Touchstone (24 page)

As “The Dragon” progressed, Cade kept careful watch on the audience. Not on the judges, seated in their own special box in the middle of the theater; they would decide what they’d decide, and Touchstone would have to accept it. Besides, he already knew their decision; he’d dreamed its aftermath, hadn’t he? No, he watched the audience because they were the ones who would talk later on to their friends. And by the expressions on their faces as the Dragon appeared—taking up half the stage, a real tail-lashing fire-breather—they would be talking about this for months.

Simultaneously, of course, Cade was doing his usual monitoring. It was extremely odd to sense the presence of the stewards, guarding against any dangerous foolishness brought on by nerves. He wasn’t accustomed to other people’s magic being in use during a Touchstone show. But what really struck him—and Rafe, too, by the slight, startled movement of his shoulders—was that after the Fair Lady started bewailing her plight, the stewards relaxed their grip. They had decided that Rafcadion Threadchaser was a fettler who knew what he was doing. Sneaking a glance at the faces half-hidden in the back of the hall, Cade wanted to laugh when he saw that the four men weren’t attending to their usual duties. They were watching the show.

Cade couldn’t blame them.

From his one night glisking for the Shadowshapers, Mieka had learned—barely, which was why Sakary Grainer had had such trouble with him—how to create a swirling gloom from which the play coalesced. Now he used the same technique to create the Dragon. The dread that crept down the spine, the fear that hollowed the chest, the grim determination to gut it all out even though tremors shook the muscles—he played lightly, delicately with all these things, before he made the Dragon. And when he did, and the fire erupted from its gaping mouth that reeked of congealed blood and rotting flesh, every man in the hall twitched and gasped, and some of them even shielded their faces with their arms.

Spectacular? Sensational? Oh, yeh
, Cade told himself with an interior grin. Mieka was so good at subtle quivers of sensation, and Rafe was so good at ensuring that they stayed subtle—even for the most susceptible in the crowd—that most of the audience, sophisticated theater patrons that they were, not gullible provincials, actually took an instant or two to examine their hands for blisters and blackened skin that magic had persuaded them must be there.

The phantom burning was forgotten when Mieka did as Cade had suggested earlier, and tossed Jeska a withie to use as the core of his illusory sword. As the glass twig spun end-over-end in the air, the audience saw it transformed by Cade’s magic in Mieka’s clever hands to a long, broad blade of shining silver. Jeska snatched it by the hilt and began the Prince’s battle with the Dragon—all the while using the Fair Lady’s voice to describe the frantic action.

Blood darkened the sword, dripping to the rocky ground. The Prince’s parries began to falter. The Dragon roared and threw its head back almost to the ceiling, fire gushing from its jaws. The Fair Lady screamed—just as the sword plunged into the Dragon’s heart. The thud of the massive body hitting the stage was like a thunderclap shuddering through the theater.

Exhausted, the Prince sank to his knees as the girl’s voice trilled passionately of her love for him. He looked up as she ended her speech, dark eyes glazed, uncaring, even rather cynical, as if to say,
I just killed a dragon for you—you’re
supposed
to be in love with me, you silly girl.
Then he reached a hand to the Dragon’s outspread wing, almost touching it, fingers trembling with weariness.

“Enough?” he rasped. “Good enough? Brave enough? Will my son’s sons sing of it—wondering all the while if they’ll face down dragons of their own?” Using the sword to push himself to his feet, swaying, he shook his head. “They’ll know their own dragons, in their time. Let them sing not that I was mindlessly brave, but that I was frightened and overcame my fear.
That
is the legacy I leave them, the same, I see now, that my fathers left to me. The overcoming is what fashions a man into a prince, and a prince into a king.”

The shades and sensations faded quietly, drawn from the far corners of the theater, returning to the stage. It was a long, tense wait, but the applause when it finally came stunned Cade’s ears and pounded inside his chest along with his heart.

He met Rafe’s gleeful gaze; they both knew Touchstone would be First Flight, and making money enough to give Crisiant a High Chapel wedding as grand as any titled lady’s. Jeska rose lithely to his feet, grinning as he tossed the withie back to Mieka—who laughed aloud, standing on his glisker’s bench amid the glass baskets, arms outspread as if to catch all the cheers and applause. But he didn’t catch the withie. He shattered it in midair.

A million tiny slivers of glass tinkled to the stage between the glisker’s bench and Jeska. Cade heard every single one in the sudden hollow silence. And his certainty of triumph and the future splintered with them.

*   *   *

“Master Silversun?”

His head seemed to weigh quite a bit more than it had a few hours ago. Or perhaps he’d somehow lost or misplaced the muscles of his neck. Perfectly reasonable to prop his jaw in his palm as he scowled up at the cullion who’d interrupted … um … whatever it was he’d interrupted. Cade wasn’t entirely sure, except that it had involved a very large glass filled with very excellent brandy. Filled many, many times, in fact. And emptied.

“Master Silversun.”

“Unh?”

“Court courier, sir.”

A roll of parchment was placed on the table before him, right next to his glass. His tragically empty glass. He mourned it for a moment, then picked up the letter. Ribbons and wax seal all present and correct.
Touchstone
written on the outside in the elegant scrawl affected by the nobility.

“I’m to wait for a reply, sir.”

“Havva sit-down.” He waved vaguely to the place where there ought to have been more chairs. Or a bench. Or something.

“Beholden, sir, but no.” And the boy assumed the parade stance of a Royal Guardsman, hands clasped behind his back, chin high.

“Whassat?”

At the sound of his glisker’s voice, Cade let his hand rotate his head a little in the Elf’s general direction. Arms braced and palms flat, Mieka was leaning on the table as if the table was the only thing holding him up.

“Court,” Cade answered.

It seemed to be explanation enough. Mieka nodded wisely once, twice—and on the third nod began a slow descent towards the tabletop. A strong arm circled his chest from behind and lowered him more or less gently to a bench shoved into range by a booted foot. Cade recognized the arm (Rafe’s) and the boot (Jeska’s). Thus identified to his satisfaction, it really was too much effort to focus on the rest of either of them. So he looked at the parchment roll instead.

After a time, he decided that something wasn’t quite right. The invitation to Trials had been decorated with wide sea-green and silver ribbons, and a big brown wax seal, much more impressive than this pair of thin pink ribbons and smear of blue wax. He looked at it some more—and flinched when the boy coughed politely beside him.

Oh. He was supposed to send back an answer.

“Will you
open
it, for fuck’s sake?”

He lifted his head—still very much heavier than it ought to be; perhaps it was the weight of the gigantic drum pounding inside his skull—and met Rafe’s narrow glare.

“Izzint the Reveleries—Revulseries—” Whatever he was trying to say, it wasn’t coming out right. It didn’t matter; they’d got their First Flight on the Winterly, and he hadn’t had to murder the Elf after all.

Mieka gave a whining sort of mumble and curled onto his side atop the bench, cheek pillowed in the crook of his arm. Cade thought idly how awkward it must be, finding the right position so the tip of his ear didn’t go numb.…

“Jus’ opinnit, eh?” Jeska was sitting beside him—how had he got there? As the masquer reached for the parchment, he overbalanced and slid half across Cade’s lap.

Pushing him more or less upright, Cade finally picked up the message—it took both hands to do it—and picked at the little blot of blue wax. He’d scraped a gouge in the parchment without actually breaking the seal when Rafe growled and snatched it out of his hands.

“Invitation,” Rafe finally said.

“Got that already, dinnit we?” Jeska frowned, befuddled.

“No, to the castle. Tomorrow night after cur—” A mighty belch interrupted the word. “—few.”

“But what about First?” Jeska asked, almost in tears. “Dinnit we get First?” He turned drowning blue eyes on Cade, and wiped his nose. “I was
good
. Wassunt I good, Cade?”

“The best,” Cade assured him. “We got First, Jeska.”

Rafe carefully smoothed the parchment onto the table. “The castle,” he repeated, then looked at the liveried servant boy. “Honored. Charmed. Delighted. Can’t fuckin’ wait—”

All at once Mieka scrambled himself upright, wreathed in smiles, rocking lightly back and forth as if warming up for a show. “The ladies!” he announced happily.

This made no sense whatsoever. But then, so little of what the Elf said and did made the kind of sense that made sense to Cade. All the same, he gave a nod and a smile, because they seemed to be the order of the evening, and said, “Brilliant!” And never felt his face hit the table.

*   *   *

By the next noon, Cade had more or less convinced himself that rising from his bed wouldn’t shred every muscle currently (barely) holding him together and dislocate every bone in his body.

He turned out to be correct, but it was a very near thing.

He had never been so repulsively drunk in his life. He was paying for it now in a hangover so vile that even his eyelashes ached.

The sight of Mieka’s empty bed brought a resurgent longing to get his hands around his glisker’s throat and strangle him, but it took a moment to figure out why.

Oh. The shattered glass withie.

He’d thought his heart would freeze in his chest, become a lump of solid ice that anyone could reach between his ribs and yank out of his body. Here was proof positive that his own choices counted for almost nothing. So he’d seen Tobalt in the Downstreet twenty-five years from now. So what? With a single flash of rebellious magic, Mieka had shattered not just the spent withie but potentially Touchstone’s whole future. The startled eyes, the shocked faces, the gasps of outrage—hundreds upon hundreds of them—he moaned softly, leaning forward with his hands gripping his skull. It could have been absolute disaster.

That it hadn’t been was hardly the Elf’s doing. The grim expressions of the judges and the agonizing wait for their decision had clawed into Cayden’s guts. In the end, that they had accepted Touchstone for the Winterly Circuit, and moreover assigned them First Flight, was in spite of and not because of what Mieka had done. Cade had been told so in unambiguous language when the scores were read out and the coveted brass medals signifying their new status were handed to them.

“Keep him under control, boy,” one of the old men had growled. “You’re lucky we don’t send you back to Gallantrybanks with citations instead of medals.”

“Yes, m’lord,” he’d breathed, shaking, the token of triumph cold in his palm.

Two other judges said nothing, merely glared. The fourth told Cade, “You nearly lost First. Had it right in your hands, right up until that stunt at the end. I had to argue them into it.”

A fifth judge sniffed and turned away, but the sixth had some advice. “Silversun? Find yourself another glisker.”

Pride had forbidden him to react. Furious as he was with Mieka, he also knew there wasn’t a glisker anywhere to touch him.
Mine he is, and mine he stays,
Cade had told himself.
Even when I want to kill him.

The urge to slap the insolent grin from Mieka’s face had not abated until they’d toasted victory with many, many bottles of fine Frannitch brandy (contributed by their hosts, thrilled that
their
boys had won First Flight on the Winterly and given their inn bragging rights for the next year). It was just as well that on the walk back into Seekhaven Town, Cade had been carrying his crated glass baskets; had his hands been free … As it was, he’d snarled at Rafe, “Keep him the fuck away from me,” and stayed silent all the way back to the inn. Then he’d taken a seat at the table on the porch and got deliberately, disgustingly drunk.

A scratching noise abraded his aching ears. Before he could decide whether it was a mouse in the walls or a tree branch against a window, the bedchamber door opened.

“Cade? Are you—oh. You’re awake.”

He would have thrown Mieka out but for two things. First, he wasn’t entirely sure his knees would last long enough to carry him to the door, and second, the boy held a very large teapot in one hand and a cup in the other. As the contents of the former filled the latter and the steam wafted towards him, smelling of cinnamon and some even more exotic spice he couldn’t identify, he decided to let the boy live. He took the cup and downed half the scalding contents in three gulps.

“It’s lovely outside,” Mieka ventured apprehensively. “Clear and very warm, and—”

Cade lifted his gaze from the cup. Mieka managed a rather sickly smile and thereafter kept his mouth shut.

At length, revived sufficiently, Cade condescended to address the Elf. “Beholden for the tea. I ought to break every bone in every finger of both your hands.” Then he looked more closely at Mieka’s face. There was a patch of reddened, raw skin on one cheekbone, and a bruise blooming around it.

{He looked down at that arrogantly beautiful face, hating the drunken smirk, the smug certainty that he would be forgiven anything, everything. All at once he wanted nothing so much as to smash his fists into that face until it was a bleeding, broken ruin. But as his arm raised, he decided instead on another and perhaps deeper kind of hurting. And so he cracked his open palm across the Elf’s cheek, a deliberate insult.

The cry of pain, the look of betrayal in those eyes—he stared down at Mieka where he’d stumbled to the floor and said very quietly, “Don’t you ever show up this drunk again. Not ever.”