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finding it so that everybody would know that it wasn’t just a story made into a play, that it was real, and applaud Cade for his cleverness in working it all out.
    Looking back, it seemed to Mieka that Briuly’s death, which everyone else thought was merely a strange “disappearance,” generally attributed to the vagaries of artistic temperament, was the last thing that Cade had really cared about, the last time he’d openly felt anything. There had been no change in the intensity of magic Cade put into the withies for a performance. Love, hate, fear, joy, contempt, anxiety, tenderness, indignation, grief, rage, pride—all the emotions that Touchstone used onstage were reliably there in the glass twigs. The feel of them had changed some, though Mieka stubbornly chose to attribute the difference to maturity and even to increased mastery of the magic. Cade primed the withies expertly, giving Mieka everything he needed for a performance.
    Yet in his personal life, Cade seemed only to be going through the motions. He’d looked and acted grim enough this afternoon, but to Mieka’s knowing eye it was … not
faked
, not exactly, but …
muted.
Rather like what that unknown fettler had done to them several times on that first Royal Circuit, only Cade was muting his own emotions, not onstage magic. It was as if he’d set up a barrier between him and any event that might cause him to feel too much … or feel at all. Like the barrier Lady Megs had raised to protect a sensitive little girl one night at the Keymarker.
    And there, Mieka told himself, was another sore point. The noble Lady Megueris Mindrising was everything Cade could want—nice looking, smart, spirited, educated, adept at magic, and insanely rich besides—yet he behaved as if she existed only when he was looking at her. Mieka knew very well what it was like to want a woman, to be so hopelessly in love that every waking thought and every night’s dreamings were about her. Any man with half a grain of sense would have been out of his mind in love with Lady Megs. Cade gave no signs of it that Mieka could recognize.
    They’d met her quite a few times in the last couple of years: during Trials at Seekhaven, private performances at one or another of Lord Mindrising’s many residences throughout Albeyn, at lunching or tea with Princess Miriuzca, at the races. Cade responded not at all to being teased about Megs. He neither flushed red with embarrassment nor snarled that it was nobody’s business but his, nor laughed, nor threatened serious physical mayhem if they didn’t shut up. He simply didn’t react. The lady, of course, could not be similarly teased; Mieka did have some notion of manners. Though she was pleasant enough around Cade, she showed no particular partiality for his company. Granted, it simply wasn’t done: no self-respecting girl, wellborn or not, would be caught actively pursuing a man. But Megs wasn’t the typical twitchy little titled ladyship, nor simpering simpleminded shopgirl. And, facts be faced, she was getting to be of an age when people sniggered behind their hands at unwed females. Cade wasn’t the best catch in terms of the Court, but Megs had buckets of money and a name ancient enough for both of them. Mieka couldn’t see why anyone would object to Cade. True, he was no beauty, and he’d talk the hind leg off a wyvern, and his sulks were the most infuriatingly boring thing in the world, but he had pretty manners and could talk interestingly when he felt like it, and he was famous and even had a few noble ancestors, and why was Mieka chittering inside his own head about Cade’s love life when his brother lay upstairs—?
    “How is he?”
    Cade and Derien stood in the hallway. Mieka hadn’t even noticed their arrival. Getting to his feet, he said, “We took him upstairs. Nobody’s said anything to me since.” And then, seizing on something to talk about that would distract him from thinking about Jez, he asked, “Why did