor Wordturner remembered a thing. The little man with the silver badge scurried the other way when he saw Mieka coming. And the expression in Cade’s gray eyes discouraged conversation. If not for his bumps and bruises from that wild retreat back down the steps, Mieka might have thought he’d dreamed the whole thing while under the influence of some especially cryptic variety of thorn concocted by Auntie Brishen.
But he hadn’t dreamed it.
He would remember those screams until his dying day.
Whatever those water-things were, there was no suggestion that they even existed by daylight. They might have been taken someplace for a feed, or mayhap they were sleeping. And there would be no chance to investigate further tonight, even if he’d been able to gather the courage to do so, for the passengers and all their belongings were loaded into coaches for the last part of the journey to Gref Jyziero.
In a way, he was relieved. Thinking of those things plunging through the river current, dragging the barges behind them—it gave him the weirds. As much as he tried to tell himself it was no different, really, from horses hitched to a carriage, he knew it was very different. He didn’t know quite how, but it was. Cayden would probably have been able to explain it. But Cayden wasn’t talking. For the whole long, jostled, cramped, miserable journey, Cade didn’t say much of anything to anybody.
During the next four days it was like being back on the Winterly. They were rousted out of bed at dawn, chivvied into the coaches, allowed out at lunching, and repacked until dusk. Then they ate dinner, got sorted into beds at taverns or inns (in the Archduke’s case, the nicest house in whatever town or village was privileged to host the delegation), and did it all again on the morrow. Through it all, Cade took refuge in books, thought, and gazing silently out the window. Never much of a reader, Mieka had long since discovered that attempting it while in a moving coach made him sick to his stomach. All the things he could think of to think about were annoying, upsetting, or depressing. And once he’d seen one lakelet, manor house, grove of trees, or glimpse of distant mountains, he’d seen them all.
Besides, this place made him jittery. It was too big. The river was too wide. The fields were too vast and the trees were too tall. It was all familiar, even the mountains, but on a scale that unnerved him. The roads stretched out to infinity and the sky was just too damned blue. He reminded himself time and again that he ought to be collecting impressions to use as backdrops for future plays, but he couldn’t keep his mind on his work, either. On the Winterly, one endured the tedium of travel for the excitement of a new town to explore, a new theater to analyze, a new audience to play for, a new girl to bed. A brief show for the locals would at least have kept him from feeling that rust was eating away at his magic, or maybe it was roof-rot in his brain. What he knew for certain, and with displeasure as well as discomfort, was that with all this sitting about with no exercise beyond climbing into and out of the coach, his belt was getting tight.
And Cayden wasn’t talking.
Fairwalk filled in a lot of the silences, of course. He was good at that, Kearney Fairwalk was. And at reiterating what everybody already knew. They would be playing two outdoor and three indoor shows. The new Princess had specifically requested “Hidden Cottage.” The primarily visual pieces would be received better than the talkier ones by people who didn’t understand their language. Mieka was about ready to stuff Fairwalk’s neckband down his throat to shut him up when he actually said something new: that they would not be returning to the port town on the barges.
Mieka perked up at that. “Crossland, then?” he asked, not sure whether the daunting length of such a journey would be worth it for not having to think about those water-things again.
“No, on the river, as before—but we’ll be sailing on ships her father has hired. Something about the winds and the current, and all that sort of thing.”
“None of that on-and-off nonsense? Good,” Rafe said.
Mieka tried to catch Cade’s attention, and couldn’t. But he knew they must be thinking the same thing: None of those water-things? Better than good!
Their fourth night on the road, with dinner congealing like a lump of molten glass in his stomach, Mieka left the taproom after one glass of whiskey—very bad whiskey, though the wines were quite good here—and went up early to the room he would share with Cade, Jeska, Rafe, Briuly, and Fairwalk. Contemplation of his purple roll of thorn brought scant satisfaction. He didn’t want to sleep, and he certainly didn’t want to stay awake in this dismal place. He pondered blackthorn for a time. Yet when he recalled what had happened to Cade—that he’d dreamed about what he’d been thinking of just before the thornprick—he shuddered away from it. All he lacked were horrid dreams about those yellow monsters in the river. He could try, of course, to dream about her by fixing her image in his mind, but he didn’t want to risk that his determination wouldn’t be strong enough. Everything that meant home to him seemed so distant. Abruptly worried, he started to dig through his satchel for the neckband she’d made for him, then remembered with a curse that, not wanting to risk losing it, he’d left it carefully folded on a shelf in his aerie at Wistly.
The door was flung open and Cade appeared—genially squiffed, smiling for the first time in days. “Well? C’mon, then. Briuly says there’s a tavern up the way with much better drinks, and music. And girls.”
A flick of his hand rolled up the collection of thorn. “Lead on!”
This was more like it, he told himself an hour later. He had a pretty girl on his knee and a pewter tankard of very good beer in his hand, and Jeska was leading the chorus of a children’s song that seemed to be common to all countries—though Jeska’s lyrics were definitely not suitable for children. When Mieka smiled, the girl giggled and snuggled closer. A charming little thing, she was, weighing no more than a feather, with big brown eyes and a dimple in one cheek. He dared a kiss to the dimple, and she blushed. But when he tossed his long, wild hair out of his eyes and joined Jeska in howling out the song’s refrain, she was off his lap with a squeal like a scalded kitten.
“Albeynvolker—!”
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nbsp; The singing stopped. There was no shouting. No ugly words, no fists threatening a fight. Barmaids swooped in to seize the tankards. The barkeep didn’t do anything so dramatic as vault over the bar; he simply walked around it, approached their table, and stood there, staring down at Mieka’s pointed Elfen ears.
Briuly started to his feet. Rafe slammed him back down with a hand to his chest. Looking up at the barkeep, he drawled, “I hadn’t finished my drink, friend.”
No mistaking his tone, even if the words weren’t understood. The man planted his hands on his hips and stood his ground. Staring.
“Let’s—let’s not make any trouble,” Mieka whispered. It was the Prickspur incident all over again, only without any yelling, and somehow that made it worse. The silent menace of this tavern, the fear in the eyes of the girl who’d been giggling on his lap not two minutes ago—oh it was so much worse. “We’ll just leave now, Rafe, please, it doesn’t matter—”
“It matters to me.” This from Cayden, who sat straight-spined and furious beside Mieka.
“I’m the one they’re all lookin’ at! And I say we’re out of here!” He got to his feet. A murmur ran through the crowd. It took everything he had to summon up his usual beguiling smile. Jeska rose and came to his side. “No fists, eh?” Mieka whispered.
“No magic, neither,” Jeska warned.
Chairs scraped the floor as first Briuly, then Rafe, and finally Cade stood up. With an ominous growl, Briuly raked back his long wild curls to reveal his own ears. Someone gasped. Mieka flung his best smile to the four corners of the room, then deliberately mimicked Briuly, tucking his hair back so everyone could get a good look. He hoped no one saw that his fingers were shaking. He bowed to the girl, then the barkeep, pivoted on one heel, and started for the door. Along the way, an elbow dug into his back. The toe of a boot caught his ankle, and he stumbled slightly. He heard Rafe snarl like a wolfhound. He lengthened his strides, gaze darting everywhere at once as he tried to anticipate where the next shove might come from—but none did. He was at the door and outside in the warm night and wanting so desperately to run that his whole body trembled.
