Touchstone (9 page)

“The tavern keeper will have our balls on a platter.” But Mieka was beginning to look intrigued.

“Before or after his wife kills us?” Rafe inquired caustically.

“She won’t be killing anybody, and our balls are perfectly safe.” Cade forced himself look into those eyes. “
You’re
going to charm her out of any temper—and what’s more, you’re going to charm her into replacing her glassware at a price she can well afford. Once people start talking about what they’ll see here tonight, she’ll need more anyway, to serve all the new customers.”

Mieka looked at him with frank admiration. “And here I thought
I
flew high and wide!”

“Try to keep up,” Cade said, and laughed.
His
choice, this;
his
decision. Made a spectacular first appearance at Trials, had they? Why wait?
Spectacular
could just as easily start tonight.

Chapter 5

There seemed scarce ten minutes between the time Cayden fell into his bed and the vehement return of consciousness in the form of his little brother, Derien, bouncing on the mattress, making the supporting ropes whine and the bed frame creak.

“Wake up, wake up, wake
up
!”

“No!” he growled. “Get off and go away!”

“But you have to see, you have to read it! C’mon, Cade, wake up!”

He made a grab for the child, who giggled and leaped from the bed, waving a broadsheet so fresh-printed that the ink had left smudges on Dery’s fingers. “Read what? Did somebody—?” Rolling out of bed, he lunged, and almost missed. The page tore. “Give it here!”

“Don’t worry, I bought four of them—one for each of you,” Dery said, handing over the rest of the sheet. “You’re mentioned by name—well,
your
names, and not spelled right, because you don’t have a real name yet, do you? But—”

He babbled on; Cade didn’t hear him. Two long strides took him to the dormer window, and by the fragile sunlight of a wintry morning he scanned the broadsheet for names, any of their names, spelled right or not. There, in one of the thin columns printers used to fill a page when there wasn’t enough real news or a shop notice couldn’t be wedged in, were three sentences.

AT THE DOWNSTREET
last night, a smashing good show by four local lads not yet knowing what to call themselves. Led by tregetour Cadan Silversun, with fettler Rafcadio Threadspinner, masquer Jeshika Bowbender, and energetic glisker Mekal Windthistle, it was a performance of the sort rarely seen in players not already on a Circuit. Catch their show while it can still be seen for the price of a tankard.

“—have to think up
something,
Cade, people need to know who you are so when the placards go up they know who they’re looking for—”

He wanted to yell and laugh and just explode. But he restrained himself, and looked round from the window with what he hoped was a casual shrug. “Not quite as nice as if they’d got our names right, but it’s a start.”

With a howl of outrage, Dery bounced back onto the bed, grabbed a pillow, and began pummeling him with it. Cade laughed, picked up him, and tickled him. The pillow burst, the feathers flew, and all at once a chilly voice addressed them from the doorway.

“If you’re
quite
finished, I would appreciate a few moments of the famous tregetour’s attention.”

“Did you see, Mum? Cade was
wonderful,
and now he’s famous, and soon he’ll be rich, and then—”

Cade experienced a sudden aching inside as his little brother abruptly realized what would happen once there was enough money. Excitement dropped from the child’s face like the magic from a masquer changing characters. Cade reached out a hand to ruffle the thick brown hair, and smiled reassurance. But he couldn’t lie; he couldn’t say he wouldn’t be out of this house as soon as may be, no matter if the address was a disgrace and a scandal compared to Redpebble Square.

Their mother ignored the change in mood. “Leave us, Derien.”

“Go on, then,” Cade said gently to the child. “Tell Mistress Mirdley I’ll be down soon for breakfast, won’t you? And don’t you yaffle down all the muffins, either—I can smell them all the way up here. Beholden, Dery.”

Derien slumped off, and Cade regarded Lady Jaspiela through the last drifting fall of feathers. His name (misspelled or not) was in the newspaper. He had known it would happen eventually; he hadn’t expected it quite this soon. Well, that was what a couple of shelves of broken glassware would do.

His instincts had been right. He’d have to heed them more often. That Her Ladyship would be raging at him for the next little while required no instinct at all. First would come a description of her mortification that his name had appeared in so disreputable a broadsheet as the
Nayword
. She would progress to a renewed demand that his name show up in the
Court Circular
instead, preferably in connection with a prestigious appointment. Then she would move on to the usual lecture about what a disappointment he was and that the very least he could do was cease to parade his inadequacies in front of his little brother, who deserved a much better example, and so on and so on.

Cade decided he didn’t much want to hear any of it.

“Don’t bother,” he said as she was drawing breath. “I’ll be gone from here as soon as I’ve the coin to manage it. Which won’t be long if the papers keep mentioning us, so p’rhaps your time would be better spent beseeking the Lady to favor us, instead of repeating all the things I’ve heard a thousand times before.”

Her brows arched in the expression that always meant
Remember who I am!
By which she didn’t mean she was his mother, and therefore he owed her respect; she meant she was a Lady of the Highcollar Name of the Wolf Clan. That, and a se’en-penny piece, would get her through the palace gates for one of the weekly tours of the grounds.

“The sooner we’re a grand success, the sooner you’ll be rid of me,” he added, just in case she had missed the point.

She did something unexpected then. She asked, “Who is this ‘Windthistle’ person? The one who is so … energetic,” she finished, as if it were a particularly unpleasant disease.

He shrugged. “You read the broadsheet. He’s my new glisker.”

“I see.”

She was a beautiful woman still, pure Wizard in looks: thick straight hair she wore in a swirl of golden silk at her nape, long bones, brown eyes, high rounded brow. Of the other races in her ancestry, none showed. She was said to resemble her mother, who had so disastrously aligned the Highcollar family with the Archduke. Cade had no way of judging, as the old lady died long before he was born and there were no extant imagings that depicted her. Rumor had it, though, that the Archduke’s son, current holder of the title, had met Lady Jaspiela once, a chance encounter at High Chapel, and turned quite pale. Evidently he still had memories of a woman as haughty and as dangerous as she was beautiful. As little as Cade relished being Lady Jaspiela’s son, he liked being Lady Kiritin’s grandson even less. All at once he wondered if perhaps he might have a thing or two in common with the present Archduke.

Dark eyes swept Cade head to foot, and then inspected his face, as if trying to remember the reason why he inhabited her home. “An Elf,” she said. “And with that name—Air, is he? Yes, of course he would be. I trust I won’t be seeing him anywhere near here.”

“No more than you ever see Rafe or Jeska. Now, if that’s all, Mother, I should get to work on tonight’s performance.”

“If you must.”

Did she
finally
understand? Not likely. “Yes,” he replied. “I must.”

She never simply exited a room. She swept, strode, stalked, glided, drifted, anything rather than just put one foot in front of the other. And there were always sound effects. The slurring of her skirts, the tap of her heels, the tinkle of her jewelry, the sharply meaningful click of a closing door—the imperious voice raised just that fraction that meant it was a lazy, neglectful servant’s fault that she must raise her voice at all. Today she called down the stairs for the footman, which usually meant she had an appointment somewhere and required a hire-hack. Cade knew perfectly well that she would be making appearances at her friends’ homes this morning to pretend total ignorance of last night’s triumph. How they informed her of it, whether their attitudes were excited or patronizing or pitying, would dictate her response. Compliments—genuine compliments, not the kind soaked in acid—she would wave away with a shrug, a change of subject, and a mental note not to further cultivate the acquaintance, for no real lady would be thrilled by something so vulgar as a son’s name in a broadsheet. Condescension she would greet with a sigh and a shake of the head, and expressions of gratitude for sympathy that hadn’t been offered. Commiseration for the indignity of having a son who performed for anyone with the coin to buy a drink would in all probability bring the daintiest of quivers to her mouth, as if she bravely restrained tears.

Someday, he promised himself, he would write a piece incorporating all her arrogance and pretentiousness, and even though she would never see it, those who did would laugh about it to their wives, who would know instantly who had been his model. And Lady Jaspiela really would have reason to weep.

A childish ambition, he knew. Perhaps by the time his work was performed in the real theaters frequented by the husbands of her friends, he would have outgrown the need to pay back humiliation for humiliation. But she would make such a wonderful character study for Jeska … and that was as good an excuse as any to use her however he saw fit. He was an artist, writing for other artists to entertain an audience; no one was exempt from becoming fodder.

Mothers, he reflected as he got dressed, were always an interesting topic. Jeska did an excellent Mother Loosebuckle, a stock character in farces popular for their exceedingly low humor. They’d have to give one of them a try, now that Mieka had joined them. Jeska could have plenty of fun with any of the playlets—and Cade could just imagine the Elf, dancing behind the glass baskets, flinging magic far and wide as he chortled his way through the piece.

He was grinning as he magicked the strewn feathers into a tidy little white mountain on the bed—a simple Affinity spell, roughly the opposite of that Mieka had used to shell walnuts. He’d restuff the pillow later. Right now he was hungry, and eager to start the day’s work, to see Mieka and Rafe and Jeska, to laugh over their “smashing” show at the Downstreet. Mieka had talked about possibly sneaking his twin sister in tonight, if Blye would come along to help. It really was rotten that women must hoodwink their way into any performance—Blye had almost been grassed last night by a drunk who collapsed against her and discovered unboyish curves beneath her clothes. He’d been so squiffed, no one paid him any attention when he stuttered about a girl being in the tavern (everybody thought he meant the Sweetheart), but it had been a near thing.

Still, what was the worst that could happen? Surely nothing more terrible than getting thrown back out on the street—

{—out on the street, just beneath the vast awning that sheltered the theater doors, a bizarre little group coalesced. Three anxious boys who didn’t move like boys at all, two outraged constables, and one gaudily clad woman who didn’t move anything like a woman. She didn’t sound like one either as she—he—shouted that they’d best leave their hands off or answer to someone more important than they’d ever dreamed they’d meet in their whole miserable, worthless lives—}

Cade clutched at the banister for support, dizzy, as the scene came and went in the space of five heartbeats. He didn’t recognize the girls dressed as boys, or the man dressed as a woman, and he’d no idea what they thought they were doing. When his breathing had calmed, he re-created what he’d just seen and became even more confused—not just by the glimpse of that very odd possibility, but by what might have prompted it. Trace it back, then. He’d been thinking about Blye, and how she’d nearly been caught, and he had just barely started wondering how she’d get Mieka’s sister safely into and out of the Downstreet tonight, and before that he’d speculated about the Mother Loosebuckle playlets, and—

{“Mother—oh, I want him, I want him so much!”

“He’s full fair, I’ll grant, with everything best about all his bloodlines, but you know what you’re in for.”

“I don’t care. I want him. I love him.” She paced the firelit darkness fretfully, slight and shadowy, flames glinting off masses of long bronze-and-gold hair.

The other woman was older, worn and sour. “It’s a stupid thing you’ve done, casting your glance on such as him.”

“Ah, but he wants me as well. Men have looked at me since I was ten, you know they have—”

Smugly: “I made sure of it.” Surprisingly beautiful hands plucked up the rich dark folds of a gown that spread across her knees, and a silver needle began darting in and out, in and out.

“I know, and I’m grateful. But how
he
looks at me—it’s all those looks and more besides, there in those eyes. He’s mine already, I know he is! All I have to do is reach—” She laughed, flinging her arms wide and then wrapping herself tight, grasping her own shoulders. Her hands were her mother’s hands, slender and delicate.

“Now you’re fooling yourself, girl. His kind, they never belong to anyone. All you can hope is to tame him for a while.”

“Just because you couldn’t keep my father doesn’t mean
I
won’t be able to keep him!”

The needle paused, a glare of firelight turning it crimson. “What you’ll keep is a mannerly tongue in your head!”

“You know it’s true. Your mistake was waiting too long. You left it too late. He’s much younger than Father. He can’t have found a bonding yet.”

“You think he’s untouched, do you?”

“I don’t care how many girls he’s bedded. If any of them meant anything, he’d be with her. But he’s not. And that means he can be mine. I want him. And you’re going to help me get him.”