by Melanie Rawn
“As long as he pays up, who cares?”
Cade stumbled against him. “Lord Oakapple can go fiddle with himself. The truth is the truth—”
“—and therefore beautiful?” Mieka laughed up at him. “We all read the article, Quill!”
Fairwalk, with Jeska in tow, struggled through to them. “This way!”
A few minutes and a few bruises later, they were in a room scarcely larger than a broom cupboard. Rafe slammed the door and leaned his spine against it.
“Gods!” Jeska exclaimed. “That’s a relief! Who let all those people in?”
“Good job we didn’t bring Dery in this way,” Rafe said.
“I’m regretting that we brought him at all,” Cade fretted.
“There’s three Windthistles—two of them six-foot-five—and a Threadchaser looking out for him,” Mieka soothed. “Did I forget to say beholden for the tickets, Kearney?” He looked around. “Kearney?”
“If you think I’m opening this door to let him in, have another think about it,” Rafe warned.
Eventually the noise outside died down. Rafe cracked the door open a bit, nodded, and they eased out of the room. The hallway had depopulated dramatically, and they knew why when, from the great hall there echoed a shout of, “Your Gracious Majesty, Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, my lords, and gentlemen—Black Lightning!”
“Oh, splendid,” Jeska muttered. “Anybody seen Alaen to warn him to pay attention to us?”
“He won’t be heeding anybody but the Shadowshapers tonight,” Mieka said. “I had it from Chat himself—”
“I should talk to him all the same,” Cade decided. “We’ve half an hour of—” He waved a contemptuous hand towards the great hall. “—that before we’re on.”
He had scarcely left when Fairwalk fluttered over to them. “Lord and Lady and Angels above—I thought I’d never find you again! Where’s Cayden?”
“No idea,” Mieka said. “Any hope of a drink round here?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” said Fairwalk, though his gaze shifted to the right, which Mieka took to be an involuntary indicator that there were indeed drinks to be had.
“Make it three,” Rafe said. “Cade can get his own.”
“Mieka! You can’t—please don’t—”
“Won’t be a tick of the clock,” he promised.
Three columns down there was an alcove, and in it was the sad sight of a hundred or so upended bottles in a gigantic tub of melting ice. Mieka growled low in his throat and wondered how he could possibly have missed this on the way in. He turned, spotted a half-open door leading from the alcove, and started for it.
“Just listen for a moment, won’t you?” Cade’s voice said. “Alaen, this is vitally important—”
Mieka nearly pushed the door open to add his insistence to Cade’s, but the anguish in Alaen’s voice stopped him.
“I told you—unless it helps me with Chirene, I’m not interested!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Alaen!”
“I can’t help it, Cayden, I—”
“Just listen! You have to watch everything we do onstage tonight, understand? Watch and remember, you and Briuly both—”
“I don’t care! I can’t think of anything but her. I’m in love with her, Cade.”
“Does Sakary know?”
“Gods, I hope not—I don’t think she knows.”
Derisively: “She’s a woman. She knows.”
“What am I to do?”
“Why are you asking me? What do you think I could do?”
“You—but I thought you’d understand! You want somebody you can’t have—you know how it feels, seeing that person and—and—”
“Shut it!”
Mieka winced. After the initial white-faced shock at hearing she was bespoken, Cade hadn’t shown a morsel of feeling one way or the other about Lady Vrennerie. Ah, but that was Cade, wasn’t it, right down to the ground.
“But, Cade, I’ve seen your eyes when you—I just thought—”
“Not very good at thinking, are you? Didn’t do any before you fixed on her!”
“I don’t see her that often, and never alone, but I love her, I want her—oh Gods, she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen—”
“Is that the criterion, then?”
“Wh-what d’you mean?’
“The most beautiful thing, you said. Like she’s a tapestry to display on the wall, or a lute you can possess—”
“Fuck you! That’s not how it is! The first time I ever saw her, I knew. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since. It’s been all hells, her living at Mieka’s house, I don’t dare go all the way out there, someone would see me, someone would find out—”
“You showed that much sense? I’m amazed.”
Alaen didn’t seem to have heard him. “When I play, she’s the one I’m playing for, singing to, even though she’s never there—if there was any hope, any hope at all—”
“Hope? There’s none, Alaen. No hope in the world.”
Suddenly Mieka wondered which of them he was speaking to.
“But there has to be! If I could just be near her, alone with her, for a few moments, I could tell her, and—”
“And then what? You’d fall into each other’s arms and everyone would be happier than swine in shit?”
Alaen’s tone turned vicious. “Is that what you’re hoping for, Cayden?”
Time and past time he interrupted this. Plastering a carefree grin onto his face, he swanned through the door, calling out, “Quill! Where’ve you got to? Oh! Here you are! His Lordship’s blithering about something that only you can mend, you’d best go smooth his fruzzles. Alaen, old son, you wouldn’t happen to know where there might be a drink about, would you? I’m perfectly parched!”
Cade wore that blank expression he used when he wanted to be a thousand miles from wherever it was he currently stood. Mieka threw him a grimace of a smile behind Alaen’s back, just to let him know he’d heard enough to understand, and pulled the musician out of the alcove and down the corridor, babbling amiably all the way. At the far end he glimpsed Vered Goldbraider’s distinctive white-blond hair, and steered Alaen towards the Shadowshapers. They were as grateful to have him back as Mieka was to get rid of him.
“No drinks left,” Mieka reported when he found the rest of Touchstone again. “I knew I should’ve brought me own bottle! I—” He broke off as a sudden gust of emotion hit him like a slap in the face. He didn’t just want a drink, he wanted to laugh hysterically, and dance on corpses, and drag some girl into a corner and fuck her until she screamed—
Just as quickly as it happened, it was muted. He dragged in a gasping breath. “Gods almighty! What was that?”
“Black fucking Lightning,” Jeska muttered, and wiped sweat from his forehead. “Subtle as a shipwreck!”
Mieka looked up at Rafe. The fettler’s gray-blue eyes were unfocused, his lips bitten in a tight line. He was deflecting the backwash from the performance, and he didn’t stop for long minutes, until applause thundered through the great hall.
“Beholden,” Mieka whispered when Rafe’s face cleared of strain. “More than I can tell you.”
“Crowkeeper couldn’t control his own farts, much less his glisker,” Cade said. But he looked unaffected, as if nothing had touched him—and that, Mieka told himself, was Cade, too. Right down to the ground.
“It’s time,” Fairwalk said suddenly, and Mieka wondered where he’d come from. “They’re about to announce you.”
Cade shook his head. “Give it a few minutes. The audience needs to recover from that.”
Mieka understood instantly that he was worried about Rafe, not the audience. Gods, for some bluethorn right now, just a bit of it to get that look out of Rafe’s eyes. But in the next moment rage replaced the fettler’s exhaustion, and the jaw beneath the thick black beard set stubbornly, and he met Cade’s eyes with a curt nod.
All the same, Mieka told himself to be very careful with the magic
tonight, adjusting it himself as much as possible so that Rafe didn’t have to work so hard.
Sakary Grainer approached, his usually impassive face flushed with anger. “Did you feel that?” he demanded of them all. “Stupid fools oughtn’t to be allowed on a stage!”
“We’re all right,” Rafe said. “You?”
“He’s in luck that I didn’t send it all right back at him.”
“We’ll have to try that sometime.” Rafe grinned.
“Name the day.” Sakary glanced round as Rauel called his name. “Here’s to it—we’re sneaking in at the side to watch.”
“Enjoy,” Mieka said, and winked, and within moments heard the Steward cry, “Touchstone!”
* * *
Mieka concentrated on the place first, just as they’d planned. A cold twilight, cold clouds, cold sun hanging listlessly in the sky. A second withie gave him the wind, the footsteps, the ragged breath. A third guised Jeska as a tall, becloaked man, hood up over his head, pausing to look back over his shoulder in terror.
“No night bedarked as soonly—as soonly—” He stammered out the words of the poem, and the wall swirled into view ahead of him. “Crumbling wall—athwart the crumbling wall—yes! Here!”
Gently now; a throne coalescing into recognizable shape from what had seemed at first to be a simple stone wall. Triumph threading through the sight, and urgency, and defiance. That last was the most important, Cade had said. Without the insolent disdain, what followed would mean nothing.
Jeska collapsed onto his knees and from his cloak there fell a wrapped bundle that spilled diamonds and gold- and silver-threaded glass into the mud. He moaned in dismay at the sacrilege—and then started with terror as he heard the galloping hooves and the howling dogs. (A nice touch, that; saved Cade having to provide and Mieka having to conjure the actual company of cavalry and hounds.) Scrabbling at the wall, he shoved the bundle deep and staggered up to his full height, lifting both arms, his hooded cloak slipping to the ground, revealing the pointed ears and iridescent wings of a Fae.
The audience gasped. Mieka spared attention enough for a brief glance over at Cade, who wore a harsh little smile.
Lightning blasted from the Fae’s fingertips, toppling the wall atop the Treasure just as the last rays of the sun seemed to reach for the glimmering crown. He stood straight, let his arms fall, and as night swept across him the pursuers caught at him, billowing cloaks throwing wild shadows in the darkness.
The spinning shadows resolved with painful suddenness into a castle hall blazing with torchlight. Dozens of shifting sinister shapes lined the walls, their faces hidden beneath hoods. Chained by iron at wrists and ankles, he kept his feet despite the wounds that bled from his shoulders, arms, thighs. Crimson dripped from his bruised lips. As he drew himself straight again, his wings quivered across his back.
“The Rights are not yours, will never be yours,” he cried. “Be Liege of all you fancy, let all others bow their heads to you. But not us. Never us!” Nasty, spiteful, this was not the romanticized Fae of noble bearing and quick caprice. “We are the true rulers of this land! You are the usurpers—all you craven Elves and traitorous Wizards, cowardly Sprites, conniving Gnomes, deceiving Goblins and faithless Pikseys and arrogant thieving Humans! The Rights belong to the Fae and if we cannot have them, no one will!”
A low murmuring flowed through the audience. Into it, Cade’s voice said, “Mayhap we are all these things, and more, and worse. But you broke the peace. You brought this war upon us all. And you lost.”
It was Rafe who spoke the Fae’s doom: “Hang him.” And his deep, powerful voice sent a tremble through the great hall, from the front rows of seats where the Royals sat to the balcony where carved wooden screens hid the ladies.
Bells rang out, deep mismatched notes that hurt to hear. Sunlight flared through the windows. When the dazzlement faded, the Fae was naught but a shadow on the far wall: dangling by a noose, turning slowly, dead.
Jeska, himself once more, walked silently to the center of the stage. When the bells ceased, he said, “Those who make war, those who break the peace, those who take that to which they have no right—these are the thieves. The Treasure they steal is life, and that belongs to us all.”
Cade had worried that not everyone would recognize those words. Mieka had told him to use them anyway, because the people who needed to hear them would know them by heart: the King, whose father had spoken them, and the Archduke, whose father had been condemned by them.
Jeska lifted his hands, and between them Mieka conjured with delicate care a gleaming necklet and a splendid crown of glass spun with threads of gold and silver, the diamonds sparking as the Rights turned slowly, in time with the hanged man’s shadow on the wall. And instead of shattering glass withies or glass windows or glass candle-shades, the glass crown and necklet disintegrated without sound into tiny dazzling broken shards that lingered in the air like stars.
Mieka had no idea when the applause began, or who began it. The next thing he knew was that he’d obeyed what had by now become instinct, and had leaped over his glass baskets, and he and Cade and Rafe and Jeska stood with linked arms and took their bows.
“Touchstone!” someone yelled, and the chant was taken up from the marble floor to the wooden rafters. “Touchstone!”
Mieka looked up at Cade, and tightened an arm around his waist, and laughed.
* * *
Very late that night a conversation took place in a Gallantrybanks mansion.
“Your Grace must recall that I didn’t find him until he was almost thirteen.”
“Rather late.”
“Not really. He had to want it, you see. That fribbling fool of a father, that Harpy of a mother … not many friends, and of course looking the way he does … this is exquisite wine, Your Grace.”
“You mean that he had to want it the same way I had to want it.”
“Precisely. Another year or two and it might either have been crushed out of him or driven him mad. He is of a temperament that it could have gone either way. But when I came for him, he was ready.”
“I suppose that, like me, he was spilling over with questions.”
“Not at all. He was so eager for what I offered that he asked almost nothing. In some ways, he’s very innocent, and remains so. I taught him as I taught all my other students, though mayhap I made him work a little harder for it. It was later, when he trusted me, that the questions came—”
“But by that time he did trust you, and the answers you gave. May I refill your glass?”
“Beholden, Your Grace.”
“So now it is confirmed, or so you say.”
“He could not have known what the Rights actually were, and looked like, unless he had seen them. Yes, it is confirmed, although I never required any proof, myself.”
“Why didn’t you bring him to me? Why did I have to discover him on my own?”
“Your Grace knows the answers.”
“I know my answers. I should like very much to hear yours.”
“And why I steered him towards the theater?”
“That would seem to be one of the more important questions.”
“It is the most important. As for the others—you recall, I’m sure, what it was like, being seventeen years old and eager to prove yourself.”
“I recall that you cautioned against doing anything of the sort. Good advice.”
“For you, yes. But for him it was necessary to demonstrate to his parents that he’s not the mistake they think him to be. To show himself gifted. To strive for independence, to make his mark. All the usual fevers of adolescence.”
“I remember.”
“You were constantly in the public eye. You had to be careful. But he had to try his wings.”
“And now that he’s taken flight…”
“He has confidence, made a name for himself. At almost twenty-one, he possesses the fame, the money, the respect, and the acclaim he craves. Not that any of it will ever be enough for hi
m, of course.”
“One might almost think you feel sorry for him. Are fond of him.”
“I do pity him, yes. But he’s not the sort for whom one feels fondness. I admire his talents, and I’m gratified that he fulfilled my expectations. But he isn’t a person one likes. A prickly and difficult character, Cayden Silversun. From what I have observed, one either loves him as he is, or accepts him with a shrug.”
“Devotion or indifference?”
“Once curiosity is satisfied. There is no charm about him, Your Grace.”
“Unlike his glisker.”
“Ah, yes. The Elf. He is fiercely protective of his ‘Quill’ because he feels everything with the wild intensity of his kind. This will work to your advantage, of course.”
“Better if he had chosen to feel fiercely indifferent.”
“Elfenfolk don’t ‘choose.’ But what you must understand is that to break the one will be to break the other.”
“Naturally, I want a lesser shattering for Silversun.”
“He is the stronger, certainly. He could not have survived his gift otherwise.”
“You might have confirmed it sooner.”
“Your Grace’s life has been one of difficulty and dissembling. You have stepped with caution around lies and liars since your childhood. Would you truly have believed in what Cayden is if it had not been thus demonstrated to you?”
“How dare he use those words tonight—the very words that doomed my father—”
“Arrogance, which will also work to Your Grace’s advantage. But to return to the point, his gift has been independently corroborated—”
“That old woman will be trouble.”
“Such women always are. She can be appeased. Accommodated.”
“I wonder why I ought to bother.”
“Because she may accomplish the necessary without your having to lift a finger. The Elf is, as I say, devoted and protective. If he is separated from Cayden Silversun in a manner totally removed from any hint of your involvement, so much the better.”
“Caitiffer … I’m surprised they kept the name.”
“No one remembers the word these days. One of the proud old Witchly clans from the Durkah Isle. The Gods only know how she’s lived here so long without being spotted. But the fact is that she’s here, and her daughter with her, and they will in their doing undo what’s between the Elf and Silversun. I give it two years. Mayhap three.”
