Touchstone (11 page)

“Oh, darlin’!” the Elf exclaimed. “First off, it’s not the face on him that’s his most impressive attribute, it’s what’s about three feet lower down.” He approached the trull, who topped him by a good handspan and outweighed him by at least twenty pounds. “Second,” he went on in a sweetly confiding tone, “the way we work is, all of us or none of us.” He tapped her lightly on the chin with one finger. “Professional though you are, you’d never survive
him,
let alone us three others besides.”

Ferralise treated her giggling coworkers to a snarl of outrage and raised a clenched fist. Mieka danced mockingly out of reach, stuck out his tongue at her, and leaped over a snowbank to the middle of the street.

“Last one home has to come back tomorrow night and fuck her!”

He scampered off, leaving only laughter behind him. When Rafe set out after him, Jeska close behind, Cade looked once more at the fuming and furious Ferralise. Her attention was on his crotch. Her rapt attention.

He couldn’t help it; he started to laugh. “You better hope I can outrun them,
darlin’,
” he told her, wedged the velvet bag under his elbow, and took off.

Long legs were an advantage. He caught up to his chortling, breathless friends by the end of the next block.

Jeska was holding his side, breathing hard. “I don’t think I’ve seen Rafe move that fast since the time Crisiant got back from a whole month at her gran’s!”

“You really
want
to be last in my front door, don’t you?” Rafe shot back.

“Has to be, doesn’t he?” Mieka taunted. “After all, he already paid the fair Ferralise for the privilege!”

Jeska lunged for him, and suddenly they were all running again, and laughing, and didn’t stop until they piled up in the Threadchaser doorway, all four of them trying to push through at the same time. They ended up falling over each other into an ungainly sprawl on the vestibule rug, and it was a good five minutes before any of them had breath enough to get through half a sentence of explanation (carefully censored for Rafe’s mother’s ears) without collapsing into giggles again.

Mistress Threadchaser waited them out, fists on her hips, a vastly tolerant expression on her face. When at last they’d sorted out arms and legs and were arrayed about the sitting room grinning like idiots at each other, she picked up the bag Cade had dropped and frowned as a broken withie slid from a hole sliced in the velvet. “You’ll be having some work to do tomorrow,” she observed, handing him the bag.

He stared at it, stunned. He’d heard no clink of coins. Upending it onto a nearby table, he groaned as a single se’en-penny piece fell out with bits of broken glass.

“Here,” Mieka said at once, digging into his pockets. “Have mine.”

Mute with shock, he shook his head.

“You’re the one as earns it, working as hard as you do. Besides, what’ll you use to buy replacement withies? Mistress Blye can’t afford to extend credit, not even to you, not until the Downstreet pays for their new glassware.
Take
it,” he ordered, and dropped a double handful of coins on the table.

“A loan,” Cade managed at last. “Just a loan, all right?”

Mieka smiled down at him. “Me old fa says a loan is just payment of a debt owed on a bet lost.”

“Did you? Lose a bet, I mean?”

“Only with meself.”

Before Cade could ask anything more, Jeska suddenly snapped, “Rafe, will you
please
sit down?”

The fettler turned sharply, and in doing so nearly knocked into his mother, returning to the sitting room with a laden tray. In the resulting juggle of plates, cups, and bowls, Cade took a long look at Rafe. Something he hadn’t seen earlier, on the walk back, was all too obvious now: even in the mellow firelight, his pupils were pinpricks of black within the gray-blue irises. And above his beard his cheekbones were ruddy red, even though he’d long since caught his breath back.

Cade looked over at Mieka again. The same shrunken pupils, the same flush of color. The same restless exuberance, he realized.

But Rafe’s sudden wilting into a chair, as if all the energy had bled out of him, was not repeated in the Elf. Supper was devoured, good nights were said, Rafe dragged himself up the stairs, and still Mieka was wide awake and lively as a puppy let off his lead.

Returning to Beekbacks, Jeska took the corner for home and Mieka walked along beside Cade, casting nervous sidelong glances that annoyed Cade into speaking more roughly than he’d intended to someone who’d just lent him quite a bit of money.

“I’ve never heard Rafe yell before. I’ve never seen him fidgety like that. He told me his control slipped tonight, and he didn’t mean to break the pitchers. Was that you, playing the fool by glutting the magic?”

“No.”

“I don’t care how good the show was, don’t ever put him or yourself or the audience in danger again.”

“I didn’t.”

Cade stopped near a streetlamp and grasped Mieka’s upper arm. For a long moment he looked down into those eyes—sullen, dark, and guilty—as Elf-light crackled softly within the heavy glass lamp close by.

“What was it, then?”

A shrug, but no attempt to break free of his hold. “He was tired. I fixed it.”

He waited.

“He had enough whiskey to get to sleep tonight—you saw it, he could hardly keep his eyes open—”

“What does drink have to do with anything?”

“It’s the offset, innit?”

“The offset to
what
?”

Another shrug of thin shoulders. “You take it when you need it, and when you don’t need it, you don’t take it.”

“And you decided Rafe needed it, so you gave it to him. What was it?”

“Bluethorn. A bit in his tea yesterday, a bit in the ale he had before the show. He was tired, and then he wasn’t.”

“Bluethorn?”

“Nothing serious. He’ll’ve slept it off by tomorrow.”

“Will he need more?”

“If he does, I won’t give it to him without telling him first, all right?”

“What happens when somebody starts to need it—really
need
it? That happens to some people with alcohol.” Notoriously, sometimes; he flicked the thought of his father out of his head at once.

“So? You stop for a while. Ease up, Quill—it’s all right.”

“What other things do you know about?”

“What do you mean?”

He couldn’t believe he was saying this. “Just for instance, if somebody wanted to … to dream.”

“Waking dream or sleeping dream?” Mieka searched his eyes, then shook his head. “You Wizardly types call it going lost, Trolls call it blocked, and if somebody’s got too much Gnomish blood they just call it dead, because they can’t take anything at all. My folk have gathered up recipes since forever, and people like Auntie Brishen make a life’s study of Thornlore.”

“I thought she distilled whiskey.”

“That, too. There’s some things as make a Goblin sick for a week, and some that turn a Wizard wicked crazy until it wears off, and what dragon tears do to an Elf isn’t anything you want to know. A lot depends on how much of what blood you’ve got in you. The Human in me lets me drink—something me old fa can’t do, by the way, without he goes all grinagog and silly with it, and after that he’s snarly for three days. The Elf and the Wizard and the Piksey are too strong in him, y’see. You’re a bit of almost everything, so you can probably take anything you fancy.” He paused, placing a hand over Cade’s where it rested on his arm. “What’re you hiding from, Quill, that you want to go lost?”

“Nothing.” He was lying, of course, and Mieka knew it. “I just—if it’s safe, I’d—I mean, I think it’d be interesting, y’know—to find out.”

“Blockweed for a beginner like you, I think. Tomorrow night after the show?”

Cade nodded. They had a few days off before next week’s three-night booking at the Downstreet. He’d use the time to rest, respell old withies and work new ones to replace those broken tonight—and see what sort of dreams blockweed could provide. What foreseeings he could go lost in. He should have been appalled by the whole notion. But he wasn’t.

“How can you be your age, and live in Gallytown all your life, and not know about any of this?”

“From the time I was thirteen until I was almost eighteen, I lived—elsewhere,” he finished awkwardly, not yet ready to admit certain things to someone he’d known less than a week.

“You’ll tell me someday,” Mieka said softly. “Just like you’ll tell me what happened last night, when Blye wanted to know if you’d come back. You can trust me, you know. I promise I won’t disappoint you, Quill, or hurt you, or laugh at you.”

He wondered if that was true. He wanted it to be true.

“We were good tonight,” Mieka offered suddenly, kicking at a pile of snow. “We’ve some rough edges yet, but those will polish down. Another month, I think, and we’ll be sharp as the shoulders on the King’s Guard. There’ll be none to touch us, Quill, none at all.”

“The new standard,” he heard himself say. “The standard everyone else is measured against. The touchstone.”

Mieka caught his breath, a smile beginning on his face. “Is that what you want to call us, then?”

Startled, he could only stare down at those eyes. They were green and brown and gold, shining with barely repressed excitement.

“More than a bit nervy, that,” the boy went on teasingly. “Setting ourselves up as the mark for everyone else to beat! Touchstones, all of us—”

“No.” Gruffly, his voice a rasp he hardly recognized, he said, “What you told that trull tonight—about all of us or none? We’re a knot of four ropes. Everyone else calls themselves a plural—Shadowshapers, Wishcallers, Shorelines—they’re not
together,
do you see what I mean? There’s no unity. They’re still separate parts, even when they’re performing. It’s why Vered and Rauel could even
consider
doing a show with a different glisker—”

“I didn’t suit them, I told you that. It was the worst possible fit—”

“I know. It’s us three you fit with. But we’re not a plural. We’re separate people, but when we work together we make a whole, a single thing. Touchstone. Just that. Not a collection of things but one single thing, all of us together.”

Mieka watched his eyes for a long time before saying, “All of us together. I’ve never before belonged to anything worth belonging to.”

It was only as he trudged wearily up the five flights to his room that he remembered the word’s other definition. A touchstone wasn’t just the metaphorical standard by which something was judged. It was a real thing that existed in the real world: the stone that was the test of truth.

Chapter 6

Once Rafcadion slept off the bluethorn, and Cade figured he wouldn’t be
too
dangerous when he got angry, he mentioned—in private—what Mieka had done.

Rafe didn’t get angry.

“Right little cogger, innit he?” the fettler drawled. “Does he plan on doing it again?”

“Not without asking first.”

Cade scrutinized his friend, puzzled by his attitude. They were seated in Mistress Threadchaser’s kitchen, sampling various tarts judged not quite perfect enough to be offered for sale in the bakery shop. The crusts were slightly too brown, or the filling had settled slightly uneven, or something else was slightly amiss that Cade had never been able to see and didn’t care about as long as it resulted in sinking his fork into the best pastries in Gallantrybanks. Having had his fill of pear-walnut, he dug into custard flavored with some kind of citrus, looking a question at Rafe, who grinned and shook his head.

“You’ll be wondering why I’m not swearing a holy vow to rip his lungs out. I would, except for this. What he told me about the ceiling, it made all the difference. If I hadn’t known, the magic really would have got out of my hands and there’d be more than glassware broken.”

“So the bluethorn he gave you that made you almost lose control is canceled out by the information he gave you that meant you didn’t lose control?”

“One can always count on a wordsmith for a fine, concise summary,” Rafe observed. “Whatever would we do without you to explain us to ourselves whether we want you to or not?”

“Let’s stuff a gag in his mouth and find out.”

Crisiant Bramblecotte let the door to the bakery swing shut behind her, and Rafe leaped up to take the heavy stack of trays from her hands. As he did so, he leaned down for a kiss. She was tall, sharp of feature and sharper of tongue, her perfect creamy complexion emphasized by thick black curls, straight black eyebrows, and long black eyelashes that proclaimed Dark Elf just as surely as her stature spoke of Wizard. Cade had known Crisiant as long as Rafe had. The local littleschool for Wizardly children shared a playground and some generalized classes (arithmetic, history, reading) with a school for those lacking magic, and he remembered the precise moment he’d turned to throw a ball to his friend and found Rafe staring slack-jawed at the laughing girl running towards the nearby swing sets. To hear Rafe tell it in afteryears, one glance from those amber brown eyes had been enough to render him helpless for the rest of his life. Crisiant always retorted that having a ball knock him in the head half a second later might have had something to do with it. She tolerated but had never much liked Cade, for reasons he understood well enough: the life of traveling players, agreed upon when the two boys were barely fifteen, would take Rafe from her almost half of every year. They had never spoken about it, but Cade knew. He also knew Crisiant had never and would never ask Rafe to give up his work, his dream, this thing he was so good at, this thing he loved so much. Cade didn’t mind that she resented him; better she should blame him than Rafe.

He smiled his sweetest and said, “One of what you just gave him would shut me up just fine, y’know.”

She snorted. “Keep on with the hallucinations, Cade, and they’ll chuck you into Culch Minster. Rafe, your mother says your da won’t be back for another se’ennight. I’ll stay to help her in the shop, shall I?”

Rafe laughed a singularly suggestive laugh and kissed her again, for staying to help in the shop meant staying overnight upstairs, a convenient floor down from Rafe’s bedchamber. Cade hid his face behind his teacup, but not because he didn’t want to watch them kissing.
Hallucinations
—Gods, if she only knew.