Thornlost (Book 3) (26 page)

The editor’s jaw by this time was slightly open. His fingers scrabbled feebly at some papers on his desk.

“In any case,” Mieka went on, rising to his feet with one hand in the pocket of the skirt where Cade knew the withie had to be, “I’m here to demonstrate as convincingly as I can the truth of the matter.” With an endearing smile, he spread his arms wide and announced, “
This
is how Miekella Windthistle would look.”

Then he let the magic fade.

Gone were the extravagant curls, the pink lips, the full bosom. Gone as well, Cade saw with a shock, were the clothes. Skirt, blouse, hat, scarf—he stood there stark naked with the feather fan gripped in his fist. The fan lost its garnishings and became a slender glass withie.

Mieka’s smile became truly Angelic. “
I
,” he announced, “am Mieka Windthistle.”

“Oh dear Gods,” Cade breathed. The mad little Elf really had come out onto the street dressed in nothing but magic and a pair of knitted blue silk socks. Cade had known from that very first night in Gowerion that Mieka was good, but he’d never imagined he was
this
good.

Or this crazy.

“Any questions?” Mieka prompted. “Doubts?” No response from behind the desk. “Mayhap an admiring adjective here and there? No? Well, much beholden to you for your time and understanding. We’ll leave you to your work. Cayden, old dear, shall we?”

“Get some clothes on!” he hissed.

Mieka glanced down as if only now realizing he wasn’t wearing anything at all. He examined the withie, shook it once or twice, held it to one ear to listen to it. “Oh, my. I seem to have run out of magic.” Turning back to the editor, he asked, “You wouldn’t
happen to have a spare pair of trousers hanging about, would you?”

Cade snatched the withie from his hand. It was hard to concentrate enough to prime it, for the editor had recovered his powers of speech.

“Get out of here!” He pushed himself up from his desk, leaning heavily on it, and roared, “This instant, d’you hear me? Right now!”

“Love to,” Mieka told him. “Slight problem.”

“Out!
Out!
”

Mieka shrugged. “If you insist.”

Cade grabbed his arm before he could stroll through the doorway. “Here—use this—there’s not much, but you can wear my jacket—”

Taking the withie, Mieka favored him with a radiant smile and fluttering eyelashes. “Oh, Quill! You’re so good to me!”

Within moments Cade was following him back through the
Lilyleaves
main room. If anyone was startled to see that the young woman who had entered wearing a yellow skirt and pink blouse and carrying a hugely feathered fan was now a young man, barefoot, wearing gray trousers and a blue jacket much too long for him, it didn’t make the next day’s edition.

* * *

D
amn it to all Hells!” Mieka whined on their walk back. “The paving’s hot enough to burn holes in me feet!”

“Should’ve thought of that, shouldn’t you?” Cade asked with no sympathy whatsoever. The sunshine was in full spate by now; they’d stuck to the shady sides of the streets on the walk here, but now there were no shady sides. He just hoped the magic lasted long enough to get Mieka upstairs at Croodle’s. “You lied.”

“I’m known to do that, on occasion.”

“About the withie.”

“Among other things.”

“Cousin Miekanna?” Cade asked pointedly.

“Miekella,” he corrected. “I only lied that she looks like me. I’m
much
prettier.”

He kept his gaze on the paving stones directly in front of him, as if he might be able to judge which would be cooler than the rest. The absurdity of his little jumps from one to another was getting him stared at by passers-by. Cade told himself he ought to be grateful they weren’t staring at him for other reasons.

“And you don’t want to meet her, believe me,” Mieka went on. “Dreadful creature. She lives at the Clink now, with Granny Tightfist and Uncle Breedbate.” All at once he gave an exclamation of delight and jumped into the gutter, feet splashing. “Ooh, that’s much better!”

Cade glanced up ahead of them and finally broke down laughing. Mieka looked up and wailed aloud. The small gutter river was the accomplishment of a fat gray horse who, by the looks of the production, hadn’t taken a piss in at least three days.

J
ust this one last show in Lilyleaf, Cade told himself, just another few hours to get through, and he could laugh himself silly all the way to Castle Biding. He had not the slightest confidence, however, that he or Jeska or Rafe would be able to get through tonight without collapsing every time they even glanced at Mieka. Throughout the afternoon somebody broke into sniggers every few minutes, and on the walk over to the Baths for the performance, Mieka made them laugh apurpose when he slunk along the sides of the buildings as far away from the gutters as possible.

They were still grinning when they took the stage.

All humor was gone by the end of the first two minutes of “Dragon.”

Someone was mucking up their magic again. Cade sensed it, knew Rafe and Mieka and Jeska did, too, and fought it to the final lines.

A few nights ago, the muting of the magic had been general, spreading over the whole audience. That time at the Keymarker, when Megs had been protecting the young girl (or so she’d said), the obstruction had been specifically localized. This leaped all over the theater, from group to group with no anticipating where it would be next. The audience saw the Dragon spread its great
wings, smelled its fetid breath; heard the rasp of the Prince’s labored breathing, tasted the copper of blood and fear on his tongue, felt the heft of the sword in his hand—all these things were as usual. But the effects were deadened by that leaping, infuriating barrier.

Cade called up everything his grandfather had ever told him about fettling, everything he’d observed Rafe do over the years, everything he’d ever read about technique. He kept seeking the source of the obstruction, trying to track it back from the area it affected to its origin, and could not. What he found he
could
do, after a while, was to scare it off, pitting his own magic against it, projecting strength and a lethal threat. It would falter, then vanish, only to rise in another part of the theater. Cade began to be distracted by fear that Rafe and Mieka, frustrated and angered, might pour more emotion into the piece and concentrate it more keenly to get past that infuriatingly skipping barrier, and overwhelm the audience to its peril and their own exhaustion. Still, as furious as both of them were, they were professionals. They had to get through the play, and somehow they did.

And although they were wrung out by the futile effort to find and negate the muffling magic, they agreed backstage amongst themselves that they owed the audience one more playlet. Nobody would be expecting it, so there was a good chance that whoever had set up the strange, frustrating barrier had left the theater. So had a goodly number of other patrons. A little over half of them lingered, complaining about Touchstone’s undeserved reputation or arguing that they’d been superb the other night and this was just a fluke, everyone had off days.

When the manager stepped onstage to announce a second play, there was applause, of course. The theater had been packed to bursting, patrons doubtless drawn by the glowing review in that morning’s
Lilyleaves
. Those who had stayed were getting twice the value for their money—although many of them would
have said they’d not yet got much for their money at all. So there was also jeering, and Cade flinched when he heard it.

“We’ll have to give them ‘Doorways,’ ” he said. He expected groans of dismay; what he got were curt nods. “And if any of you sense anything, anything at all, we stop right in the middle of whatever it is and—”

“—and demand to know who’s trying to fuck with us?” Rafe shook his head. “No weakness, Cade. We do it. Whatever happens.”

At the glisker’s bench, Mieka had selected the withies for him. “I need whatever you can give me,” he said quietly, those eyes narrowed and furious and grimly determined. “We can sleep it off all the way to Castle Biding if needs must. But it has to be a spectacle, with all the flash we’ve got, and powerful enough to overwhelm the bastard if he’s still out there.”

“Do it fast,” Jeska put in nervously. “He might’ve gone, then heard we’re doing another play, and be coming back.”

So Cade primed the withies as quickly as he could, and with more than he’d thought he had in him. He’d never been so tired in his life as he was when he trudged back to his lectern. If Mieka had brought his thorn-roll to the theater, they could have pricked some bluethorn and got through this. Where Rafe and Mieka and Jeska would dredge up the energy for this without thorn, he’d no idea. He only knew—they all knew—that it had to be done.

The Sleeper began to dream. The doors lay before him. He opened some, backed away from others. Scenes of home, family, richly ripe fields; despair, degradation; idleness and apathy; accomplishment and wealth and fame. All the effects were there. The tastes and scents of fresh bread and butter, of sour wine, of flowers and rotting fruit and spring air. The feel of rough sacking, smooth silk; the sounds of lutes and Minster bells and maddened dogs and happy laughter and terrified screams. And the emotions: smug satisfaction, colossal boredom, elated triumph, drunken befuddlement, quiet pleasure—with an undercurrent of
dissatisfaction beneath it all, until the last door opened and Jeska spoke the final line, and vanished into
This life, and none other
.

The audience got what they came for. The volume of the applause was all out of proportion to the number of people still in the theater. No one had attempted to dampen down the magic. The intensity of what Cade had put into the withies, and that Mieka had extracted to make the scenes within the open doors, Rafe had tempered and adjusted to spread evenly throughout the hall without hindrance. There’d been more anger than usual in the mix, and mayhap the images had not been so precisely detailed, but there’d been no snags. They were
Touchstone
, and by the time they walked offstage, every man in the place knew it.

Jeska took care of them on the way back to Croodle’s. He steadied them when their steps faltered, hired a couple of lads to carry the glass baskets and withies, demanded a pair of hire-hacks to convey them all, yelled for Croodle and Kazie to help them upstairs.

“What about you, then?” Cade heard Kazie ask worriedly.

“I’m fine. Not much for me to do in ‘Doorways’ except remember the lines. They did all the work.”

That wasn’t strictly true. Tonight Jeska had added what Elfen magic he possessed, and edited the play as it had progressed to shorten it as much as he could without damage. He’d run the show tonight, with Mieka and Rafe taking their cues from him rather than the other way round, as was usual with “Doorways.” Cade kept putting one foot in front of the other up the stairs, one arm around Mieka’s ribs and the other draped across Croodle’s strong shoulders, mindlessly grateful for a masquer who was a true artist and an even truer friend.

He fell across his bed and felt somebody haul off his boots. Croodle said something about food. The mere mention of eating made his stomach heave.

He must have groaned, or maybe whimpered, for Jeska said hastily, “Not just now. In the morning, maybe.”

“You have a good long lie-in,” Kazie advised. “We’ll keep the place closed until noon.”

“But—”

Croodle interrupted him. “You boys will be needing the quiet more than I’ll be needing the morning drunks.”

Cade tried to rouse himself enough to express his appreciation for this generosity. All he managed to do was get his eyes open. Standing there, arm in arm, were Jeska and Kazie. They made a striking couple, his limpid-eyed golden good looks the perfect contrast and complement to her darkly exotic beauty. There was a steadiness about them, somehow, a feeling of stable ground underfoot. He’d never seen this expression on Jeska’s face before, and all at once he envied it ferociously.

Stability? In the life of a traveling player? Gods and Angels, he must be getting old.

As his eyelids slid shut and he plummeted into sleep, he tried to understand how a day that had been so much fun at noon could become such a nightmare by midnight.
This life, and none other…
He grimaced, thinking what a Hell this life could sometimes be.

* * *

C
ade went to sleep exhausted and woke up angry. So did his partners. It wasn’t quite noon when they met downstairs for something to eat before piling into the wagon for the journey to Castle Biding. Cade forced himself to make the usual polite farewells, to which Croodle merely arched a brow before giving him a hug that nearly snapped his backbone.

“You stay safe,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ll get word to you if anyone else has to go through what you boys did.”

It was the first time it had occurred to him that whoever this was, he might have other quarry in mind besides Touchstone. Mulling this over took him out into the courtyard and into the
wagon. He glanced out one of the windows in time to see Jeska kiss Kazie in full view of anyone who cared to watch. She was wearing the green scarf he’d lent Cade at Coldkettle.