Window Wall (5 page)

“I know. But that’s where she is. Mistress Mirdley will want to keep an eye on Jez and it’d be just me at Redpebble. The footmen have the week free as well.”

It was thus demonstrated to him how little he knew about his own family these days. “Well … all right. But be sure you wake in time for school tomorrow.”

Lord Piercehand, still bestowing silver coins, called out to Cade—called him by name, in fact. For all that each group on each circuit spent several days of each tour on holiday at Piercehand’s Castle Eyot, Cade hadn’t known that the man had ever seen Touchstone perform. He was always off on some voyage or other, collecting. He was very charming, very rich, and very dissipated. Part Wizard and part Elf, with plenty of Human noble titles in his bloodlines and to spare, in his youth he had been all the craze at Court, where his good looks and merry wit made him the darling of Queen Roshien and her ladies. But that had been twenty years ago. He bore all the signs nowadays of indulgence in every diversion wealth could buy. The advancing ruin of a handsome face and fine body was something Cade had seen before, but he couldn’t quite recall where. An Elsewhen, mayhap.

“Master Silversun! Yes, yes, over here, if you please!”

Cade dutifully approached. “Your Lordship?”

A monologue ensued, one voice meant for Cade and the other voice for the workmen queued up for commiseration in the form of silver coin—as if he were the masquer in a play that called for asides to the audience.

“A good thing it was that you did with the carriage, Master Silversun.” With a quick, warm smile at a workman as he pressed a coin into his hand: “Here, my good fellow, glad to see you’re unhurt. I don’t know why she insisted on coming here, never any telling what that woman will do. Spend some of this on your wife, eh? Buy her something pretty. Invited her to my town house, gave her tea, asked if she’d part with a few of her better bits and bobs for my Gallery—yes, come back to work tomorrow, have to clear all this up, eh? On gracious loan from the collection of, and all that sort of thing. Then the runner came with word of this—” He waved his free hand aimlessly. “—and damn me if she didn’t offer her own carriage and stepped right in ahead of me. Let’s hope there’s not too much blood on the upholstery. Bright and early tomorrow, my lad! We’ve an opening to make ready for, eh? Where’d she take herself off to, then?”

“The Minster across the way.”

“Good place for her,” said Piercehand. “Devout these days—admirable, I’m sure, but a trifle tedious, eh? Not at all the way she was in her young day, I can tell you! Damn, but I’m afraid I’ve run out of coin! Well, lads, there’ll be more tomorrow. Tremendous apologies, and drink to your own good fortune tonight! This is
costing
me a bloody fortune,” he muttered as the line dispersed with grumbles—most of them hypocritical, for most of these men had gone through at least twice, rightly trusting to the usual inability of noblemen to distinguish one member of the working class from another. “But it might have cost me Needstraw, and that would be beyond tragedy! My curator, don’t you know—brilliant man, can’t do without him to keep my trinkets sorted. They say you’re the one who found him?”

Cade thought fast. “No, my lord, actually not. I only asked if that section had been explored, and nobody was sure, so they looked again.”

“Well, he owes his life to you and make no mistake. I’ve emptied my purse for today, but there’ll be a reward for you.”

“That’s very gracious but entirely unnecessary—”

“Of course it’s necessary! And I’ll hear no more about it. Now, let’s find you a hack to take you home, eh?” As he smiled, Cade saw the remnants of the young man he had been, a gleaming past glimpsed behind tarnished decay.

“I am beholden to Your Lordship,” Cade responded.

Someone was sent to find a hire-hack. After once again expressing gratitude to Lord Piercehand, Cade climbed in after his brother and frowned as he heard Derien say to the driver, “Wistly Hall, Waterknot Street.”

“I thought you were staying with me tonight.”

“It’s closer to school. And there’s always a place to sleep at Wistly.”

They rode in silence for a time. Then, just as the hack was turning onto Waterknot Street, Cade snorted a laugh. When Dery arched an inquiring brow, he said, “And once again my Namingday turns out memorable. I think I’ll stop having them. Twenty-four is quite old enough, isn’t it?”

“I’ll let you know when I get there.”

G
etting Jezael home to Wistly was a nightmare. Mieka was torn between a desire to shout the horse into a gallop and the equal and opposite desire to go as gently as possible. What Princess Iamina’s driver achieved was an uncomfortable in-between: not fast enough to get them home as quickly as Mieka wanted, but not slow enough to prevent cobblestoned bumps and lurches from wringing strangled groans from Jez’s throat—in spite of whatever Mistress Mirdley had given him for the pain. Every sound his brother made sent a spasm of sick panic through Mieka’s body. He locked his fingers around the wooden side rail of the driver’s bench and scanned the road up ahead, futilely trying to find the smoothest path.

Someone had had brains enough to send word to Mishia Windthistle about the accident; she and Jinsie were waiting at the front door with a makeshift litter. As they moved Jez slowly, safely out of the carriage, Jinsie climbed in the other side for the return journey, telling Blye she’d collar Jedris and get him home before dark.

Blye nodded gratefully. “He’ll want to know how the accident happened, but it can wait until tomorrow, when he can actually see something.”

Mieka helped carry his brother upstairs, and then was shooed out by his mother and Mistress Mirdley. Descending to the hall, he sat on the bottom step of the grand staircase and gnawed on a thumbnail and felt helpless. He didn’t like feeling helpless. Rarely did he get himself into situations where he did feel helpless; he was an expert at strategic departures. The last time he’d felt like this was almost two years ago, that night just before Midsummer when Cade had been thornlost in his Elsewhens, and seen Briuly and Alaen Blackpath finding The Rights of the Fae. Mieka hadn’t been alone in his helplessness; there was nothing anyone could have done. All the rest of that night and on into the next day, nobody had said much of anything, each of them imagining the sunrise scene at Nackerty Close—and, being players, they were exceptionally imaginative.

Only once had Rafe attempted to talk about it, saying that it was Briuly who had reasoned out that the sun would hit the hiding place of The Rights at Midsummer dawn as well as Midwinter sunset, so Cade really wasn’t to blame for what happened. Mieka had the sense not to open his mouth and remind everyone that Cade had wanted the cousins to go after the treasure. Jeska had accused him more than once of pestering them about finding it so that everybody would know that it wasn’t just a story made into a play, that it was real, and applaud Cade for his cleverness in working it all out.

Looking back, it seemed to Mieka that Briuly’s death, which everyone else thought was merely a strange “disappearance,” generally attributed to the vagaries of artistic temperament, was the last thing that Cade had really cared about, the last time he’d openly felt anything. There had been no change in the intensity of magic Cade put into the withies for a performance. Love, hate, fear, joy, contempt, anxiety, tenderness, indignation, grief, rage, pride—all the emotions that Touchstone used onstage were reliably there in the glass twigs. The feel of them had changed some, though Mieka stubbornly chose to attribute the difference to maturity and even to increased mastery of the magic. Cade primed the withies expertly, giving Mieka everything he needed for a performance.

Yet in his personal life, Cade seemed only to be going through the motions. He’d looked and acted grim enough this afternoon, but to Mieka’s knowing eye it was … not
faked
, not exactly, but …
muted.
Rather like what that unknown fettler had done to them several times on that first Royal Circuit, only Cade was muting his own emotions, not onstage magic. It was as if he’d set up a barrier between him and any event that might cause him to feel too much … or feel at all. Like the barrier Lady Megs had raised to protect a sensitive little girl one night at the Keymarker.

And there, Mieka told himself, was another sore point. The noble Lady Megueris Mindrising was everything Cade could want—nice looking, smart, spirited, educated, adept at magic, and insanely rich besides—yet he behaved as if she existed only when he was looking at her. Mieka knew very well what it was like to want a woman, to be so hopelessly in love that every waking thought and every night’s dreamings were about her. Any man with half a grain of sense would have been out of his mind in love with Lady Megs. Cade gave no signs of it that Mieka could recognize.

They’d met her quite a few times in the last couple of years: during Trials at Seekhaven, private performances at one or another of Lord Mindrising’s many residences throughout Albeyn, at lunching or tea with Princess Miriuzca, at the races. Cade responded not at all to being teased about Megs. He neither flushed red with embarrassment nor snarled that it was nobody’s business but his, nor laughed, nor threatened serious physical mayhem if they didn’t shut up. He simply didn’t react. The lady, of course, could not be similarly teased; Mieka did have some notion of manners. Though she was pleasant enough around Cade, she showed no particular partiality for his company. Granted, it simply wasn’t done: no self-respecting girl, wellborn or not, would be caught actively pursuing a man. But Megs wasn’t the typical twitchy little titled ladyship, nor simpering simpleminded shopgirl. And, facts be faced, she was getting to be of an age when people sniggered behind their hands at unwed females. Cade wasn’t the best catch in terms of the Court, but Megs had buckets of money and a name ancient enough for both of them. Mieka couldn’t see why anyone would object to Cade. True, he was no beauty, and he’d talk the hind leg off a wyvern, and his sulks were the most infuriatingly boring thing in the world, but he had pretty manners and could talk interestingly when he felt like it, and he was famous and even had a few noble ancestors, and why was Mieka chittering inside his own head about Cade’s love life when his brother lay upstairs—?

“How is he?”

Cade and Derien stood in the hallway. Mieka hadn’t even noticed their arrival. Getting to his feet, he said, “We took him upstairs. Nobody’s said anything to me since.” And then, seizing on something to talk about that would distract him from thinking about Jez, he asked, “Why did you pretend it was you, Cade?”

Derien glanced briefly up at his brother—but not for permission to speak, and
that
told Mieka more than anything else could that Derien was not a little boy anymore. “You’re right, it was me,” he said to Mieka. “But Blye would believe it from Cade, so we said it was him.”

“Yes, I believed it,” said Blye from the top of the stairs. She continued wearily down to them, wiping her hands on a red-stained towel. “But not for long. Jez is resting. Mistress Mirdley says the wounds are—well, let’s just say that she cleaned them out and stitched him up. Mieka, she wants a bottle of sweet wine to hide the taste of the medicine. He has to get some sleep.”

“Pantry,” he said, and led the way.

In common with the other grand houses on Waterknot Street, which had all been built around the same time, Wistly Hall possessed a wine cellar. All these wine cellars leaked, no matter how thick the stone walls, the Gally River’s underground tributaries stubbornly finding any crack or seam to seep through. The door to Wistly’s cellar was kept locked. Finances in the Windthistle family had been tight for the last thirty-five years and more, so nobody knew how deep the water might be these days. There was no money for drainage and repair. So all the bottles and kegs were crowded into a pantry along with flour and spices and loaves of sugar. Mieka threaded past boxes and barrels and shelving to the back wall, where the paltry remnant of the once-extensive Windthistle wine collection was stored. Behind him in the kitchen, he could hear Blye confronting Cade.

“I believed you for a minute or two—but you only see things that you have the ability to change. So it has to have been Dery.”

“I didn’t tell you, because I don’t want anyone to know before we figure out exactly what it is he can do.”

“But you already know what it is.”

“More or less,” Cade admitted. “Why did you send for me, anyway? It’s not as if I could’ve been any help.”

“When Mistress Mirdley got there, she said Mieka and Dery were at your flat.”

“So it’s Mieka you were wanting? Even though he was no more useful than me?”

Mieka found a venerable bottle of mead and dusted it off. Honey-wine ought to be sweet enough to disguise any nasty medicinal taste, unless it had been stored too long and gone sour.

“Mieka needed to be where his brothers were!” she snapped. “You’re right, you weren’t necessary, and you’ve made it clear that nobody’s necessary to you except when you’re onstage. So why did you bother to come?”