by Melanie Rawn
“You must and shall address me as ‘Rolon.’ Rather a silly name, but all the eldest sons have had to endure it. The original Piercehand—the one on the door—labored under it, which often makes me wonder why he didn’t step his whole body in front of the king to receive that arrow!”
Mieka smiled politely, watching as His Lordship made preparations. He didn’t use thorns made of glass; his were silver, delicate little things lined up in a specially made silver rack on the desk. Likewise the flask of brandy, the bowl he poured the liquor into, and the pincers he used to remove the cleansed thorns were all of silver. A few drops of water from a silver pitcher were dripped into a silver spoon, and a pinch from one of the small silver boxes laid out in rows was mixed in with a thin silver stick.
“It began in this room, you know,” he said as he worked. “My original wonder cabinet. Other men have them to display interesting objects or little collections of things. My collection grew beyond this room, and then beyond this house and the house in Gallybanks. Princess Miriuzca’s suggestion to put much of it into a gallery was most fortuitously timed, for I really was beginning to run out of space! And while sorting through what ought to be at the Gallery, I ran across some things I’d forgot about. A chain, for instance, made of teeth. Oh, not people teeth—although somewhere around here there’s a set of buttons …” He waved aimlessly.
“I ought to show Jeska. Our masquer used to have a collection of teeth from people foolish enough to challenge him to a fight. His wife made him get rid of it, though.”
“A reason I never married! What woman would put up with all this in her home? Anyway, talking of dentistry, this particular thorn is called Demon Teeth—such an exciting, provocative name isn’t it? They grow it in—oh, I’ve forgotten exactly where, except that it was so hot, I was near to expiring! My personal apothecary tells me it had all the qualities of Dragon Tears, but without the slighest danger to Elves, I assure you, Master Windthistle, not the slightest. I’m quite a goodly mix of Elf, you know, though I missed out on the ears, and it’s never done me any harm at all.” He poured the brownish mixture into the silver thorn, holding it out to Mieka with the pincers. “Do give it a try. It’s really remarkable. This little taste won’t last more than an hour, I assure you.”
He hesitated. The last time he’d used someone else’s thorn … here in this very castle … but Pirro had given him some sort of wicked warping thorn on purpose. Piercehand wasn’t likely to do the same to an honored guest who was moreover the brother of his builders. And there was something else, something he’d never admitted even to himself: a tiny sneaking part of him had always wondered what Dragon Tears might be like. This was everything Dragon Tears was, but without the danger. Without the risk.
“Oh, you needn’t be frightened of it,” Piercehand went on. “I hope you’re not frightened. Are you?”
Mieka snorted. How stupid of the man, seeking to goad him by querying his daring as if he were still fourteen years old and desperate to prove himself all grown up. Of course he wasn’t frightened. Even if this thorn turned out strange, Cade was nearby in the library with Drevan Wordturner. Cade was close, so he was safe.
He rolled up a sleeve and held out his arm.
* * *
The hanging candle-branches grew feathers, and the feathers grew into wings, and the wings flared from the backs and shoulders of almost the most beautiful girls he’d ever seen. Pink and green and blue and orange they swung back and forth, back and forth, wings beating lazily, long hair and filmy silken skirts trailing behind them, nearly long enough for him to reach up and grasp a handful. Silvery bells chimed and rainbows twinkled in the wake of their passing, as if they enchanted the very air around them, these lovely Fae birdies with their languid smiles and sweet bells and drifting silky skirts.
He laughed softly, enjoying the show, which surely was finer and more magical than anything the most elegant of gentlemen’s private guilds could offer. Not even the Finchery, with its vast and voluptuous reputation—the Finchery—the—
He struggled to his feet, bellowing incoherently with rage. Did one of those bird-girls have gold-and-bronze hair? Did she? That one on the farthest swing—with rainbows wrapped round her dainty fingers—wearing silks exactly the shade of plum that turned her iris-blue eyes dark purple, her favorite gown and his as well and was that her, was it, was it? He could smell the violets that were her favorite perfume and he could hear her high trilling laughter and was it her, was she here, swinging amid the rainbows and the candlelight with these whores from the Finchery—their wings couldn’t be real, no Fae would ever demean herself to prostitution—but it paid well, didn’t it, being a whore, and she was forever asking for more money and more money and the Finchery paid very well indeed because the little birdies were favorites of Zekien Silversun who picked out the finest of them for Prince Ashgar’s entertainment and—and there it was at last, the reason for the Finchery card! She had given up trying to make him use friendship with the Princess to their advantage and she planned to become a highly paid whore to attract Ashgar’s notice and get into Ashgar’s bed and thereby gain riches and jewels and a fine house in Gallybanks and mayhap even a castle because these days there were no opportunities to save a king’s life and thus become landed nobility with an arrow through your palm—all you had to do was spread your legs—
Staggering, infuriated, he tripped on a cat’s tail and fell flat on his face. When he found the energy to roll over, the candle-branches were plain silver-gilt, unlit, and the room was empty of everyone but himself and the cats and Lord Rolon Piercehand, who was bending over him with a worried expression on his handsome, dissipated face.
Then the cats began to yowl. He pushed the nobleman away and clambered to his feet. He had to let the cats out—he knew that note in their voices, the one that meant The walls are closing in and I need to be outside! Now! He knew there must be a door someplace, he had no idea where, but there were three windows and so he shoved aside the bead curtains on the left-side window and then on the right, and was just about to climb onto the desk to get at the cascading blood-beads when the cats swarmed out both open windows. One of them got caught in the glinting curtain of glass. He untangled it gently, whispering to soothe it. The shiver of white and gray fur nestled into his neck, meowing faintly. Hungry, he thought, and looked around for food.
Over in a corner of the long room that he hadn’t noticed before was an alcove, badly whitewashed, with a sink and a counter and shelves. He carried the cat there and began rummaging through the shelves. It turned out that the whitewash wasn’t poorly done: it was crawling with tiny black things that gathered into larger black things and became wriggling black maggots that slid off the walls onto the floor. He cuddled the cat closer and backed away, nausea cramping his stomach. The maggots were everywhere, clustering on the white walls and thudding to the floor in great writhing heaps. Sickened, he kept backing up until he felt soft carpet beneath his feet again. He knew the maggots would not swarm across the carpet. Something about the color, but he didn’t bother to chase the thought down. The cat cried softly against his neck and he stroked it, thinking that it would have better luck hunting for itself, and walked towards the windows. The beads were all red now, flinging blood rainbows across the floor.
“You have to change everything, Mieka. You have to change everything.”
He didn’t recognize the voice. There was no one else in the room with him—just the cat, not even Lord … Lord … what was his name? Mieka couldn’t remember.
“You have to change everything, Mieka. You have to change everything.”
Deep and compassionate, as if hoping he would heed the warning—but quiet and sad, too, as if only too aware that all warnings were pointless.
“Why?” he asked.
The cat burrowed more deeply into his neck, purring. Behind him he could hear the slither and plop of more and more maggots falling to the floor. He must get out of here somehow. But there was no door—no door? Ho
w had he gotten into the room? He didn’t know. But there was no door. Only the windows, all of them dripping blood.
The cat dug its claws into his shoulder as thunder bellowed in the distance and the sunny gardens outside were quickly awash in cold gray rain. Lightning flashed and the cat hissed. And then he saw, dimly through the lashing rain in the garden and the drops of blood at the window, a tall man dressed in gray. Cayden. He called out, hopelessly: the window was still shut and the maggots shirred threateningly behind him.
Suddenly he was ankle-deep in squirming maggots and the cat hissed again and clawed his shoulder and the ropes of glass beads in his hands were bubbles of blood that burst and stained his fingers and he cried out for Cade again, and again, and down in the garden Cade looked up and Mieka couldn’t even get hold of the window now because the blood made his fingers slick and clumsy but if he could only get outside where it was raining clean cool water he could wash off the blood and the yowling hissing cat would abandon him because of the wet and the maggots couldn’t crawl up his legs and despite the pounding rain and the ragged lightning and the deafening thunder, Cade was there, and with Cade he was always safe.
“Mieka? Mieka, come on. Look at me. Open your eyes.”
How had Cade got into the room? The windows wouldn’t open, there was no door—
“Mieka!”
—and how had he ended up on the carpet, anyways, when just an instant ago he’d been at the desk clutching at the blood dripping from the window, trying to escape the maggots—
“I do apologize, Master Silversun. I’d no idea it would produce this effect on him.”
—and none of it mattered, because Cade was here. He huddled inside the warmth where nothing could hurt him.
“Mieka. Open your eyes and look at me.”
“He might be asleep, you know,” said the other voice, unwelcome. “It takes some people that way. They sleep it off, rather like too much whiskey.”
“Mieka. I won’t ask again.”
So he opened his eyes and looked up, and Cade was frowning down at him, his skin ashen beneath the sun-glossing of summer. With the wrinkling of his forehead and the strain around his eyes and mouth, he looked twice his age and then some. Mieka felt horribly guilty. But he’d apologize later. For now—
“Don’t let go,” he said, or thought he did. It came out sounding like dunnlekko. He tried again, very carefully. “Don’t. Let. Go.”
The lines of tension and worry mostly smoothed from Cade’s face. “Can you stand? I can’t carry you, Mieka. I’d call for Yazz, but he’s across the river in the village. Come on, get up.” Then, sharply: “No, Your Lordship, we don’t need your help. Beholden all the same. He can walk.”
There was that in Cayden’s voice that told Mieka he’d better be able to walk, or something a lot worse than a roomful of maggots would happen to him. So he got up and walked. More or less.
He must have fallen asleep on the way to his chamber. The next thing he knew, he was tucked up beneath a blue silk sheet as light and delicate as a cloudless sky. Cade was nearby, folding his shirt. As Mieka grouked himself awake, slow as always to return to full consciousness, he sighed and grunted softly, and Cade turned round.
“Your wife won’t be happy,” he said. He held up the new trousers, the braid down each leg tattered and straggling, as if someone—or something—had been clawing at the material. “I won’t ask what happened or what you saw, and I won’t tell you what you already know—that of all the stupid things you’ve ever done, this probably tops the list. But I will tell you one thing absolutely, Mieka, and you’d bloody well better take heed. Whatever kind of thorn that was—”
“Demon Teeth.” He hadn’t meant to interrupt. Doing so when Cade was in this mood was invariably dangerous.
“Demon Teeth. Charming. If you ever prick that kind of thorn again—”
“No—don’t say it,” Mieka blurted. “I won’t. I promise.”
An unpleasant smile twitched the corners of Cade’s mouth, and suddenly Mieka knew he was about to say something like, And what are your promises worth these days? He couldn’t have borne it. Mere moments ago, he had been treasuring the warm security of being with Cade; how could that feeling change so quickly into fear and foreboding? An unexpected flush of anger flared. How dare Cayden be so nice to him one minute and rip him apart the next?
But once more the mood altered, and Cade nodded, accepting the promise. He plucked at the tattered hems of the trousers. “How did this happen, anyways? Do you even remember?”
Mieka shrugged and pulled the sheet up to his chin. “No.” Wary of the lie that must be in his eyes, and the fright, he didn’t look at Cade, for he did remember the maggots. Reason told him that all of it had happened inside his own thorn-befuddled head. Like a dream while sleeping, it must have been—yet here was evidence otherwise. A horrible idea occurred to him and he squeezed his eyes shut, knowing Cade couldn’t possibly miss the new horror that filled him. It was this: What if Demon Teeth stimulated magic? Glisker’s magic? What if the cats and the maggots and the bloody ropes of beads had been real?
He felt the skin of his shoulder where the cat had sunk in its claws, ran the instep of his right foot along the ankle of his left leg. No blood, no tenderness, no bruising, no damage at all. And it made no sense to him, because if the trousers were half-shredded, then surely his leg must be as well.
With other thorn, he could and did work magic onstage. Skill, training, instinct, and experience had taught him how, for example, to make a breeze luffing a ship’s sails ruffle Jeska’s hair at the same time. The sails were the products of magic; so was the wind; Jeska’s golden curls were real. Magic acted upon magic, and—when Mieka willed it through the withies—upon reality as well. Bluethorn and whitethorn never interfered with his work. What was Demon Teeth, that it could merge with his magic this way?
“You probably ought to sleep this off, as His Lordship said.”
Mieka frowned at him, annoyed that his thoughts had been interrupted. He’d been on the verge of something; he knew it. “Wake me in time for tea,” he replied, trying to sound as normal as he could.
Cade had a strange expression on his face. “That was over an hour ago.”
Good Gods, how long had Demon Teeth had a grip on him? It had been shortly after breakfast that Lord Piercehand had ushered him into that awful room. Mieka gave another little shrug, as if it didn’t matter, and said, “Dinner, then.”
Cade began to fold up the trousers. “She won’t be pleased, all that work going to waste.”
And then he remembered his insight regarding the Finchery. But he could never tell Cade. Never. The humiliation of it wasn’t that she had tried to provoke him and had succeeded. It was that he had married a girl so shallow that all she wanted from life was money and social position, and so unscrupulously scheming that she’d do anything to attain her goals, even sell her own body. Mieka clenched his fists around the silken sheet, renewed fury firing his blood. She was his. Her body belonged to him. He tolerated people looking at her, and even enjoyed it—up to a point. But she was his, no one else’s—certainly not Zekien Silversun’s to look at and evaluate and select for a night in Prince Ashgar’s bed.
“Get some sleep,” said Cayden.
Mieka was relieved to see the back of him as he left the room. Turning onto one side, he stared at the beige and crimson stripes of the wallpaper and thought feverishly.
The only explanation for the torn trousers was his own magic. The maggots hadn’t been real, but the damage was a fact. He had spent years by now onstage directing his magic to affect real things. And when he did, he was in control of it. This had happened without his conscious volition. Though his skin bore no signs of the maggots or the cat, mayhap the shirt he’d been wearing did. With a sick chill in his belly, he wondered if the maggots had left their marks on the walls or the floor or the carpets—and if the sparkling red beads had left smears of blood on the desk. His hands must be clean, or Cade would
have said something. As for his shirt … perhaps the pinpricks of sharp claws hadn’t actually torn the fabric.
The Minster across the river had chimed the hour before he got up courage enough to rise, find the shirt, and investigate. No evidence on the shirt, no matter how hard he squinted at it. He picked up the shoes he’d been wearing, looking for slime or scratches or something, but they were unmarked as well. He settled back into bed, pulling up the sheet, then gasped aloud. There were blotches of blood on the sky-blue silk. His arm, where Piercehand had pricked him with the silver thorn of Demon Teeth, was openly bleeding. And with the rush of shock came a pounding of his heart and the thorn took him back to itself, screaming.
“Mieka!” Cade was here with him and he clung to thin shoulders, babbling.
“Maggots, Quill—there were maggots and they’re back and one is inside me head—”
“Mieka, no, it’s all right. There aren’t any maggots.”
“Yes, there are! And—and it’s growing, I can hear it—a brainsnake, it’s thinking and I can hear it thinking and it’s horrible, what it’s thinking—”
Cade lifted a hand as if to slap him, then shook his head and gathered Mieka tight. “Shush. It’s all right. There’s no brainsnake, Mieka. It’s just the thorn.”
“It got in through my arm,” he whimpered. “I thought I got away from them—they ripped up my trousers and she really did want to be a whore so the Prince would give her everything she ever wanted—” He sobbed once, fingers clenched in Cade’s shirt. “No, it can’t—it’s the brainsnake telling me that, she’d never—she couldn’t—help me, Quill, please!”
“Mieka, try to settle down. I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. There’s no brainsnake, it’s just the thorn, I promise it’ll be all right. I’m here, Mieka. I won’t let go.”
