Touchstone (17 page)

Why didn’t he want to know? All these men—for a few moments they had possessed what they most desired. Or at least they thought they had. They now knew what it felt like. Whatever they saw or felt or discovered about themselves—why didn’t Cade want the same? Why did it feel so dangerous even to speculate?

What was it, he asked himself, that he wanted more than anything?

And what would he do to get it?

And then, without warning, another question: What about the Elf? What was it that
he
was feeling right now? Had he touched what he most wanted, taking it into himself, satisfying whatever dream or need was hidden deepest in his soul?

The applause began, startling Cayden out of his thoughts. Though it was boorish to throw trimmings onto a real stage in a real theater, there was no such rule here. The chink and chime of coins was almost as loud as the clapping of hands. Vered, whose interpretation of “Dancing Ground” this had been and who’d acted as masquer, ignored the coins bombarding the stage, leaving it to Rauel to come out from behind the tregetour’s lectern and do the smiling and the bowing and the collecting. Vered strode to the abandoned lectern and gripped it with both powerful hands, looking grim.

“Ooh,
that’s
trouble,” Mieka said under his breath, and Cade leaned down to hear. “I thought something was going on.” Cade’s nudging elbow encouraged him to elaborate. “Didn’t you feel the tweaks Rauel kept giving the backdrop while Vered was playing the knight?”

“All I noticed was he made more switches back and forth than I could count, and faster than I’ve ever seen it done,” Cade admitted. “Impressive.”

“Well, while he was doing that, and Chat was giving him what he needed to do it with, and Sakary was keeping it all reined in, Rauel was fooling with the dancing circle. And did you notice when Chat sent the wishes out, the change in the taste of it? Rauel focused in on what each man wanted, and gave it to him.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure if he wanted to put his own hallmark on it so Vered doesn’t get all the credit, or if he was doing it to provoke.”

“Maybe he just couldn’t help himself,” Cade mused, turning back to the bar to order another drink. “There’s times when I—” He broke off abruptly, realizing what he was about to reveal.

Mieka guessed anyway. “You think I never sense it?” he demanded. “Is it that even after two months you don’t yet trust me, or you ‘just can’t help yourself’?”

“I do trust you. But I’m not used to that yet.”

Mollified, the Elf signaled the barmaid for a second round. “Think a moment on what you’d feel if some other tregetour messed about with
your
work.” With a shrewd upward glance, he answered the question. “You’d string him up by his balls and shove a few dozen withies up his nose, that’s what you’d do.” Handing Cade a fresh drink, he said, “Do you want to find a table this time?”

“I’m fine here.” He nodded off to their left. “Who’s that, do you know? The one in the emerald neckband that somebody really ought to teach him how to tie.”

Mieka sniggered into his silver cup. “That’s Pirro Spangler. Him and me, we took lessons from the same Master. He’d
like
to work the way I do, but he’s built too Human.”

Giving the glisker a once-over, Cayden was compelled to agree. The young man was not quite as tall but fashioned twice as solidly as Mieka, bull-shouldered and deep-chested, with powerful arms. He’d do fine working traditional, but Mieka’s style—no, not near light or quick enough.

“All Elf in the ears, though,” Cade remarked. Peeking shyly out from a tangle of dark brown curls, they were rather large but gracefully shaped, the tip of the left one decorated by three tiny silver hoops.

“More than can be said for that one over there.” He hooked a thumb, very rudely, towards the apex of the bar.

Cade knew instantly whom he meant. Lank brown-blond hair, wide-set blue eyes, and the unmistakable signs of surgery on his ears. Where there ought to have been a gentle inward furl rounding a Human ear, there were only hard edges. The young man looked their way, caught them examining him, blew them a mocking kiss, and turned his back.

“Fraud,” Mieka muttered. “He’s no more Elf than Yazz. Look at his ears. He was never kagged.”

“What?” He squinted but remained unenlightened.

“Like a tooth stump left in somebody’s jaw—”

“I know what it means.” He’d learned the term from Jeska, to whom it had been done. “You’re saying a chirurgeon never touched him?”

“Only to make it look as if another one had.”

“Why would somebody do that?”

“To pretend he’s Elf when he’s not—or more Elf than shows on the outside, anyway.” He drained his ale and turned the goblet upside down on the bar to indicate he was finished for the night. “They’re about ready again. This should be interesting. Rauel’s piece this time—I wonder if Vered will muck about with it.”

Vered didn’t game Rauel the way Rauel had gamed him. He stood at the tregetour’s lectern, straight-spined and solemn, giving every evidence of rapt attention. But Cade detected something coldly resentful in his eyes at Rauel’s hilarious rendering of “Piksey Ride.” Chattim could be seen laughing to himself as he created the weary and worn-out nag ridden nightly into exhaustion by Pikseys. Rauel’s befuddled farmer had everyone howling, and Cade appreciated the spry delineation of the Pikseys as dancing outlines all over the tavern. Still, he had the feeling that Vered considered such light entertainment beneath them.

Shadows again swept the tavern, and slowly vanished. Show over, Mieka took Cade backstage to the tiring-room, where the Shadowshapers were holding court, one on each of the four blue couches. The youth with the fake kagged ears was talking earnestly to Rauel. Beside him was a tall, lean, intense Wizard, his face all angles, his black eyes scouring the crowd as if looking for, and knowing he wouldn’t find, a reason to linger. He appeared, in fact, to have taken lessons in Haughty from Cade’s mother.

“Mieka!” Chattim waved, and Mieka dragged Cade over. The glisker’s face was even more comically asymmetrical up close—one cheekbone wider than the other, the mouth lopsided especially when he smiled, the nose taking a sharp right turn below the bridge. Even the cleft in his chin was off-center. But there was so merry a nature clear in his blue eyes that he really did seem rather good-looking.

Introductions were performed, and Mieka settled on the sofa beside Chattim. Cade listened as Blye’s withies were praised even though Blye’s name never was mentioned, and hid a grin. Someone drifted by with a tray of drinks, and Cade snagged one before wandering about the room, hearing snatches of conversations that didn’t much interest him, but enjoying the atmosphere of sleek success … even if that success wasn’t his own. Yet.

“—fuckin’ snarge, that’s what he is,” snarled someone behind Cade, and he turned to find Vered Goldbraider grabbing two silver cups of wine, which he poured down his throat one right after the other. He came up for air to find Cade looking at him, and his black eyes narrowed dangerously. “Liked the ending, did you? All sweet and delightful, sunshine and smiles—”

“It’s kind of supposed to end that way, isn’t it?” Cade ventured.

“Not in
my
version it fucking doesn’t!”

Oh; wrong playlet. Cade tried to make amends for his mistake. “Unusual, though, wasn’t it—having the knight outsmart the Elf Queen like that—”

“And there it should’ve ended.” Vered wasn’t quite as tall as Cade, and as his head tilted back so he could look Cade in the eyes he swayed a bit on his heels, already quite drunk. “He tricks her. They dance. The end.”

All at once Cade understood. “Which makes every man in the place wonder what
he
would’ve asked for, what’s more important to him than anything else in the world.”

“Exactly! Make ’em
think
, wouldn’t it? That’s the way I’d end it. But not him. No, not him!
Feeling’s
the thing—Lord and Lady preserve him from ever having a single
thinking
moment in his life!” He turned a glare on Rauel, who was laughing with the burly little glisker Mieka knew. Another young man had joined them, delicate and compellingly beautiful, with dark curling hair and a graceful body. But he was somehow sinister, too, somehow dangerous—especially when seen next to Rauel’s boyish, wide-eyed charm.

“It didn’t
not
work, though, did it?” Cade was astounded by his own temerity in discussing the work as if they were equals. “I mean, not the way you intended, but it was effective all the same.” The audience had been washed with emotions and images, and that was what all good theater was supposed to do. Even if they hadn’t been forced to think during the performance they’d certainly think for days afterwards, just as Vered said he wanted. What the Shadowshapers had done tonight what not just good theater but
great
theater. Through their art, every man in the audience had learned something about himself, something true.

Almost
every man in the audience, Cade suddenly corrected himself. And again he wondered what it was that Mieka most desired.

Vered was frowning. “I know you, don’t I?”

“You know my glisker. Worked with him, once. Mieka Windthistle.”

“
Your
glisker now, is he?” He laughed, so heartily that Cade was within a moment of being annoyed when he went on, “No stopping that little Elf, is there? I think I heard something of it—you’d be Silversun?”

“Yes. Cayden Silversun.”

“Got it! Touchstone!” With a cynicism that was almost a challenge: “They say you’re the next us.”

Cade ought to have known that even his blandest smile wouldn’t fool someone like this. A gaze both wily and wise bored into him.

“But you’d rather be the first
you
. Grab that by the throat, Cayden, and hang on tight. And if you value your sanity, don’t ever let another tregetour work with you.”

“Not in a million years,” Cade said fervently.

Vered laughed once more. “And here’s your Elf. So you’re with players worthy of you now, eh, Mieka?”

He gave Vered a grin and an elaborate shrug. “We fit, the four of us. And I s’pose all is forgiven—Sakary’s speaking to me again, anyway. Why’d you do this show tonight? I thought you were done and dusted for Seekhaven.”

“Had to try out the new pieces. We’d thought to make this a surprise appearance, but I s’pose word gets out fast.”

“It does,” Mieka acknowledged, “if you know where to listen.”

Vered took the winecup right out of Mieka’s hand and drained it in two long swallows. “Did the wall remember you?”

“It did. Beholden.”

“It was Chat, not me. But you gliskers all stick together like scales on a wyvern’s wings. Talked to Pirro lately?”

“Not much. Has he settled yet?”

“He’s like you—can’t find players who suit him. Sakary’s got a notion he’d work well with Thierin over there, but Rauel and me, we think alike on that if on bloody little else. Thierin gives us the eeries.”

Glancing in the direction Vered indicated, Cade saw the disturbingly beautiful youth he’d noticed earlier.

“So you’re for the Royal Circuit after Trials, are you?” Mieka asked, adding blithely, “We might see you there.”

Cade choked on a gulp of wine. Vered laughed again, lighter, genuinely amused at the notion that anyone could do so well at Trials as to bypass the Winterly and Ducal Circuits entirely, right straight to Royal.

“You’re frustled for it, no mistake.” Taking an unsteady step back, he made a show of eyeing Mieka’s clothing. “I never saw you half so fine when you were hangin’ round last year.” He winked at Cade. “Such a forlorn little Elf, it was, alone and alack, and just aching to show us all how it ought to be done!”

Cade arched an eloquent, teasing brow at Mieka, who blushed and said quickly, “Only until Rauel mentioned that he’d seen some players over on Beekbacks, and knew the tregetour, and they could use a glisker who knew what he was about.”

“I’m beholden to him, then,” Cade said, smiling.

“Go and be properly grateful, then,” Vered advised, “before I wring his neck for him.” But by now anger had been drowned in wine, and he was humming dreamily under his breath as he moved away in search of another goblet.

Cade was quiet for a few moments, watching the crowd, feeling both out of place and completely comfortable. These young men spoke in words he knew and used and understood, but he wasn’t entirely sure
they
would understand
him
. The vocabulary of the theater, of tregetour and glisker, masquer and fettler, scenes and playlets and the pestilential Thirteen—he had all these things in common with all these people. But he also knew himself to be different.

“Have you been dreaming?”

He nearly dropped his wine. “What? No. I mean—what d’you mean?”

“I wrote to Auntie Brishen,” Mieka told him, looking grim. “She says that sometimes blockweed will take someone the way it has you, without dreams when you sleep. And that’s not good, Cade. I told you. It’s important for you to dream.”

And that, he realized all at once, was what differenced him from all these people who ought to have been his peers. Who ought to understand him, and never would. It wasn’t the kind of dreaming Mieka meant; it was that other thing that happened to him. Dreamless sleep was wonderful. But he didn’t see anything, did he? He hadn’t in weeks. And he needed to look. He wanted to find out if the man Tobalt still sat in a tavern somewhere and said that when they lost their Elf, they lost their soul.

What prevented prescience took away his ability to choose. It eliminated this thing that made him unique in this room and perhaps in all his profession. Control it, yes, if he could; use it, for certes, as he’d learned to. But give it up? Obstruct its lessons and its warnings? He’d always told himself this seeing of his was a burden, a chore, a curse. Humbling to know that he’d secretly treasured it all along, that he valued it, even needed it.

“All right,” he told Mieka. “I’ll take the dreaming, not the thorn.”

They stayed a while longer, ignoring the time even when everyone knew it was past curfew bell. Mieka seemed to know most of the players here, and steered Cayden expertly through the room so he met them all. He found himself liking Pirro Spangler, who was Mieka’s opposite in more than looks: quiet, calm, he smiled rather than laughed at his fellow glisker’s teasing and expressed no opinions of his own at all. If he had the depths to be a glisker, he obviously saved it for the stage. But he did keep glancing over at the dark young Wizard with the curling hair, and Cade wondered if Pirro would agree with Sakary or with Vered and Rauel—and Cade himself—that Thierin was downright weird.