Thornlost (Book 3) (35 page)

E
arly-rising tregetours were an abomination. Cade Silversun in a
Let’s get going!
mood was an offense against nature, common decency, and especially his long-suffering glisker. It didn’t happen often, this revoltingly cheery morning frame of mind, which was probably why he was still amongst the living. Cade with a purposeful glint in his gray eyes meant places to go or people to see, sometimes both, and Mieka knew the look well enough to know he had no chance of rolling over and going back to sleep. His last desperate gambit on such occasions was to suggest that Cade was looking a bit grubby and needed a shave. That usually got him at least another half hour or so while the water was heated and the straight razor stropped, lather was applied and whiskers were scraped off.

But today Cade only shook his head. “Nobody will mind, where we’re going.” He smiled slightly, adding, “And besides, you know it never matters what I look like, when I’m going someplace with you. Nobody ever even notices I’m there.”

Mieka had always thought this attitude was just plain silly. During the last year or so, Cade had started to grow into his face. He would never be conventionally handsome, and there was that nose to consider, but he seemed to think he was the ugliest thing ever birthed with the possible exception of the average new-hatched
wyvern. And he truly had no idea how beautiful his eyes were. It was rather akin to the way he didn’t realize how brilliant he was. Sometimes Mieka was amused, and sometimes frustrated, by Cade’s ongoing bewilderment at being in possession of a really remarkable brain. At his age, one would think he’d have got used to it by now, or at least accepted that it did in fact exist and it was indeed his.

All that aside, Mieka was grateful that Cade was speaking to him. They’d said some rotten things to each other last night and he knew they’d been on the verge of the unforgivable. Yet here Cade was, sunny and teasing. It was almost enough for Mieka to absolve him of getting up so bloody early in the morning.

“So where
are
we going?” Mieka asked.

The only answer was a shrug. Mieka was handed clothes and a towel, and told to hurry up because the kettle was already on the boil downstairs in the kitchen. After a quick wash—no shave, because although his beard was very thick for an Elf, it grew very slowly—he trudged downstairs to find that a gulped cup of tea was all he would get for breakfast, for the hire-hack had arrived.

“Where are we going?” he demanded again as Cade waved farewell to Mistress Mirdley and hustled Mieka out the front door.

“Someplace you’ve never even heard of. But we’ll make a stop along the way.”

“Food?” Mieka asked hopefully.

Cade chuckled. “Food.”

But not for Mieka.

Long ago there’d been only one huge market in Gallantrybanks, but as the city grew, people began to complain about having to slog across town and back just for a few days’ provisions. The problems of housewives and servants made no impression, of course, on anyone with the influence or the money to change this state of things. One evening, however, a middle-aged lord was presented with a dinner that consisted of nothing that had
not been salted, potted, pickled, dried, or otherwise preserved, because by the time his cook and her kitchen maid had fought through the ever-increasing traffic to the market, everything fresh had already been sold. That this outrage occurred in late summer, when everything from lamb to lettuce ought to have appeared nightly on his table, offended His Lordship. What absolutely infuriated him was that he was not dining alone, and whereas housewives and other people’s servants mattered to him not at all, to offer such a meal to his friends was insupportable. When told the nature of the difficulty, he ruminated for a few days, and then bought and razed an entire block of Gallantrybanks within easy walking distance of his mansion and set up an indoor market. His Lordship was in most other respects something of a moron, but he did know good food, and its lack on his table motivated him to exert himself for the first and only time in his life. He made a fortune and was never heard from again. His grandson, however, built a second, third, and fourth establishment, his great-grandsons a fifth and sixth and seventh, and every spring for the last 143 years, the old man’s Namingday was celebrated with a minor parade through the stalls and free ale at lunching.

Mieka knew all this because of the annual excursion (
not
on the free-ale days) offered by the littleschool near Wistly that he and all his siblings attended. The children toured the stalls, were told where various fruits and vegetables and meats came from, and given free samples, and whereas Mieka had found all this most enjoyable at the age of seven, the next year he had matured enough to look on the outing as a lovely opportunity for some truly creative mischief. That year, Jez had been chosen to give the speech to the market guildmaster who always welcomed the children, and Mieka had been forced to listen to his brother practice it about a half million times. (Jez didn’t mention it in his speech, but that the cook had deliberately chosen to serve no fresh foods on a night when guests were present was something
Mieka took for granted; no fool, she. It was also his opinion that His Lordship had been mostly a moron, along with everyone else in the olden days, for it had taken them such a very long time to come up with the idea of multiple markets.) Mieka’s antics on the day of his brother’s speech had been comparatively tame compared to what he got up to in subsequent years. He always behaved himself perfectly at school during the week prior to the outing. He always spent the following week in disgrace and confined to his room at home, but this was a small price to pay.

When one of these markets turned out to be the stop Cade had mentioned, Mieka was delighted. But if he had thought they would be selecting their breakfast fresh off the carts, he was mistaken. Cade took him right past vendors of teas and mocahs, fruit pastries and buttered muffins, while Mieka entertained him with the tale of what he’d done on the school visit when he was ten.

“—great huge sacks of dried peas, like hailstones—Cade, don’t those muffins look wonderful? Couldn’t we—?”

“Maybe later. Come on.”

“But I’m hungry!”

“What did you do with the peas after you stole them?”

“How did you know?” He grinned. “It was only a couple handfuls—handsful?”

“Handfuls.”

“Oh. Anyways, there was a teacher everybody hated—a real snarge. Every day at
exactly
four he left his assistant in charge and went downstairs before everybody else to be first in line for the best cakes at teachers’ tea.”

Cade sidestepped a harried-looking matron with a huge shopping basket in one arm and a screaming infant in the other. “How far did he fall?”

“Only half a flight, bouncing on his great big bum. Not much of an audience for it, either. Just me, behind a pillar. But we were free of him for a whole fortnight!”

“Aggravating little smatchet, weren’t you? I take it you didn’t get caught.”

Mieka laughed for what felt like the first time in weeks. “Me? Never!”

Cade murmured, “But then you grew up.” He swerved towards a booth piled with sacks of flour. “Find us a handcart, there’s a good lad. Good morrow to you, Mistress Tola!” he greeted the Trollwife behind the counter. “I’ll be needing twenty pounds of your best.”

“Quite a while since last I saw you, Cayden. Out gallivanting, I wager.” She dusted down her apron and clasped one of his hands in both of hers. “How’s Mirdley doing these days?”

“As charming and winsome as ever, beholden to you.”

She snorted. “That’s not saying much. Fifty pounds, you said?”

“Thirty.”

“Oh, I thought I heard you say sixty.”

“No, forty ought to do very nicely.”

“We’ll make it fifty, then, shall we?”

“I think that’s fair.” They clasped hands on it and Cade turned to Mieka. “Weren’t you looking for a handcart?”

Mieka had never heard an odder haggle, but it seemed this was an old joke with them. Mistress Tola was eyeing him sidelong as she effortlessly hoisted ten-pound sacks of flour onto the counter.

“So that’s your Elf?”

“That’s him.”

Mieka waited to be introduced.

“Mieka, go find a handcart.”

He went to find a handcart.

When he returned, lighter by a couple of pence to hire it for an hour, he helped with the loading. Somehow in the interim, fifty pounds had become one hundred. He counted, then again: ten ten-pound sacks. But neither Cade nor Mistress Tola said
anything about it, so neither did Mieka.

It took a little less than an hour for Cade to finish his shopping. In addition to the flour, other staples joined the haul: salt, porridge oats, loaves of sugar from the Islands. There were spices, too, and huge bags of tea, and boxes of sweets. At last Mieka helped roll the handcart back outside to the street, where Cade waved down another hire-hack and everything was loaded into it.

“
Now
do I get some breakfast?” Mieka asked.

“Worked for it, I s’pose. Here.” He delved into a pocket for two slightly crushed muffins. Another pocket yielded a bottle of apple cider—the uninteresting kind, Mieka was unhappy to note when he pulled the stopper and took a swig. “All for you, glunsh,” he mocked gently.

Mieka was too busy devouring the muffins to hear the address Cade gave the driver. A few minutes later he was feeling quite his old self and thinking that mayhap he wasn’t such a horrible person after all. He’d seen Cade cut people dead with a single glance. But Cade was still speaking to him, even teasing him and including him on whatever mysterious errand this was. So he couldn’t be so terribly awful, could he? Not if Cade was still his friend.

Anyways, plenty of men disciplined their wives—and their children, he reminded himself with a reminiscent wince for the swats on his bum he had to admit he’d earned. It wasn’t as if he beat his wife on a nightly basis. He’d never hit her before, and never would again. He’d promised.

And it wasn’t as if he didn’t give her everything she could possibly want. A lovely house, a child, blue tassels for the curtains, even her mother living with them. She had money and a home and beautiful clothes and now she was even acquainted with Royalty. So he’d given her a slap—what of it? He’d been provoked. He’d been drunk. He’d made a mistake about the card but not about the way she was lying to him.

Gods, what a tangle.

He was about to say as much to Cade when the hire-hack came to a stop. Eating and thinking had taken more time than he thought it had. When they emerged into a sluggish drizzling rain, Mieka saw with astonishment that this was the worst section of Gallantrybanks: clamorous manufactories and tenement blocks for the men who worked in them, men who used to be their audiences in the seedy taverns they used to play. Touchstone had got too grand and important and posh and expensive for these men nowadays. Somehow, this realization made Mieka feel a whole new sort of guilty.

Cade told him to stay with the hack. He went to knock on a wooden door that needed fresh paint set into a two-story brick building that needed fresh mortar and seemed to have been constructed entirely of clinkers fired in a kiln too long. Rain glistened on the blackened bits, shiny as glass. To either side were derelict manufactories, the signs on them so old that the words could no longer be read.

Within a few minutes a youngish man came out with a wheelbarrow, his powerful muscles and rolling gait proclaiming a goodly mix of Troll in his background. The transfer of goods began. It took four trips to get everything inside and stacked in a tiny vestibule. Mieka shook the rain from his hair and looked around the dim interior. A desk bare of everything but a pitcher and four wooden cups; two closed doors to the left; a short, narrow hall leading to a locked and bolted door; and a small, badly painted sign on the brick wall between two unlit lamps. GINNEL HOUSE.

He looked to Cade for an explanation. A ginnel was a passage between buildings, and Gallantrybanks was riddled with them. But how could a ginnel be
inside
a building? The implication was—what? He didn’t have the sort of mind Cade did, able to play about with words and make peculiar connections.

The locked door opened from the inside, and a small, dainty
woman came out, seemingly in danger of being bowled over on a wave of children’s noises behind her: giggling, crying, yelling, singing. She shut the door behind her and touched her palm to a brick in the wall beside it, and suddenly Mieka knew that the steel lock was just for show. Whatever was behind that door was protected by magic.

“Master Silversun!” the woman exclaimed, holding out both hands. “You’re welcome for just yourself, but look what you’ve brought with you!”

“Trying to make up for being gone all these months,” Cade said, bending gallantly over her wrists. Each was circled by a thin, beautifully worked silver filigree bracelet; she was married, and to a man with taste, Mieka decided. She could have been any age from thirty to fifty, her dark face unlined but for a few strokes at the corners of her deep brown eyes. “This is my friend, Mieka Windthistle.”

“Ah, the glisker!”

Mieka received both hands as well, and noticed as he bowed over them that although her fingernails were scrupulously clean, they were cracked and ragged with hard work. “Delighted,” he told her, stepping back.

“And puzzled, yes?” She smiled. Turning to Cade, she went on, “The tour, but it must be quick. There’s a wagon due in about an hour.”

“Of course. We don’t want to trouble you.”

She opened the magical lock, and the noise washed over them as they went through into a passage lighted by lamps at regular intervals. There were a dozen or so doors down its length—rather like Cade’s “Doorways” play. But unlike onstage, where the doors opened onto various scenes, here the the scenes were painted on the walls between doors. Green hillsides with cows and sheep, houses with bursting rosebushes, fanciful trees bearing fruit in all the colors of the rainbow, a farm with goats and dogs and cats
and a dragon, white-sailed ships on a brilliant blue ocean with a mountainous island in the distance. They weren’t professional paintings, and none of them were magical—no movement, no changing colors—in fact, Mieka realized, they looked as if painted by children. Several of the doors stood partly open, and in each there were cots and a chair, a few toys, small stacks of neatly folded clothing. The brick walls within had been painted soft green or pale yellow, with counterpanes that sometimes matched.