Window Wall

by Melanie Rawn

“If you never saw another Elsewhen, if you never even felt a prickling of one inside your head, you’d still never have the life of an ordinary person. You’re not ordinary. You never could be. What’s more, you don’t want to be.” He finished, shrewdly, with: “Did Blye say that, too?”

  “Consulted with her, did you?” Cade spat.

  Mieka noted with satisfaction that he stayed put, hadn’t taken a single step back to the wagon. It rolled on without them, little puffs of dust rising with every massive hoof-fall.

  “I didn’t have to,” he told Cade. “I’ve got the knowing of you by now, old dear.”

  The gray eyes sought his. “Don’t forget, old dear,” Cade said in that silky soft voice that always grated on Mieka’s nerves, “that I know you, too. And what have you been doing for the last few years but trying as hard as you can to be ordinary? To do what everybody’s supposed to do? Get married, buy a house, have a child, just as if you were normal! That’s one of the masks you wear, Mieka, husband and householder and father—just as if you were an ordinary type of man. Hiding behind that, just the way you hide behind the palace jester mask, so nobody will look any further and start asking awkward questions. Yes, you did exactly what a man is supposed to do, and keep moping and whining because it isn’t all perfect the way it’s supposed to be. Poor you!”

  “At least I tried!” he snarled back. This wasn’t turning out the way he’d planned. Did anything? Not even his pranks worked out the way he wanted these days, and now, when he was deadly serious and needed Cade to think in a certain direction, without all these distractions along the way—

  “Frustrating, is it?” Cade was smiling a nasty smile. “Hurts, does it? Wretchedly unfair, you think? Welcome to life, Mieka.”

  He pinched both lips between his teeth to keep himself from speaking too swiftly, and then he saw how to use what Cade had said to steer him back to the road Mieka wanted him to take. So he said, “Exactly. Life. It hurts.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “It hurts,” he repeated deliberately. “When you do everything you’re supposed to do and it still doesn’t come right—it’s not fair, and it hurts, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Except that you did do something about it, about one part of it, anyways. You forgot all the Elsewhens and won’t see any that have come to you since. Are you any happier for doing that, Quill?”

  “Fuck you,” Cade spat, and used his long legs to outdistance Mieka. The wagon was well ahead of them now. Mieka knew he couldn’t let Cade reach it, climb back aboard, wrap himself in silence, refuse to listen. Refuse to see. So he yelled, and had the satisfaction of seeing Cade stop dead in the middle of the road.

  “Coward!”

  For many long heartbeats Cade didn’t move. It scared Mieka a little, this imitation of cold and unmagical marble statuary. It scared him even more when Cade turned around and looked at him.

  “You are a coward,” Mieka said. “A stupid, blind, bloody coward. You can gripe and moan and deny the Elsewhens—but some of ’em have been pretty damned useful, wouldn’t you say? I guess you would’ve liked it better if I’d sliced my foot open on broken glass and bled to death onstage!” He stalked closer, holding that steel-gray gaze. “You can play the coward in another way and accept the Elsewhens and not tell anybody what’s in them—like a fucking pantomancer, seeing omens and portents in everything that happens—going about with a black cloud over your head and whimpering and whining until no one can stand you, and one or another of us—or all three!—ends up slicing out your tongue with a broken withie!”

  “That’s enough!”

  “Not by half! Back when you saw the Elsewhens because you couldn’t help it, you had such a lovely time anguishing yourself about them, scared to say or do anything in case it changed, but if you didn’t do anything then maybe it changed even more and even worse, so you’re paralyzed and no use to anybody. Not the people you might help, or people who might help you, and least of all to yourself.”

  “I’m warning you, Mieka.” Cade took one step and then another so they were glowering at each other almost within arm’s reach. Mieka knew he had perhaps another minute before Cade raised a fist to him, and that had always been what Cade feared most: losing control. He wondered if he should risk it. Just once, just to see what happened.

  “What about this, then?” Mieka asked. “What if you actually take responsibility for the Elsewhens? What if you share what you’ve seen? You started to, before that night when you saw Alaen and Briuly. Don’t think I don’t know how horrible it was for you. I was there. I saw you, that night in Shollop. But I’ve seen the other times, too, the ones that came in time to warn us, and the good ones like when it was your Namingday and Touchstone was still going strong and I had a diamond earring and we all of us were happy.”

  He ran out of air, but not yet out of things to say. Cade stood there, staring at him, a trickle of sweat running unregarded down the side of his neck.

  “Quill …” Mieka softened his voice and dared another step towards him. “The Elsewhens haven’t stopped. They’re still there, and real, and you can accept them and use them, and maybe then they won’t torture you so much. Some of them will be good ones and some will be rotten, but if you turn your back on all of them, then you’ll miss not just the awful things but the wonderful ones as well.”

  Mieka waited for Cade to say something. It seemed a long, long while before at last he spoke.

  “They’re different.” He walked to the side of the road and stopped, shoulders flinching vaguely as he encountered the runnel of dried mud. “The one about Alaen and Briuly—it isn’t that I remember it, because I got rid of all of them. But I remember what it was about. And the thing of it was—” He glanced over his shoulder at Mieka, then returned his gaze to the languid wheat field. “—I couldn’t have done anything about it. All the others, they always showed me things I could change. A future that I had a hand in making, and that I could alter. It’s always been this dread of not knowing what I ought to do to make things better. But that one—I was too far from Nackerty Close, Mieka, there’s no way I could have done anything to prevent what happened. I’ve thought a lot about it, and—”

  “—and now you’re scared that not only would you not know what to do, but there wouldn’t be anything you could do at all.” Mieka chewed that over for a moment. He could see how that intensified the difficulties; he could understand that Cade had more reason than ever to fear the Elsewhens. The helplessness would be crippling. Still … he couldn’t go on crippling himself. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t Cayden.

  Mieka dragged in a deep breath full of heat and dust and sun. But Cayden spoke before he could organize his own thoughts.

  “What if I see things in the future that are the result of something I did or didn’t do in the past?”

  “In the past,” Mieka echoed. “Where you can’t do anything about them.” Without knowing where the thought had come from, he blurted, “What about Dery? What if you keep on not seeing the Elsewhens and one of them is about Dery, especially now that his magic has come up and—?”

  The blank shock told him that this was a thing that, for all his compulsive thinking, had never occurred to Cade. Mieka regretted the pain that began to tremble in his friend’s face; he knew it could be worked on; he made a deliberate decision not to do so. Instead, he returned to his original plan. Not that Cade would much enjoy being told that he’d already told himself this next bit in a play without even knowing it. But Mieka had to make him understand.

  “Quill … don’t you see you’ve been doing just exactly what Vered and Rauel and Mirko and you yourself warned against when you reworked that play? You’re refusing your magic just the way Vaustas refused his. You’re crippling yourself. How can anyone be everything he ought to be if he doesn’t—?”

  Cade swung round. “You’re saying that to me? About growing up? You?”

  Mieka nodded with a stubborn set to his jaw that made his teeth hurt.

&n
bsp; “If I take responsibility for the Elsewhens, don’t you think it’s time you took responsibility, too? You’ve done everything a man’s supposed to do, and you feel cheated because it’s not perfect. Well, either shut up about it or grow up and make the best of it.”

  “That’s all I’m saying, Quill. Except with you, it matters more. Didn’t I tell you within weeks of meeting you that your dreams are important? And back then I didn’t even know what those dreams really were. You’ve been living as if what was done to your mother and her sisters had been done to you. A Hindering of your magic. Remember how you described it to me? Like being in a room with a window looking out onto life, but you can’t feel the wind or hear the birds sing or smell the fresh bread when the bakery cart goes by—seeing through the window but the window is really like a wall that keeps you from—”

  “All right. Enough.”

  Mieka was only half out of breath, but a searching of Cade’s face told him he’d made his point. They resumed walking, and after about half a mile, Cade finally spoke.

  “Tell you what, Mieka. I’ll stop refusing to see the Elsewhens if you stop behaving like a quat. No more pranks, for one thing—leave Rafe’s beard alone! And if you’re going to use the black powder, use it on somebody who deserves it.”

  “Prickspur?” he asked hopefully. “We still owe him, y’know.”

  “Prickspur,” Cade agreed with a sigh. “I’ll even bring the flint-rasp. And we both go easy on the whiskey and the thorn.” After a slight hesitation, he said, “Your marriage is up to you. None of my business. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  Mieka shrugged that off, too happy with his success to worry about something that he wouldn’t have to worry about until they returned to Gallantrybanks in the early autumn.

  “And one other thing,” Cade said. “If I’m to use the gifts I’ve been given—all of them—then so must you.”

  Mieka frowned. “But apart from the glisking, I can’t—”

  “I’m not talking about magic. I meant that we both stop hiding. We can’t become who we’re meant to be if we don’t let people see us. You don’t have to play the clown all the time, Mieka.”

  “Then don’t you play the tormented tregetour,” he retorted. “D’you have any notion how boring you are when you sulk?”

  Cade ignored this. “I mean it. I know you see yourself as the great and grand and glorious purveyor of jokes, and that’s fine sometimes. But if you’re not careful, people will see you that way whether you want them to or not, and they’ll force you into that role until a clown is all you’ll ever be.”

  He was tempted to shrug that away, too, but a certain fundamental and inconvenient honesty compelled him to say, “It’s what everybody expects, though, innit? Nobody takes me seriously when I’m being serious.” Except, he thought with a slight shock, Cayden.

  “You’ve quite a history of larking about, you know,” Cade said more gently. “All the way back to the cradle, I should think. But you don’t have to hide from me, nor Rafe nor Jeska, either.”

  “So we’re to grow up, the pair of us?” He made himself shudder, then was ashamed of himself for doing precisely what Cade didn’t want him to do: hiding behind a joke. “Growing up, all right. I’ll give it a try. But don’t ask me to grow old, Quill.”

  He smiled. “If I’m forty-five in that Elsewhen you keep talking about, then you’re coming up on forty-four. Did I ever tell you what you looked like?”

  “Yeh. Gray hair and a diamond earring. Nice of you not to mention the wrinkles.”

  “Idiot!” Cade grinned. “Elves don’t look their age until they’re past seventy or so, and you know it. I can just see us all, onstage, in our forties, with you looking like you’re still twenty-two years old!”

  “Can’t wait,” Mieka replied. He hesitated, then asked, “D’you think you’ll see it again? That Elsewhen.”

  “And will I tell you if I do? Yes, Mieka. If I see it, or one like it, I’ll tell you.”

  He nodded, satisfied.

  When, three days later in Shollop, they did “Doorways” and Jeska got to the final line, Mieka suddenly thought of that Namingday Elsewhen. Was this the life that would take them to that day? If so, he was halfway there. This life, and none other—if he had to grow up in order to reach that day, then he’d do his best to grow up.

  He just hoped it wouldn’t be as boring as he’d always feared.

  11

  Mile upon mile passed beneath the wheels of Touchstone’s wagon; stage after stage echoed with their magic and the wild applause that greeted them even before the curtains swept open. They performed at the assigned venues on the Royal Circuit and at private giggings; their share of the take from the former and their fee for the latter—almost double what it had hitherto been—were deposited in their Gallantrybanks accounts. Occasionally they were invited to spend the night in a lordly castle, to sleep in silken bedclothes; sometimes they stayed at the finest inns Sidlowe and New Halt and Bexmarket could offer (in Lilyleaf they stayed at Croodle’s, of course). The Royal Circuit, for those who had reached the pinnacle of First Flight, turned out to be a rather luxurious experience.

  It was a real shame that by the time they rolled out of Scatterseed, they were almost too exhausted to enjoy it.

  The truth of it was that at the first few shows, the people in charge of the venues weren’t exactly thrilled to see them. Which was strange, because they’d played all those places before as Second Flight on the Royal and been greeted with enthusiasm. It was Jeska who eventually realized that these people expected the Shadowshapers. It had been the Shadowshapers for years now. And Touchstone wasn’t the Shadowshapers.

  Mortifying. But it steeled them to give the best performances of their careers thus far. To do this, they had to have all the energy and brilliance and flash they’d ever had, and more.

  Word that their shows were almost every bit as good as the Shadowshapers, and drew the same crowds at the same prices, preceded them out of Shollop. So after those first few shows, nobody looked sidewise at them anymore and silently wished for the Shadowshapers. It was Cade’s acerbic opinion that none of them had yet learned that although they’d be able to book the Shadowshapers for giggings, the cost would probably stagger them. “And then,” he told Mieka, “they might really start appreciating us.”

  The Royal and Ducal Circuits had been trimmed by a number of days but not by a corresponding number of shows. With the addition of women to theater audiences, attendance was nearly doubled and only the biggest venues could meet the demand for tickets. That Touchstone were themselves largely responsible for this was no consolation to them. They arrived, performed, collapsed into a bed somewhere, got up the next afternoon, did it all again at least three more times, then crawled into their wagon for the journey to the next town.

  Bluethorn for energy and alertness. Performance. Alcohol to counteract the bluethorn. Sleep. More bluethorn to wake up. Another performance. More alcohol. More sleep. First Flight on the Royal was a thing Cade had been wanting since he’d decided he wanted to be a tregetour. The first part of it, the long journey from Seekhaven to Scatterseed, he actually remembered most of. But after that he was occasionally too wrung out to enjoy it, or too thorned and drunk to remember it.

  Dolven Wold was one of the places very clear in his mind. The Rose Court was outdoors, where nearly a thousand people clapped their hands crimson and yelled themselves hoarse—four shows they played there, but it wasn’t until the last of them that he found out why he felt oddly off balance each time they walked onstage. The grating in the center of the stage, presumably for drawing off rainwater, tweaked something inside him. But for fear of what it was he pushed the Elsewhen aside until “Caladrius” was over and they were gathering to take their bows. With one arm over Mieka’s shoulders and with Rafe’s strong arm around his waist, Cade gave in to the Elsewhen and wished he hadn’t.

  { —the strange iron grate in the middle of the stage, in the shape of a full-blown rose�
�blood flowing, fresh blood, thick bright red blood, spilling through the grate—the audience groaning, ecstatic, participating through magic just as they would if a play was being performed rather than this ritual of slit throats and eager feeding—}

  Mieka kept him upright with a shoulder against his ribs. Rafe held him steady with an arm around his back. Somehow they made it into the darkness stage right, where Yazz simply picked him up and carried him to the wagon.

  The next thing he knew was the gulping, bloddering sound of liquid poured out of a narrow-mouthed bottle. Not beer, not whiskey from the barrel in the back of the wagon; wine. Smooth and soothing white wine in one of Blye’s cool glass goblets. He drank gratefully, then opened his eyes and stretched slowly where he sprawled in one of the padded chairs.

  “Sorry. It hit me rather sudden-like.”

  Rafe took a seat at the table. “I think they’ll take you like that until you get used to them again.”

  “Finish your wine,” Mieka advised, crouching at his side.

  Cade did as told. He was glad it was white wine; red would have been too much like blood. Setting down his glass, he chose words carefully as he described the Elsewhen, finishing with, “And I swear that’s what it felt like. Feeding time. Only it was a public spectacle, too, with the audience partaking.”

  “Of the blood?” Jeska’s blue eyes were wide with shock.

  “No. Oh, no. The sensations. Just as if they were in Rose Court for a play, and a glisker and fettler had spread the magic.”

  “Wasn’t anyone … well, disgusted?” Mieka asked.

  Cade shook his head. “Not a bit of it. It was like a special treat they were given, a favor eagerly sought, that they were allowed to join in.”

  “But what was being fed, down below the grate?” All at once Mieka turned very pale and sat back hard on his rump. “Oh Gods,” he muttered. “Balaurin!”

  “What?” Jeska exclaimed.

  “Like in Vered’s play! The enemy warriors who drank blood from their victims’ skulls, like Vampires except not exactly, but enough to set Chat to tale-telling that time, remember?”