The voice was not a voice, but a thought, whispered close into the ventricle of Quicksilver’s brain. But that thought was Sylvanus’s. The voice of a scared elf.
It echoed a voice Quicksilver remembered from when Sylvanus had been but a young prince and faced with the monumental sky-cracking rages of their father, Oberon.
And though Quicksilver knew that his brother had done more than enough to deserve this fate, though he knew Sylvanus’s crimes mounted to the sky and raised bloody hands to the heavens, craving the gods’ revenge, yet in his heart Quicksilver pitied the vile thing.
Sylvanus had once reigned in Fairyland.
Now Quicksilver was the king of elves.
In vain he told himself that a king must be impervious to the hurts and lacerations of his subjects.
Yet if Sylvanus was his subject, then couldn’t Quicksilver decide to stop Sylvanus’s punishment?
Ten years, Sylvanus had endured near the heart and center of a vengeful force, his elven body consumed away, his elven nature distorted. Was that not enough?
Behind Quicksilver, Malachite withdrew his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry, milord. I—”
Raising his hand, Quicksilver spoke, his voice small against the gathering thunder, the baying of the dogs that clustered around their master, Sylvanus’s whimpers of desolate pain.
“Stop, Great One,” Quicksilver said. “Stop, I beg you.”
The Hunter turned to Quicksilver a face that looked almost human or elven, save that no human, no elf, could even envision the perfection of the Hunter’s noble look, from curly dark hair to chiseled features. As he turned, the Hunter exposed his chest where—in the place a human heart would lodge—an empty darkness, an absence of all, reigned.
“You beg?” the Hunter asked. Laughter poured out, as cold as ice, as chilled as winter fog. “You beg me to stop? Who are you to beg and to demand how I should punish this cur, and when I should stay?”
“But justice—” Quicksilver said.
Again the Hunter laughed. “Justice is a word you don’t understand, oh king, who judge everyone according to your changeable measure. This is true evil, and this I will punish.”
The Hunter’s arm rose. Upon it something crackled, a whip of light, a cord of lightning.
He raised it and let it fall upon Sylvanus’s canine form.
Sylvanus howled and fell, bleeding again, yet rose again as the Hunter called, “Come.”
Quicksilver could not endure it.
He could neither watch it nor turn away. His heart pounding, his blood raging through his head like a fever, he raised his hand.
“No,” the Hunter yelled. “No. Give way. I’ll take what’s mine.”
Sylvanus, the dog, whimpered, belly to the dirt.
Before Quicksilver knew it, he lifted his hand. He summoned to him his magic and the gathered strength of his hill, that gathering of elven souls and bodies and magic over which Quicksilver reigned, his to command. He aimed a bolt of destruction at the Hunter’s feet and threw it and felt the burn of power leave his hand.
The power of the hill, in a form like the thunderbolt, flew from his open palm.
Quicksilver meant only to let the ball of fire land between Sylvanus and the Hunter, and thus call the Hunter’s attention and give his brother respite.
But as the fire crackled, bright, from his hand, it flew past the dog and the dog, somehow, reached out a hand that looked like Sylvanus’s and caught the fire and spun it off again—toward the thatched roofs of Stratford.
Fairy lights burned in the mortal night, a trail of power splitting the mundane peace of mortal repose.
Fire hit the roofs of the nearby houses.
The thatch blazed.
Dogs howled, men screamed, babies cried.
“Milord,” Malachite whispered.
“Stop,” the Hunter yelled. “Stop.”
Quicksilver took a deep breath, tainted with the smoke from the burning houses. One breath to realize he was alive.
Another breath as the smoke grew worse.
Another breath and Quicksilver saw Sylvanus writhe to human shape and grow and smile, a smile of satisfaction such as babes show after milk and men after love.
“He’s feeding on the deaths,” the Hunter yelled. “He’s feeding on the life force of dead mortals. From me he learned that, but I refrain unless the life comes from evildoers.”
Sylvanus’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed in satisfaction, his small, pulpy lips widened in a broader smile, and he waved a hand that looked more solid than before, in the direction of the fire that spread, from roof to roof and from thatch to thatch, like vermin that jump from one body to the other and consume all.
“Thank you, brother. Thank you. I would have lived my whole life as the Hunter’s dog, but for you. By setting this fire have you given me lives that, in the manner of the Hunter, I can collect to grow my own, and increase my force.”
As Sylvanus twisted and writhed in his obscene pleasure, he grew. The dark mist around him overspread, darker and darker, like a killing frost, its tendrils reaching out to the burning houses and by them growing in strength and force, like a dark octopus that grows and spreads over the floor of a blighted sea.
There was plague in that wicked mist, Quicksilver thought, the pestilent touch and evil humor of illness.
And other things, other dark things that would bring death to most and feed Sylvanus’s swollen appetite.
What was this creature Sylvanus was becoming? What powers would it have?
Never in the collective memory of Fairyland had something like this happened.
Never had an elf been king and slave to the Hunter and then . . . what?
Quicksilver broke into a sweat of shame and fear.
Never had a king been so weak as to help free his mortal enemy.
Quicksilver wished he could hide, wished he could crawl away in shame.
Screams echoed from everywhere in Stratford. Women and children and men woke to find themselves engulfed in flame.
Some ran out of the houses, flaming like living torches, to burn and die on the street. Others ran here and there, with buckets of water, throwing these at the flames, which mockingly grew despite all.
Quicksilver, unable to breathe, unable to think, looking at his brother grow in power, looking at Stratford being consumed, sank to his knees and screamed, “What have I done?”
“No time for that, no time,” Malachite said. “No time for that, milord. These your vassals await orders. Should we not fight the fire?” He gestured to the elven youths who stood behind Quicksilver and waited.
“Listen to him, listen, brother,” Sylvanus said before Malachite was even fully done. His words echoed of amusement and mockery. “Listen to him, for he’s a man, his wit greater than your womanly wiles.”
Quicksilver wanted to scream, he wanted to rage. He wished he could throw fire again, this time the fire that consumed his heart and burned his soul. But instead he nodded to Malachite and said, “Aye. Go. Help them.”
Aware of what he must look like to the young people he commanded, he stood up and, trembling, tried to brush the knees of his breeches.
Sylvanus’s power still grew and Quicksilver must do something.
Steeling himself, knowing he gazed on his own death, knowing nothing would come of this but his own destruction, he stepped forward.
The Hunter stepped forward also, in giant steps, approaching Sylvanus. “There will be an end to this, cur,” the Hunter said. “You cannot thus break your bond.”
Once more, Sylvanus changed, as if the sound compelled him, his well-formed humanlike form compacting and shrinking into the shape of a square-headed, squat dog.
Only the dog was bigger than he’d ever been, almost as big as a dog as he’d been as a man.
The Hunter looked puzzled for a moment, then his voice sounded so loud that it seemed to make both earth and sky tremble, and almost obscured the screams of the dying humans. “Come to heel, you creature.�
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He advanced on Sylvanus, like a displeased master calling his puppy. “What? You dare defy me?”
Sylvanus hunkered down and showed his glowing teeth as the Hunter approached.
Suddenly, Sylvanus leapt. His glowing teeth pierced the darkness of the Hunter’s arm.
The Hunter screamed, a sound such as had never been heard before. Reality wavered and turned and reeled, like a windblown paper dancing in the whirlwind that announces a storm. What light there was, amid the smoke of the fires and the darkness of the Hunter and his dogs, seemed to waver also, the very moon growing pale as if in distress.
Drops of glowing blood fell to the earth, withering and blighting the very weeds it touched.
Around them, as if this were a contagion-infested breath, Quicksilver could feel crops withering and dying in the fields.
Time was out of joint and the mechanisms of the world jangled off-key.
The dog charged again, this time sinking its teeth into the Hunter’s leg. He pulled, seeking to bring the Hunter down.
The Hunter wrenched away and turned, his misty shape looking sickly green where it had been pitch black and alive before. “This is your fault, oh Quicksilver, king of elves. And I will come for you in judgment,” the Hunter screamed.
With his scream he vanished, like a fog upon the air. With him vanished his waiting horse, and the pack of his cowering dogs.
“My first victory is won,” Sylvanus crowed, his voice changing from a low growl to a smooth human voice as he shifted and unfolded into his elven form once more. “Now for the others.”
Quicksilver realized he was covered in a sweat of fear, as he hadn’t been in many a year, not since acquiring the rule of Fairyland and all the power that came with it.
Trembling, he watched as Sylvanus grew and seemingly called to him every tendril of darkness that touched on every one of the burned houses. He changed and shifted to a dark miasma and transported himself somewhere.
To London. Quicksilver felt it both as a word and an image impressed upon his fevered brain. Sylvanus had gone to London, the largest city in the land. It wasn’t so much knowledge but a deeper certainty, born of blood, of sinew, of Elvenland magic.
Sylvanus had transported to London, capital of this human realm whose boundaries overlapped sacred, elven Avalon—like two pages in a book will share a leaf, each taking up a different face, the two touching but never mingling.
What would Sylvanus want with London? What would he do there?
Quicksilver looked at the charred ruin around him, heard the lamentations of those who’d lost loved ones, and trembled.
What would Sylvanus not do there, in that London of packed multitudes?
More than half of Stratford had burned. Only a few houses stood amid the destruction caused by magical fire. Quicksilver’s magical fire.
Where the town had been silent, now it echoed the screams of widows and the inconsolable cries of orphans.
And all because of Quicksilver.
The Hunter said he would come for him. Come for Quicksilver he would, doubtless, as soon as the Hunter had recovered.
If the Hunter recovered. Quicksilver shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling small and young and foolish. Oh, curse the day he’d become king, he who was so naive, so dumb, so frail, so divided.
What if the Hunter didn’t recover? Quicksilver would willingly suffer any punishment to be assured of the Hunter’s recovery.
For what would happen if the Hunter did not recover? What would become of the workings of the world?
Quicksilver hadn’t even known that such creatures as the Hunter could be hurt. He’d never suspected it. And now the Hunter was injured. With the Hunter’s scream of pain something seemed to have changed about the very nature of reality, the truths that held everything in its place.
He watched through the smoke his elves, like unseen angels, smothering the last magical fires.
What did it matter, this belated charity? The damage was done.
Done through Quicksilver’s hand.
Quicksilver had set the fire, and Sylvanus had fed upon it.
Distracted, Quicksilver stared at the house closest to the forest, the double wattle-and-daub house of the Shakespeares. It still stood, undamaged.
Will’s wife, Nan, had organized her in-laws and her own three children—the older girl, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to carry buckets of water from the river and thus soak all before flame ever touched it.
Quicksilver thought of Will, who was in London. Once upon a time, the Lady Silver, Quicksilver’s female aspect, had loved Will with all-consuming passion.
Even now, thinking of that young man with the golden falconlike eyes made Quicksilver’s heart quiver.
Will was in London. Quicksilver remembered hearing elven gossip from one of Ariel’s maids, Peaseblossom, who’d seduced a mortal youth.
Will was in London and Sylvanus had gone there.
Quicksilver realized he was trembling again.
He must go to London and stop Sylvanus. He must keep the evil creature from wreaking havoc upon the unprepared humans.
Quicksilver must, if nothing else, keep Sylvanus from hurting Will.
And Quicksilver should stop Sylvanus, rein him in, atone for his crime against Stratford by keeping Sylvanus from destroying London.
He, Quicksilver, was the king of elves, and responsible for all other elves, even those who had ceased to be of elvenkind.
It fell to him to protect London from Sylvanus.
“Malachite,” he called, and his friend approached. “Go to your mistress. Tell her I’ve gone to London, and whatever you do, do not disclose this sad fray here. No reason she should fear.”
No reason fair Ariel, who loved Quicksilver enough to imagine him a good king, should know that he had brought doom on innocent humans and loosed plague and danger upon both fairy and mortal.
Scene 5
A road running along the Thames River. On the other side of the river, the impressive mansions of the nobility line up in impressive display, their stone facades vying to outdo each other in grandeur and architectural ornament. On the nearer side, only a few houses, hovels, and decaying warehouses cluster. Amid them, a small shop remains open, a lantern burning over the sign that advertises used clothes for resale. Will Shakespeare enters the shop, where clothes hang from the ceiling and lie in neat piles upon the two tables that take up most of the scant interior space. An old man sits at the back, by a small table at which a wavering oil lamp burns. Two other, younger men argue with him.
“Not worth three pennies.” The old man turned a dark red velvet doublet over and over in his dried-up clawlike hands. He squinted at the fabric and squeezed his lips together, multiplying the wrinkles on his already wrinkled face.
“I need five pennies, please, master,” a tall man in his twenties, obviously the owner of the doublet, said. “I must have five pennies to pay my gaming debt.”
“Three pennies,” the man said. “And I’m being too generous. I’ll ruin myself this way.”
He waved the tall man aside, saying, “Think it over.”
The blond youth, no more than sixteen or so, pushed a folded dark suit at the man.
The boy looked scared and his anxiety mounted as the old man picked at seams, and turned sleeves, and made smacking sounds with his mouth.
Will Shakespeare held on tightly to his best suit, of much-washed black velvet, and waited his turn.
His suit had been new ten years ago when he’d married Nan. It was not, Will knew, nearly as well made as the tall man’s wine-colored doublet.
And yet Will had to have ten pence for the suit.
It wouldn’t pay Will’s rent, but it would—if he husbanded it right—feed Will through the days it would take him to walk home.
But what were his chances of getting that much when the much-better doublet was held so cheap?
Will watched the old man purse his lips with finality and look at th
e young man. “Poor quality,” he told the boy. “Poor quality. I don’t think I can—”
On those words he checked and arrested.
The young man had started quivering, like a leaf upon a tree in high wind.
He stumbled, gave a strangled cry, and fell toward Will.
“What’s this, what’s this?” the shopkeeper said.
To save himself from being toppled, Will dropped his suit and put his hands out, easing the tall, thick-boned youth onto the beaten-dirt floor of the shop.
“He’ll be drunk,” the tall man said. “Drunk or hungry. It’s hard days in the country and many young bucks come to town searching for work and food. As if we had it to give.”
Will shook his head. He’d come to town in search of work, but no one would call him a young buck.
He knelt beside the young man on the floor. He looked like a farmhand and he smelled neither of ale or wine. Will lay his hand on the youth’s forehead, as he would have on Hamnet’s, back in Stratford. It was hot enough to feel burning to the touch.
“He’s ill,” Will said. He fumbled with the man’s shirt, trying to open it, to give him air.
But as Will pulled, the worn-through shirt ripped, exposing the man’s underarm, and the huge, pulsing growth beneath it.
“Jesu,” the seller said. He got up and bent over the youth, staring at the growth. “Jesu. It’s the plague.” The old man’s lips quivered. His hand went to his forehead, tracing the papist sign of the cross in atavistic exorcism. “My shop will be closed now. What will become of my grandchildren?”
“How long have you been ill, good man?” Will asked. He wanted to ask where the man had been, where he might have contracted this illness, whether in London or the countryside.
For a moment he thought the man was too far gone to answer. His pale blue country-boy eyes looked at Will uncomprehending.
But then he cleared his throat and coughed, and whispered, “Faith, I’ve not been ill. It was just now, this pain . . . . I’ve not been ill. Tell my mother—” He stopped, and coughed again, and his body convulsed, in a long shudder. “Mother,” he said and he was still.
Will saw that breath didn’t rise in the broad chest.
All Night Awake Page 5