Touchstone (3 page)

As for the glisker—Mieka Windthistle couldn’t have said his own name once, slowly, let alone five times fast, without hopelessly tangling his tongue.

Cayden didn’t wait to be noticed. He poked the Elf in the ribs and demanded, “What the fuck was
that
?”

Big, innocent, very drunk eyes—almost entirely green at the moment—blinked up at him. “Ye dinnit like it?” Before Cade could reply, he turned to Jeska. “Sorry for that bit at the end, mate, but it were such a fetchin’ little Sweetheart, I just couldn’t resist.”

“You’re a shithead,” Jeska remarked amiably, sorting coins on the bar. “You want your share now, or after the show tomorrow night?”

“Tomorrow night?” Cade sucked in an outraged breath. How dare they decide such things without him? “Have I said yet that there’s gonna be a next show with this—this—”

Rafcadion interrupted. “This best glisker you or me or Jeska or anybody else in this shit-pit of a town ever saw? Yeh, there’ll be a next show.” He grinned, white teeth flashing in his dark beard. “And a next, and a next, and a next—all the way to Trials.” Raising his glass—they’d all been given the real thing in place of the leather—he announced, “Trials, and the Winterly Circuit!”

Mieka laughed and raised his glass to his lips—but his gaze was sharp and watchful, and suddenly he appeared considerably more sober. Cade looked into those eyes, discovered he was unable to look away. When at last he nodded, and drank the toast, the Elf nodded back, satisfied.

“Much beholden, Quill,” he murmured. “Very much beholden.”

Chapter 2

Even though he’d long since learned not to anticipate, Cayden wasn’t too surprised when he didn’t dream that night. He had both expected to and expected not to; that was the particular glorious hell of what his Fae heritage had done to him. His Sagemaster had explained it once.

“There are things that occur which are important, and things that are not. There are things that are essential, things that
must
happen—and things that are so trivial, they make no difference at all. The difficulty is discerning which is which. Now, what may seem obviously important—a death in the family, moving from one village to another, falling in love—might not be important after all. And things such as choosing to wear the red tunic instead of the blue, this might be absolutely vital. Simply put, you will never, ever know.

“It would be logical to assume that events, people, interior realizations that you know at once will change your life—these will be pivots from which visions will come. Assume nothing of the kind. Some of these things are simply fated. They must happen for every other thing to happen. You have no choices to make and therefore you will dream no futures. You cannot unmeet your future wife, for example. So the day you meet her, you probably won’t dream. But if you bring her daisies instead of roses, if you wear that red tunic instead of the blue, these things may very well trigger more dreams than you can keep track of—for these are the things that often determine what shape the future will take.

“So the lesson must be that there is no predicting what will set off a foretelling. What seems important may be trivial, and what seems insignificant may be critical. You cannot control your gift. You are at the mercy of fate.”

Which was why, as Cade knew very well, he enjoyed his work so much. For, during the time he spent devising his tales, he
was
in control.

Once his part was done, once he’d written or rewritten the lines and employed his own special ciphers that signaled the sensory underlays, he had to give everything over to Jeska and Rafe and now, apparently, Mieka. But for those hours and days of the creative process, the work was entirely his. He supposed he could learn to trust the Elf the way he trusted his two other partners.

At least—unlike their last couple of gliskers—Mieka told them the truth, that next afternoon when they met to discuss what they would perform that night. When Rafe asked a polite question about where in the village he lived, he laughed.

“Don’t live here at all! I’m as much a Gallybanker as you three.” When they stared at him, he shrugged. “Saw you last year, didn’t I, at that tavern over on Beekbacks. With a glisker not worth a splintered withie—nor the one I saw you with next, or next as well. The one last month wasn’t
bad,
but…”

“A cullion, he was,” Jeska commented. “Wish him good morrow, and he’d say, ‘I take it you’re planning to die before then? Lovely!’ Mean of spirit and meaner of pocket. But I don’t understand why everyone here seems to know you.”

“My auntie’s house is out on the edge of town. She’s the one as brews the whiskey.” He winked; those eyes were blue with flecks of green this afternoon. “I’d be popular and indeed beloved even if I weren’t adorable all on me own.”

“And modest, I see,” Rafe drawled.

Mieka nodded genially. “When I heard you were booked here, I decided to make a visit to Auntie Brishen.”

“You followed us,” Cade accused.

“And aren’t you glad I did?”

He sat back in his chair, rolling his eyes. “When His Gracious Majesty gives you the silver sword and golden spurs, Sir Mieka, you’ll be sure to spare a nod for us petty quidams, won’t you?”

“Don’t condemn yourself to wretched obscurity so soon,” Mieka shot back. “Tell me what you want to do for tonight, and then tell me what your thinking is for Trials.”

“That’s almost three months away,” Rafe observed. “We’ve the first of two shows in three hours.”

“Only one show tonight.” The boy burst out laughing when they stared at him. “Thunderin’ hells, I hope what’s between your legs is more use to you than what’s between your ears! They expect us at eight. We come on near nine. They expect a good giggle, and we give it to ’em—but instead of an interval, we go right into what makes ’em weep. I know this lot. They’re surly outside and mushy inside—and once they’ve worn themselves out laughing, they won’t have energy to resist a good long cry. Which is what they really want anyway, drunk as they’ll be by then.”

Cayden had the feeling this would not be the last time he’d have to struggle for control of his own group. “If they expect us at eight and we come on at nine, they’ll be so impatient and angry that Jeska will have to work twice as hard to win them over.”

“Not with
me
doing the glisking.” He tapped a finger down the list Rafe had given him of the works in their folio. “No … no … no—Gods and Angels, not that one!—and not that one, neither, not if you held a sword to me throat—”

“Do you ever stay still long enough for anyone to give it a try?” Jeska asked.

“Not often, and certainly not when I’m working. Not this one—but I think the sons-and-fathers dialogue would be just the thing.”

Rafe actually recoiled. “We don’t hardly ever do that one.”

“Nobody does,” Mieka responded with a shrug. “But it’s perfect tonight, and here’s why. There’s a reason this village is near empty of old men—hadn’t you noticed?”

With a suddenness that set his heart pounding too hard, Cade knew everything. “We’re on the Archduke’s old domains, aren’t we?”

“And full marks with shooting star clusters for the scion of the Falcon Clan.” Mieka crooked a finger at the tavern keeper’s daughter. “Another round here, if you would, please, darlin’,” he called, and gave her a beguiling smile.

“Not for me,” Jeska told him. “Not until after.”

Mieka shrugged. “As you will. I’ll have yours, then. What Cayden knows and you haven’t yet guessed—”

“Almost every man of military age either died or was crippled by the Archduke’s War,” Rafe said flatly. “You don’t yet know me, boy, but there’s no advantage in routinely assuming everyone you meet isn’t near as smart as you.”

Mieka had the grace to look abashed—for all of three heartbeats. “Won’t happen again. Anyway, the piece may be about the loss of three fathers in a collapsed silver mine, but that’s neither here nor there nor anywhere else for our purpose. There’s no man will be present tonight who’ll not have lost a father or a grandsir, an uncle or older brother. They’ll weep oceans. And we’ll be up to our necks in trimmings.”

Cade accepted his glass of ale before the maid could spill it—her attention was dangerously divided between Jeska and Mieka—and took a long swallow. It wasn’t polite to ask, but previous experience had made him cautious about a glisker’s willingness to work the really wrenching pieces, the ones that demanded a fettler’s iron control but a glisker’s near-total abandonment to emotion. Uninhibited expression of joy or sorrow, love or fear, was the reason no one not substantially Elfenblood could function effectively as a glisker. Elves were creatures of unabashed emotion; unruly as a rule, even the best of them were unpredictable. The worst of them …
self-indulgent
was a nice way of putting it.

As for the best of them … perhaps Mieka was one, though from his enthusiastic consumption of alcohol, he appeared to have fully mastered the
self-indulgent
part. Cade slumped back in his chair again and sipped his ale, listening as the other three discussed the proposed performance of “The Silver Mine.” There was a wild glint in those changeable eyes, granted—but there was also an intensity of purpose as Mieka plotted out the changes with Jeska and made notes with Rafe on when he’d have to exert most control. Skepticism turned to cautious admiration as it became plain that the glisker knew what he was doing.

It was odd, Cade reflected, that he’d never once had a dream—waking or sleeping—about anyone even vaguely resembling this Elf. Jeschenar had been glimpsed several times, so when they’d finally met almost two years ago, Cade felt reasonably comfortable with him from the start. Getting used to his occasionally belligerent ways had been another matter, but at least Cade knew not to challenge him physically: Jeska was effectively king of about a square mile of Gallantrybanks, with a bagful of souvenir teeth he’d knocked out to prove it. The roster of his defeated rivals had stopped growing only because these days nobody was fool enough to confront him and add another name to the list, or tooth to the collection.

Cade had known Rafe since littleschool, so the foretelling dreams about him had no power to surprise him. He was still waiting for the squat little Gnomelike man he’d seen more and more often this last year. Those dreams were comparatively forceful, the kind that flashed through his waking consciousness as well as invaded his sleeping mind. There were several other people who populated his foretellings with more or less frequency and importance. But he’d never caught even a hint of this Elf, and it confused him.

Did it mean Mieka was insignificant? Cade would never believe that. What he’d seen and experienced last night, what he presumed would happen again this evening, argued for a powerful presence in his life. But why had he never seen the boy before?

“The worst mistake you can make is to believe that
you
are the sole arbiter of your existence. Put another way—do you really have the arrogance to think that nothing anyone else does has any effect on you? That if
you
don’t envision it in advance, it can’t possibly be real? That
you
make all the choices?”

Mieka must be one of those people whose caprices ruled his own life so thoroughly that Cayden’s prescience was of no use at all in predicting his sudden arrival. Now that he was here, however, Cade found it equally unsettling that there had been no dream last night, not even a vague impression upon waking that something in life had changed forever.

In fact, now that he considered it, last night he’d slept better than he had in a long time. Worry usually kept him awake until sheer physical exhaustion dragged him down into sleep. He’d attributed the swift and untroubled slumber of last night to good liquor and a blissfully soft bed. But now, watching his group thrash out the details of the night’s performance, he wondered if something else might be at work here.

“Cade? Cayden!”

“Oh—sorry,” he said as Jeska’s impatience finally penetrated his self-absorption. “Have you decided, then?”

Mieka was giving him a sidelong glitter of a smile. “Remind me—why do we need you?”

Cade grinned back, set down his empty glass, and flexed his fingers. “Without me, you’d all be nothing. Are you ready to make your choices, then, Mieka? Come on.”

Together they went into the kitchen, where a large cupboard was unlocked by the glowering Trollwife who vastly resented this interruption from her bread-making—until the Elf gave her a sweetly innocent smile. Without the slightest twinge of a dreaming, Cade foresaw infinite doors being opened for them by that smile.

They took the glass baskets outside to the enclosed porch, trying to ignore the stench of uncovered rubbish bins as they sorted through for what Mieka would be using tonight.

“Who made these for you?” he asked, fingers caressing the graceful curvature of the blue basket.

“Friend of mine,” Cade answered.

Another sidelong glance, this time speculative, and a moment later Mieka said, “You’ll have to introduce me to her.”

Cade stared. “How did you know—?”

“I didn’t!” He crowed with triumphant laughter. “Quill, you really do need to guard those eyes of yours! You can turn down your mouth and knot up your eyebrows all you like, but the eyes will always give you away! Does she make the withies as well?”

“Some of them,” he admitted grudgingly. “Most of them are her father’s castoffs. I have terrible trouble priming some of them.”

“I felt that, last night.” He selected a glass twig and inspected it. “This is one of hers?”

“Yes. Even her best aren’t quite as supple as her father’s culls, but she knows me better.”

“Let’s pick out the ones he made,” Mieka instructed, “and return them for credit. Whatever skill she lacks, I can make up for. I didn’t much like the feel of some of those from last night. They fought me.”

Bemused, he helped to sort as required. Mieka made no mistakes in choosing which had been Blye’s work and which her father’s. Those quick little fingers were exquisitely sensitive.