Touchstone Page 4

  He would have asked how much trouble, and what kind, but Blye was beside him, cuffing him affectionately on the shoulder, and he smiled down at her. No one would ever know it to look at her, because the more obvious traits of the bloodline had been more or less overcome by Human and Wizard, Piksey and even some Elf, but like all those who worked with fire or forge, she was primarily of Goblin descent. It showed in how short she was, and her wiry build, and her slightly crooked teeth, but only if you were looking for Goblin traits. Her beauty was in the silvery blond hair that any other woman would have slit her own throat rather than cut; Blye kept it scythed off to barely neck length, to keep it out of her way when she worked. Cade hadn’t seen her in a skirt for any occasion other than Chapel since they were children. She was exactly five days older than he, and they had known each other all their lives.

  “Yes,” he told her before she could say anything, “I made it home in one piece. Yes, I have the money you lent me for the trip, plus enough to take you out for a drink tonight. Yes, we were good, and he’s why.” He pointed to the slumbering Elf curled between whiskey barrels. “Introductions will have to wait for when he’s conscious, but that’s our new glisker.”

  Placing a foot on a wheel spoke, she hoisted herself up to peer over the side of the wagon. “You’re hiring children now?”

  “He’s eighteen. Well, probably. But it doesn’t matter, Blye, he’s good.” Then, shrewdly, knowing she’d be caught even if she didn’t want to admit it, he added, “He only wants to use your work from now on.”

  “So I’ll be getting to know him whether I like it or not?” Blye looked for a moment more, then jumped down. “I’d better like it, Cade,” she warned. “Come on, let’s get your things inside and you can tell me all about it.”

  They were arranging the crates between them with the ease of long practice, and the wagon had just set off again, when a voice rang out.

  “Tell her she’ll adore me, Quill—everyone does!”

  Blye slanted a look at Cade, dark eyes not quite amused. “Adorable, is he?”

  “To hear him tell it.” He shrugged. “Me, I don’t much care what he says or does offstage. When he’s on…”

  “Jeska and Rafe agree with you?”

  “They agreed with me before I did!” They reached the back door of Cade’s parents’ house, and he paused. “We’ll be at the Downstreet tomorrow night, Blye, I wish you’d come and see.”

  “P’rhaps I will. Is he really that good?”

  Reluctant as he was to admit this, still he had never been anything less than honest with her. “Y’know, I think he might be better.”

  Chapter 3

  Time after time it happened, and every time it happened, it was different.

  Sometimes there was a setting, just as if he’d planned it all out for a performance: a backdrop as clear and tangible as if he could walk into the room and pull the curtains open to the sunshine, or stride up the hill and feel the wind on his face as it rustled the trees. There were smells and sensations, he could hear chirring birds and mothers calling their children inside for supper. He even knew what clothes he wore by the feel of linen or wool or leather against his skin. He was there, in that place and time, and if he was lucky, a glance around would show him a broadsheet thrown on a table or left open across a chair arm, and a glimpse of its date would tell him precisely when he was.

  But sometimes there were only vague shadows. Glimpses. Fleeting sensations. Unrecognized, unclear voices. Being a crafter of words, a designer of specific magic, he was both annoyed and frightened by the imprecision. He never knew if the blurred dreams were blurred because that particular future was as yet unresolved, unset, uncaused. He did know that the crisply real futures could be changed, in spite of their detailed authenticity, because he’d done it. He had done it when he was twelve years old.

  {His mother turned her back on him and stepped lightly from the drawing room, the satisfied smile on her face seeming to linger in the mirror above the hearth. He felt Mistress Mirdley’s warm, powerful arms around his waist as she hugged him, but she let go very quickly and hurried for the kitchen. He thought she might be crying. He hoisted his satchel up onto a shoulder and turned, catching sight of himself in the huge gold-flecked mirror that had long since been drained of its magic. Very tall, very thin, the merest shadow of a beard on his jaw, he could not have been more than sixteen. His fist clenched around parchment, and he looked down at the letter with loathing.

  Master Remey Honeycoil

  Fine Imported Wines

  72 Tullyhowe Lane

  Vintners and Victuallers Guild

  How pleased Master Honeycoil was to accept so clever a boy as his clerk—and how relieved his mother was that selling her son into servitude would cancel out the family’s liquor bills for the last two years and the next three besides. Shoving open the door to the vestibule, grabbing up his father’s old blue cloak, not pausing to don it against the snow-swirled night outside, he unlatched the front door and left his parents’ house for what he knew was the last time.}

  It had all felt so real. So appallingly real. He’d woken, shivering as desperately as if he really had been outside in the bitterest cold, rather than sweating with the midsummer heat in his own bedroom high above Redpebble Square. But what had awakened him had not been the lingering chill of his dream. As he lay there, trying to catch his breath, he heard his mother cry out, and then the quick heavy stomping of Mistress Mirdley’s feet up the wrought iron staircase, and knew the baby was finally about to be born. Pillows over his head to muffle the awful sounds from two floors below, he reviewed the dream and concluded the obvious: that this new baby would be a boy, and healthy, and as good-looking as his handsome parents, and therefore Cade would no longer be required to enhance the family repute. But something would have to be done with him, something would have to be found for him to do with his life. When the bills came in for little Derien’s Namingday party a month later, he saw the note from Master Honeycoil, and chills shook him once again.

  That he was not tending the wine shop at 72 Tullyhowe Lane was his own doing. It had not been as simple as stealing his father’s new blue woolen cloak and stuffing it into the glassworks kiln, although that was the very first thing he’d done. In retrospect, he was ashamed of himself for it. Not for stealing and destroying the cloak (a household mystery ever after), but for having panicked. One had to think these things through, he decided. So he thought, and found that it was even simpler than it had at first appeared, for what it all came down to was money. So for the rest of that summer and on into the autumn, he ran errands for the Trollwives who served the other houses in Redpebble Square, using the coins earned to pay Master Honeycoil on the sly. It wasn’t until the beginning of winter that he had his inspiration: to work for Master Honeycoil after school each day. During a month of sweeping floors and lugging crates, he learned quite a lot about wine—at secondhand, of course, being not quite thirteen years old. And then one day his employer mentioned that when the current apprentice went to open his own shop, another boy would be needed. So Cayden—who only the previous night had woken from a slightly different version of the same dreadful dream, still featuring his departure from home to become Master Honeycoil’s apprentice—made the “mistake” that cost him his job. A shipment of twenty-year-old wine to a very important client for a very important Wintering party in the Spillwater district somehow was switched with two dozen bottles of rumbullion lately arrived from the Islands. Master Honeycoil sacked him and refused to have anything to do with the Silversun household again.

  There had been other dreams, of course, where he saw himself walking out the front door to become anything from an office clerk to a bookseller. (That wouldn’t have been too bad, but it wasn’t his choice any more than the wine shop.) There were also visions of being summarily thrown out the back door and slinking along to Blye’s or Rafe’s because he had nowhere else to go. As each dream occurred, he made plans to show himself incompetent at
the proposed work, or to offend the master whose apprentice he might have become. It seemed to him that just thinking about how to avoid a particular future must change things enough to cancel those possibilities for all time. Yet it remained that he had done it, he had made certain that he would never be trapped into any life he didn’t want. Now, at nearly nineteen, he was what he had always yearned to be: a tregetour, an artist. And when he finally walked out his parents’ front door for good, it would be to lodgings of his own, paid for with his own money, and he would be answerable to no one and live exactly as he pleased.

  But for the time being, he still slept in the smallest and highest of the bedrooms, and mostly avoided his family—though it had turned out that he and Derien liked each other. The little boy was old enough now to understand that he was the important one, not Cade, and it was beginning to be clear to him that the responsibility was a burden Cade was more than happy to surrender. It remained to be seen if Derien would choose to shoulder their parents’ hopes or shrug them aside. Cade thought it could go either way. He spent as much time with Derien as he could, bespelling silly voices into stuffed animals and creating Fae lights that danced to make him laugh. He liked Dery for his affectionate heart and inquisitive mind; but even if he hadn’t, Cade would have been benevolence personified to anybody who freed him of his parents’ ambitions.

  Those ambitions were emphasized by their address. Criddow Close was the back entrance. Their front door opened on the infinitely more stylish Redpebble Square. It had been the pretty conceit of the long-dead nobleman who had ordered the town houses constructed to use dark red sandstone from his own quarries. He had, regrettably, started a trend; Gallantrybanks was here and there inflicted with buildings made of stone in shades of sunshine yellow, seaweed green, clover blue, and a frightful shade of orange. Any color other than white or gray made it easy to date a block of houses to that period. The Silversun residence was the smallest and narrowest on the Square, having originally housed a collection of upper servants who worked in the more lavish homes. Cade’s great-great-great-grandfather had purchased the five-floors-plus-attic house from the founding noble’s impoverished descendant, and by now Cade’s mother had almost everyone convinced that it had never been servants’ quarters at all, but the elegant little town mansion of the nobleman’s widowed mother. Not that anyone but Lady Jaspiela cared. Cade certainly didn’t. The tall, thin house had felt constricted to him ever since he could remember—as if it were a coat too tight in the shoulders, that wouldn’t allow him to stretch without ripping a seam. His mother glided with perfect composure up and down the delicate wrought iron staircase, serenely approving the tricks she had herself arranged—mirrors, pale walls, sparse but supremely elegant furniture—to make the rooms look bigger. All of it illusion, especially the big gilt-framed looking-glass over the hearth. Long ago that mirror had been the dwelling of no one quite knew who or what. But there was no magic left in it now.

  The glassworks down Criddow Close had been established by Cade’s grandfather, a Master Fettler who had performed on the Royal Circuit. He had set up his favorite glasscrafter a few steps away from his own back door. This artisan had been Blye’s great-grandfather. The families got along splendidly until Cade’s father brought Lady Jaspiela home as his bride. Arrogant about her heritage, she had no time for anyone tainted by even a trace of Goblin blood. The Lord and Lady and all the Angels help anyone who failed to address her by her title—even though their title was all her family had retained after championing the losing side in the Archduke’s War. She had condescended to marry Cade’s father for two reasons: his descent from some long-ago princess nobody else cared about, and the fact that he was the only undamaged son of a wealthy Master Fettler with plenty of Court connections. She hadn’t counted on his being a shiftless quiddler who was forever promising the world … tomorrow. Or surely the day after. Perhaps next week. Certainly by the end of the month …

  But he was charming and handsome, was Zekien Silversun, and she forgave him everything so long as he treated her with the deference that was her due, and called her Lady, and brought a few Court nobles to dine every so often.

  Cade wondered sometimes if he was so good at what he did, at making up scenes and stories, because he’d inherited his mother’s gift for pretending.

  At least he wasn’t self-delusional. Sagemaster Emmot had crushed that out of him by the time he turned fourteen. His parents, however, were of the opinion that Cade was deceiving himself about his life’s work. If so, he intended to go on deceiving himself—and everyone who saw his work—until the day he died.

  But accompanying the Wizardly magic that he was positive would make his name and his fortune onstage was the bequest of the Fae within him. The dreams were not delusions. They were real. Worse, they might become real.

  Blye always knew when the visions had come. When he met her at his parents’ back door the evening of his return from Gowerion, she saw it in his face at once. She said nothing, though, until they were well away from Criddow Close and walking up the cobbled slope of Beekbacks to the only tavern within a mile that allowed decent women inside—even the eccentric ones who wore trousers.

  “What was it this time?” she asked quietly.

  He shrugged.

  “You looked tired this morning when you got home. You look about ready for the burn and the urn now. Did you get any rest this afternoon?”

  “Not much.” That morning, he’d begged off telling her the tale of the last few days and gone up to his bed. He’d slept, but he hadn’t rested. Not at all.

  “We don’t have to do this tonight,” she insisted. “Why don’t we go back to the works, and I’ll get out that bottle my da keeps for important customers? He won’t miss it,” she added bitterly. “Word’s got round. There aren’t many customers, important or otherwise.”

  “You should have told me.” He detoured down a side street, nipped into a shop, and emerged a few minutes later with a distinctive long-necked bottle. “Colvado brandy,” he said. “I can afford it.”

  “Because of the new glisker. I’ve been fretting myself to splinters all day,” she admitted as they retraced their steps back to the glassworks. “You have to tell me everything, Cade. Especially if I’m to be making all the withies from now on.”

  He grinned down at her. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about that part of it! And he’s serious, he truly is. Picked out yours from your father’s without a single mistake. What’s more, he said that while he was working, he could sense how well you knew me from how they felt in his hands.”

  “Hands?” She looked up sharply. “Both hands?”

  “I know it’s odd,” he said. “But he does, he works with both. And doesn’t just sit there, either. It’s—it’s a dance, what he does. You have to come see us tomorrow night, Blye, you just have to.”

  She unlocked the door of the glassworks and gestured him inside. “P’rhaps I will,” she allowed.

  “I wish you’d let me spell that for you,” he said suddenly, gesturing to the lock. “So nobody but you and your father can get in.”

  She shook her head. The silvery hair, loose from its band and neatly combed, shifted around her cheeks. “Beholden, Cade, but I can always feel additional magic, and it distracts me when I work.” She led him through to the little shop, and he made a casual gesture that lit the overhead lamp with a mellow bluish light: Wizardfire in its gentlest form. Shelf on shelf of vases, goblets, bowls, and baskets gleamed the full spectrum of colors. In a special display case atop a wooden plinth was a sampling of a full suite of tableware, plate to chalice to eggcup. Cade walked over to investigate.

  “This is new,” he remarked. “Yours, right?”

  “Some of it,” she admitted. “As much of each piece as the Guild allows, so we can legally sell it with Da’s hallmark. But it’s my design.”

  “It looks like you,” he said. When he saw her brows arch, he smiled. “Silver and gold round the edges, dark accents. Unpr
etentious. And threatening to become elegant any moment now.”

  “Elegant!” Blye snorted. “Lady forefend! Open the bottle and tell me about the glisker.” From the assortment on the shelves she selected a pair of round-bellied snifters swirled with green, eyeing him sidelong as she appended shrewdly, “Or maybe I should say, tell me the dream you had today that was about the glisker.”

  He supposed it was a measure of how much he’d learned while bargaining with tavern keepers that not a flicker of reaction crossed his face. As Blye held out the glasses, he was ashamed of himself. Of all the people in his life—including Rafe and Jeska and even Mistress Mirdley—he trusted Blye alone with most of himself. Most; not all.

  “I know you remember it,” she went on sympathetically. “Sage Emmot taught you how to remember every single detail. If you don’t want to talk about it, fine. But you did dream today.”

  He poured brandy, set the bottle aside, and cradled the glass in his hands to warm the liquor. “I’m not sure I want to talk about it yet. But wait till you hear what happened in Gowerion.”

  He talked, she listened, and they got through half the bottle. Yet even as he described what Mieka had done, and how the audiences had reacted, the boundary line separating his waking mind from the insistent dreaming began to smudge. Yes, he remembered it; all of it; Sage Emmot had taught him so well that he could never not remember.

  {Perhaps the tavern had once been fashionable and popular. Not anymore. The chairs were rickety, the tables stained and scarred. Instead of fragrant wood in the huge hearth, finances compelled the burning of turfs, and not very good ones at that. The stink was unmistakable.

  Over in a back corner two men sat opposite each other, leather tankards between them. One man stared into his ale; the other stared with calculating intent, paper and pen and ink at the ready.

  The first man spoke, his voice raspy, one hand suddenly raking lank brown hair from his face, fingers shaking a little. “I must’ve written a dozen pieces about them through the years. I don’t think anybody ever realized how good they really were.” He drained his ale down his throat, coughed, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and glanced at his companion.