All Night Awake

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “But my brother, with great cunning and power, has broken the bonds of his state,” Quicksilver said. “And, if he does find a foolish human who’ll take him in -- he can gain power by killing humans and absorbing their suffering and life, until Sylvanus is more powerful than the Hunter himself, more powerful than any bonds upon him. Then will he destroy me and faerieland, and aye, both the worlds of elf and of mortal.” Quicksilver sighed. “So you see, I need help. Help to find my brother. Help to find who might be harboring him. Oh, look not at me that way. I only thought to keep you out of this, Kit. I only thought to protect you.”

  Kit dug his nails into his own palms, willing the pain to distract the wolf, and, with desperate tenderness, managed to speak. “Run from me,” Kit said. “Do not come near me.” Overpowering the wolf’s hate with all the force of his love, he pulled his arm away from Quicksilver’s grasping hand, from the warm of that elven life, that much warmer, that much more fragrant than pale mortal life.

  Kit went two steps, no more. The wolf grabbed him. With a shudder that ran down Kit’s whole body, the wolf turned him about face, made him take two steps back to where he’d been and turned his eyes, his battle-broken eyes upon Quicksilver.

  “Idiot,” Quicksilver said and smiled. “Idiot. Come with me. “I’ll buy you a drink at a tavern, and we’ll decide how to go on from here.”

  The sun had all but sunk beneath the horizon.

  The stench coming off the river was the smell of death and the graveyard.

  Kit had no more control over his aching, tired body, than he had over his beating heart, over his fearful love.

  Quicksilver put his hand around Kit’s arm and pulled him, and Kit followed, while within Kit the wolf laughed at easy victory.

  Scene Twenty Seven

  Will’s room. Ariel sits on the bed, and Will stands by the window.

  “Master Shakespeare, we’d better go about it,” Ariel said.

  Will turned towards her, and started. In front of him stood a young fair haired boy, attired in a sky blue doublet, fashionable breeches, impeccable white stockings and dark shoes. “How now...?” Will started. He’d thought Quicksilver was unique in his ability to change. Was this a common thing with all elves, and had he been so deceived?

  But Ariel laughed, easy musical laughter. “No, Master Shakespeare, I did not change my aspect, only my clothes.” And, removing the hat from her head, she showed her hair coiled beneath it, in braids and loops, fantastically arranged as some rich boys coiffed their long hair.

  Will bowed to her. For some reason she looked all the more charming now, in this boyish aspect, her blandness masked by masculine decision, her small face revealed by her hair being pulled back. He realized he was looking into her eyes, when she blinked, and looked away, blushing.

  She blushed a becoming shade of apricot. Her grey-blue eyes looked very blue. A calm sea.

  I thought it would be better this way,” she said, very low. “I thought I would attract less attention as a boy.”

  Her voice was ever soft. An excellent thing in a woman, or so Will thought, who’d never known that kind of woman. “You’ll attract attention whichever way you’re attired, milady.”

  For a moment he put a hand out to her, but then pulled it a way. He hadn’t been alone with a woman, who was not Nan, in too long. It seemed to him that this whole situation was improper.

  She nodded, her blush intensifying.

  He turned away, looked out his window. “One thing I don’t understand, milady? How mean you to find the wolf out there? Your husband couldn’t. Does he not have more power than you? All the power of faerieland? I thought that was how it worked.”

  He heard Ariel sigh behind him, and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “I can see it,” she said. “I can see the trail of the dark power of the wolf. I can even see the traces of my lord’s bright power. Which is how I followed him here.

  “You can see it? Can Quicksilver? Can the other elves?”

  Ariel shook her head. She didn’t look at him, but she spied on him, just out of the corner of her eye, like a shy maiden. But she wasn’t a maiden, was she now? A grown elf, probably many years older than Will. And Quicksilver’s wife.

  Again, Will felt the slipperiness of faerieland, how things were never what they seemed. Ariel seemed young and innocent, and harmless enough.

  He turned away towards the window. Anything, anything, to break the eye contact, and the thoughts forming in his mind. Ariel was maybe all the more dangerous for not seeming as glamourous as Silver. Yet, Will knew that she must have her share of tawdry elf glamoury, that she must be manipulating him even now. And yet it didn’t feel tawdry. Not on Ariel. Quicksilver and Silver, oh, surely -- tawdry as yellow metal, cloying like cheap perfume.

  But Ariel was something altogether different. She looked young and soft, and in need of protection and tugged at the same place in Will’s heart that harbored tender, protective feelings for injured animals, for whipped dogs, for small children.

  He could resist seduction well enough. He was old enough to know what he wanted and that was Nan. But this soft appeal for protection, what man with a kind heart could resist it?

  “I can see it,” Ariel said. “Not every elf can, though. Quicksilver can’t. Which is why.... Which is why it was passing foolish for my husband to come to London without me. I am the seer of faerieland and my eyes penetrate distances no other elf can see.”

  “Like being a Sunday child,” Will said, thinking of his own capacity to see things of magic, all because he’d been born on a Sunday. Looking out the window, he could see apprentices leaving work, and the taverns starting to open. Over it all, a steady drizzle fell. An ordinary late afternoon in Southwark. Ordinary. And he was here, in his room, with the faerie queen. How odd, how odd that of all people Will knew about faerieland. All because he’d been born on a Sunday.

  “Exactly like that,” Ariel said. “I was born on Summer solstice. Only a rare thing because there are so few elven births.”

  He heard her get up, heard her soft steps approaching him, felt her hand on his arm and, looking down, saw the long, thin fingers clasped around his sleeve, shining almost ivory white against the dark russet fabric. A hand as small and delicate as his children’s hands.

  He heard his voice, softer than usual, “Then why would your husband come to London without you? He is neither crazy nor a fool, Quicksilver.”

  Ariel let go of Will’s sleeve, her lips trembled, her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know...,” she said. “I don’t know. Only your good lady....” she stopped.

  His good lady? “Nan? You saw Nan?” Suddenly, Ariel didn’t matter, but Nan mattered. “You saw my Nan. And what says my Nan?”

  Ariel took in a deep sobbing breath. “She says by asking Quicksilver to be Quicksilver only, by denying Silver, I killed Quicksilver’s love for me. She says.... your Lady says I never could have loved him or I’d not have done that.”

  Fat tears ran down the little oval face and the delicate pink lips trembled. “And maybe she’s right, Master Shakespeare. Maybe she’s right, and maybe there won’t be another chance.”

  Will smiled, because he could see Nan counseling the faerie queen as though she were a young housewife from Stratford. It was so like his Nan, this utter disregard of rank and even of species, that he couldn’t help but smiling, as his mind filled with Nan’s dear image.

  Seen through this light, Ariel no longer felt like an irresistible creature of glamoury, no longer supernatural, no longer dangerous. She was a young woman, pale and distressed. A woman to whom Nan had extended a hand. A newlywed in trouble. And Will would do no more than carry out what Nan would wish and protect this young lady and see her safely to her lord’s arms and the firm compass of her marriage.

  “My Nan is probably right,” Will said. “She has an uncomfortable habit of being so. But she’d not give you that advice if it were hopeless.” He fished within his sleeve for his handkerchief -- good, s
turdy cotton, monogrammed with W.S. by Nan in her huge, clumsy stitches.

  Ariel wiped her eyes on it.

  “Let’s go milady,” Will said. “We’ll use your good talent to search out your errant lord and the dark creature. We’ll find them both, I daresay, and you’ll be restored to your lord, who can’t but forgive you. He makes his mistakes too.” Will thought that Silver had tried to seduce him. He knew enough to know that had been no delusion. And if that wasn’t a mistake, what was it, when such a thing would visibly have broken the heart of Quicksilver’s queen?

  Gently, he walked Ariel down the steps.

  Together, they went into the darkened streets of Southwark, and night long they searched, amid bawds and gamers, drunkards and cutpurses.

  It wasn’t till dawn tinged the horizon pink that they came upon Sylvanus’s handiwork, in an alley, away from human traffic. It had been a young girl, barely a woman. Now it was nothing but a bundle of blood-soaked rags and a few bones, glimmering white where the flesh had been devoured.

  No crowd gathered around her yet, Will and Ariel having been first on the scene.

  Will backed away, in horror, at the sight.

  But Ariel stood still, staring, eyes wide open, “It is the wolf’s work,” she said. “But it has my lord’s power prints upon it, also.” She fainted dead away, and only Will’s quick dive and ready arms prevented her dirtying her dainty page costume with the bloodied mud of the foul alley.

  With the faerie queen unconscious in his harms, Will first thought that this was becoming an habit, elves losing their senses around him.

  But irreverence was soon driven out by shock. What could Ariel mean that this had her lord’s traces? Had Quicksilver himself been taken by the wolf?

  And all because Will had turned him out. Looking at Ariel’s eyes, as they fluttered open, Will felt more heartily sorry of that than he’d ever been of anything.

  Scene Twenty Eight

  Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and he and the bed are covered in blood.

  Kit Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

  He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

  Damn the world and the light and the blood, and his headache too.

  He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

  He pulled the blanket away from his body -- he appeared to have lain a-bed naked -- and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

  Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed, a nuisance where there should be screaming awe.

  Thus, step by step, he thought, do humans become used to their own sins.

  Thus had be become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service -- first out of fear, then out of monetary need and finally, finally, out of convenience, of expediency, almost out of boredom, ignoring the lives consumed to his casualness, the very real deaths he caused on the gallows, on the rack, or out of sheer despair, at the victim’s own hand.

  Would he, thus, get used to the foul taste of raw flesh in his mouth, to the dried blood covering him?

  He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

  Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in the cool clear water, from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched it turn red. He realized, with a sob caught in the throat and suffocating his emotions, that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

  Standing there, Kit felt for the wolf in his mind, and found a wall -- a diamond-strong wall, black and unyielding. Pushing at that wall, behind which Kit felt that the wolf’s thoughts hid, Kit knew his battle was lost before he drew his weapon.

  There might be, true, some way to circumvent the curse, some way to pierce the wall, or look beneath it, but what mattered it? Kit was not likely to find it. Not on his own.

  Some knowledge, some thought of Silver tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

  He might kill himself. But he didn’t wish to kill himself. All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger? Not likely. No. It was useless. Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation.

  “I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as going over,” he told himself, reasonably, while staring at his hands submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

  He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm, and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

  A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

  What land was this London that a man may pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

  Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

  It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered.

  As if out of a dream, he saw Quicksilver smile, and touch Kit’s face, and tell him not to worry, that all would be well and that, between them, they could conquer the foul fiend who threatened Quicksilver’s reign and the world of men.

  He heard Quicksilver’s sweet, confiding voice, smelled the lilac perfume of the elf lord, felt that white hand -- just like Silver’s -- caress his cheek.

  Kit straightened. The red from his face dripped from his beard onto the basin, like drops of fresh blood.

  Quicksilver. Was this a dream? A horrible illusion? Or had Quicksilver come to him, in this his dream? Or was it true?

  All of his senses told him it was true, mind and heart and speeding breath. All of them. All.

  Quicksilver had come to Kit and, all unsuspecting, had sought Kit’s help.

  Oh, cursed fate, that thus would deliver Kit’s love to his hate.

  And what had happened? What had Kit done? Had he done aught? Or was this deception? Vain delusion of a mind too strained?

  But he remembered walking by the river and he remembered Quicksilver taking him to a tavern, and sharing a drink with him and telling him—

  He couldn’t remember what Quicksilver had told him, or what might have happened to Quicksilver after.

  Kit leaned forward, so his fevered forehead touched his cool plastered wall.

  He prodded at his memory but still found it divided by that black, impenetrable partition. So were the two parts of Kit divided, like a child that, once separated from the mother, becomes lost in the multitudinous world, never to be found again.

  He stared at the basin, with mute horror, contemplating anew this red horror that stained the white porcelain.

  Was some of that blood, fresh again upon the touch of water, Quicksilver’s immortal blood?

  The thought froze the blood in Kit’s own veins. Had he then committed that ultimate betrayal, and tore his love to pieces?

  Had he -- had the wolf in Kit, using Kit’s body -- feasted upon the flesh of the king of elves?

  Sickness, horrible sickness overpowered Kit’s reasoning, and he swallowed hard, and leaned against the wall, too weak to move, while tea
rs gathered in his eyes and his breath came in sobs.

  Kit remembered Quicksilver with painful clarity. He remembered Quicksilver standing beside him, asking his help. Quicksilver’s moss-green eyes filled with sweet appeal he’d never before shown Kit.

  And all the while, deaf-mute, unable to express his fear and his warning, Kit had felt himself pushed down and down into the black room of his mind and out of the way.

  Oh, curse Kit’s intemperate heart, his quick jealousy and boiling blood that had led him into the clutches of the wolf.

  His mind in turmoil, Kit sank to his knees on the floor, holding his wet hands to his bloodied face.

  Had he killed Quicksilver? And Silver also, withal? Had his hand, his mouth, his own body put an end to that dear body that should have lasted all eternity and the world beyond?

  Kit heard a sob as from a long way off, and realized he cried. What had been a calm acceptance of his murder of innocents, turned now in his mind and heart to raging storm, the waves of blood turned against himself. If that blood was Quicksilver’s also, then Kit did not wish to live. If Quicksilver was dead, then let the world dissolve, for what was the gross substance of the Earth, compared to Silver’s body, to Quicksilver’s wit, to the substance and light of Kit’s elven love?