Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

  “Master Silversun! Yes, yes, over here, if you please!”

  Cade dutifully approached. “Your Lordship?”

  A monologue ensued, one voice meant for Cade and the other voice for the workmen queued up for commiseration in the form of silver coin—as if he were the masquer in a play that called for asides to the audience.

  “A good thing it was that you did with the carriage, Master Silversun.” With a quick, warm smile at a workman as he pressed a coin into his hand: “Here, my good fellow, glad to see you’re unhurt. I don’t know why she insisted on coming here, never any telling what that woman will do. Spend some of this on your wife, eh? Buy her something pretty. Invited her to my town house, gave her tea, asked if she’d part with a few of her better bits and bobs for my Gallery—yes, come back to work tomorrow, have to clear all this up, eh? On gracious loan from the collection of, and all that sort of thing. Then the runner came with word of this—” He waved his free hand aimlessly. “—and damn me if she didn’t offer her own carriage and stepped right in ahead of me. Let’s hope there’s not too much blood on the upholstery. Bright and early tomorrow, my lad! We’ve an opening to make ready for, eh? Where’d she take herself off to, then?”

  “The Minster across the way.”

  “Good place for her,” said Piercehand. “Devout these days—admirable, I’m sure, but a trifle tedious, eh? Not at all the way she was in her young day, I can tell you! Damn, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of coin! Well, lads, there’ll be more tomorrow. Tremendous apologies, and drink to your own good fortune tonight! This is costing me a bloody fortune,” he muttered as the line dispersed with grumbles—most of them hypocritical, for most of these men had gone through at least twice, rightly trusting to the usual inability of noblemen to distinguish one member of the working class from another. “But it might have cost me Needstraw, and that would be beyond tragedy! My curator, don’t you know—brilliant man, can’t do without him to keep my trinkets sorted. They say you’re the one who found him?”

  Cade thought fast. “No, my lord, actually not. I only asked if that section had been explored, and nobody was sure, so they looked again.”

  “Well, he owes his life to you and make no mistake. I’ve emptied my purse for today, but there’ll be a reward for you.”

  “That’s very gracious but entirely unnecessary—”

  “Of course it’s necessary! And I’ll hear no more about it. Now, let’s find you a hack to take you home, eh?” As he smiled, Cade saw the remnants of the young man he had been, a gleaming past glimpsed behind tarnished decay.

  “I am beholden to Your Lordship,” Cade responded.

  Someone was sent to find a hire-hack. After once again expressing gratitude to Lord Piercehand, Cade climbed in after his brother and frowned as he heard Derien say to the driver, “Wistly Hall, Waterknot Street.”

  “I thought you were staying with me tonight.”

  “It’s closer to school. And there’s always a place to sleep at Wistly.”

  They rode in silence for a time. Then, just as the hack was turning onto Waterknot Street, Cade snorted a laugh. When Dery arched an inquiring brow, he said, “And once again my Namingday turns out memorable. I think I’ll stop having them. Twenty-four is quite old enough, isn’t it?”

  “I’ll let you know when I get there.”

  3

  Getting Jezael home to Wistly was a nightmare. Mieka was torn between a desire to shout the horse into a gallop and the equal and opposite desire to go as gently as possible. What Princess Iamina’s driver achieved was an uncomfortable in-between: not fast enough to get them home as quickly as Mieka wanted, but not slow enough to prevent cobblestoned bumps and lurches from wringing strangled groans from Jez’s throat—in spite of whatever Mistress Mirdley had given him for the pain. Every sound his brother made sent a spasm of sick panic through Mieka’s body. He locked his fingers around the wooden side rail of the driver’s bench and scanned the road up ahead, futilely trying to find the smoothest path.

  Someone had had brains enough to send word to Mishia Windthistle about the accident; she and Jinsie were waiting at the front door with a makeshift litter. As they moved Jez slowly, safely out of the carriage, Jinsie climbed in the other side for the return journey, telling Blye she’d collar Jedris and get him home before dark.

  Blye nodded gratefully. “He’ll want to know how the accident happened, but it can wait until tomorrow, when he can actually see something.”

  Mieka helped carry his brother upstairs, and then was shooed out by his mother and Mistress Mirdley. Descending to the hall, he sat on the bottom step of the grand staircase and gnawed on a thumbnail and felt helpless. He didn’t like feeling helpless. Rarely did he get himself into situations where he did feel helpless; he was an expert at strategic departures. The last time he’d felt like this was almost two years ago, that night just before Midsummer when Cade had been thornlost in his Elsewhens, and seen Briuly and Alaen Blackpath finding The Rights of the Fae. Mieka hadn’t been alone in his helplessness; there was nothing anyone could have done. All the rest of that night and on into the next day, nobody had said much of anything, each of them imagining the sunrise scene at Nackerty Close—and, being players, they were exceptionally imaginative.

  Only once had Rafe attempted to talk about it, saying that it was Briuly who had reasoned out that the sun would hit the hiding place of The Rights at Midsummer dawn as well as Midwinter sunset, so Cade really wasn’t to blame for what happened. Mieka had the sense not to open his mouth and remind everyone that Cade had wanted the cousins to go after the treasure. Jeska had accused him more than once of pestering them about finding it so that everybody would know that it wasn’t just a story made into a play, that it was real, and applaud Cade for his cleverness in working it all out.

  Looking back, it seemed to Mieka that Briuly’s death, which everyone else thought was merely a strange “disappearance,” generally attributed to the vagaries of artistic temperament, was the last thing that Cade had really cared about, the last time he’d openly felt anything. There had been no change in the intensity of magic Cade put into the withies for a performance. Love, hate, fear, joy, contempt, anxiety, tenderness, indignation, grief, rage, pride—all the emotions that Touchstone used onstage were reliably there in the glass twigs. The feel of them had changed some, though Mieka stubbornly chose to attribute the difference to maturity and even to increased mastery of the magic. Cade primed the withies expertly, giving Mieka everything he needed for a performance.

  Yet in his personal life, Cade seemed only to be going through the motions. He’d looked and acted grim enough this afternoon, but to Mieka’s knowing eye it was … not faked, not exactly, but … muted. Rather like what that unknown fettler had done to them several times on that first Royal Circuit, only Cade was muting his own emotions, not onstage magic. It was as if he’d set up a barrier between him and any event that might cause him to feel too much … or feel at all. Like the barrier Lady Megs had raised to protect a sensitive little girl one night at the Keymarker.

  And there, Mieka told himself, was another sore point. The noble Lady Megueris Mindrising was everything Cade could want—nice looking, smart, spirited, educated, adept at magic, and insanely rich besides—yet he behaved as if she existed only when he was looking at her. Mieka knew very well what it was like to want a woman, to be so hopelessly in love that every waking thought and every night’s dreamings were about her. Any man with half a grain of sense would have been out of his mind in love with Lady Megs. Cade gave no signs of it that Mieka could recognize.

  They’d met her quite a few times in the last couple of years: during Trials at Seekhaven, private performances at one or another of Lord Mindrising’s many residences throughout Albeyn, at lunching or tea with Princess Miriuzca, at the races. Cade responded not at all to being teased about Megs. He neither flushed red with embarrassment nor snarled that it was nobody’s business but his, nor laughed, nor threatened serious physical mayhe
m if they didn’t shut up. He simply didn’t react. The lady, of course, could not be similarly teased; Mieka did have some notion of manners. Though she was pleasant enough around Cade, she showed no particular partiality for his company. Granted, it simply wasn’t done: no self-respecting girl, wellborn or not, would be caught actively pursuing a man. But Megs wasn’t the typical twitchy little titled ladyship, nor simpering simpleminded shopgirl. And, facts be faced, she was getting to be of an age when people sniggered behind their hands at unwed females. Cade wasn’t the best catch in terms of the Court, but Megs had buckets of money and a name ancient enough for both of them. Mieka couldn’t see why anyone would object to Cade. True, he was no beauty, and he’d talk the hind leg off a wyvern, and his sulks were the most infuriatingly boring thing in the world, but he had pretty manners and could talk interestingly when he felt like it, and he was famous and even had a few noble ancestors, and why was Mieka chittering inside his own head about Cade’s love life when his brother lay upstairs—?

  “How is he?”

  Cade and Derien stood in the hallway. Mieka hadn’t even noticed their arrival. Getting to his feet, he said, “We took him upstairs. Nobody’s said anything to me since.” And then, seizing on something to talk about that would distract him from thinking about Jez, he asked, “Why did you pretend it was you, Cade?”

  Derien glanced briefly up at his brother—but not for permission to speak, and that told Mieka more than anything else could that Derien was not a little boy anymore. “You’re right, it was me,” he said to Mieka. “But Blye would believe it from Cade, so we said it was him.”

  “Yes, I believed it,” said Blye from the top of the stairs. She continued wearily down to them, wiping her hands on a red-stained towel. “But not for long. Jez is resting. Mistress Mirdley says the wounds are—well, let’s just say that she cleaned them out and stitched him up. Mieka, she wants a bottle of sweet wine to hide the taste of the medicine. He has to get some sleep.”

  “Pantry,” he said, and led the way.

  In common with the other grand houses on Waterknot Street, which had all been built around the same time, Wistly Hall possessed a wine cellar. All these wine cellars leaked, no matter how thick the stone walls, the Gally River’s underground tributaries stubbornly finding any crack or seam to seep through. The door to Wistly’s cellar was kept locked. Finances in the Windthistle family had been tight for the last thirty-five years and more, so nobody knew how deep the water might be these days. There was no money for drainage and repair. So all the bottles and kegs were crowded into a pantry along with flour and spices and loaves of sugar. Mieka threaded past boxes and barrels and shelving to the back wall, where the paltry remnant of the once-extensive Windthistle wine collection was stored. Behind him in the kitchen, he could hear Blye confronting Cade.

  “I believed you for a minute or two—but you only see things that you have the ability to change. So it has to have been Dery.”

  “I didn’t tell you, because I don’t want anyone to know before we figure out exactly what it is he can do.”

  “But you already know what it is.”

  “More or less,” Cade admitted. “Why did you send for me, anyway? It’s not as if I could’ve been any help.”

  “When Mistress Mirdley got there, she said Mieka and Dery were at your flat.”

  “So it’s Mieka you were wanting? Even though he was no more useful than me?”

  Mieka found a venerable bottle of mead and dusted it off. Honey-wine ought to be sweet enough to disguise any nasty medicinal taste, unless it had been stored too long and gone sour.

  “Mieka needed to be where his brothers were!” she snapped. “You’re right, you weren’t necessary, and you’ve made it clear that nobody’s necessary to you except when you’re onstage. So why did you bother to come?”

  Mieka winced. He was fairly certain he knew what Blye would say next.

  Sure enough: “Tell me, Cade, have you figured out a way yet to present your plays without Jeska and Rafe and Mieka?”

  He also knew what Cade would say. He found a corkscrew, opened the bottle, and took a swig. Not his usual tipple, but still good and perfectly suited to the purpose. As Cade answered Blye’s question, Mieka took another swallow, wishing it were something stronger. There was no comfort in being right.

  “Not quite yet. But I’m working on it.”

  Derien, with desperation in his voice, broke in. “It was the gold. That one man had a gold bracelet, and the other had gold buttons. But Jez doesn’t wear any gold jewelry. His wedding necklet is silver.”

  “Now you know why it has to be kept quiet,” Cade said.

  Mieka wiped the cloying sweetness of the wine from his lips and returned to the kitchen. “Derien, old son, now that you’re of an age for it, you’d best come up with some other sort of magic to tell people about, because telling anybody about this would be as much as your life’s worth.” When Cade scowled horribly at him, he merely shrugged. “He’s not stupid. He knows what this could mean. I think we’d all rather he stayed put in Albeyn, not get himself hauled off on somebody-or-other’s ship to the back of the bleedin’ beyond, just so other people can get rich on the gold he can find for them.”

  Cade and Blye both looked shocked—not by what he’d said, because they had to have been thinking the same thing, but by the fact that he’d said it to the boy. Well, it was time they stopped treating Dery like a child. If twelve (or almost) was old enough to come into his magic, it was old enough to be told the truth.

  “Here,” Mieka said, handing the bottle of mead to Blye. “This should suit.” To Cade: “You’ll be staying here tonight, yeh? Let’s find some blankets and things.”

  “You’d do better to find us all something to eat,” Blye said. “Bread and cheese and beer will do.”

  It would have to, because what Mieka, Cade, and Derien amongst them didn’t know about cooking would sink one of Lord Piercehand’s ships. Mieka wasn’t sure who else was living at Wistly these days, and was grateful that none of them showed up to complain about dinner or the lack of it.

  At ten by the nearby Minster chimes everyone had been fed and put into order. Jez was asleep under his mother’s watchful eye. Hadden and Blye took the younger children up to bed. Blye came back down to inform them that Mistress Mirdley had settled in a chair for a nap and would take over watching Jez in a few hours so Mishia could get a little sleep.

  “Jed should be back by now,” she fretted as Mieka poured her a tot of whiskey.

  “Sit down,” Cade said, “and tell us what happened.”

  “I don’t know any more about that than I did the first time you asked.”

  “My brothers,” Mieka stated, “are too careful and too good at their work for it to’ve been a structural failure.”

  “Much beholden for the endorsement,” came Jed’s voice from the drawing room doorway. “How’s Jez?”

  “Sleeping.” Blye was at his side instantly. “No, don’t sit here, come into the kitchen and eat.” She pulled him out into the hall. Though she was a foot and a half shorter than he, her determination overwhelmed his exhaustion.

  Jinsie crossed to where Mieka was sitting, appropriated the glass right out of his hand, and took a long swallow of whiskey. “You’ll appreciate this,” she said, and dropped a piece of something glittering into his hand.

  “What is it?” Derien demanded.

  “Glass,” he said. “It’s—” He thought better of what he’d been about to say, and tucked the shard into his shirt pocket. “It’s just a bit of glass.”

  Jinsie gave him back his whiskey and looked narrowly into his eyes. He met his twin’s gaze levelly. “Probably bottle glass,” she said, taking his meaning, for she knew as well as he did what it was. “No windows in the place yet for an accident to shatter.”

  If she put the slightest emphasis on the word accident, only Mieka heard it. “I’ll ask Blye tomorrow. She’ll know what sort it is. It might even be a chunk from one of those ri
ngs she makes for neck-cloths. And that remembers me—she owes me my percentage from sales of the things. They were my idea, after all.”

  Jinsie wrinkled her nose at him. “Money, money—it’s all you think about. Me, all I can think of right now is sleep.”

  “Hint taken,” Cade said, and looked pointedly at his brother.

  “I won’t be able to sleep,” Derien warned. “Will you?”

  “You’ve school tomorrow,” Cade reminded him.

  “And we have a rehearsal.” Mieka finished off the scant swallow of whiskey Jinsie had left him, and set down his glass. “You take my room, Dery.” He’d long since switched bedchambers with Jinsie, not wanting to spend any more nights in the place where he’d struck his wife for the first—and, he swore, last and only—time. When they were upstairs and Mieka turned left down the hall instead of right, a glance at Cayden showed him that the change had been noted. He was briefly shocked that Cade hadn’t been to Wistly for an overnight in such a long time that he didn’t know.

  Despite his protests, Derien was yawning before his head hit the pillow. Cade collected the boy’s discarded clothes while Mieka doused the candles, and once the door was shut said, “I ought to wash these for tomorrow.”

  Mieka hadn’t a clue where the laundry was done. The only good-sized sink he knew of was in the kitchen. So to the kitchen they went. Jed was gulping hot tea; on the worktable before him was a plate emptied of all but bread crumbs and cheese rind.

  “—possibly be your fault,” Blye was saying as Mieka and Cade entered.

  “But it happened, and I have to know why. Everything was just as we always do it. All the braces, the struts, the pulleys, the ladders—and all the workers are experienced men. It just doesn’t make any sense.” He finished his tea. “I have to be up early tomorrow. I want to go look everything over in the daylight. I s’pose it’s no good looking in on Jez?”