Ill Met by Moonlight (15 page)

Will’s hand went to the handle of the dagger he had sheathed, but it stopped there. “If you are of them . . .” he began. Should he give a dagger to the person—creature—who’d just fought, as he put it, his oldest friend? Would he not kill Will, this elf whose friend Will had killed?

But he’d come into the fray to defend Will.

The creature laughed again, one of those frightening laughs with no joy in it. “Come, boy, come. I came into this to protect you, to keep your head on your shoulders, not to strike it off.” He held his hand out for the dagger.

His voice sounded familiar, but in a way that Will could not quite understand. He’d always had a good memory for sounds, and he knew not this timbre, nor this tone, yet the voice sounded, nevertheless, like one he’d heard before.

It also sounded commanding, full of power, used to demanding and not begging.

Will handed him the dagger, wooden handle out, and the creature held it, by the wood. First, he looked down at the thing in horror, as if Will had just handed him a snake. Then, he probed, with the tip of a tentative finger for the dagger end. A blue flash, a sound of sizzling, and a smell of scorch, and the creature took the tip of his gloved finger to his mouth and handed the dagger back to Will. “An evil thing,” he said. “More enchantments and curses on it, boy, than I could dream of heaping on anything.” He paused, blinked, and went a shade paler, his eyes full of sudden understanding. “Unless I were making the knife and sharpening it to slay the power of the hill and the rulers thereof. Keep it, boy, keep it. It will serve you well.” His face set itself in a hard grimace, looking as though years unnumbered had carved runnels down his perfect skin.

Amazed, Will accepted the dagger, and slid it into its sheath, thinking how strange it all was, how odd. Who was this creature, and why had he come to Will’s aid, when Will most needed it? Why had he set himself against his own kin and friends for Will’s sake, and why did he speak now of giving back to Will a weapon he thought so dangerous?

If this were a guardian angel, it was a mad one.

“Why would you defend me, milord? And why would they attack me? Even if they are people from the hill, why set themselves against me? They already have my wife and daughter, both.” He heard his own voice echo pitifully, as the voice of the poor man claiming the loss of his single ewe lamb, and the full misery of it struck him, till he had trouble not crying. Yet he kept his eyes dry. Let the stranger, this unnamed creature, cry if he wished, but Will was a man and a married one. He would not lend himself to such displays.

He could not see the creature’s expression, but his commanding voice came out with a sneer, a force, a desperate strength of hatred and disdain. “They attacked you because the king of elves, the King of Fairyland, has decreed that you must die, so that he can have your wife for his own.”

Will turned startled eyes to the creature and found, etched on the creature’s face, such an expression of hatred that his hand went to the sheathed dagger.

But the creature looked away and spat on the ground in great disgust. “The coward, the traitorous usurper who sits on the throne of elvenkind,” he said. “Don’t you remember?” He looked back at Will, his eyes softer, though a little impatient, like the eyes of an adult contemplating a slow child. “I told you yesterday that you must kill him, if you want to have any hope of winning back your wife.”

“You told me?” Will asked amazed. “You? I’ve never seen you.”

The stranger’s cheeks tinged a light pink, and his small, pulpy lips squeezed themselves into an impatient line. “Oh, I didn’t tell you myself, but my . . . sister . . . my sister Silver told you. Do you not remember?”

“Your sister?” Gulping air as he remembered that lady of the night before, her rounded breasts pressed against his arm, her slim-waisted form walking next to him, the touch of her soft hand on his arm, Will foundered. “Your sister?”

The creature smiled, an ironic smile, and bowed a little, and made as if to take off a hat he wasn’t wearing, “I am Quicksilver, Prince of Elvenland, at your service, Will, son of John Shakespeare. My sister sent me to protect you, that I might keep you alive and you might get your wife back, yet. My sister has a most tender regard for your safety.” The smile might be mocking, or it might be appeasing.

Will couldn’t tell which. He felt blood rush to his cheeks, thinking of the lady Silver, and he tried to speak in a way that would not aggrieve the lady’s brother. Did elves have honor, and mind if it got stained? He remembered how furious the other elf—the one Will had unwittingly killed—had become at the mention of his sister’s name, and he shuddered. “I . . . I too have a most tender and respectful regard for the lady your sister.”

Quicksilver drew in breath like a man drowning, but exploded in laughter all the same. A brittle laughter, shaky and afraid of itself, looking all around for dark corners where fear hid that might slay it. He turned to face Will, with something like a devilish light playing in his dark green eyes even while tears still shone there. “Ah, Will. A tender regard, then? Not a firm one? Silver will be disappointed.”

Will felt the blood rush all the faster to his cheeks, and looked at the ground of the path, the hard ground, turned to mud by the incessant rain and trampled by men’s feet in a mortal fight. The stains of supernatural blood on the ground stood out as vivid as ever, shining in soft, puddled patches.

“Come, come, boy,” Quicksilver said. “I will walk you to the edge of your town, where we might meet your own kind, and keep you safe from mine. Three of them ran off, and who knows what deviltry they might not be stirring?” His face turned grave, all amusement gone from it. He started up, a little ahead of Will, and Will, obediently, walked behind him.

They walked a long while in silence. The elf’s footsteps made no more sound than a leaf fluttering gently to the ground. Will’s own footsteps were lost in the constant patter of rain, the growl of thunder. Rain lashed them and soaked them, and stole their warmth like a greedy thief.

Halfway through the path to Stratford, when the air became tinted with the smell of burning wood, Quicksilver looked back over his shoulder and asked, “That dagger, where did you get it?”

“From my father’s workshop.” The hard, driven rain filled Will’s mouth, forcing him to spit it out. “A year ago, when I found I must walk all this way from Wincot, I borrowed the dagger from my father’s shop . . . in case I should meet footpads, or highwaymen abroad.”

The elf chuckled, a cold chuckle that sounded like ice breaking. “Some footpads you meet, Will.” When he looked over his shoulder, again, he didn’t appear amused. “And where did your father get it?”

Will shrugged. “I don’t know. I found it in his shop, behind some pelts, and I thought I might as well use it. Why?”

“Oh, nothing much and no reason.” The elf’s voice betrayed much reason, indeed. “Is this your father who hides in his house and lets his business dwindle?”

Will felt a prickle of annoyance. Had he told Silver that much? He remembered her beauty and her lilac smell making him drunk. He might have. He might have, at that. But must she run and tell it to her brother? “Aye,” he said. “My father who claims creditors will come and collect from him if he shows himself.” And then, with a spur of filial pride, he added, “Though he owes no man anything.”

The elf didn’t answer that for a while, and Will thought the conversation had been forgotten. They walked in the dark forest, under the pelting rain. All around, creatures ran and scurried in the underbrush, their sounds announcing their flight from this unseasonable rain.

What creatures, and of what kind? Animal, or supernatural? And how would Will pull himself from this tangle, where his wife was gone and his life half-forfeit, entailed to a realm he didn’t even understand?

Worried, immersed in his own problems, he barely heard and even less remarked when Quicksilver said, under his breath. “Aye,
no man
. Your father owes
no man
anything.”

Scene 9

The entrance to the fairy palace, wet marble steps glimmering under the rain. From inside the open, arched doorway, spill light and music. Enter Quicksilver, rushing up the steps.

C
limbing the broad stairway of the fairy palace, Quicksilver looked up, wondering if his brother, the treasonous king, had already been told of Pyrite’s death. What reception had Sylvanus prepared for Quicksilver? Did his death wait within?

Though he could see the throne room from the outside through the open door, he saw no person within, as if courtiers had deserted the room or else gathered near the walls, out of Quicksilver’s line of sight. Light and warmth came from the doorway, as did a feeling of normalcy. Music played, the same music that graced the beginning of every royal reception—soft music that didn’t intrude on conversations or flirting.

If Quicksilver but closed his eyes, he could imagine Pyrite alive and well within the white palace, prattling in his vacuous, pretty way to everyone and about everything. But Pyrite wasn’t within. Pyrite would never be there again. He’d been slain by a strange, cursed dagger.

Quicksilver shook his head at his own thoughts. No, no and no. The dagger should not occupy his mind now, and the dagger was not the most relevant matter now. At this moment, with danger hemming him in on all sides, Quicksilver must consider that his brother would have heard how Pyrite had died. Pyrite had died, not in a duel, but in a fight that Quicksilver had precipitated. He’d been killed before discharging the mission Sylvanus had given him. Duels happened and elf killed elf, and normally it entailed no more than a loss of dignities, a diminution of the power that the guilty elf could withdraw from the hill for a time.

But this was different. Though Quicksilver had committed no murder, he had, indubitably, caused Pyrite’s death.

What manner of wrath would Quicksilver have incurred? Would Sylvanus see his brother’s deed as treason? And, if not, would he still pretend it to be such, so as to use it as an excuse for getting rid of his brother, who should have been king in his stead?

At the top of the stairs, Quicksilver rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. His fine leather slippers had got scuffed and dusty in the fray. In fact, all of him felt sticky with sweat and grimy with dust and he must look frightfully disheveled. He’d used magic to keep himself from getting wet, but for cleaning himself, making himself presentable, he’d have preferred a warm bath in his own apartments. Malachite would gladly get Quicksilver’s bath ready, or if not gladly, at least efficiently, as he had done thousands of times before. So, why should Quicksilver not go first to his own room? Why not bathe and rest, and then confront Sylvanus?

Pulling his doublet down and brushing mindlessly at the caking of mud and blood on the black velvet, Quicksilver started to turn away from the front door, ready to go down the stairs and enter through the side door into his own apartments. But just that one movement, that peek down the stairs and around the corner, revealed to him a bulky figure, in black diamond armor, leaning outside the door Quicksilver would use.

A guard. A guard in full war armor. That door was never guarded, in the normal way of things. The realm was at peace and didn’t fear invasion, and lower beings could not, would not, dare the magic of the hill and enter through the door to where their betters gathered. So, why the guard?

Quicksilver could think of only one reason, and the reason he thought of ran like an icy finger down his back, the chill of it making his bright, pale hair stand at the back of his neck.

So he would be arrested if he went in that way, would he? Then he would, doubtless, also be arrested the moment he stepped into the throne room.

Squaring his shoulders, pulling down his disreputable doublet, adjusting his tangled, knotted hair and combing it through with his fingers, Quicksilver turned to enter the throne room.

If he was going to be taken, then he would be taken in front of everyone, where Sylvanus would at least be put to the trouble of holding a mock trial. Quicksilver would not be caught in a dark purlieu where he could be finished by odd magic, like what had killed his parents. Like what had killed Pyrite.

Taking a deep breath, attempting not to shake, though he felt as though ice flowed from his mind to encase his body, Quicksilver made for the open door of the palace and walked in.

No sooner had he stepped through the broad entrance, than two dark shapes, twice as bulky as Quicksilver himself and almost twice as tall, detached themselves from either side of the inner doorway. Guards, giants in full battle armor, arrayed as though to meet a foreign enemy.

Quicksilver ground his teeth and forced a smile onto his lips, and gave the guards the same careless nod he’d given them every day of his adult life, when entering or leaving through that door. If he was going to be taken, he would be taken as if he didn’t expect it. Not like a guilty coward, cringing from punishment to come.

The guards ignored his nod and closed in fast, one on either side of him. Their steps clanged hard against the marble floor, the echoes of them resounding in the broad salon.