Window Wall (11 page)

“Yes,” the Princess was saying, “I’m only a half-sister, and we look nothing alike except for our eyes—that’s Father, and all of us have his eyes. So do my children. And so will Ilesko’s,” she said, fondly teasing, “if he ever finds a girl who suits him to becoming their mother!”

“Is that what brings you to Albeyn?” Rafe asked. “Apart from visiting Her Royal Highness, and finding comfort in your mutual grief, that is.”

“A girl from this place?”

The young man did not elaborate on his obvious distaste, for Miriuzca swiftly interrupted with, “I’ve warned all my ladies not to lose their hearts to him, Master Threadchaser.”

Cade watched the Tregrefin’s lip curl before a smile was forced to the corners of his mouth. So: he did not like the ladies of Albeyn. He probably did not like the gentlemen of Albeyn, either, nor Albeyn as a whole. Why, then, was he here? Surely not to console Miriuzca. Anyone less likely to provide solace in her sorrow could not be imagined. Well, her husband, perhaps—but Cade knew himself to be prejudiced.

The sweet was served. Some whimsical pastry cook had concocted two towers of cake on either side of a river of blue frosting meant to represent the Keeps and the Gally. Windows were picked out in candied fruit, and the green whipped-cream lawns were dotted with yellow and purple sugar sprinkles representing flowers. How they were to eat this elaborate creation was beyond Cade but, perhaps predictably, not beyond Mieka. He snatched up a knife and decapitated one of the towers, placing it on Miriuzca’s plate, then lopped off the top of the other one for her brother.

And at that point, the Elsewhen shrieked at Cade, breaking through the chinks of doubt. A hundred screaming voices; a feeling of horrible panic; the crashing of stone onto stone and into deep water; the smells of fire and the smoke of black powder exploding—

No! I won’t! Leave me alone!

He recovered himself and glanced quickly around him. Everyone was laughing at the way Mieka was carving up the Keeps. No one was paying any attention to Cade. It hadn’t been a full-on Elsewhen, but all the same it left him with a taste of sick dread in his mouth, and when Mieka offered him a plate of cake and frosting and candies and whipped cream, he thought that he’d vomit.

“My brother,” Miriuzca said, “brought with him people who will interest you. They are players in the theater, from—where are they from, Ilesko?”

Cade swallowed wine and commanded himself to pay attention. The word that answered the Princess’s question might have been anything. He didn’t recognize it, couldn’t even sort out its syllables in his head. Derien would have known, he told himself. Derien, who loved maps and knew more about where Touchstone had been on the Continent than Touchstone did. If anyone found out what Derien’s magic could do, he’d be seeing all those places and dozens more on a quest for gold. Could an Elsewhen warn Cayden about who might have designs on his adored little brother? He repressed a shiver.

“Will they be performing for the Court?” Jeska asked politely.

“I think yes,” the Tregrefin said. “Plays differ here. Not only the making and doing, but the meaning.”

“Indeed? May one ask how they differ from what we perform?”

“No magic, of course.”

Cade understood then the source of his stiffness, his disapproval. He ought to have known. Miriuzca had taken a while to become accustomed to the magic practiced every day in her new country—but she was used to it by now and more than used to it, for had she not given Blye the Gift of the Gloves, signifying her Royal patronage? All at once he wondered when, if ever, Miriuzca would ask him to seal the little glass box Blye had made and he had given her back in her own country, a box to hold a keepsake safe forever.

With that thought, another Elsewhen hammered at him. He escaped most of it, but for a quick vision of that glass box gleaming at its edges with magic, and a tiny lock of golden hair, tied with a forget-me-never blue ribbon, inside.

Mieka was saying, “D’you know, back when we were in Vathis, a boy tried to steal one of our withies—thought it would give him the magic he needed to be a player.” He sighed sadly. “It’s there or it’s not, and there’s no stealing it.”

“But how do they manage?” Rafe asked. “Without magic to set the place and feel of the thing—?”

“Words,” Cade said. “They do it all with words.”

“But
how
?”

“Beautiful words,” the Tregrefin agreed. “Words to honor the Lord and the Lady. Words of faith. Words to say that right is right and wrongness is wrongness.”

And magic, Cade assumed, was a wrongness. “I’ll be interested to see them perform,” he said, meaning it more than the young man could ever know.

Ilesko took that as encouragement to elaborate. “Words to make mind again of truth. All are birthed with—” He broke off, asked his sister something in their language, and nodded his gratitude when she replied. “All are birthed with inborn bent to sin. Sometimes one, sometimes many. No escaping from inborn sin.”

Cade had never heard anything so sad in his life. He didn’t think much about religion; he went to Chapel when he couldn’t avoid it, and knew all the stories from the
Consecreations
, but the subject wasn’t anything that took up long hours of sleeplessness. Lord and Lady, Angels, Old Gods—people believed as it suited their characters and lineages. But nobody talked about innocent children being born not so innocent at all, children born with inherent sin that they could never escape.

A swift look at Mieka and Rafe showed him that they weren’t exactly charmed by that notion, either. Jeska went on smiling slightly, nodding slightly, thoughts and feelings hidden behind his beautiful golden face.

“Plays,” concluded Ilesko, “are for showing the sin, and how it is punished, and what to do for the earning forgiveness.”

Miriuzca was looking a little desperate. Cade imitated Jeska, knowing the smile to be infinitely less effective on his infinitely less beautiful face, and said, “Our theater was once much the same, you know. Plays were made to encourage people to behave honorably towards each other, and to educate them about history, and the ways of the Lord and the Lady and Angels and Old Gods—”

“That is a very great wrongness,” Ilesko interrupted severely. “There is the Lord and there is the Lady and that is all. The other things—they do not matter. They do not exist.” He turned to his sister, who looked uncomfortable. “You are now believing these things that you should not.”

“It is the custom of Albeyn, which is now my home,” she said with simple dignity. “And in Albeyn the theater has expanded beyond plays about morality, and now a tregetour can write about anything. Is this not so, Master Silversun?”

“Your Royal Highness is perfectly correct. Theater has and indeed must move on from the traditional plays, and explore whatevery person thinks and feels. Has Your Royal Highness ever seen the Shadowshapers’ play, ‘A Life in a Day’?”

“Oh, yes!”

The more she praised it, the less her brother liked it.

Jeska explained the difficulties of having two masquers onstage at once, and how it complicated the work of the glisker and fettler; Rafe expressed himself grateful that Cade and Jeska were too much the individualists to permit more than one tregetour or more than one masquer into Touchstone’s plays, because he and Mieka had enough trouble with the pair of them as it was.

“How many masquers appear in plays on the Continent?” Rafe asked.

“For the play they perform, five.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “A learned man named Vaustas, a nobleman and his wife, and the Lord and the Lady.”

Rafe grinned across the table at Mieka. “You hear that? Five of them onstage!”

The Elf gave an exaggerated shudder. “I’m good, but nobody’s
that
good! I’d get so confused, I’d dress the nobleman in a ball gown and his wife in full armor!”

“The Lord would have long blond curls and a feathered fan,” Cade said deliberately, unsurprised to see the Tregrefin’s flinch of disgust.

“And the scholar would smell of the stables!” Miriuzca laughed.

“The masquers,” the Tregrefin said humorlessly, “do not become confused. They are knowing the importance of their roles and the words.”

“
All
done with words.” Rafe sighed. “Well, Mieka, that’s us out of work!”

The Tregrefin looked as if he thought that would not be a tragic turn of events.

By the time a last round of tea was served, Cade considered that he had the boy’s measure. Snobbishly confident, self-righteous in the way only an eighteen-year-old could be (from the vantage point of his twenty-four years, Cade was honest enough to admit that he was living in the skin of the perfect priggish pattern for this attitude); pious, and militant in his piety; wary of magic, and giving Mieka’s ears many nervous sidelong glances. Condescension and disapproval competed to a standstill on his dark face. Cade wondered suddenly if the Tregrefin had met Princess Iamina yet.

Miriuzca turned her face to the spring sunlight and smiled. “I so enjoy Seekhaven,” she said. “Not as formal as the Palace or even the Keeps. Though it’s fun to be there on tour days.”

When her brother looked blank and baffled, Rafe said, “There are days for schoolchildren to visit, and days when the Keeps are open to the public.” He smiled over at Cade. “Site of our first foray into theater, wouldn’t you say?”

“I never looked at it like that before, but you’re right!” He laughed—it felt good and genuine to laugh. “We escaped our teachers and ran up and down the halls and stairways—the Keeps have a lot of stairways!—battling horrible monsters who had a beautiful princess captive high in the tower. Twigs broken from bushes in the garden made lovely swords. We made it almost to the top before some guards caught us. But seeing as how we were only ten or eleven at the time, we weren’t clapped in irons and tossed into the dungeons.”

“So your kind of theater is a pastime for children?” asked the Tregrefin.

Cade considered being insulted, but then realized that the boy hadn’t the wit to disguise this rudeness in a seemingly innocent request for information. So he smiled amiably and replied, “Only now that we’re all grown up, we use withies instead of swords, and the monsters are made of magic as well as imagination.”

“Though of course,” Jeska put in, “they couldn’t have imagined a princess so beautiful as the one Albeyn was lucky enough to welcome four years ago.”

Miriuzca laughed. “If I am needing rescue from monsters, I know who to call on!”

Later, on the walk back to the Shadowstone Inn, Rafe muttered, “Our sort of theater is for children—bah! I’d like to see him call it that once he sees our ‘Dragon’! Adorable little naffter, isn’t he?”

Cade shrugged. “Well, you know what they say. The firstborn son gets everything the father owns, and the only thing the others get is a choice of clothing.”

“Clothing?” Jeska asked. “What would clothes have to do with it?”

“A bright, pretty uniform with gold braid, a gray cassock with a pair of bracelets, or plain trousers knee-deep in cow shit.”

“Soldier, Good Brother, or farmer,” Rafe explained further.

“You might have said so,” Jeska complained.

“State it plain, like?” Mieka snorted. “A tregetour?” When Cade turned down the wrong street for the Shadowstone, he called out, “Oy! Where are you off to?”

“Same place as you. Unless you think we worked out all the rusty lines and creaky transitions after only one rehearsal.” Cade laughed as the three of them moaned. “I signed us up for teatime to dinnertime. Nobody else wanted the hours at the rehearsal hall. Mistress Luta is bringing our folios and a bagful of withies, bless her.”

“I hate you.” Mieka stalked past, scowling.

“You’ll get over it.”

B
altryn Knolltread, an apprentice Steward about thirty years old, smiled all over his broad freckled face as he welcomed them to the rehearsal hall.

“When I saw that Touchstone were asking for more time here, I says to meself, ‘Touchstone might be putting together something new,’ I says. Now, I won’t be telling a soul, but I couldn’t be passing up the chance to see it first!”

“Sorry, nothing special happening,” Mieka told him. They’d got to know Baltryn last year, when Touchstone’s unquestioned excellence had brought the invitation from the Stewards:
Help us train up the new ones by giving them a challenge
. Rafe and Mieka had had a fine old time throwing all sorts of wild and weird magic at the man, who handled it all with aplomb. Baltryn and others like him were in charge of the keys to the rehearsal hall, and sometimes stayed to watch—either from interest, friendship, or caution, if a group was new and inexperienced and needed monitoring.

Rafe greeted him with a genial smile. “How’s the family?”

“The bigger and happier this year by a wee girlie. The wife’s dark skin, praise be, but my ears!”

Mieka laughed. “Are you sure she didn’t get your freckles and they just merged all together?”

“To keep each other company, like?” Knolltread grinned and shook his head. “You do have the oddest notions sometimes.”

“Well, if she has your ears, then mayhap she’ll have your gift as well, and grow up to be a Steward, just like her father.”