Any Man So Daring (22 page)

His anger, his disappointment, his heartbreak, gathered into words.

Alas, I am betrayed
, he thought. But betrayed by whom?

He could not answer. He could get no nearer to it than this feeling that both he and Silver had been grossly abused.

This joining had been no less — no more — than his many encounters with elf and mortal alike.

How could you make love to your other half and feel no more than when you joined with a stranger?

Looking down on Silver, he knew her no more and no less than he had known his mortal lovers, or his other elf couplings.

There was her face, filled with disappointment, like the face of a child who feels eternal loss. He could guess that she, like him, felt grief at union denied.

But her thoughts remained locked behind the wall of otherness that kept him out.

She was not him. She might never be him, again.

This union, rushed, craved, had served only to underline their separation, their awful, aching separation.

He saw her hands go to her breasts and cover them in belated modesty, while they remained joined, and he still above her.

He saw her hands touch her breasts, but he could not feel what those hands felt, or those breasts, when her hands covered them.

He was bereft. Yet something in him — he was sure of it — had resisted their reunion.

But what?

When had it happened, and why had she fled? When had she left his body and his soul, ripping herself from him like new cloth from an unsound old patch?

Was it the death of Vargmar, when Quicksilver had felt as though a long-held cord broke within him?

Was it the death of Vargmar that had expelled the lady, for good, from Quicksilver’s being?

But how could it be when the Lady, like Quicksilver, knew the need for defense and blood and death in that defense? Though neither of them had sought the kingship that had fallen upon their conjoined shoulders like a mantle of lead, Quicksilver had understood the need for serving kingship.

Yet Silver had thought kingship should serve them.

And thus, divided, over tradition as over their own nature, they had started their painful separation.

Thinking on the crown that he only wore for ceremonies of state, it seemed to Quicksilver that he could still feel its weight — old and accustomed, heavy gold and spells woven through all the centuries in which it had symbolized the responsibility and power of fairyland.

As the keeper of the power and souls of elves and fairies and those grosser, inferior races — trolls and centaurs and mountain dwarves — Quicksilver would always feel the crown upon his brow.

 
But Silver had felt it not, nor did she see any reason to conform to the tradition of the kings before them. As though Quicksilver, alone, could make a better system than what his ancestors had devised over countless generations.

It had started with the crown, Quicksilver thought. And their disagreement over how a king should behave.

Refusing to concede, Silver had distanced herself, and Quicksilver had remained alone to wear the crown and sit in audience and receive guests, and be King Quicksilver, not the Lady Silver with her flirtatious ways, her carefree laughter, her caprices, her loves...her love for Will.

He thought of how she loved Will and flinched, as a wounded man will flinch from touching raw flesh.

It had started like that, thus. Now it wasn’t convenient and then it wasn’t proper, and then again they disagreed. Silver had bled away from within him like a man’s life leaving through an open vein that he heeds not.

Little by little she’d trickled away, and he’d never felt it, till they were divided, separated.

How could a man be so oblivious to his own self, to the currents of his own soul?

How could an elf reign who knew himself so little?

Quicksilver looked down at the perfect face of Lady Silver, crumpled in grief, her eyes overflowing with woe.

He lowered his own face to hers and kissed her gently, tasting the salt of her tears.

She cried still.

Had the loss of her brought about his other woes?

Was it his lack of her that had brought about the war, the hill deaths, the destruction? Would Silver’s irreverent, experimental approach to kingship have been better?

He’d been a man divided, who knew not himself. Little by little, trickle by trickle. He’d lost Silver, and then his soul appeared to have fled after her. When was the last time he had felt alive? When was the last time he’d laughed?

Fair Ariel had seen him as though dead. And she’d been right. He’d become naught but the crown on his head that crushed all thought and stopped all feeling.

He’d become a king, a king and nothing more, and, as a king, he’d ruled heavily, his hand resting in crushing weight upon the hills of fairyland.

There had been no dissent allowed, and no jokes, and no one could mention that the king was two and could become, at will, the Queen Silver, of fairyland.

Fairyland, Quicksilver had determined, would have only one queen and one king — and those in different bodies.

And in that decision, how humorless he’d become, quenching jest and flirting as though they were crimes, and allowing no elf speak his mind, unless his mind met with Quicksilver’s own.

There, there, Vargmar’s treason had found fodder.

Alone, Vargmar would not have been able to rebel.

His early attempt at killing Quicksilver would have ended as it did end, in a midnight discovery with everyone watching.

But his attempt at raising an army would have died ere it began, were it not that Quicksilver had long nurtured discontent amid the ranks and squelched the voice of the little ones of elfland, till the little ones rose against him like a tide, like an unstoppable storm. The odd ones, those who didn’t fit in — trolls and centaurs, Pucks and brownies — had Quicksilver allowed himself to be who he truly was, would he have understood them better?

Had he shown himself for what he truly was — an impetuous, imperfect shape changer — would they have loved him better?

He looked at Silver’s crying face, and felt her sobs.

It was too late now. He’d shown himself a perfect, unassailable, cold king, and they’d turned their hearts from him and wholeheartedly served Vargmar.

Oh, Vargmar had been guilty and deserved death.

But then, what of Quicksilver, who’d encouraged and created the division as much as Vargmar ever had? The division that had led to the war, for which the youth of fairyland had bled?

If Vargmar had earned death, what had Quicksilver earned?

He saw, in Silver’s eyes, that her thought, traveling the like path had arrived at a similar destination.

He saw her small hands clench into fists, and the fists lift to pound upon his battle-scarred chest.

Had he not earned it?

He had killed her, had he not? He’d pulled her from him, and in fairyland she could not appear and had no expression.

Only here, in the crux, where magic was free and rampant, could he see her.

No more would the Lady Silver’s laughter echo in the glades and circles of fairyland. No more would she dance, graceful and happy, in the ceremonies of her people.

No more would she jest and smile and joke and with her cheering encourage all around her — inspire them to courage, show them the way of love.

No more would her white body, her beautiful face, her joyous love, lend itself to those her heart inclined to — in the fairyland palace and in the rooms of humankind.

No more would her joy be Quicksilver’s joy, her love make him regard mortal and elf with less than disdain and more than hauteur.

He needed and craved her, yet he could not allow her to become part of him. They were so different.
 

Her eyes were sad, her features shocked, afraid.

He reached for her as she pushed him away, kissed her as her small fists pummeled his chest and shoulders.

What should have died together was separate. The world was broken, and Quicksilver could not mend it.

Getting up, he ran blindly into the forest.

Scene Nineteen

Will walks through the forest, looking tired and bedraggled.

N
ever so tired. Never so in woe. Will could no further crawl, no further go.

The fog around him, like a living thing, grew tendrils and fingers that reached for him and pulled him now in this direction, now in that, like a wanton child playing with a doll.

Trees swayed around him and, in swaying, made sounds that echoed a familiar voice. “Stay,” the voice said. “Stay, stay, stay.”

That one voice spoke in the carefully cultivated tones of Kit Marlowe as though, from beyond death, the shoemaker’s son from Canterbury still attempted to affect the manner of speech of the cultured elites.

“Stay, Will,” Marlowe whispered from Will’s left.

A succession of mournful echoes repeated, “Stay, Will.” The echoes, like sad bells, went chasing through the tree tops, sighing through the underbrush, till they died in the distance.

“He’s lost,” the voice whimpered from his right. “Quicksilver grieves. He shall presently die.”

"Die" was a sigh, turning to despairing moan.

Will flailed at the trees around him, trying to stop Marlowe’s voice.

Why had Marlowe’s ghost followed him here, to this accursed land?

What terror had brought so low that spirit that had once aspired to the stars? Having left the earthly plane in so untimely a manner, why did he pursue Will? Why did he not head for the freedom of the great spheres above?

Will remembered what Marlowe had said about doing a good deed and about the scales of good and evil being too exactly balanced. But why must Will be the recipient of Marlowe’s misguided charity?

“You have my poetry,” Marlowe said. “I must follow you.”

“Oh, be still,” Will said, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “Be still.” He couldn’t remember exorcisms or incantations to keep the creature away. He must be content with this. “Be still.”

“Will, you must go to him,” Marlowe said, and the tops of the trees swayed in agitation and each leaf was an eager, echoing tongue. “You must bring them back together.”

Them? “I don’t know of what you speak. I am here for my son. Leave me alone and return to your grave.”

Will kicked aside a root that twisted towards his ankle like a monstrous snake. This was no place for humans.

“Go,” he told Marlowe. “Why don’t you go? You do not need to follow your poetry here. I’ll not be writing. ”

But he remembered Marlowe’s eye, the sad, tender look in it when speaking of Quicksilver. Marlowe said he was tied to Will by his poetry, yet Will suspected that it was Quicksilver’s presence that kept the ghost here. What an illness this love was that not even death could cure it.

He glimpsed Marlowe just ahead of him, standing between two trees, a translucent Marlowe, his body seemingly distorted, stretched now this way, now that by breezes that blew through him. Marlowe’s remaining eye filled with urgent concern.

“Come,” Marlowe’s voice said. “Come.”

Will shook his head. “I will go nowhere but in search of my son,” he said. And where could his son be? He wished he knew. He’d seen the castle and, knowing his fairytales, suspected the captive Hamnet of being there.

But captive how? And what manner of monster guarded him? Will had started on a path that should have led to the castle. But then there was the fog and the roots that twisted beneath his feet. He suspected the path itself was magical and changed to keep the unwary from their destination.

“Quicksilver will help you find your son,” Marlowe said. “But you must go to him.”

“I am no servant of elf.”

“He is dying.”

The words were so sad, so serious, tolling with such unrelieved certainty that for a moment Will saw Quicksilver lying dead, and his breath caught. But then he thought that Quicksilver, somehow, was guilty of bringing Hamnet here, guilty of bringing Will from his safe world.

“Let him die. Let him die.” Will stopped, lacking the breath for both walking and talking at the same time. “Let him die. He stole my son. He ensnared....”

“Hush,” the ghost voice whispered. Will felt Marlowe’s half-ethereal hand upon his own, pulling him.

“Hush,” Marlowe said. “He ensnared no one, but is, himself, ensnared.”

“You believe him,” Will said, his voice tolling with withering scorn. “You believe him yet.”

Marlowe smiled. For a moment he became visible, flickering and translucent like a candle’s flame against the green jungle. His sad smile and his bleeding eye warred with each other. It looked as though he wept blood and smiled at doing it.

“I’ve gone beyond doubt,” Marlowe said. His voice sounded remote, echoing from a great distance. “Being a spirit, I am nowhere and everywhere and, being a spirit, I have seen the bloody war in the elven kingdom. It came not from Quicksilver, but from his kinsmen, who longed for his crown and his throne and thought Quicksilver weak and frail.

“I do not say that Quicksilver is blameless, but he did fight fair and bravely, and with great wisdom.”

“But my son--”