Any Man So Daring (32 page)

His smile made the girl frown and stomp her foot. “Oh, you know nothing of elves.”

Will sighed in turn. “I know of males, elf and human alike,” he said. “I know beauty is no sign of goodness and that fair elves, like fair humans, can and do lie.”

She stared at him, and her eyes went wide, and again the slightest bit of suspicion entered their blue expanse. But she shook her head. “If you mean Proteus, that cannot be true, for he loves me and, loving me, he’s kind and joyous and smiling.”

“Ah,” Will said. “Ah, but a man may smile and smile and be a villain.”

She shook her head. She sighed. She closed her hands, one upon the other, their grip strong upon each other, as though by one hand holding the other both could be saved of falling into the abyss and Miranda with them.

She set her lips in a straight line. She shook her head. “Nay,” she said. “Nay. Proteus is good. You do not know him as I do. He’s good. Deceived perhaps, but good. And I hold a duty to him, having left him sleeping under a spell. I must go find him, wake him.” And then, raising her eyebrows with sudden memory. “Aye me, there’s Caliban also. I’ve forgotten Caliban. I must go to him, and make sure he’s well and safe. For he’s but a poor creature, none too bright, my servant and my responsibility since we were infants together.”

She started to walk away from Will, then returned and, offering both hands to him, suffered them to be enclosed in his rough, calloused hands.

“Thank you,” she said. “For I was blind to truth, but you have revealed to me that ugliness and evil aren’t always conjoined.”

Will smiled. He’d become used to the idea that this beautiful, dainty elf princess thought him horribly ugly. And well she might, having been raised in the Hunter’s world of perfection where such people as Will could never exist.

Yet he cautioned her, with weary voice, “Neither is beauty always married to goodness.”

She nodded and smiled.
 

He knew she didn’t listen.

“I wish you good luck in finding your son,” she said. “I wish that you may get out of the crux well, for you belong not here, nor should you have been caught in this net of elven discord.”

Will nodded. He couldn’t agree more with that, and as he parted with Miranda, he felt the stick thump-thump beneath his shirt like a second heart, anxious to find and follow the true path.

He wondered if he’d be the only one walking it, though, the only one walking towards the castle — the prize, the place of reckoning and victory.

For Quicksilver and Silver were divided and -- if Silver spoke true -- both were dying.
 

Their only hope of meeting was where Quicksilver would go to rescue Hamnet -- at the castle. And Miranda was doubling back upon her own steps to find Proteus, about whom Will’s heart misgave him. Proteus, Will suspected, would be going to the castle, to try once more to entrap Quicksilver.

He wished he could have told Miranda more, warned her of what might happen.

But he suspected anything he said would fall upon deaf ears.

Too well did he remember his first love, a girl his age, named Katherine Hamlet.

Will had been sixteen and mad in love. His mother and father had warned him about her, told him she went with other men and boys, though remaining chaste with Will. But he’d not believed them, never believed them until she drowned herself, pregnant by one of the local gentry.

Like his mother’s and his father’s pleas, would any warning he gave the girl be heard? For it was true that one’s first love was often a disease that must run its course, the poison spreading through the body and ruling it wholly before it subsided and diminished its influence upon the afflicted limbs and presently retreated to a memory that made one smile or cry and nothing more.

So Will leaned his head and spoke, in the voice of a man who knows his own limitations. “And fare you well, kind lady. Flocks of angels watch over your progress and keep you ever free from harm.”

She shot him a curious look, but she smiled and nodded — and she walked away.

Was her gait slower? Was her gracefulness somewhat more controlled? Had the episode to which her impetuous good will had led her put some more thought into her actions? Having learned the evil of centaurs, was she now on guard?

Will couldn’t tell. As with any child, he could only hope that she’d learned a lesson and would not do it again.

And then he realized, with a shock, that he was thinking of Miranda as one of his own children. Remembering his dream, he grinned at the foolishness of it all.

But the rage he had felt in his dream no longer haunted him. Miranda was like one of his own daughters. Elf, perhaps, but no longer fearsome.

He shook his head and, taking the twig out of his shirt,allowed it to tug him onto the right path.

How foolish could a man be who adopted an elf?

He remembered how Nan had told him that she’d once considered doing just that — leaving fairyland with both babes and raising them together as sisters.

He wondered what Miranda would be like if she’d been raised in Henley street, in Stratford upon Avon, as the daughter of a struggling playwright.

Humbler, he thought, as his feet found the true path and his stick pulled him on and on. As graceful, as beautiful as she now was, but humbler and quieter. More modest. Not that the princess of elvenland was boastful, but even while crying on Will’s shoulder, she had been regal.

Regal, he thought, seizing upon the word. That was how Hamnet had looked in that image of him upon the pond.

Thus Will thought of what he didn’t want to think: Hamnet much older, standing on the ramparts of the white castle.

Had it been an illusion? He remembered what Quicksilver had said about the different rates of time in the crux.

Had Hamnet truly grown that fast in a few days? Had years passed for him? And who had raised Hamnet those years?

How could Will take Hamnet back to Stratford and explain how he had grown in just a few days? Who would believe him?

Worse, if they did, would he be tried for witchcraft? Would enough magic remain to Will, from his use of magic in the crux that all would believe him a dark mage?

Oh, let it not be so.

And what about Hamnet? Would Hamnet be magic?

Who was this son that Will was trying to rescue? He recalled the haughty air, the impeccable clothing.

A son of Will’s? By whose fiat?

Who was this prince that, having originated in Will’s humble loins, in a night of passion with Nan in Stratford upon Avon, had now become quite something else?

He didn’t know and he couldn’t think on it, or on how he would explain his son’s sudden growth and superior demeanor to Nan, to the neighbors, to the family in Stratford.

But he did know this land was dangerous. Already once, the sun had set on their stay here. Much longer and they’d be absorbed here forever. And this, also, was no place for Hamnet.

Only let Will get to the castle where Hamnet was captive, and ransom him, and take him safe to the Earth from whence they came.

All the rest would solve itself upon the ripeness of time.

For the sake of the son he could no longer call his, Will held onto his stick and wearily walked the path.

Scene Thirty One

Quicksilver, lying on the ground, is covered in the magical net that steals his powers. Proteus stands nearby, and a terrified Caliban, a few feet off, covers his lipless mouth with his trembling paws.

Q
uicksilver hurt. His chest hurt where Hylas had kicked him, and his shoulder, where the wound from Proteus's blade still smarted and where the cruel hooves had brought forth blood anew.

Something about the crux made Quicksilver less than invulnerable and slower to heal. Or perhaps something about his separation from Silver, Quicksilver thought.

And, thinking it, he felt the now familiar pain of the separation.
 

Hylas laughed, an easy laugh. He stood beside Quicksilver and laughed at Quicksilver’s helplessness or perhaps at his look of pain. He trotted in place, giving his movement the look of a victory dance.

“Now is the king of fairyland brought low,” he said and laughed again.

Aching, bleeding, his face in the dirt, breathing in the bracken scent of moldy leaf and old moss, his power sapped by the cruel net, Quicksilver found voice to whisper. What he whispered surprised himself.

“Why do you hate me?” he asked.

His voice, raspy and pained, barely rose above the rustling of wind upon the trees.

But it was heard by all and hung upon the cool air of the crux and upon Quicksilver’s mind.

For it was a mad question. Rebellious centaurs had always hated the elven kings.

There was nothing to know.

Hylas stopped his dance and was silent a moment. Then, in a voice that rose aggressively, he said, “Why do I hate you? Oh, I hate you as I hate death and pain and all elves. Your infant race — like the race of men — clambered upon our ancient, ordered world and took it from us.

“With your ideas of a proper life, of right government, you sullied our nation-states. You destroyed our loves, our rhymes, our heroic wars, our hunting bands, our academies.
 

“You took the meadows where we ran free and fenced them in parcels so small there was scarcely space to get up to a trot. Our forests you turned into plowed fields, where the hoof can catch and the ankle break. In our sacred glades you built haughty palaces, from which we — half-animal, you said — were excluded.” He spat in Quicksilver’s face.

His spit, warm and smelling of wine, landed on Quicksilver’s eyelid, making Quicksilver’s eye smart.

“All this we withstood, in patient calm, till humanity invented wine. Tasting it unlocked our rage and our hurt. Then, over a private brawl and minor damage — such as humans do daily to each other — did the Lapithae almost destroy our race.

“And when the sad remnants of that race asked for asylum and help in your land, were we told we had to surrender all our power and magic to the king of elves.

“In return we got nothing, not even that magic that all other subjects of the hill can access. Rather we were kept at bay and kept down, feared and despised at once.”

Hylas pawed at the ground with irate hoof. “For the lack of healing magic, our young foals die. Because we lack the use of our own magic, let alone the magic of the hill, we’re unable to catch animals in the depopulated woods and amid the houses of mankind. Our people starve, O king, while you dance in your palace.

“Again and again have our people rebelled and tried to improve their lot and have use, at least, of their own magic. Time and again, elves have killed our best stallions on the field of battle — and given us nothing.”

Hylas stopped talking.

For a while, only the sound of wind on the trees, the sound of the centaurs’ breathing — all three of them, in unison — broke the perfect silence of the crux.

“And you ask why I hate you?” Hylas said.

“But I have not done this myself,” Quicksilver said. “I’ve only reigned for fourteen years. How can you accuse me of centuries of injustice?”

“You knew of it,” Hylas said. “You perpetuated the injustice, and so all the injustice is yours.”

“But Proteus would be no better king than I,” Quicksilver said.

Hylas laughed. “Did I say we want Proteus for our king?” Turning half away from Quicksilver, Hylas grinned at Caliban. “You, beast, serve me true, or you shall be our meal. Watch this
king
while we go hunting. Something in this land must be edible, and I’ve seen some deer over yonder.”

Together, the centaurs galloped out of the clearing.

Caliban lowered his hands, slowly, and looked at Quicksilver -- an unreadable look.

Lying on the ground, cold, empty of magic and trembling in fear, Quicksilver boiled with rage that he’d been unable to express. Why was he blamed for the evils of all his race? How could he defend himself from such, all-encompassing charges?

As soon as he judged safe — hooves sounded nowhere, and the voices of the centaurs had receded in the distance, he spoke, “Caliban, remove the net from me.”

Quicksilver must go rescue Miranda. He must go back to the hill and surround himself with those who didn’t accuse him of crimes he could not ever mend.

Caliban looked at him. His eyes were dark and reflected nothing. If eyes were the mirror of the soul, then Caliban’s soul remained unreflected.

Perhaps he had no soul.

Caliban shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ll not risk my life for your sake.”

“Remove the net,” Quicksilver said. “And then I’ll be able to do magic and I’ll set it all to rights. And then, when we return to fairyland shall I make you a courtier, one of my honored ministers.

“Your cave in the mountains shall be transformed by my might and magic to a palace, and your mother shall be honored above all mothers in elvenland.”

Now did Caliban stare harder at Quicksilver. He squinted, his eyes narrowing, without showing any more expression than before.

“He’s told me the truth,” Caliban said. “Hylas has. When they caught me again, they said I must help them, and they told me the truth. Trolls fought on
his
side in the great elven war. And your side killed countless trolls.