“One more chance, Will, one more chance,” the voice that was no voice spoke in Will’s mind. “One more chance to grasp at your desire. But take me to your heart, good Will, and I will give you those winged words you long for.”
The smell and taste of graveyard clay came with the voice, and the rank odor of this, the worm’s final banquet, penetrated Will’s skin and mouth, stopped his nostrils, put a dampening effect on the other sounds his ears perceived: the rustling of the trees overhead, the clinking of glasses and soft laughter from within the house.
Will took a deep, shuddering breath.
He’d been wrong, after all, and how many times need he prove himself wrong? He’d not give all for a gift of words. Even he didn’t crave poetry all that much. No. Will would succeed himself, of himself, or not at all.
“No,” he spoke, sure that what he saw was no more than hallucination. “No. Not were you as fair as the angels and as good. I’ll do it on my own or not at all.”
“Oh, but it would be on your own. You and I would be one, linked forever. A touch of magic, a wish of faerieland upon your mortal bones, making you more than you will ever be,” the shape spoke out of a darker shadow within woods.
But the odor and feel of the thing were rank and gross and the thought of being one with this corruption brought bitter bile to Will’s throat. He shook his head, and in shaking it he ran, down the drive, all the way to where the carriage was letting out a passel of guests. Forgetting himself, Will ran past the guests, and all the way up the staircase, only to meet with a handsome valet in blue livery, who bowed slightly to him and said, “Sir?”
“I am no Sir,” he said, out of breath. “I am no Sir. Just Will. Will Shakespeare. A player. I would wish to be a play maker, and my friend Richard Fielding has spoken for me to his Lordship the earl and -- ”
“Ah, Shakespeare,” a voice spoke from the dazzle of light that was the interior of the vast salon into which the door opened. A figure walked from that dazzle of light that so confused Will’s dark-adapted eyes that he could not tell details nor size of the salon, nor even how many people attended -- nothing, really, save that it was brightly lit.
For a moment, still half-blinded, Will thought it was Quicksilver.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized that what he saw was actually a human, younger and, perforce, less perfect than the lord of faerieland. And yet, in his features, and in the blond hair carefully combed over his left shoulder, he resembled Quicksilver entire.
It was this resemblance, disquieting but familiar and soothing at once, that reminded Will he had, once before, faced royalty without trembling.
That certainty steadied his voice when, moments later, the earl said, “Recite us some of your poetry, good Shakespeare.”
Unable to think of anything, unable to remember any of his carefully polished poems he had labored over and crafted for months on end, Will was for a moment mute.
Then he thought of what Marlowe had said about a tragic fate and mythical lovers, and thought of people loved by the gods. Out of all this, lines appeared, plucked entire from his frantic, panicked mind.
He heard himself say with unwonted assurance, “I have but a few lines of a poem I’ve been working on, your Lordship.... Thinking of making it a gift to you, if you should like it.” He cleared his throat and his voice swelled and for a moment he wondered if the words he used were truly his or if somehow he had accepted the foul bargain of the creature outside, without meaning to. It was so strange for him to speak like this, poetry pouring from his lips, unthought. “Even as the sun, with purple-colored face, had taken his last leave of the weeping morn, rose cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved but love he laughed to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, and like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him.”
Then the words swept even him along, and he could do no more than follow with his mind, as his lips spoke on, and the entire audience listened in silence that, for once, betrayed no amusement and no scorn, “Stain to all the nymphs, more lovely than a man; more white and red than doves or roses are....”
Nothing mattered, except the words.
Scene Thirteen
The throne room, in the faerie palace. Ariel sits on the throne. With the other, vacant throne by her side, she looks scared and small, like a child wearing adult clothes, or sitting in furniture too large for her frame. She faces the centaurs. On either side of the throne, the fine Lords, the delicate ladies of faerieland stand, dressed in their finery.
There was something rotten in faerieland.
Ariel could feel it, palpable, harsh, within the throne room. A tension of expectancy or dread knit the elven gentlemen in groups and made the fans of the elven ladies move as fast as dragon fly wings, while the ladies’ mouths, no doubt, moved the same way behind those agitated plumes and painted cloth.
Yet, Ariel had no idea what was causing the tension, and felt her back stiffen against the unknown. Her shoulders ached, as if her fine mantle and her crown weighed of a sudden much more than they’d ever done.
She glanced at the empty throne beside her. Odd how she missed Quicksilver; his presence, his support.
She’d always thought she could take on his job, unaided. But now she missed having him to lean upon. And, thinking that, she almost smiled, for who was Quicksilver that she should lean upon him? She might as well lean upon flowing water, rest her hope on the inconstant stream.
Hylas, the head of the centaur delegation, advanced to the center of the room, and stood on the red carpet that led to the throne, awaiting Ariel’s notice.
Today he displayed hammered gold bracelets and a heavy sort of pectoral. As always, Malachite stood beside the centaur, his hand upon his sword handle, as if fearing the centaur would try to overpower Malachite’s sovereign.
Ariel wanted to give her attention to what the centaur said, but she felt her head swim.
Even from here, she could swear she smelled Hylas’ heavy, animal stench.
For a moment her sight dimmed and she glimpsed the dark wolf creature darting amid the silk skirts of the elven ladies and the well-trimmed velvet breeches of the elven lords.
“Milady, are you well?” Malachite, stepped up the throne steps, extending a hand towards Ariel’s harm. “Lady?”
Ariel nodded, though even Malachite swam on and off focus, and her vision dimmed and put spots where it shouldn’t. For the barest of moments Malachite seemed to have a wolf’s head, like that Egyptian god it was, long ago, who’d devoured the souls of the unrighteous dead.
“I am well,” she said. “Passing well. My majesty would hear the delegate Hylas again.”
“What I said is simple,” said the centaur. “And what I told your husband I will say to you.” He smiled at her, an animal smile, all glimmering teeth and harsh stare. “It is simple as a simple, which, as you know is the name for a remedy brewed of herbs and such, which can cure illness. To cure the illness of the land, milady, you must give Centuria to the centaurs.”
“But the land you speak of is not Centuria,” Ariel said, expounding in the same way she wished her husband had, the night before. But where Quicksilver could make anything sound plausible, Ariel’s voice came out small, tiny, appearing to turn on and off, like her sight. “Before ever the centaurs came there, there were the pixies, and the dwarves, and others who lived on that land.”
The centaur grinned. “Why should your strong majesty care for such weak races?” His smile tried to draw a parallel between himself and Ariel -- both strong, capable beings.
It made Ariel’s nausea worse to think about it. Had she, then, been such an arrogant creature that this thing should think them alike?
Hylas went on, mercilessly. “Those races were nothing and they’ve folded before our onslaught like grass bending before a strong wind.”
Her strong majesty. Ariel clasped both hands on the harms of her throne. She’d thought herself strong, and Quicksilver a weak and foolish man, but sitting in her throne,
next to his empty one, the power and decision resting with her, she wasn’t so sure.
Her impulse was to stop Hylas’ insolence, to send him flying hence, to send the faerie armies after the centaurs.
But would the faerie armies go if she sent them?
She looked at Malachite out of the corner of her eye. She could now see his face clearly, but she couldn’t see any warlike intent in his features, except sort of a peaked excitement, a narrow-eyed intentness.
Did Quicksilver do this? Did he thus observe Malachite and thus weigh, the eagerness of his commander for the battle field? Did Quicksilver likewise decide even Malachite, for all his words, wasn’t eager enough? And if the commander wasn’t eager, then who would be?
Who wanted to fight amid foreign marshes an enemy that vanished like fog on a sunny day, only to reappear again when the night fell?
She looked at Hylas’s insolent smile that displayed his golden teeth in glittering glory.
A superior people, he had said. She had heard the centaurs had haunted pixies down, and carried them, speared on the tip of their lances, and roasted them over big open fires.
The image made Ariel’s stomach tighten, while her vision yet remained dark.
“It is all well,” she said. “But my majesty will have to deliberate upon your request, before we can answer.” Even to her own ears, she sounded like Quicksilver.
She heard the disapproval from her people, their murmurs.
Was it her impression, or had she heard Sylvanus’s name pronounced by the crowd?
She tried to discern the faces of the assembly, but she couldn’t. Was it terror that was making her so faint? Terror of what? What evil loomed before her, that she could not see?
“Milady,” a male voice said, close at hand. “Milady.”
She blinked and took deep breaths, and forced herself to focus, until she saw someone else standing before her, so close that one more step would take him onto the stair to the throne.
It was a young elf, blond and slight and, like Malachite, displaying that want of total perfection that marked him for a changeling.
He was Malachite’s second in command. All of Malachite’s underlings were changelings. Ariel struggled for this one’s name. Aconite. Ariel remembered hearing Quicksilver refer to him as nimble of tongue and adept at gathering information. He was, to the faerie realm, what an intelligencer was to the mortal Queen.
Ariel brought her sight to bear on Aconite, and attempted to smile. “Yes?” she said. Perhaps this creature could explain her humors so at variance with her normal frame of mind.
Aconite had very straight, thin hair, which fell in front of his face as he bowed, and he had to pull it back as he straightened. His formal livery, green, edged with silver lace at the neck and sleeves, ornamented with broad stripes of silver down each of the arms and the legs, and belted with a heavy gilded expanse of silk was the same livery of all of Quicksilver’s servants, yet somehow, he managed to give it an impression of somberness. How, Ariel couldn’t tell.
“Milady, we know the lord left last night, and we know he told you it was upon state business. But we believe your majesty ought to be acquainted with.... There are facts your majesty should know. You are our Queen, and you should know the truth.”
Aconite looked very nervous. His eyes darted here and there, and he licked his lips with a quick, nervous tongue.
Ariel raised her eyebrows at him. Facts she should know? Was this creature attempting to intrigue between her and Quicksilver?
Oh, and why not, if sentiment against Quicksilver ran so high among the hill as it seemed to?
“If I might,” the youth said. “I would like to have your majesty’s ear in private.”
And yet, if intrigue were made, would it not be better it were made in the full light of day? Ariel glanced at the empty throne by her side, and sighed.
As uncertain as she felt of her own thoughts, she wasn’t sure she should trust her judgment upon anything. Whatever this creature had to say, would it sway a crowd as it might sway her? And if it did, would it not be better to know it had swayed the court also? Would she not feel less like a traitor then?
Feeling enough like a traitor now, because part of her wished this creature would say something damning enough to make her stop longing for Quicksilver’s return, she said, “There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t speak in front of my people.”
Aconite hesitated. He looked towards Malachite, and a look full of meaning passed between them.
Holla, what was then here?
Ariel leaned forward. She forgot her fear, her mind wholly taken up with curiosity. What did these machinations mean? Had she been right in suspecting that private ill against Quicksilver moved here?
But.... Ill against Quicksilver from Malachite? Malachite, who was Quicksilver’s milk brother, his most faithful servant?
Ariel shook her head. “Speak here and now, or not at all.”
Aconite pulled his hair back, and looked at Malachite again, and colored, a deep, dark coral. He frowned. “Milady, if I might just give you....”
He advanced boldly, walked up the throne steps before she could stop him.
Ariel recoiled from his extended hand, before she realized that what he held out on the palm of his hand was a drop of water -- one of those dew drops that faerie kind had used, from time immemorial, to record images upon.
He dropped it into the hand that she extended for it.
At the touch of her hand, the drop of water grew in size and clarity, and displayed a shabby bedroom, and Lady Silver, disporting herself with a red-headed mortal.
Scene Fourteen
Will’s bedroom, late at night. The candle stands on the writing table, half consumed. The bed lies in some disarray, the cheap blanket thrown to the floor, the covers rumpled. Kit’s clothes lie scattered around the dusty wooden floor. Kit himself sits on the bed, looking dazed and lost, like a man who’s endured a blow to the head and hasn’t fully recovered. In his male aspect, fully dressed, his hair perfectly coiffed down his left shoulder, Quicksilver paces the room. The moon, circled with red, sends her light through the window, adding as if a blood tinged cast to the scene.
“Come and lie down,” Kit said. “Why did you change aspect, even as slept for no more than a moment? I can’t have closed my eyes for longer than a gathered breath. What can have disturbed you so in such a short while?” He looked with uncomprehending eyes at the elf and blinked.
“Come and be sweet, come and be mine, come and be Silver again. Come and lie down.” And with what enticement he could muster, Kit patted the rumpled bed beside him.
But Quicksilver only cast him a vague glance, as if in that space it had taken Kit to close his eyes and open them again, Quicksilver had forgotten Kit’s name and visage and the joy of their erstwhile embraces.
How he frowned, and how his countenance changed, moment by moment, like a motley moon.
Staring at him, Kit couldn’t help thinking that the change between male and female was a small thing and this changeableness, from smile to frown, from hesitant hope to utter despair, from love to scorn, the greater change.
Nor could Kit, despite his wishing to hold on to what had just happened and the recent memory of his kind welcome by the elf, help but remember the last time he’d been dismissed by this creature, and in what manner.
He stared, and waited for the ax to fall and hoped it mightn’t, and craved yet more of what had failed to evoke satiety however greatly enjoyed.
“Quicksilver?” he said, at long last. Not a call, so much as plaintive questioning.
The elf stopped. Red moonlight bronzing his golden air, he stopped. He turned to face Kit, but what he said were not so much words as something that sounded like the fragment of some lost poetry. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, ‘tis lust in action.”
Kit shivered. Sweat cooled fast upon his body. He reached for the blanket that he and Silver had tossed to the floor in their exertions,
and pulled it over himself. Caught on the edge of the bed, it would only come up at an odd angle, covering Kit’s legs and little more. Not enough to stop the chill that climbed up his body, as he looked at Quicksilver.
Once before had this elf dismissed him. Once before, had Quicksilver, in his most foreboding mood, barred Kit from touching Silver.
It was as though this creature were not one and the same with his lady love, but someone else, a tyrant brother or a harsh father bent and determined to keep her under lock and key.
And yet, Kit recognized Silver’s gesture in the hand that Quicksilver lifted to the air and then let fall in a vain swoop that maybe signified the impossibility of all human endeavor or of human loving elf. And those hands were the same -- they were so white, and long and more perfectly shaped than mortal hands ever.
Kit wanted those hands and that touch, and the magical entrancement that came with elven love, and didn’t care in what form he got it, so long as he attained that state where he was lifted out of his mortal nature, and touched the heavens with an immortal madness. “Come to bed,” he said, aware that he sounded peevish and whined with a child’s ill-hazarded tantrum. “Come to bed.”
Quicksilver looked at Kit -- a long, hard and appraising look. Who could read those moss-green eyes? Were Quicksilver human, Kit might have ventured to guess at pity and sorrow, and perhaps a touch of affection, a hint of remorse, a brief lament over lost pleasures, fleeting across that gaze.
But Quicksilver was not human and all these emotions flashed in his countenance, one after the other, like shapes within the golden flames of a blazing fire. They darkened the glow a moment, then were gone, leaving nothing but a blank slate, a diamond perfection, a face etched by eternal fire and eternal ice, and not created or doomed by human love.
All Night Awake Page 41