Thornlost (Book 3) (15 page)

“No.” Jeska kicked at a rock in the road. “I doubt he’s thought it out this far, but what it really gains him is a thousand people at his door, wanting him to find a missing this or long-lost that. Another thousand who want to show him jewelry what’s been in the family forever, with appropriate old stories, and have him say it’s Fae-wrought. The Royal Librarian will want him to rake through every ancient text in the Archives, searching for
clues to any other little dibs and daubs nobody’s been able to figure out before. And then there’ll be those who actually do some thinking about it.” He gave Cayden an upslanting smile. “The ones who’ll want to know how you knew, and won’t take scholarship or research for an answer. And then you’ll
really
be in the shit, won’t you?”

No, he hadn’t thought it out that far.

“Leave them lie, Cade,” Rafe said. “If Alaen or Briuly want to play the bright lad and go looking, fine. Content yourself with good reviews, can’t you?”

He usually had plenty to say about just about anything. He had no reply for this. They returned to the wagon and occupied themselves in individual pursuits—Jeska with totting up his own bank account, Rafe playing cards against himself, and Cade with a book he didn’t read. Mieka was sleeping, or still in a snit pretending to be asleep. It didn’t matter. They were only a few hours from home.

Yet
home
was not the refuge of solitude, high up in his fifth-floor room, that it had always been. They had exactly four days before they’d start out on the Royal Circuit, and in those four days, there were at least four hundred things to be done.

Packing. Making sure there were withies enough and to spare. Finalizing their portfolio. Playing a last show at the Keymarker before they left Gallantrybanks for the summer. And a long consultation with Lord Kearney Fairwalk in strictest privacy.

He had no intention of leaving before he’d arranged the transfer of his grandfather’s legacy to a new account, nice and legal, with only two people having access to it. Kearney was all agog at his explanation of the bargain he’d made with his mother, but the look Cade gave him when he was about to ask why Lady Jaspiela’s name would not also be on the account guaranteed that the question was not asked. They paid a visit to Kearney’s lawyer, and then to the bank, and all was put in order. Bills
for Derien’s school and books and suchlike would be sent to Kearney’s clerks, and anything questionable—payment demands from Lady Jaspiela’s favorite dressmaker, for instance—would be forwarded to Cayden or His Lordship to be approved… or not. The final papers were signed the day before the Royal Circuit started. And, as things had taken a bit longer than anticipated, Cade had Kearney drop him off directly at the Keymarker. He watched the carriage move cautiously down the narrow street, then remembered something and ran after it.

“Did you arrange for horses along the route?” The huge white animals belonging to the Shadowshapers would not be available to Touchstone, for of course the Shadowshapers would be using them all.

“Everything perfectly in order,” His Lordship assured him, leaning out the window of his carriage. “Don’t fret, Cayden, I know what I’m doing!”

“I know, I know—it’s just—”

“You can’t help yourself. You worry about your art, my dear boy, and let me take care of everything else. Hurry, now, or you’ll be late for the performance!”

He wasn’t late, but it was a near thing. Because of their early start on the morrow, the show tonight would be an early one. The placards announcing it read: THE DOORS OPEN AT SIX. THE TROUBLE STARTS AT SEVEN!

“New barmaid,” Mieka commented as they took the stage. “Not their usual. Must be a cousin or something who needs the work.”

Cade glanced over the settling crowd and picked out the new girl at once. The Keymarker had recently decided to specialize in leggy redheads. This girl wore the same black skirt, green blouse, and white apron as all the others, but she was a pocket-sized blond with a thick braid swinging down her back to her waist. As the barmaids finished delivering orders and gathered along
the back wall to watch the performance, the new one looked ridiculous amidst all the tall, lissome young women with masses of red hair. Mieka must be right: cousin or niece or friend-of-a-friend needful of a job, or filling in tonight for one of the regular girls.

He did his usual survey of the audience as Rafe and Mieka set up the beginnings of the magic. Nobody here was particularly sensitive, so he relaxed. In spite of what Mistress Mirdley had said about various combinations of bloodlines producing unpredictabilities (such as Cade himself), he tended to agree with Sagemaster Emmot: Whatever magic each of the old races had, each generation saw it diluted just a little more. The play they were doing tonight was a perfect demonstration. “Dwarmy Day” involved a haughty Wizard who refused to pay the bridge passage fee to an understandably irate Troll. The spells they used could still be found in reference books, but nobody Cade had ever heard of could conjure them for real nowadays. Lack of skill, lack of education, or lack of sufficient specific magic?

Traditionally this was a “glisker’s choice” sort of playlet. No group attempted it that did not trust absolutely in its masquer’s ability to improvise. Accordingly, Cade had primed the withies with all sorts of things for Mieka to play with, and Jeska did his partners proud.

The first gambit was a cloud of grayish smoke called by the Troll so that the Wizard couldn’t even see the bridge. Jeska made a great show of coughing and waving his arms about, then took in a huge breath and blew the cloud out over the audience, where it turned to sparkles like glass shards. Triumphant, he spit into his hand. A swirl of moisture rose from his palm and became a rain cloud. It hovered briefly over his head while he grinned—but before he could use it, the Troll’s laughter (Rafe, over at his lectern) boomed through the theater as the cloud burst and the Wizard was drenched in his own spit. The audience chortled—Mieka
had evidently decided to save the sensation of being soaked to the skin for the end. Sure enough, he could hear Mieka chuckling to himself as the infuriated Troll finally stomped out from his den beneath the bridge. When the Elf was feeling especially playful, he gave the audience not just the feeling of water but sopped undergarments as well when the Wizard hit the river. Tonight he had the audience squirming.

The play ended, a couple of withies were shattered in midair between Jeska and the glisker’s bench, the applause began, and Cade was about to walk out from behind his lectern to join his partners in their bows when he sensed a snag in the magic. Frowning, he looked immediately to Mieka. If the Elf had been drinking too much again, or pricking some new kind of thorn—

But those changeable eyes were very nearly sober. Not Mieka, then. Cade glanced at Rafe and nearly tripped over his own feet. Calm, laconic Master Fettler Rafcadion Threadchaser was as close to sizzling furious as Cade had ever seen him.

They bowed, and again, but Rafe didn’t stay for a third. He was down off the stage and striding to the back of the room, where the barmaids had dispersed to refill glasses.

“What’s wrong with him?” Jeska asked.

Mieka raked sweat-damp hair off his face. “Thirsty, mayhap? I know I am!”

Cade’s progress through the crowd was delayed by compliments and backslaps. When he finally found Rafe over near the side door, the fettler was pointing a long finger in the blond barmaid’s face.

“—d’you think you were doing, girl? Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to twiddle about with magic? And don’t tell me you didn’t know what you were doing, neither!”

“I won’t tell you that because it wouldn’t be true,” she replied coolly. “You know that as well as I do.”

“Then what in the unholy fuck was all that?”

“There’s a girl here tonight who’s barely twelve. Right on the verge of her magic. So she’s a little delicate.”

“Girl? What girl?”

“Her older brother sneaks her in dressed as a boy. Not the first time, probably not the last. I’ve had words with him, but he’s responsible for her—if you can call it that—while their parents are out at work until midnight. He’s sixteen and perfectly besotted for theater, so whenever he can, he slinks into the Keymarker by working an hour or two carrying crates up from the cellar.”

Cade nodded his understanding. “He brings his little sister along with him to sit in a corner out of the way, and when the place starts to fill up, everyone’s too busy to keep an eye on either of them. So he sees a show for free—no, he actually gets paid, doesn’t he, for the work done beforehand? Smart lad! And then he scarpers as quick as may be, to get home before his parents.”

She gave him a glance from bottle-green eyes flecked with gold. “Not half stupid, are you?” Tossing the braid of dark-blond hair over her shoulder, she looked up at Rafe again. “Anyways, if I hadn’t put up a bit of a guard between her and that mad little glisker of yours, and done it before your magic even began, what her screaming would’ve done to your concentration I don’t like to think.”

Amused, Cade watched Rafe’s face as insult competed with outrage. Cade could guess what was running through his mind—Hells, it was clear enough in his face. Bad enough was the implication that a fettler of Rafe’s talent and experience wouldn’t sense a vulnerable child in the audience. Worse: that he in fact
hadn’t
sensed it, because this girl had established a buffer before the first magic swept through the Keymarker—and he hadn’t sensed that, either, until the very end. (Neither had Cayden, not until that little hitch.) Worse still was her insufferable cheek in thinking he not only wouldn’t recognize frailty but couldn’t adjust for it. But worst of all, she was a
girl
.

Rafe was drawing breath to express himself on any or all of these points when a barman yelled, “Megs!” and the girl flinched.

“Rafe,” Cade said mildly, “we’re keeping her from her work.”

Finger in her face again, Rafe snapped, “Just don’t you interfere in mine anymore, understand me?” He pivoted on one heel and made for the tiring room.

“Ale, please,” Cade said swiftly, seeing she was about to escape. “Four, actually. Could you bring them backstage? Beholden.” As he watched her go, he gave in to the smile that had been twitching his mouth. Though it was Mieka’s opinion that there were seven sorts of female, Rafe recognized only two: Crisiant and everybody else. Each might have her individual place—mother, shopkeeper, glasscrafter, princess—but those places were to be kept to and no arguments about it. This barmaid who appeared to have the skills of a fettler… this wasn’t something to which Rafe would raise an approving toast.

In the tiring room, Rafe had sprawled in a low chair as Mieka and Jeska finished packing up the glass baskets and spent withies. Cade saw the questions on the faces of his glisker and masquer, and wondered why neither had felt that little hiccup in the magic. He had no chance to say anything, because Megs was right behind him, expertly lofting a tray of four ales and a bowl of the Keymarker’s special baked pompkin squash, a delicacy from the Islands provided at great trouble and expense, according to the owner, but in reality available at several dockside markets, according to Mistress Mirdley.

Rafe glared at the girl. Mieka looked more bewildered than ever. Jeska polished off his charm, as usual when around a girl whether she was pretty or not. Cade watched, fighting another smile, as he helped distribute the glasses and serve little plates of food.

“Beholden,” she muttered.

“And what might your name be, darlin’?” Jeska asked.

She kept her gaze on the empty tray in her hands. “Megs.”

“Megs what?”

With a long-suffering sigh: “Knolltender.”

Jeska smiled. “And are you?”

She gave him a broad, toothy smile. “Congratulations! You’re the five thousandth person who’s tried to make that pun!”

“So what have I won?”

“A vocabulary lesson,” Cade said. “It’s tender as in ‘minder,’ not ‘affectionate.’ ”

“I said he
tried
,” Megs reminded him. “I didn’t say he succeeded.” Tucking the tray beneath her arm, she bobbed a mocking curtsy and strode out.

“Nice exit line,” Jeska remarked.

Cade said, “Let’s finish our drinks and get out of here. If I know you lot—and I know you very well indeed—you still have packing to do, and we leave tomorrow early.”

“On the Royal Circuit,” Mieka said with a contented sigh. “Y’know, I don’t think I’ll ever tire of saying that!”

* * *

I
t occurred to Cayden on their fifth day out that he’d seen the Continent bedecked in summer, but not his own homeland. He’d never gone traveling like this before. That first Winterly, in the King’s Coach, had been at times a sheer cold-clotted misery; the second, in the Shadowshapers’ wagon, had been much more comfortable, but still… the
Winterly
. Landscape swathed in snow, roads knee-deep in mud, skies shrouded in dismal gray, and not much scenery even on the better days.

But Cade discovered, on Touchstone’s first Royal Circuit, that his country was magnificently beautiful. He had seen only its autumnal gold and brown, its wintry gray and white. Sitting up on the coachman’s bench with Yazz, wind gusting through his hair, the boisterous drench of summer colors amazed him.

Green
, for instance. It had only ever been a color of coolness to him before; he learned that it could be warm, drowsy, richly scented. Wheat rippling in endless fields; fruit trees bursting with pears and walnuts, apricots and almonds; dignified oaks quivering slightly with the chase and dance of foraging squirrels.
Green
was the tart juice of gooseberries picked sun-warm from streamside bushes, and the moist tang of grass crushed underfoot. It was the emerald flash of dragonfly wings, the limp drapery of a woman’s skirt rucked up into her belt as she worked, and waves of tangleskein moss clinging to river stones.

And there was noise, too, infinitely more noise than in winter. It was the animals, mainly. A Gallybanker, in the usual daily run of things, heard horses, dogs and cats, and the occasional caged songbird trilling in somebody’s open window. Out here in the fields there were horses aplenty, of course, and dogs and cats, and a profusion of birds. But the lowing cattle, bleating sheep, grunting swine, and whatever sound goats made when provoked—for which Cade had no word, and this irked him—these things, although not precisely new to him, were in summer a raucous counterpoint to the flurrying wind and rushing streams.