Touchstone Read online

  It was odd, Cade reflected, that he’d never once had a dream—waking or sleeping—about anyone even vaguely resembling this Elf. Jeschenar had been glimpsed several times, so when they’d finally met almost two years ago, Cade felt reasonably comfortable with him from the start. Getting used to his occasionally belligerent ways had been another matter, but at least Cade knew not to challenge him physically: Jeska was effectively king of about a square mile of Gallantrybanks, with a bagful of souvenir teeth he’d knocked out to prove it. The roster of his defeated rivals had stopped growing only because these days nobody was fool enough to confront him and add another name to the list, or tooth to the collection.

  Cade had known Rafe since littleschool, so the foretelling dreams about him had no power to surprise him. He was still waiting for the squat little Gnomelike man he’d seen more and more often this last year. Those dreams were comparatively forceful, the kind that flashed through his waking consciousness as well as invaded his sleeping mind. There were several other people who populated his foretellings with more or less frequency and importance. But he’d never caught even a hint of this Elf, and it confused him.

  Did it mean Mieka was insignificant? Cade would never believe that. What he’d seen and experienced last night, what he presumed would happen again this evening, argued for a powerful presence in his life. But why had he never seen the boy before?

  “The worst mistake you can make is to believe that you are the sole arbiter of your existence. Put another way—do you really have the arrogance to think that nothing anyone else does has any effect on you? That if you don’t envision it in advance, it can’t possibly be real? That you make all the choices?”

  Mieka must be one of those people whose caprices ruled his own life so thoroughly that Cayden’s prescience was of no use at all in predicting his sudden arrival. Now that he was here, however, Cade found it equally unsettling that there had been no dream last night, not even a vague impression upon waking that something in life had changed forever.

  In fact, now that he considered it, last night he’d slept better than he had in a long time. Worry usually kept him awake until sheer physical exhaustion dragged him down into sleep. He’d attributed the swift and untroubled slumber of last night to good liquor and a blissfully soft bed. But now, watching his group thrash out the details of the night’s performance, he wondered if something else might be at work here.

  “Cade? Cayden!”

  “Oh—sorry,” he said as Jeska’s impatience finally penetrated his self-absorption. “Have you decided, then?”

  Mieka was giving him a sidelong glitter of a smile. “Remind me—why do we need you?”

  Cade grinned back, set down his empty glass, and flexed his fingers. “Without me, you’d all be nothing. Are you ready to make your choices, then, Mieka? Come on.”

  Together they went into the kitchen, where a large cupboard was unlocked by the glowering Trollwife who vastly resented this interruption from her bread-making—until the Elf gave her a sweetly innocent smile. Without the slightest twinge of a dreaming, Cade foresaw infinite doors being opened for them by that smile.

  They took the glass baskets outside to the enclosed porch, trying to ignore the stench of uncovered rubbish bins as they sorted through for what Mieka would be using tonight.

  “Who made these for you?” he asked, fingers caressing the graceful curvature of the blue basket.

  “Friend of mine,” Cade answered.

  Another sidelong glance, this time speculative, and a moment later Mieka said, “You’ll have to introduce me to her.”

  Cade stared. “How did you know—?”

  “I didn’t!” He crowed with triumphant laughter. “Quill, you really do need to guard those eyes of yours! You can turn down your mouth and knot up your eyebrows all you like, but the eyes will always give you away! Does she make the withies as well?”

  “Some of them,” he admitted grudgingly. “Most of them are her father’s castoffs. I have terrible trouble priming some of them.”

  “I felt that, last night.” He selected a glass twig and inspected it. “This is one of hers?”

  “Yes. Even her best aren’t quite as supple as her father’s culls, but she knows me better.”

  “Let’s pick out the ones he made,” Mieka instructed, “and return them for credit. Whatever skill she lacks, I can make up for. I didn’t much like the feel of some of those from last night. They fought me.”

  Bemused, he helped to sort as required. Mieka made no mistakes in choosing which had been Blye’s work and which her father’s. Those quick little fingers were exquisitely sensitive.

  “Bleedin’ indecent, if you ask me,” the boy muttered, tossing a withie onto the discard pile, “trying to pass off mottles like these as usable. And you were a fool to buy them, I don’t care how much of a discount he gave you. Look at the warp in this!” He held up a foot-long twig of glass tinted faint blue, and pointed to a distortion halfway down. “It’s a tribute to your skill that these do what you want them to do—but they make you work much too hard. From now on, we use only the best, right? What’s your glasscrafter girl’s name?”

  “Blye Cindercliff.”

  “A rare and lovely Goblin name,” he approved. “We’ll make her as rich as us—but on what she’ll charge other people,” he added with a grin, “once we’ve made her famous!”

  “We can’t use her name. No Guild allows women to use a hallmark.” And thus their wares went for much less than Guild-sanctioned items, and foreign trade was forbidden to them—“inferior” goods might ruin the Kingdom’s reputation. Never mind that what Blye made was far beyond apprentice work, approaching that of Master. She, and the hundreds of women crafters like her, would never receive Guild-level prices or Guild rights.

  “This is her father’s, then?” He ran a finger over the symbol stamped into the crimp end of a withie.

  “Yes. You don’t seem upset that she’s a girl.”

  “A knack’s a knack, no matter if it comes wearing trousers or a skirt. You say she knows you, and that’s a very good thing. Once she gets to know me, it’ll be even better.” He paused, head tilting to one side, hair shifting to reveal one pointed ear. “Forgot to ask—how well do you know her? Meaning—”

  “—would I be upset if you bedded her?” Cade laughed, genuinely amused. “I’d like to see you try, to be honest.”

  “Oh. Likes girls, does she?”

  “Not that I’ve ever noticed. It’s not something we discuss. No, it’s just that I’ve never seen her with anybody—she works too hard, being her father’s only child and determined to learn all she can from him before he dies. After, she’ll hire another glasscrafter, to keep the Guild happy and everything looking legal. But she wants to know everything about the work so the new man doesn’t swindle her.” He rolled one of Blye’s better efforts between his palms. There was only one barely discernible bump near the crimp to mark it as apprentice work. But no bubbles, no rutilations. Blye knew what she was about, and would only get better. As the chill glass warmed to his skin, the warmth within it seemed to stir and stretch like a cat recognizing a familiar caress.

  “I like her more and more,” Mieka announced. “What’s ailing her father, can I ask?”

  “Lungs. He was in the war.”

  Mieka shivered. “No wonder his hand slips and his breath’s unsteady, then. Is he at the blood stage yet?”

  “Not quite. A year or so, the physicker says.”

  Anger made him look years older as he snarled, “Damn the Archduke, and damn the Wizards he corrupted!”

  It was a typical attitude for Elfenkind, but there was a subtlety of loathing that differed from what Cayden had come to expect. It was a lack of contempt, he decided as he searched Mieka’s face, and a sincere compassion for the victims. But to hear an Elf count Wizards amongst those victims … perhaps Mieka wasn’t just the better sort of Elf. Perhaps he was one of the best.

  “You’ll have to change up your cipher
ing,” Mieka said all at once. “These codes and colors—no, none of this will work at all.”

  “Are you insane? Do you know how long it took me to put that together?”

  “And how many gliskers have you explained it to?” He tapped the page of performance notes. “I don’t want anyone stealing and copying. So there’ll have to be a new cipher. I’ll help.”

  “Kindly of you,” Cade snapped.

  “Not at all,” Mieka replied blithely. “We see things in the same colors, you know. It’s alike to the quality as makes Chattim so good with Vered’s work—but with Rauel’s, not as much.”

  “How do you know that? And how do you know the Shadowshapers, anyway?”

  “And that’s another thing. We need a name, and a good one. But I’ll help with that, too. Anyway, all you and I need do is settle on a color arch, organize the subtleties, and code everything so just the four of us understand it. A night’s work, if the whiskey’s good enough for inspiration.” He smiled. “I’ll ask me auntie to contribute to the cause, shall I?”

  “Anything else about our lives you’d care to rearrange?”

  “Well…” Critically, gaze flickering down and up Cade’s frame. “The clothes could use a tweak. Yellow just isn’t your color. You ought to wear something silver or gray, always, to play on your name and play up your eyes. And do stop trying to grow a beard, Quill, you’re only embarrassing yourself.”

  Had he really just speculated that this Elf might be one of the best sort?

  “You know I’m right,” Mieka added with a cajoling smile. “I always am. But if you won’t admit it now, you will after tonight.”

  It turned out he was right—about the performance, anyway. The tavern’s patrons laughed themselves silly over “The Sailor’s Sweetheart,” just as Mieka had predicted, soon forgetting that the show had begun almost an hour late. They had barely recovered their breath when “The Silver Mine” began. And they wept unashamed, also as Mieka had predicted. For all that Cade himself had been the one to supply the magic for the withies used tonight, he was hard-pressed to keep tears from his own eyes as he watched from beneath the stairs. Across Jeska’s features the anguished faces of the dying fathers melted one by one, with heartrending subtlety, into the younger, grief-stricken faces of their sons; the elusive sensations of physical pain in broken legs, ribs, fingers were diffused by Rafe carefully, gently, gliding into the emotional pain of loss as the boys bade their fathers farewell. The changes from the sunlit hill where the sons stood to the dark depths of the silver mine, with a single candle glinting that turned veins of ore to threads of light, were accomplished with breathtaking grace. The dialogue was traditional to the piece, except for a dozen or so lines Cade had changed within each section, adding and subtracting words as he sensed them needed or unnecessary. For all the familiarity of the story, there was nothing mawkish about the performance, nothing squirmy. All of it was honest. All of it was real.

  He wondered what Mieka was using to produce such effects, what he was quarrying inside himself that created this art. Surely he was too young to have experienced that intensity of emotion. As the last echoes faded and Rafe allowed the magic to drain quietly away, Cade found himself doing something he never did: He joined his masquer, fettler, and glisker onstage to share, as their tregetour, in the applause.

  Jeska’s arched brows conveyed his astonishment at this break with Cade’s introverted habits. Rafe’s wry smile of understanding wasn’t quite hidden in his beard. Mieka, breathing hard, damp with sweat, grinned brightly up at him and shouted over the tumult, “Free ale tonight!”

  He was right about that, too. Ale there was, and the best, in tall green glasses the landlord brought out from his wife’s own shelves. When Cade finally staggered upstairs to bed—oh, the delight of a real bed with a real mattress and real sheets, and all to himself besides—he had to work hard at it to remember how buttons and lacings worked as he got out of his clothes and slid between those real sheets, naked so he could fully enjoy them. He was asleep before he had time to do more than stretch in the luxurious little cocoon. For the second night in a row, he had no dreams. And when he woke in the morning, surprisingly free of a hangover, considering the amount of ale he’d drained down his throat the night before, he was actually happy.

  Their ride home was in the back of one of Mieka’s aunt’s whiskey wagons. It was chilly, but it was free—and it became a lot less chilly when Mieka tugged the bung from a half-size barrel snugged in beneath the driver’s bench and handed out tin cups.

  “She always puts this one in for me,” he said, patting the barrel fondly.

  By the milestone that marked halfway home, all four of them were roaring drunk—or, rather, warbling drunk, because Jeska had issued a singing challenge for Most Obscene Ballad. The black sky overhead, dappled with stars, was treated to Rafe’s touching rendition of “Whistlecock and Biggerstaff” and Jeska’s contribution of “The Wizard’s Wondrous Wand.” Cade gave them a mercifully truncated version of the thirty-three stanza “What a Lady Needs,” mainly because he was too drunk to recall the middle fifteen requirements. But before Mieka could offer a contender, he passed out. By the Presence Lamps of a lonesome countryside chapel Cade saw him do it, marveling at the transition from full, laughing consciousness to absolute oblivion between one eyeblink and the next. He slumped against a barrel of whiskey, his jaw dropped open, and he began to snore. Jeska prodded him in the side with a toe of his boot; there was no reaction.

  “Will somebody for the love of the Lord shut him up?” Rafe growled.

  “Lay him down on his side,” said the driver, with a glance over his shoulder.

  They tried, tugging and cursing, until Mieka grunted, pulled away, and—still sitting up, more or less—curled with his cheek to one of the padded crates containing Cade’s glass baskets and withies.

  “He’ll sleep it off by daybreak,” the driver continued. “Now, tell me again, where am I setting you boys down?”

  “He won’t be sick, will he?” Cade asked. He’d stitched the feather-filled cushioning himself, each nest specific to the basket it held.

  “Never that I’ve seen it.” He paused for thought. “Always a first time, though.”

  “Wonderful,” Cade muttered, and yanked the boy away from the padded crate with scant sympathy for any bruises he might be giving. Mieka grunted again, shifted, and this time curled on the floor of the wagon with his head on Cade’s knee. He snuffled like a puppy and settled back into sleep.

  Jeska sniggered. “At least if he yarks, it’ll be on you.”

  “I’m washable.” Shrugging, he addressed the back of the driver’s head. “Let them off at Beekbacks Lane.” Rafe lived a block north, Jeska four blocks east. “And me at Criddow Close, if you would.” He had all his baskets to carry, and his partners helped him when they took the public coach, but he was certain that Blye would be readying the glassworks by the time the wagon got them home, and be on the lookout for him—he was returning a day later than planned. That she would help him with the crates was secondary, though; he wanted her to get a look at his new glisker.

  It was nearly daybreak, and the city traffic had not quite snarled the streets yet, when the wagon stopped at the top of Beekbacks Lane. Mieka didn’t stir as Jeska and Rafe jumped off. Cade threw their satchels down to them and reminded them of rehearsal at Rafe’s the following afternoon. The fettler’s parents were most obliging when it came to giving over their sitting room to their son and his friends. Jeska’s widowed mother allowed them the use of her cellar, but strictly in the summer months; she worried about the damp. Cade’s parents didn’t want that rubbish in their house at all. He wondered suddenly what sort of attitude Mieka’s family had towards his work, his ambitions, his determination to live the unpredictable life of a traveling player. As the horses began their weary clopping over the pavement again, he looked down at the head still resting on his knee. Shaggy black hair hid most of the face, and Cade was tempted to brush it back, wa
ke him up, ask the thousand questions he should have been asking all day yesterday and all night last night. What held him back was the memory of another bit of advice from the Sage who had taught him.

  “Sometimes, you know, it’s best just to let things happen. There are places and moments and people meant to be savored. You can force flowers to a quicker bloom in a hothouse, but they only fade all the faster. What your mind can do to you, Cayden, means that all too often you’re skipping ahead in a book to the last few pages, and you find out how it ends—but you have no idea how you got there, how it happened the way it did. In brief, there are times when you simply have to sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.”

  The driver brought the horses to a halt at the bottom of Criddow Close, tucked up onto the cobbled footway to avoid carts and coaches now clogging the morning. The city had woken up; Mieka hadn’t. Cade stacked the crates handed down to him by the driver, who also did him the favor of yelling at a Trollwife as she prepared to slosh her slops bucket down to the drainage runnel right next to Cade’s feet. By the time the last of the gear was unloaded, Blye had been distracted from her kiln, as Cade had known she would be. She stood in the middle of the lane, absently smacking fireproof dragon-gut gloves again her thigh. He waved, and she tossed the gloves back into the shop and started towards him.

  “Until another time then, lad,” the driver said. Cade nodded and began to express his gratitude, but he interrupted with, “Last night? I was watching. You’d do well to keep him, in spite of the trouble he’ll be to you.”