Ill Met by Moonlight (28 page)

Nan sighed. Eternity. She could have eternity, too, or close enough as made no difference. She could live for centuries, here in the fairy hill by Sylvanus’s side. And she need no more interpose her shadow between Will and his true love.

How they must have laughed, both of them, when Quicksilver told Will that she had thanked him for saving Will’s life.

Nan felt as though her heart were a balloon, pricked, all the blood escaping from it and leaving her gasping in vain for life. “You will go,” she told Ariel. “You will go and tell the king that I will marry him. Tomorrow night, at the great solstice ball, I will eat the elven food and become his wife.”

Scene 16

A small Elizabethan schoolroom with a single, narrow window high up on the northern wall. Long benches are ranged all around the walls, and on the benches sit twelve shiny-faced small boys holding the horn-protected sheets of writing known as the hornbooks. One small blond boy reads from his hornbook, while Will, standing, listens to him.

W
ill nodded, while his pupil read.

“. . . who aren’t in heaven,” the little blond boy read, laboriously appearing to decode the mysteries of the Paternoster written on the paper that the transparent sheet of horn protected. “Hollow be thy name.”

Normally, Will would have stopped this unrighteous reciting of the Lord’s Prayer. As it was, the other students, smaller boys and bigger ones, all laughed at the pupil’s declamation. The boy’s name was Robert Haite and he’d memorized the Lord’s Prayer and somehow memorized it wrong. Will couldn’t seem to make him understand that the words he said might have anything to do with the mysterious signs engraved on the paper in front of him. And if Will called his attention to the correspondence between symbols and pronounced words, as he often had, Robert would no more than turn round, innocent eyes toward Will and listen with rapt, breathless attention to all Will said. To forget it the next minute.

But this time, despite the titters of his fellow students, and the boy’s very poor rendition of the prayer, the petty master nodded as though Robert had said everything perfectly.

Will noticed the mistakes, as well as a vague expectancy around him, a hush that said that, faith, the petty master had been distracted the livelong day.

But he had other worries. No blasphemy uttered with sweet schoolboy innocence could pierce Will’s preoccupation.

Tension started to show in the boy’s face, in a nervous twitch at the corner of his mouth, and the way he kept looking all around, when the expected rebuke did not come.

In Will’s mind thoughts and feelings warred about the fair youth who was the dark lady. He’d lied to Will in that. Well, he’d lied to him in a lot besides. Eyes wide open, thinking over the conversation with the dark lady the night before, Will realized that she’d refused to tell him what would happen to him once he killed the fairy king.

She took him for a rube, a knave with no more mind than a hare hurrying ahead of the dogs to certain doom. The fair youth, the dark lady, that person who was both had no more regard for Will than a man for an old suit he wore, that served a need and was discarded afterwards.

But Will would find a way to defeat the elves, and get them off his back, and turn them from his family, like a curse averted.

While his pupil desecrated the Lord’s Prayer, Will thought and thought of Nan, who had been taken from him. His guilt had returned to haunt him, his certainty that had he been a better man, a better husband, Nan would never have been taken.

And now, to his manifold sins, Will had added adultery, the staining of their marriage bed with someone who wasn’t human, someone who, almost certainly, wasn’t even female.

The memory of the dark lady’s charms was pushed out of the way, and Will longed for Nan, his sweet, uncomplicated Nan who’d never lie to him and never, never make him feel like the fool he was, led around blindfolded by other people.

His students’ titters grew so loud that Will pulled himself from his thoughts. He looked sharply at Robert’s glowing face, his wide, innocent eyes, and, for the first time, realized the boy had been shamming all these long months. He could read well enough or, if not, at least he knew that the words he said were wrong.

Fool that Will had been, fool, that even a petty-school pupil could fool him. He’d half a mind to whip the boy, but why whip Robert when the whole world had been laughing at Will? And, looking at the boy’s innocent expression, Will saw a reflection of himself and the jokes he’d once played on his masters.

The light coming slantwise through the leaded glass of the high window above the row of benches looked scant enough, and the sounds that came through were the sounds of workmen hurrying home for supper, and mothers calling their sons back in. This day, this awful day of guilt and doubt, had passed and night neared.

“Go,” Will told the solemn assembly of dark-clad little boys, who all stared at him, having understood, through some mysterious alchemy, that their prank had been caught out, and now awaited punishment for their mischievousness. “Go home, all of you, and pray that the Lord make you as smart as you think you are.”

Chastised by his very restraint, the boys left and it was not until a good while down the muddy road in front of the school that the first one let out a whoop of joy and another one called out a challenge to a race.

Will listened to their merry noise, receding down the street, as he locked the schoolhouse door.

Ah, for their freedom, their certainty, the carefree days of his own childhood.

Will must find out how to counteract the dark lady’s charm. Even knowing her for what she was and knowing himself duped, could he resist her blandishments if she were to appear?

Who could he ask for help on dealing with unruly elves?
Not
his father. Will shuddered at the thought. And not his mother. He’d taken Joan to her this morning, with admonitions to keep the young girl inside and out of danger. His mother had, predictably, made it out to be Will’s fault and turned it all on him. But maybe she’d listened enough to keep Joan safe. Maybe not.

So, other than his family, to whom could he go? Too long he’d listened to Quicksilver-Silver, too far believed in him-her. Now Will needed a mortal advisor and knew not where to turn.

Starting down the street, trading nods with his casual acquaintances in Wincot, Will saw movement in front of the door to the alehouse ahead, and thought of Christopher Sly. A drunkard the old man might be, and insane he might have sounded. And yet, Will remembered his words about the knife, and about the dangers Will might incur in the forest.

Was Sly, then, more than he seemed to be?

Will stopped at the door to the alehouse and looked in.

The place still looked as Will had left it—was it only yesterday?

Had he not known better, he would have thought nothing had changed and that the same people had sat here, through the day and to this evening.

When he’d come in yesterday, he’d been so hungry, so miserable, that he hadn’t noticed the smell of the place, a moist, heated mingling of body odor and both sour and sweet ale—sour where it had spilled on the floor, sweet in the jars.

“Now, now, is your thirst such?” Marian Hacket stopped amid the tables, with the white ale jug resting on her rounded hip, and looked up at Will. “Will you be coming here every day now, lad? You’re too young for this.”

Will came a step into the house, and blinked at the darker, smokier light inside the place, which rivaled the dark, overcast day outside. He shook his head at Marian, but did not say anything. He hadn’t come for the ale, but what he had come for he didn’t want to say aloud, where all could hear him.

Sly was nowhere to be seen, though the space he’d occupied on the bench remained empty, as though other drinkers feared to take his place. “I was wondering about Christopher Sly,” Will said. “Have you not seen him? I thought he might have something to tell me.”

Marian’s soft face creased, and she pursed her lips. Taking a deep breath, she set the jug of ale on the stained table. “Now, that’s strange, for he has left something for you.” She walked over to the hearth, where the dispirited bawds sat, their half-hearted smiles displaying near-toothless mouths. From a corner near the fireplace, she retrieved something dark, that clinked metallically as she lifted it, and made her frown in carrying it on her arms, as if it weighed much.

“There,” she said and deposited what, up close, Will could see was an iron chain, in his arms. “There. He left that for you, and said it should be the answer to all your problems.”

Will remembered the old man telling him that the creatures were afraid of cold iron. Was Will supposed, then, to bind the dark lady with this metal, and with this bond cause her to tell him the truth? It had to be. Nothing else could be true. But how did Sly know of Will’s real troubles? And how did he know what Will needed? “Who is Christopher Sly?” Will asked. “He said he was a peddler and that—”

Marian was shaking her head. “A peddler he is not, unless what he peddles be some goods we can’t fathom, boy. I saw him talking to you and wondered . . .” She lowered her voice to a whisper and looked frantically around, though none of the drunkards or bawds seemed to take any interest in their conversation. “I’ve known him since I was a little girl, helping my gram with the serving, and he always has looked the same. At the height of summer and the height of winter, and the days just before, he’ll come and drink, and talk like a local, though no one hereabouts knows him except from being here, on those days. My grandmother used to say he was a great lord who played the pauper for his own amusement. My grandfather said he was one of the ancient gods, Lug, god of merchants and liars . . . And so he might be . . .” Her voice trailed off and her hand, as if on its own, made the sign of the cross over her round face, then wiped itself to her apron with nervous haste. “And so he might be, but I didn’t say it, and you didn’t hear it from me. Only I’ve never seen him take such an interest in someone, and I wonder what trouble you can have got yourself into, lad.”

Will, too, wondered very much what trouble he’d got himself into.

He nodded gravely, to Marian Hacket’s words, and nodded again when she said, “My prayers go with you, boy. May the good Lord protect you.”

“I thank you,” he said. “I thank you.” And, shouldering the heavy iron chain, he set out for Stratford.

Scene 17

A forest glade, near the fairy hill. There’s just the vaguest suggestion of the white palace, at a distance. Close by, amid the trees, Quicksilver stands, looking toward the palace expectantly. Rain pours down, unrelenting.

T
he whole day Quicksilver hid and waited outside his brother’s palace. He felt hungry and tired and very, very bored. A hundred times he’d thought to leave, but if he left, where would he go? Nowhere that his memory of Will wouldn’t pursue him. Nowhere the Hunter couldn’t find him. No. He would do this thing, this one, final thing for Will. He would do it for no profit to himself, and prove himself different from the Hunter.

He watched the evening guards replace the morning guards, all of them dressed in full diamond armor such as they would have worn had the country been at war.

Was this for him? Did Sylvanus deem Quicksilver such a threat?

Quicksilver couldn’t fathom it. He could see, as mortals could not—not even mortals born on Sundays—the magic wards around the palace. Between guard and guard, and all around the white, gleaming walls, rising even to the highest tower where the green flag of Elvenland flew, a golden mesh of power encased the hill and protected it, as if invasion were eminent. Could all this be defense against a single, near-powerless elf?

The power of the protections drew Quicksilver in, sure as food will draw a famished hound, but his mind told him to keep away. Now that he was not of the hill, that net was no beneficial protection to his unprotected head. Rather, like the net that surrounds a fish and pulls it to his doom, this net would spell the end of Quicksilver and the death of all his meager hopes—his hope of love, his desire for atonement.