Cadence and the Pearl

Chapter 1

Chapter 1Cadence Bell sat on uncomfortable grey rocks at the far end of the curve of the dull grey shore, and watched the waves crash over and over under the looming grey sky. He’d been sitting on stone long enough for his left leg to go numb. He ignored it.

Water flung itself into the rocks again. Ceaseless. Mindless. Unconcerned with his presence. This felt oddly reassuring: insignificant, he couldn’t harm the world.

Insignificant. He shifted a hand, discovered a pebble, tossed it. It sank beyond his sight.

Beyond sight, beyond reach: like the world he’d left behind back in the glittering multifaceted gem of Londre, capital-city spires stretching to the sky, streets bustling with broadsheet-boys and violet-sellers, parliamentarians and Queen’s men, politics and taverns and theaters. Above all: theaters, palaces of imagination and greasepaint and paste jewels and stories that could change the world.

Cade had taken a bow, laughing, dragged up onto that stage by his players. An author surrounded by love. A Queen’s commission, court masques, rubies in his hair. A prodigy, the Court had murmured. They’d lavished his work with praise.

He squinted into the wind of Gull Skerrie, which lay about as far from the kaleidoscopic twirl of Londre ballrooms as he could get. The wind burned his eyes, unless that was something else. The waves murmured upward, though they did not sing of joy and farce and playful springtime dances. A year ago, when he’d written the lines for that pageant, the Queen herself had worn a flower coronet to play spring.

A year ago he’d had no sense of the stone about to land in his life. Ripples and ripples, and he was sinking.

“Cadence Bell,” he said, to the wind and the sea, “Queen’s playwright and artistic advisor. On the Inner Council.” The sea sighed at him with voiceless well-meant soothing rhythm; but it had no advice to give.

He squirmed around on his rock. The curlicue of neighboring Harbor Skerrie rose to the south, followed by dotted islands that question-marked into the mainland. Cade did not need question marks at the moment.

He did not look at the village as it lurked behind him. He especially did not look at his parents’ inn and boarding-house. His inn and boarding-house.

Cade did not hate The Bell. He never had. He’d loved his childhood: laughing, crawling about under fishermen’s legs, being scooped up and told stories about the selkies and the sirens and the vast and terrible storms and the narrow escapes and the giant sharp-beaked unicorn-fish. He’d known every curl of pipe-smoke and sea-soaked wool, and had fled Gull Skerrie as soon as he could, with his parents’ blessing at his back.

He found a bit of driftwood to gaze at, brown and thin as his thoughts.

He had not been able to write since coming home. He had not been able to write through the end of his father’s long illness, and his mother’s short and sudden one. He had not had time to think, and even when he had, concepts had flapped around like the island’s namesake gulls: clamoring, wary, restless.

His shirt was not warm enough, and his boots were growing wet from spray. They’d been bought for city streets and Court debates about patronage of the arts. Cadence Bell, even at the age of seventeen, had known his destiny lay in those streets, that Court patronage. He’d even been right.

He could barely recall those first exhilarating beribboned nights. Chess and banter and wordplay that might alter the fate of nations. Wine and lute-playing and invitations to operettas. The operettas drowned under the changing of sheets and the sound of his father coughing and the weary gnawing knowledge that someone had to open the inn and count money in the cashbox and pay the physicians and settle the will and stare at the business now in his name.

He found another pebble. Overhead a single gull called out, lonely on the breeze. The afternoon floated like the twig, adrift. He’d left Gwen and Rhys in charge; the pair of them could conjure up marvelous chowders and miraculous flaky fish, but had given him worried expressions about the cashbox. Cade probably ought to worry as well. Couldn’t find the energy. Couldn’t summon the interest.

His parents were gone. His life was gone. He was somehow still here. Tidying up loose ends, or not tidying them up, or not doing much of anything at all.

This pebble felt smooth, and chilly, and surprisingly round. He glanced at it in mild interest before throwing it.

Blue-white shimmer caught his gaze. He lifted it, turned the gleam around in fingertips. Iridescent promises caressed his skin.

A pearl, he thought. Under the dome of the sky, at the end of the world, on rocks in a fishing-village: a pearl.

Quixotically, unpredictably, it suggested another life. A dream of wealth and extravagance and recognition of talent and gifts given for those talents. Strewn at his feet.

He looked at the pearl. It developed a voice, a hum; it sang to him, a wordless peal of high exquisite music in his hand.

He dropped it, shaken. That’d been the tune he’d written for the last midwinter masque, when they’d ended with a dance; his occasional partner-composer Felix Fellini had sent over a delicate wild fantasia of melody, and Cade had put words to it, a song of wintry folklore and elfin legend with a giddy chorus. Felix liked difficult twisty compositions; Cade liked writing tunes the Court could actually sing. Between them they’d woven a musical.

And the pearl had sung it back to him.

He stared very hard at it, as it lay on cold grey rocks. It did nothing more: it was a pearl.

“I think,” he said aloud, “I might possibly be insane.” Surely that happened. From grief. From an odd hollow lack of grief, as if he’d been emptied out. From the inability to write. Twenty-two years old, he’d be a tragic cautionary tale, a genius burnt out too soon. Trapped by an inn’s cashbox. Never living up to the glorious promise of his youth.

The pearl said nothing.

Cade extended a finger. Nudged it. Still nothing.

“Well,” he sighed, “you’re no help, are you?” A larger wave hit the rock three down from his. Icy ocean exploded over his shoulder. He started to swear at it in gutter Firezi he’d learned from Felix, felt emotion ebb and drain away, and gave up.

“I might not be,” said the rocks, holding out a thick woolen blanket, “but would this, at all?”

Cade attempted levitation, flailed, slipped on wet stone. Jeremiah’s hand caught his wrist, pulled him to safety. They stood blinking at each other for a moment under slate-slab sun; Jeremiah’s mouth quirked. “I should’ve known you hadn’t heard me. Thinking?”

“Trying not to.” He scooped up the pearl, an impulse, and tossed it into a weather-beaten trouser-pocket. “Are you done already? It’s still early, isn’t it?”

“After three, now.” Jeremiah put the blanket around his shoulders. Jeremiah Carver thought of details like that: caring for the world. “I’ve got the afternoon to help out. Whatever you want.”

Cade, feeling prickly and spiky and black-mooded as a sea-urchin, grumbled, “I want to not be snuck up on, thanks.”

“Sorry about that.” And he was. Sincerity in those soft brown eyes, in broad shoulders and strong arms. They’d fallen into bed the night after Marian Bell’s funeral, after Cade had drunk too much local moonshine and run out into pounding rain and stood with his face turned to the sky, shaking with too many emotions. Jeremiah had followed him, had touched his shoulder; Cade had turned and kissed him fiercely, angrily, smothering the storm with fire. Jeremiah had kissed him back, or had let himself be kissed, or perhaps there’d been no difference; he’d come upstairs to Cade’s room readily, and had knelt and been shoved to his back and touched Cade’s body with endearing solemn awe.

Cade did not know what to think about this. Some days he wanted to shove Jeremiah away and run; some days he wanted to lean into that firm chest until he could stand on his own. Some days this emotion felt newer than it should, as if he’d never quite had feelings before, or not these feelings, at least. He avoided dwelling on it.

Unfair and knowing he was being unfair, he muttered, “Don’t do it again.”

“I won’t. I can make noise.” Jeremiah offered him a smile. “I’m having the advanced class read Spense’s Fairy King, like you recommended. They’re liking it. I am too.”

“Mmm,” Cade said, noncommittal; and discovered that he could not precisely meet that gentle schoolteacher’s gaze. Jeremiah organized the island’s one schoolhouse and multiple levels of ability with the tender efficiency of a beloved general, and had ever since taking it over from the now-retired Miss Beatrix, who’d taught them both arithmetic and letters and book-lore.

Cade had loved every drop of story. Had pleaded for more. When that wasn’t sufficient, not enough tales of magic and fairies and faraway lands, had scribbled his own. Had left Gull Skerrie at the age of seventeen, accompanied by a band of traveling musical players and his parents’ best hopes for a life beyond rocks and fish stew, and had not looked back.

Jeremiah Carver had been a year behind him in school, stoic and silent and seemingly etched out of stone: big and calm and deliberate. Cade hadn’t known him well then, not beyond the simple fact of another boy in the school-crowd who’d listened wide-eyed to made-up stories about pirates and sea-treasure and merfolk. Jeremiah, he’d discovered since returning, had begun helping out at the inn several years ago, when Leigh Bell’s hands had first begun to shake and his chest to ache.

“Gwen said you went for a walk,” Jeremiah ventured, hand tugging the blanket more securely around Cade’s shoulders and then resting on the closest one, not quite an embrace. “If you don’t want company I can go.”

“Where would you go?” Cade waved an irritable hand from under woolen conquests. “Stop that. We’re at the most godforsaken spot in the most godforsaken end of the northern earth; where can any of us go? Besides the fishing fleet, I suppose. If you like mackerel.”

“I don’t mind mackerel,” Jeremiah said. “It’s a fish. Your hair looks cold.”

“My hair is wet and full of salt. I know, I know, it’s my own fault, yes I’m coming back, Rhys has probably set the common room on fire by now.” He picked his way up across rocks, with Jeremiah’s help. “How’re your students? Any interesting ones?”

“I like this group,” Jeremiah said. “All of them. There’s a really bright girl in the third class, though. Rosie Conway. You might remember her mother? She’s Elsie Carrock’s daughter. Well, Elsie Conway now. But you knew Elsie, she was your year, she married Peter Conway after you left?”

Cade, who remembered none of this, nodded. Easier.

“And anyway Rosie’s adorable and also some sort of mathematical magician, I think.” Jeremiah’s eyes were pleased and proud, dark and bright as a sea-bird’s, excited about a fisherman’s daughter doing math on a rock. “She’s nearly past what I can teach her. I’m having to keep up. I’m wondering whether it’s worth trying to send her off to the capital for school? Really proper school, I mean.”

“Then you should,” Cade said, half-listening. His fingers brushed the pearl in his pocket, the pearl that’d whispered his own song at him.

“You think so?” Jeremiah paused to glance at him. With longer legs, he’d been shortening his stride; Cade, though generally a fast walker, got easily annoyed at effortlessly tall persons. “It’s awfully far. And the money is, well…”

“If it’s what she needs, then they’ll make it work.”

Jeremiah started to answer, stopped, shook his head. “You’re likely right. After all, it worked for you. Did you find something? A shell, or a bottle, or something?”

“Yes,” Cade said. “It worked for me. And now I’m back. And, no, nothing important. Just a bit of shell. I liked it.”

He did not know why he was lying. He had not meant to, not exactly. The words had become tangled up with aching loneliness and obligation and a lack of letters from anyone he’d thought had been a friend in Londre; with the bulk of The Bell looming into view like a tomb, like his tomb for the past three months; with the kind weight of Jeremiah’s hand slipping into his. The pearl was his, and it had been magical for a single glowing instant, and he did not want to share that or to lose it, to spread the moment thin by giving it away.

“Maybe it’s a poem,” Jeremiah mused. “Seashell and ocean and a person picking it up. Could you like that? A story?”

“I don’t write children’s tales about pirates and buried treasure anymore.” Cade ducked under Jeremiah’s arm as it held the side door open for him. They spilled into the kitchen, sea-damp against heat and potatoes and bacon and salted fish and cream. “I just found it. It doesn’t matter.” In her domain, Gwen beamed at them across a saucepot. She and her husband adored Jeremiah and had been prepared to adore Cade whether he wanted adoration or not. Cade hadn’t told them yet that he planned to sell the inn.

“I didn’t mean I was asking.” Jeremiah touched his cheek, an apology and a request, and then kissed him: still tentative and shy and wondering, as if amazed to be allowed. Cadence Bell, who’d kissed courtiers in silk and velvet, who’d snickered at filthy jokes and scribbled coy references into the next satirical sonnet, now tasted saltwater and warmth and a hint of sweet peppermint; Jeremiah liked them.

He did not know how to be kissed by such honesty. He was unsure whether he liked it, whether he was embarrassed on Jeremiah’s behalf, whether he wanted to laugh or blush or look away. He said, lightly, “Good thing you aren’t. Asking.”

“I’ll go rescue Rhys from the cashbox, then,” Jeremiah promised, and went out to the front room. Laughter and lamplight and travelers bubbled up to greet him: the cacophony of sailing ships, of locals in for a pint of bitter, of merriment over the carved wooden chess set. Rhys, minding the bar and the front door and the copper pieces, said, “Ah, you can figure out change, good, take this—” as the door swung loosely behind him.

Cadence, momentarily at sea in the kitchen, contemplated bread, a knife, a sweet potato. Gwen patted his arm, and said, “Would you like supper up in your room, then? It’s a bit early, but I know you’ll be having things to deal with, the estate and all, and you’ve a letter from Londre, where did I put that, young Billy brought it over…”

Cade snatched paper from flour-dust. Skimmed pages: Felix missed him, wanted help with a new operetta, chattered about the current fashion for short coats coming into vogue, mentioned Queen Lyssa’s newest lover and his profligate spending of the royal purse upon various yachts and boating-races. Cade swam in Court gossip, and shamelessly mentally begged for more.

He had a life. He wasn’t meant for eel pies and rocks on the cliff-edge of nowhere. He mattered.

He wished briefly that Felix had inquired how he felt, before asking for lyrical assistance.

He said, “I’ll have to answer this.”

“Of course you will, ducks.” Gwen loaded down a tray with sharp cheddar, golden honey, bacon sandwiches, and put it into his hands. “Just to tide you over, there’s a good stew for later, go on.” Tea got added to the tray; Cade balanced food and heat and Jeremiah’s ridiculous woolly blanket on his shoulders, and escaped upstairs with only minor wobbling.