Any Man So Daring

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Just when Quicksilver thought his words fell on deaf ears, he saw that Will, standing just behind Proteus, had been riveted by them and now ran, out in the same direction the girl first had run.

  Too late, Quicksilver realized that Will thought the girl, having got them here, would know how to get them out, how to get young Hamnet home safe.

  “Will, stop!” Quicksilver yelled and, momentarily distracted, felt searing pain and terrible coldness upon his shoulder, where Proteus's dagger had entered to the hilt.

  Quicksilver felt his blood rush out, as the blade entered. He felt cold. Cold, as though eternal ice had come into his flesh from the dagger. His love for the mortal brought him ill luck, he thought, his vision blurring.

  Faith, it had almost killed him.

  Oh, curse the luck and mortals and love too, that made Quicksilver such a fool and all of them, all such vulnerable creatures.

  “Curse you,” he said, and, reaching for his shoulder, he pulled out the dagger Proteus had left there.

  Something to his fury, to the madness he felt, must have shown in his eyes, for Proteus stepped back as Quicksilver dropped the dagger onto the sand.

  The magical blood that rushed from Quicksilver’s shoulder, fell onto the sand, and each drop increased the force of the storm. The storm blew and grew around Proteus.

  Proteus screamed, blinded, impotent.

  Quicksilver ran into the forest, or what he hoped was into the forest, following the girl and the human, hoping to find them.

  His thought of giving Proteus the throne seemed sacrilege. How could entrust the hill to such an untrustworthy elf?

  Away from the shore, the wind died down.

  He stepped into the forest, and it was like stepping into another world. Suddenly, there was green calm, and green filtered light, and the moist smell of growing plants all around.

  Above him a canopy of leaves grew entwined. The air felt warm and so moist that sweat ran in rivulets to soak his hair and course down his back.

  He put his hand to his shoulder wound and pressed, willing the blood to stop flowing. Were he in fairyland, it would have stopped instantly.

  But even here, even in the crux, how bad could it be? For was Quicksilver not an elf and of that blessed race which can be killed by nothing save cold iron?

  Yet it seemed to him — and perhaps it was because of his blood loss — that the sounds around him were remote and distant. The rustling of leaves, the howling of the wind on the beach, all of it seemed to recede, as will the sounds of the waking world upon the ears of the sleeper.

  And from this distance, nothing seemed to reach him — nothing.

  Was his vision growing dim, or had a fog sprang up all around him, perhaps in response to the drops of his blood falling on the soft ground underfoot?

  Fallen leaves and the remnants of other seasons’ leaves cushioned his steps and drank, eagerly, of the blood of even royalty. It seemed to him as though, beneath him, a thousand mouths sprang up to drink his magical strength, his power.

  Through the fog, he saw as though a fractured landscape: now the trunk of a tree and now large, luscious leaves reaching out for him with fleshy eagerness.

  The caresses of leaves felt like so many fingers fondling him as he passed.

  He stepped between them and around them, hoping, guessing, imagining that he followed the path the girl and Will had taken.

  Had Will even taken the same path as the girl?

  Oh, fools that they were to have allowed themselves to be trapped in the crux. Fools they were, who, with each step, took themselves deeper into this unpredictable magical land.

  Fools.

  Yet, Will had gone and Quicksilver must go, and make sure no harm came to the human to whom so much harm had already come from fairyland.

  Quicksilver must go and find the child, Will’s son, and restore him to father and family.

  He remembered legends that said that each day in the crux was like a year in the mortal world, and he hoped it wasn’t true.

  Would Will age a year in a day? Or would he find, once he rescued his son, that his son was a man and didn’t recognize him?

  The boy would be in the castle in the center of the crux, the magical point, the nexus of power and magic. Would the effect of the crux be stronger there?

  Would the child age faster?

  Quicksilver shook his head, his mind as fogged as his vision.

  There were no answers to his questions and nothing to do but find the people who had preceded him into this green fog, this confusion of leaves and green light.

  A root made him trip. How weak he was. His vision seemed more fogged, or else, ahead of him, a pink mist rose, all pale and soft.

  He leaned against a tree and felt his shoulder, and he would swear blood had stopped dripping. The soaked fabric didn’t seem to be getting any more wet, nor did the wet patch seem to expand.

  Or perhaps Quicksilver’s sense of touch misgave him as much as his other senses.

  It seemed to him as though, at the edge of his hearing, horses galloped. Horses in the crux? He must be mad.

  He took a gulp of the too-moist air and wished he could find Miranda. If the girl had brought the child, and herself, and Proteus too, to the crux, she must have power of an extraordinary kind, power that would make her a natural ruler of fairyland.

  Happily would he give her the throne--happily, happily hand over the crown of a kingdom that more and more seemed to resemble a family quarrel with ill-defined borders.

  And if she would be kind, then he would go, through the world, like a beggar or a mortal, taking upon him only that much power that would keep him from craving death and feeding on suffering and becoming one of the dark spirits that tormented men.

  Oh, let him go. Let him go and be glad of it.

  He felt cold and his teeth chattered. It seemed to him that his energy was leaving with the blood dripping from his arm.

  He remembered, long ago, a friend dying of a seemingly harmless wound inflicted by an iron weapon.

  But he must find the girl. And then he had to purchase his healing, his freedom and life from her, at whatever dear price.

  He let go the tree and, on unsteady feet, stepped into the pink mist ahead.

  It seemed to him, for just a moment, that amid the obfuscation of fog and diffuse light, a woman moved, or something like a woman.

  There was an impression of a long skirt, a green dress, and graceful, feminine movements.

  “Miranda,” Quicksilver called. “Gentle maiden.”

  But she didn’t answer him.

  Scene Sixteen

  A clearing in the green forest. Miranda sits beneath an overspreading tree, her head in her hands, in the position of a saddened child, or one who doesn’t understand the events around her, and who needs guidance from somewhere or from someone. Into the clearing, Will emerges, running. Miranda gets up, and Will checks his step.

  Miranda sat beneath the tree and sobbed. She’d dropped somewhere in thick of the forest the net that Proteus had acquired at such dear cost to himself.

  She didn’t think she could find it now if she so wished, and she didn’t know if she wished it.

  She couldn’t tell. Her mind held, impressed upon it, the image of Proteus's ungallant behavior, his pressing close an unarmed adversary, his pushing for the blood of one who would gladly have surrendered all to Proteus's claims.

  “Proteus,” she sobbed. “Ah, Proteus. Beautiful tyrant. Fiend angelical. Dove-feathered raven. Wolvish-ravening lamb. Despised substance of divinest show. Just opposite to what you justly seemed. A damned saint, an honorable villain. Oh, nature. What had you to do in hell when you did bower the spirit of a fiend in almost immortal paradise of such sweet flesh?”

  And yet, was this right? For perhaps Proteus had held back, perhaps Proteus didn’t take the offered throne and power and magic and all for he knew it not to be offered in earnest.

  Perhaps he knew the only way to stop Quicksilver was to murd
er the king.

  And yet -- how did she know the king was evil? How, but that Proteus had told her?

  And how did she know Proteus was right, but that he was lovely?

  And yet, wasn’t there more to it? Proteus loved her. She’d known Proteus long.

  Proteus said Quicksilver was a villain and Proteus was an honorable elf.

  “Blistered be my tongue for my words. He was not born to shame. Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit. Proteus is perfect and his brow is a throne where honor may be crowned sole monarch of universal earth. Oh, what a beast was I to chide him.”

  Some small sound called her attention, and looking up she saw the other creature, the creature that wasn’t an elf.

  His coarse face was fixed in some anxiety, his skin gone the color of tallow candles.

  How could Quicksilver love such a one? Did he truly?

  He did if Proteus didn’t lie, and Miranda had decided that Proteus told truth. But then Quicksilver was mad. Not a villain so much as turned from his wits.

  For how could elf, perfect and true, love this creature where already, the signs of death showed in the shedding hair, the drying skin, the dull eyes?

  The creature stood, feet together, and stared at Miranda as a petitioner who would speak but is afraid.

  He cleared his throat and doffed his cap and bowed his head, then looked up, his eye just spying to see whether she noticed his deference.

  She grew impatient with it all. No one had ever showed her this deference except Caliban, and even Caliban had never been this obsequious.

  She stood in a leap and wiped her tears with her hand, while her other hand attempted to smooth her hair. She wondered if she looked at all as a princess should look to this creature.

  But what did this creature know of princesses? “Speak,” she said, and heard her own voice crack and willed it to great decision as she ordered again, “Speak, mortal. Who are you? And what want you with me?”

  Again the man looked up without straightening his head, which remained bowed. “Milady, my name is Will Shakespeare, and I believe you know who I am right enough. Or at least I knew you in that dim and distant infancy no man remembers, and perhaps no elf. To speak plain, I knew you when you were but a baby.”

  “A baby?”

  He looked up now fully and some memory softened his gaze, as his lips tugged upward into an almost-smile. “Aye, a babe you were, but months old, when my wife was kidnapped by your--” Will stopped, afraid that any mention of her father would raise her filial feeling, and with it perhaps some resentment or fear that would make her run. “My wife was kidnapped by fairyland, to be your nursemaid. My daughter, Susannah, who is much your age, was taken with her and, for a time, the two of you slept side by side in a single crib.”

  Miranda stared at the man in disbelief. His wife? A coarse, mortal woman had been her nurse?

  How could this be?

  It was as if she’d had a whole other life of which she remembered nothing.

  “Your wife?” she asked. “She was my nursemaid?” It had to be a lie. She shook her head.

  “My wife, Nan,” Will said.

  She frowned. How could it be that all these people knew her? Proteus and Quicksilver and now this mortal? They all knew her, but she knew nothing of them, nor could she guess whom to trust.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. She spoke as a child speaks of a lost toy.

  The mortal smiled, a smile at the edge of laughter.

  What was so amusing about Miranda’s lack of memory? Why did it please him? She stared at him out of the corner of her eye. Was he lying to her?

  “You wouldn’t remember,” he said. “For it was but a week that Nan was your nursemaid, and that so long ago that you were but a little fool. Yet you were the prettiest babe I ever saw.”

  “I was?” she asked, and almost smiled at this because, for once, this accorded with what Proteus had told her -- that she was the most beautiful, the most royal of all elves. “I was? But why did your wife leave, then?” For if she were that pretty, wouldn’t mortals have been in her thrall? She straightened her hair with her hand.

  “Your...,” Will hesitated. “She was taken against her will,” he said, "and she pined for me and for our home, and thus, with the help of Quicksilver, your...your uncle, I rescued her.”

  “Quicksilver?” she asked. “My uncle? He helped you? Was that when he had my father killed and, treacherously, usurped his throne?”

  She had never thought the confirmation of such a truth would come to her in this strange place.

  But the mortal didn’t seem to think she was telling the truth. He started as though slapped, and shook his head.

  “Your father was not killed by Quicksilver,” he said. “Nor did your uncle take the throne unlawfully. He was the true heir, you see, by law and custom of fairy land.”

  Miranda blinked. Quicksilver the true heir? No. No. This did not accord with what Proteus had told her. “Was Quicksilver the younger?” she asked. “For among us it is the contrary to the laws of mankind. It is the youngest or the woman that inherits. Only the youngest or the woman.”

  The mortal nodded. “Yes, Quicksilver is younger than your father was, younger by thousands of years.”

  “Oh,” Miranda said. “But then....” She shook her head. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. “But then my uncle was always the rightful heir, the rightful king. But then my father must--” she stopped, and her mouth dropped open. No. The mortal had to be confused.

  Slowly, she raised her gaze to meet his. She felt as though around her the whole world were crumbling, facts and certainties come crashing down.

  For if the mortal were right, then Proteus was a villain, seeking to turn her against her uncle, the rightful king of fairyland.

  But if that were true, then was all of reality subverted. Fair was foul and foul was fair and everything was that which it wasn’t.

  And the mortal, so ugly, was good, and Proteus, so beautiful, was evil, and the world had turned so far from the course of legends that Miranda, deceived, would never find her way.

  “Milady,” the mortal said, and looked scared. “Milady? Are you stricken?”

  “Aye,” she heard her own voice. “Aye, I am stricken. I am sped. Who can help me? For I’m lost in a fog with no direction. Proteus looks like an angel. Can he be other? Proteus told me that my father was right and noble and honorable. He told me I was a princess of fairyland, daughter of the just the true king of fairyland. He told me my uncle was a tyrant who had held the throne by evil and over the bodies of those he subjugated.”

  She advanced towards the mortal, like a blind woman seeking sight. “You must tell me the truth, kind stranger. You must tell me what the truth is, how my father came to die, and how I came to grow up with the Hunter, the dread avatar of vengeance, the very body of final justice for both men and elves.”

  She felt magic crackling around her as she spoke, magic empowering her words, so that her command to the mortal was a compelling spell.

  The magic crackled and shone around her, tendrils forming and reaching out for the mortal.

  His eyes bugged out. He opened his mouth as though to scream, and took a step back, as if he’d bolt.

  But he moved not. “My lady,” he said, his voice small and strangled. “My kind lady.” He stepped back from her crackling power, her radiating force. His eyes looked as if he’d rather run, but couldn’t.

  “Speak,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

  Sweat dripped from the creature’s forehead. “Find another to tell you, for I cannot.”

  She shook her head. “What other? My uncle? But Proteus says my uncle is a villain. But then if my uncle isn’t a villain, Proteus lies.” She felt tears fall down her cheeks, hot and scalding, and her voice come plaintive from her throat. “You must tell me the truth and tell me right, of who my father was and how I came by this weird life, being the adopted daughter of the Hunter.”

  “Your father...aye,
Lady, your father was a villain or misguided, so possessed by his ambition, so overruled by his need for power that he’d killed his parents to inherit.”

  “His parents?”

  “Titania and Oberon they were called and, with a charmed knife he had them stabbed.” The mortal bit his lip, and his eyes darted sideways, as though his lips wished to say more but he prevented them.

  The girl stopped on her tracks and said, “Oh.”

  More tears rolled down her face, and she felt as though the world spun around her, as though were she the earth encircled by the sun. “Oh. Did the Hunter then take my father? Is my father one of the dread dogs with whom I grew up in ignorance?”

  She thought of the dark, slavering creatures who jumped and fought and slept on the floor of the Hunter, ignored by him save for the occasional kick, the occasional summons.

  They smelled and looked vile, and felt strange and cold to the touch. Miranda had avoided them as much as she could. Now she ran their low muzzles, their terrible fanged mouths, through her memory, trying to think which of them might hold the soul of her father: dark Malice, cold Unkindness, dread Envy.

  Their muzzles looked all the same to her, as did their narrowed, glittering red eyes.

  And she was descended from such a one?

  The mortal shook his head. “No, lady. It is true the Hunter took your father as one of his dogs when the tangled skein of his treasons unraveled for all to see. It is true he took him and that your father, heartless villain that he was, in his last moment of freedom, took you with him into that dread captivity.

  “Innocent and pure that you were, Quicksilver told us you could not become one of the dogs, nor be seduced by the evil that surrounded you. You must be raised in inviolate kindness, in some distant castle, untouched by man or elf, until you reached your maturity, when the kiss and true love of a true prince might release you. This Quicksilver told us was the legend and lore of fairykind....”