Window Wall (28 page)

It seemed he had been very far away, because he heard Mieka’s voice, as if from a distance, say, “What about Briuly?”

Briuly. Good Gods, he had completely forgotten that the third play of the group would be about Briuly and Alaen, and the vengeful Fae, and death. Abruptly present in the here and now, and with more of a shock than any time he’d ever come out of an Elsewhen, he looked at the Fae.

All the menace had faded; the eyes were flat yellow again, lightless. Sullenly, like a five-year-old caught raiding the sweets canister, the Fae said, “Deep into the Brightlands he was taken. The Seemly Court was gathered from far and wide—”

“Quite the spectacle, I take it,” mused Mieka.

With a glance of annoyance, the Fae continued, “His crime was weighed against recovery of the King’s Right.
I
was in favor of killing him.”

“He’s not dead?” Cade blurted. “You didn’t kill him? He’s alive?”

With a smirk: “If you’d care to call it that.”

Cade was scared to ask what that might mean. The Fae was maliciously eager to explain.

“Ask him a question, and he’ll sing you a song. Remark that it’s a lovely sunny day, and he’ll sing you another song. Songs are all he knows. Not even his name. Not a single spoken word leaves his lips. He opens his mouth only to drink and sing—”

“At the same time?” Mieka interrupted.

“Elf!” spat the Fae. “How I have always hated Elves! Rude and foolish—utterly undeserving of the ears of the Blood—”

“Oh, but they look so pretty on me,” Mieka said earnestly. “Everyone says so. Well, much beholden for the information. We really ought to be on our way. Lovely meeting you. Do please give our best regards to Master Blackpath when next you see him!”

The wings rustled angrily. “I’ll have my Tithing first.”

“Sorry, no idea what you’re talking about.” Mieka had hold of Cade’s arm, pulling him backwards one step, then two. “Must toddle off home now.”

“I’ll have my full Tithing of Fae Blood!”

He lunged forward, leafy wings widespread and snapping. Mieka hauled Cade to one side, flinging the second daisy chain over his head. The Fae recoiled, his eyes flaring gold flames once more. But he didn’t back off. Indeed, he took one step forward, then another, wings chittering like the wings of a thousand angry insects.

Mieka dug his free hand into his trousers pocket and came up with a coin, rather large, about two inches across. He tossed it into the air and caught it again. Cade watched the Fae’s yellow eyes follow the dull gray disk and acquire a look of confusion that Cade was pretty sure matched his own.

Mieka smiled with all his teeth. “I really don’t want to lose this,” he said. “But if it’s a tithing you’re after …”

And then the Fae gasped as Mieka threw the coin right at him. Cade, utterly bewildered, yelped as Mieka yanked at his arm again and cried out, “Run!”

They gained the top of the hill, thighs aching, lungs heaving, and at last they stopped. Bent over, hands on his knees, gasping, Cade looked down the path to the bushes. They were simply bushes again, lushly green, frothed with yellow flowers.

“Fucking Hells!” Mieka panted. “That was close!”

Getting his wind back, Cade asked, “You want to explain all that?”

The Elf flopped a hand in the air, still whooping for breath. Cade waited him out. At last he managed, “Daisies are protection against Fae.”

So they were. Something else he’d forgotten. “How did you know?”

“Had a talk with Mistress Mirdley, didn’t I? Back last winter, when I told her about your little side trip to see the Chalk Dragon. Trolls don’t much like Fae. She gave me fair warning, and a gambit or two in case you got foolish and wanted to have another look.”

It shamed Cade that he had not remembered this vital piece of information himself. A laughably simple bit of protective magic that had protected them from—what?

“He wanted our blood!”

“No, just yours. I already gave some.” He held up his scratched palm. “It summoned him, I think. Strictly by accident, of course, when I tripped on that rock. But I didn’t much fancy watching him open one of your veins.” Frowning at the reddened skin on his hand, he added, “You could’ve been quicker on the uptake, y’know.”

“Forgive me if I didn’t quite believe that a Fae was so insulted by the thought of accepting money instead of blood that he’d—” He stopped. Mieka was looking insufferably smug. “All right, I give up.”

“Too easily,” Mieka scoffed. “’Tweren’t just any old coin, but I don’t s’pose Mistress Mirdley will grumble much at losing it to save your life. I tossed him an ironslip, my dear old Quill,” he explained at last. “From the early part of the war. The only danger was in me forgetting, and spending it!”

As a precaution against the Fae taking advantage of the conflict spawned by the Archduke, King Cobin had ordered iron coins struck, under the theory that if the Fae thought to hide their wings by magic and mix in with everyone else and cause further havoc, daily life necessitated the use of money. And although iron, properly bespelled as in the rings Cade’s grandfather Isshak Highcollar had worn, interfered with a Wizard’s magic, it was pain and poison to the Fae. The
slip
, of course, would be a Fae’s taking the coin and inevitably reacting to it.

Not that it had ever really worked. There’d been a few anecdotes, mostly suspect, about a Fae’s burned fingers or cries of agony. What the ironslips had really done was make the general populace feel a bit safer from any encroachments by the Fae in a war that wasn’t their own. Most of the coins had been culled from general circulation. Though they were still legal tender, they were rare these days, kept mostly by those who had been in the war, or whose fathers or grandfathers had; the coins served as a convincing prop for implausible tales of outsmarting a Fae.

“Could’ve just used a nail,” Mieka went on. “But the ironslip had more flash.”

“And the Old Gods forfend that you should do anything that lacks genuine style,” Cade teased. He paused, then straightened his posture and settled the daisy chain more evenly around his shoulders. With a low bow, he said, “I am honored, Master Windthistle, to have been invested with the Most Excellent Elfen Order of the Yellow Eye.” After a moment he added, “Though one might have wished—not that I’m complaining, mind you—but it would have been less strain on the nerves if the ceremony had been just slightly less spectacular. You do tend to go for the grandiose, don’t you?”

Mieka pretended puzzlement. “What’s the point, otherwise?”

Even as he burst out laughing, Cade reflected that Mieka had done it to him again. The Elf could always make him laugh, whatever the situation. And this one, anybody would admit, was purely ridiculous.

Daisies. And a coin. A big bad beastly yellow-eyed leafy-winged Fae had been flummoxed by two chains of daisies and a rusty old coin. Had he put it into a play, not only would nobody believe it, but the audience would pelt the stage with whatever came to hand.

Back at the crossroads, they hitched a ride with a farmer who was thrilled to be conveying such illustrious young men and plied them with questions about the theater for at least ten miles. Unhappily, he could not take them directly to their inn, for his wagonload of cabbages was destined for a market on the other side of New Halt. Cade expressed their gratitude and asked his name, and told him that two free tickets would be waiting for him at the theater. The man never asked about the daisy chains both wore.

Rafe asked. Cade shook his head and invited him and Jeska into his and Mieka’s room, there to regale them with the whole story. Rafe was incredulous (“Daisies?”), but Jeska was appalled.

“Why did they do that to Briuly? He got them back the Crown, and they punished him by taking away everything but his music!”

“He’s probably happier that way,” Rafe said with a shrug. “You know him—never had time for anybody or anything but his lute. I’d swear that even in his sleep he was fingering songs on his blankets and pillows.”

Cade, who had been trying to avoid thinking about Briuly, seized on to this idea and liked it. But then he thought about Alaen, thorn-thralled and morose all this long while. The notion that Briuly was most likely living a life of perfect contentment, only himself and his lute and his songs, eased some of Cade’s guilt. Still—what would Alaen say when he was told what had happened to his cousin?

He had deliberately forgotten the Elsewhen that had showed him Briuly and Alaen’s discovery of The Rights. Glimpses lingered, nothing substantial—and he wondered if he could track down the rest of it inside his mind for use in the new play. He had the feeling that the cold calculation of it should have disgusted him more than it did. What kind of man was he, anyways?

“You’re wilting,” Rafe said to Mieka, pointing to the daisies still draped about his shoulders.

Eyeing the drooping petals, he sighed. “If Cilka or Petrinka were here, I could get them to do a preserving spell. As it is …” He lifted the chain and gathered it all between his palms, then crushed the flowers together and dropped them into the bin by the door. “Cade?”

Part of him wanted to keep it on, a reminder of how foolish he had been today. To have forgotten that the Fae always came out of the west, that Briuly had been captured and Alaen traumatized by the Fae because Cade had insisted on their listening to “Treasure,” and that something as common and innocent as a daisy and a coin could halt an enraged Fae in his tracks—actually, what miffed him the most was that Mieka had remembered all those things.

Mieka, who never opened a book, and read a broadsheet only if Touchstone was mentioned.

Mieka, whose education was best described as
sketchy.

Mieka, who was worried enough to ask Mistress Mirdley how to defend him from the Fae if necessary.

Mieka, who had bullied and shamed him into accepting his Elsewhens again.

There was more than one type of intelligence in this world. Cade had never doubted it, but neither had he ever given any of the other sorts much more than scant acknowledgment and grudging respect.

He handed over the daisy chain. “You didn’t tell me you were Fae enough to make your blood interesting.”

“
All
my blood is perfectly fascinating.” Flowers disposed of, he raked both hands back through his hair and grinned. “Wait until I get hold of Yazz! All this about Giants riding dragons—I’ll grill him like a pork chop!”

The performance that night went brilliantly. They gave the audience “Troll and Trull” and “Dragon.” Cade had a glimpse of the farmer, seated front row center as befitted someone with a free pass, rapt with fascination and applauding wildly.

That night, lying under a light sheet with the breeze from the open window cooling the bedchamber, he broached with himself the topic of the Elsewhens. Though he had purposely forgotten their content, he retained a fair idea of what most of them had been about, and—his stupidity today seemed limitless—he finally realized something that he ought to have figured out long before this.

He’d thought that the Elsewhens were almost always visions of things that could happen in the future—weeks or months or years in the future—that he could influence. There had been a very few exceptions, or so he had to tell himself, cursing his own arrogance and cowardice up one side and down the other for deliberately getting rid of them. They might have confirmed this new idea of his—something Mieka had proposed and that Cade had, shameful to admit, not considered seriously: that the Elsewhens could also show him things that would happen in the very near future, within days or hours or even minutes, because of something that he’d already done or said. And that sometimes, as with the one about finding The Rights, they were events about which he could do nothing at all. Events he had in large part caused.

The others, of months or years into the future, no longer frightened him. It was the prospect of more Elsewhens like the one about Briuly and Alaen that sent waves of cold sickness through him. In common with everyone else in the world, he feared being helpless. But the Elsewhens held a particular cruelty. He understood now that sometimes he would see them not because there was something he could do or say to change them, but because something he had already said or done had brought them about and there was nothing,
nothing
, that would alter them in the slightest.

He was well aware of why Briuly and Alaen had gone after The Rights. He’d nagged Alaen into it. As for other Elsewhens of the kind—he might or might not know how they had come about. He might or might not realize which decision of his had led to them.

What he had to acknowledge, if he was to continue accepting and keeping the visions, was that sometimes he would be utterly helpless. He was well acquainted with worry, confusion, anger, fretfulness about what he ought to do to bring about or to avoid a certain Elsewhen. Now, for the sake of his sanity, he had to resign himself to the fact that there would be times when he could do nothing at all.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake! Give it a rest, would you?”

He nearly fell out of bed at the sound of Mieka’s annoyed voice.

“You’re thinking too loud! Stop it and get some sleep!”

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and turned over, and tried to compose his brain for slumber.

A rustle of bedclothes from the opposite side of the room made him sit up and light the bedside candle. Mieka was rummaging in his carry sack. Cade knew why.

“Just enough so you can sleep.”

“It’s all right, I don’t—”

“Shut up and hold out your arm.”

He began to roll the loose sleeve up his right arm, then quickly switched to the unmarked left. He knew he needed bluethorn for the energy to perform, and blockweed to be able to sleep, and the occasional exotic mixture concocted specially for him by Auntie Brishen for interesting dreams such as those he’d had last night. But he couldn’t help feeling ashamed of the red pinprick marks on his right arm.

* * *

T
he rest of their stay at New Halt was unremarkable, as was the drive to Castle Eyot. They did not perform at the mansion outside New Halt, and had not for two years now. The substantial heft of the bags of gold they earned wasn’t worth the terrible drain on their energies and the sheer creepiness of the place.