Window Wall (45 page)

Ah well. At least
I
don’t have to live here
, Mieka told himself.

Cade paused at the foot of the stairs, waiting for a gray-suited functionary to descend. Orange braid at the neck and cuffs of his jacket, and the quality of the gray material, identified him as an upper servant, but a servant just the same. Persons more important would not be wearing a variation on the Archducal livery. Their servitude would be shown in more subtle ways.

Mieka once more slid the withie into his hand, but it was unnecessary. The servant escorted them up the stairs (Mieka amused himself by leaving fingerprints and palmprints all over the industriously polished brass handrail, and regretted having washed his hands of this morning’s bacon grease), turned left, and ushered them through a double doorway into a huge chamber. Then he bowed and vanished.

This was, at a guess, a ballroom. Light spilled in from floor-to-ceiling windows all along one wall. Outside was a spacious balcony bedecked with potted plants. Directly opposite the windows was a mural, but at this angle, Mieka couldn’t discern the subject. At the far end of the room, overhanging a collection of dust-sheeted chairs, was a minstrels’ gallery made of carved oak. The floor was gray marble, polished to a shiny slickness that made him want to haul off his boots and slide the length of the place in his stockings.

“No mirrors,” Cade remarked as they advanced a little ways into the room.

“Huh? What?”

“Mirrors. There aren’t any. If there’s a wall of windows on one side, there ought to be mirrors facing it. Gives the illusion of symmetry and reflects the sunlight during the day. And by night, ladies like to admire themselves and their gowns and jewels while they’re dancing.”

“Master Silversun,” came a voice from the doors just behind them, “His Grace will see you now.”

Mieka met Cayden’s nervous gaze. “Miriuzca and the children,” he whispered. “Think of them, not anything else. And say what you need to, Quill. Promise whatever will make him put a stop to it.”

“The only promises,” Cade replied grimly, “will be his.”

Mieka felt like applauding. He watched Cade stride briskly out and could almost feel sorry for the Archduke. Almost.

The door shut again, and Mieka was left to his own devices in the ballroom. He meandered over to the windows, peering at the balcony, the gardens beyond, and the gray-green marshlands past the gray stone walls. Except for a few scrawny saplings in the enclosed gardens, there wasn’t an honest tree in sight.

Turning, wondering again if he could get away with a long slide in his stocking feet, he approached the mural wall. It seemed familiar somehow.

In the middle of the room he stopped cold. Familiar. Yes. It was.

He’d last seen these scenes in the Kiral Kellari, the mural rejected by Master Warringheath for being repulsive and insulting. The only differences between that painting and this was that the theme of a cellar no longer applied, there was no magic to make the figures move, and the figures themselves were much larger.

For instance, that rural scene of a dirt road curving between green wheat fields and an apple orchard, where a girl slept beneath a tree, was at least four feet wide. The fruit was falling from the branches as a hideous creature in dark clothes and a tall hat laughed, spinning cobwebs between his fingers, trickling the thread down into the girl’s ear. Goblin. Or, rather, the nasty despised version of a Goblin, with crooked yellow teeth, single across-the-forehead eyebrow, red-splotched skin. His laughter made the apples plummet from the trees. He wove nightmares to slither into the sleeping girl’s mind.

Next was the Piksey on a giant toadstool. All in green, grinning a grin that crinkled the corners of his upslanting eyes as a bewildered farmer coaxed his exhausted horse to the plow—the horse the Piksey had been racing around the fields all night long. A trail of gold and silver footprints led to the toadstool, footprints of Piksey dust.

Mieka walked the length of the mural. A Harpy played cards with a Gorgon who sat with her back turned, and on the large table between them crouched a terrified Human child: the living wager. A Selkie lured a young and handsome knight to his death in the sea. Caladrius, Touchstone’s own pure white raven, perched in the window of a sick woman’s room, its face turned away—which meant that the woman would die.
Vodabeists
rampaged along a river while their land-dwelling cousins thundered through a village. A wyvern devoured a beautiful young maiden. A Troll hauled a whole family screaming into the river beneath a bridge. Merfolk laughed on a ragged rock as their daughters’ singing lured a ship to disaster. One Gnome wearing birch-bark shoes squared off against an arched, spitting cat, while another stood over a firepit, stirring soup that cat would soon flavor. A Fae with a redheaded Human baby in her arms watched through an open window with malicious glee as a Human mother reached into a cradle.

Mieka needed wine, brandy, anything to get this taste out of his mouth. Was there some kind of thorn that would remove these images from his mind? There was neither alcohol nor thorn to hand. There was nothing but himself. He coughed, and the sound echoed from windows to ceiling to polished marble floor.

He wouldn’t look at the paintings again. He went to the windows, tried to open them. Locked. Every single one of them. He tried them all. There was a corner door just below the minstrels’ gallery, presumably leading up to it. This, too, was locked. He turned and stared the length of the ballroom to the door he and Cade had come in by. Had that been locked by now, too?

And if it had … why? Who could think him a danger to anyone? Cade was the one with the brains and the magic. All Mieka had was a glib tongue. And a noteworthy facility for getting into and out of trouble. And now, as of this moment, a new and understandable aversion to locked rooms.

There was no sound except his own breathing, but all at once he knew he was being watched. He could feel it all along his skin. He turned, and again, seeing no one, hearing no one. Yet whatever his other senses told him, his magic shrieked that he was being watched, and by someone unimpressed with his Kingdom-wide fame and prodigious talents and winsome good looks.

There was the faintest rustle of material up in the minstrels gallery. Only Elfen ears would have heard it. He turned, squinting up at the carved and latticed wood. “You up there, I can hear you,” he called. “Why not come down?”

No answer.

Nervous apprehension was quickly turning to fear. He knew it was all the thorn he’d been pricking, intensifying his emotions, but he’d never been able to figure out if the sensation was more powerful at the start, in the middle, or while the thorn was fading away. This morning’s whitethorn was definitely fading by now, and it took a real effort to keep his voice steady and his hands from shaking—and he could tell himself all he liked that it was anger, but he knew it was sudden unreasoning fear.

“Who are you?” he snarled.

“No one you would know.”

Deep voice, highborn accent. A panel of fretwork slid aside up in the minstrels’ gallery and Mieka peered up at a very old man. Tall and bald, with eyes so dark they were almost black set in a cadaverous face, he stood in the little window with his clasped hands hidden in the baggy sleeves of his brown robes.

“So you’re the Elf,” he went on.

Desperately grabbing hold of his composure, Mieka replied, “Beholden for singling me out as special, but while there’s only one of me, there’s more than one of us, if you see what I mean.” He congratulated himself on sounding almost casual.

“Have you any idea, I wonder, how very special you are?”

The congratulations were, it seemed, premature. There was something in the old man’s voice that iced Mieka’s veins and stopped the breath in his lungs.

“I’ve heard that your performances on the Royal Circuit this year were outstanding, even for Touchstone.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant by
special
, and Mieka knew it. He didn’t want to be special, not to this man. He took one step back, then another, barely able to restrain himself from turning to run for the main doors.

His body betrayed him with a twitch to one side, and the child-size withie fell out of his sleeve and clattered to the floor. The old man began to laugh.

Mieka snatched up the withie. As he rose, he happened to look at the mural again.

It was alive.

The Gorgon had won the hand of cards and, with a reedy chortle, stroked a talon down the Human child’s arm, leaving a line of blood that burst into flame. The wyvern crunched the maiden’s leg bones, threw back its head, and shrieked its delight. The Piksey was giggling madly, the Goblin was singing some ghastly off-key song as he wove misted nightmares. Mieka stumbled a step back, to the side, back again—and gagged when the hideous yellow
vodabeists
seemed to be clawing their way out of the mural, coming for him.

Thorn, imagination, or the magic of the old man up there in the minstrels gallery? Mieka gripped the withie in his hand like a sword and shouted, “Who the fuck
are
you? Stop it! Let me out of here!”

“You’re free to go at any time, Elf.” The old man was laughing at him. “Free to do exactly as you please—isn’t that your primary goal in life? To waste it doing exactly as you please, with no thought to anyone else?”

Had there been the slightest magic left in the withie, Mieka would have blasted him to the northernmost peaks of the Pennynine Mountains.

“Oh, don’t think I disapprove. In point of fact, I rather admire your ambition. It’s not everyone who can be so single-mindedly selfish without feeling the slightest hint of guilt.”

Pride and defiance had kept Mieka where he was until now. When the
vodabeists
lunged for him again, he decided that pride and defiance could go fuck themselves. He turned and ran for the doors.

But his legs moved so slowly. His feet felt so heavy. He gritted his teeth and struggled on, gaze fixed on the doors. If only they could be like the ones in “Doorways,” doors he had created with Cade’s magic, doors that were not locked. He clutched the withie, but it was a dead thing, hints of Cade and Blye within it, but no useful and usable magic.

Suddenly he needed the sound of his own voice, his Elfen voice. Only Elves and Wizards were blessed by the Lord and the Lady. What about all those other things he was? Some of them were shown in the mural. How could people dance and laugh and flirt and drink gallons of bubbling wine in a room with all that muck on the wall? And quite probably that horrible old man watching from behind the latticework like servants peeking into bedrooms at a whorehouse—

If only this door ahead of him was one of his own doors, his and Quill’s. He could open it and walk through it and be safe. “This life, and none other,” he heard himself whisper, breath coming short and fast.

And like a talisman constructed only of words, of sounds, the sentence once spoken made the door open. He knew it was only coincidence. He knew that.

But he couldn’t help but feel that it was magic, to have said those words and have Quill open that door.

D
oing this crazy thing—going to Great Welkin, demanding to see the Archduke, saying what he must say to convince, persuade, bully, bribe, plead, whatever it took—it had all seemed impossible when he woke before dawn, shaking and sweating, fighting his way free of a nightmare in which the Archduke was laughing at him, throwing gigantic daisies with the malevolent yellow eyes of the Fae and petals that were fat, writhing white maggots.

He lay there until all the shadows in his bedchamber had been banished by fresh sunlight. Tense and determined, he rose and washed and dressed. By accident (certainly not willingly) he happened to meet his own eyes in the looking glass as he shaved, and it occurred to him that he was nobody and nothing, and that to confront Archduke Cyed Henick was an insanity seldom equaled in his life.

When he saw Mieka in the kitchen, he wanted to run away and hide.

Yet Mieka had, with his blithe acceptance that this was what Cade would do, and he would in fact be able to do it, settled his thoughts and emotions. Mieka didn’t believe in much, but he did believe in Cade. And somehow that was enough.

When Mieka magicked the guards into letting them inside Great Welkin, Cade was at last reminded of what he was that the Archduke was not. Cade and Touchstone were famous, admired, celebrated, creative, successful, trusted by the only Royal who really mattered. Henick was famous, too—for being the son of the man who had lost a war. He lived his life as if none of that had ever happened and he was merely one more nobleman—with better bloodlines than most, and more money, once he’d turned twenty-one and invested a small inheritance into a major fortune—content to spend his days in amusing himself, creating nothing, eyed askance by the whole of Albeyn.

Cayden would be giving him his chance to shine.

The servant left him in the open doorway of a library stuffed with books. Three walls of shelves nearly to the ceiling, with rolling ladders for access; a range of waist-high shelves down the middle of the long room; glass display cases here and there for rare and precious volumes; Cayden could quite happily have spent years in this room that was undoubtedly Drevan Wordturner’s particular version of Hell. A smile twitched one corner of his mouth as he walked slowly along the wall, glancing at titles, wondering how many of these books had been pinched by Drevan for Vered Goldbraider on the sly and then returned with the Archduke none the wiser. A nice little gambit, that had been, and Cade congratulated himself.