Thornlost (Book 3) (2 page)

I am what I was born
, Cade told himself, and he’d much rather be born with a mind than with a mindless zeal for his own antecedents. He blessed the Lord and Lady and all the Angels and Old Gods who had given him the capacity to express himself in words, to step back from whatever was going on around him in order to observe and catalog it for possible future use, to keep himself separated from the seethe of events and emotions that he nonetheless gathered up to feed his art. Rather Vampirish, but that was how things were.

If he was what he was—so, too, was Mieka. And again Cayden wondered why he didn’t find it extraordinary that he hadn’t murdered the Elf for having revealed his secret. He’d even experienced an Elsewhen about it, a few days after their triumph at the Royal wedding celebrations this spring. He took it out now and examined it, allowing himself leisurely enjoyment of Mistress Caitiffer’s shock. And her hatred.

{“Make no mistake, woman. I will
finish
you. I know a few things that I’m sure you’d prefer remained unknown in certain quarters.”

“You know nothing!”

“Don’t I?” He smiled. “You’re forgetting what I am, what I can see.”

The old woman’s lips tightened but then she gave a little shrug. “And to ruin me, you’ll offer what you know to the Archduke—”

“Good Gods! Are you truly that stupid? I don’t have to offer him anything. What’s going to happen… well, I’ve already seen it, you know,” he said, lowering his voice as if confessing. “Just as I saw you write the letter to the Archduke that told him what I am. ‘Something to His Grace’s advantage,’ that’s how you phrased it. Purple wax to seal it. I saw it all.”

“And couldn’t prevent it!” she spat. “No more than you could prevent that stupid little Elf from spilling the whole tale one night, or prevent my daughter from telling me after! He was that furious with you, and that drunk, and will be again, and what won’t you be able to stop him doing the next time?” Then, as if the question had been feeding on her insides, she demanded, “Why didn’t you kill him? You knew what he’d done, that he’d betrayed you. You saw it all, and yet you forgave him. Why didn’t you kill him?”

He laughed at her. “Kill the best glisker in the Kingdom? Oh, I don’t think so. He does have his uses. And I’m not quite finished with him yet.”}

Forgive
—there was another interesting word. Some part of him knew that Mieka was Mieka, and would do what he would do; as well blame him for breathing. Why fight it? What Cade
would
fight for, would spend himself to the marrow of his bones fighting for, was that future where Mieka surprised him with a party on his forty-fifth Namingday. He liked taking this Elsewhen out to examine, to see again the grin on Mieka’s face and the little diamond sparkling from the tip of one ear. Especially did he like the singing certainty that Touchstone would still be together, would still be wildly successful—and that Mieka would still be alive.

{“You didn’t remember, did you?” Mieka challenged.

“Remember? What’s all this, then? Remember what?”

Excited as a child, he gave a little bounce of delight that his surprise had turned out a surprise after all. “Happy Namingday, Cayden!”

He was right; it was past midnight, and it was his Namingday. “Forty-five!” Cade groaned. “Holy Gods, Mieka, I’m too old to still be playin’ a show five nights out of every nine!”

“Oh,
I
know that,” Mieka said with his most impudent grin. “But try telling it to the two thousand people out there tonight who kept screaming for more!”}

That was the Mieka he wanted to see. Which of Cade’s own decisions led to that Elsewhen, he couldn’t know. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He had to trust in himself, and in Mieka, to make the right choices. But that was the future he wanted, the one he would fight for.

As of tonight, he had exactly twenty-four years to wait.

Ah, but mayhap it hadn’t been an Elsewhen at all, only something concocted by thorn. If that one wasn’t really a possible future, then the other one, the terrifying one, couldn’t be real, either.

{He stared at the words so hastily scrawled by Kearney Fairwalk, read them once, and again.

Mieka died a few minutes after midnight.

The horror was cold and raw and completely sobering. Into the huge silence his own voice said, “But I’m still here.”}

The magnificent self-importance of it, the colossal arrogance: he, Cayden Silversun, was the only person who truly mattered.

Both visions had come to him while deep in thorn-induced dreams. They weren’t the regular sort of Elsewhen. He couldn’t decide if they had been prompted or merely enhanced by thorn. But he knew that he must accept both, or reject both. Each must be real and possible, or neither must be. He couldn’t pick the one he wanted to believe and choose to ignore the other.

Someone had gone round to light torches throughout the little courtyard, and someone else had come by to refill Cade’s glass when he wasn’t looking. A nice courtyard, it was, and a tidy house, and the newly refurbished barn was as he remembered it from the Elsewhen that had come to him on the day Mieka bought the place. Well, as it had been—would be—before Mieka blew it up with cannon powder.

Cade drank a private toast to the absolute certainty that this vision was truly an Elsewhen, unprompted by thorn, and he wouldn’t have to wait twenty-four years for it. Until it happened, he’d enjoy the prettiness of the thatched-roof cottage and its courtyard and barn, all lit up and filled with food, drink, a bonfire, garlands of beribboned flowers, laughter, music, every charming thing that celebrated a young man’s coming of age.

But no gifts. Not yet, anyway. As the day had progressed into evening—lurching or flowing, depending on whether he was just drinking or whether he and Mieka had sneaked off for another sampling of thorn—he’d begun to wonder if the party itself wasn’t his gift. No, there was always something special to commemorate a man’s twenty-first. In that future-to-be, when he’d turn forty-five, Mieka had given him a pair of crystal wineglasses. One day he’d have to open that Elsewhen inside his head just to take a closer look at them. Blye’s work, they must have been. And Blye on the sly (ah, there he was, rhyming again!), because without an official hallmark bestowed by the Glasscrafters Guild, she wasn’t allowed to make anything hollow. On the other hand, in twenty-four years, things might have changed. He liked that thought, and tucked it away for further contemplation at a time when he wasn’t owl-eyed.

One day he’d make the choice that led to that future of the wineglasses and the diamond earring. It was all his to decide. He wouldn’t have foreseen it, otherwise, because every Elsewhen he experienced was a direct result of his own actions. The futures that
he could not affect, those were the ones he never saw in advance.

The visions had changed over the years—not just their content, but the manner of their occurrence. It used to be that he’d hear a few words, glimpse a scene. As he’d got older, some of the Elsewhens became longer, more elaborate, with greater detail. The turn he’d reviewed just a little while ago, for instance: at fifteen or sixteen, there would have been just the woman and her nasty laughter. Sagemaster Emmot had told him that as the years passed and his brain matured, the visions would mature as well.

“When first this began, your mind didn’t quite know what to do with it. As age and experience increase, your mind will recognize that it needs to respond in certain ways. The first time someone who will become a musician hears music, his brain hasn’t yet learned how to organize the sounds, much less reproduce them. Eventually there is enough music stored in his mind that the response becomes intuitive—but it also requires the application of learned knowledge in order to manage the sounds, arrange them into comprehensible patterns. By the twenty-third year, or thereabouts, the brain has matured through a combination of instinct, experience, and education. When the visions come, you’ll know precisely what they are, how to view them, how to understand them. It may even be that you will be able to control the timing of these visions.”

Gods, how he hoped so. He’d almost stopped being afraid that a turn would take him when he was someplace dangerous—on the stairs, on horseback—because there seemed to be a portion of his brain that took care of his body in the here and now while the Elsewhens were sending his thoughts into the someplace and whenever. Again, the example was the way the vision of Mistress Caitiffer had first taken him: during the time it took to unfold inside his mind, he’d walked from the back door of his parents’ house almost to Blye’s glassworks on Criddow Close. He supposed it was a bit like Mieka’s ability to comport himself with near-perfect normalcy even though the look in those eyes proclaimed
that he was thorned to the tips of his delicately pointed ears.

To be sure, in the scant weeks since Touchstone’s first performance of “Treasure,” there had been more Elsewhens than just the one featuring Mieka’s mother-in-law. But that one had been the most satisfying. He’d smiled as he made his threat, and although he wasn’t sure what knowledge he had of her—or would have—that frightened her into compliance, that smile had felt very good. One of the frustrating things about an Elsewhen was that when they occurred he rarely knew what he would know in the future. During the one about his forty-fifth Namingday, for instance, there hadn’t been a thought in his head about why he and Mieka shared a house. He knew that portions of it were his, and portions of it were Mieka’s, but how this had come about was a mystery. Cade had gone over that one several times, trying to glean a hint or two, but he no more understood the reasons for their living arrangement than he knew what Mieka’s upstairs “studio” was for. He knew it existed, because the word had been in his mind, but—would Mieka take up painting? Sculpting? Music?
Studio
implied
art
, but if the Elf had any talent other than glisking, Cade had never seen any sign of it. An odd little mystery, and one he looked forward to solving.

The various thorn he’d indulged in during the afternoon had all faded by now. The feasting was over, the dancing had begun, and Cade laughed quietly into his glass as his little brother, Derien, partnered two girls at a time: Cilka and Petrinka Windthistle. He was almost nine, the twins were almost fourteen, and he was already taller than they, already growing the long bones that were his Wizardly heritage. Just as there was the promise of a tall and elegant body in him, there was also the promise of a handsome face, with a singular sweetness about his clear brown eyes. He bowed and flourished in all the right places, and stepped lively around the two laughing white-blond Elfen girls in the movements of the dance, but didn’t dare what their elder brother Jedris did. Cade
nearly spluttered his drink as Jed tossed his wife in the air and caught her in strong arms, holding her high off the ground. Blye shrieked and pretended to box his ears. This party was for her, as well; five days ago she, too, had turned twenty-one. She and Jed had celebrated quietly in their home above the glassworks on Criddow Close, enjoying a scrumptious feast sent by Touchstone. Blye was growing truly pretty, Cade decided with a fond smile. Marriage agreed with her. She looked so happy, swinging high in her adoring husband’s arms.

But then she was yelling in earnest, in astonishment, and pointed to the main road.

That was how Cayden discovered his Namingday present.

Not strictly just his, of course. It was for all four of them, for Touchstone.

The wagon came rumbling down the lane, pulled by two huge dun-colored horses, driven by Yazz with Robel at his side. It was a beauty. (And so, he noted, was Robel: masses of flaming red hair piled atop her head to make her even taller, a face as sternly perfect as the faces of archaic queens on well-worn coins, and a body made of just the right proportions of sturdy bones, supple muscles, and firmly rounded flesh. Scant wonder Yazz had trudged multiple times through heavy snows to win her.)

All excitement centered on the massive white wagon as it looped round the bonfire and pulled to a stop in the cobbled courtyard. Kearney Fairwalk had promised the absolute latest by way of springs and wheels and lanterns and interior comforts, and Cade supposed that all those things and more were present in abundance, but what made his heart swell to bursting was the way it had been painted. Although the bold red
TOUCHSTONE
on either side, down below the windows, was good advertising and a point of pride, and the symbols in black below each window made him smile (a spider, a drawn bow, a thistle, and a hawk), it was the painting between the two windows that made his jaw clench
and his fists tighten. He knew who had worked it. A map of the Kingdom of Albeyn: green land, brown delineating the main highways, blue for the lakes and rivers and surrounding Ocean Sea, purple jags for the Pennynine Mountains, tiny red dots for all the stops on the Circuits, and gold for Gallantrybanks. Way down at the bottom corner was a little silver hawk with arching wings. The maker’s mark.

“Do you like it? Do you?”

He looked down at his little brother’s flushed, eager face. “It’s—yes.” He swallowed hard, and bit his lip, and smiled. “Yes, I like it.”

All at once the back door opened, stairs unfolded, and Lord Fairwalk stepped cautiously down. After him, less decorous—or perhaps thirstier—leaped Vered Goldbraider and Chattim Czillag. Cade had wondered sporadically through the afternoon whether any of the Shadowshapers would accept the invitation, eventually deciding that they felt it was too much of a drive from Gallantrybanks. Well, evidently not, when Auntie Brishen’s whiskey was on offer.

Cade greeted his friends, accepted their good wishes and the apologies relayed from Rauel Kevelock and Sakary Grainer, saw them provided with brimming cups of whiskey, and prepared to hear all about the marvels of the wagon. He was a trifle miffed that Touchstone wouldn’t be the first to ride in it.