Any Man So Daring (19 page)

But she didn’t answer him.

Scene Sixteen

A clearing in the green forest. Miranda sits beneath an overspreading tree, her head in her hands, in the position of a saddened child, or one who doesn’t understand the events around her, and who needs guidance from somewhere or from someone. Into the clearing, Will emerges, running. Miranda gets up, and Will checks his step.

M
iranda sat beneath the tree and sobbed. She’d dropped somewhere in thick of the forest the net that Proteus had acquired at such dear cost to himself.

She didn’t think she could find it now if she so wished, and she didn’t know if she wished it.

She couldn’t tell. Her mind held, impressed upon it, the image of Proteus's ungallant behavior, his pressing close an unarmed adversary, his pushing for the blood of one who would gladly have surrendered all to Proteus's claims.

“Proteus,” she sobbed. “Ah, Proteus. Beautiful tyrant. Fiend angelical. Dove-feathered raven. Wolvish-ravening lamb. Despised substance of divinest show. Just opposite to what you justly seemed. A damned saint, an honorable villain. Oh, nature. What had you to do in hell when you did bower the spirit of a fiend in almost immortal paradise of such sweet flesh?”

And yet, was this right? For perhaps Proteus had held back, perhaps Proteus didn’t take the offered throne and power and magic and all for he knew it not to be offered in earnest.

Perhaps he knew the only way to stop Quicksilver was to murder the king.

And yet -- how did she know the king was evil? How, but that Proteus had told her?

And how did she know Proteus was right, but that he was lovely?

And yet, wasn’t there more to it? Proteus loved her. She’d known Proteus long.

Proteus said Quicksilver was a villain and Proteus was an honorable elf.

“Blistered be my tongue for my words. He was not born to shame. Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit. Proteus is perfect and his brow is a throne where honor may be crowned sole monarch of universal earth. Oh, what a beast was I to chide him.”

Some small sound called her attention, and looking up she saw the other creature, the creature that wasn’t an elf.

His coarse face was fixed in some anxiety, his skin gone the color of tallow candles.

How could Quicksilver love such a one? Did he truly?

He did if Proteus didn’t lie, and Miranda had decided that Proteus told truth. But then Quicksilver was mad. Not a villain so much as turned from his wits.

For how could elf, perfect and true, love this creature where already, the signs of death showed in the shedding hair, the drying skin, the dull eyes?

The creature stood, feet together, and stared at Miranda as a petitioner who would speak but is afraid.

He cleared his throat and doffed his cap and bowed his head, then looked up, his eye just spying to see whether she noticed his deference.

She grew impatient with it all. No one had ever showed her this deference except Caliban, and even Caliban had never been this obsequious.

She stood in a leap and wiped her tears with her hand, while her other hand attempted to smooth her hair. She wondered if she looked at all as a princess should look to this creature.

But what did this creature know of princesses? “Speak,” she said, and heard her own voice crack and willed it to great decision as she ordered again, “Speak, mortal. Who are you? And what want you with me?”

Again the man looked up without straightening his head, which remained bowed. “Milady, my name is Will Shakespeare, and I believe you know who I am right enough. Or at least I knew you in that dim and distant infancy no man remembers, and perhaps no elf. To speak plain, I knew you when you were but a baby.”

“A baby?”

He looked up now fully and some memory softened his gaze, as his lips tugged upward into an almost-smile. “Aye, a babe you were, but months old, when my wife was kidnapped by your--” Will stopped, afraid that any mention of her father would raise her filial feeling, and with it perhaps some resentment or fear that would make her run. “My wife was kidnapped by fairyland, to be your nursemaid. My daughter, Susannah, who is much your age, was taken with her and, for a time, the two of you slept side by side in a single crib.”

Miranda stared at the man in disbelief. His wife? A coarse, mortal woman had been her nurse?

How could this be?

It was as if she’d had a whole other life of which she remembered nothing.

“Your wife?” she asked. “She was my nursemaid?” It had to be a lie. She shook her head.

“My wife, Nan,” Will said.

She frowned. How could it be that all these people knew her? Proteus and Quicksilver and now this mortal? They all knew her, but she knew nothing of them, nor could she guess whom to trust.

“I don’t remember,” she said. She spoke as a child speaks of a lost toy.

The mortal smiled, a smile at the edge of laughter.

What was so amusing about Miranda’s lack of memory? Why did it please him? She stared at him out of the corner of her eye. Was he lying to her?

“You wouldn’t remember,” he said. “For it was but a week that Nan was your nursemaid, and that so long ago that you were but a little fool. Yet you were the prettiest babe I ever saw.”

“I was?” she asked, and almost smiled at this because, for once, this accorded with what Proteus had told her -- that she was the most beautiful, the most royal of all elves. “I was? But why did your wife leave, then?” For if she were that pretty, wouldn’t mortals have been in her thrall? She straightened her hair with her hand.

“Your...,” Will hesitated. “She was taken against her will,” he said, "and she pined for me and for our home, and thus, with the help of Quicksilver, your...your uncle, I rescued her.”

“Quicksilver?” she asked. “My uncle? He helped you? Was that when he had my father killed and, treacherously, usurped his throne?”

She had never thought the confirmation of such a truth would come to her in this strange place.

But the mortal didn’t seem to think she was telling the truth. He started as though slapped, and shook his head.

“Your father was not killed by Quicksilver,” he said. “Nor did your uncle take the throne unlawfully. He was the true heir, you see, by law and custom of fairy land.”

Miranda blinked. Quicksilver the true heir? No. No. This did not accord with what Proteus had told her.
 
“Was Quicksilver the younger?” she asked. “For among us it is the contrary to the laws of mankind. It is the youngest or the woman that inherits. Only the youngest or the woman.”

The mortal nodded. “Yes, Quicksilver is younger than your father was, younger by thousands of years.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. “But then....” She shook her head. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. “But then my uncle was always the rightful heir, the rightful king. But then my father must--” she stopped, and her mouth dropped open. No. The mortal had to be confused.

Slowly, she raised her gaze to meet his. She felt as though around her the whole world were crumbling, facts and certainties come crashing down.

For if the mortal were right, then Proteus was a villain, seeking to turn her against her uncle, the rightful king of fairyland.

But if that were true, then was all of reality subverted. Fair was foul and foul was fair and everything was that which it wasn’t.

And the mortal, so ugly, was good, and Proteus, so beautiful, was evil, and the world had turned so far from the course of legends that Miranda, deceived, would never find her way.

“Milady,” the mortal said, and looked scared. “Milady? Are you stricken?”

“Aye,” she heard her own voice. “Aye, I am stricken. I am sped. Who can help me? For I’m lost in a fog with no direction. Proteus looks like an angel. Can he be other? Proteus told me that my father was right and noble and honorable. He told me I was a princess of fairyland, daughter of the just the true king of fairyland. He told me my uncle was a tyrant who had held the throne by evil and over the bodies of those he subjugated.”

She advanced towards the mortal, like a blind woman seeking sight. “You must tell me the truth, kind stranger. You must tell me what the truth is, how my father came to die, and how I came to grow up with the Hunter, the dread avatar of vengeance, the very body of final justice for both men and elves.”

She felt magic crackling around her as she spoke, magic empowering her words, so that her command to the mortal was a compelling spell.

The magic crackled and shone around her, tendrils forming and reaching out for the mortal.

His eyes bugged out. He opened his mouth as though to scream, and took a step back, as if he’d bolt.

But he moved not. “My lady,” he said, his voice small and strangled. “My kind lady.” He stepped back from her crackling power, her radiating force. His eyes looked as if he’d rather run, but couldn’t.
 

“Speak,” she said. “Tell me the truth.”

Sweat dripped from the creature’s forehead. “Find another to tell you, for I cannot.”

She shook her head. “What other? My uncle? But Proteus says my uncle is a villain. But then if my uncle isn’t a villain, Proteus lies.” She felt tears fall down her cheeks, hot and scalding, and her voice come plaintive from her throat. “You must tell me the truth and tell me right, of who my father was and how I came by this weird life, being the adopted daughter of the Hunter.”

“Your father...aye, Lady, your father was a villain or misguided, so possessed by his ambition, so overruled by his need for power that he’d killed his parents to inherit.”

“His parents?”

“Titania and Oberon they were called and, with a charmed knife he had them stabbed.” The mortal bit his lip, and his eyes darted sideways, as though his lips wished to say more but he prevented them.

The girl stopped on her tracks and said, “Oh.”

More tears rolled down her face, and she felt as though the world spun around her, as though were she the earth encircled by the sun. “Oh. Did the Hunter then take my father? Is my father one of the dread dogs with whom I grew up in ignorance?”

She thought of the dark, slavering creatures who jumped and fought and slept on the floor of the Hunter, ignored by him save for the occasional kick, the occasional summons.

They smelled and looked vile, and felt strange and cold to the touch. Miranda had avoided them as much as she could. Now she ran their low muzzles, their terrible fanged mouths, through her memory, trying to think which of them might hold the soul of her father: dark Malice, cold Unkindness, dread Envy.

Their muzzles looked all the same to her, as did their narrowed, glittering red eyes.

And she was descended from such a one?

The mortal shook his head. “No, lady. It is true the Hunter took your father as one of his dogs when the tangled skein of his treasons unraveled for all to see. It is true he took him and that your father, heartless villain that he was, in his last moment of freedom, took you with him into that dread captivity.

“Innocent and pure that you were, Quicksilver told us you could not become one of the dogs, nor be seduced by the evil that surrounded you. You must be raised in inviolate kindness, in some distant castle, untouched by man or elf, until you reached your maturity, when the kiss and true love of a true prince might release you. This Quicksilver told us was the legend and lore of fairykind....”

“And my uncle, Quicksilver, then, he did not kill my father? What became of my father?” Her tears slowed, but she wasn’t sure that she was well. It seemed to her that her heart had ceased beating and seized, in pain and anguish, within her chest.

“Oh, your father, Lady. His immortal ambition would not rest, so he wrested power from the Hunter himself and ran, a plague upon the world. Quicksilver, who considered himself responsible, came to him, but he could not stop him, and upon London, the great city of mankind’s queen, your father descended, a predator feeding on suffering.

“There, a man, a...friend of mine lost his life, and your uncle seemed on the verge of losing his throne and the world its freedom before, through my agency, by luck the Hunter brought your father to ground...”

“You killed my father?” Miranda asked, staring at him, reading between the lines and feeling the dread horror of facing her father’s true murderer.
 

So the legends were right. The evil were evil-looking. For killing her father must the mortal have become this twisted, aged creature. “You killed my father,” she said. “You... villain.”

Proteus had been right, right all along. And she’d stolen his weapon and left him alone on the beach, with no defense against the cunning tyrant Quicksilver.

Miranda must go back to him. This mortal, this... creature, she would deal with later.

She ran out of the clearing.

Behind her, the mortal yelled, “But... my son?”

Miranda ignored him. She hadn’t decided what to do about the mortal boy yet.

For, if his father was guilty, would it be proper to give the boy to a murderer?

Scene Seventeen