Touchstone
For
Fred Lentz
because he always wanted one
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Predictably, the girl was willing to draw the pint only when the coin was glinting on the bar. Cayden stretched his lips in a parody of a smile as she scooped up the money with one hand and pulled the tap with the other. No glass for him, oh no; leather tankard instead, sealed with tar and riveted with brass and bound to taste of both.
Well, it was alcohol, and that was all that mattered. But if that fool who’d had the bollocks to claim himself a glisker had been any good, Cade would be knocking back whiskey right now, and plenty of it—from a real glass, and with coin to spare for something to eat. Decent drink and his supper had walked out of the tavern a little while ago, jingling in the incompetent’s purse. Glisker, he’d termed himself. Experienced, even. Cade snorted. Probably had about as much Elfenblood in him as the dirty rag the girl was using to mop up the bar. At least he was paid off and gone, and nobody was any the worse for the performance.
Yet when Cade thought about what might have been, if he had the right glisker, one with real talent and real magic—
“Wuzna too gude, wuzzee?”
The accent was excruciating—especially as Cayden had worked so hard to soften his own, distorted during years of schooling not twenty miles from here. Eyeing the young man beside him at the bar, he noted a confusion of features that proclaimed an ancestry so diverse that probably even he didn’t know what to call himself.
“No, he wasn’t too good.” He had to admit it. Honesty was the hallmark of a real artist, or so his Sagemaster had told him. Or maybe it was “truth” that mattered most. They weren’t the same.
“Gotz me a chum c’n do ooshuns better,” the rough voice continued.
“Do you?” Cayden smiled politely and returned his attention to his ale.
“Domn near purely breeded Elferblud, an’ tha’s fact. Givvem withies next show, whyn’t ya?”
Yet another aspiring glisker. Splendid. What was he, the audition manager for every amateur in the kingdom?
Still … they’d gone through four gliskers this year alone, not counting the idiot tonight, never finding the right mix, never finding anyone Cayden could trust with his visions and Jeschenar could trust with his skin and Rafcadion could trust with his sanity. They weren’t anywhere near good enough even to seek Trials, and it was all because they didn’t have the right glisker.
What would it be like, he wondered, to experience that effortless balance of talent and energy and magic that this was supposed to be? It was what all the greatest players had known, what he sensed was going on with the Shadowshapers now that they’d hired Chattim Czillag away from his old group. That nobody had ever heard a name so outrageous, nobody knew where he’d come from or his lineage or the name of his clan—if any—or indeed aught about him mattered not at all. Chattim
fit
. With the right glisker, a performance became an event, a distinction.
Hells, what was one more tryout, anyway? It wasn’t as if anyone would ever hear about yet another botched playlet, not in this rickety old tavern only half a step inside civilization.
Cade shrugged to himself and glanced down—way down—at the youth beside him. “All right, send him up for the next show.”
Breath hissed between ragged teeth—a sign of delight in a Troll, and of an impending brawl in a Gnome. As he hurried off to find his friend, he moved with the rolling shoulders and splayed knees peculiar to the former, thereby settling the question of his primary ancestry as surely as Cayden’s long-boned height proclaimed his. Watching the little man, recalling the quirks of his accent, for an instant Cade felt a twinge of longing for home. Not for his parents; a bit for his little brother; mostly for their Trollwife, Mistress Mirdley. She’d been strict and kind to him, when all his mother knew how to be was neglectful and harsh.
“Oh, pity the poor little Wizardling!”
jeered the Sagemaster’s voice in his head.
“How horrid to be you!”
A small commotion behind him jostled him into the bar, and he turned his head to snarl. One more trite old playlet tonight for this unsophisticated crowd, and they could get out of here, get some sleep in the hayloft, and then tomorrow be gone entirely from this village of sour ale and foul manners. And really lousy trimmings, he thought with a gloomy sigh; two nights of this, and they’d barely made enough for the coach fare home. He thought with longing of the brand-new private coach his friend (and rival, though nobody but Cayden knew that yet) Rauel Kevelock had so gleefully described last month, painted in swirling colors like a demented prism, with
SHADOWSHAPERS
in stark black on both sides. It had bunk beds for when they got tired, and a firepocket for when they got cold. True, the group still had to hire horses from the post stations, but at least they were no longer at the mercy of worn-out springs and a coachman who drank his wages in full before clambering up to take the reins, and—
Someone bumped into him again, knocking his hand against his leather flask of ale. He half-turned and shoved right back. Spindle-boned Cade might be, but Jeska had taught him how to use his fists efficiently rather than his magic haphazardly, and he was just frustrated enough right now to relish the prospect of a punch-up.
Then he saw what had knocked into him.
Even for someone with plenty of Wizardly blood, Cayden was tall. The man whose chest was on a level with his eyes—this man was at least half Giant. Maybe more than half; there was very little mitigating intellect visible in the red-rimmed eyes glaring down on him.
“Uh—sorry,” Cade managed. “Thought you were somebody else.”
“Did ’ee, now?” The depth of his rumble rattled the bottles on the shelves.
Oh, shit.
“Yazz!” exclaimed a light, cheerful voice. “Don’t break him! He’s me new Quill, he is! It’s rich an’ famed he and me will be—but only if ye leave him all his wits an’ bones!”
A slow, fond smile gentled the massive face. Cade turned, wondering if he was more grateful for the rescue or annoyed by the glisker’s arrogance. Because a glisker this had to be, the one promised by the Troll. For an Elf, however, this boy had peculiar taste in friends.
And then all speculation—indeed, all thought—fled Cade’s brain, except for the sure knowledge that he would remember for the rest of his life the instant those huge, melting eyes looked up at him from beneath a shock of coal-black hair.
Those eyes: sparkling with what his Sagemaster called “front and effrontery,” a combination of awful nervousness and awe-inspiring conceit. Cade had been accused of it himself on occasion, but hard lessoning in the brutal school of his own family had taught him to hide any fear behind all the arrogance he could possibly project. This boy was too young yet to have perfected his mask.
Those eyes: a bit too bright with the alcohol downed to get his courage up, trying to hide apprehension that Cade wouldn’t think he was good enough, but not trying at all to disguise that he thought any group of players would be colossally lucky to get him.
Those eyes: full of anxiety and arrogance, innocence and cunning, and a dozen other conflicting things that dizzied Cade for a moment.
There was a low growling in his ears that he hoped was Yazz agreeing to let him live. A burst of bright laughter followed from the Elf. His new glisker.
Those eyes were directed at him again, calculating, challenging. “Mieka say-it-five-times-fast Windthistle.”
“Dare ’ee t’try!” The Giant nudged Cade with an elbow strongly reminiscent of a roof joist, and he staggered against the bar.
“Did I tell ye or did I not, Yazz?
Don’t
damage him!”
“Much beholden,” Cade said, taking refuge in the stock phrases of civility. “You’re the glisker wants a chance?”
“You need me, and here I am. Thought I’d introduce meself afore we start work.” Thick black brows arched an invitation to share his name.
“Cayden Silversun, Falcon Clan,” he said.
To his annoyance, the Elf didn’t look as impressed as he ought to have done. But there was an odd sort of approval in his eyes, and perhaps relief, as he said, “Falcon, not Hawk? Good. Such a harsh, cruel word, innit? Typical of that tongue—and that clan. Always makes me think of claws with blood drippin’ off ’em. Met any foreign kin?”
“No. Are you ready to work?” He cast an eloquent glance at the whiskey in Windthistle’s hand.
“Almost.” He slugged back the remainder of his drink, slapped the glass onto the bar, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, belched delicately, and gave Cade a dazzling smile. “
Now
I’m ready.”
Yazz reached out a finger and tapped a carefully gentle admonishment on the Elf’s head. “Rich un’ famed, Miek,” he rasped, and Cade had the irrelevant thought that
meek
was precisely the wrong word for any Elf, particularly this one.
“Oh, certain sure,” the boy laughed, and scampered off towards the tavern’s pathetic excuse for a stage.
“Givvem simple t’do,” said Yazz. “Makes everythin’ from nothin’, Miek does.”
“Is that so?” Hearing the sharp skepticism in his own voice, he dredged up a smile meant to mollify the Giant. “I’m looking forward to it.”
* * *
The trouble with being the tregetour, Cayden thought for possibly the millionth time, was that after you were done with your part of the piece, you were helpless. Superfluous. At times, a nuisance.
No, that was wrong, he thought morosely as he crouched before his glass baskets of crystalline withies. The worst part of it was having to trust.
Rafcadion and Jeschenar, them he trusted. It wasn’t their fault they’d never found a glisker who really knew what he was doing—or, more to the purpose, knew what to do with Cade’s magic. Jeska was a good masquer, and getting better—and Cade knew that a lot of the reason they’d gotten as far as they had was that Jeska really could make much out of practically nothing. Rafe was just plain brilliant: steady, calm, powerful, everything a fettler ought to be and more. But Cayden couldn’t help wondering what it would be like when Rafe didn’t have to use up so much of himself keeping the performance together because the glisker was lazy or erratic or reckless; when he could fine-tune things, work
with
the man instead of guarding against excesses, correcting failures, glossing over incompetences.
Given a glisker who could not only perform the piece but also enhance it, Jeska and Rafcadion would be free to develop their gifts to their fullest, to provide Cayden’s work with the nuances he craved. And they would no longer end each evening so wrung out they could hardly stand.
Despite Yazz’s affectionate confidence in this new glisker, Cade had no hopes for him. He’d never known of any Elf from that kin line who even aspired to what the Troll and the Giant claimed this one could do. All Elves were maddeningly insubordinate, but the Air lineages added a wicked capriciousness to the mix, just as the Earths were devious and greedy, the Waters were sullen, and the Fires were downright malicious. Cade doubted that this Elf could sit still long enough for a performance.
Things definitely ran in families; he knew that for a fact. His mother’s great-grandfather—the one without a title, the one she never talked about—had been a noteworthy poet. His father’s father had been a Master Fettler who’d performed on the Ducal Circuit. Some of Cade’s cousins participated in amateur theatrics—though none of them would dream of making it a profession, for more money and status were to be had in other Wizardcraftings. His uncle had begun a promising career as a fettler before being called up into the army for that despicable experiment that had killed so many—and left others drooling imbeciles, like Uncle Dennet. It was a grudge Wizards had against Elfenkind, that they had flatly refused to participate in the Archduke’s scheme to use magic as a method of war, and had thus escaped tragedy.
That this Mieka Windthistle had no ancestors Cayden knew of who’d ever worked in theater boded ill. Then again, maybe his circumstances were like Cayden’s: a talent that simply would not be stifled, a restless need to create that could not be channeled into more respectable ways of making a living. Maybe he had chafed and rebelled as Cayden had, until finally his parents gave their unwilling consent to let him try.