Ill Met by Moonlight (30 page)

Walking through the forest, hungry, cold, scared, he half dreamed himself a young peasant woman and Will’s wife. Had dreams been possible, he would have been just that, and happy ever after, for the brief span of mortal life.

But in reality he remained something other, a tangle of physical body and magic—the raw power that had formed when the hearth had first been created from the burning heart of the sun. He remained such a creature of power and magic, of fire and air and fallible, aching flesh. And he must somehow find it in him to fulfill his destiny and be a king.

Scene 18

Will’s kitchen. The cat atop the cupboard watches with skeptical gaze, while Will waits by the door, holding the heavy iron chain in his hands.

W
ill prayed that the dark lady would not come. Standing there, in his kitchen, holding the iron chain, he couldn’t help but remember their love, in this very place. He felt like the worst of traitors.

What if she meant him no harm? What if her love had been as real and warm as it felt? What if she came, all kindness, to bestow love on him yet again and he surprised her thus, with this chain?

Behind Will, the fire hissed and spat, and the everlasting rain that had fallen over the last three days lashed against the door and window, and rattled and sang on the pavement outside, its noise sometimes so intense that it could almost be mistaken for a weary walker’s feet, dragging toward the door.

The lady had seemed so tired, yesterday. Tired and belabored and bruised. Thinking of her as she had looked, so helpless and frail and needing comfort, Will almost dropped his iron chain. But not quite. At the next breath a thought of Nan, a longing for her as he had known her—strong and sweet and unbearably dear, a woman of his sphere, proper who belonged to him alone—made him clutch the iron with renewed vigor.

The chain felt heavy in his hands. Colder to the touch than any other metal Will had ever held, it abraded his hands as he held it, its links rough like the branch of a tree with the bark still on it.

Where had this chain come from and through whose hands? Like most young men with a grammar-school education, Will knew enough about Roman gods, but precious little about the gods of his own ancestors, who’d been driven into the twilight of nonbelief by those same Roman divinities who would later be sent, howling and shivering, into everlasting nothingness by the light of the Christian faith.

Lug. God of liars and thieves. Will tried to picture in his mind what such a god would look like and superimpose it on the remembered countenance of Christopher Sly, by birth a peddler, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd, and now by present profession a tinker. He’d said he was a tinker. Not a peddler, though he’d said that later, and not a smithy, but a tinker. An important distinction. What did Christopher Sly tinker with?

Will had a feeling that Christopher Sly neared and spoke in his ear, in an inebriated whisper ripe with the smell of ale, “I mend more than plates, young Will, and set more than pots fit to boil again.”

But who could trust a god of liars, the local brother of that ancient Mercury?

The cat changed positions atop the keeping cupboard and, backlit by the fire, cast its enormous shadow on the wall in front of Will. Will recoiled from that projection as though it were a demon come from the depths to swallow him. Looking over his shoulder, startled, he saw the cause of it and smiled, and returned to his vigil.

Listening carefully, he thought he heard light steps approaching along the alley.

The lady came.

Or maybe some child had been forgotten late out of doors and now slunk under the rain to the bed in which he should, long since, have reposed.

Almost suspending his own breath, holding it in, Will tried to hear, all the while attempting to calm the turmoil in his soul.

Silver had lied, he told himself, her aspect of frailty was a mere ruse with which such as her snagged men from their better purposes, lovers from their better intent. And, to the mellow protests of his heart, he replied with stern warning that she wasn’t even a lady, nor a man, but a thing caught between, a thing that could only belong to that realm of nightmare whence the whole hill came. And maybe they were fallen angels, for how else could such evil dwell in a single being?

Will was not so foolish, nor so blind, that he could blame the whole of his transgression—his taking of another to his marriage bed—on the lady’s persuasiveness or her perfidious nature. Well he knew how eager he had been.

Such fantasies had long haunted Will and, juxtaposed with his meager experience, his all-too tame upbringing, they might have driven him to commit adultery, someday, some other day, when far from home.

But that would have been later, and no one need have known, and he would have been more settled, more sure of his ways. And he would never, never, have mistaken such bawdy love for the real thing.

He’d loved the elf creature. He’d loved her and considered replacing Nan’s sweet truthful love with the lady’s false one.

And the lady had, she had, tried to convince Will to kill the king of elves—her brother or no, who could tell—which would have killed Will, or, if not killed him, led him to the same sort of madness that held his father in its thrall.

The steps came all the way to the door, and a meek knock sounded.

Will froze, the chain in his hand. What if he opened the door and it was Joan, or a neighbor on the other side, come to borrow a cup of flour, a jar of ale? What if he encircled with chains a good wife of Stratford?

The knock sounded again, a tempting music, and on the heels of it a faint, sweet voice, called, “Open up Will. Open up. I must talk to you. I must tell you how to recover your Nan and—”

Reaching over, Will unlocked the door, and, with his foot, shoved it open, even while he knit himself with the wall so that he and his chain, both, would be invisible to the lady outside.

“Will?” The lady stepped within. As she had the night before, she wore a cloak wrapped around her head, only this time the wrapping had been better done, and Lady Silver walked with a more assured step. “Will?” She turned her head to the side where he hid, but too late.

He jumped from his hiding place and wound the chain all about her, like a python holding the lady in a lethal embrace.

Blue light flashed the first time the chain touched her and blue light went on flashing. Blue light bathed the kitchen in weird reflections.

She screamed.

From atop the keeping cupboard, Nan’s cat spat, hissed, and howled, in a symphony of strange distress.

The lady collapsed to the floor, as if the weight of the chain had crushed her. On the floor, she writhed and screamed, adding a cacophony of sounds to the blue-white brilliance of unhallowed splendor that emanated from her and the chain.

Amazed, scared, breathless, Will stepped back and closed the door. All he needed now, all he needed, would be for Joan to see this spectacle and report it widely enough to have Will arrested for witchcraft.

His eyes dazed by blue-white fire, his ears pierced by the lady’s screams and the cat’s strange lamentations, Will shivered and tried to look at his handiwork.

He’d expected a sulfurous odor, but there was none, only a strange stench of scorch, but without any taint of infernal fires.

And he’d expected—he didn’t know what—that within the chain the lady would turn into some strange creature, some giant aphid, some monstrous toad, something fantastic and inhuman and not to be pitied.

Instead, the blue dazzle subsided, as though its fire had consumed whatever magical strength remained in this being. When Will could see again, what he saw was strange and wondrous indeed, but all too human, almost pathetically so.

The blond man, Quicksilver, whose hand had defended Will from the brigands in the forest, lay in the tangle of iron chain, his eyes closed. He looked dead and his whole noble countenance had been cast into that dignity that sculptors try to give noblemen’s statues that rest upon grand marble tombs. Even Quicksilver’s hair, moonlight-bright and wild, spread like a fan beneath his head and half-pulled over his face, could not detract from his dignity.

Below the neck, he looked like something quite other. His body had changed but his clothes hadn’t. The fine white dress that had so fetchingly encased the lady Silver’s cleavage, now lay, split and rent, across Quicksilver’s broad chest. And from the ample folds of the white skirt, an unmistakably male leg protruded.

The whole looked both noble and pathetic at once and, struck by it, by Quicksilver’s apparent death, Will took two steps back, then another two.

He hadn’t meant to kill. He hadn’t meant to injure her—him—seriously. He hadn’t meant ill, not at all. He must go. He must run from this supernatural murder, from the vengeance that would come as its aftermath.

Will might be able, yet, to endure the ghost of Pyrite whom he had scarcely known and hardly betrayed. But Will knew better than to imagine he could live with Quicksilver’s noble ghost, Silver’s enchanting one.

And yet, how does one run from a ghost? If the times of papacy remained . . . Will looked at the creature on his floor and more imagined than hoped to detect a very faint movement of the chest, like breathing. Was color returning to the high, waxen cheekbones?

No, no. It was naught but a reflection of the fire.

Will had murdered the elf. He must leave. In some other land, where monasteries still kept their timeless rules, Will would openly affirm and expiate his sins with self-applied scourge and unfailing fast. He’d become, mayhap, adept at herbs and their secrets and use such to help star-crossed lovers. He would . . .

“Will?”

Did he imagine it, or had the creature spoken? Or was it already his ghost, that haunted Will?

“Will?” Quicksilver’s long blond lashes quivered upon his cheeks and with immense, visible effort, he managed to open his eyes. “Will?”

The dark green eyes turned toward Will, where he stood in the shadows.

“Will, oh, curse it, Will.” Quicksilver’s voice, faint, little more than a whisper, sounded like Silver’s own, lamenting lost love. “Why did you do this? Why? I loved you well.”

Will had backed up until he was flat against the wall. He wanted to go and remove the chain from this creature and then open the door and watch him run out into the darkness outside, never to be seen again.

But, much as he wished it, Will could not do it. For some reason, having Quicksilver address him in Lady Silver’s voice, and hearing Quicksilver speak of love, scared Will more than anything yet. He pressed his palms flat against the rough plaster of the wall, and breathed fast, in scant breaths, like one wounded.

“I only came to tell you . . .” The creature on the floor took a deep breath that sounded as though it broke the stays of his chest with filling it. “I came to tell you that the sacred solstice dance will be held in the rushy glen, by the riverside and that, if you go there, you will see Nan.” He took another deep, painful-sounding breath.

Once, Will had kept vigil at the bedside of a dying neighbor and these breaths sounded much like the last breaths a moribund might take.

“If you hold her, though she change aspect and transform into all manner of monstrous things, if you hold her still and hold her fast till she stops changing and the sacred dance is done, then will she be yours, Will, yours forever.”

At this speech from the creature, who was patently not dead, obviously still able to discourse, Will felt as if he recovered strength and anger. What was this? What was this, but another confabulation, yet another lie from that pretty-lipped liar? Wildly, Will looked to the table where, he thought, he’d left his magical dagger. He’d kill this creature, kill him, cut his lying tongue out of his mouth.

“I can’t lie, Will,” the creature answered. “Not while wrapped in cold iron.”

Will stopped. “How would I know if you lie not? Is that not the tragedy of the liar, that even when he speaks the truth he will be doubted? You have lied to me too well, milord, milady, whichever you might be.”

The creature’s lips—the lips that, even in this manifestation, looked so much like the lady Silver’s—parted.

Will felt that had it more power, the creature would have laughed at the thought of what Will had said. And yet, the eyes that looked on Will reflected such sadness, such never-ending sorrow as if the sins and follies of a million years had come to repose there, like the tatters and ruins of long forgotten kingdoms might be submerged beneath a cold and ancient river.

“Will, if I hadn’t been forced into my primary aspect, would I have taken it?” With slow, slow effort, the creature raised its head to fix Will with the full glare of those doleful green eyes. “Or would I judge, and knowingly at that, that you would be more moved by a woman in this plight? Come, Will, I lie not.” Breath hissed in and out of its parted, pale lips. “This once, I lie not.”

“So it is true?” Will asked, all of a rush, feeling the rightness of the creature’s arguments and knowing that unless it was more deeply cunning than Will could ever combat, it would indeed have remained female the better to control him. “So it is true that I might have my Nan? If I hold her fast?”