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For

Barbara Jean Doty
and
Jeane Relleve Caveness

R
eality intruded on Cayden’s notice in the form of a flaming pig. Seated in a place of honor in the small courtyard of Number 39, Hilldrop Crescent, he had an excellent view of every marvel of cookery that came out of Mieka Windthistle’s kitchen door. Each was placed on a long trestle table for inspection by the guests, many of whom Cade didn’t know. Friends and family were in attendance, of course, but there were also neighbors who knew the new residents of Number 39; those who didn’t yet know them but were untroubled by the scandalous reputations of theater folk; those who were curious; and those who simply had heard that food and drink were to be had all afternoon and into the evening. Fortunately, Hilldrop wasn’t a large village—a central cluster of shops and two small taverns, mayhap forty houses, most with a bit of acreage for grazing, and a tiny Chapel visited every fortnight or so by a Good Brother or Good Sister attending to the spiritual needs of the village. Simple folk they were in Hilldrop, all Human to look at, though with a hint of other races here and there, and Cade had found them friendly enough. They’d no reason not to be. There was music all afternoon, local musicians on flutes and drums thrilled beyond words to be accompanying the famous cousins Alaen and Briuly Blackpath and their lutes. Later there would be dancing round the bonfire. For now there was a parade of culinary wonders, all presented first to Cayden Silversun.

There was also thorn, but that was not offered to other guests.

Cade had been doing quite nicely all afternoon on a combination of very fine ale and one or another of Brishen Staindrop’s mysterious concoctions of thorn. The latter was responsible for the way he saw the food. First had been a completely feathered purple swan that blinked its glassy green eyes, stretched its wings, and flew off its platter into the lazy spring afternoon. A little while later a blue and red striped lamprey—fully five feet long and glowing like a lantern lit by Wizardfire, coiled in a bed of salad greens—was sliced its entire length by a sharpened snake wielded by Mistress Mirdley. It spewed dozens of tiny yellow butterflies that followed the swan skywards. A pink porpoise was next, arched above frothing cabbage waves that shimmered white and green in the gathering dusk. The poor thing flapped its orange fins in valiant effort, but failed to join the butterflies and the swan.

Some part of Cade knew that none of these things actually happened, and that the swan, lamprey, and porpoise had all been the proper colors and carved up and eaten. Plates had been given to him, loaded with meat and appropriate garnishments. But it suited him to choose to believe in the butterflies.

The pig was different. As the sun dipped below the western hills and vague spring shadows spread through the courtyard, all the lovely prancing colors and blossoming visions dissolved when the pig was brought out on a pair of planks, ablaze from the curl in its tail to the apple in its mouth. He expected it to do something: snort rainbows out its snout, leap upright and dance a jig. (A piggy-jiggy, he told himself, vastly pleased with the rhyme; he’d make of himself a famous poet yet, see if he didn’t.) At the very least, the flames ought to turn to glass and, fittingly for Touchstone, shatter.

But the flames were real, and as the rumbullion burned out, the pig did nothing more spectacular than lie there on the planks. Space was made on the table so Mistress Mirdley could carve with a knife that was definitely a knife. As a plate was piled for him, Cade’s last hope was that the apple would sprout wings and flutter off to join the butterflies. The apple stayed an apple as the plate was presented to him: his Namingday, after all, and his the honor of the prime slices and garnishments. He smiled past his disappointment that the thorn had faded, and made much of praising the pig that had betrayed him by staying a pig.

With the thought of betrayal, he absolutely avoided looking at Mieka.

Mieka’s mother-in-law, who had betrayed Cayden’s secret to the Archduke after Mieka had drunkenly burbled it to her daughter, had been sneaking sidelong looks at him since his arrival. He could guess what she was thinking: There must be some sort of mark on him, some significance of face or glance that indicated he was something other than a Master Tregetour newly turned twenty-one years old. That which he truly was, some sign must needs betray.

That word again. With his extensive—nay, exceptional—vocabulary, he ought to be able to think up something else to call it. But a betrayal was a betrayal, just as the pig was a pig, and when Mieka came by to refill his glass, the last lingering bit of thorn mocked him by overlaying the glisker’s perfect, quirky Elfen face with a snuffling swinish snout.

He realized he was writing it all in his head, and quite badly, too. For one thing, he was punning—
snout
was local colloquial for someone who betrayed his mates to the constables—and Cayden never punned. Worse, as if that triple
s
of
snuffling
and so forth weren’t bad enough, the odd little almost-rhyme of
local colloquial
was just plain awful. He was a Master Tregetour. Before inflicting things like that on anyone, including himself, he ought
to rip his own brains out through his nose with a hoof-pick.

It was definitely time to go home. He’d been here since the afternoon, partaking of liquor in public and Mieka’s collection of thorn in private. It had been over two hours since the last pricking of mysterious powder, and Mieka hadn’t been round to suggest more. Cade could stay drunk, of course. There was alcohol aplenty in the barrels of Auntie Brishen’s whiskey and casks of very good locally brewed ale. But with thorn, the pig would not have disappointed him by staying a pig, and he didn’t feel like dealing with reality just now. Especially not if reality included listening to another chide from Mieka’s wife about polishing up her husband’s accent. Sweet and delicate as the renewed entreaty was, Cade heard the impatience behind it. He bent his head over his plate of no-longer-flaming pork and wished somebody would come by with a full bottle just for him.

“Dearling, you have such a beautiful voice, and you’re so brilliant in the way you think, but there are some people who won’t hear anything you say, because of the way you say it.”

“Anybody worth the talkin’ to won’t be carin’ much, now, will they?”

Fundamentally, she was right. The drunker Mieka got, the fewer
g
’s attached to the ends of words and the worse his grammar became. Hadn’t Cade worked to smooth out his own accent after it turned sloppy during his years at Sagemaster Emmot’s Academy? He saw the adoption of slurrings and slang as a deliberate, if unrealized at the time, taunt to his mother: typical adolescent rebellion. He also understood why he had abandoned those slumping consonants and harsh vowels. Words were important to him. Vital, in fact. Slapdash speech could not but influence the way he used words on paper. Precise; controlled; things Mieka was only onstage (it never looked that way, but he was). Offstage, he was… Mieka. No sense trying to change him, to make him other than what he
was. If that was his wife’s goal, she was doomed to frustration.

“But, Mieka, when there are noble ladies present—”

Among the friends, relations, business associates, and new neighbors in the town of Hilldrop gathered in the little courtyard this night, there was only one noble lady: Cade’s mother. The fact that she was here at all was another shard of reality he didn’t much care for. Yet Lady Jaspiela seemed content to occupy a chair padded with velvet cushions over there under the rose trellis by the kitchen door, where she could survey the company and yet preserve a suitable aristocratic distance. And keep an eye on Derien, Cade added to himself: Derien, his adored little brother whose idea all this had been. One huge party to combine Cayden’s twenty-first Namingday, the Windthistles’ much delayed home-cozying, Touchstone’s recent triumph with “Treasure,” the completion of renovating the barn, and the arrival of Yazz and his new wife, Robel.

Oh, and a belated Namingday party for Mieka’s daughter, whom Cade had glimpsed exactly once since her birth.

“If you’d just be a little more heeding—you meet so many important people now, like Her Ladyship, and what if we’re invited to—”

“Be puttin’ an end to it, lovie,” Mieka laughed. “There’s me girl!”

Somehow young Mistress Windthistle had missed the fact that Lady Jaspiela had been Mieka’s devoted admirer since first they met. The girl didn’t seem to be the shiniest withie in the glass baskets. But there was something else that escaped her, something more…
profound
wasn’t the word he wanted, but he was drunk and it would have to do. There were distinctions of bloodline and social class to which certain members of the nobility clung like drifting spars after a shipwreck. Manner of dress and address, the precise depth of a bow and the particular flourish of a feathered hat… Mieka had long since sussed out
Lady Jaspiela’s rather mundane snobberies. Of course, he knew that Cayden, too, was a snob, and had teased him about it more than once. Cade’s haughtiness was of the intellect, and he had scant patience with what he saw as inferior minds. Mieka claimed to be unable to decide which was worse: the innate arrogance of the aristocrat or the learned conceit of the academic.

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