Ill Met by Moonlight (23 page)

Removing her dripping cloak, she dropped it, with the carelessness of someone raised with servants, in a soggy heap by the fireplace. Thus revealed, she looked yet more frail. She shivered along the length of her slim body and stretched her hands greedily to the heat of the fire.

Her hands looked blue and bruised, and each finger was bent slightly, as though cramped, like the fingers of a much older woman.

Suddenly she marked the dagger on the table, and a more pronounced shudder coursed down her body. She breathed fast, in short gasps, as she half turned to look at Will with arched brows. Her silver-colored eyes were dull, swallowing up the light but reflecting none.

Will felt pity for her, and a tenderness, a protective care he’d never have felt for the grand lady he’d first glimpsed in the forest. This new feeling gathered around the core of lust that she’d first inspired, and coiled there, making Will ache with longing and tremble with need and almost believe himself in love with this woman . . . this creature he scarcely knew. No, his mind protested, No. It was Nan he wanted, and Nan he craved.

Yet he knew not where Nan was, nor what she did, and this elf lady stood in front of him, bruised and battered and in need of protection and love.

He stretched his hand to her shoulder, where the rent fabric showed creamy pale skin, but withdrew it again without touching her. He remembered too well his longing for Nan, the feeling that he needed Nan more than anything—food or drink, or the very air he breathed. He remembered how guilty he’d felt that he’d used Nan, shamelessly used her, to convince himself that he was a man. No more. He would use people no more.

Yet this lady needed him. And yet, she was not real. Nan was reality. This woman, real though she looked, was of a piece with the nightmare his life had become. She belonged to the forest and its whispered secrets, to the shaded pathways where supernatural villains ambushed him. He didn’t want her, or any part of her. He wanted Nan and Susannah and his tidy, rational world the way it had been two days ago. And he’d be a good father to Susannah, a good husband to Nan, and a good son to his much-abused parents.

The dark lady looked at the dagger, then back at Will, her gaze a questing look, alarm at his silence making it tense, like the strings of a drawn bow.

Will thought of his father’s fears, thought of what his mother had said. Was his mother insane, as she seemed, or was it the world that had gone insane around his family? “I have heard . . . stories, milady. Stories about . . . my father? My father and this dagger?”

The lady’s eyes widened, in mute wonder, and her lips shaped bewilderment as she whispered back, “Your father?” She spoke as though the very words were unknown, as if the idea of Will having been sired were strange and alien. She attempted a small, timid smile. “Your father, Will?”

She was not going to make it easy, he thought. And yet he must know. He had to ask her. “My father said someone told him to kill the King and Queen of Fairyland. He said this person told him they were oppressors and not the rightful rulers. . . .” He shrugged. He couldn’t quite tell this supernatural creature that his father had thought it would be no crime, since the elves were not natural. “A folly, but he did it, and since then, night or day, he sees their ghosts and he believes they will come and take vengeance on him.”

The lady stared at him, her wide silver eyes unbelieving, or rather unthinking. They were like silver buttons on some great gentleman’s jacket, unseeing, unreflecting, showing nothing of what the wearer thought or felt. “Your father?” she repeated, as if the words were unknown, a fragment of some great lost language spoken by the people before the deluge. “And your father lives?”

Will frowned. “He lives but a poor sort of life. He lives in fear of vengeance, of retribution.”

The lady’s pale lips formed a word, but didn’t pronounce it, then opened on expelled breath and said, “No. And he lives?”

She shook her head, as if to an answer he hadn’t given. “But he should have died. When releasing the power of the hill—when killing the king and queen—fair Titania, powerful Oberon—he should have been dead, there and then, the vengeance of the hill upon him. How can he be alive?”

“But I killed an elf myself. And I live still.”

She shook her head impatiently. “The elf you killed was not a sovereign. Although all elves are tied into the power of the hill, it is the king or queen who controls it, who, in him or her, holds every other power. Killing them brings instant loss to the whole hill, and immediate, unavoidable retribution.”

Will was tired. He’d waited long, and he’d worked hard during the day, ruling over his little tribe of shiny-faced savages, and he’d drunk too much ale and he’d been attacked and he’d killed. For the first time, he’d killed, if not a man, then a creature so much like a man that there was scant difference.

What the dark lady had said added up slowly in his addled brain. Slowly but surely it formed a pattern and made sense, if sense of a sort he didn’t like. “But,” he said. “But you said I should kill the elf king. You said . . .” He stared at the lady and on her face read, in rapid succession, guilt, dismay, and guilt again. “You said that I would get my Nan back then. You said that. And now you say that if my father killed the king and queen, then he should be dead.”

The lady shook her head and smiled, the quiet smile of an adult watching a child’s harmless tantrum.

Her smiling assurance made Will’s voice small. “If I kill the king . . . will I die?”

The lady Silver’s eyes regained some of their spark, as if she lit it by an effort of will. “Ah, Will,” she said. “Ah, Will. But, you see, Titania and Oberon were rightful and just monarchs, full of might and power, while Sylvanus . . .” Her voice trailed off. “And you’ll have my protection, Will. My own protection.”

Smiling like that, she looked very pretty but still helpless and frail.

Will felt her charm, but not strongly enough to cloud his mind. He thought that his father must have had someone’s protection, too, the protection of the person who’d ordered the murder. Yet, that protection didn’t prevent his being haunted. But still, Will’s father was alive.

Will walked over to the dagger and picked it up.

Silver turned to face him, her features a mask of shock. She took a step back, then another. “I mean you no harm, kind master Shakespeare. Indeed . . .”

But Will shook his head. “It is I who means no harm. No harm at all.” And with outstretched arm he made as if to throw the dagger in the fire. The metal would no doubt survive the flames, but maybe its evil power would be purged. Did not fire purge and cleanse?

“Stay.” The dark lady stretched out her arm hastily, to prevent his flinging the dagger in the fire and, in her hurried movement, touched the dagger’s blade. Blue fire sparked and the lady screamed, and took her naked hand to her mouth, and sucked on it. “Keep it,” she said, around her fingers. “Keep it. It will serve you well.”

Will brought his arm in slowly, and looked at the dagger. “Serve me well?” he asked. The dagger glowed with an inner light, as though having tasted the blood of one elf and sensing the presence of another, it longed for another meal. He set the dagger down on the table and looked up at her. “You said it would serve me well. Serve me well how, lady? I want my wife and daughter back, not anyone’s life.” Will sat down slowly, on the bench next to the table. “And what has this elf king done to deserve death? Already, I’ve killed . . .” He thought of the ghost he’d dreamed up and shivered. Maybe Will’s father had a reason for his fears.

The lady hesitated, then sat down across the table from Will and leaned forward eagerly, till her face was within a hand span of his.

Nan’s cat, who’d been sitting at the table, watching it all with a cat’s skepticism, hissed and spat and sought refuge above the keeping cupboard.

The lady Silver’s eyes looked into Will’s with intense, aching need. “The king must die to expiate his treason. His treason in having his parents killed and stealing the throne from me.” Like that, sudden tears sprang to her eyes and rolled, fat and sparkling, down her pale face. “His crime has set both worlds wrong. Only his death, the vengeance for his awful crime, can make the world right and give your Nan to you again.”

Will’s heart contracted, and he squeezed Silver’s hand in his.

He’d never been able to resist a crying woman.

Thus had Nan cried, on that far off day when she’d told Will that no one would ever want her, that everyone called her a shrew, that she’d dance barefoot at her sisters’ weddings and for their sakes lead apes in hell. Nine months later, Susannah had been born.

Will leaned across the table and squeezed the elf’s small hand. It felt and looked cold and frail in his, all too human, with delicate bones and a faint blue tracery of veins beneath the smooth, pale skin. Will squeezed it, seeking to give the lady some of his own warmth, some of his own strength.

Her parents? The throne? The realization that he faced royalty sank into Will’s sluggish mind, causing his jaw to go slack, like the jaw of a fool walking through a great town.

“Milady,” he said, and attempted to stand, and would have done it, but for her small hand that still held his hand fast. “I did not know you were a princess. And I do not know . . . Milady, I do not . . .” He wished to tell her he was rough, a farm boy, a village boy and ignorant of all courtly stuff, human or supernatural. He wanted to explain that he didn’t know how to deal with princesses, mortal or not, and that he was bound to hurt her with his crude words, his crude gestures, his uncouth touch.

He couldn’t express himself better, though, than by holding her hand tight. He remembered that she had kissed him. She, the princess of an ethereal world. He’d always wanted to be better than he was, but he’d never thought he’d climb so fast. A smile, only half mocking, shaped itself on his face. An enchanted princess had approached him. An enchanted princess wanted his help. “You say we have to kill this traitor, then,” he said. “And that this”—he touched the dagger with one finger—“will do it? But who will pay for it, milady, and how?”

She looked at him with heartbreaking sorrow. She gave him her other hand, too, grasping at his hands like a drowning man clawing for the riverbank. “My parents were killed,” she said, “these five years ago, at the behest of my older brother.” Her face pinched in sorrow. “That dagger will do the trick and dispatch the traitor. I know from the grief it caused poor Pyrite.” Her eyes brimmed again and, while she looked up and met his gaze, something came and went behind her stare, like a veil quickly lifted and then dropped again. “My brother told me what it did. . .how the poor elf dissolved into another world. . . .”

“But your brother . . . Your brother, Quicksilver?” Will asked, puzzled. Her words circled round and round inside his head, beautiful and senseless like the ditties sung by schoolchildren at their merry games. And like his pupils singing, it made his head spin. “I thought—” He didn’t know how to explain what he thought. He’d believed that her brother, the king, was her foe. Were they, after all, friends? Was she, then, on the side of those that had sent the men to kill Will? No, it couldn’t be, Quicksilver himself had said that the king wanted Will dead. “How many brothers have you?”

The lady looked at him, her silver eyes wide open and her expression intent. Again there was that feeling, of a curtain opening for just a second and then closing before Will could get an idea of what it hid. “Two brothers,” she said. “Two brothers. Quicksilver and I—we were one birth. My older brother, he has stolen the throne. From us.”

“But if he’s older, perforce . . . Is he not the heir?”

Silver smiled, flashing bright, tiny teeth, the teeth of a mouse in a human mouth, the sharp teeth of a woodland creature showing between the pulpy softness of a woman’s lips. “No. Among our race, it is the younger that inherits, or the girl. It is assumed the older one will go throughout the world, seeking adventure. It is the younger child who follows in the parents’ footsteps.” She clasped Will’s hands, hard, her strength better suited to a swordsman than to a woman’s frail muscles. “It is our law, and under our law, I’ve been dispossessed.”

An odd arrangement, but who was Will to complain? If she said she should have been the heir, then she should have been the heir. And yet, his doubt remained. “But who will pay for this killing, milady? Is there not a price for murder, even if merited murder, even if just vengeance? Who will pay for it?”

The lady sighed. She stood up and walked around the table to stop in front of Will, and sighed again. Great tears fell down her prominent cheekbones, rolled down to drip from her pointy chin.

Will pulled his handkerchief from his sleeve, and offered it to her. She took it, wiping her face without seeming to effect much drying. The fresh source of her grief provided a continuous spring to her tears and made them fall again and again down her face like a river ever renewed.

“I’ve never killed anyone,” Will said. “Nor much of anything. A . . . a few hares, but never . . . Lady, could we not make him redress your wrong another way?”

She laughed. “What, infirm of purpose already?” Her silver eyes gazed into his with all-consuming intensity. “What about Nan—do you not wish to rescue her?”

Will’s mouth worked in vain, conjuring no sound. A perfume of lilacs, thick and cloying, flowed from the dark lady and made his blood pound along his veins like an army deployed for assault.

He loved Nan, he thought, but he wanted this lady. He wanted to lay his head on her bosom, he wanted to compass her svelte waist within his hands. He wanted . . .

“Don’t you love me?” the dark lady asked.

His hand reached out to the lady Silver’s shoulder and clasped the wet, frayed gown. “How come you here, like this?” he asked, his voice small, his thoughts all at odds with his labored, slow words. “How come you with clothes in tatters and why do you look hurt?”

The lady glared, hot temper burning like twin hearth fires in her eyes, lips trembling and nostrils flared.

“He expelled me,” she said. “He. Expelled. Me. From hill and dale and the haunts of our kind and our tribe. From the dancing glens and the power circles. He. Expelled. Me. Me, who should have been king and ruled over elvenkind, my every wish obeyed, my every whim feared.”