Any Man So Daring (31 page)

What being, better than the one who knew the guilt and ambition in every heart, could have arranged to have them all trapped in the crux?

And what being could better manipulate magic to divide them all ere they fell to the crux, sending Miranda and the others to the beach, the centaurs and Caliban to the deep forest, and the child to the secret seclusion of the castle?

Miranda had felt the Hunter’s magic in her spelling before they’d all come here.

Yet how could she accept that her father, the only father she’d ever known, had set this trap for her and for her love?

How could she expect evil where she’d only known love?

Scene Twenty Nine

Quicksilver on the ground of the clearing. Caliban enters, running, and starts shaking him.

“M
aster, awake,” someone said. “Awake, Master.”

His mind overtaken with wine, his body collapsing with tiredness, Quicksilver had been dreaming that he lay in his bed in the palace, with his wife beside him.

He stretched his hand towards Ariel’s side of the bed and touched — leaves? He sat up, struggling to open his eyes against an unforgiving weight on his eyelids.

“Malachite?” he asked, confused at the voice screaming in his ears, at the strong hands shaking him.
 

Beneath him there were rude leaves and moss. His fogged brain thought perhaps he was, after all, at the battle front. Perhaps this was Malachite waking him to fight. But Malachite’s voice had never sounded like a growl, and Malachite’s breath didn’t smell like decayed meat and dank moss.

By an effort of will, Quicksilver opened his eyes.

And saw a troll’s dull, unreflective eyes staring at him.

He jumped up, and his hand reached for his dagger.

The troll screamed and tried to escape. “Not me, master, not me...” he screamed. “I’m not the enemy.”

Something about the troll looked familiar. The orange fur, the scared face, the canines, the....

“Caliban?” Quicksilver asked, sheathing the dagger again. “Caliban, what do you do here?”

“It’s them, Master,” Caliban said. “They are coming. I thought I must wake you.”

“Who is coming?” Quicksilver asked. His head spun and a fog obscured his vision. He was still confused by sleep, by too much wine, by this strange land. “Who?”

The monster looked terrified. Even his dark, lipless mouth looked pale. “Centaurs. They would have eaten me, if my mistress hadn’t distracted them.” He shook Quicksilver. “They would have made me into a meal. And my mistress, sir, my mistress, they pursued her, they offered her violence.”

“Your mistress?” Was Miranda in danger? Quicksilver felt a quickening of apprehension and woke fully. Had something happened to Miranda?

Even as he felt it, he wondered at his own concern. How could he love a creature he didn’t even know? How, so quickly, could he feel a protective, fatherly, love for this elf girl?

And yet what he’d glimpsed of her had been pleasing, bespeaking a tenderer heart, a gentler upbringing than he could expect of Sylvanus's daughter, of the adopted daughter of the Hunter.

And Quicksilver
wished
to love her as his daughter, the daughter he likely would never sire, for his nature seemed to be as sterile as it was mutable.

If he loved not the girl, then he loved his dream of a daughter, the daughter she could be to him.

But... “Centaurs?” Centaurs upon the crux? How? “Centaurs?”

Caliban didn’t answer. He opened his mouth as if to speak but made only a strangled sound, like a man so terrified that he cannot find the strength to scream. He looked at Quicksilver and covered his mouth with his hairy hands.

“What? What is this?”

Something — a cold something — a web, a net, fell over Quicksilver’s head and extended to engulf his whole body, covering him, whole, from head to toe.

With it came a coolness, a cold, cold, icy dankness that was, as it were, death traveling through a mortal body and advancing its army and its pale standard.

His strength gone, his breath a shallow mockery of life, Quicksilver fell to the ground.

Yet his mind remained clear, and he knew, moment by moment what happened to him.
 

The troll covered his own mouth, his eyes wide, looking in horror at Quicksilver.

Did the troll’s mouth shape
forgive me
, or was that an illusion of Quicksilver’s fright and the creature’s odd features?

Meanwhile, the centaurs rode into the clearing, a black one and a dappled one. “The net that your silly niece threw away was easy enough to find, its power calling to us from the undergrowth. It is from our region, and it was for many years kept under centaur guard. It is woven from such material that it will remove all magic from whomsoever it covers. Now are you without power, now are you defanged.” Hylas — Quicksilver remembered the dark centaur’s name -- grinned. “I could kill you with a spell, or with my dagger. But I fear me the protections of the hill are not yet neutralized. Unworthy though you are--” He kicked at Quicksilver’s chest, inflicting a sharp pain. “--you are the king. To stop the hill’s vengeance, we’ll need Proteus's strumpet, or at least her power -- either willingly given upon the bed of love, or else taken by a force-spell. That was the reason he sought her out and courted her and got her involved in this plan. And she’s so infatuated by him that he controls all her thought. Surely her power shall in time also. Meanwhile, your free life is gone. From now on it falls to us to drag your carcass to the meeting point, where you shall die.”
 

The centaur looked at Caliban and grinned. “Well-played, troll, keeping him busy while we sneaked into the clearing. For a moment I thought you played me false, for you did wake him, but now I understand it was but a precaution against his waking with the sound of our hooves.” He grinned at Caliban. “For this we’ll forgive all your past insolence, and we’ll forgo feasting on your flesh.”

Quicksilver looked at the troll.

Caliban looked away, his eyes half-closed. Caliban could not be read.

To be truthful, trolls were slow creatures, and Caliban probably had trouble understanding language itself. Maybe he didn’t know what he had done.

Yet Quicksilver didn’t believe it. Despite his extravagant and strange behavior upon meeting Quicksilver -- a behavior perhaps born of panic -- the night before Caliban had proven himself a rational being. As rational as most elves, if not as well mannered.
 

No, there was no other explanation but that Caliban had betrayed him. Quicksilver had, for the first time in the history of the kings of the hill, taken a soft, compassionate stand towards one of the lower races, and see how he was repaid!

He shook his head at his own folly. Maybe he should be glad he’d lost Silver. For what was she but that erratic softness, that reckless spirit that led him to such traps?

Scene Thirty

The clearing where Miranda has done the scrying. Will stands beside her, gone very pale, shaking.

“H
amnet!” Will said, and, turning to the girl, said, by way of explanation, “That’s my son. My son, who was but a child. How he’s grown. Sixteen? Seventeen? He’s no more my child.”

Will felt a great sense of loss — a grief afraid to own itself. For Hamnet was alive and he should be happy—yet Hamnet was no more Hamnet.

The girl met his startled glance with a panicked one of her own. “That’s my father’s standard,” she said. “That’s my father’s banner that flies beside the youth, my father’s own flag on the ramparts of that white, magical castle. What plot is this? And why would my father plot against me?”

She lifted her hand to her throat.

“Your father?” Will felt as though his blood had turned to ice in his veins. “Sylvanus?”

She shook her head, her disheveled hair though matted and twisted still shining like moonlight in the dark of night. “The Hunter. My true father. My father who raised me.”

She looked cold as she said it, and Will wondered what coldness, what harsh loneliness she might not have learned, living with the Hunter all these years. He remembered his own brief encounter with the creature of shadow and midnight, of dark chases and unforgiving slaughter.

He looked at the small, pale face that was cold and wan like that of a child who has lost her way. “Lady,” he said, softly, in such a tone as he might have said, "Child." “Lady, why would the Hunter conspire against anyone? Is he not a creature of greater power than I, mere mortal, can dream, or even you, immortal though you are, can conceive? Could he not crush all of us with a look, or kill us with a thought?”

She nodded, then shook her head, then shrugged. Her lips, which looked colorless, opened in a round “o” and shaped a sigh. “I’d have thought so, but I, his daughter, was disobedient, and perhaps my disobedience hardened his heart against me. Does not his paternal duty include the duty to discipline me?”

Will sighed. He had some experience with the other side of this. He knew it was his duty to discipline his children. He’d always known it. But ever since Susannah, the eldest, had walked into trouble with her one-year-old feet, and reached for trouble with her little pudgy hands, he’d found himself more inclined to tell her stories and by example show the folly of her ways.

“The good book,” he said, and then, realizing she might not know what that meant, he explained, “the sacred book of humans in my land, says that you should not spare the rod, lest you spoil the child.” He looked around him at the dark turbulent skies, the dark turbulent trees, the agitated landscape. “But truth, sending a child to the crux as a punishment seems well beyond a touch of the rod, a scolding or even a whipping. Why would your father take it upon himself to do something so cruel to his only child?”

And even as he said it, Will thought he couldn’t say such thing. How could he know what the Hunter felt as a father? How did he know how the Hunter felt about this creature he’d adopted, this creature who was no true kin of his?

Did he feel towards Miranda as Will did towards his own children? Or as Will felt towards Nan’s irascible black-and-white cat — beloved, perforce, for he was Nan’s pet -- but not beloved like one of the children. And what would they not do if the cat betrayed them?

The elf princess shook her head. Tears shone in her eyes, and trembled at the edge of falling down her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. He was ever gentle and kind, watching over me with a concern more than fatherly — the concern of a mother anxious for her cub. He saw to my needs and my wants, and indulged my tantrums with a smile. But now...”

Strangely, in Will’s mind, a picture formed: the Hunter as doting a father as he knew himself to be during his visits to Stratford. He could see the Hunter bending his immortal heart to accommodate this small, fragile charge, guiding her, step by step, to adulthood.

Knowing what kind of a father the Hunter had been, he knew that such a father, being as he was, could never turn upon his own child in this way.

He shook his head at the girl’s worry and, ever so gently, set his hand upon her shoulder. “Do not cry,” he said. “And do not fear, for I’m sure such a father would not change, suddenly, nor torment his child in this way.”

“But then--” The girl looked at Will, and her lip trembled. “But then who could have lured us here and trapped your son upon the castle, and played with Proteus's mind so that he thought the king of fairyland was evil? Who could have arranged to meet with the centaurs?” she asked. She spoke the last word as though it stung her lips. “Who could have betrayed me thus? And why does the tower fly my father’s standard?”

Will would dearly love to have the answer to that last question himself, but he knew he stood no chance of finding out, till the powerful immortal desired to reveal it.

 
So he spoke to the other questions. “There are others who might have done it, think. Having been raised by an immortal, always truthful father, perhaps you trust too much. And perhaps you should not assume that beauty always equals virtue, even in elf.”

Miranda sighed and rolled her eyes — a gesture so much like Susannah’s fits of rebellion that Will couldn’t help smiling.