Thornlost (Book 3) (13 page)

“Stop it! People know who we are!”

“Mayhap so,” Rafe whispered, “but tonight nobody cares.”

Mieka was not disposed to enjoy that notion. After nearly a fortnight of being recognized everywhere they went in Seekhaven—he’d signed his name to more placards than he’d thought Kearney Fairwalk ordered printed up—the only nods and smiles he’d seen directed at Touchstone were the ones from the guards at the door. He found he didn’t much like being anonymous.

“It’s said,” a man in Prince Ashgar’s livery whispered excitedly to his companion, “that when the Lightning strikes, no man is left unscathed!”

Jeska muttered, “Is that what they’re putting on their placards now?
The
Lightning?”

Another man was saying, “Saw them in Stiddolfe last year, with my brother who’s a gatekeeper at the University. And I’ll tell
you one thing for certes. Nobody who sees them once can see them
only
once.”

Cade murmured, “No, they just keep coming back to haunt you—like a bad lamb stew.”

“Your Majesty—Your Royal Highness—Your Grace—my lords and gentlemen!” bawled the Master of Revelries. “Black Lightning!” And as the curtains began to part, he scuttled off the stage as fast as he could.

Kaj Seamark, the thin and pallid masquer, had barely taken up position when Mieka had to catch his breath, staggered by the strength of the magic that suddenly saturated Fliting Hall. It was impossible to tell right now the nature of that strength. The fettler, Herris Crowkeeper, could be keeping tight hold on exceptionally powerful magic, or their glisker, Pirro Spangler, could be using withies spelled with tremendous energy by tregetour Thierin Knottinger, or a combination of these. Master Glisker though he was, Mieka had trouble sorting it.

And he wanted very much to stay as detached from the performance as Cayden always did, so that he
could
sort it. In the presence of the Shadowshapers, he inevitably gave in to the skill of the players and went wherever it pleased them to take him, as compliantly swayed as any member of an audience totally ignorant of how it was all done. What they wanted him to feel, touch, smell, see, taste, and hear, these things he willingly gave himself to—because with the Shadowshapers, he knew he was safe. He’d worked with them once and knew how heedful they were of every fine distinction; he knew them personally and trusted their magic and their intentions. It should have been the same with Black Lightning, or at least regarding Pirro Spangler—he and Mieka had taken lessons from the same tutor, after all. But these first few instants, with the fierce glut of magic produced by Black Lightning—this felt dangerous.

“ ‘The Lost Ones,’ ” proclaimed Knottinger, and Mieka
was surprised yet again. Seldom performed these days, never a part of Touchstone’s folio—he knew the story, and that was all. What Black Lightning would do with it, and how they hoped to impress the audience, was beyond his imagining.

The way the traditional tale went was that one day the chiefest of the Old Gods, tired of his daily duties and longing for some quiet family life, went to call upon his wife. She was busy bathing their children. She hadn’t finished when he presented himself at her door, for she had so very many children, and so she brought into the room only those that were already clean. When her husband asked if she had no other offspring—for he seemed to recall a few more—she replied that she had none, for she was ashamed to show him all the little unwashed children and had hidden them away. But he heard them crying for their mother, and became angry, and said, “What woman hides from me, I will hide from men.” His wife ran back into the kitchen, and discovered that all the little unwashed children had vanished to the hills and moors and woods and the lonely places, to live there apart from their brothers and sisters, invisible and abandoned. The sobbing mother bemoaned the loss of her children, while the wails of the forsaken ones echoed in the distance. The father, moved by their cries, regretful of his tantrum, vowed to help her find each and every one of their offspring, which he declared were as dear to him as all the rest.

It was a very old tale and a very old playlet, said to be written by a King who himself had the blood of Wizards and Gnomes, and was supposed to be a reprimand to parents who kagged an Elfen infant’s pointed ears, or bleached a Goblin’s red-mottled skin to purest white, or otherwise changed or disguised the physical signs of magical heritage.

Black Lightning made “The Lost Ones” into something very different.

In their version, it was not one of the Old Gods but the Lord himself who came to the Lady’s residence and asked to see their
offspring. Seamark was at first the Lady, robed and hooded in green, presiding over an unruly tribe of children: small flittering shapes easily seen to be Gnomes and Trolls, Pikseys and Sprites and Goblins, every magical race except Wizards and Elves. At the sound of the Lord’s voice, she kicked aside the unwashed children and scolded them into silence as waves of annoyed disgust washed over the audience. Seamark made the change to the Lord, garbed in blue, thundering his rage at seeing all the dirty little children. And what happened once the Lord had banished them had the audience gasping. In a trice, he became once more the Lady, who neither wept nor pleaded. Instead, she nodded and bent her knees, praising the Lord’s wisdom in rejecting the imperfect and the soiled.

All at once Seamark allowed the Lady’s hood to fall back, revealing gracefully pointed ears. Knottinger suddenly stepped from behind his lectern, clothed in the Lord’s sky-blue robes, tall and Wizardly and holding out his hand to his Elfen wife. The whines and whimpers of the vanished children trickled away into silence. Then the Wizardly Lord said things that had never been part of the script before.

“And best riddance to them all—neither good enough for Heaven, nor bad enough for Hell. Mischievous Pikseys and troublesome Trolls and gross misshapen Goblins. Blood-soaked Redcaps, sullen Gnomes, and gobble-tongued Giants—all gone. So, too, the cunning Merfolk and hideous Harpies and especially the treacherous Fae—all invisible to the eyes of common man. But who was left? Which of the children did the Lord not curse?”

Onstage there appeared two swirls of white smoke. Lightning—jagged splinters of black, of course—stabbed first one column of smoke and then the other. The audience cried out as two figures appeared: an Elf and a Wizard.

“These, the favored children, the clean and virtuous children, the blithe and the wise! The children who alone resembled the
Lord and Lady in looks and in merits! These, the only children seen by ordinary honest Human souls! Look upon these children who alone could be seen, who alone were washed by the Lady’s own loving hands, cleansed of all taint! These, the givers of all music and poetry, art and crafting, knowledge, magic, and everything worth anything in life!”

Joy and gratitude, and awed delight—the tregetour had primed these into the withies, and the glisker conjured them, and the fettler let them rush across the audience in torrents. There was a taste of honeyed wine, a scent of rain-washed roses warming in the sun, and the figures of the Elf and the Wizard glowed as if the lightning lingered in their bodies. But when the tregetour finished his recitation, the emotions changed violently. Needle-prickles of panic and dread swept the hall. And to either side of the Elf and the Wizard other swirls of smoke appeared, black and brown and dirty, and the taste was of mold and the scent was all decay.

“But terrible things transpired,” the tregetour breathed. “The Elf, the Wizard, they alone could look upon their lost brethren—the Troll and the Gnome, the Piksey and the Sprite, the Goblin and the Giant, and especially the Fae. And these jealous beings stole Elf and Wizard and even Human children away from here and there, taking them without warning into their invisible world to steal pieces of their clean-washed souls. From these they bred the halflings. And as years stretched to centuries, the descendants of the halflings lost their wings, their claws, their taste for blood and living flesh, and became almost… almost…
almost
Human.”

Knottinger’s voice softened so that all strained to hear him whisper those last two words:
almost Human
. The fear was raw, visceral, no subtlety about it. As powerful as Cade’s own magic was, as intimately as Mieka knew the tricks players used to produce such effects, still he could not fight off this cold terror.

Fear of himself. Of what he was. Of those other races whose
blood commingled in his body. Of Piksey and Sprite and Fae, the dirty unwashed banished children…

He sensed warmth next to him, and huddled closer to it—to Cade, who never allowed himself to succumb to anyone’s magic, who always held himself apart and scarcely touched. He felt thin fingers lace with his own, and the terror began to drain away. Quill was here. He was safe.

The Lordly Wizard held aloft a glowing golden withie, and lightning once more flashed across the stage. He flung the shining glass twig towards the Elfen Lady in a graceful arc, and quick hands caught it, and black flame flared from the withie, annihilating the groupings of murky smoke all around. But then it did more: the fire reached far out into the audience, above their heads, banishing the fear, replacing it with pleasure, leaving behind a scent like new leaves and fresh bread, and the caress of soft summery rain, and the distant sweet sound of Minster chimes. The release was like surcease of pain, like warmth to shivering limbs. Mieka clung to Cade’s hand and felt like weeping.

And then darkness, and silence. No one breathed. All at once a dozen strokes of black lightning split the air, and the tregetour and glisker, the masquer and fettler, all four were there onstage, clothed only as themselves in harsh black, shoulder to shoulder. Grinning.

Touchstone walked back to their lodgings in silence, applause that belonged to someone else still thundering in their ears. Their first round of ale was consumed without comment. At last, in the empty taproom, Cade stared into his empty glass and spoke. Cade the analytical; Cade the intellectual; Cade the one who never let himself feel the entirety of anyone’s performance.

“I don’t know how they did it, and I’m thinking I don’t want to know. They targeted magic tonight, specific magic to specific bloodlines.”

“I was ashamed of what I am,” Mieka said. “Piksey, Sprite, Fae. The words were in my head like curses—like the way those people looked at me in that tavern last summer.”

“I didn’t hear myself being called any names, and I didn’t feel anything except the washing water.” Rafe downed the rest of his drink. “Wizard. That’s all I am, besides Human.”

“Nothing else at all?” Mieka clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Now I know why you’re so boring.” Feeble joke, feeble smiles. But he had to admit he wasn’t much in the mood for laughter, himself.

Cade turned his drink this way and that, staring at the patterns of color in the glass. “Any man in that audience who’s got only Human or Wizard or Elfen blood—he felt the washing. He knows he’s ‘clean’ according to this new version of things.”

Jeska knocked back alcohol in a manner uncharacteristic of him. “I didn’t feel any water.”

“And thus you didn’t feel ‘clean.’ The man beside me, the one who said about not being able to see Black Lightning only once, he felt it. He was smiling. Someone behind me and to the right, he was squirming. He’s partly Gnome or Goblin or what-the-fuck-ever, and he felt dirty. Ashamed, like Mieka said.”

“But how could they have specified the magic?” Rafe asked. “They can’t possibly know any of those men. How could they target that way?”

Cade shook his head, still speaking to his drink. “It isn’t a matter of having people at the doors making note of ears and teeth and skin and the way someone walks—that would be impossible. They’d have to identify everybody, and where exactly they’re seated, and get the information to the group right before the show and that’s just not possible.”

Mieka was only on his second ale, but suddenly lost his taste for it. “They’ve got some sort of magic that tells them who’s what without all that bother.”

“Almost, but not quite right,” Cade said. “The magic is specific and targeted, like Rafe says. But it—” Suddenly he raked
both hands back through his hair. “It
seeks
. That’s the only way I can describe it.”

Rafe held up a palm as Mistress Luta approached with more ale. “Beholden, no,” he told her. “Mayhap later.” Then, to Cayden: “There’s always been ways of sussing out who’s what. Indicators of what kind of blood a person’s got. Mieka’s ears give him away, but even if they were round as any Human’s, there’s other things about him that scream
Elf
. And even if all those weren’t present, you put him in total darkness long enough, and he’ll conjure up a nice little golden light, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“I’m not afeared of the dark,” Mieka said curtly. “It’s one Elfen thing I missed, praise all the Old Gods.”

“Well, then, we’d just have to sit around and wait to see how slow your beard grows. Same for Jeska, that way. There’s always something physical, isn’t there? Those with Troll blood can train themselves to walk different, but when it comes to running, there’s no concealing the way they move. What I’m saying is that however somebody tries to hide whatever shows up on the outside, there’s ways of finding out what they really are.”

“This is different.” Cade took a swallow of ale, as if to get a foul taste from his tongue. “It’s magic meant for particular kinds of people. If I’d got caught in it, I would’ve been thinking like you, only it would be Fae and Troll and so forth.”

Jeska said slowly, “I’ve always known about the Elf—no other reason to kag my ears.”

“Except mayhap Fae,” Rafe reminded him.

“And yet you felt unclean.” Cade looked over at him. “Goblin?”

Jeska nodded. “How did you know?”

“You come back from visiting your mother seaside, you’re sun-browned. But you never stand too near a blazing fire, do you? Mottles your skin. Blye’s the same way, if she stands too long too near her kiln. And the fair hair—there are a dozen Goblin lines that breed true for being blond as butter.”