Touchstone (37 page)

And slowly, groping for the words, she described dreams and visions that beset Cayden sleeping and waking, taunting him with glimpses of futures that might come to pass—that
would
come to pass if changes went unmade. He never knew what those changes must be or what might further result from them, which decisions would prompt a better future and which would awaken even worse. The worry of it, the grinding uncertainty, the paralyzing fear of doing anything at all—

That afternoon Mieka came to understand that it wasn’t an
Elsewhere
look he’d seen in Cade’s gray eyes, but
Elsewhen
.

“He used to tell me almost all of them,” Blye murmured. She still wouldn’t look at him. “About seeing himself older, working at things he had no intention of doing, and then fixing it so whatever it was got closed off, and wasn’t any part of any future anymore. I think the first one, when he really began to understand what it is that goes on inside his head, was when his father got the appointment at Court. Prince Ashgar turned eighteen, and a Household was set up for him. Zekien put his name up for Private Secretary, but Cade knew at least a week before the official letter came that he’d got Bedchamber instead. He let it slip to me, bragging a bit. First Gentleman is supposed to run the private chambers, supervise the servants, all that. Nobody knew back then what Zekien would be called upon to do, or that he’d do it so well,” she added sourly. “When the letter came, and everyone but Cade was surprised … that was the first time he realized, I think. He wasn’t quite eleven. Over the next year and more I got to recognizing a particular look on his face, and pester him to tell me. He had to tell
someone,
it was gnawing him up inside, knowing what was to come and thinking he was helpless to change it. But then he found he
could
change it. And that’s when he went off to Sagemaster Emmot’s academy. After he got back, he wouldn’t tell me as much as he used to. But I can still see it in his eyes, even hours after he’s had a dreaming.”

“He had a waking dream on the way back from Seekhaven. There was a fox in the middle of the road, at night, and he—”

“I know. He did tell me about that one.” She hesitated, and finally met his gaze again. “No specifics, but it was concerning you. You fretted him at first, you know—you never showed up in any of the foreseeings, but then you just appeared out of thin air in Gowerion and he expected to start seeing you more and more often. But it’s only glimpses he has of you, a few moments, a few words.”

“But if seeing the fox was about me—”

“You weren’t listening. Not that it was
about
you, but that it
concerned
you. There’s a difference.”

“Is that what makes him afraid?” Mieka demanded. “What I’m feeling in those withies of his—something about me in the future scares him?”

“You’d have to ask him that. If you dare.” It was said with wry sympathy, for they both knew very well that to confront Cade could produce any reaction from cold, flat denial to raging fury. “But I think you’re right,” Blye went on. “I think there’s something about any number of possible futures that scares him, in regard to you. I don’t know what he sees, but it’s not pleasant.”

“And I was the one as told him his dreams are important,” he murmured. “I told him he had to keep dreaming.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” When she frowned, he amended, “Nothing much. This Sagemaster Emmot—did he teach Cade how to—Gods, Blye, how
would
you control such a thing?”

“You can’t. There’s things to do afterwards, to get all of it organized and analyzed inside your head, pick the visions apart to try and figure out what’s most important, what might be changed. There’s things he can do to calm himself, if the dreaming is too disturbing. But it’s worried me ever since he started in the theater, because there are so many more people that get brought into his view, people he has to interact with. It’s routine that quiets him, settles him. And there’s nothing quiet or routine about traveling a Circuit. Rafe and Jeska know about this, but I don’t know that they’ll be able to help him the way you could.”

“Me?”

“If the dreams he fears have to do with you, then doesn’t it stand to reason that you’re the one can reassure him?” She was almost begging for this to be true. “Stay near him, sleep in the same room if you can, so that if he wakes affrighted he can see that you’re still there. Give him some kind of an anchor, a connection to what’s really real. What already
is,
I mean, not what
could
be, according to what he sees in his dreamings. Is this making any sense?”

Mieka nodded, and not just to make her feel better. “If I’m what worries him, then I’ll stop worrying him as best I can. I’ll be what’s really real, there with him every day—and every night, too, because I think you’re right about having me there if he wakes from one of those dreams.”

“But don’t change who you are,” she cautioned. “Don’t be different around him, don’t—”

“Don’t stop playing the fool?” He managed a smile. “Blye, darlin’,
that’s
how I’ll reassure him. I can’t be aught but what I am, and he’ll find that a reality to hold on to. And
that
sounds as if it makes no sense at all—”

“—but it actually does,” she finished for him. “Which makes us both either very, very clever, or quite, quite mad, y’know.”

“Mad
and
clever, that’s what I am and what I’ll continue to be. The inconstant constant, the predictably unpredictable.”

“This is sounding worse and worse!” But she was smiling again.

“It’s what he expects of me, and if I become somebody different, that would worry him even more.”

“Just—just have a care to him, won’t you? And when he finally tells you about—”

“I won’t mention that I already know.”

It would be interesting, he reflected, keeping Cayden’s secret, because he would be keeping it from Cayden himself. Clever and mad …

Chapter 18

Having learned at last why those withies of Cayden’s felt like fear, Mieka spent the rest of that afternoon pondering over what Blye had told him, and what he’d promised. That such a gift of magic existed, he had no doubt. Plenty of people had flashes of twice-seen, and it sometimes indicated Fae ancestry. Being predominantly Elfen—notwithstanding all those strains of who-knew-what flooding the family bloodstream—Mieka didn’t know much about the Fae, but he did know this: They actually
could
foresee the future. They were capricious about what they revealed because they disliked looking upon evil and so reported only what pleased them. Nobody trusted a Fae’s predictions; nobody’s future was made entirely of rainbows.

Mieka knew without thinking about it that even with this Fae foreseeing inside him, Cayden was unflinchingly Wizard enough to look upon any future in its brutal entirety, and stubbornly Human enough to want to do something about it.

He also knew that his instinct had been right: those dreams were important.

Yet whatever else it was the dreams revealed, the ones that frightened Cade were about Mieka. Or, rather,
concerned
Mieka, as Blye had corrected him. Unable to think what sort of actions of his might prompt futures that terrified Cade, Mieka decided that the only thing for it was to keep his promise: to be near Cade if he woke scared, and to be both clever and mad.

Thus resolved, he started off to the Downstreet that night in a serene mood swiftly spoiled by the weather. The cooling breeze had died away, and it was a thick and sultry evening that got worse inside the confines of the tavern. They’d just finished one of the sillier Mother Loosebuckle farces, and Jeska was snatching up the coins almost as fast as guffawing patrons could throw them. Mieka was in the midst of catching his breath and wishing for a tall drink of anything as long as it was icy-cold when he glanced over at Cade. The smirk on his tregetour’s face wasn’t quite the one that came after a particularly good performance; indeed, he’d been picking nits with everything lately. Tonight there was the triumph of a fine show in his cloud-gray eyes, but something else as well. His attention was fixed on someone in the audience with a look of recognition Mieka realized he had seen before, when the young musician had come to Wistly Hall to buy one of Fa’s lutes. Squinting, he tried to locate whoever it was Cade was staring at with so smug a grin. But just then Cade slipped from behind his lectern (recently presented to him by Lord Kearney Fairwalk, a gorgeous thing of rosewood inlaid with curlicues of carved and polished dragon bone) and approached the glisker’s bench.

“Let’s give them ‘The Dragon,’ shall we? I know we were going to do ‘Caladrius’ and there isn’t much room for you to spread out, but—”

“You didn’t give me enough to work it with,” Mieka replied, irritably mopping sweat from his face and neck with one of Mistress Mirdley’s dish towels. “Have mercy, Quill—all we lack in this furnace is a fire-breathing dragon!”

Cade moved round behind him, grabbing up a fistful of withies on his way. “Here. This should be enough.”

“Change of plans?” Jeska asked, coming over to empty his hands and pockets of coins into a new little glass basket Blye had made just for the purpose.

“He wants to do ‘The Dragon,’” Mieka said.

“Scale it back a bit—no pun intended,” Cade told them. “We haven’t done it since Seekhaven, but we ought to leave a chavishing behind, once we’re on the road, about how lucky they were tonight to see what the Court saw.”

Jeska crooked a finger at Rafe, who sauntered over. “‘Dragon’ instead of ‘Caladrius’ all right with you?”

Wide shoulders shrugged. That was his only comment.

“Helpful,” Mieka snapped.

“It won’t take me more than a few minutes to prime these,” Cade soothed. “C’mon, Mieka, it’s important.”

He was about to invite Cade to explain precisely
why
it was important when he caught another almost gleeful glance at the audience. A quick look at Jeska and then Rafe told him they’d noticed nothing, or if they had, and understood, they weren’t letting on. Mieka chewed on his lower lip for a moment, then nodded.

It could have been a disaster. It was a piece they’d last played in an outdoor pavilion, with five times the room for conjuring the Prince and the Dragon and their epic battle, and to cram it into a tavern with a dodgy arrangement of ceiling rafters was risky at best. But they did it, and by its ending Mieka couldn’t hear the shatter of glassware for the uproar of applause. The coins were thrown so enthusiastically that a few almost hit him, all the way back at the glisker’s bench.

Eager as he was for a cold drink—and a fresh shirt—he stuck close to Cayden after they’d taken their bows and left the stage. The tavern owner tried to pull him aside to express the extent of his raptures, but Mieka smiled and sidestepped him, arriving at Cade’s elbow just as he paused before a table in the far corner of the room.

“I’m told you want to meet us,” he was saying to a startled young man wearing a dark blue shirt—to minimize the splotches of ink, Mieka realized, that so abundantly decorated his fingers.

“I do indeed. Tobalt Fluter,
The Nayword
. You’d be Silversun?”

As drinks were handed round, Mieka thought he might understand. The weekly broadsheet was gaining a reputation for being the first to report the latest trends in everything from the cut of a coat to the style of a poem. Naturally Cayden would want to see an article on Touchstone in
The Nayword
. Someone must have tipped him about the man’s presence tonight, and that was why—

No. Mieka was certain of what he’d seen in Cade’s eyes.

He exerted himself to be charming and funny—and an exertion it was tonight, after all that work in all this heat—giving Tobalt Fluter some excellent material. He had to keep reminding himself that he wasn’t supposed to know that whereas Fluter was meeting Touchstone for the first time, Touchstone’s tregetour had undoubtedly seen this man before. Talked to him, perhaps; come to know him as a friend. Or would do so; or
might
do so. Or something. This shaded Mieka’s reactions to the writer: wanting to impress him, predisposed to like him because Cade probably did—or would, or might—he began to see how insanely confusing life could become for someone who had prescient dreams. When he read the article a few days later, he was pleased that not only had all their names been spelled correctly, and his jokes cleverly conveyed, but Tobalt also seemed to grasp most of the subtleties of their work. The instant he thought this, he wondered if Cade had known it all in advance.

There was another memorable night during Touchstone’s summer run at the Downstreet. It started out dismally. Mieka had had a little too much to drink at the family’s early evening celebration of his and Jinsie’s Namingday, and had pricked a little too much bluethorn to invigorate himself for the night’s performance. Thus he was acutely aware that except for absolute essentials, none of his partners was talking to him. Nothing but a nod or two when he arrived; nothing but a terse reminder of what playlets they’d chosen. He was edgy and fretted during “Caladrius,” and then when it came time to masque Jeska as the Sweetheart, he made the gown golden and the hair green for just an instant before correcting his mistake. He sensed Rafe exert iron restraint on the magic after that, and cursed himself. None of them would look at him when they gathered up front to take their bows.

Cade left the stage first, closely followed by Jeska. Mieka looked imploringly up at Rafe and said, “I’m sorry—it was only for a second, nobody noticed—”

A quirk of one brow and a twist of his mouth beneath his beard were all the reply Rafe gave. When he jerked his head in what amounted to an order, Mieka trailed along behind him, torn between misery at his blunder and a growing defiance. Had none of the others ever slipped up before? Had Jeska never muddled a line, had Rafe never faltered in his control, had Cade never left out of a withie a bit of magic specific to a piece?

He followed Rafe past the packed tables towards the stairs, confused when the fettler began the ascent to the next floor. Mieka hadn’t been up here since the tavern keeper’s wife had shown him her Lady Shrine months and months ago. Oh Gods, he was about to be scolded, and roundly—and on his Namingday, too. At least, he told himself glumly, they were considerate enough to yell at him in private.