Thornlost (Book 3) (22 page)

Mieka was rummaging in piles of discarded clothing. “Where’s me trousers, eh? Oh, here—no, those are Rafe’s—”

“What did she say?”

Yanking his own pants free, he smirked. “I’m not telling.”

“Come on, Mieka!”

“No.” He tried stuffing all those folds of bleached linen into the waistband, then cursed and hauled the thing off, looking around for a shirt. When he found one, he shouldered into it.
“But one thing I’ll say, Cayden Silversun, and it’s that those stories you two were talking about, they crept into my dreams and it’s a marvel and a wonder I didn’t wake up shrieking!” He bounded down the steps, begging for something to drink.

The hunting party returned, as Vrennerie had predicted, without the stag. Jeska returned with a torn shirt and scratches all over his face and arms and a vow, once he was in the wagon applying salve to his cuts, never to participate in such folly ever again.

“All this anguishing yourself,” Cade scoffed, “over a few scrapes?”

“It’s not just that,” he replied, and gingerly rubbed his backside. “I’ll be sore for a week!”

“You can visit the baths in Lilyleaf,” Mieka suggested. “That ought to help.” When Jeska continued to grumble, he went on, “Only think on it—all that lovely hot water, all those lovely bath girls to rub your back—”

“It’s not me back that hurts!” But the masquer began to look interested.

“I’m sure they’ll rub whatever needs rubbing,” Mieka soothed. “And very capably, too.” He stretched and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, saying, “I’m for a ride up top with Yazz. And I really ought to meet Lord Eastkeeping afore their road splits off from ours.”

The introductions were performed just as everyone was mounting up to continue the journey. Mieka was all charm and smiles, but as Cade watched the usual process, he discerned a subtle shift in the Elf’s demeanor from
This is someone who must be won over
to
This man is someone I like;
from master manipulator to real person.

Cade walked with him over to the wagon, intending to give him a leg up to the coachman’s bench. Mieka hesitated, gave Cade an oblique glance, and said softly, “He seems nice.”

“Yes.”

“She looks happy.”

“Yes. Are there any other trite social niceties you’d like to trot out for inspection?”

“I just meant—” He gripped the handhold on the side of the wagon. “You’re not bothered. Them, I mean. It doesn’t bother you.”

“Not at all.”

“Well… good, then.” Without another word, and without looking directly at Cade, he climbed up to sit beside Yazz.

With a wry smile and a shake of his head, Cade went to check his horse’s girth. For all that Mieka’s antics could render him speechless with fury at times, there was yet a kindness about him, a gentleness unexpected in one so madly brash. But Cade still wanted to know what Vrennerie had told him. Not that he’d ever find out, of course.

They parted from Lord Eastkeeping’s party at dusk. Camp was set up and dinner was set to cook, but Touchstone’s wagon rolled on to the night. Farewells were warm and promises were made to meet again in Gallantrybanks this winter. Cade got back into the wagon and found a glass of ale already poured for him, and Rafe frowning across it.

“What’s all this about that story Chat told us? Mieka says you asked Vrennerie all about it. You’re not thinking of making us do a full-stage battle and all that goes with it, are you?”

“No.” He watched an apple orchard go by outside the window, heard the sounds of Lord Eastkeeping’s camp fade into the distance.

Mieka slouched in the opposite chair and poured more ale. “We should’ve stayed for dinner.”

“Lilyleaf tomorrow,” Cade reminded him. “Mistress Ringdove will have fresh trout in lemon sauce and those mocah candies you like.”

“Stop tormenting me!” Mieka scowled at the leftovers of
bread, cheese, and vegetables that would be their evening meal. “Croodle’s cooking—the very mention of it in the same breath as such chankings as this just isn’t decent—”

All at once Jeska began burbling where he lay in his hammock, swinging gently back and forth. “
Croo
dle,
Croo
dle,” he sang, a sweetly silly grin on his face. “Croodle cooking cooing cuckoos—”

Cade stared. “What’s wrong with him? Swallow the same dictionary Mieka did?”

Rafe said, “A little something of Auntie Brishen’s finest in his ale. So he’d stop carrying on about his sore bum.”

“Don’t worry,” Mieka assured them as Jeska went on crooning. “It’ll really hit him in a few minutes and then he’ll shut up. Thorn’s different when you drink it—not like sliding down a hill, more like falling off a cliff.”

“Croodley, crudely, rudely, lewdly, cutely, toodley-dum-de-doodley—”

“Oh Gods,” Cade moaned. “How many minutes is a
few
minutes?”

“—lumpety-thump, clumpety-rump, teedley-wheedley-boo!”

Cade pointed a finger at Mieka. “Make it stop. Now.”

“Dumpety-crumpush, Duchess on crutches, luscious, mush… m-m-m-mushes…”

Silence.

Cade peered at his slumbering masquer. “Will he be all right in the morning?”

“No reason why not.” Mieka plunged his fork into a hunk of cheese and regarded it resentfully. “We’ll throw him into the baths, shall we, first thing after lunching?”

E
arly to rise, early to bed
only made a man bored out of his head, as far as Mieka was concerned. Whilst he’d still lived at Wistly Hall, his bedchamber had been far enough away from everyone else’s in the vast barracks of a place that he wasn’t bothered by other people rising at repulsive hours of the morning. In his new home, his wife had thoughtfully arranged the baby’s cradle in her mother’s room at the opposite corner of the house from their bedchamber. When his daughter squalled for her morning feed, Mieka heard her, but only at a distance.

His partners in Touchstone weren’t so obliging regarding his comfort. Rafe, the baker’s son, still woke early, noisily, and inconsiderately: banging about the wagon, opening or closing windows, muttering to himself, searching with an unjustified amount of racket for this or that or something to eat. Cade, bless him, usually sprawled silently in his hammock, thinking Great Thoughts or reading, for an hour or so after waking. Sometimes, though, he was as rude as Rafe, especially when he couldn’t find the book he’d been reading the night before. Jeska would slide quietly enough from his bed, but the splashing of his morning wash, the cursing that always came with negotiating the cleft in his chin on a shaving day, and the debating he did with himself
about which of his score of equally gorgeous outfits he would wear that day invariably interrupted Mieka’s sleep. A discreet application of redthorn at night didn’t last until dawn.

So Mieka never minded that much when Yazz got them to their next stop while they were all still abed. He could wake up enough to climb stairs to their allotted rooms, or elect to stay in the wagon while the others went into the inn, and then cuddle back to sleep with little or no memory of ever having woken up at all.

Yet when the wagon pulled into Mistress Ringdove’s establishment in Lilyleaf at dawn, Mieka was wide awake and had been for quite some time. This annoyed him. If he didn’t get some decent sleep, he’d be nigh on useless at their first show tonight—or would be, without some of Auntie Brishen’s bluethorn. The reasons why the night had been fitful and fretful were only partially clear to him, but he was sure all of them were Cayden’s fault. The man’s habit of thinking too much was, unfortunately, contagious.

Mieka wasn’t quite sure how they’d come to be traveling with Lady Vrennerie and her husband—he hadn’t even known she was at Coldkettle for the wedding—so her presence in the wagon yesterday had been a shock. Not the shock that had twisted him up in his hammock; that maneuver had been deliberate, an example of the
clever and mad
Blye had recommended years ago. He’d actually been awake for some time, listening to the conversation. And grisly talk it had been, too. He’d decided when they got to the dead animals part that it was time to put a stop to it before he lost his appetite.

There had been a second shock when he was handing her down the steps.
“Just to be letting you know,”
she’d whispered,
“that green shirt from last night suits you much better than all that velvet last summer—such a difficult shade of blue, don’t you agree?”
He’d nearly collapsed with the knowing that she had recognized him last summer behind the blue gown and heavy veil. How had
she managed it? He hadn’t a clue. But if he ever did such a thing again, he’d make sure to keep a withie up his sleeve and use the magic inside to create an appearance for himself that would keep him mysterious. And all at once he resolved that he would indeed do such a thing again, just to see if he could.

Thus decided, he’d settled himself for sleep. But his brain was too engaged in poking around various other things, all of them to do with Cade and Vrennerie.

He still didn’t understand why Quill hadn’t pursued the girl. She was attractive and he’d been attracted. She laughed in all the right places, they were compatible—what was Cade’s problem? Mieka had thought, for a time, that Vrennerie would become a presence in Cade’s life, and therefore in his own. But it seemed she was naught but a passing digression.

Had this been a play, he thought suddenly, one thing would follow another in nice, logical, and even predictable order, all of it leading to culmination and resolution. Happily ever after wasn’t a strict requirement, but nothing in the script would have anything to do with aught other than the stated plot.

But this wasn’t a play. Life was messy, illogical, unpredictable, and things and people happened that had nothing to do with each other, leave alone the basic plot. How did you apply a
plot
to life? You couldn’t, not without warping things out of their proper proportions. Events that ought to be significant turned out to be trifles; people one met seemingly at random turned out to be central to one’s life. People came and went, things that had once been vitally important became trivial, what you thought would come of something—or someone—never happened the way you thought it might. Mayhap by the end of one’s years, one could look back and make sense of everything. But not necessarily—and certainly not while it was all happening. There was no predictable plot to the events of a life.

Lady Vrennerie, for instance. Had this been a play, Cade
would be sighing right now at losing her to Lord Eastkeeping, who would of course have been infinitely less agreeable and perhaps even sinister, as befitted the standard story of a hero’s heartbreak (casting Cade as the Hero, naturally).

In a romance, something would happen to His Lordship to make Vrennerie available again, and she would come running to Cade for a scene of tearful, joyful reunion. Applause, take the proper number of bows, curtain down. In a tragedy, Vrennerie would be very unhappily wedded and stay that way, and Cade would keep sighing for the rest of his life—but
nobly
sighing, for as the Hero, he must do the honorable thing and not tempt her away from her marriage vows.

Cade evidently did not feel inclined to sigh. Why should he? Vrennerie was clearly happy in her marriage and he was clearly happy for her—which automatically disqualified him from the role of Hero, because even the noblest of that breed must needs sigh. Lord Singleheart, for instance; in a rather stupid little playlet, upon realizing the superior suitability of his lady’s husband, he became so depressed that he rode off to fight wyverns and, needless to say, managed to get himself killed.

Nowhere in any play or poem or tale Mieka had ever heard of—and in his profession, he’d encountered most of them—not in romance or tragedy or anything in between, did the Hero stay friends with the lady who married another man. This was
life
, not a play, and Mieka concluded that it was much better that Cade was happy for Vrennerie and remained her friend rather than sighing (nobly) or riding off to get himself killed.

Not that Quill would ever do anything that idiotic, or that vulgar. Mieka could see Alaen doing it, though—a much deeper streak of the romantic than Cade had Alaen Blackpath, pining after Chirene. His wife had mentioned in her latest letter that the poor fool had shown up again at the house. Thorned, of course. Her mother had had the fright of her life when she came upon
him, sleeping curled up like a child with tears still on his face, in a corner of the bedchamber Chirene occupied whilst she and Sakary had rented the place. When he woke, humbly apologetic and meek as a lamb, they bundled him into a hire-hack back to Gallantrybanks, but in Mieka’s opinion the man really ought to pull himself back into one piece.

He simply couldn’t imagine Cayden doing something that silly. He had better taste.

Still… was there no feeling that the man would surrender to? Not love, obviously. Nor rage, neither. Mieka couldn’t have counted the times he’d seen fury flare in those gray eyes, only to be doused almost immediately. Sometimes he deliberately provoked that anger, just to see if Cade would succumb. He never did.