Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  “Don’t know.”

  “You stay put,” Hadden said. “Cade, keep Dery back. It’s not safe.”

  Cade took over restraining his little brother, getting a good hold on the boy’s elbow, and told him what Hadden was too kind to tell him: “You’d only get in the way. Where’s Mistress Mirdley?”

  Jed pointed towards the street. “Helping with the wounded, of course. Mieka, go see if you can give her a hand. Fa and I have to get back.”

  “I’ll go with,” Mieka said. “I can use that hover spell Mum taught me—”

  “No,” his brother told him. “Save your magic for Cayden’s plays.”

  Cade saw how hurt Mieka was by Jed’s words—as if Mieka were of no use for anything except what he could do onstage. Considering how dodgy that particular spell was in Mieka’s hands, Cade understood why Jed forbade it.

  Blye hurried up to give her husband a cupful of water, looking at him as if memorizing his face anew down to each individual eyelash. He drank, handed back the cup, leaned down to kiss her, and strode off with his father through the billowing dust into the building’s interior.

  “What happened?” Cade asked Blye.

  “Do I look like a construction engineer to you?” she snapped. “I was here to measure for the windows. Things fell down.”

  “Obviously,” Cade couldn’t help but say, earning himself a murderous glare. “How many injured?”

  “Lots. Five were up on the scaffolding and fell thirty feet. Cuts and bruises on a dozen more. Two men had their legs crushed—they might walk again, and they might not. And three are still missing.”

  “Jez?” Mieka asked. When she nodded and bit her lips together, he went on bracingly, “Jed will find him. When we were little and playing seeky-findy, they always knew where the other one was. Mum says identical twins are like that. She—”

  “Mieka,” Blye said, nervous hands twisting the cup over and over, “shut up.”

  Cade had seen the plans for the gallery over at Blye’s glassworks one afternoon this winter, and though he had made a conscious effort to forget entirely about the Elsewhens, there was nothing wrong with his memory. Two staircases led from street level to the first of three upper floors. Between those staircases was a pair of fluted columns. The ground floor would be filled with heavier exhibits—statuary and the like—with a tearoom at the back overlooking the river. Up one flight of stairs to a pair of long galleries and a series of smaller chambers; up one more flight, and at one side was a library and reading room, the opposite side a maze of glass cases for small and insanely expensive things; up yet another flight was a series of offices and meeting rooms. Windows let in natural light from dawn until dusk. Cayden squinted at the confusion of stone and timber, and guessed that something had gone wrong on the gallery floor. But it couldn’t have been Jed and Jez’s fault—they were always scrupulously careful about scaffolding and support beams.

  He wondered all at once why he’d been sent for. What use could he possibly be?

  He became aware that Derien was yanking urgently at his shirtsleeve. Cade very nearly bent into a crouch, as he used to when Dery was little, but realized all at once that doing so now would have him looking up at his brother. He wondered if he’d be glad or galled when they could both stand straight and look one another in the eyes.

  “There’s somebody over there,” the boy whispered, and pointed to a tangle of wood and stone. “Under the rubble.”

  “How far under?”

  “I can’t tell.” He spoke even more softly. “But I know someone’s there.”

  “Is it Jezael?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

  Cade hesitated, searching the boy’s limpid brown eyes. He whispered back, “Like Grandfather Isshak?”

  It took Derien a moment to understand and consider. Then he shook his head. “No. I can’t see through the stone like they say he could. I just know.”

  Not for an instant did Cayden scoff. He knew this tone of voice. He had spoken with the same certainty when, at just about Dery’s age, he’d told Mistress Mirdley about an Elsewhen. Derien had just discovered a portion of his magic. How that magic might ripen could—indeed, must—wait. The problem right now was how to use what Derien knew without revealing how he knew it. Cade was painfully familiar with that sort of thing.

  “Right,” he said briskly. “On me, then.” And before Dery could say another word, Cade straightened up, drew in a deep breath, adjusted the muscles of his face, and turned to Blye. In a deliberately raspy voice he asked, “Have they looked over that way? Has that section been cleared?”

  “Yes.” She peered up at him, frowning. “Did you just—?”

  He didn’t want to lie to her, so he merely said, “They ought to dig deeper.”

  Her brown eyes widened, and then she strode off. Whatever she told the workmen, however she explained it, mattered not at all to Cade. He took Dery aside and asked quietly, “Anyone else?”

  The boy half-closed his eyes, turning his head slowly from left to right. He hesitated about a third of the way, his face directed at the stately half-finished steps of an interior stone staircase. Cade knew better than to interrupt him. But he did brace his brother with an arm around his shoulders as Dery trembled.

  “Behind the left-hand stairs.”

  “Blye!”

  Again he arranged his face in the so-familiar expression that immediately followed an Elsewhen; again he gave instructions. This time there were no questions. Blye snagged another pair of workmen and sent them hurrying to investigate.

  “It’s not you,” murmured Mieka’s voice at his shoulder. “I know what it looks like on you. It’s Dery, isn’t it?”

  Without looking at him, Cade said, “Drunk, sober, or thornlost, tell anyone and I’ll kill you.”

  Whatever the Elf might have replied was lost in a new commotion. Lord Rolon Piercehand had just arrived in an open carriage and in a frenzy of shouts and gestures, accompanied by—of all people—Princess Iamina. His Lordship was standing up even before the horse had come to a halt. He sprang over the half door of the carriage and bellowed for someone called Needstraw. One of the workmen dashed over and said something that stopped Piercehand in his tracks with a look of horror on his face.

  Princess Iamina hadn’t worn well. Cade remembered what she’d looked like that year he served at Wintering, when he wasn’t quite twelve years old. She hadn’t aged gracefully. She had just aged. At long last admitting defeat in her self-imposed competition with Miriuzca, she had taken to wearing gowns as plain as the robes of a Good Sister. Rumor had it she had become ostentatiously pious as well. She sat primly in the open carriage, hands folded, watching through narrowed eyes as Piercehand stalked about, giving orders and behaving as if he knew what he was doing. Iamina’s gaze snagged on Cade, then shifted to Mieka; she recognized them both, he was sure of it, from Touchstone’s “secret” performances for the ladies at Seekhaven. Considering some of the magic they had deliberately sent in her direction during those performances, it would have been bizarre if she hadn’t recognized them. Her upper lip lifted and her head jerked back, as if someone had waved a dog turd under her chin.

  Cade wasted a moment wondering why she was here, then turned his attention back to his brother. “There are three people missing. You’ve sensed two of them.”

  “I’ve been trying,” Dery whispered. “But it’s—it’s confusing.”

  “What’s the feeling like? Is it heartbeats or breathing, or—?”

  The boy thought about it, then said, “It’s hard. Not like skin. This is cold and hard. Metallic.”

  He might be sensing gold or silver jewelry; it might be the steel supports of the building. There would be testings and evaluations, but later. And in strictest privacy, because if Derien was indeed sensitive to precious metals, that would make him an extremely valuable young man. Almost as valuable as Cade. Or, rather, as valuable as Cade had been before he started refusing the Elsewhens.

&
nbsp; Physickers had arrived and were sorting out the wounded. Suddenly a jubilant cry went up from behind the stone staircase, and soon a man was being carried to safety. Cade saw a thin glisten of gold at his left wrist as he reached up, fingers scrabbling mindlessly at rubble that no longer entrapped him. He was either married or bespoken, with a wife or sweetheart to take care of him as he mended. If he mended, for Cade saw with a sick lurch of his stomach that his right arm ended above the elbow in a snarl of skin, bone, sinew, and blood. Cade had just turned away from the sight when another man, supported by two others but limping along under his own power, came into view, and Piercehand sprinted towards him, yelling, “Needstraw!” Cade was numbly unsurprised to see an array of gold buttons on the man’s torn and dirty jacket.

  “Does Jez wear any gold jewelry?” Derien asked in a tense whisper.

  So the boy had figured it out for himself. Cade gave a helpless shrug, thinking most irrelevantly that had this occurred after the exhibits were installed, there would be a hopeless confusion of gold in the rubble. Clocks and little statues and trimmings on boxes and settings for gemstones, all the oddments Piercehand’s ships brought home from all over the world, currently on display at Castle Eyot—

  “Cade,” Dery said. “It’s Jez. Look.”

  Hadden and Jed were carrying him. His left leg was wrapped in a bloodied bandage made from Jed’s shirt. Cade heard a soft moan of anguish beside him, and then Mieka was running to help.

  “That’s all three of the missing, then,” someone said. “Broken heads and broken bones, but nobody dead, praise be to the Lord and the Lady. His Lordship won’t have the keeping of any widows or orphans.”

  “No, that’d be the builders’ charge,” another man said. “And as it is, they’ll be compensating the one for the loss of a hand—or mayhap the wife, for her husband being able to squeeze but one breast at a time!”

  “You’re a one, ain’t you?”

  Undaunted, the second man went on, “And that other one, he was too tall anyway—and now, if they can’t save that leg, he’s likely to be the shorter by a foot!” He chortled at his own wit.

  Cade turned slowly. The pair behind him, Lord Piercehand’s guards by their livery, were his own height but half again his heft. Very cordially, very coldly, he asked, “How would your own wife feel if you came home lighter by the weight of your balls?”

  “Wife?” Derien snorted. “What girl in her right mind would marry a brains-in-his-buttocks naffter like him?”

  It was madness, of course, to confront the man; armed with a lethal-looking cudgel and plenty of muscle, the guard could have snapped Cade in two with one hand while smashing Dery’s skull to splinters with the other.

  Happily, his companion was of a mind to calm things down. “Here, now,” he said, “there’s been enough ruckus for one day, I’m thinkin’. Apologies all round, and—”

  “Apology accepted,” Derien said quickly, and dragged Cade away by the elbow. The boy was stronger than he looked; Cade stumbled a bit, flinging a glare over his shoulder. “It’s not as if they’d recognize your face, or even your name, being barely literate if at all, you know,” he said, “and you have shows coming up next week—and besides that, it’s your Namingday and you don’t want to spend the rest of it and the next month besides with a broken jaw, do you?”

  Fine thing it was, when his little brother got him out of trouble.

  His little brother, who could sense the presence of gold.

  “Dery,” he said, low-voiced, “don’t mention a word to anybody about what you just did. Not even to Mistress Mirdley. Not until we figure out exactly what it is you can do, and what you have to do in order to do it.”

  Dark eyes glinted up at him. “And you call yourself a writer!”

  “Derien, I mean it,” he insisted.

  “I know. I’ll keep quiet.”

  Along with the physickers had come carts for transporting the injured. Jez, Cade saw with profound gratitude, was in the capable care of Mistress Mirdley, who snapped over her shoulder at a physicker unwise enough to express his opinion.

  “Forgive me for mentioning it,” he said with an exaggerated courtesy that was worse than any open contempt for the elderly Trollwife, “but my credentials are from Stiddolfe and Shollop both. With respect, Mistress, I think I know quite a lot more about—”

  “It’s not what you do know as what you don’t,” she growled, working swiftly to staunch the bleeding and cleanse the wound. “He’s Elf and Wizard and Piksey as well as the Human that gives him his looks. A thornful of dragon tears could send him into spasms.”

  He brushed that aside and shook out the dusty folds of his green gown, conspicuously decorated at the left breast with two embroidered badges: Stiddolfe University’s lion and Shollop University’s dragonfly. “That’s as may be. But I really don’t think—”

  Hadden, who sat just behind his son, supporting him with both arms around his chest, looked up. “I quite agree. You don’t.”

  Mieka was holding both of Jezael’s hands. “Go polish your credentials and leave the work to those who understand it!”

  The physicker took himself off in a huff. Cade stood there feeling useless until it occurred to him that Jez had to be conveyed home somehow to Wistly Hall. Convenient was not a word ever associated with Princess Iamina, but she—or, more to the point, her carriage—was excellently convenient right now.

  When Cade set his mind to it, he could be almost as glibly garrulous as Mieka. In fact, he started talking even before he unlatched the little half-door of the carriage. “Your Royal Highness, I hope you haven’t been too shocked and upset. It’s so good of you to bring along your carriage to fetch the wounded back home—I’m sure it won’t take above an hour or so, and I will be more than happy to escort you back to your own house. You’ll know me, of course, as the tregetour of Touchstone.”

  The Princess scooted back into the far corner of the leather seat, scowling horribly. “I have no idea who you are, and I cannot say that I care! And to imply that a decent woman would know the first thing about anything to do with theater—I have never in my life seen a play! Sinful enough when men attend such performances, but ladies in an audience—though one could scarce term them ladies—is a scandal, utterly depraved.”

  Cade put a look of shock onto his face as he took the long step up into the carriage. “But—forgive me, but some dreadful impertinent woman has made a mockery of Your Royal Highness!” When she sat up straight and sucked in air, he went on, “Touchstone, you see, has performed for the ladies of the Court at Seekhaven—all very secret, of course, and I understand perfectly that Your Royal Highness’s delicacy of mind would never permit attendance there—because of course it couldn’t have been you, it was some disrespectful woman wearing a copy of Your Royal Highness’s famous yellow flower jewel.”

  Derien obliged him by unfolding the steps. Cade took firm possession of Iamina’s left elbow, tugging her adamantly from her corner. She was the sort of person whose indignation was boundless, but bound by one indignity at a time. Cade had given her four atrocities in quick succession. Commandeering her carriage competed with the implication that she had actually seen a play, but could not rival the outrage of being “impersonated,” which faded to insignificance in the immediate affront of having her Royal Person touched. The claims of all these on her powers of speech resulted in paralysis.

  Cade congratulated himself and delivered his final blow. “Your Royal Highness may rest assured that if I ever see that fake jewel again, I will tear the insolent woman limb from limb—” He paused and leaned in to whisper for her ears alone. “—much like that Woodwose many years ago at a private Wintering celebration. Tell me, can you still taste his blood?”

  She reared back like a horse eyeing a snake. This put her off balance enough so that Cade could extract her from her carriage and set her on the pavement.

  “So very kind of Your Royal Highness!” He rapped his knuckles on the side of the carriage. “Dri
ver, follow my brother over that way. You may return for the Princess across the street at the Minster.” Turning again to Iamina, he finished, “I feel sure Your Royal Highness’s well-known piety will do much good for these poor people with your prayers. Here, you—” He waved at one of Piercehand’s guards. “Escort Her Royal Highness to the Minster!”

  He bowed to Iamina before hurrying to catch up to the carriage. The driver didn’t look happy. Cade met him stare for stare and eventually the man shrugged.

  There was room on the butter-soft upholstery for Jez, Mistress Mirdley, Blye, and Hadden. Mieka leaped up to sit beside the driver. Jedris stayed behind to make sure the rest of the wounded were taken care of and got home all right. Lord Rolon Piercehand was distributing handfuls of coin to every worker who filed past him. Cade noticed that some were going round twice.

  “Can I stay with you tonight?”

  He looked down at Derien. “What? No. Mother—”

  “She’s at Threne with the Archduchess for a week.”

  “She’s where? She never goes anywhere to stay.”

  “I know. But that’s where she is. Mistress Mirdley will want to keep an eye on Jez and it’d be just me at Redpebble. The footmen have the week free as well.”

  It was thus demonstrated to him how little he knew about his own family these days. “Well … all right. But be sure you wake in time for school tomorrow.”

  Lord Piercehand, still bestowing silver coins, called out to Cade—called him by name, in fact. For all that each group on each circuit spent several days of each tour on holiday at Piercehand’s Castle Eyot, Cade hadn’t known that the man had ever seen Touchstone perform. He was always off on some voyage or other, collecting. He was very charming, very rich, and very dissipated. Part Wizard and part Elf, with plenty of Human noble titles in his bloodlines and to spare, in his youth he had been all the craze at Court, where his good looks and merry wit made him the darling of Queen Roshien and her ladies. But that had been twenty years ago. He bore all the signs nowadays of indulgence in every diversion wealth could buy. The advancing ruin of a handsome face and fine body was something Cade had seen before, but he couldn’t quite recall where. An Elsewhen, mayhap.