Touchstone (8 page)

Jeska packed up the scuffed leather portfolio where he kept his charts, saying, “I can’t stop. Make my apologies to Mistress Threadchaser, if you would. And I’ll have to meet you at the Downstreet—I’ve accounts to be totted before supper.” As difficult as he found reading, arithmetic came as simply to him as breathing. Jeska supplemented his mother’s always shaky finances by keeping the books for a dozen local businesses.

“Our duty to your mum,” Rafe said. He had very pretty manners.

“Travel safe,” Cade added, and when Jeska had left the sitting room turned again to his fettler. “You really do look worn out. Are you sure he fits?”

“Even boots made to measure start out a little stiff. But he knows what he’s doing, and what’s better,
I
know what he’s doing. It’ll come right, Cade, stop fretting.”

Nodding once more, he pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll bring in the tea.”

He knocked politely on the kitchen door—Mistress Mirdley had more than once threatened to smack his bottom for startling her at her work. The day she’d carried through on the threat had given him the biggest surprise of his life. There had been a napkinful of sweets on his pillow that night by way of apology, but he had never again forgotten to knock.

No one answered from the other side of the kitchen door, and as he listened carefully he understood why. Mieka was talking. Did Mieka ever stop talking?

“—shoulda seen me fa’s great-auntie, ears like big floppy bat wings—took all four brothers and a sister or two to hold her down in a spring breeze or she’d take flight! Mum was horrid scared I’d turn out the same, but it appears I got the best of all things Elfen,” he finished without a trace of conceit. Only stating the facts.

“And there are eight of you? Mercy!” exclaimed Mistress Threadchaser.

“Eight,” the Elf confirmed, “and no two sets like another. My older brothers, they’re all Human, down to the last curly red hair. Six foot five, shoulders like cannon mounts, no more magic in them than can stir the soup—which neither of ’em can bring to a boil. Not that it’s so unusual in our family—not much Fire Elf, we’re none of us very good at that sort of thing. But the Air and Earth and Water, my younger sisters got those and those only. They look like the Greenseed line, mostly—or so Fa says. For a while they were hoping they’d top five feet, but that’s not gonna happen, not in this lifetime. White hair at twelve years old, eyes almost black, and a set of teeth on each of them that’d gnaw through a tree trunk in a twitch of a wyvern’s tail. Ears like the sails on a schooner, too,” he added, and Cade could hear the smirk. “Mum found a chirurgeon—a good, careful one, mind—to refine them just a bit, and take care of the teeth. Me an’ Jinsie, though, we got the best of the Elf and the best of the Human, with a bit of Wizard and a dash of Sprite for spice.”

Blye asked, “She’s your twin sister, and that much alike?”

“Mirror image, almost. She’s not quite as pretty as me, though! Twins aren’t usual with Elfenfolk, of course, but it’s the clue we’ve some Piksey knockin’ about somewhere, and makin’ quite a racket with it, too. They whelp twins as an iron-bound rule. The new little mites, they’re only two years old, a boy and a girl—and it looks as if the one’s pretty much Water Elf from the Staindrop and Stormchill lines, and the other’s anybody’s guess, ’cept he’s determined to grow up to be a dragon!”

As Mieka paused for breath and the ladies laughed, Cade knocked again. Invited to enter, he found the coziest imaginable domestic scene: Mistress Threadchaser in a big cushioned chair by the blazing hearth, Blye in the matching armchair opposite her, and Mieka hunched on a low wooden stool between, two pottery bowls at his feet and one in his lap as he shelled walnuts. He looked up as Cade entered, and his hair shifted around his pointed Elfen ears, and a wide smile revealed white, square, very Human teeth.

“Quill! There you are! Hunger finally got the best of you, then?”

“Oh, good Lady have mercy on us,” Mistress Threadchaser cried with a quick glance at the clicking clock on the sideboard. “It’s gone five and you poor things must be starved! Here, I’ll take care of those later,” she said to Mieka, who shook his head.

“I finish what I begin.” He twirled a finger above the bowl on his knees, and a little whirlwind surged upwards, emitting a series of sharp cracks. Then the blur split in two and descended neatly to the bowl of nuts and the bowl of shells. Beaming, Mieka looked about for approval—just as a last walnut hurtled from the bowl in his lap and struck him right in the nose.

Cade laughed at him. Mistress Threadchaser asked anxiously if he was all right. Blye, however, sat back in her chair and frowned.

Cade asked her about that later, after they’d devoured the usual lavish and excellent tea and were carrying his crated glass baskets to the Downstreet.

“Bit of a jester, isn’t he?” she murmured. “I mean, look at him.”

Mieka was loping along beside Rafe, who had livened up considerably after his mother’s cakes, fruit breads, and sausage salad. Usually he was quietly self-possessed before a performance; Cade had expected him to be completely silent, in fact, on their way to this oh-so-important booking. But Rafe was trading quips with Mieka, laughing, even snatching the cap off his head and holding it high out of the Elf’s reach to tease him.

“Why didn’t he crack the walnuts by magic in the first place?” Blye went on. “If he’d got finished faster, maybe Mistress Threadchaser had something else she wanted done.”

Cade eyed her sidelong. “You don’t like him, do you.”

“I like him fine. He’s funny, he’s a charmer, and he’s no chore to look at, that’s for certain sure.”

“P’rhaps a little
too
much the charmer?” he guessed. “Did he pay you a compliment you didn’t believe? Not that you ever believe a compliment.” Her blush told him all he needed to know. “Leave off, Blye, he’s just a puppy, all excited and wriggly over joining us, wanting to show off a bit. It’s the player in him.”

“That remembers me, Cade—on the walk over, when he wasn’t asking questions about you, he was trying to figure a name for the group. I’m hopeless, I’ve no imagination to speak of, but he wasn’t doing much better.”

“Something will occur to us,” he replied. “What kind of questions?”

“Oh, just things,” she evaded. “He’s not very subtle. That last walnut, for instance—it was on purpose. Didn’t you notice?”

“He did it to get a laugh? What’s wrong with that?”

“As I said. Look at him—a clown.”

“He was really good with ‘Silver Mine,’ y’know,” Cade told her quietly. “There’s thought in him, and honesty. He’s more than a clown. You’ll see that tonight.”

“P’rhaps. But the ‘Princess’ isn’t exactly grand tragedy, is it? And are you sure he won’t make
that
into a farce, the way you say he does the ‘Sailor’?”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

She arched her brows eloquently, but said nothing more.

“Cade!” Mieka had danced back towards them, his moss-green cap stowed in his pocket where Rafe couldn’t get at it again. “We still need a name. There’s a group over the North End goes by Wishcallers, and somebody else that thinks if they’re lucky they’ll get mistaken for the Shadowshapers by naming themselves the Smokecatchers.” His nose wrinkled with disdain. “We need a contrast, I think, don’t you?”

“Good idea,” Blye said. “So that nobody thinks you’re trying to imitate anybody. Something solid. Rock, brick, stone—”

“Brickballs,” Mieka offered, grinning.

“Brickbrains,” she tossed back at him.

Rafe had paused to let them catch him up, and contributed dryly, “Pebblebrains, more like.”

“What about ‘stone’ something, or something ‘stone’?” Blye asked. “Keystones?”

“Not bad,” Rafe allowed. “Nice imagery—a bit nervy, implying we’re the ones holding everything together—”

“—when it’s really only you, O Great Fettler?” Mieka scampered ahead, then turned and walked backwards so he could talk to them. “Lodestones. Nobody can resist us, we’ll draw them in like magnets!”

Cade wanted to join in their banter, but a slither of a chill down his backbone caught him unawares.

“Lodestars? No,” Blye decided at once. “You’re none of you Fire Clan, and they’re touchy about who thinks to associate with them.”

Mieka was scowling. “Stone … Stonesmiths—I hate it. Stoneciphers? Hewstones? Whetstones? Even worse. Come on, Quill, you’re the wordsmith!”

“Headstones—everybody needs one eventually,” Rafe said.

Mieka began a mocking singsong. “Limestones, Sandstones, Gemstones, Cornerstones—”

“No!”

The protest burst out of his mouth before he could remember why it was the worst word in the lexicon. As they stared at him, he lost track of where he was and even who he was, and he was back in the dim, run-down tavern listening to someone called Tobalt say,
“When the Cornerstones lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”

“Quill?”

Soft voice, worried and even a little frightened. Gentle touch on his shoulder. He looked down into those eyes and if the glass baskets hadn’t been cradled in his arms, he would have grasped Mieka with both hands, to keep him here and safe and alive—

“Cade, what is it?” Rafe’s deep voice, raspy with concern.

“Back away,” said Blye. “Let him breathe.”

She knew. Of course she knew. But he couldn’t look away from the Elf, the Elf he would one day lose, and with him his soul, and he would go cold inside and heartless and cruel, he knew it, he knew those things were inside him and if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t do everything exactly right, if he made even one wrong choice—Sagemaster Emmot had told him that very first night, hadn’t he, told him what a ruthless decision it was to leave home and friends to seek magic, a decision Cayden had made without a single qualm—

“Cade!” Blye had pushed Mieka aside and was gripping Cade’s face between her hands. She snarled over her shoulder as Mieka protested, and swept the sweat-damp hair from Cade’s face. “Are you back?” she asked in a low voice. “Have you come back?”

He nodded and caught his breath. “Yes,” he muttered, looking into her dark eyes that were so wonderfully familiar—eyes that didn’t compel feelings he couldn’t put names to.

“What just happened?” Mieka demanded. “Quill, what does she mean, ‘Are you back?’ Back from where?”

“Leave it,” Rafe said. “Come on, we’ve a show to do. Come
on,
Mieka!”

Blye asked him exactly nothing during the rest of the walk to the Downstreet. He could only imagine what must have been on his face, in his eyes, during the turn, as Master Emmot had always called such things.
“Turns your brain right round inside your skull, doesn’t it? Not to be mistaken for the kind of ‘turn’ a lady succumbs to when the fit of her corset is too tight—although it’s rather like the fit of your thoughts is too tight, isn’t it?”

Too many thoughts. Too many feelings. Too many memories that weren’t, but might be—and all of it so huge that his mind couldn’t sort it without reasoned reflection, which the Sagemaster had taught him to do and which he had unwisely neglected to do since the dreaming about that derelict tavern.

In the few minutes remaining to him before the most important performance of his life thus far, he tried to run through the basic exercise of organizing the separate elements of the vision.

Hopeless; all he could think about was Mieka.

As he paused for a deep breath before walking up a short flight of steps to the Downstreet’s back door, he decided his instincts were correct. Mieka
was
the crucial element. From him—from losing him—all else would come. Cade didn’t know how they had lost the Elf, or when, or why. But he could change things. He knew he was young, that he’d had scant experience adjusting the futures he’d seen in his dreamings. But he had made choices, conscious choices, to avoid futures he feared. He blinked at the darkness in the back hallway of the tavern, and Blye’s hand on his elbow guided him towards the stage and the knee-high wooden riser where the glass baskets had to be arranged for the show. She helped him with the crates, still not questioning him. Good of her to choose not to pester him …

And then he realized that he had come to a point in his life where futures depended not just on his own choices, but on those made by others as well. He had to reckon on their desire to change things—or to change themselves. He would be at the mercy of their decisions.

This was no scene he was writing, no playlet where he could decide who did what. He could not control this. He knew that. He also knew himself well enough to know that however useless it might be, he would make the attempt.

Blye had disappeared, presumably to find a drink and a seat someplace where she wouldn’t be noticed. It occurred to Cade to wonder if she was the wife Tobalt had mentioned. No. Impossible. Blye would never leave him.

“Cade, we’re about ready.”

Rafe was there, stacking the padded crates out of the way. He asked no questions, even though he had known Cade long enough to recognize a turn when he saw it. Jeska hopped up onto the glisker’s little platform, unaware of what had happened on the walk over. He rubbed Cade’s shoulder affectionately, smiled at Rafe, and jumped down again to take his place center stage, eager to begin. And then Mieka was there, pushing the glisker’s bench forward, setting the baskets on it, swaying and reaching as if already at work, making adjustments until satisfied. He didn’t look at Cade as he stepped back, and instead addressed Rafe.

“See what I mean about the roof timbers?”

“Play to the right, you said. But the bar’s at an angle back there, and I don’t want to bust any glasses before I get the feel of the bounce.”

“Break as many as you like,” Cade heard himself say. “Shatter them to splinters.”

“Are you insane?” Mieka gasped.

“I won’t have it get round that I’m a fettler who lost control of his glisker’s magic,” Rafe growled.

“That’s the last thing anyone will say about you,” Cade told him, meeting his eyes. He still couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Mieka. “Because you’re going to make it obvious that you did it deliberately. Word will get round, right enough—that we’ve a strength and a power no one can match.”