Touchstone (10 page)

The pretense of sewing was abandoned, and the graceful fingers dug deep into velvet the purple-black of overripe plums. “It’s a long time since I used that part of me.”

“I’ve more of it than you. I’ve got it through Father. I can help. It’ll be just that much stronger, don’t you see? You’ll have to teach me, but—with both of us doing the workings, and him so young—”

“Hear me, girl. Search inside yourself. Is he what you really want? Are you willing to go through the work to tame and bind him? Those days he was nearby, the letters he writes—that’s but the start of it. When he sees you again—”

“Next week! Only next week, and I’ll have him for my own—”

“Mind what I’m telling you! It will be long and difficult, and sieve your heart’s blood. He’ll not know what’s happening to him, but he’s Elfenblood, just like your father, and he’ll sense
something
. Like as not, he’ll fight without even knowing he’s fighting. They don’t conquer easy, and can rarely be broken.”

“You left it too late with my father,” she said again. “And you were never as beautiful as me, you know that, you’ve said it yourself. I’m not meaning to be cruel, but you know it’s true. With him so young, and me the way I am, and your workings upon him and mine added to them—”

Her mother glanced up, and a look spread across her face, something sly and shrewd and predatory, a frightening parody of what had perhaps once been a smile winsome enough to snare a wayward, willful Elfen lover. “Dearling mine, he’ll have no chance at all.”}

Cade struggled out of firelit darkness into the thin winter light of the stairwell, his empty stomach roiling and his head threatening to explode. Laughter echoed from the rafters overhead, rattled off the wrought iron stairs. He would know that laughter if he ever heard it for real. He was afraid he would hear it in his head, unreal, for the rest of his life.

The turn had taken him more viciously than any ever had before. His thoughts had splintered worse than usual, and the panic was something he hadn’t felt this deeply in a long time. His knees hurt, his left shoulder felt bruised—he blinked, and was disgusted to find he’d fallen. A different fear assailed him then, for what if he’d been taken halfway down the stairs and tumbled the rest of the way down and broken his neck? There’d be no one to warn Mieka then, no one who knew to look for the bronze-gold hair and listen for the laughter—

Mieka? Was that whom she’d wanted so desperately?

Instinct told him yes.

He spent a weary while reassembling the bits of himself: reality fitting back with reality, dream joining into dream, unaccomplished pasts and possible futures tucked back into their places. At length he pushed himself to his feet and trudged down to the kitchen, needing the warmth of the big hearth and of Mistress Mirdley’s grumpy affection.

Why the Elf? And why—as yet—no foreseeings that actually featured him? Two men in a run-down tavern, talking about him as if he were dead; two women in shadows, talking about him as if he were some wild thing they would catch and tame—and break. But nothing that showed Mieka as he would be—

No, as he
might
be. For there had been that one glimpse, just one, of silvering hair and lines beside those laughing eyes—

“Always,
always
keep it in your mind that what you see is what is possible. Not positive, and sometimes not even all that probable. You can change it. It’s a dangerous and uncertain thing to attempt, but with care and wisdom, you can change it. Only you must be very, very certain that you’re willing to accept the future you’ve made by that changing. Can you live with it? Perhaps more importantly, can you live with yourself for having dared to act as a God?”

The muffins smelled even better now that he was in the back hallway, but he felt he deserved a reward for surviving that dangerous and unsettling turn, something more bracing than tea and fresh-baked muffins. The stillroom door was slightly ajar; he shoved it open and looked around for any congenial bottles left about. Ah—there, on the worktable below the shelves of spice jars, a lovely squat brown bottle of ale, still corked.

Empty. Someone, probably the footman, had finished it off and plugged the cork back in. He shook the bottle once more to make sure, and then hurled it into the darkest corner of the stillroom.

How he was growing to love the sound of shattering glass.

“Cayden! Is that you?”

He should have pulled the door shut. Not that it would have helped much—Mistress Mirdley had hearing as sharp as if her ears were Elfen instead of Troll. “Sorry!” he called out. “I’ll just sweep this up and be there in a moment!”

But she was in the doorway, short and stubby and brown as the bottle he’d just broken, arms folded, small sharp eyes flashing below a frown. “Wondering half the morning, I was, if you’d condescend to make a meal in the kitchen as usual, and not order me up the stairs with a tray. Famous tregetour now, are you? You’ll have your breakfast where you always do, though, until you can afford a servant of your own to fetch and carry to your whims! Oh, leave that, I’ll clean it up later. Come eat.”

He did as he was told. Everyone did as Mistress Mirdley told them—even Lady Jaspiela. The Trollwife had served the Silversun family for generations, although she was forever threatening to abandon civilization entirely and find herself a nice, quiet, secluded bridge somewhere to guard for a lord whose agent came round once a year, if that, to collect the tolls. Grumbling at travelers was preferable, she avowed, to raising a pair of miscreants passing themselves off as Wizards, and half-noble ones at that.

“Don’t you leave anything on this plate,” she ordered as he sat before a small table bearing a large meal. “Skinny as a stick, no matter what I do. Eat!”

He grinned and stuffed half a butter-drenched muffin in his mouth before she could do it for him—which she had been known on occasion to do. He knew better than to talk with his mouth full, and so waited until he’d washed the muffin down with fragrant cinnamon tea before saying, “I’ll bring my new glisker to dinner one night, shall I? Not a pingle in him, that Elf.”

“It
would
be nice, having all my hard work appreciated for a change by a boy with an appetite instead of an attitude,” she retorted. Quite without magic, although nearly as quick as, two more muffins appeared on his plate. “And talking of honest work, Herself left you a bit to do out front.” When he looked a question at her, she added, “Snowed last night, didn’t it?”

He hadn’t noticed this morning—well, he hadn’t noticed anything other than the broadsheet, even while standing at the window. But now he knew why his mother hadn’t berated him as he’d expected: The weathering witches hadn’t got round to Redpebble Square yet, and she’d want him to clear their front walk of snow. She enjoyed providing the neighbors with proof that powerful Wizardly blood resided at Number Eight. Melting snow might be the work of those with no other skills at all, a task for menials, but it was magic all the same.

Cade didn’t mind doing the little things that would keep her quiet about the big things. It cost him nothing but time and a bit of magic. As he dug into scuffled eggs with cheese, and the chicken sausages that were Mistress Mirdley’s specialty, he was more concerned with the fact that he honestly hadn’t noticed the snow. Sagemaster Emmot had admonished him day after day to pay attention to the world around him, not just the worlds inside his own head, and not let his mind dart about like a dragon perched on a fence between a sheep pen and a pigsty, unable to decide what to chew on first. The parts of his mind that he couldn’t control could get him into serious trouble. Another turn like the one on the stairs just now, and he might break something. Master Emmot had mentioned a few times that precautions might become necessary as he got older, if his foreseeings strengthened so that he had the longer sort of visions waking as well as sleeping. But in his almost five years of study, and the two years since, there’d been only a few waking turns and all of them very brief. Shock usually immobilized him for a minute or two, so he didn’t fall or knock into anything. But if the seeings were going to be as lengthy as the one on the stairs this morning …

… life could become very awkward. There had to be a way to control what happened to him. Other Wizards with Fae blood who were taken the way he was must have discovered a means of keeping the visions confined to sleep, when they were safely in bed. There must be methods or techniques of control. Sagemaster Emmot hadn’t mentioned any, but there must be.

Mieka’s twin sister didn’t risk attending the performance that night. Blye stayed home, too, her father having had one of his very worst days. The tavern keeper—and, more to the purpose, his wife—watched with contentment the swollen crowd in the Downstreet, and flinched only a little when first one row and then another of their cheaper glassware (carefully pointed out to Rafe before the show) splintered along the bar. The four empty beer pitchers didn’t please them as much; the barman and one of the serving girls were picking shards from their clothing for an hour afterwards. Rafe made sure to apologize eloquently to the girl, but not so eloquently as to make Crisiant jealous if she heard of it. Bespoken to each other since the age of thirteen, Rafe and Crisiant would have good reason to like the sound of shattering glass, too, if it resulted in trimmings that piled up enough for them to get married.

On the walk back to the Threadchaser home for an after-show supper, Rafe took Cade’s arm to hold him back from Jeska and Mieka.

“I didn’t mean to do the pitchers,” he confessed worriedly. “The glasses, yes—but it got away from me a bit, and that’s never happened to me before.”

“Ease up,” Cade advised. “No harm done.” A dollop of cold water hit him on the bridge of his nose, and he looked up. The icicle melting down from a shop sign was as clear as a perfectly made withie, sparkling in the Elf-light from a corner streetlamp. He reached high and broke the icicle off, weighing it in his fingers. It was as cold and dead as the spent glass twigs bundled in the black velvet bag in his other hand; Mieka had released, Jeska had used, and Rafe had disciplined more magic than usual, shattering all that glassware. He’d have a long day tomorrow, respelling withies enough for the next show.

Not that he minded. Not at all. The sound was wonderfully satisfying, and the audience’s reaction even more so. Better still was the jingle of coins at the bottom of the velvet bag, his share of the night’s trimmings. But best of all was something the tavern owner’s wife had said while reassuring him that his glass baskets would be perfectly safe upstairs in her very own chamber.

“I watched our customers tonight, until I couldn’t just watch, if you see what I mean. You caught at me, especially that mad little glisker of yours, and I’ve seen them come and go these ten years and more. It’s not the shock of the shattered glass that’s the new standard to measure by. All that does is get you talked about. No, mark me well on this—it’s the shock of how good you really are.”

“No harm done at all,” he reassured Rafe again. “You know what the mistress told me? That we’re the new standard to measure by.” Cade grinned. No, he didn’t mind the poor spent little twigs in his bag one bit.

“So I’m to pretend I did everything on purpose, is that it?” Rafe didn’t sound pleased.

“Nobody knew. Nobody even guessed.”

“
I
knew.”

“You fret too much.” Cade nudged him with a shoulder, smiling, and they walked on.

The four of them were taking a shortcut back to the bakery, and had reached the section of Beekbacks known as Chaffer Stroll. The prostitutes who walked it were garrulously living up to the name. “Ooh, it’s a lovely little Elfer-boy, innit?” and “Me, I’m for the big tall one with the beard!” and “Pretty enough that golden one is that
I’d
pay
him
!” This earned a snort from a girl across the street who yelled back, “An’ that’s the
only
way you’ll ever put hands on ’im, Ferralise!”

“Damn it, Cade,” Rafe suddenly growled, “you don’t understand. It slipped out of my fingers. That doesn’t happen to me, not ever!”

Jeschenar was feeling either very rich tonight or very happy with his performance, because he sauntered up to Ferralise, bowed, kissed the inside of her wrist as if she were Princess Iamina herself, and pressed a coin into her palm. “A drink on me, sweet.” He grinned.

“Come join me and I’ll drink
you
down, Sun-face!”

“Another time,” he told her with an expression of regret that Cade might have believed if he hadn’t known Jeska to be a consummate masquer.

“Cade, I’m not joking around,” Rafe insisted. “It got away from me.”

“This was only the second time we’ve done things that way.” He tossed the icicle into a snowbank left behind by lazy weathering witches who had only moved the snow from the street and walkway, not melted it as they did in better neighborhoods. “You’re not used to it yet, that’s all.”

“‘Used to it’?” Rafe grabbed his shoulder and roared, “Will you fucking
listen
to me? I lost control!”

Cade was so startled that he lost his hold on the spent withies. He winced at the muffled splintering as the bag hit the paving stones. Not in the dozen and more years he’d known Rafe had he ever heard him raise his voice, and certainly not like this. Jeska swung round to stare.

“Oy, Sun-face,” Ferralise was saying, trying to cajole his attention back to herself. “You can bring yer friends, and fer free, like. Always exceptin’
that
one,” she added. “Lady witness it, the
face
on him!”

No question whom she meant. Cade crouched to pick up the velvet bag, head bent to hide that face until he could arrange it in the contemptuous glare he used as a reply to such insults. He was quite good at it, usually; he’d had enough practice. It was all in the attitude, a thing his mother had inadvertently taught him. But before he could rise to his full six-foot-two with sneer intact, he heard Mieka laugh.