Touchstone Read online

  They were all looking at him now, waiting for his concurrence. How did he explain to them that knowing Mieka had worked with the absolute best, had done the glisking for two of the most innovative minds in the theater, had shaken his confidence on the very night when a successful booking at the Downstreet could assure their future?

  “Please don’t be cross,” Mieka said softly.

  “He’s not,” Rafe said with the certainty of long friendship. “He’s comparing himself to Vered and Rauel again, that’s all. He does it all the time. The good thing is that it always makes him work harder.” Eyeing Cade with wry understanding, he added, “If you’re through being overawed by the thought of your glisker working with the illustrious Shadowshapers, can we get down to it now?”

  “Mine he is, and mine he’ll stay.” He heard his own voice saying it just last evening. He nodded sharply.

  “Right, then,” Rafe said. “What can you tell me about the Downstreet, Mieka? We’ve never played a place that big before.”

  With a last wary glance at Cade, Mieka made a grimace that was half relief and half apology. “Nothing to it, really.”

  “No, nothing at all,” Cade muttered, but when he caught the nervous flicker of those big eyes—dark now with apprehension, plain brown and murky—he shrugged and gestured for him to start talking.

  The Downstreet was, as Mieka had mentioned, a real venue, not just a tavern with a rickety makeshift platform. The stage was actually divided for a performance: a solidly made wooden riser for the glisker, a lectern for the fettler, with the masquer given plenty of room. It was so big, in fact, that a glisker could add more than just the usual impressions of a landscape, buildings, a room’s interior: he could really paint a whole scene for the masquer to act against.

  But there was a problem with this large a venue, as well, because the fettler had to make sure the people in the cheap seats could feel things, sense things, just as well as the people up front and in the middle. Rafe was nervous about exactly how and where to direct everything.

  “How did Sakary do it?” he asked.

  “Played to the middle, and just slightly to the right. The roof timbers aren’t evenly spaced on that side of the room. There’s an extra row crosswise, put in to support the Lady Shrine upstairs. The wife and daughters insisted, once there was coin enough for it. They’ve a stone plinth, and a little fountain—remind me to flick some extra magic up there. It’s only polite to give them a nice little cascade for their evening devotions.”

  “Plinth and fountain?” Jeska asked, amazed. “Most noble ladies make do with molded plaster and a bowl!”

  Mieka snorted. “‘Make do’ isn’t a thing the mistress would recognize if it introduced itself and paid for the privilege. She has plans for her girls, she does. The elder is to make a noble marriage, the younger will be consigned to whichever minster’s influence matches up with their money.” He paused, then resumed pensively, “Why is it that mothers lacking a son reach even higher than those with?”

  “You’ve never met Lady Jaspiela,” Cade said before either of the other two could.

  “Really?” Those eyes were lighter now, the shine back in them. “What did she want you to be, before you told her you’d be a tregetour or nothing?”

  “His father’s at Court,” Rafe said quite casually, and Cade silently blessed him. “Her Ladyship was seeing Cayden there in a few years when Prince Ashgar takes a bride, and then a rich marriage, and by the time the grandchildren come, everybody’d forget that Herself married middle for the money and not upper for the glory.”

  Mieka whistled softly between his teeth. “Sounds grim. Prince Ashgar is nobody’s pattern of perfection, is he? Lovely of your little brother to oblige you by being born. But if he’s anything like you, I’d imagine your lady mother will be thwarted a second time.” Shifting in the wide chair, drawing both legs up and wrapping his arms around his shins, he rested his chin on his knees. “Bless the good Gods for giving my parents four sets of twins! There’s enough of us to drive them stark staring mad, and they know it, so they let us do what we please!”

  “Must be nice,” Jeska said. “Can we get on with the rehearsal now?”

  “Yes,” Rafe said, “and I’d like to get there a bit early, and have a look at this ceiling. Extra timbers, and a big stone plinth above—it’ll be tricky, no doubt of it. How did you know about the Lady Shrine?”

  “Showed it to me, didn’t she? Old ladies, they like me,” he confided with a smirk. “They think I’m sweet. Anyhow, the support timbers deflect things a bit odd, but if you play to the right, everything bounces just like it should, all the way back to the bar.”

  An hour later they were all more than ready for their tea. In some ways, containing even the minimal magic used in rehearsal was harder on Rafe than an entire show. A few years ago, when they finally confessed to each other that they had the same ambitions regarding the theater and were learning their crafts, Cade had tried to impart as much as he recalled of what his grandsir the Master Fettler had taught him when he was little. Lady Jaspiela had not been pleased, having decided there were more distinguished uses for her son’s magic than stagecraft. But she hadn’t dared speak against it while the old man was still alive. Cade had tried to feel disappointed that he had no talent for his grandsir’s specialty; a restless imagination impelled him instead towards the creative process of the tregetour. But even years later, he remembered most of what he’d been taught, even if he didn’t really understand it, and had shared it all with Rafe. On one memorable occasion, up in Rafe’s big, airy bedchamber that occupied the whole of the attic high above the bakery, Cade’s attempted demonstration of how to expand and contract control had burst every piece of glass and ceramic in the room, including the mirror, and warped the chamber door into the bargain. It had never closed properly since, or so Rafe’s mother avowed with a wink at Cade every time she said it. She treasured the memory of that afternoon, for as it turned out, her son’s instincts had kicked him into containing Cade’s magic so that it didn’t run riot through the rest of the house. “Might have blown out every other window in the place, and in the bakery besides,” Mistress Threadchaser always said to finish the tale. “Cayden is that powerful—but my boy, he’s that strong!”

  Once Jeska announced himself prepared, and Mieka had agreed with Cade on the exact sequence and nature of the magic, and Cade had done the minor shifts in the spells already within the withies, Rafe sank back into his chair with a long sigh of weariness.

  “We go on at eight? Fine. Wake me five minutes before the show.”

  “What you want is your tea, mate.” Mieka sprang to his feet and bounded lightly for the kitchen door.

  Cade leaned towards his fettler, frowning. “Are you sure you’ll be ready for this tonight? Or maybe I ought to be asking if you can cope with him?”

  Rafe shrugged. “It’s a different sort of tired, y’know.”

  Nodding, Cade settled back again. He knew what Rafe meant. There was a look his friend wore sometimes after a performance that meant he’d spent the evening fighting to discipline an erratic or inexperienced glisker. This was not the same. Rafe had been modulating and adjusting, not struggling for control. The tired that came of satisfying work was entirely different from that of a long battle to a disappointing end.

  Jeska packed up the scuffed leather portfolio where he kept his charts, saying, “I can’t stop. Make my apologies to Mistress Threadchaser, if you would. And I’ll have to meet you at the Downstreet—I’ve accounts to be totted before supper.” As difficult as he found reading, arithmetic came as simply to him as breathing. Jeska supplemented his mother’s always shaky finances by keeping the books for a dozen local businesses.

  “Our duty to your mum,” Rafe said. He had very pretty manners.

  “Travel safe,” Cade added, and when Jeska had left the sitting room turned again to his fettler. “You really do look worn out. Are you sure he fits?”

  “Even boots made to measure s
tart out a little stiff. But he knows what he’s doing, and what’s better, I know what he’s doing. It’ll come right, Cade, stop fretting.”

  Nodding once more, he pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll bring in the tea.”

  He knocked politely on the kitchen door—Mistress Mirdley had more than once threatened to smack his bottom for startling her at her work. The day she’d carried through on the threat had given him the biggest surprise of his life. There had been a napkinful of sweets on his pillow that night by way of apology, but he had never again forgotten to knock.

  No one answered from the other side of the kitchen door, and as he listened carefully he understood why. Mieka was talking. Did Mieka ever stop talking?

  “—shoulda seen me fa’s great-auntie, ears like big floppy bat wings—took all four brothers and a sister or two to hold her down in a spring breeze or she’d take flight! Mum was horrid scared I’d turn out the same, but it appears I got the best of all things Elfen,” he finished without a trace of conceit. Only stating the facts.

  “And there are eight of you? Mercy!” exclaimed Mistress Threadchaser.

  “Eight,” the Elf confirmed, “and no two sets like another. My older brothers, they’re all Human, down to the last curly red hair. Six foot five, shoulders like cannon mounts, no more magic in them than can stir the soup—which neither of ’em can bring to a boil. Not that it’s so unusual in our family—not much Fire Elf, we’re none of us very good at that sort of thing. But the Air and Earth and Water, my younger sisters got those and those only. They look like the Greenseed line, mostly—or so Fa says. For a while they were hoping they’d top five feet, but that’s not gonna happen, not in this lifetime. White hair at twelve years old, eyes almost black, and a set of teeth on each of them that’d gnaw through a tree trunk in a twitch of a wyvern’s tail. Ears like the sails on a schooner, too,” he added, and Cade could hear the smirk. “Mum found a chirurgeon—a good, careful one, mind—to refine them just a bit, and take care of the teeth. Me an’ Jinsie, though, we got the best of the Elf and the best of the Human, with a bit of Wizard and a dash of Sprite for spice.”

  Blye asked, “She’s your twin sister, and that much alike?”

  “Mirror image, almost. She’s not quite as pretty as me, though! Twins aren’t usual with Elfenfolk, of course, but it’s the clue we’ve some Piksey knockin’ about somewhere, and makin’ quite a racket with it, too. They whelp twins as an iron-bound rule. The new little mites, they’re only two years old, a boy and a girl—and it looks as if the one’s pretty much Water Elf from the Staindrop and Stormchill lines, and the other’s anybody’s guess, ’cept he’s determined to grow up to be a dragon!”

  As Mieka paused for breath and the ladies laughed, Cade knocked again. Invited to enter, he found the coziest imaginable domestic scene: Mistress Threadchaser in a big cushioned chair by the blazing hearth, Blye in the matching armchair opposite her, and Mieka hunched on a low wooden stool between, two pottery bowls at his feet and one in his lap as he shelled walnuts. He looked up as Cade entered, and his hair shifted around his pointed Elfen ears, and a wide smile revealed white, square, very Human teeth.

  “Quill! There you are! Hunger finally got the best of you, then?”

  “Oh, good Lady have mercy on us,” Mistress Threadchaser cried with a quick glance at the clicking clock on the sideboard. “It’s gone five and you poor things must be starved! Here, I’ll take care of those later,” she said to Mieka, who shook his head.

  “I finish what I begin.” He twirled a finger above the bowl on his knees, and a little whirlwind surged upwards, emitting a series of sharp cracks. Then the blur split in two and descended neatly to the bowl of nuts and the bowl of shells. Beaming, Mieka looked about for approval—just as a last walnut hurtled from the bowl in his lap and struck him right in the nose.

  Cade laughed at him. Mistress Threadchaser asked anxiously if he was all right. Blye, however, sat back in her chair and frowned.

  Cade asked her about that later, after they’d devoured the usual lavish and excellent tea and were carrying his crated glass baskets to the Downstreet.

  “Bit of a jester, isn’t he?” she murmured. “I mean, look at him.”

  Mieka was loping along beside Rafe, who had livened up considerably after his mother’s cakes, fruit breads, and sausage salad. Usually he was quietly self-possessed before a performance; Cade had expected him to be completely silent, in fact, on their way to this oh-so-important booking. But Rafe was trading quips with Mieka, laughing, even snatching the cap off his head and holding it high out of the Elf’s reach to tease him.

  “Why didn’t he crack the walnuts by magic in the first place?” Blye went on. “If he’d got finished faster, maybe Mistress Threadchaser had something else she wanted done.”

  Cade eyed her sidelong. “You don’t like him, do you.”

  “I like him fine. He’s funny, he’s a charmer, and he’s no chore to look at, that’s for certain sure.”

  “P’rhaps a little too much the charmer?” he guessed. “Did he pay you a compliment you didn’t believe? Not that you ever believe a compliment.” Her blush told him all he needed to know. “Leave off, Blye, he’s just a puppy, all excited and wriggly over joining us, wanting to show off a bit. It’s the player in him.”

  “That remembers me, Cade—on the walk over, when he wasn’t asking questions about you, he was trying to figure a name for the group. I’m hopeless, I’ve no imagination to speak of, but he wasn’t doing much better.”

  “Something will occur to us,” he replied. “What kind of questions?”

  “Oh, just things,” she evaded. “He’s not very subtle. That last walnut, for instance—it was on purpose. Didn’t you notice?”

  “He did it to get a laugh? What’s wrong with that?”

  “As I said. Look at him—a clown.”

  “He was really good with ‘Silver Mine,’ y’know,” Cade told her quietly. “There’s thought in him, and honesty. He’s more than a clown. You’ll see that tonight.”

  “P’rhaps. But the ‘Princess’ isn’t exactly grand tragedy, is it? And are you sure he won’t make that into a farce, the way you say he does the ‘Sailor’?”

  “He wouldn’t dare.”

  She arched her brows eloquently, but said nothing more.

  “Cade!” Mieka had danced back towards them, his moss-green cap stowed in his pocket where Rafe couldn’t get at it again. “We still need a name. There’s a group over the North End goes by Wishcallers, and somebody else that thinks if they’re lucky they’ll get mistaken for the Shadowshapers by naming themselves the Smokecatchers.” His nose wrinkled with disdain. “We need a contrast, I think, don’t you?”

  “Good idea,” Blye said. “So that nobody thinks you’re trying to imitate anybody. Something solid. Rock, brick, stone—”

  “Brickballs,” Mieka offered, grinning.

  “Brickbrains,” she tossed back at him.

  Rafe had paused to let them catch him up, and contributed dryly, “Pebblebrains, more like.”

  “What about ‘stone’ something, or something ‘stone’?” Blye asked. “Keystones?”

  “Not bad,” Rafe allowed. “Nice imagery—a bit nervy, implying we’re the ones holding everything together—”

  “—when it’s really only you, O Great Fettler?” Mieka scampered ahead, then turned and walked backwards so he could talk to them. “Lodestones. Nobody can resist us, we’ll draw them in like magnets!”

  Cade wanted to join in their banter, but a slither of a chill down his backbone caught him unawares.

  “Lodestars? No,” Blye decided at once. “You’re none of you Fire Clan, and they’re touchy about who thinks to associate with them.”

  Mieka was scowling. “Stone … Stonesmiths—I hate it. Stoneciphers? Hewstones? Whetstones? Even worse. Come on, Quill, you’re the wordsmith!”

  “Headstones—everybody needs one eventually,” Rafe said.

  Mieka began a mocking singsong.
“Limestones, Sandstones, Gemstones, Cornerstones—”

  “No!”

  The protest burst out of his mouth before he could remember why it was the worst word in the lexicon. As they stared at him, he lost track of where he was and even who he was, and he was back in the dim, run-down tavern listening to someone called Tobalt say, “When the Cornerstones lost their Elf, they lost their soul.”

  “Quill?”

  Soft voice, worried and even a little frightened. Gentle touch on his shoulder. He looked down into those eyes and if the glass baskets hadn’t been cradled in his arms, he would have grasped Mieka with both hands, to keep him here and safe and alive—

  “Cade, what is it?” Rafe’s deep voice, raspy with concern.

  “Back away,” said Blye. “Let him breathe.”

  She knew. Of course she knew. But he couldn’t look away from the Elf, the Elf he would one day lose, and with him his soul, and he would go cold inside and heartless and cruel, he knew it, he knew those things were inside him and if he wasn’t careful, if he didn’t do everything exactly right, if he made even one wrong choice—Sagemaster Emmot had told him that very first night, hadn’t he, told him what a ruthless decision it was to leave home and friends to seek magic, a decision Cayden had made without a single qualm—

  “Cade!” Blye had pushed Mieka aside and was gripping Cade’s face between her hands. She snarled over her shoulder as Mieka protested, and swept the sweat-damp hair from Cade’s face. “Are you back?” she asked in a low voice. “Have you come back?”

  He nodded and caught his breath. “Yes,” he muttered, looking into her dark eyes that were so wonderfully familiar—eyes that didn’t compel feelings he couldn’t put names to.

  “What just happened?” Mieka demanded. “Quill, what does she mean, ‘Are you back?’ Back from where?”

  “Leave it,” Rafe said. “Come on, we’ve a show to do. Come on, Mieka!”

  Blye asked him exactly nothing during the rest of the walk to the Downstreet. He could only imagine what must have been on his face, in his eyes, during the turn, as Master Emmot had always called such things. “Turns your brain right round inside your skull, doesn’t it? Not to be mistaken for the kind of ‘turn’ a lady succumbs to when the fit of her corset is too tight—although it’s rather like the fit of your thoughts is too tight, isn’t it?”