Window Wall (32 page)

Webstitch hung back a little, putting a hand on Cade’s arm. “A small word, if you please,” he said.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”

“You realize why His Lordship is here, and not in Gallybanks?”

“Directing the pack-up of things for the new Gallery, I’d imagine.”

“I suppose that would do as an excuse. But listen here, Master Silversun. In tracking His Lordship down, I found he’d spent a night at Threne before traveling at speed here to Eyot. In time to catch you here, I’m thinking.”

Cade said mildly, “Noblemen pay visits to each other all the time.”

“’Twasn’t just the usual, or so says my wife’s cousin, His Lordship’s Master of Horse. It seems the pair of them had long and private talk, and His Lordship came away with a locked case made of green leather, kept with him at all times on the way here. Had it tied close to his knee while in the saddle, and at his side while he slept.”

“That sounds important,” was all Cade could think of to say.

“That it does. And here’s another oddity as got mentioned to me yesternight by my good girl’s cousin, after word of your glisker’s misadventure. In the courtyard at Threne, the Archduke bade His Lordship farewell, and was heard to say Master Windthistle’s name. Not the names of his brothers, who are doing so much work on the Gallery, nor of his brother’s wife, the glasscrafter. ‘Mieka Windthistle’ was the name the Archduke spoke. His Lordship patted the case at his knee and smiled.”

Cade wanted to cringe. Everyone in the castle and probably the village and ten miles beyond it must know what had happened to Mieka yesterday. On the other hand, if no one had gossiped about it, Captain Webstitch wouldn’t have been told about the locked case—all too obviously supplied with thorn meant for Mieka. Cade expressed his gratitude to the captain, and on their way downstairs said, “I do wonder, though, that he took the trouble to provide something that must be very expensive. The Archduke, I mean. Demon Teeth, it’s called. Isn’t it from somewhere quite far away?”

Webstitch nearly lost his footing on the spiral stone stairs. “Is
that
what it was? By all the Gods in the Briny Deep, that lad’s lucky to be breathing!”

“It’s like Dragon Tears, isn’t it? Only not dangerous to Elves.”
Just stupid, easily bored Elves with overactive imaginations
, he reflected sourly.

“Who told you that? It’s dangerous to anybody and everybody. ’Tis not the first taste, nor the second, that binds a man. But by the third, he’ll sell his own wife and daughters to the nearest whorehouse for money to buy the fourth.”

“Why would anybody want to prick that sort of thorn even a
first
time?”

The answer was so close to what he’d just been thinking that he winced. “Because,” said Captain Webstitch, “not excluding bored young lordlings with more money than sense, stupidity is in my experience the commonest failing of any race—Human, Wizard, Elf, Goblin, Gnome, and all the rest, and any combination of any or all of them.”

Cade lay awake half the night thinking about it. This was the second time someone connected to the Archduke had provided Mieka with treacherous thorn. The first had been Pirro Spangler of Black Lightning—and Mieka had pricked what Pirro had given him in this very castle. Cade struggled to recall whether the Archduke had already bought and paid for Black Lightning at the time, or whether they had simply been trying to impress him, then decided it didn’t matter. This time it was pretty clear. A locked case, with whatever was inside meant for Mieka Windthistle, and the grim results yesterday—yes, it added up.

He spent quite a while silently cursing Mieka for being so reckless. The mad little Elf hadn’t the slightest acquaintance with anything resembling caution. But if he had, he wouldn’t be Mieka. Cade had concluded years ago that pushing him to change was an invariably doomed effort. All one could do was work him into a position where he could see for himself, the way Cade had done on the visit to Ginnel House. Left to himself, he might have kept his promise never to hit his wife again, but seeing those terrified, battered women and children at Ginnel House made certain of it.

And that led him to what Mieka had said about his wife—thorned to the tips of his ears, of course, so it wasn’t entirely to be trusted—but could money and position have motivated her? Had she really been angling to become Prince Ashgar’s mistress? He could have named a dozen kings, princes, grand dukes, and other noblemen whose relationships with their official mistresses had furnished the stories for a dozen plays and twice that number of poems and songs. He just couldn’t see Mieka’s wife casting herself in a similar plotline. For one thing, she did truly love Mieka—

—which hadn’t prevented her from groping Cade’s crotch at the races.

Well, she wasn’t his problem, he told himself. Except that she
was
, because she was Mieka’s wife and Jindra’s mother. Leaving aside the havoc she might wreak on his glisker, Cade was aware of an odd anxiety whenever he thought about Jindra. She seemed happy and healthy, and in all respects was a darling. His unease was probably the aftermath of an Elsewhen, he told himself, accepting at last that he had been a rank fool and a craven coward to have purposely forgotten all of them.

Of those Elsewhens, there remained what amounted almost to a compulsion to protect Jindra from her own parents. The Gods alone knew what her mother might have in mind, but at least this little episode at Castle Eyot had crossed off the list of Mieka’s possible stupidities a potential addiction to Demon Teeth. Not that there weren’t scores of other things he could prick into his arms, and scores more mistakes he could make.

Someone had said something to him once, long ago, when he’d known Mieka less than two days. The wagon driver who’d taken them all back to Gallybanks … what had he said?
“You’d do well to keep him, in spite of the trouble he’ll be to you.”
Cade fell asleep cataloging all the separate and distinct sorts of trouble Mieka had caused. But when he met his partners downstairs for breakfast before climbing into the wagon for the drive to Bexmarket, one smile, one burst of laughter, one joke, and Cade realized yet again what he’d known for years now: that Touchstone would never have become Touchstone without their mad little Elf.

And that was why the Archduke had chosen Mieka. Cade heard someone say in a memory, or a memory of an Elsewhen, he couldn’t be sure:
“When Touchstone lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”
Cade himself was their brain, thinking up the words. Jeska was their heart, giving voice and feeling to those words. As for Rafe—he was their conscience, ever watchful. And Mieka, dancing behind his glass baskets, weaving Cade’s magic with his own, giving everything of himself night after night—yes, Mieka was their soul.

Towards morning he had dreamed that he was in the clock room at Castle Eyot. The hour struck on hundreds of clocks at once, ticking, whirring, thumping, chiming, whistling, tapping, ringing—like the pulse beats and the mocking laughter of spiteful beings that scorned all those persons, with magic or without it, who lived in the real world.
This
life, and none other—not the haughty hidden lives of the Fae, or the despised and shunned Gorgons or grinning bloodthirsty Redcaps or any of the malicious races who begrudged all others the freedom of the light. Cade had woken himself with his own voice—not that what he said made any sense. What he muttered, just as the sun rose, was, “The window is out of time.”

Lounging in his hammock while the wagon rolled smartly towards Bexmarket, he wondered what his mind was trying to tell him about that dream and the new piece, the one about the boy trapped in the room with a window on one wall. What did clocks have to do with anything, other than telling and tolling the time? Was it a warning that he ought to hurry and write this new play? He knew he had interesting and mayhap even important things to say in it, but was there any reason he should rush to write it? Was he treating an honest dream, one that came while sleeping like the dreams other people had, the way he would have examined an Elsewhen?

The boy in the room with the window wall, separated from life and magic … Vaustas, sheltering in the safety of books, rejecting his own magic …
“You’ll figure something out. ’Cause they’re you, Quill.”
Damn the Elf for his perception. But he hadn’t got to the very core of it: Through that window, the boy saw other people who never saw him. Denying magic, Vaustas’s soul was a stunted, ungrown thing. Denied life and magic, the boy was invisible.

He wished suddenly, passionately, for an Elsewhen that would show him how “Window Wall” ended. “The Avowal”—which, oddly enough, they had yet to do onstage—had come straight out of an Elsewhen of a performance. Why couldn’t “Window Wall” do the same?

Yet the Elsewhens, it became clear to him on their arrival in Bexmarket, were not to be relied on for warnings about the future. If they could be, he wouldn’t have been so thoroughly gobsmacked when they encountered the Shadowshapers after Touchstone’s last performance at the Smithing Guildhall. And even then, it wasn’t that the Shadowshapers were in Bexmarket, on their way to a series of lucrative giggings in New Halt and points north. It was what Vered and Rauel and Chat and even Sakary told them about over drinks late that night.

“You hadn’t heard?” Rauel asked, eyes wide with innocence—
too
wide, Cayden thought, frowning slightly, aware that whatever came next would in all likelihood be something he’d have to force himself to laugh at.

He was right.

Black Lightning had a new playlet. Not even a playlet, actually, for there was nothing even remotely resembling a plot. It involved the frustrated efforts of a tiny Elf with huge floppy ears to kiss an immensely tall, extremely skinny Wizard with a huge nose. There was much capering about on chairs and tables and stepladders, and attempts by the Wizard to fold his gangly limbs so that he was an approachable height, and snippy dialogue about the nose and the ears getting in their way, and a speech from the Wizard about being unable to find any girl willing to bed him because he’s so ugly which ended with, “What’s a man to do when he’s in need of a lick and a tickle?” Things became truly obscene from that point, and the Shadowshapers kindly spared them the details.

The Elf and the Wizard were, of course, unmistakable.

Cade knew where the thing had come from. Mieka’s famous adventures dressed in women’s clothing had provided a start—and Touchstone on occasion repeated the before-performance scene of Mieka showing up late and swanning up to the stage in voluminous skirts while Cade berated him. Audiences loved it. And then there was the little farce he and Mieka had played for the overly amorous young lady in Scatterseed. Her father might have talked about it; she undoubtedly had done, to excuse her failure in attracting Mieka to her bed. Cade knew she had talked because a fortnight or so ago he’d received a letter from Blye, playfully demanding to know when she ought to craft the loving cups for the wedding, and chastising him for breaking so many female hearts. It was a very funny letter, and he’d laughed when he read it to his partners.

He laughed now, too. So did everybody else. Mieka blew him a kiss that Cade pretended to catch in his two hands and press, sighing, to his heart. And thus the evening ended, with everyone pleasantly drunk and singing an old ballad on the walk back to their respective wagons.

It was only when they were alone that Cade felt he could vent his disgust. “Black
fucking
Lightning,” he muttered as he hooked his hammock up for the night.

Jeska snorted. “Don’t tell me you give a shit?”

Mieka turned from the cabinet where the blankets were stored. “But I owe them such a great debt!” he exclaimed. “They’ve managed to get the message across! Gods know
I’ve
never been able to!”

“Aw, poor little Elf,” Rafe said, patting him on the head.

“Oh, give over!” Cade snapped. “It’s not
you
getting laughed at, is it?”

“Yes it is too!” Mieka declared. “I can’t blame you for being a trifle peeved by the description of your nose, but
I’m
the one who was grossly insulted.”

“How do you reckon?” Jeska asked.

He flourished a finger at the tip of one ear. “How could anyone think that these ears aren’t absolutely
perfect
specimens of Elfenhood?”

They all grinned at him. He stroked the tips of both ears with admiring fingers, then delved into the cabinet for the velvet bag of withies. He picked through it for a moment, then came up with a long, slender glass twig colored a faint green.

“I think
we
ought to do a playlet,” he announced, holding the withie at arm’s length and pointing it at himself. “Prominently featuring someone we all know.” Whatever magic was left in it after the night’s performance was enough to give him the semblance of Thierin Knottinger: tall, thin, dark, sneering. “And what
we
show the audience will be the truth!”

Wearing Thierin’s sharp-boned face and prominently displayed crotch, he frowned elaborately, wriggled like a puppy, and with his free hand undid a few trouser buttons. From his—Thierin’s—crotch he produced a pair of balled-up stockings. And another. Letting them drop to the floor of the wagon, he twisted again, reached, and drew a shirt from his groin. And a towel. When Mieka gave another spasming squirm and began to pull a sheet from his pants, Cade simply gave up and collapsed onto the floor beside Rafe and Jeska, howling with laughter. Their mad little Elf had done it to them again.

He didn’t dream that night, but a few minutes after waking in the morning, an Elsewhen took him completely by surprise.

{ Cade stretched out across the seat of the carriage, boots propped against the closed window and head resting on a green velvet cushion. Pleasantly tired, still thrumming inside with the triumph of
Window Wall
, he squinted in the dimness at Mieka, sprawled in the opposite seat. Despite the lines crossing his forehead and framing his mouth, and even despite the silver in his black hair, he looked at least fifteen years younger than his age. Cade, who daily glared at his receding hairline, glared now at the Elf.