Ill Met by Moonlight (25 page)

Quicksilver sighed, thinking how much power he’d used to bring the food here. But the little power he retained would have to do. He had enough for his diminished purpose.

Quicksilver wished his clothes back to their male aspect and restored them to their prime by an effort of wishing, that left him panting and drained. He put on shirt and doublet and breeches and boots. Then he found the knife on the table, and rolling it in a scrap torn from his shirt, he slid its threatening solidity into his sleeve.

Fully attired, he bid a mental farewell to Will. What had happened this night past would never happen again. Quicksilver had woken sure of this knowledge. He would not, ever again, lie with Will in that bed, not in either aspect.

Thus resolved, he slipped out the door and into the rainy garden outside.

The thought of saintly death warred in his mind with his wish to live and enjoy himself. He should seek out another hill that would admit him. Now, Quicksilver could go to Tyr-Nan-Og. But would the queen there take a proscript? Well, if not, he could always have his well-merited death. But first, he must leave Will alone and restore him to the life he’d had before the hill had meddled in it. For the fine future he’d forecast for Will, Will must have his wife back. And how could Will accomplish that?

The sacred Summer Solstice Dance, when mortals could intrude and seize a changeling, and thus recover him, was held at a different glen every year, at the whim of the king. Which clearing would Sylvanus have chosen? Quicksilver could send Will looking and spend all of Will’s mortal life in that endeavor.

But as cold rain hit Quicksilver’s head, he thought that Ariel would know. Ariel had shown friendship for the woman Nan. Surely she’d want to restore Nan to her true lord.

Still, going near the hill, seemed too much pain for too little gain. What did Quicksilver win by such an effort? On the heels of that thought, he reared, startled. Was he then so like the Hunter, never giving aught that he didn’t mean to be paid for in triplicate? Was that why his mind had called to the Hunter’s?

No. He would go to the hill, and humiliate himself before Ariel, to restore Will’s wife to Will. He would do it despite his aching heart, his muted jealousy. He would do it though he gained nothing from it. He would do it to prove himself different from the Hunter. He never wanted to attract attention from such a one again.

He’d go near the hill and there wait, and wait, until he saw Lady Ariel or someone who would agree to call her to him. Perhaps he could even reach as far as to have his magic touch her privately, and call her to him, and beg, and cringe and cry if needed, till she told him what he needed to know.

A great peace fell over his heart. All would be well, for others if not for him.

Walking out, under the pouring rain, Quicksilver noticed the child at the door of the house next to Will’s, a pixie-like thin girl who looked somewhat like Will. He gave her no more thought, as he walked out of the garden and into the woods.

The best time, the only time, for Quicksilver to find Ariel would be now, now before his power depleted itself to nothing, before his craving became too great, before he became a thing of air and shade and little more. His vanity didn’t wish for Ariel to see him that way.

Walking through the woods in the rain, he smiled to himself. He must get it out of fair Ariel. A doubtful prospect, considering her wrath at him. And yet, she’d always been kind. And this was not something he wanted for himself, but for another.

He must woo the lady and represent to her the sure necessity of their alliance.

If nothing else, he thought, as his smile faded from his lips, it might help keep his mind off Will. Will, whom he was starting to like much too well.

Scene 14

Will’s bedroom, the shutters closed against the rain, and scant light filtering through the warped boards.

W
ill woke with the creaking of a floorboard across the room. He struggled to open his eyes, but found it hard going.

Another board creaked, at the foot of the bed, closer to him. He felt that someone was there, close, close by.

Will’s head hurt and his brain roared like ill-tuned virginals. That was Will’s first thought, and the second, fast on that, was that his mouth tasted like a midden.

He opened his eyes, which hurt on opening, and stung with the light, as though he’d been monumentally drunk the night before and were just now wakening from that drunk. What he saw was like a refraction of light on a spider web, as though his world had been fractured and his brain struggled in vain to reconstruct it.

As he blinked, he heard a voice say, “Will, are you awake?”

The voice was Joan’s, but Will couldn’t imagine what his sister was doing in his room, nor could he think of any plausible reason for her presence. His thoughts moved through his mind, slow and quiet, on hesitant feet, like ghosts fleeting through the land of the living. He brought himself to sitting, surprised that his bones didn’t creak and that he didn’t fall apart with the movement. His stomach clutched and hurt, and nausea climbed the slope of his throat. He swallowed back the bitter bile. His sight cleared enough that he could see Joan standing by the bed, staring at him as if the night past had transmuted him into some monster. He reached for the blanket, to make sure his privates were covered, and wished his head would stop pounding.

“Will?” Joan asked.

He closed his eyes, waiting for it all to quiet and for his body, again, to become a good servant to his mind.

Behind his closed eyes, his headache pounded, and, to the rhythm of it, his recollections danced like gaily garbed clowns.

There had been a lady—a fairy lady—dark as the night and fair as the day. A lady, Will thought, and marveled at it.

She was a princess, a fair, enchanted creature such as Will had read about but never expected to meet in real life.

Into his kitchen she’d come to ask him to do justice on her behalf. Justice. He, Will, had been asked to do justice by a lady of high birth, an ethereal lady from the land of fairy tales.

She’d come to him in the kitchen and they’d talked of knives and . . . one knife in particular. He flinched, thinking of what his father had done with that knife. What crimes had been committed and how dark a revenge awaited? And should Will kill again, kill the new king of the elves, and should . . .

He couldn’t think straight. His brain wouldn’t follow from word to word, from sentence to sentence. Instead, it gave him the image of the dark lady and made his blood course faster through his veins, while he remembered what she’d felt like in his arms, and how she’d kissed him, and she’d . . . He blushed, remembering the remainder of the night.

But, oh, what pleasures two bodies could wring out of one night. That, too, was like a dream, a tale he’d never been told and had never imagined. He’d suspected naught beyond the sweet but plain twinings he’d known with Nan.

On opening his eyelids again, he knew what pained him and what illness this was that made his brain so sluggish—he suffered from hangover, as if he’d drunk two casks of good French wine. But he’d drunk nothing, save the ale those hours ago, and a little more ale the lady said she’d conjured from the tavern. And he’d drunk ale too long to be drunk by that little.

He must be drunk on love, and the roar marching through his veins must echo the pain of parting. Love, when taken in excess could be as debilitating as ale, as maddening as good wine. A wondrous thing.

This thought made Will spry; the memories of the night past made him smile; his own joy made him laugh.

“Will?”

Oh, yes, Joan. Will brought his gaze to his sister, who stood by the foot of the bed, her face flushed pink, her expression like that of one with a private joke.

“Yes?” Will asked, the word reverberating through his pained head. His voice rasped and droned like rusty bellows.

Joan smiled. Her wide-open eyes were dark and cunning, filled with knowledge that shouldn’t come to one so young.

Will had a moment of panic. What had Joan seen? And what thought?

“So it is you now,” Joan said, still smiling, her small, bow-shaped lips curled in an amused smile. “It is you now who consort with velvet-clad gentlemen.” She put her hand on the oak footboard, and caressed it with a slow touch. “I wonder what our mother would think.”

Will’s mind felt so strange, so wrapped up in supernatural fogs and miasmas and vapors of otherworldly things, that he couldn’t, for a moment, make out what Joan might mean.

Then he caught the cunning look in the girl’s eye, a sharp, expectant look that he associated with tavern shills and cheaters fleecing the unwary in games of chance. She had seen something, and for that something, to keep that something secret from their parents, she wanted . . . What? Money? Gifts? Or simply the attention of her older brother, whose attention she’d lost almost a year ago, when all his thoughts and all his actions had started revolving around Nan?

But why did the girl babble about gentlemen? What gentlemen? Was there something wrong with her eyes? Will could have understood her talking of the dark lady, and promising to keep that secret for a prize. And though right now Will felt like shouting it all from the rooftops, the glory and ecstasy of that uncalled-for love, that surprising joy, he knew that tomorrow, and the day after, and yet another day, he might rethink it all and not want the company that graced his bed to be bandied about on dark corners, smiled at over the smith’s cold forge, seamed over by the tailor, handed over the draper’s counter like so many tawdry goods.

That was not what he wanted for his dark lady. What he wanted . . . A series of disconnected images crossed Will’s mind: the lady Silver in his bed, and in his kitchen, in his garden and walking about Stratford streets, like Nan had. Children graced with the lady’s fantastical beauty, with her quick, parrying mind. He never put such images in words, not even to himself. He knew, in his bones and in his sinews and in that knowledge that permeates every man and, comes down the generations, weaves itself into every pore, every fragment of him, that this thing he dreamed would never become reality.

The lady was supernatural, a creature of fire and air, of enchantment and thunder, immaterial and weightless as those fantasies that men weave late at night and can’t recall in the morning.

The lady was made of the same cloth as the ancient goddesses who would condescend to lie with a mortal but could never compass their power, their strength, to a mortal form, nor abide beside that mortal as the mortal aged.

Something in Will rustled, whispered, that those whom the gods loved went insane, and perhaps he was insane already, to even allow such images to cross his mind.

Annoyed with himself, more than with Joan, who still stared, her eyes wide and cunning and full of secret, insalubrious knowledge, Will got up, holding the blanket in front of him, and rasped out in anger: “What, child, what? Speak or be gone.” With the blanket held in front of him, looking much like a gypsy woman dancing in a fair and appearing to be nude while taking good care to keep the essentials concealed, he pranced here and there, around the room, looking for his clothes with no success. “What you say makes no sense. What gentlemen, child?”

“If it’s your clothes you want, they’re in the kitchen,” Joan said, slow, amused, her voice that of a grown woman. “Where, no doubt, the good neighbor pulled them off you last night, when your magical party was progressing and all that food was consumed. . . .” She tittered, her tongue touching her lip.

What did this girl know, and where had she learned such mannerisms and dissolute insinuations?

Will backed down the stairs, not an easy feat considering that he must hold the blanket in front of him, for the sake of Joan who followed him and looked on, still amused. With quick, awkward movements, Will draped the blanket around himself like a toga worn by the Romans. It made him think of Plutarch and imagine himself a persuasive Marc Antony standing before Caesar’s coffin in an ancient forum.

But his position was much less dignified. He had—nothing less—to justify his pleasures and his choices to his little sister, aged fourteen and full of more mischief than a fourteen-year-old should be. The girl should have been supervised. She needed more than her lax, crazy old mother. She needed someone who cared what she did and where she went. She went walking about after dark. Had she seen the dark lady? “If you talk of the lady,” Will said, reaching the bottom of the stairs, and backing through his father’s workshop, avoiding by instinct the broad work-scarred tables. “The lady who came here last night came to me on business. Grave business. Involving . . . death and business. Business and business . . . and . . . well, business . . . such as you . . . you couldn’t understand, if you tried.”

Joan tittered again. “Which part of this business was removing your clothes in the kitchen? And what part of it was played by the gentleman who crossed our yard, early morning, right after sunup, and disappeared into the forest? And why did he look like the fat cat who has swallowed the plump bird?”