Touchstone (32 page)

He could say that mayhem in his general vicinity was almost always his fault anyway, so why not take the credit for it and add to his legend? Less charitably, by putting it onto himself, Mieka was indebting Cade to him. Yet the truth, which he knew could be quite different from what was honest, was that he’d wanted to spare Cade being shouted at while still in shock. If the look in those gray eyes had been any indication—and Mieka knew it was—then Cade couldn’t be held responsible for what had happened. Deflecting the coachman’s anger onto himself had been a protective instinct. It rather surprised him.

“Mieka?”

He responded to the irritable prompting with a shrug lost in the darkness. “Seemed the thing to do.”

“What, lie? Was that the thing to do?”

“To people who aren’t us? Yeh.” He couldn’t help but add, “Something you might think about, next time you go elsewhere and won’t tell me what’s happening to you.”

“I haven’t the least idea what you’re talking about.”

“
Now
who’s lying?”

“Shut it, both of you,” Rafe muttered. “Get some sleep.”

Wedged into his corner, Mieka brooded and wished he had access to Auntie Brishen’s wyvern-hide roll of thorn for all occasions. He knew he was right about whatever had happened when Cade saw the fox in the road, he
knew
it. Why wouldn’t anybody tell him what was really going on?

He’d been gnawing on this for quite some time when he heard the whisper and rasp of someone sliding across leather. He sensed the warmth of Cade’s body and smelled the combination of brandy, ink, shaving soap, and—annoyingly—just a hint of the lavender used by that girl with the red hair. Or perhaps that was only his imaginings.

“Don’t lie to me,” Cade breathed, barely audible. “I’ll brook the drinking and the thorn and the foolery, and even the tricks onstage, but don’t ever lie to me. Because I’ll always be able to tell, Mieka, always.”

“Same back to you, Quill,” he muttered.

*   *   *

Their first stop in Gallantrybanks was not Redpebble Square, or even Criddow Close. They directed the coachman to Rafe’s house instead, where they were sure Blye would be under the kind care of Mistress Threadchaser.

She wasn’t. She was still at the glassworks.

“I tried! Lord and Lady witness that I tried!” exclaimed Rafe’s mother. “She’d have none of it.”

“She’s working, isn’t she?” Jeska asked. “Trying to make enough to pay off the next part of the loan when it comes due.”

“That she is, day and night. Silly child, I told her she was welcome, that we’d take care of her—”

Mieka didn’t cast a significant glance at Cayden; he’d decided he wasn’t speaking to or even looking at his tregetour until an apology or an explanation occurred, preferably both.

Cade wouldn’t have noticed if Mieka had grabbed him by the shirtfront and shook him. He was swearing in a low, fierce monotone, and went on swearing all the way to Criddow Close. It was something of an education, actually. Mieka had heard most of those words at one time or another, but not strung together this fluently and embellished by fists slammed at intervals against the uncomplaining leather seats. Upon reaching the glassworks, Cade transferred the pounding to its outer door, and the cussing resolved into a single bellow of rage: “Blye!”

A titled lord’s elegant if dust-covered carriage was not the most common sight in Criddow Close. Doors opened all down the narrow street—including the back door of the Silversun residence. But the door of the glassworks and its shop stayed shut. Mieka had just followed Rafe out of the rig when Derien came hurtling up to them, talking so fast that not one word was intelligible. Mistress Mirdley was right behind him, alternating exclamations of relief that they were home with admonitions to Dery.

“We weren’t looking for you until tomorrow—will you
shoosh,
boy!—but it’s a blessing from the Old Gods that you’re here so quick. She’s grieving and worried sick and I don’t know—Master Derien, if you don’t quiet down—”

Rafe caught the boy up in his arms for a hug. “It’s all right, bantling, settle down and breathe. That’s the way.” Over the child’s head, he collected Mieka and Jeska with his gaze. Cayden was still yelling.

The door finally opened, and Blye—dirty, disheveled, hollow-eyed—began screaming right back at Cade. “What d’you think you’re doin’, eh? Shrieking outside my door at this hour! Damn you, Cade, put me down!”

For he had wrapped his arms around her and lifted her right off her feet, just as Rafe had done to Dery. “Why didn’t you send for me when it happened?” he demanded. “I would’ve come home, you know I would’ve come home—”

“Why d’you think I didn’t tell you? Let go of me!”

Rightly judging that this argument would go on for a while, Mieka turned to Mistress Mirdley. “Can you and Dery go get her things?”

“She’s coming back to my house with me,” Rafe added.

Dery wriggled his way down, breathing hard but coherent now. “She wouldn’t let me write to Cade, but after the man came and asked all those questions I knew he had to know and I knew you’d come back and—”

“What man?” Jeska asked, frowning.

Mistress Mirdley looked up at Mieka. “She won’t do it. She won’t leave.”

“Oh yes she will,” he muttered.

He strode past Cade—still holding the struggling, spitting Blye—and into the glassworks. It took him a few moments, but then he saw them on a corner table: a dozen new withies spread out for polishing. Grabbing one, he slid the crimped end up his sleeve, keeping a few inches of it concealed in his palm. Turning on his heel, he went back to the shop, estimated the distance between himself and Blye—back on her own two feet now, and shouting at the top of her lungs, standing too close to Cayden.

Unpolished though the glass twig was, still he sensed the magic she had used to create it, familiar to him by now and comfortable. Comforting. Nothing of Cade’s work was in it, but that it had been fashioned for him was unmistakable. It was as if her thoughts about him while she’d worked, her deep understanding of his character, had imbued the glass. Here was his rigorous intensity, his striving, his passion, his need to be not just better than he was but to be the
best
. Yet there were other things, too, sparkles of humor and recklessness, and an entirely different sort of intensity that was arrogance and uncertainty in the same glints of magic. These things were himself, Mieka realized; Blye’s knowledge of
him
infused the glass as well. None of the others she had made up until now had reached him until Cade had done his own work. Now he could sense what made this withie his just as much as Cade’s. He was swept with affection and gratitude for Blye, and used these emotions as she finally stalked far away enough from Cade for Mieka to do what he knew he must.

Gently, he awakened the withie. Unprimed, untouched by any magic but Blye’s, with nothing inside it he could use as he used onstage, yet it was a conduit just as it always was. Mieka held out his hand, trying to be casual about it, but nobody was looking at him and he could have waved the thing as he pleased. He kept it discreet, though, the magic he used to calm her down. He took nothing from her, not her grief or her anger, and he changed nothing about what she was feeling. What he did was ease feelings, not create them. He gentled her anger and her fear.

It was how he had first figured out he had the makings of a glisker, this ability to affect others. He’d always thought it was his wit, his looks, his charm, his big innocent eyes. But he’d been working people’s emotions on instinct, even though before the withies and his training it had been unfocused and unreliable, quite weak in its effects—especially compared to what he could do now.

Blye stopped yelling. She was shivering a little, arms wrapped around herself rather than waving furiously in the air, but she was calm. Mieka slipped back into the glassworks, replaced the withie, and went back outside in time to see that Cade had wrapped Blye tenderly into his arms and was smoothing her limp blond hair.

Satisfaction put a smile onto Mieka’s face—until he happened to look at Mistress Mirdley. She knew. Muted as the magic had been, she had sensed it. They went on staring at each other as Rafe and Jeska unloaded Cade’s things from the carriage and Lord Fairwalk’s coachman drank gratefully from the huge cup of tea Dery gave him, and at length the Trollwife nodded slowly and Mieka could relax.

Within the half hour, Cade and Rafe had taken Blye off to the Threadchaser home, and Jeska had departed for his own house on foot, grateful to stretch his legs after the long hours in the carriage. Mieka had elected to stay and explain as much as he knew—and discover if he could get explanations for what he didn’t know. Settling in the kitchen with breakfast enough for three piled onto his plate, he cheerfully stuffed himself and between bites, sips, and swallows managed to convey the gist of what Touchstone had decided to do.

“—and that way, we’ll own the glassworks just like your grandsir did, Dery, with our very own crafter working for us—and for a few select friends,” he finished with a wink.

“More tea,” said Mistress Mirdley, and poured from a fresh pot without further comment. She wouldn’t look Mieka in the eyes.

“Do you really think Blye will let you do that?” Derien asked, frowning.

“Well, it’s not just that she hasn’t much other choice. It’s for the best all round, she’ll see that eventually. But it has to be presented to her in just the right way, and I hope your brother isn’t babbling like a blatteroon when she’s in no fit state to hear above one word in ten. It’ll wait for tomorrow or the next day.”

“I can help,” Derien offered. “It was me paid for the post courier, but I’ve still some left of what I’ve saved.”

“What you paid the courier counts as a share in the business,” Mieka told him. “You can be special communications commissioner, and whenever we need to send a letter quick-like, you can arrange it with His Lordship.”

“Whose Lordship?” the boy demanded, wide eyed.

“Lord Kearney Fairwalk.” He grinned as he announced the name and Mistress Mirdley dropped a spoon. “I’m not sure of all the details yet—Cayden had the arranging of it—but he’s to take charge of our bookings, see to the equipment, make sure we have decent lodgings on the road and get paid on time and—”

“So long as it’s understood,” Mistress Mirdley said severely, “that it’s Touchstone he’s working for and not the other way round.”

Derien sniggered. “This is Cade we’re talking of! He’ll see to it, no worries! Who else is going to use Blye’s withies, Mieka?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me about the man with the questions.”

“Thought you’d snag on that,” said the Trollwife. “’Twas the morning after the death, and then again two days after that.”

“Blye didn’t see him, not either time,” Dery contributed. “I was outside waiting for the Good Brother, and Mistress Mirdley was upstairs helping Blye ready her father’s body. It was a lot of questions he had, and thought I was stupid enough to answer.”

“Such an adorable, innocent little boy as you are!” Mieka teased.

“So p’rhaps I don’t need lessons from you after all!” Dery retorted. “He was the stupid one, wearing a cloak to his boot-tops, and hot as the glass kiln outside at not even noon. Did he think nobody’d notice?”

“It’s the foolish arrogance of high nobility,” Mistress Mirdley observed. “Thinking nobody but them has two wits to rub together. It seeps down into their servants as well.”

“What did this man in the cloak want to know?”

“Well, he told me at first he was from the Guild,” Derien said, “but the things he asked, he was lying about that, because the Guild already knows names and merchandise and shipping agreements and all that, don’t they? I asked him if he thought I looked like a business clerk.”

Mieka pretended to examine him head to heels. “No, can’t say you do. There’s a decided lack of ink on your fingers—from lack of doing your schoolwork, no doubt. What else did he say?”

“That he supposed the shop was popular, and did a lot of trade. I told him I wasn’t a tariff inspector, either.”

“Snide child,” Mieka said sorrowfully.

“Cade’s a terrible influence,” Dery agreed. “The second time he came round, Mistress Mirdley and me, we were just setting off to bring Blye something to eat, and there he was in his cloak again.” He paused a moment, brows knitting over a nose that would never even begin to rival his brother’s. “There was a breeze that day, Mieka, and it blew his cloak aside, and he was wearing a dark gray tunic with orange piping. That’s the Archduke’s livery, right? Those colors?”

“You must have mistook it,” Mistress Mirdley said. “Why would the Archduke be interested in a glassworks?”

“I told you before, I didn’t make a mistake!” Dery exclaimed, shoulders stiffening in the same stubborn way Cade’s did. “I know what I saw!”

Mieka had by this time lost all impulse to laughter. He chewed his lip, trying to add a proposed purchase of the Shadowshapers to an inquisitiveness about a glassworks whose owner had just died. He couldn’t do the sum without more information, but he was in no doubt he wouldn’t like the total.

“I believe you, Dery,” he said. “I’ll tell you why when Cade gets back. But I do believe you. It was quick of you to notice.”

Derien accept this with dignity, but couldn’t repress a
See? Told you!
glance for Mistress Mirdley. She harrumphed with a sound like a blocked drain.

“Time you got some ink onto those fingers, isn’t it?” she asked pointedly. “Unless you want another scold. How many would that make this week?” When he had slumped off to his neglected work, she turned to Mieka. “That was a kind and gentle thing you did for her. But I hope you have a care with it, boy.”

He didn’t pretend ignorance. “I don’t use it like that—not often, anyway. Truly.”

“It was soft enough that no one else suspects. Make sure no one ever does. Onstage is one thing. It makes you good at what you do. Off … it makes you dangerous, and you know it.”

Which was precisely why he didn’t use it. Not often, anyway.

Chapter 16