Thornlost (Book 3) (53 page)

Touchstone was served a late supper upstairs in a private parlor, just the four of them after the maids had brought platters of local shellfish and bread still warm from the oven. Mistress Gesha came in to collect empty plates and leave another two bottles of wine, mentioned that Yazz was already tucked up in bed, and recommended an early start tomorrow for Shollop. When the door closed behind her, Cade refilled his wineglass and settled back to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening.

Mieka, who had accounted for two of the bottles all by himself, suddenly turned to Jeska and asked, “Tell me, old thing, how would you like to fuck my wife?”

Cade stopped breathing.

“She’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, yeh?” Mieka persisted. “Doesn’t everybody say so? The most beautiful thing they’ve ever seen.” He waited for an answer, then challenged, “What man wouldn’t want to fuck her?”

If the masquer said yes, he’d be admitting lust for Mieka’s wife. If he said no, Mieka would demand to know why in all Hells not, or go into some sneering rant about Jeska’s manhood. Cade froze, expecting an explosion that was as certain as striking flint to a pile of black powder.

But Jeska had been trained to nimbleness of wit, and just as he sometimes had to do within a play, he found a way out of it.

“It’s not question of
like
or
want
or
would
,” he said calmly, “but of
could
. As Rafe has said a good few times, I can’t get it up without the smell of hay and horseshit, and your lady wife is certainly not the class of woman a man takes to a barn.”

Mieka roared with laughter and the moment passed and everybody relaxed. Yet it nagged at Cade, the reason for the outrageous question. And then he remembered the business card from the Finchery, and it occurred to him that Mieka must still be wondering just why she would have such a thing in the first place. Cade thought that the issue had been settled, that he’d accepted the explanation that she wanted something to use when he was drunk or thorned and lost his temper—and Cade had seen enough in Elsewhens to know that violence was indeed more than possible in the futures. He hadn’t been all that surprised, truly, when Mieka showed up with that bruise. But he hadn’t realized that Mieka would keep mulling over the why of that folded Finchery card as Cade had done. He’d been hoping that the visit to the Ginnel House shelter had served its purpose, and shocked Mieka enough that he would never raise a hand to his wife again. But the contemplative bitterness, accentuated by thorn, in those changeable eyes when he’d asked Jeska,
“What man wouldn’t want to fuck her?”
frightened Cade. There was never any telling what Mieka might do when drunk or thornlost.

Talk started up again on uncomplicated topics: the long drive to Shollop over the next few days and whether it was more or less tedious than the even longer trip to Dolven Wold Road; relief
that this year they’d refused the invitation to play at the sinister mansion outside New Halt; whose turn it would be tomorrow night to empty the wagon’s slops. Cade didn’t join in. He was thinking about what a contrast Shellery House was to Castle Eyot. Lord Mindrising was not an indiscriminate collector, like Lord Rolon Piercehand, but a discerning selector of fine, fascinating, beautiful objects. The floor of this very room was demonstration of his taste. At Castle Eyot, one walked on intricate tiled mosaics and costly marbles inlaid in dizzying patterns. Here, where storms would blow in all winter and half the spring off the Flood and the North Deeps, the floorboards had been painted as if sunlight were perpetually shining in through the windows. It was as much fool-the-eye as Mieka’s riotous gaiety that evening.

Jeska and then Rafe departed for their rooms. Cade lingered because Mieka lingered, and because somebody had to make sure he actually made it to his assigned bed.

“I didn’t hit her.”

Cade sat up straighter in his chair.

“I know you’ve been wonderin’. And she’s not the one as gave me this.” He gestured to his jaw, where the bruise was by now almost gone. “Not that she didn’t want to. Not that
I
didn’t want to.” He stared into his nearly empty glass and said softly, “She sewed me a yellow shirt.”

When he glanced up, Cade said, “And you reacted… badly.”

“She couldn’t’ve known. But it set me all wrong, y’see, and then that wretched foxling of hers damned near bit me, and after
that
she was all in a mistemper that there’d been no invitation for her to our show at the Keeps.”

“Oh.”

“Met the Princess, she has,” he went on in a nasty whine. “Talked with Her Royal Highness, she has. Sent her a pretty little pillow for the baby’s head, she did. As much right as anybody and more than most.” He finished his drink and reached for the
bottle. It was empty. He sat there gripping it by the neck as he said, “That was when the third party showed up.”

“And he was the one who hit you.”

“Only because I hit him first.” Mieka snorted. “Don’t tell me it was stupid. I know it was stupid. Big strapping young muscly rustic, come by to check on what her mother wants by way of gardening done to pay for their secret, he says. A dress for his sister’s wedding, to surprise her.”

“But you thought it was something different.”

“Fuckin’ right I did! So would you, after half an hour of ‘I don’t mean anything to you anymore’ and ‘I have to go to Gallantrybanks to see you’ and ‘even when you’re home, you’re never really here’ and ‘so bored I could scream’ and ‘you think more about your next show than you do about me’ and—” He finally paused for breath. “And ‘Touchstone means more to you than I do.’ ”

Cade knew instantly what Mieka’s real problem was: His wife had spoken the truth.

“So when he winked at her and said to keep their secret, I had a swing at him. I’m tellin’ you, Cade, he was a head taller than me, all bulges in his arms from shoveling shit, and as purely and boringly Human as any Human ever born. I knew it was stupid even when I was doin’ it. But you know what really did it for me? The look in his eyes. Like he was doin’ me a favor because if we really got to slugging, he’d have to hurt me or I’d hurt meself. Like he felt sorry for me.” He shook the empty bottle as if it might have magically refilled in the last few minutes. Then he hurled it against the wall. “
Me!
”

Cade thought it likely that Mieka had mistaken the reason for the young farmer’s pity. Not because a slight-boned little Elf was no match for a hefty Human in a brawl, but because he had everything a man could want and still wasn’t happy.

As if Mieka had heard a partial echo of the thought, he said,
“I give her everything she wants! I married her and gave her a child and a house and clothes and jewelry and her silly blue tassels on the curtains and everything she asks for and a shitload of things she doesn’t and I give them to her because I love her! I even let her Gods-damned mother live at the house! What more does she want?”

Cade had no answer for him. Or, rather, he had too many answers that Mieka wouldn’t want to hear. He settled for the obvious. “Fidelity, perhaps?”

“She’s the only girl I’ve ever loved and the only girl I will ever love. What’s it matter if I fuck half the girls in Albeyn, as long as I come home to her and love her and—”

“Women tend to see these things a bit differently than men do,” he ventured. And it was odd, but in a way he agreed with Mieka. The betrayals of the flesh meant little compared to the betrayals of the heart, the mind, the soul.

“All I know is that seeing her with another man—”

“She wasn’t
with
another man. You know that. But if you keep on as you’re going, she might start to think about it, just to make you take notice. Like with that card from the Finchery.”

“She put her hand up to her cheek, y’know. Just like I thought she would. To remind me what I did. But I didn’t, Quill. I swear I didn’t. I never will again.”

“I know,” he said softly. But Mieka didn’t hear him, for he had succumbed to three—or was it four?—bottles of wine and slumped down in his chair, loose-limbed and senseless.

Cade sat there contemplating him in silence until a gentle scratching at the door made him glance round. A maidservant tiptoed in, glancing about her, and nodded to herself when she saw the green glass shards over by the wall.

“I’m sorry,” Cade said, and heard the thickness of his voice, and decided it was time he went to bed, too.

“You’re
Touchstone
, ain’t you?” the girl said with a quick
smile, and went out again, presumably to fetch a broom.

Yes, they were Touchstone. They shattered glass for a living. It was probably time that they stopped.

Mieka revived enough to take a few steps on his own as Cade helped him to his room. He saw the Elf safely on his bed, if not actually in it, and went down the hall to his own bedchamber.

But he couldn’t sleep. Waiting for him on a low table was a large, flat package. Imagings of Touchstone collectively and each of them individually, sent by Kearney Fairwalk for their approval before being printed up on placards. There were several of them all together, two each of Rafe and Jeska, four of Mieka. Only one of Cade himself had been deemed fit for public viewing. This didn’t surprise him. What was a trifle astonishing was that he looked rather good, with his longish hair and high-necked white shirt, Derien’s little silver falcon pinned at his throat.

He spread the imagings of Mieka out across the table.
I know what you will look like
, he thought.
I know that there are doors you might choose where youth and whimsical beauty will decay and the misery will weigh on you like whole mountains of wrong. I know that inside other doorways, your hair will turn gray and your face will be lined but you’ll be wearing a diamond in your ear and you’ll be happy. I know what you will look like and what you will become. What I don’t know is how any of it will happen.

It wasn’t the usual thing, he supposed, to look at an imaging and see future damage, future pain marring that beautiful Elfen face and haunting those incredible eyes. He tried to see that other Elsewhen, the night of his forty-fifth Namingday with the wineglasses and the friends coming to celebrate, but this night he could see nothing but sorrow. It was a twisting of time, that he should see the future in these imagings, as if the Mieka of right now, today, did not belong there on the page. But then he realized: the one who didn’t belong was the Mieka he’d seen in the Elsewhens. That Mieka wasn’t real. He didn’t exist.

Not yet.

Not ever
, he vowed silently. Not if things kept on as they were at Hilldrop Crescent. Hateful as the present and those futures were, he didn’t hate her. Why bother? Sooner or later, one way or another, she would be gone. What he felt for her was contempt, which had begun when she groped him at the races. He still wondered what she had been after. To attract him? To mock him? To assert silently but graphically that her beauty could get any man to want her? To make it impossible for him to meet Mieka’s gaze? He could just imagine that conversation—Mieka asking what was wrong, nagging and pestering until Cade lost his temper and told him, Mieka furiously accusing him of being a liar. Was that what she’d wanted?

In truth, Cade still didn’t understand why she’d wanted Mieka in the first place. Oh, he was beautiful, and he had an ancient Elfen name, and she was obviously in love with him, but why go to all that effort for some traveling player who at that time didn’t make much money and didn’t have great prospects? The conquest of it? Getting to Gallybanks to conquer further? What did she
want
?

Or mayhap the better question would be, what did her mother want?

He didn’t know. Perhaps an Elsewhen would show him. Something about the Archduke, and power, and secrets. What part did her daughter play in it? And Mieka—what about him?

Well, it was beginning, he told himself, the slow, agonizing process of their untangling, one from the other. All he could hope was to spare Jindra as much as possible, defend and protect her as he’d promised himself he’d do that night of his twenty-first Namingday. She was just a baby, too little to understand anything of what might happen between her parents, but as she grew older and the doubts and questions inevitably came, he would have to work hard to prevent her from becoming that
cold, bitter woman who refused a Royal invitation to a ceremony honoring her long-dead father.

As for Mieka’s marriage… that it would end he had no doubting. Mieka’s was the dilemma of the traveling player, and solving it had defeated men older and smarter than he. Boredom threatened during the months at home; longing for family could taint the months on the road. The only certainties were onstage.

An ordinary home life… Cayden finally accepted the warning of that Elsewhen, the one where he’d been married to a woman who had no interest in his work except for the fact that it paid the bills.
Ordinary
—that was the word he’d used with Blye, the word that had her scoffing and scorning. Oh, she’d been right about him. She always was. He couldn’t be ordinary; no player could. Crisiant understood and accepted Rafe’s absences, but they all knew that she suffered when he was gone. Whether or not Kazie would adapt was as yet an unanswerable question; she was probably still trying to decide. Mieka’s wife did not understand and could not accept, and whereas Cade regretted her anguish just as he did Crisiant’s, it seemed to him that the nature of their unhappiness differed. Simply put, Crisiant knew that Rafe would not be the man he was, the man she loved, if he stopped being what he was meant to be. As far as Cade could tell, Mieka’s wife had never tried very hard to figure out who her husband truly was. How many times had Mieka described her as being
“the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen”
? How many times had Cade reviewed that Elsewhen where she cried out to her mother,
“I want him!”
Blye had been right about that, too: that they didn’t really know each other at all.

As he wearily undressed and made ready for bed, a memory came to him—a real memory, not an Elsewhen. Alaen, just before Touchstone performed “Treasure” for the first time, and Cade had tried to tell him to watch carefully—but Alaen cared for nothing but Chirene.