Touchstone Page 2

  “You really want to?” Jeska asked, frowning all over his gorgeous golden face. “I’m game, of course I am, but—”

  “You’ve Elf enough in you to supplement whatever he can’t do. I’ve watched you work this one when you’re so drunk, you can’t hardly see straight.” To Rafe, he added, “I’ll tell him he’ll have more than the usual to work with on this piece, but if you catch him messing about, slap him back down.”

  The fettler shrugged powerful shoulders and nodded. “I’ll keep him in line. No flourishes.”

  “Oh, you can tease him a bit. Just don’t let him get away with anything silly.”

  Ten minutes later, watching from his hiding place beneath the stairs—hiding not to avoid seeing the audience’s reactions but to avoid their seeing him—he clenched his jaw and his fists and prayed to the good Lord and Lady to protect his friends if this new glisker should prove not just arrogant but dangerous. Still, their long search for the right glisker had taught them to deal swiftly with the inconsistent and the incompetent, the nervous and the confused. Jeschenar was strong, with great instincts; Rafcadion was capable of throttling any flawed or frantic magic. And if needs must, Cayden could summon up his own skills and help his friends.

  Expecting the boy to wait politely beside the glass baskets while Jeska readied himself and Rafe took a position at far stage left, Cade was startled when the glisker charmingly persuaded a couple of patrons out of their chairs and dragged the furniture to the back of the stage. Then he began rearranging baskets. Quick hands switched green with blue, yellow with violet, perched the black and white onto chair seats and balanced the orange on their slick rims. Then he seemed to be looking for something. Not finding it, he shrugged—and picked out two withies from the red basket to balance across the blue. It was a configuration that made no sense to Cade at all, who always used the classic prism pattern. Then, rather than seat himself on the glisker’s bench within easy reach of all the baskets, he remained standing. When Jeska nodded to Rafe that he was ready, and Rafe began the foundation work—steady and solid as always, the best fettler Cade had ever encountered—the glisker bounced a few times on his heels, laughing soundlessly to himself.

  Magic began to radiate through the tavern. Usually Cade spent a few moments watching the audience, marking those who resisted and those who instinctively fought, just in case his help might be needed. It never was. Rafe was too good at control. But vigilance was another duty a tregetour owed his group. Tonight, though, he completely forgot. The Elf did something he’d never seen a glisker do before, not even the Winterly or Ducal or Royal Circuit professionals.

  He made his work into a dance.

  Instead of sitting where he could reach for one withie at a time to have it ready in the left hand for the switch to the right when needed, he twisted and curled his whole body, swaying from one basket to another, grabbing up glass twigs in both hands and waving them like a Good Brother censing parishioners at High Chapel. Cayden bit back a despairing moan. If the boy was this wild just setting up the scene, who knew what he’d do with the piece itself?

  Mieka played it straight for the Sailor’s homecoming. A mast and a white backdrop sail, and a wooden deck below Jeska’s feet: all these things were usual. The hint of salt air, the touch of a breeze, even the dim ring of ship’s bells calling the hour—all were subtle touches usually found only on the Circuits. But when the Sailor set foot on land and caught sight of his beloved in the company of another man, instead of the outrage and pain and betrayal the piece called for, Mieka projected shocked amazement without letting the audience—or poor Jeska—in on why.

  What he had in mind became apparent when Jeska made his shift to the persona of the Sweetheart. At first she was as the Sailor had remembered and described her: a lovely, dainty little thing with blond curls and a winsome smile. But quickly the demure blue gown deepened to a vile purple; the shawl turning from leaf to livid green; the gold hair brassy; and the petal-pink lips blood-crimson as the glisker conjured the painted face and blowsy figure of a seasoned whore. She lamented how hard she had to work, how difficult her life was—all with Jeska behaving physically as if he wore the usual pretty face and graceful form. The audience howled with laughter and pounded tables with fists and flagons. As she bemoaned the fact that she’d had to accept the other man’s proposal because it just wasn’t possible for her to go on any longer alone and unprotected, Jeska did what he always did at this point—what, by tradition, every masquer did at this point: sank to his knees. A pitiable gesture for a young girl, it now looked as if she was kneeling to perform certain services.

  Jeska held the pose, then got to his feet almost as if pulled upright by powerful, unseen hands on his shoulders. By the time he was standing, the shift back to the Sailor had been made. Cayden swallowed a gasp of shock at the glisker’s skill—and nearly strangled on an exclamation when he sensed Rafe loosen his stringent hold on the flux of magic. The Sailor told his former girlfriend that it was breaking his heart but he understood, he’d been gone a long time, it was only natural that she’d grown tired of waiting—and all the while the Elf emanated waves of gleeful relief at this lucky escape that washed over the eagerly receptive audience. At the end, the Sailor was supposed to slump into a tavern to drown his sorrows, dejection in every line of him as he dropped coins on the bar and bought drinks all round so he’d have company in his despair. By now Jeska had adapted—oh, had he ever adapted. Jaunty and carefree, whistling in between his lines, he dug deep in pockets and flung coins high in the air as he invited everyone to toast his freedom. The imaginary coins were one of Cade’s best feats of magic, something very few tregetours his age could do; their cheery chiming was all Mieka, and something no other glisker had ever managed to do for Cade before.

  It was funny, it was brilliant, it was completely outrageous, and it had the patrons flinging real coins onto the stage.

  The Elf had one more trick. As Jeska bent to retrieve the money, he suddenly wore once again the Sweetheart’s garish gown and brassy curls. Startled, he nearly tripped on his own feet. Cayden heard Mieka chortling behind the glass baskets. Jeska again reacted swiftly, changing the crouches to curtseys, blowing kisses to the audience. And the trimmings piled up in his swift, snatching hands.

  It was a while before Cayden felt ready to leave the darkness beneath the stairs and shoulder his way through the crowd to the bar. The whole village was congratulating the Elf, buying him and Rafe and Jeska drinks, roaring out the stale old lines that Mieka had turned from histrionic to hilarious. When Cade at last ventured out, he was swept up in the general celebration of the glisker’s triumph.

  He had never been so furious in his life.

  He wasn’t so furious that he turned down the chance to get drunk for free.

  Neither was he so drunk by the end of the night that he neglected his duty to himself and his friends by making it easy for the tavern keeper to hire them for another night. Guessing that the coins would keep coming from the audience, Cade demanded not money but decent beds—including tonight—and three meals tomorrow instead of one, plus a full supper before they went to bed tonight and breakfast on the day they left. By the time he got what he wanted, the minster chimes had rung curfew and the place was nearly empty. Both he and the landlord knew that tomorrow night, from opening bell until closing, there would scarcely be room in the tavern to stand. He spread his hands wide open in the Wizardly gesture that meant You may trust my word, I use no magic and concluded the deal, then returned to the bar.

  Rafe was superbly drunk, lids drooping over his blue-gray eyes, a silly smile curving his lips beneath the heavy beard he was very proud of being able to grow at the ripe old age of nineteen. Jeska was a little more sober, but only a little; the tavern keeper’s daughter might or might not get the full benefits of his attention later on. Cade wondered whether he ought to mention they’d be in real beds tonight, not in the hayloft, then shrugged to himself. Jeska always found a way.

  As for th
e glisker—Mieka Windthistle couldn’t have said his own name once, slowly, let alone five times fast, without hopelessly tangling his tongue.

  Cayden didn’t wait to be noticed. He poked the Elf in the ribs and demanded, “What the fuck was that?”

  Big, innocent, very drunk eyes—almost entirely green at the moment—blinked up at him. “Ye dinnit like it?” Before Cade could reply, he turned to Jeska. “Sorry for that bit at the end, mate, but it were such a fetchin’ little Sweetheart, I just couldn’t resist.”

  “You’re a shithead,” Jeska remarked amiably, sorting coins on the bar. “You want your share now, or after the show tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow night?” Cade sucked in an outraged breath. How dare they decide such things without him? “Have I said yet that there’s gonna be a next show with this—this—”

  Rafcadion interrupted. “This best glisker you or me or Jeska or anybody else in this shit-pit of a town ever saw? Yeh, there’ll be a next show.” He grinned, white teeth flashing in his dark beard. “And a next, and a next, and a next—all the way to Trials.” Raising his glass—they’d all been given the real thing in place of the leather—he announced, “Trials, and the Winterly Circuit!”

  Mieka laughed and raised his glass to his lips—but his gaze was sharp and watchful, and suddenly he appeared considerably more sober. Cade looked into those eyes, discovered he was unable to look away. When at last he nodded, and drank the toast, the Elf nodded back, satisfied.

  “Much beholden, Quill,” he murmured. “Very much beholden.”

  Chapter 2

  Even though he’d long since learned not to anticipate, Cayden wasn’t too surprised when he didn’t dream that night. He had both expected to and expected not to; that was the particular glorious hell of what his Fae heritage had done to him. His Sagemaster had explained it once.

  “There are things that occur which are important, and things that are not. There are things that are essential, things that must happen—and things that are so trivial, they make no difference at all. The difficulty is discerning which is which. Now, what may seem obviously important—a death in the family, moving from one village to another, falling in love—might not be important after all. And things such as choosing to wear the red tunic instead of the blue, this might be absolutely vital. Simply put, you will never, ever know.

  “It would be logical to assume that events, people, interior realizations that you know at once will change your life—these will be pivots from which visions will come. Assume nothing of the kind. Some of these things are simply fated. They must happen for every other thing to happen. You have no choices to make and therefore you will dream no futures. You cannot unmeet your future wife, for example. So the day you meet her, you probably won’t dream. But if you bring her daisies instead of roses, if you wear that red tunic instead of the blue, these things may very well trigger more dreams than you can keep track of—for these are the things that often determine what shape the future will take.

  “So the lesson must be that there is no predicting what will set off a foretelling. What seems important may be trivial, and what seems insignificant may be critical. You cannot control your gift. You are at the mercy of fate.”

  Which was why, as Cade knew very well, he enjoyed his work so much. For, during the time he spent devising his tales, he was in control.

  Once his part was done, once he’d written or rewritten the lines and employed his own special ciphers that signaled the sensory underlays, he had to give everything over to Jeska and Rafe and now, apparently, Mieka. But for those hours and days of the creative process, the work was entirely his. He supposed he could learn to trust the Elf the way he trusted his two other partners.

  At least—unlike their last couple of gliskers—Mieka told them the truth, that next afternoon when they met to discuss what they would perform that night. When Rafe asked a polite question about where in the village he lived, he laughed.

  “Don’t live here at all! I’m as much a Gallybanker as you three.” When they stared at him, he shrugged. “Saw you last year, didn’t I, at that tavern over on Beekbacks. With a glisker not worth a splintered withie—nor the one I saw you with next, or next as well. The one last month wasn’t bad, but…”

  “A cullion, he was,” Jeska commented. “Wish him good morrow, and he’d say, ‘I take it you’re planning to die before then? Lovely!’ Mean of spirit and meaner of pocket. But I don’t understand why everyone here seems to know you.”

  “My auntie’s house is out on the edge of town. She’s the one as brews the whiskey.” He winked; those eyes were blue with flecks of green this afternoon. “I’d be popular and indeed beloved even if I weren’t adorable all on me own.”

  “And modest, I see,” Rafe drawled.

  Mieka nodded genially. “When I heard you were booked here, I decided to make a visit to Auntie Brishen.”

  “You followed us,” Cade accused.

  “And aren’t you glad I did?”

  He sat back in his chair, rolling his eyes. “When His Gracious Majesty gives you the silver sword and golden spurs, Sir Mieka, you’ll be sure to spare a nod for us petty quidams, won’t you?”

  “Don’t condemn yourself to wretched obscurity so soon,” Mieka shot back. “Tell me what you want to do for tonight, and then tell me what your thinking is for Trials.”

  “That’s almost three months away,” Rafe observed. “We’ve the first of two shows in three hours.”

  “Only one show tonight.” The boy burst out laughing when they stared at him. “Thunderin’ hells, I hope what’s between your legs is more use to you than what’s between your ears! They expect us at eight. We come on near nine. They expect a good giggle, and we give it to ’em—but instead of an interval, we go right into what makes ’em weep. I know this lot. They’re surly outside and mushy inside—and once they’ve worn themselves out laughing, they won’t have energy to resist a good long cry. Which is what they really want anyway, drunk as they’ll be by then.”

  Cayden had the feeling this would not be the last time he’d have to struggle for control of his own group. “If they expect us at eight and we come on at nine, they’ll be so impatient and angry that Jeska will have to work twice as hard to win them over.”

  “Not with me doing the glisking.” He tapped a finger down the list Rafe had given him of the works in their folio. “No … no … no—Gods and Angels, not that one!—and not that one, neither, not if you held a sword to me throat—”

  “Do you ever stay still long enough for anyone to give it a try?” Jeska asked.

  “Not often, and certainly not when I’m working. Not this one—but I think the sons-and-fathers dialogue would be just the thing.”

  Rafe actually recoiled. “We don’t hardly ever do that one.”

  “Nobody does,” Mieka responded with a shrug. “But it’s perfect tonight, and here’s why. There’s a reason this village is near empty of old men—hadn’t you noticed?”

  With a suddenness that set his heart pounding too hard, Cade knew everything. “We’re on the Archduke’s old domains, aren’t we?”

  “And full marks with shooting star clusters for the scion of the Falcon Clan.” Mieka crooked a finger at the tavern keeper’s daughter. “Another round here, if you would, please, darlin’,” he called, and gave her a beguiling smile.

  “Not for me,” Jeska told him. “Not until after.”

  Mieka shrugged. “As you will. I’ll have yours, then. What Cayden knows and you haven’t yet guessed—”

  “Almost every man of military age either died or was crippled by the Archduke’s War,” Rafe said flatly. “You don’t yet know me, boy, but there’s no advantage in routinely assuming everyone you meet isn’t near as smart as you.”

  Mieka had the grace to look abashed—for all of three heartbeats. “Won’t happen again. Anyway, the piece may be about the loss of three fathers in a collapsed silver mine, but that’s neither here nor there nor anywhere else for our purpo
se. There’s no man will be present tonight who’ll not have lost a father or a grandsir, an uncle or older brother. They’ll weep oceans. And we’ll be up to our necks in trimmings.”

  Cade accepted his glass of ale before the maid could spill it—her attention was dangerously divided between Jeska and Mieka—and took a long swallow. It wasn’t polite to ask, but previous experience had made him cautious about a glisker’s willingness to work the really wrenching pieces, the ones that demanded a fettler’s iron control but a glisker’s near-total abandonment to emotion. Uninhibited expression of joy or sorrow, love or fear, was the reason no one not substantially Elfenblood could function effectively as a glisker. Elves were creatures of unabashed emotion; unruly as a rule, even the best of them were unpredictable. The worst of them … self-indulgent was a nice way of putting it.

  As for the best of them … perhaps Mieka was one, though from his enthusiastic consumption of alcohol, he appeared to have fully mastered the self-indulgent part. Cade slumped back in his chair again and sipped his ale, listening as the other three discussed the proposed performance of “The Silver Mine.” There was a wild glint in those changeable eyes, granted—but there was also an intensity of purpose as Mieka plotted out the changes with Jeska and made notes with Rafe on when he’d have to exert most control. Skepticism turned to cautious admiration as it became plain that the glisker knew what he was doing.