Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

“No glass in the building yet,” Cade argued. “She was there to take the final measurements. Mieka, are you sure it’s identifiable as Master Splithook’s work?”

  “His hallmark’s there for anyone to see.”

  “But not to prove where Jinsie found it,” Rafe said. “And before you have a seizure, Cade, and order Yazz to turn around so we can go back, consider this: If nobody can find anything wrong with Jed and Jez’s work, they’ll find something wrong with their work anyway.” When Mieka opened his mouth to protest, Rafe pointed a long finger at him. “It can’t be an accident, not if a withie was used the way a withie isn’t s’posed to be used—the way we use them, or near to it, every time we shatter one at the end of a show. So if it’s not an accident, and no other cause can be found—and won’t be found, because there’s a withie involved—then it’ll have to be the Windthistle Brothers’ fault.”

  Cade was nodding slowly. “Sheer chance that Jinsie found it. Any other piece of glass—there’s a specific formula for a withie, they all use it by law, so there’s no identifying whose it was but for the crimp end.”

  “And it’s not just Black Lightning uses Splithook’s work,” Jeska said. “Some of the newer groups—”

  “But the point,” Cade interrupted, “is that to use a withie like that requires a Wizard or an Elf. And only theater groups use withies, and theater people are mainly Wizard or Elf, no matter what else may be rattling around in their backgrounds.”

  “And the person who dreamed up using a withie like that was your very own grandmother,” Mieka said. “How many people know how to do it?”

  “Hundreds, for all I know. And not all of them in the theater. You’re wrong about blaming Blye, though, Rafe. It wouldn’t make any sense. Why would she wreck her husband’s business? Same thing goes for any of us. We’re known for exploding the damned things, but why would we do such a thing to Mieka’s brothers?”

  “So, as I said, the blame will fall on Jed and Jez, because it can’t fall on a withie made by Master Splithook. That would mean that somebody had deliberately set it to explode. The only people who could do that are Wizards or Elves, and that would call up too many bad memories that nobody wants to talk about. So Jed and Jez will be held responsible.”

  “But that’s not fair!” Mieka cried. “And who’d want to do such a thing?”

  “Oh, use what brains the Old Gods gave you!” Rafe snapped. “Anything that touches somebody we love touches us.”

  “If we’re fretting ourselves over this,” Jeska added, “we won’t be as good at Trials. And who benefits from that?”

  “So it does come back to Black Lightning,” Rafe concluded. “Although why they’d be stupid enough to use one of their own withies—”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Cade said softly. He turned from the cupboard where his things were stored, paper and pen and ink in hand. Rafe pulled out the table and kicked the supporting leg into place. Cade sat and as he began writing, said, “I’m telling Blye to stall. Not to answer any questions, and especially not to reveal that withie. What did you tell your wife, Mieka?”

  “Only to give it to Blye. She doesn’t even know what it is. And why are we wrong?”

  Rather than reply, he wrote rapidly for a minute or two. By the time he’d finished and folded the letter, Rafe was looking enlightened, Jeska was looking worried, and Mieka was looking from one to the other of them in total confusion. Rising to his feet, bracing himself with one hand on the wall as the wagon rocked slightly over uneven paving stones, Cade got a stick of sealing wax from his cupboard, then sat down again.

  “While it’s true that the Archduke forbade Black Lightning from playing any more tricks on us like that meddling fettler two years ago, it’s also true that, as Rafe says, hurting people we’re close to hurts us. Withies are used by tregetours and gliskers—Wizards and Elves, in other words. So if anybody was obviously harmed by flying glass, or if a bit of it was found and could be identified as a withie, since Blye hadn’t put any glass into the building, and bottle glass and so forth are different from withie glass, the logical inference is that a Wizard or an Elf, probably somebody in theater, primed a withie to explode and damage the scaffolding. But I think that’s what everybody’s supposed to think. I think we’re supposed to blame Black Lightning even if the crimp end of that withie hadn’t been found.”

  “Why?” Mieka demanded.

  “Because if it’s made public—if, for instance, we talked to Tobalt Fluter about it and he published something in The Nayword—then what Rafe said about things nobody wants to remember being remembered will hold true. Which directs a lot of suspicious eyes at theater folk in general and me in particular. It was my grandmother, as you so delicately reminded me, who thought up that use for withies, and there’s plenty still alive who suffered the results of her inventiveness. Now, who doesn’t like theater folk?”

  Mieka was completely lost. He didn’t have to say so; he knew it was clear enough in his face. Cade lit a candle with a flint-rasp and held it to the stick of sealing wax, then smeared a dark red glob onto the folded letter.

  “Oh, come on, Mieka. Who arrived quite inexplicably at the scene with Lord Piercehand?”

  Jeska’s chiseled jaw was hanging open. “Princess Iamina?”

  Mieka began to see some of it. “You said she denied ever having seen a play—and she’s been flagrantly religious the last year or so.”

  “She’s thief-thick with the Archduchess these days.” Cade looked round for something to press into the hot wax, and came up with a chess piece from the box on the shelf. He upended the piece and pushed its crown into the wax and went on, “I keep waiting for my mother to drop them, you know. For all that she turns up every week at High Chapel, religion bores her. And both the Archduchess and Princess Iamina are just a little too pious these days even for her to stomach.”

  Jeska took the chess piece and began picking bits of wax from its carved wood. “The Archduchess had to forswear her own religion in order to marry the Archduke. It’s said that under Iamina’s influence, she’s become very enthusiastic about certain aspects of ours.”

  Mieka was still scowling. “So you’re saying Iamina just had to come along and admire her handiwork?” He shuddered. “People could’ve died!”

  Rafe cocked a satirical eye at the chess piece and said, “How inappropriate of you, Cade, not to have used a highly symbolic pawn.”

  Cade grinned at him. “Feeling just a little used, are we?”

  Seeing nothing funny about this, Mieka demanded, “Who would she know that’s able to prime a withie that way?”

  “I’m sure there are quite a few left who remember what my grandmother taught them. And since when does a highborn like Iamina or the Archduchess give the tiniest shit about the common folk?”

  “Iamina hates us,” Jeska murmured. “We’ve made a fool of her more than once.” He looked hard at Cade. “Did you see this? Do you know for sure because of—?”

  Mieka almost blurted it out. He actually bit both lips together to keep from saying it, from saying that Cade was refusing his Elsewhens these days.

  Cade was shaking his head. “I don’t have to see it. Pull the bell, would you? We have to stop and find somebody to run this back to Wistly Hall. Anybody got any change to give the lad?”

  A street brat was found who looked relatively clean, if not entirely trustworthy. To Wistly Hall, he was told, double-quick, and there was a nice shiny royal waiting for him there to add to the coins pressed into his palm along with the letter.

  While this transaction was being completed, Mieka puzzled through Cade’s reasoning. Archduchess Panshilara and Princess Iamina had arranged for a withie to explode at the Gallery work site—how? Black fucking Lightning used Splithook’s withies; Thierin Knottinger would be delighted to do a favor for the Archduke’s wife. Unless that was a ruse to make them think it was Black Lightning, known to loathe Touchstone, while the real culprit went unsuspected. But how could anyone have known that the cri
mp end would be found and identified? Sloppy work; when Mieka shattered a withie, nothing was left but tiny stardust shards. So if they hadn’t intended for the glass to be found, then they couldn’t have intended the blame to fall on Black Lightning specifically or theater folk in general, which canceled out Cade’s notion about Iamina’s new piety and ostentatious disapproval of the theater. Yet it remained that a withie had been used, and in the way invented by Cade’s grandmother, Lady Kiritin, which nobody wanted to talk about and which had been the purpose behind the laws forbidding Wizards to work with glass. If those responsible thought the means would go undetected, then all that stuff about Wizards and Elves and theater folk and withies used as weapons was naught but nonsense.

  Which left the question of why anyone would want to stage such a dangerous “accident” in the first place. Was it to destroy Windthistle Brothers as a business? To cause such anguishing in Touchstone that their performances suffered and they were relegated to third flight on the Royal—or perhaps taken down to the Ducal Circuit? That pointed once again to Black Lightning. But if so, why had Princess Iamina come along with Piercehand to view the calamity?

  Good Gods, his brain was getting as twisty-turny as Cayden’s.

  The wagon had started up again. Everyone was sitting down, frowning over his own thoughts. Suddenly Mieka burst out, “Lord Piercehand!”

  “What about him?” Rafe asked.

  “It’s his Gallery, ain’t it? What if it’s naught to do with Jed and Jez or us or Iamina or Panshilara or anything else? What if it’s to do with him?”

  5

  Cade looked long and hard at Mieka. “Why would Black Lightning want to do him an injury?”

  “Who says it really was Black Lightning?” Mieka challenged. “All we know for certain sure is that the withie was made by Master Splithook. And that Piercehand owns the building that parts of it fell down.”

  “Hmm.” He sat back in his chair, knees splayed. “Didn’t they sail on one of his ships to the Continent last year?”

  “And the year before,” Jeska put in. “Just to Vathis, for a dozen or so shows. That makes twice they’ve gone to the Continent. The Shadowshapers flat-out won’t set foot there, but the Sparks did for a fortnight or so last year, and there’s talk that Hawk’s Claw will be invited soon.”

  Rafe had by now hooked up his hammock and was stretched out in it, arms folded behind his head. “Did their cabins on board his ships not please them?” he inquired acidly. “Not grand enough? Slops not emptied more than twice a day? Food and wine not what they expected?”

  “Auntie Brishen,” Mieka said, as if that solved the whole puzzle.

  Cade snorted a laugh. “So now it’s Auntie Brishen who used a withie to make such a mess at Piercehand’s Gallery?”

  “Don’t be such a quat. One of her letters to Mum complained that she can’t get a contract to export her whiskey to the Continent. Most of the demand there is for rumbullion from the Islands.”

  Rafe began to look interested. “And who is it imports most of the rumbullion? Lord Rolon Piercehand.”

  “Not everything’s to do with us,” Jeska mused. “Plenty of private begrudgements going on.”

  Cade frowned at him. “Are you saying I’m obsessed with plots inside plots and all of them to get at us?”

  “Well,” Rafe pointed out reasonably, “you didn’t see anything about it in advance, did you? We’ve always taken that to mean that nothing you can do will change what will happen. There’s a good chance, then, that it’s naught to do with us at all.”

  Once again, at the oblique mention of the Elsewhens, Cade felt Mieka looking at him. Kind of him, Cade thought with a mental sneer, not to reveal that the Elsewhens were a thing of the past.

  “Both the rumbullion and Black Lightning have sailed on Piercehand’s ships,” Rafe was saying. “Both are in demand on the Continent.”

  “But the one preceded the other!” Jeska exclaimed. “Kazie hears from her people from time to time, and the news these days is that they’re planting more and more sugarcane in the Islands, and production of rumbullion has got really brutal because of the demand. When did the demand start? Right after Black Lightning played Vathis!”

  Cade shook his head. “You’re reaching for something that isn’t there.” But the memory came to him, unbidden—and it really was a memory, something that had really happened. Mieka, bristling with outrage: “You think I’m some sort of backspanger hired by the management to waft a bit of dry-mouth around the tavern?” Jeska, explaining the trick: “Those of us Elves as has a bit of glisker magic, but too young or not good enough, tavern owners hire them—but not too often, mind, or it’d give the game away. Easier if you’re kagged, of course. That way, nobody suspects Elf when all of a sudden they’re perishin’ for another drink.”

  What if Black Lightning had created during their Vathis shows a preference for rumbullion? Cade knew they had another ploy: an ability to direct specific magic at specific types of people. Anyone but Wizards and Elves would feel the shame and the stain of their Goblin or Gnomish or Piksey or Troll blood. Did that match up somehow with this? Assuming that this, the lingering suggestion that one sort of drink was superior to another—no, that wasn’t right. It would be an inclination, and mayhap more than an inclination, for one thing over another. Did Black Lightning know how to create a desire in their audiences? Not just a preference, but a need and a want and—and even a compulsion?

  “Not possible,” he said aloud, and the three stared at him. “What we make of emotion through magic lasts only as long as the performance. It can’t go on for days or weeks at a time.”

  Rafe lifted his head slightly. “If you’ve never tried, how can you be certain?”

  Cade heard himself spluttering. “It’s not—I mean, it just isn’t—I don’t know how it would—” Then, with a glance at Mieka’s fiendish grin, everything resolved itself into a simple, “I absolutely forbid it!”

  The Elf shrugged, magnificently unconcerned. “But we could, y’know. Might take some effort, but I’ll wager it could be done.”

  Cade shivered and shook his head again. “No. It’s not—it’s not honest.”

  “Is anything we make them experience during a show ‘honest’?” Jeska asked. “Fabricated feelings, contrived sensations—”

  “But that’s what they’ve come for!” He surged out of his chair and rummaged through the cupboard again. “Here—I wrote this a while ago, I wasn’t going to work it up into anything for a goodly while longer—but you have to read it, and even if we don’t perform it—well, there’s nothing, really, to perform, but—”

  “Give it here,” Rafe said, maneuvering himself into a sitting position, hammock swaying. He read rapidly through the pages, looked at Cade for a long, hard minute, then began to recite the words aloud.

  Cade heard only some of them, phrases here and there. He’d forgotten about this piece, deliberately forgotten, because it had come to him in an Elsewhen.

  BUT TO FEEL IS WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR. YOU KNOW IT, WE KNOW IT….

  In an abrupt panic, he wondered what other things he might have missed these past two years that could be worked into a play. So much of “Treasure” had come to him as an Elsewhen, as a dreaming, but he had stopped dreaming. What might he have lost by denying the Elsewhens?

  YOU ARE SAFE HERE. WE WILL LET YOU FEEL ALL THE THINGS THAT FRIGHTEN YOU, ELUDE YOU, COMPEL YOU, SEDUCE YOU. THE THINGS YOU CANNOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO FEEL IN THEIR ENTIRETY, IN THEIR REALITY, IN THEIR MAD INTENSE AWFUL PURITY….

  What had Mieka said on his Namingday? That not all the Elsewhens had to hurt?

  IT’S WHAT YOU CAME HERE FOR. IT’S WHAT YOU WANT. WHAT YOU NEED….

  What had he missed? What had he deliberately turned away from, rejected, refused to see and feel?

  BUT DO NOT SAY, LATER, THAT YOU WERE TRICKED. YOU WERE NOT. YOU KNOW IT, WE KNOW IT. YOU WANT THIS. AND WE WILL PROVIDE.

  Into a long silence he heard Jeska say softly, “We’l
l do this at Trials. We have to. There’s so many these days looking sideways at the theater, ever since women began attending openly. This tells them why they need us. We have to do it, Cade.”

  “When did you write this?” Rafe asked in the same hushed tone.

  “A while ago.” He held out a hand for the pages, and Rafe gave them back.

  “Don’t you dare throw that away,” Mieka warned.

  Cade gave a guilty start. How had the Elf known how much Cade was regretting the impulse that had led him to share this vision?

  “How does the rest of it go?” When Cade shook his head, helplessly this time, Mieka got up and took the pages right out of his hands. “Just us four standing there, and Jeska saying the words? That feels right, doesn’t it, Rafe?”

  “The plainest stage-clothes we’ve got,” Jeska mused. “No backdrop, no effects. Just the words. But which play could possibly follow it?”

  “It doesn’t come at the beginning of a performance,” Mieka chided. “It comes after.”

  “Something to take home with them,” Rafe agreed.

  Cade listened as they worked it out amongst themselves. For all that none of them had realized about the Elsewhens, professionally they knew him all too well.

  “Speaking not just for ourselves,” Mieka went on, “but for all players. Isn’t that what you wanted, Cade? Isn’t that what you saw?”

  Before you stopped seeing anything? He could hear it as clearly as if Mieka had said it aloud. He couldn’t look at him, nor at Rafe nor at Jeska. He could only stare at his hands that had written those words in a frenzy after having seen the whole of it in an Elsewhen. No, they didn’t all hurt. This one hadn’t. But so many of them had been agony, and him so powerless to know what actions of his would or would not make them come to pass that he was better off not seeing them. He was better off walling his conscious brain away from the Elsewhens that had been his torment, and looking at the world from a safe distance.

  “I suppose that’s what I meant by it,” he said at last.