Touchstone (18 page)

The close atmosphere began to give Cade a headache. Mieka seemed nowhere near ready to leave—and as the parish minster clock chimed midnight, Cade learned why. The stairwell door opened and into the room came a succession of very pretty, very unclothed girls, carrying silver trays heaping with little colored glass thorns.

He stared, trying not to. But it was a revelation, how callow he was, how unsophisticated in the ways of the capital city where, after all, he’d grown up. Evidently the years he’d spent at Sagemaster Emmot’s remote seaside academy had been the crucial ones, when it came to experimentation. Everyone here seemed experienced; they plucked up red or blue or green or purple without hesitation.

As one of the girls paused nearby, he recognized a pair of hands that seemed unable to decide between the purple and the blue. Small hands, with the little fingers almost as long as the ring fingers. Unmistakable hands.

Mieka felt his gaze and glanced up. Someone nudged Mieka out of the way to snatch up half a dozen thorns. In the jostle, Cade lost track of him. Then there was a touch on his shoulder, and his gray coat was thrust into his arms.

“Dery’s waited long enough, don’t you think?”

He nodded, and by the time they were back out on Amberwall Closure he was buttoning the coat to his chin. It was freezing cold, and there wasn’t a hire-hack in sight. He found his gloves in his coat pockets, and something else besides. He went over to the nearest streetlamp to read the little card, thinking that perhaps along with the coat his father had sent him a message of congratulations. But the card was much smaller than the palm-sized social notes his parents used, and advertised a business.

THE FINCHERY

17-19 Old West Parapet

Refined Diversions for the Discerning Gentleman

In his father’s handwriting were the names of six women, two of them crossed out, with one, two, or three little five-pointed stars drawn next to the others.

“What’s that?”

He tossed the card to the pavement and turned away. “I think I see a hack lantern down that street.”

A muffled snicker told him Mieka had picked up and read the card. “Ooh, a
discerning
gentleman, are we?”

Cade ignored him.

“What’s Kessa do, that she gets three stars?”

He began walking towards the hack, waving an arm.

“What d’you think—is she more ‘refined’ or ‘diverting’?”

He heard rapid footsteps as Mieka hurried to catch him up.

“C’mon, Quill—what sort of pretty little birds do they keep at a place called the Finchery?”

He swung round, and one look at his face by lamplight sent the boy skidding backwards, out of reach.

“Ask my father,” he snarled. “I’ll introduce you, shall I, at Seekhaven? He’ll be there with Prince Ashgar. You can compare notes on what makes a ‘refined’ fuck. And p’rhaps I’ll take the opportunity to give him his Gods-damned coat back. It doesn’t fit, anyway.”

“Quill—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“You never do ‘mean’ anything, do you? In fact,” he finished viciously, “off the stage, you’re about the most meaningless person I know.”

Whatever he had hoped to provoke of anger or insult or hurt didn’t appear on Mieka’s face. Subdued and solemn, he looked up at Cade and said nothing.

The jingle of harness turned their heads, and they got into the hack. The silence lasted all the way to Redpebble Square. By the time he stepped down, Cade was regretting the ruin of one of the best nights of his life—knowing that he had only himself to blame. Pausing as he shut the half-door behind him, he found Mieka’s face in the gloom and began stammering an apology.

“It’s all right,” the boy interrupted. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he snapped, frustrated, thus adding another personally distilled measure of guilt and regret to the mix. Why was he blaming Mieka for things that weren’t his fault?

“Oh, but I do understand, y’know,” Mieka replied quietly. “There’s some as are born knowin’ how to say the wrong thing. You and me, we’re two of them, we are. With each other, anyway.” Then he glanced up at the house. “That’s Dery’s window, innit? With the light still lit? Go on up, Quill, he’s probably fretted himself to a fever by now.”

“Beholden for tonight, Mieka. Really.”

“I know.” He smiled, then settled back into the seat and called to the driver, “Waterknot Circle, please—just to the edge of the Plume. Dream sweet, Quill!”

Thus it was that, after months of knowing him, Cade finally learned that Mieka lived in the most exclusive riverside district in Gallantrybanks, within half a mile of the Palace itself.

Chapter 9

Sketchy though his retail skills were, in the usual way of things Cayden would have tended the glass shop several hours a day so Blye could keep up with work while her father was sleeping off the latest “guaranteed” cure. There was always something new, something that gave hope … for a few weeks, anyhow. Master Cindercliff would be better, sometimes for months. But the cursing magic was slowly rotting his lungs, and nothing could stop it.

This spring was different. This spring, Touchstone was preparing for Trials. The first time Cade showed up just after lunching to help in the shop, Blye sent him right back home.

“I can work in here just as well as—”

“No, you can’t,” she told him flatly. “You need quiet, not interruptions. Go on, get out.”

He protested a while longer, but he knew she was right. So he trudged back up the wrought iron stairs and huddled in his bedchamber, writing, planning, making notes for Jeska and Rafe and Mieka, wishing he could call a rehearsal every single day. He couldn’t, of course. Jeska in particular had other work that supported his mother; Rafe helped out in the bakery; even Mieka, whose parents were moneyed (that Waterknot Circle address proved it), had family responsibilities. Besides, too much rehearsal was as bad as too little. There was always the risk that they’d leave the performance in Mistress Threadchaser’s sitting room.

About teatime the day after Mieka took him to see the Shadowshapers, Cade was in the kitchen with Mistress Mirdley, telling her and Derien all about it (again) while she prepared a food basket for him to take to Blye. He’d got to the part about how Mieka had sensed Rauel’s tinkering with Vered’s work when a sound like the screech of an infuriated falcon assaulted their ears.

It was the sort of alarm common along streets where potentially dangerous professions were practiced, especially anything to do with fire. Spelled long ago by Master Fettler Cadriel Silversun to alert him to trouble on his glasscrafter’s premises, Cade had heard it several times when thieves attempted to enter the shop, and once when Blye’s father lost his balance during a coughing fit and staggered hard against the kiln. For all that he recognized what it was, for a few shocked moments he simply sat there with a word half-spoken on his lips. But Mistress Mirdley instantly threw down her carving knife, and was shouting orders before the second shriek even began.

“Derien! Run fetch my cures bag from the stillroom, and be quick! Cayden, you come with me. Now!” She didn’t wait for him to uncoil himself from the armchair by the fire. She hauled him up by an elbow and pushed him through the back door. A few running steps—staggering as she kept him off-balance—and they were at the glassworks, just as other neighbors began spilling into the street, frightened that there might be a fire.

The opening of the glassworks door seemed to be the charm that silenced the screaming falcon: help had arrived. Ears still ringing, Cade now heard Blye’s voice from somewhere beyond the central workbench, swearing impressively. Mistress Mirdley moved quickly, if clumsily. By the time Cade had registered the rope of molten glass cooling on the floor and the shattered bowl beside it, the Trollwife had found Blye—sitting on the floor with her hands in a bucket—and was yelling for more cold water.

Twenty minutes later, Mistress Mirdley had salved the burns. Gawkers had been sent away with reassurances that neither the glassworks nor their own houses were in any danger. And Blye was still cussing—though at a slower pace, and with fury, not pain.

“I
knew
I should’ve mended those gloves,” she fumed as clean bandages were wrapped around her hands.

Derien had retrieved the dragon-gut gloves from the floor. “I don’t think mending would’ve done any good,” he said, poking a finger through a hole where the stitching had come loose.

“Five days, and not an instant less,” Mistress Mirdley said as she tied off bandages. “And don’t you be rolling your eyes at me, girl. You’re lucky it’s not five weeks. Think about that, next time you try to work too fast to get things done for those as scantly appreciates it.” This, with an accusing glare at Cayden.

Blye shook her head, silvery blond hair lank around her cheeks and neck. “But I have to—they need—”

“Shoosh!” the Trollwife exclaimed. “I won’t hear a word!”

They glowered at each other. Cade knew who would win. So did Blye; she relented with a sigh much sooner than she would have with anyone else. But as Mistress Mirdley bustled out with Derien in tow and her bag of household remedies clutched in her arms, Blye suddenly turned pleading eyes on him. He actually backed up a pace, unnerved. He’d known her his whole life, and he’d never seen this anguish in her face.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I haven’t made your withies. I meant to do them a few days ago, but Da was so bad, and—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But you need them! It’s
Trials,
Cade!”

“I can buy what I need.”

“Mieka won’t like that,” she predicted—accurately, he was well aware. “He’s got used to my work. I know both of you now, and I can fashion them to suit his magic as well as yours, and—”

“That’s us humiliated, then,” he said, striving for the laugh he knew Mieka could have got without effort. “So spoiled we’ve lost the knack of priming or using anyone else’s withies—total incompetents, the pair of us—”

“Stop it, Cade! You
need
them for Seekhaven, you leave tomorrow, and—”

“—and you’re going to be wearing those bandages for the next five days,” he warned, “or what Mistress Mirdley will do to you, I don’t like to think.”

“You’re not thinking at all, that’s your problem,” she snapped, sounding much more like herself. “I should’ve had them done by now—”

A lightly scolding voice from the glassworks doorway called out, “Don’t you dare even consider it!” Mieka strolled in, a basket of food in his right hand and a bottle of brandy in his left. “I see I arrived at exactly the right time. You’re both about to be very silly, I can tell.” Setting down the basket, he plucked from it a nosegay of flowers and presented them to Blye. “These are for you,” he told her, then sloshed the bottle. “And this is for all of us. Mistress Mirdley told me everything—and what she didn’t, Dery did. Make yourself useful instead of just ornamental, Quill, and get us a vase and some glasses. A very small one for yourself, though. Glass, not vase,” he added, grinning, as if Cade were too stupid to tell the difference.

Not that the only word to come out of Cade’s mouth proved his intelligence. Not at all. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you when we’ve had a drink.”

Mieka had turned up at the Silversun kitchen to collect Cade so they could examine the new withies, and had been sent next door to the glassworks. That there were no withies to examine brought a passing furrow to his brow, but of speculation rather than annoyance. He helped Blye cradle her snifter between her bandaged hands, toasted everyone with a brilliant smile, and kindly waited for Cade to swallow before he said, “I bet you’ve watched a million times. And I bet she’s an excellent teacher. So why not stop anguishin’ ourselves about it, and
you
make them?”

The sudden jolt of dislocation was like having an arm wrenched from its socket, only more frightening than painful, the thoughts and memories and seeming memories jostling each other for precedence, for attention—

“He can’t,” Blye was saying from a very great distance, or perhaps another place and time entirely, Cade wasn’t sure. “He’s not allowed.”

“I know,” Mieka said, sounding supremely unconcerned. “Quill’s a Wizard, forbidden to do aught to a withie except prime it for a play. So what?”

“Mieka,” Blye warned.

With a long-suffering sigh: “Oh, you mean that business about his grandmother?”

The world shifted again. He knew. How could he possibly know?

Cade’s brain settled back into its rightful position—no, a new one, a place that took into account and adjusted for things he hadn’t thought the Elf knew. And how had he found out, anyway? He set his glass down and turned a narrowed gaze on Blye, who was still staring at Mieka, horrified.

“You don’t understand!”

“Oh, I understand just fine. Happily, I’m not quite the fool I look. You told me yourself that your da gave Cade lessons a long time ago so he’d understand exactly how withies are made and how to prime them. He wasn’t s’posed to, but he did. ‘Every player should know substance and subtleties,’ isn’t that what you told me he said? If your da, one of the woman’s victims, can overlook whose grandson he is—”

“We’ve never held that against Cade!”

“You see? And besides, who’s to know except the three of us?”

Cayden didn’t listen as they went on arguing. He was too occupied with trying to organize this new information, make it fit as Sagemaster Emmot had taught him to do. How had Mieka found out? Had he asked Blye to explain Cade’s reaction to the first shattered withies this winter at the Downstreet? Had Blye told him about Lady Kiritin then?

Did it matter?

Well, yes. It did. That turn of his, when he’d shoved Mieka up against a lamppost and snarled at him—yes, he had to have found out after that, or the turn would never have happened. That meant it could now be relegated to the part of his mind labeled
Never-were,
and gratefully forgotten.

“I’m telling you he can’t,” Blye was insisting. “It’s illegal!”

“Fuck that!” Mieka exclaimed, patience gone. “
You
making them isn’t legal either, yet you do! I need six new withies, and I need them by tomorrow, so let’s bloody well get started!”