Read Online Touchstone by Melanie Rawn - Free Book Online

big bedroom on the third floor, solemnly declaiming “magical words” to bespell the glass twigs or waving them gently as imagination turned him into a Master Glisker. After twelve years of being the only child, pinched and pushed to fit a mold of his mother’s devising, Cade was rather wickedly looking forward to watching Derien stand up to her the way he himself had done. She deserved it.
    “Blye, dearling!” Rafe’s mother, large and stout and loud, held out her arms to welcome the girl. Overwhelmed by a cinnamon-scented embrace—as Cade had been half an hour earlier—Blye hugged back. “You’ll be going with the boys tonight? Sweet Angels, I do wish I still had the figure to do the same! But that’s what being a baker’s wife will do, and it’s a fact not to be argued with. Come, leave the boys to their plotting. You and I will go into the kitchen and make their tea, and you can tell me how your dear father is these days. And don’t let me forget to send you home with a dozen of those little seedy cakes he likes.”
    Even as she bustled with Blye through the kitchen door, her eyes sought the Elf with a look more suited to a woman half her age. Surely she was promising herself a much longer look later on. Rafe had noticed his mother’s sidelong glance; his jaw dropped slightly and his gray-blue eyes blinked wide. Cade hid a grin by turning his back and pretending to examine the magnificent inlaid chessboard hanging above the hearth. He’d learned to play on that board. Master Threadchaser’s pride and joy, it had been handed down from father to son for five generations, and an offer to take it down for a game was a signal that he liked you. As Cade examined for the hundredth time the delicate spiderweb patterns decorating its wide border, he had the thought that it was rather emblematic of the two families—that above this hearth was a symbol of intellectual skill, and above his mother’s was an empty looking-glass drained of magic, in which one could look only at oneself.
    “Jeska, please tell me your house is easier to locate,” Mieka whined, and Cade decided it would waste too much time to remind the Elf that he’d been very clear about the location. Even if he hadn’t, all anyone had to do was ask about for a door with a spiderweb carved above it, proclaiming the family’s clan.
    “Middle of the block, right after Marketty Round, can’t miss it,” the masquer replied absently as he scanned the evening’s performance charts. He was agonizingly meticulous, for he’d always had difficulty reading, which made him work all the harder at memorizing his lines. But he’d rarely got a word wrong in the year Cade had worked with him. “I think I’ve got this now, Cade, but I’d like to run through the whole thing at least once, just to make sure.”
    Seating himself on a ladder-back chair with a glass basket of withies at his feet, Cade said, “As many times as you need, Jeska. We’ll be doing the ‘Sailor’ again tonight, and then ‘The Princess and the Deep Dark Well’—how are you at echoes, Mieka?”
    “Excellent. But don’t you have something original? That’s such a boring old drudge of a thing.” He sprawled in one of the overstuffed chairs, looking disgruntled.
    Still without glancing up, Jeska asked, “Hadn’t you noticed? Cade puts in things of his own all the time.”
    “But not enough to make people realize it!”
    “We’ll make a splash some other night,” Cade said. “We made this booking with another glisker, you know—somebody who works traditional.”
    “They don’t know I’m coming? Get ready for a drenching, then, because it’s no mere splash we’ll make. The Downstreet is almost a real theater, you know. The stage was specially built, not just nailed together with spare planks. Big enough so I can really work!”
    Rafe caught Cade’s glance and rolled his eyes. Was there no limit to Mieka’s arrogance? But what Rafe said had nothing to do with stemming