Any Man So Daring (14 page)

“But magic has shrunk as these, our corrupted times, wound the world away from the force of creation.

“Now, the crux is nothing but an island, an island of magic in the ocean of unmagic. But there, it is strong and there it is central to life, and, from it magic comes to every world. Without the crux there would be no magic, none--in any of the worlds, mortal or elven.”

Miranda swallowed. She imagined the crux as a sphere at the center of all the worlds. An egg within an egg. “I sent the child there?”

Oh, luckless. Amid such power, how could human child survive?

“You’ve sent him there, through some grievous error.”

“But I followed the spell, I made all--”

“Worse yet, you’ve sent your uncle there, also. In that center of magic, what might Quicksilver not do? For that land was not made for man or elf and there the presence of any thinking being can wound the delicate balance of the crux, the balance of all magic. Wishes are truths in the crux and there the very thoughts have blade-sharp wings, that cut as they fly. He might perhaps destroy the crux so that, with it, he can destroy all magic and us.”

“You must send me there, Miranda. You must send me and my friends after the tyrant and the mortal boy. You must. There I can kill him, and then can I return to you.”

She turned her head to look, as the sound of hooves announced riders. “Your friends?”

She blinked, as the riders approached, for their magnificent stallions seemed headless, as from where the neck of each horse should be there rose the rider's torso, tanned and nude. Above the torsos, broad faces, surrounded by dark hair showed concerned expressions.

“We almost caught him,” the one upon the black horse said.

“Alas that he escaped,” spoke the rider of the roan.

They had thick accents and in Miranda’s mind their appearance and the accent fell together.

Centaurs. These were centaurs, the inhuman monsters who’d almost destroyed the glittering human civilization of ancient Greece in its crib.

These were Proteus's friends?

She looked at her Lord, unsure what to think.

He smiled at her, a tender, wounded smile. “You made a mistake, Miranda, and now I must correct it. My friends are here to help me.”

For a moment, chastised, her lips trembling, her eyes full of tears at having caused Proteus's anger, Proteus's vexation, an heretical thought that perhaps she didn’t want him to return to her, crossed Miranda’s mind.

But then she looked at his perfect face, his dark eyes, his golden hair, and she sighed. She wanted him to return to her. But she was not sure she wanted him to go. “Will it be dangerous,” she asked, "in the crux?”

“It will be dangerous,” Proteus said, and composed his face to manly courage. “But I will return to you.”

She swallowed a lump of fear in her throat and opened the book. She raised her hands for the spell and stared at the words that slipped and twisted beneath her gaze.

And stopped.

She didn’t want Proteus to risk himself without her.

Too many times, in these months that he’d courted her, she’d seen him leave and known that he was about to face some great challenge, some battle that might wither his soul or kill his body.

And now must she again stand and watch him go into that dark vortex, that weird place from which he might not return?

Must she let him go to face the monster alone?

She raised her hands; she recited the words that twisted and writhed beneath her gaze. She called to her each of the elves he’d indicated, and slipped the noose of the spell around Proteus's beloved neck.

And then she stood, hands raised, ready to close the spell.

She was casting the spell. She was closing it.

How could Proteus prevent her from going with them?

She pulled the spell around herself, and said, “So let it be,” closing the spell.

The vortex opened and she dropped through it, shivering and breathless.

Proteus's scream, “Miranda” echoed in her ears.

She felt the book drop from her numb hands as the whirlwind swallowed her.

Scene Twelve

A fine sand beach, white and unmarked by footsteps. The dark vortex of magic opens over it. As though the vortex brought forth wind to this timeless, undisturbed space, wind and sand and sea respond, agitating in sudden storm. Quicksilver drops from a man’s height above the beach onto the sand and rolls. Around him, sand blows in a raging wind and — though he can see no ocean — there is a feeling of the ocean nearby, a feeling of raging waves, of something crashing on this formerly undisturbed shore.

Q
uicksilver fell onto the sand. The force of his fall jarred him, addling his senses.

For a moment he didn’t know where he was.

Where had this spell brought him?

Fine sand under him prickled the tender skin of his hands, scoured his face where it had touched the ground. The fine velvet of his doublet had ripped.

Wind howled around him, violent and sand-laden, scouring his flesh and insinuating itself through the rip in his doublet and past the fine mesh of his shirt.

He opened his mouth to scream and breathed sand.

Raising his head, pushing himself up on his hands, he tried to look around through half-shut eyes — protectively closed against the sand.

He’d expected to see the boy nearby, his small body huddled, possibly hurt by the fall.

But there was no one else in sight, no living thing save a fringe of trees a little ways away. Quicksilver crawled on his hands and knees, searching the sand with his hands, as though the boy’s body might be there, under the sand.

He felt nothing but more sand. Where was the boy? Where was Will’s son, who had no part or parcel in fairyland disputes? What had Proteus wanted with the child? Whose power was it that had intervened in the spell. Such an old power, so dark, so indifferent, could not belong to Miranda, Quicksilver’s young niece.
 
Nor to Proteus, his rebellious cousin.

Why would an unknown spell maker interfere in the girl’s spell? Where would such a one have transported them all?

A loud howling, as of unleashed wind, made him look above. The black vortex spun faster, its tendrils seeming to multiply as it spun, like a monstrous spider stretching its many arms.

Where could the boy have gone?

If the same spell had brought them both here, shouldn’t they have landed in the same place?

Like a man still drowsy, retelling to himself the dream from which he’d just awakened, Quicksilver thought about the last second before he’d fallen into the magic vortex. He’d reached for the boy. Faith, reached for the boy and almost caught him.

His fingers had as near as brushed the boy’s dark curls.

He’d seen the child’s eyes -- so like Will’s that thinking on it disturbed Quicksilver -- so wide and so intent as they stared at Quicksilver in a silent appeal for help.

Quicksilver had tried to respond to that appeal. He had tried.

He’d been dropped here, and the boy had gone on. But gone on where?

And where was Quicksilver?

Clawing at the sand with his aching fingers, pushing against pressure as though he were submerged at a great depth, inch by inch and little by little, he managed to get up.

The wind seemed to press against him more, filling his cloak like a ship’s sail. It pushed on his body, yes, but his mind and his soul also, till Quicksilver felt as though he stood--body, mind and soul battered and frozen — fighting with all his strength to remain standing.

No ordinary wind could do this to the king of elvenland.

Only magic. Magic.

Quicksilver forced himself, step by step, to move upon the sand. Each of his movements multiplied the howling of the outraged wind.

His mind took halting steps, as his body did, seeking to get its bearings in this land.

There was only one place — only one — where magic was so rampant that the very wind, the very sand were full of it.

And that was one place where no elf had ever stepped, a place that, until this moment, Quicksilver would have sworn didn’t exist.

For this land was to him as fairyland to mortals, a story told by his nursemaid and learned very early, but too fantastical and full of nonsense to be real.

Standing against the push of the wind, he shielded his eyes with his hand against the assault of the sand and tried to see past the wind that the sand made amber-colored and almost opaque.

Around him, as far he could see, the sandy beach stretched, and it seemed to curve slowly, as though he were on a small island.

Inland the beach wrapped around it, a wooded center stretched, woods so thick they looked like a single tree, immense and overgrown.

The clump of trees writhed as if alive. Perhaps it just moved in the wind.

On the other side, the beach ended in something that seemed like the sea, but yet was not.

In that same space where, in a normal beach, the sea would be, something rose and fell, to rise and fall again in stormy gray waves.

But the feeling of it was not that of water.

The roar of water had never echoed thus in Quicksilver’s ears, nor had the nearness of water disturbed him thus.

Quicksilver walked towards the
sea
, forcing his feet to move against the wind, against the sand, against a wave of fear that rose within him and set his hair on end.

From that space came such a wave of force, like the feel of a lightning strike, very near.

Only this was not the natural electric feel of thunder, but a force that insinuated itself into Quicksilver’s mind and made him feel the quickening of pulse, the loosening of tongue, the deceitful, dangerous euphoria of wine.

It crept through his senses like a thief. Reaching the core within him that was his link to the magic of the hill, the power and souls of all his subjects, it slid in and it--

“No,” Quicksilver screamed as he closed all his magical defenses and his shields around himself.

All his shields barely held, feeling insufficient and flimsy, like a threadbare cloak around his soul.

Through them, he still fell the pull and push of those waves so near. Those waves of magic.

It was
magic
. The thought startled him, like a sudden blow dealt by a stranger. Raw magic. An ocean of it.

Had it reached into Quicksilver, had it truly tapped his link to the hill, it would have ignited all of magic, all of the hill, till every elf in it were consumed and burned into nothing — magic and energy and nothing more, as everything had been at creation.

It would be like setting a match to a taper of grease.

Stepping away from the ocean of magic, step by step, Quicksilver felt hot and cold by degrees, as the reality of where he was, the magnitude of his problem sank in.

I am in the crux of all magic
, he thought, and struggled to contain his panic.

He’d heard of this land first at great Titania’s knee. His nursemaid, she who’d given Quicksilver suckle, and who’d been a princess of fairyland, had told him of it too, as he grew older.

Of the land like an egg, at the center of all the known worlds, where magic enveloped all and moved in all.

That land, like a heart, kept magic centered and all magic alive in all other worlds. A change to that world and all magic— maybe all life -- might well be lost.

No elf in living memory had ever told of being there, but Quicksilver remembered the tales he had been told, of the strange rules of this primeval place.

Legends spoke of the magical rules that went withal. The rule of threes, for instance. Three sunsets in the crux and you’d never leave. Magic would so permeate your being and replace your substance, that you’d become a part of the world, like the magic ocean.

Then there was the rule of paying for leaving the crux. A mortal could never leave the crux, once he entered it, unless he left something of himself behind.

And any mortal who made magic in the crux would always and forever be a little magic, a little like the elves, living between worlds.

Yet, if this were the crux — and Quicksilver’s mind recoiled from the thought, for it was impossible, it should be impossible — if it were the crux, then everything here would be magic.

Everything. The sun, the wind, the sand, the least particle of air.

And everything that happened here would affect all the magic in all the worlds.

And the crux was not an island but an egg.

He looked up at the sky above him and realized with a shiver that it was more magic, of the sort he’d almost touched in the “ocean” before. If he touched the sky, he would be burned as surely as if he swam in the sea.

The wind, he realized, was no wind, but a pressing dislocation of magic, a magical storm.

The storm, then, was the protest of magic at an invasion, the screams of magical power against the intrusion of creatures, mortal and almost immortal -- flesh and blood and weak cravings — into the world of eternal, incorruptible power.

Where could the boy be?

Forcing his eyes to remain open against the lashing of the sand, Quicksilver looked above the forest, where a tall peak rose above the green tops of the forest like a volcano from a frothy sea. This peak was white, glimmering white, and upon it a white castle sat, the exact, but white, twin of the Hunter’s castle in the outer world.