Window Wall (3 page)

Scrambling down the embankment, they ran for a dock. Mieka dug in his pockets for coin, cursing himself for spending so much on those damned peacock feathers, coming up with enough to hire a craft that looked more or less able to hold the three of them plus the boatman. He forestalled the man’s attempt to haggle the price by saying, “Double when we get there. Just hurry!”

“Double? Easy enough to say, young sir!” Then he took a closer look at tall, Wizardly Cade and short, Elfen Mieka. “I know your faces from someplace, don’t I?”

“They’re half of Touchstone,” Dery put in. “They’re famous and they’re rich—please, I promise we’ll pay you double if you just get us there quickly!”

“Touchstone.” After further scrutiny, during which Mieka strove to look as much like their placards as possible (though, truth be told, there was never any mistaking Cade’s nose), the man gestured them into the boat.

Mieka hated boats. By the time they reached the site—a nice plot of land beside the river, nothing but the finest for Lord Rolon Piercehand—he had chewed his lower lip almost raw. Dery leaned forward in the prow, the way a rider leaned into his horse’s neck to urge speed. Cade squeezed in beside the boatman, took one of the oars, and rowed white-knuckled. By the time they reached the site, Cade’s hair and shirt were damp with the sweat of effort.

A gift to the Kingdom of Albeyn, it was, this new gallery to display a selection of Piercehand’s foreign plunder. Castle Eyot wasn’t big enough to hold the jumble of wonders and oddities and some genuinely beautiful things collected by His Lordship. On progress a year ago, Princess Miriuzca had professed herself enchanted with the place and very prettily persuaded him to share his haul with the public. The Palace would be lending certain of the Royals’ own hoard of paintings and statuary. Whether or not the Princess had also managed to steer some of the contracts for building the place to Windthistle Brothers was a matter of conjecture, but it remained that Jedris and Jezael were doing the wooden parts of the building and Blye would eventually be making the windows.

The foundation and exterior stones were golden yellow, with two curving grand staircases leading up from the street to the main entrance. Scaffolding laced the stone shell together: a few walls, unfinished interior columns, steel support beams. Arches and balconies abounded, some completed and most not. But the most notable feature was a tower, tall and spindly, made of stone and rising two hundred feet into the air. Word had it that when the gallery was finished, the tower would be topped with a solid gold statue brought back from some remote land by one of Piercehand’s many ships.

Currently the only decorations were clouds of dust.

“Right,” said the boatman. “So where’s my double the fare?”

Mieka and Cade scrambled up a few stone steps to the embankment as Dery snapped, “What you already have is all you get! My brother did half the work!”

Mieka blinked; for just an instant, the boy sounded like Lady Jaspiela. In the best possible way, of course.

“Rich!” the boatman sneered. “Famous! Rich and famous coggers is what you are! Come back here and honor your word!”

They left the boatman cursing unoriginally behind them. The crowd was all streetside: a mass of craned necks, like astonished cats peering out a window. Mieka got a good grip on Cade’s elbow and an even better one on Dery’s, and forced a route through the tangle. As he pushed and shoved, Mieka heard snatches of conversation, none of it pleasant. Speculation about how the scaffolding collapsed; contention that the scaffolding was intact but the stonework had crumbled; assurances that both wood and stone were to blame; estimates of how many had died. He wished he had Cade’s height, because then he might have seen the two red heads that were his only concern.

Suddenly they were at the Human barrier that kept the crowd from pressing forward. Not constables, but Lord Piercehand’s own liveried guards, dozens of them linking arms and looking grim. Mieka confronted the one directly in his path.

“I’m Mieka Windthistle—”

“Good for you.”

“But my brothers are—”

“Nobody gets in. Not until the physickers arrive.”

“They’re not here yet?” Cade demanded. “All these people, and not a single—?”

“Some ugly old Trollwife is tending the injured, that’s all. Stand back.”

“Cayden!”

It was Blye, dusty and frantic, running through the maze of stacked stone and cut boards. Cade tried to push through. The guardsman snarled. Cade snarled right back. A brief tussle ensued, during which Derien ducked down and darted between guards. Mieka tried to follow, and got a knee in the ribs. As he doubled over, Cade’s snarl turned to a roar.

“Stop it!” Blye shouted. “I’m Mistress Windthistle and these are my brothers! Let them by! Damn it, let them by!”

In the end, it was not a raised voice or angry words that got them through. It was Hadden Windthistle, in a calm, soft tone, saying, “Gentlemen, would you allow these young men through? Much beholden to you.”

A sliver of space was made. They slipped through. Mieka looked in wonderment at his father and asked, “How’d you do that?”

Hadden only shook his head. But as they jogged towards the building, Cade leaned down and whispered, “Didn’t you see that guard’s face? Your father magicked him!”

A
ll told, in later years Cayden Silversun would remember very little about his life from Midsummer on that second Royal Circuit until the day he finally realized how trite his life had become. For quite a long time he subscribed to that most unoriginal of ideas: that if he didn’t feel, he couldn’t be hurt.

Strangely enough, his work didn’t suffer. But his work was all he had. On it he lavished every emotion he refused to experience personally. Audiences applauded (with one mortifying exception). Accolades accumulated (with one mortifying exception). And during it all he gave a very good impersonation of an ordinary man with all the conventional and expected feelings.

Everyone was fooled. Even him. Especially him.

He laughed with his friends when something funny was said. He rejoiced with Rafe and Crisiant at the birth of their healthy baby boy. He was eloquent in his expressions of sympathy when misfortune occurred: the collapse into the river of Mieka’s little tower at Wistly Hall, injuring a boatman unlucky enough to have been passing below it; the ugly divorce of Vered Goldbraider that deprived him by law of the right to see his sons and daughter, because his former wife’s new husband was an influential justiciar and his own new wife had no interest in raising another woman’s children. Cade frowned worriedly when it seemed warranted and smiled in all the right places. He attended the performances of his friends and of any new groups that looked promising. He went to dinner at Wistly Hall and was always welcome at the Threadchaser bakery. He attended charmingly on Princess Miriuzca whenever she requested the honor of his company at lunching or tea, and had guested last Wintering at Eastkeeping Hold for many pleasant days in the company of Lord Kelinn and Lady Vrennerie and their two children.

He took back to his flat any girl who happened to strike his fancy. They never refused him; he was Cayden Silversun of Touchstone. If those girls had names, he never recalled them.

He went over to Redpebble Square as seldom as was decently possible. It wasn’t his mother he was avoiding, for she had always done most of the avoiding for him. No, it was Mistress Mirdley’s sharp and all-too-knowing gaze he dreaded. He never went to Hilldrop Crescent at all.

The sole exception to his removal from emotional life was his brother. Derien grew tall, good-looking, self-assured, a favorite everywhere he went for his sunny smiles and gentle manners. Not that the streak of mischief had been blotted out, not by any means. He participated in, and quite often personally organized, enough trouble at the King’s College to embarrass Lady Jaspiela and reassure Cade that Dery hadn’t turned into a prig. He was the only person always welcome at Cade’s flat. His was the only hand other than Cade’s that would trigger the unlocking of the door.

As for that other young life, the one Cade had sworn he would protect … Jindra Windthistle was not his concern. She had no claim on him. She wasn’t his. She was her parents’ responsibility. Whatever might happen to her was not his to influence. Whatever might happen to her was not his fault.

Whatever happened, to anyone or anything, it was not his fault. How could it be? The Elsewhens had stopped.

Nobody knew. He’d never been particularly forthcoming about his foreseeings, anyway, and things were going rather well for Touchstone professionally and personally, so why worry about it? He refused to worry about it. None of it was his responsibility; none of it was his fault.

He still dreamed. He knew he did, because he remembered them when he woke up. Anxious dreams, bewildering dreams that scared him with their bizarre juxtapositions of scenes or people or events or conversations. A trifle awkward, for instance, when people who were dead showed up—it would be terribly rude to point out to them that they couldn’t possibly be walking around alive. A few times he had wings and could fly, and woke sweating and shaking in the middle of a hideous fall. In one horrible heart-pounding nightmare he was being chased through the waters of the Flood by shrieking yellow
vodabeists
.

He might not have the sort of dreams other people had, but he had nightmares just like everyone else.

There were no more Elsewhen dreams, and neither were there any daytime turns. No glimpses of futures. Nothing.

He was just like everyone else.

Whether or not an Elsewhen could have warned him about the disaster of “Turn Aback,” he had no idea. He didn’t care to speculate. The fact remained, however, that the play had been a total failure. He’d worked so hard on it, muscling it past the doubts expressed by Jeska and Rafe and Mieka—which, truth be told, weren’t all that emphatic. His partners trusted him. Rafe asked the day after the inaugural performance whether he hadn’t seen it coming. Mieka had most conveniently spared his having to explain by coming robustly to his defense.

“He did his best—if he saw anything at all like this, I’m sure he worked to prevent it. I mean, who’d want to be him, standing there last night after we finished the thing? It’s just that you can’t ever tell with audiences. Isn’t that right, Cade?”

Mieka hardly ever called him
Quill
anymore. He felt a twinge every time he realized it, and then deliberately pushed the sensation aside, much as he pushed aside the Elsewhens when they threatened him. And they didn’t threaten all that often anymore.

But today, his twenty-fourth Namingday, he couldn’t push aside the assault of this chaos of men slumped on heaps of stone or sprawled on the ground with other men kneeling beside them, holding rags to their wounds. The dust of collapse mingled with the smell of blood. The forecourt was a welter of planks and saws and overturned buckets of nails, fallen scaffolding, and the snarled ropes of rigs for lifting stone.

“Jed!” Mieka flung his arms around his brother, standing tall and unhurt and with one hand firmly gripping Derien’s shoulder. “Where’s Jez?”

“Don’t know.”

“You stay put,” Hadden said. “Cade, keep Dery back. It’s not safe.”

Cade took over restraining his little brother, getting a good hold on the boy’s elbow, and told him what Hadden was too kind to tell him: “You’d only get in the way. Where’s Mistress Mirdley?”

Jed pointed towards the street. “Helping with the wounded, of course. Mieka, go see if you can give her a hand. Fa and I have to get back.”

“I’ll go with,” Mieka said. “I can use that hover spell Mum taught me—”

“No,” his brother told him. “Save your magic for Cayden’s plays.”

Cade saw how hurt Mieka was by Jed’s words—as if Mieka were of no use for anything except what he could do onstage. Considering how dodgy that particular spell was in Mieka’s hands, Cade understood why Jed forbade it.

Blye hurried up to give her husband a cupful of water, looking at him as if memorizing his face anew down to each individual eyelash. He drank, handed back the cup, leaned down to kiss her, and strode off with his father through the billowing dust into the building’s interior.

“What happened?” Cade asked Blye.

“Do I look like a construction engineer to you?” she snapped. “I was here to measure for the windows. Things fell down.”

“Obviously,” Cade couldn’t help but say, earning himself a murderous glare. “How many injured?”

“Lots. Five were up on the scaffolding and fell thirty feet. Cuts and bruises on a dozen more. Two men had their legs crushed—they might walk again, and they might not. And three are still missing.”

“Jez?” Mieka asked. When she nodded and bit her lips together, he went on bracingly, “Jed will find him. When we were little and playing seeky-findy, they always knew where the other one was. Mum says identical twins are like that. She—”

“Mieka,” Blye said, nervous hands twisting the cup over and over, “shut up.”

Cade had seen the plans for the gallery over at Blye’s glassworks one afternoon this winter, and though he had made a conscious effort to forget entirely about the Elsewhens, there was nothing wrong with his memory. Two staircases led from street level to the first of three upper floors. Between those staircases was a pair of fluted columns. The ground floor would be filled with heavier exhibits—statuary and the like—with a tearoom at the back overlooking the river. Up one flight of stairs to a pair of long galleries and a series of smaller chambers; up one more flight, and at one side was a library and reading room, the opposite side a maze of glass cases for small and insanely expensive things; up yet another flight was a series of offices and meeting rooms. Windows let in natural light from dawn until dusk. Cayden squinted at the confusion of stone and timber, and guessed that something had gone wrong on the gallery floor. But it couldn’t have been Jed and Jez’s fault—they were always scrupulously careful about scaffolding and support beams.