Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Melanie Rawn

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  The Players

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  Also available from Melanie Rawn and Titan Books

  TOUCHSTONE

  ELSEWHENS

  THORNLOST

  WINDOW WALL

  Print edition ISBN: 9781781166666

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781781166673

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: April 2015

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Melanie Rawn asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Copyright © 2015 by Melanie Rawn. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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  In memory of

  Marian C. Kelly

  1

  Real Mieka Windthistle arrived at the kitchen door of Number Eight, Redpebble Square, with a frown on his face. It was not an expression that suited him. Yet with the exception of the hours he spent onstage, these days it seemed all his face could do was frown.

  He conjured up a smile for Mistress Mirdley and for Derien Silversun, but the frown returned when the Trollwife, busily slicing carrot bread, told him why a huge basket was being filled with baked goods.

  “Tea. It’s his Namingday. He won’t come here, so Derien’s taking it to him.”

  Cayden’s Namingday. Thoroughly ashamed of himself, Mieka didn’t bother to pretend that he hadn’t forgotten. Dery, seeing the expression on his face, only shrugged and said, “I don’t think he wants to remember, himself. Which is stupid, of course. It’s not as if he’s turning fifty or sixty—he’s only twenty-four. But I’m sure he has nothing planned.”

  Mieka slouched on a stool by the worktable and felt his frown grow even deeper as he regarded his tregetour’s little brother—who admittedly wasn’t so little anymore. Not that Mieka had been around to notice. Redpebble Square hadn’t seen much of him these last two years. He was no longer welcome when Lady Jaspiela was at home; indeed, she hadn’t spoken to him or even acknowledged his continuing existence since he’d attempted a bit of softening magic on her. How she’d been able to sense it, what with the Hindering put on her long ago, he’d no idea. But sense it she had.

  Today Mieka had arrived just after lunching, confident that he wouldn’t be running into Lady Jaspiela. This was her day, every fortnight, for visiting the Archduchess whenever the latter was in Gallantrybanks. Mieka made it his day for visiting his brother and sister-in-law at the glassworks. Sometimes—well, rarely—he called in at the kitchen door of Redpebble Square, where Mistress Mirdley provided tea and Derien provided conversation. Cade no longer lived there. He had taken his own flat just after Touchstone’s third Royal Circuit. And even though Mieka saw him every single day when they were traveling and at least twice a week for performances in Gallantrybanks during winter, he had to go to other people to find out what Cade was thinking.

  Not that either Mistress Mirdley or Derien knew. That was made clear when the boy slumped down in a chair beside Mieka and said, “He hasn’t been round to see us in almost a month. And it’s not that long until Trials, and then he’ll be gone on the Royal again, and—and I miss him.”

  So do I, Mieka thought glumly.

  “There’s an item about him in the latest Nayword—did you see it?” Dery made a long arm to snag the broadsheet from a pile by the kitchen fire. “Not that he talked to Tobalt Fluter, either.”

  Mieka had read the piece, just a few lines about how Cade would doubtless have new and startling plays to be performed in Gallantrybanks and at Trials. The tone of it had been just slightly sardonic, as if Tobalt was annoyed that he could no longer get an interview from the eminently quotable Cayden Silversun.

  Mistress Mirdley had finished wrapping the carrot bread. “Here, and take some of this honeycomb along with you. He always liked it when he was a little boy.”

  Mieka was appalled to see sudden fierce tears in her eyes. He leaped to his feet and threw his arms around her. “I’ll bring him back here soon, I promise I will—and with three pages of apologies in rhymed couplets set to music for being so horrid to you!”

  She shook her head and extricated herself from his hug. “He’ll come round when he comes round. And it’s a few dozen more turnings he’ll be doing before that happens. Is that basket full? Tuck a cloth in, then, and get along with you.”

  “Did you put in something for Rumble?” Dery asked.

  “Of course. A nice bit of fish. Go!”

  Cayden’s only companion in his flat—well, his only steady companion; there were plenty of girls, all of them transitory—was a ginger-striped cat named Rumble, inexplicably brought home as a kitten by Blye’s cat, Bompstable. It was as if, Jedris had remarked, Bompstable knew Cade required some sort of company, and went out to find a suitable candidate.

  In the hire-hack, with a hamper of food between them, Mieka looked at Dery and asked, “Could we stop off someplace maybe? I really ought to bring a gift.”

  “Well … can you make it quick? Mistress Mirdley will be furious if I’m out after dark. And I want to spend some time with my brother,” he finished in a voice much too grim for someone not quite twelve years old.

  Mieka directed the driver to take them through a convenient shopping district. For a full quarter of an hour, he turned from side to side in the hack, peering through the windows, desperate for a shop that caught his imagination.

  “You’re giving me a neck ache,” Dery complained. “He won’t mind if you don’t bring him anything. I’m sure he’d rather nobody remembered at all.”

  Especially after what happened last year, hung unspoken between them.

  When Cayden turned nineteen, Dery had given him a silver hawk pin and Mieka had taken him to see the Shadowshapers at the Kiral Kellari. On his twentieth Namingday, he’d been at Fairwalk Manor, giving Mieka no opportunity to celebrate. To
make up for that, Mieka had thrown a lavish party at Hilldrop Crescent for Cade’s twenty-first. His twenty-second had been another Shadowshapers show—the one where Princess Miriuzca had shown up with Lady Megueris Mindrising, both of them dressed as young men. And a grand lark that had been; an exploit Mieka wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to surpass … though Cade had once had an Elsewhen about his forty-fifth, something about bubbly wine and a surprise party and a diamond in Mieka’s ear. Forty-five; Mieka couldn’t imagine it. But Cade had seen it, and by his scant telling, it had been a wonderful evening.

  Last year they’d all gathered at Blye’s glassworks, ostensibly to watch her make their new withies but in reality to present Cade with the complete table service for eight she had spent weeks making. She had forbidden them to transport the plates, bowls, cups, goblets, and platters to Cade’s flat that evening, relenting only when Mieka promised a doubling and tripling of the cushioning spell his mother had taught him. Problem was, he’d had quite a lot to drink—although so had everyone else, raising the new wine goblets again and again, then deciding that the brandy snifters also deserved a try-out, and of course there were those bottles of Auntie Brishen’s whiskey that needed sampling in the cut-crystal glasses, and … the conclusion being that Blye had had to spend another week replacing the broken items. Mieka still winced with the memory of the crashing and splintering of two inadequately cushioned crates down four flights of stairs. And one couldn’t mend glass with an Affinity spell, not and have it hold water ever again.

  There were plenty of things that needed mending after these last two years. Nothing that was permanently broken, or at least so Mieka told himself with grim resolve—well, except in Alaen Blackpath’s case. The loss of his cousin Briuly two years ago this Midsummer dawn had shattered him. A month later, he’d shown up at Sakary Grainer’s house in Gallantrybanks with a glass thorn in one hand and a little gold velvet pouch of dragon tears in the other, and announced to Chirene, Sakary’s wife, that if she didn’t run away with him that very night, he’d begin using and wouldn’t stop until she was his or he was dead. Romuald Needler, the Shadowshapers’ manager, had succeeded in hushing up most of the scandal. But the fact remained that Chirene had taken her children and gone to live with Chattim Czillag’s wife, Deshenanda, until the Shadowshapers returned that autumn from the Royal Circuit. Alaen wasn’t dead. Yet.

  “Here, stop,” Mieka said suddenly, and hopped out of the hire-hack before it had come to a full stop. “Won’t be a ticktock!” he called over his shoulder to Derien, and hurried inside.

  The shop featured all manner of decorative collectibles. Mirrors, figurines, clocks, imagings, paintings, exotic flowers from faraway lands preserved under glass or with magic. But Mieka knew exactly what he wanted, having seen it displayed in the window, and a few moments later emerged with a wrapped package almost as tall as Derien.

  “What is it?” the boy wanted to know as the hack started up again.

  “Not it,” Mieka said. “Them.” He teased a corner of the paper wrapping to show a glint of iridescent blue.

  “Peacock feathers?”

  “A round dozen of ’em.”

  “But, Mieka, aren’t they horrid bad luck for theater folk?” An instant later, he understood. “Whistling past the urn-plot?”

  “Exactly. Because if what we’ve been having is good luck in the theater, I’ll risk it. Me Mum calls it unsympathetic magic.”

  “Do the opposite of what you really want to happen? That’s a little crazy, y’know.”

  “My specialty.”

  Not that anything truly awful had happened onstage—unless one counted Cade’s last new play. That had been over a year ago now, and the reactions had been … regrettable. Nobody, including the rest of Touchstone, really understood what he’d meant to do. Mieka’s analysis was that whereas theater patrons didn’t mind thinking a bit, both during and after a play, they didn’t much enjoy thinking as a grim hour-long slog through far too many ideas.

  “Turn Aback” was in Cade’s hands an exercise in stupefying boredom. Boy and girl in love. Girl dies in tragic accident. Boy tries to broker a deal with the Lady to go get her; Lady is moved by True True Love and says fine, but on your way out, you mustn’t look back. Boy girds himself to travel into whichever Hell girl inhabits (though why she deserves any of them is left unclear), journeys through various unsavory provinces of punishment, increasingly nasty but not gruesome or bloody or even scary. At least Mieka could have had some good old gory fun with that sort of thing, been creative with the dragons that feasted on flesh that healed in an hour, or that poor stupid pillicock forever putting sand into a leaky hourglass, or the one about somebody standing lip-deep in a lake of shit.

  Cade’s Hells were all intellectual (which didn’t surprise Mieka one bit, but made for a colossally dull play). Boy is distracted from search for girl by philosophical conversations with the tenants of each Hell, blither blather blether. Boy finally remembers what he’s there for, finds girl, fingers burned and bleeding as she spins molten gold into straw. Boy leads girl back to the entrance gates. She trips on a rock (silly cow). He looks back to make sure she’s all right, and just as their Eyes Meet with Longing and then with Sudden Horror, she vanishes. The End.

  Tobalt had tried to put an interesting interpretation on it—something about how Cayden Silversun had woven scholarly moral speculation into a heartbreaking love story—but even he knew it was a bad play. Touchstone had performed it exactly three times. Then Mieka, Rafe, and Jeska all rebelled, and the script was mercifully scrapped.

  But the fact remained: Cayden Silversun had failed.

  He hadn’t liked it much.

  Derien subsided into a corner of the hack, and Mieka read The Nayword during the rest of the drive to Cade’s place. The broadsheet had grown in recent years from one very large page folded in half to three very large pages folded in quarters—more the size of a book, really, than the standard broadsheet. It wasn’t the same old Nayword anymore, as its front page trumpeted.

  THE NAYWORD

  WHAT TO READ—WHAT TO SEE—WHAT TO WEAR—WHAT TO AVOID!

  In this issue:

  Special reports from our correspondents at Court, throughout the Kingdom, and on the Continent PRINCE ASHGAR and PRINCESS MIRIUZCA welcome a daughter

  Exclusive interview with VERED GOLDBRAIDER Complete coverage of this year’s Trials hopefuls Student unrest at Stiddolfe after a rise in fees

  With: ideas and advice from our regular columnists on all the latest in theater, books, dress, food, wine, gardening, and interior design

  Mieka felt rather smug about the theater and fashion sections, considering that Touchstone (with the Shadowshapers) constantly innovated in the former and were known (with the Shadowshapers) as exemplars of the latter. He was even more smug about the gardening, because one of the regular columnists was his sister Cilka. Just fourteen, still in school, and already an authority (under a pseudonym, of course) in her field. Their mother, Mishia, wasn’t terribly surprised; her own sister Brishen had started up a little herb shop at the age of fifteen. The Greenseed Elfen line obviously dominated in them both. Cilka and Petrinka were already doing a brisk business in sculpted hedges, as prompted by Mieka’s description of such at Princess Miriuzca’s home castle on the Continent, and would someday take over Grandfather Staindrop’s gardening business.

  As for “design”—for certes, Cade never paid any attention to advice columns about interior design, or exterior either. Rather than the grand town house Mieka had once envisioned for him, he had taken a corner room on the top floor of a building near the Keymarker, one of the old abandoned manufactories refitted as blocks of flats. The view was spectacular—from his windows one could see the Keeps in one direction and the Plume in the other, with the rooftops of Gallantrybanks spreading between, though these rather blocked any sight of the Gally River—but the hike up four flights kept most people from visiting very often. Mieka knew that was precisely why Cade had chosen it.r />
  The staircase was stone to the second floor, then wood—nice and sturdy, according to Jed and Jez, who had insisted on examining the place before Cade signed the lease. Originally the top floor had been fitted out as a dormitory for the workers. Mieka shuddered, as he did every time he visited, at the idea of waking before dawn, working all day, and trudging back upstairs for food and sleep without ever once having breathed fresh air or seen the sun. A great many manufactories had moved out of the main sections of Gallantrybanks as the city expanded and the demand for urban housing increased, and there was no reason to believe that conditions were any better for workers even if the places were now in the countryside.

  A knock on Cade’s door elicited an annoyed, “What?” Derien grimaced, tried the handle, found it unlocked, and traded scowls with Mieka.

  “On the other hand,” the boy murmured as he opened the door, “except for the books, what’s he got worth stealing?”

  “I heard that,” Cade said from the depths of his big, soft, overstuffed chair. “The brass is bespelled to recognize you. I’ve forgotten her name, but she was rather good at useful little tricks.”

  Mieka resisted the urge to roll his eyes. There were lots of girls whose names Cade had forgotten. That there wasn’t one at the moment was obvious; the place was a mess. Clothes, glassware, paper, books, broadsheets, spent candles, towels, pillows, empty bags that must have contained food at some point because there was nowhere to cook—all manner of clutter was spread about the room.

  Jez had built Cade a platform bed that was seven feet long, four feet wide, and six feet off the floor. The little cavern beneath was where he huddled at a desk to write. In the winter there was a firepocket to keep his feet warm, and in summer all the windows were left open to cooling breezes, but it was dark under there when the lamps weren’t lighted and there was nothing to look at but bricks and the bed’s wooden scaffolding. The other features of the flat were Cade’s big black upholstered chair, some uncushioned wooden chairs that did not encourage visitors to linger, a huge standing wardrobe to hold Cade’s vast collection of clothes (nearly as impressive as Mieka’s), a massive carpet given him by Lord Kearney Fairwalk, a small table that seated four, a cabinet for the glass dinner service made for him by Blye, another cabinet behind a latticework willow screen for the piss-pot, and bookshelves—also built by Jez—almost to the twelve-foot ceiling.