Prospero in Hell (50 page)

“You do not know what it is like to have known Heaven’s glory and lost it.”

Astreus turned away and gazed off into the dream forest. I was left looking at his profile, which was beautiful and filled me with longing. Eventually, he began speaking again.

“Imagine you went to live in a house that looked a great deal like your father’s mansion, only nothing was ever quite right. The doors would not close properly. The well did not work. The servants were rude. The walls were moldy. The halls smelled of rotting fruit, and no matter how many logs you put on the fire, you were always cold.

“Nor can you ever grow used to this new house, precisely because it reminds you so much of your old home. You cannot see the blighted rose without recalling the beauty of your old gardens. You cannot walk the corridors without its layout bringing to mind the house you loved. You cannot look through the dingy windows at the overcast sky without remembering the glorious skies above the mansion of your youth. Everything you see makes you heartsick for the original, of which this current place is but a dark reflection. That is what it is like to remember Heaven and dwell on Earth.”

Abruptly I was back on the balcony, as Astreus—the real, waking Astreus—drew away. I was not sitting, but standing exactly where I had been when he leaned toward me and I thought he might kiss me.

I felt a pang of regret.

Nervously, I put my hands to my face, feeling my eyes and cheeks. They were damp, but my fingers came away wet with tears alone.

The elves had been tithing his people, Astreus said. The Aerie Ones were his people. Mab’s voice echoed in my thoughts:
Lord Astreus did my people a great good once
. Was this what Mab had meant? No wonder they loved him!

The elf lord had walked over to the railing where he gazed silently into the storm. A full five minutes went by. I waited patiently, stray raindrops dampening my hair. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, as if coming from a great distance.

“One day, many eons ago, Carbonel Lightfoot told me of a fabulous beast, the White Hart, whom he claimed could free men and elves from sorrow, even from the very clutches of Hell. I followed her for a year and a day, and when I finally came upon her she looked not like a hart, but like a white kirin with a single horn rising from the center of her head. I knelt before her
and asked her to free me from my oath to Hell, that I might try to find my way back to Heaven. She told me that one day a maiden would come, a Sibyl bearing her mark, who would free not only myself, but all the elves. I thought… you might be she.”

“All the elves… !” I gasped.

Oh, how I would have loved to have been the Sibyl who freed the elves from Hell! Much of the evil elves do was done to placate their dark masters. What might they be like if they were free? They may still be freed someday, of course, but I would not be the one to do it. It was someone else’s story now.

“Unaware of her duplicitous nature,” Astreus ran his finger along an orchid pedal, “I foolishly told all I had learned to Queen Maeve, for I assumed the Elf Queen would be as delighted as I to learn that Fairyland might one day throw off the yoke of Hell. She aped interest, of course, plying me with questions. Only much later did I realize her dark intent. Since that day, she has done all she could to oppose me, and it was to keep me from pursuing this matter that she tithed me. My theft of the water of the Lethe on Mephisto’s behalf was but an excuse.

“Even at Father Christmas’s, she sent Sylvie—whom she knew I had once desired above all others—to me in hopes of keeping me from withdrawing with you, a Handmaiden of the Unicorn. Had she known what gift I held for you, I am certain she would have made a much greater effort to keep us apart. Alas, for us, she found a simpler and crueler way to kill both of our dreams.”

“I am so sorry,” I whispered. “But why did you wait so long to begin with? Why didn’t you ask another Sibyl?”

“I have not been able to find one,” he replied. “’Twas a time when Sibyls were often seen in Fairyland, but these last handful of centuries, there has been nary a one. Even Handmaidens are hard to come by these days. You were my last hope.”

Astreus returned to watching the rain, which had died down to a light pleasant drizzle.

“This is the last time I will ever see the sky, yet the storm fails. Does it not know the agony in my heart?” he whispered, his voice ragged. Turning to me, he eyed my flute and asked, “Will you play for me, Miranda?”

Wordlessly, I raised the flute and began to play. The winds rose. The rain danced. Dark thunderheads raced like black galleons across the gray heavens. The tempest howled, shaking rocks free of the mountainside to
bounce and crash into the valley below. Astreus watched this as might a caged and bedraggled eagle that stared through the bars of its prison at the wide freedom of the sky.

He turned his head, and our eyes met. The pounding of the rain sang to us, and I saw reflected in his stormy eyes the same love of wind, storm, and weather that beat so fiercely in my breast. While he spoke not a word, I felt as if I could hear his voice in my heart, whispering.

“
It is as if we were made to be together, Miranda. The storm calls to us, and our hearts cannot help dancing. We are the same, you and I. You know it to be true.
”

I lowered my flute and closed my eyes, just listening to the storm. I could not kill Astreus, I realized, not matter how he beseeched me. Surely, there was another way. Surely, my Lady could… Only I no longer had a Lady. Tears spilled over my lashes and mingled with the rain.

Astreus leaned over me and wiped away my tears with his fingers. As his fingers brushed my cheek, the modern world fell away, and we were dancing, he and I, amidst the May Day revel where we first met. Fairy lights glittered in the pine boughs overhead, and elvish music played from the open door in the hill. Farther away, slightly blurred, I could see the others—Erasmus, Father, Cornelius, Logistilla. A sane Mephistopheles danced with the Elf Queen, and Theophrastus, young and hale, partnered a lovely elf maid.

We danced together, gliding over the grass. His eyes mirrored the night sky, and his laughter rang about us like song. Leaning toward me, he brushed his lips against mine. His mouth tasted of wind and honeysuckle. I moaned softly, and he drew me tightly against him. Our kiss deepened, my arms snaked about his neck… and encountered empty air.

I stood back on the balcony. Astreus stood a little ways away, his expression unreadable. I blushed and turned away, uncertain whose dream I had just been dreaming.

“Ah, the glories of what might have been…” he murmured as we stared into the storm.

“I could not have become a Sibyl in any case,” I murmured sadly, as I watched the rain plunge into the depths of the ravine. “To do so, I would have had to free the Aerie Ones, and I could not. My father’s plan requires that they be bound a while longer… for mankind’s sake.”

Gone was my noble companion. Where he had been stood some fey and wild thing. The winds whipped about him until his sable opera cape billowed
and his storm-dark hair rippled about his head. His eyes burned like black coals, blazing with barely controlled fury.

I drew back, frightened.

“Fool!” Astreus cried. “Had you but freed me from my oath, I could have curbed the Aerie Ones upon your behalf! They are my people! Commanding them not to harm your precious mortals would have been the least of prices to pay. Had you but freed them—I could have been free! Mephisto could have been saved, and you would have been a Sibyl. Everything you and I desire could have been ours!”

“I-I didn’t realize…” I whispered, heartsick.

“Slaver and daughter of a thief!” he spat, drawing splendor about him like a cloak. “You and your family have been the undoing of me. You have done me irreparable harm, while I have done nothing to warrant this terrible fate which befalls me. Every fond thought I have held of you has become a burning coal in my heart. The hope you represented was nothing. You are a lie!”

“That’s hardly fair. I never promised you anything!” I cried. “It was not even me you wanted, but a Sibyl. I have never been and never will be a Sibyl!”

“Obviously not! You are unworthy of the station!”

I recoiled, eyes stinging.

“Enough, I return to Hell. I would not allow one such as you to kill me! You are contemptible! Perhaps I can leave enough of myself in Seir to force him to seek death at Theophrastus’s hands.”

Astreus stormed away, yanking the circlet of silver and horn from his head. Darkness began gathering about him.

Frightened, I stuck my flute behind my back and grabbed my fan. I started to move forward, but he raised a hand to stop me. I halted.

“Stand over there,” he pointed to the balcony railing.

I could not tell if this was Astreus or Seir talking. Dubious, I backed up until I was pressed against the stone railing, facing him, my hand curled around the haft of my fan, which was hidden behind my back. For a moment, he stood regarding me; my dark hair and pale features framed by the violence of the storm.

“Why over here?” I asked hoarsely.

As Seir’s dark shape faded slowly away, Astreus’s voice hung in the air: “Because I would have my last memory be of the two things I most loved.”

I sank to my knees and knelt, cradling my head in my arms.

Oh, if only I had listened to Mab when he told me to leave well enough
alone! Perhaps, if I had turned my back on the message in Father’s journals, my pleasant orderly life would never have come unraveled. Instead, I had lost my innocence. My Lady had abandoned me. The lovely mother I had always idolized had turned out to be a myth. The holy love between my father and his wife, which I had believed in since my childhood, might be a lie. I had learned my father, whom I had always adored, had secretly enslaved me so I would not take after my birth mother, an ugly twisted witch. My dreams had been dashed; my immortal brothers and sisters made mortal. The only glimmer of love I had found after an eternity of solitude was now lost forever. I had lost Astreus. I had lost Ferdinand. I had lost my Lady. I had lost everything.

How long I wept, I cannot say, but the sky was growing dark when I finally wiped my eyes. So black was my despair that I could not go on or move without some kind of help or guidance. If my Lady would not answer me, I would have to go elsewhere. I thought of Gregor and, for the second time in my long life, I prayed to God.

“Please,” I prayed. “Help me. Give me hope.”

The setting sun coming through the leaves cast a deep golden light over the balcony, and the freshly washed air smelled of water lilies and of some heavenly scent I could not place. A calm seemed to settle over the ravine, soothing my ragged spirits. Only, I was facing south, so how could I be bathed in the light of the sunset?

Something hovered above me shining with a golden glow. My fan and the flute were both out of reach, scattered across the balcony where I had dropped them in my misery. Yet, even as I began to panic, a sense of peace came upon me that was so pervasive as to utterly banish fear.

An angel stood upon the air, shining with a golden light. Delicate silver slippers shod her feet. Pearls the color of a new moon glowed at the waist, sleeves, and neck of her gown of purest green. Five sets of wings—white with a touch of black, like the wings of sea gulls—spread out from her shoulders and back, and five halos, each a perfect circle, rose above her head: one of white light, one of ocean spray, one of water lilies sprinkled with perfect water drops, one of white river foam, and the last of golden light, like a shining wedding ring.

“Rejoice!”

The sound of her heavenly voice was so lovely as to bring tears of joy to my eyes, as if I heard the speech that divine thing of which a flute was merely a material approximation.

“Who are you?” I breathed.

“I am she who brings the wisdom that shatters illusions, the draught that is sweet upon the lips but bitter in the stomach. At the Will of the Most High, I once brought such a draught to a boy called Solomon. Do you not know me, my Child?”

“I know you,” I whispered.

Muriel Sophia! The angel who first visited me long ago, after the death—I knew now—of Ferdinand! When she had appeared to me, I had been wandering, ghostlike, down the red corridors of
Castello Sforzesco,
aimless and hopeless. I had been lost to grief, and her visit had saved me.

“You ask me to rejoice.” My voice cracked from sorrow and awe. “How can I, when everything worth rejoicing about has been taken from me?”

“Sorrow does not become thee, Child. Rejoice and fear not, for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom.”

“What Kingdom? Heaven?”

“Earth.”

“The Earth?” I rocked back and rose to my feet. “What do you mean?”

“Into the hands of Solomon, the Most High placed rulership of the Earth,”
replied the Virtue.
“Prospero and his children are Solomon’s heirs. Yours is the duty to guard the mortal world from the forces of Hell.”

“Will Solomon’s dream die with us?”

“Throughout the ages, I have watched over the
ORBIS SULEIMANI
,
sheltering them beneath my wings; inspiring them to remain true to their purpose; shepherding them when they have strayed. This charge shall I continue until the end of the world.
”