Thornlost (Book 3) (56 page)

The shine of gold and silver threaded through spun glass: a chain of a hundred perfect links and a crown that was a circle of sunbursts and crescent moons and diamond-studded stars. The Rights rested on a flat rock that formed the seat of the throne, its back the stone wall. Whole, immaculate, glowing like rough-carved chunks of moonlight sparkling in the new morning sunshine at his back.

To take up the carkanet and crown, to sit upon the throne, to cause the suns and moons and stars to ignite and proclaim a True King—how dazzling bright it would be, no paltry yellowish Elf-light nor sickly blue Wizardfire nor red-gold glower of a Caitiff’s spellcasting, but the pure silver and gold radiance of the Rights.

Briuly seized the crown with his long, thin hands and put it on his head, still laughing, his thorn-sharp eyes wild with joy. “The Fae King!”

Yet there was naught but sunglow on the crown. No inner fire, no eldritch shimmer. Briuly’s eyes lost their exultant sheen and his smile wavered and died. “I don’t—I don’t understand—”

“Idiot. What did you think would happen? And look, you’ve dropped the necklace.” For in his taking, the carkanet had been dislodged, dangling on a jag of stone just above the mud of last night’s rain. Alaen bent, reaching for it, saying, “For Chirene—I couldn’t bear to see any other woman wear it.”

Yet before his fingers touched it, there came the yowling of the hounds.

Alaen scrambled to his feet and ran like all Hells were after him—which a goodly number of them were. They rode out of the Westerlands, Sentinels charged with the safekeeping of the Rights until the crown encircled the brow of a True King and the carkanet clasped the throat of a True Queen. These were not the Fae of mortals’ pretty imaginings, portrayed in stone and glass and paint as winged, exquisite, elegant. These were the other sort of Fae. Fanged, hideous, filthy, huge, riding gigantic black horses with clawed feet, horses that screamed enraged reply to the belling royal hounds.

The dogs were skeletal and hideously swift, with bony bodies and narrow muzzles and a ridge of tufting fur along their spines. They formed a boundary of bared teeth and shrill growls round Nackerty Close, the field with many corners. The Sentinels drew rein, most of them at the broken wall. Two of them on their gruesome mounts continued on, halting when they loomed over Alaen where he had stumbled to the ground. They paused, glancing coldly at his twisted limbs and bloodied forehead.

“Carkanet?” one of the Fae yelled over a massive shoulder, and the rocks littering the ground quivered. The second Fae raised his sword.

“Untouched!” the cry came back.

“Unsullied, then.” A nod, reluctant; the sword dipping back down, deprived of a kill. “Leave him. We’ll take the other.”}

Cade opened his eyes to the darkness of his bedchamber, gasping, covered in clammy sweat.
I did this
, he thought helplessly.
I did this. My fault. I told them to search. I told them where to look. But not on Midsummer dawn!

“Cayden?”

An opening door, a bit of Elf-light—no fear in it, a willing conjuring. He saw her only in outline, the slight and slender shape, the pale hair glowing.

Why couldn’t it have been Mieka coming through the door? Mieka would have understood. Would not be staring at him like this, shocked and frightened. Mieka—

{Cade gripped the tregetour’s lectern in both hands, watching in horror as Mieka’s dance became a flailing stagger. The magic surged, faltered, swept the audience with a ferocity that took all Rafe’s skill and strength to control. The images and sensations of
Bewilderland
were even more bizarre than usual, and that was what people came for, returning again and again to be assaulted by Cayden Silversun’s nightmares. But whatever he had put into the withies, Mieka was enhancing with drunken, thorn-roused horrors of his own. People began to scream.

Cade lunged for the glisker’s bench, shoved Mieka out of the way, grabbed the withies. The Elf didn’t even protest, so completely thornlost that he merely sat down on the floor and began counting his fingers like a toddling child.

They finished the performance, Lord and Lady alone knew how. The only thing Cade could think of was how much he would enjoy kicking the living shit out of Mieka Windthistle. Two thousand people were out there, gasping, shaking, trying to recover from an onslaught more brutal and undisciplined than anything Black Lightning had ever dared to do.

He turned, fists clenched. Those eyes were looking up at
him, but they were no longer Mieka’s eyes. Parts of him were gone, lost to whiskey and thorn and despair. The memories stored in muscle and bone took him through the work, but none of it was guided by his conscious mind. Where before, instinct and intellect had combined with physical grace to produce an unmatched brilliance, now the muscles remembered the basics of the movements, but didn’t really know what to do without that inspired mind’s direction.

Cade felt no compassion. He would never forgive Mieka for this, never.

“Quill—”

Those big, pathetic eyes; that once-beautiful face; this drunken, thorn-thralled stranger who used to be Mieka Windthistle—

“Get out!” he roared, and kicked over the wooden frames, and all the glass baskets made by Blye so long ago shattered onto the stage.}

“Cade? What’s wrong?” The little yellow-gold Elf-light trembled. “You look like you’ve seen—”

Something that might have been laughter scraped out of his throat. What had he
seen
? What
hadn’t
he seen? What more would his “gift” from the Fae show him?

A challenge. A dare. A taunting to his own mind. He had no illusions that he’d seen the worst that the futures could offer. If there were more horrors in store, he wanted to know them.

And so they came, one after another: Elsewhens, all of them possible, all of them because of his choices, his decisions, crowding into his dazed mind, silent glimpses and sudden visions and long scenes like in a play, weaving in and out of each other as if in competition to find out which could stun him the most. But these were no stage productions, no excursions of imagination and ideas. These were the futures. His futures.

{Mieka looked up, those eyes bewildered, hurt, the eyes of a child betrayed by everyone he had ever trusted.

“How did this happen?” he whispered. “I don’t—I can’t understand how this happened.”

Cade felt his lips move, the vibration of air in his lungs, his throat, heard his own voice say with flawless coldness, “
You
made it happen.”}

He struggled uselessly against those words.
No, it wasn’t you—it was me. My choices. My decisions. My fault—

{Mieka plucked the spectacles off Jeska’s nose and peered through them. “Lord and Lady save us! Why not just strap a pair of bottle bottoms to your face?”

Jeska tossed aside the broadsheet he’d been flipping through. “It may come to that.” He took back the spectacles and tucked them in his pocket. “Please tell me the snow has stopped. Stuck here for two days, and us not on the Winterly these twenty years and more!”

“Up to the eaves by morning, Yazz said.” He sat at the table across from Jeska, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. At a far table in the taproom, Cade and Rafe were playing cards with Yazz, who as usual was winning.

The masquer waited patiently for a few moments, then frowned. “Something wrong?”

“D’you ever—does it worry you? I mean, we been doing this for more’n twenty years now, and—”

“We’re still selling out every show, ain’t we? We still have a good time onstage, Cade’s writing is better than ever—” He broke off. “What’s worrying
you
?”

“Nothin’. Everything’s fine, nothin’ to worry ab—”

“C’mon. What’s really wrong?” Then, with a frown: “Twenty years—” A tiny smile curved his lips. “Oh, Mieka!
You think we’re finally too old to work the stage, don’t you?”

“
You
ain’t. Nor Cade nor Rafe, neither.” He gulped, then admitted, “It’s me. I’m still quick enough, but what happens when I’m not? If I’m not everything I’ve always been, Cade’s work suffers. And I won’t have that. I just fuckin’
won’t
.”

Amusement faded from the beautiful face framed in curls touched here and there with silver. “You really mean it. Have you talked with Cade?”

“Oh, right. That’ll happen.” He hesitated, then rushed on, “Never occurs to him, does it—two hours a night, three if it’s
Bewilderland
, five nights of eight on a tour like this one—how do I give the audiences everything they came for if I’m not quick like I was at twenty? That’s when we worked out some of these pieces, Jeska—and I ain’t seen ‘twenty’ for over twenty years! The minute I slow down, the minute I’m tired in the middle instead of at the end—that’s the night I’m finished as glisker for Touchstone.”

“Mieka—”

“I don’t give a shit if they start sayin’ the Elf’s getting’ pudgy, getting’ gray, lookin’ his age. I—”

“You don’t. That’s the best part of Elfenblood.”

Mieka brushed that aside. “What I never want to hear ’em say is that I’m not livin’ up to the work anymore.”

“Talk to Cade,” Jeska urged. “He’ll understand.”

Mieka laughed without humor. “He’ll understand that he can’t write what he needs to write, because his glisker’s too old and feeble to perform it.”}

“Shh,” Jinsie was whispering, “calm down, Cayden, it’s all right, everything’s all right—”

Mieka
, he tried to say. All that emerged from his throat was a muffled groan.
Where’s Mieka—?

{“Where is he?”

The woman shrugged. Then she looked up into his face, his eyes. She took an involuntary step back, made an involuntary glance towards the stairs.

He pushed past her, up the dark stairs, through a double door discreetly labeled
DIVERSIONS
. The room within was littered with little girls. Little girls in schoolgirl skirts and deep red lip rouge and makeup thick and heavy and black on their eyes. Little girls in miniature silk gowns cut low over flat chests. Little girls in boys’ trousers, corkscrew curls cascading down neatly tailored jackets as they moved about the room with silver trays of prepared thorn. Little girls draped across velvet couches, posing with glasses of wine in one hand and skinny knees poking from between the folds of silken chamber robes.

A burst of raucous laughter directed him to a hall, and a muffled giggling shriek took him to the third door down. Inside, Mieka sprawled naked and fleshy on the bright blue coverlet of a bed hung about with shimmering crystal ropes, as if someone had captured rainbows to drape around the bed. Within reach were bottles, glasses, and three girls. Not little girls, praise all the Angels; these girls were sixteen or seventeen, with breasts and hips.

Those eyes, bleary and hazy, caught sight of him. “Cayden! Do join us, dear boy! These three are mine, but I’m sure we can find a few for you!”}

The horror of it was that in the Elsewhen he was neither sickened nor shocked. This was usual, this evening in a whorehouse, even normal—not just for Mieka, but for him.

He turned his head feebly, saw the penstrokes of silver light from the full moon along the wall. Like a moonglade through the gaps in the shutters, and he grasped desperately at the image,
remembering a moonglade Elsewhen where Mieka had been gentle and whimsical and happy, and oh Gods how he wanted that Mieka here beside him now—
I’ll make your moonglade for you, just as I promised, I’ll do it, Mieka, I swear I will—

{“You daft little cullion,” Jeska said, reaching across the table to hold tight to Mieka’s shaking hands. “You think you’re the only one scared? I’ll be forty-five next spring, and you needn’t think it’s any easier for me than it is for you. What if my knees crack in the middle of a speech—that’d be good for a laugh, right in the middle of
Window-wall
! And that’s not even considering my voice. The shouts aren’t as loud, and the whispers get gravelly by the fifth show out of five, and as for everything in between—how do I make Cade’s work everything it should be if I lose the shadings?”

Mieka looked thoroughly ashamed of himself. “Gods, Jeska—I’m sorry. I shoulda realized.”

“None of it’s gonna last forever,” he said softly. “We’re lucky it’s gone on as long as it has. We’re still the greatest players in Albeyn.”

The Elf was silent, staring at his hands, and then said, “I always knew it’d get harder as I got older. I just—I can’t just
sit
there, that’s not how glisking works. Not mine, anyways. One day I really will be too old, I won’t be quick enough anymore, I won’t be able to last through the whole show—and now here’s Cade talking about adding another sequence to
Window-wall
and what if I don’t have it in me anymore?”}

“Cade, please! Tell me what’s wrong! Tell me what to do—”

Nothing to be done. Nothing. He had opened himself to the Elsewhens and they were taking him, claiming him, possessing him. And he had invited this. He had dared his own mind to do its worst.

{“Beholden for the invitation,” said Tobalt, bowing the exact degree required by her rank. “Though it wasn’t unexpected.”

“Wasn’t it?” She gestured for the maid to leave them alone in the pretty little parlor, an elegantly feminine room that was obviously hers alone from the flowered carpet on the floor—irises, the purple-blue matching her eyes—to the painted plaster foxes chasing each other above windows looking out onto the gardens.