Ill Met by Moonlight (34 page)

And here Quicksilver knelt, while foolish little Ariel wished him to get up and fight, as though he could.

Sylvanus’s power encased Quicksilver and held him in place like an iron fist closed over a gnat. Now would Sylvanus crush him, with good reason and in front of the whole court. Here ended ill-fated Quicksilver. Scared and shamed, tasting blood and smelling his own sweat of fear, Quicksilver knew his whole life had been in vain. He closed his eyes and waited for the final blow.

Instead, he heard Will’s voice, raised in panic, “Help, Quicksilver, help.”

Will’s scream woke Quicksilver from the tolling of his many pains and inevitable doom. Quicksilver looked up, though looking up should have been impossible, held as he was by his brother. Just in that moment, Will overcame the illusory fire. Flames went out on his arms and along his body, showing Will’s body perfect as it had been, and his eyes amazed and scared.

Will had defeated the flames. In a fluttering of hope, Quicksilver rose upon one foot to stand. But reason crushed hope before it took wing, as Sylvanus rounded on the elf prince and Quicksilver realized that Sylvanus had only let Will go so he could give his full attention to his rebellious brother, who had moved when he should have been immobilized.

On Quicksilver, Sylvanus turned the entire might and fury of the hill. “Disobey me, will you? And flaunt your disobedience in front of the whole hill?”

Quicksilver looked at Will and thought that if he could move for Will, at Will’s voice, then he could move at any time. The power of his love for Will was true. It must be true, and ever renewed when he looked on Will’s dark curls, his pale skin, the raw gracefulness of his half-grown body, every time he remembered that Will had let him go free when he had offered himself as a slave. That power filled Quicksilver, infusing him with white-hot strength. In the grasp of that strength, that power, Quicksilver stood up.

“Challenge you, yes, challenge you, Sylvanus, who stole the kingdom from me, and who holds it against all laws of nature. I heard you speak, brother, before the dance, of the laws of nature and everything being out of kilter, the spheres clashing one against the other with the wrongness of it. You are wrong, my brother. You’re the wrongness.”

“I?” Even as he spoke, Sylvanus sent the power of the hill, as an invisible, burning force, to hit Quicksilver on the chest.

The impact, scorching and crushing, pushed Quicksilver away and sent him sprawling backwards, past the illusory floor of Elfland and onto the mud of the glen. The mud cushioned Quicksilver’s fall, but still his chest hurt where the power had hit him, and the heat of it seemed to have scorched his heart and lungs and throat, making them feel raw.

“Why would I be wrong?” Sylvanus strode on the invisible floor suspended above the mud, and stood over Quicksilver. “Just because you were born the younger? What does that signify? What does it matter, that accident of birth? For two thousand years I was Titania’s and Oberon’s only heir, their only hope of succession. And then you came along, you imperfect spawn. Why should I yield my place to you and be content to see you smirk and take it?”

Mud squelched as Quicksilver struggled to raise his head. He had to gasp and swallow air to be able to speak through a throat that felt burned by the discharge of power. His voice came out croaking. “Unfair, perhaps, but is nature not unfair? Does not the mother hare sometimes, on birthing, eat half of her litter that she might survive? Who knows if the ones that were eaten were not the best part of the whelp and the others, that survive and enjoy the freedom of the fields, the much inferior product?” He summoned the power of his love and, mud-spattered, managed to levitate back up to the illusory floor of Fairyland through which Sylvanus had willfully pushed him, and to slowly, painfully, bring himself to his feet upon it.

“Imperfect, I am, perhaps, and yet I stand, and I am your rightful sovereign. Kneel to me, Sylvanus.” As he spoke, Quicksilver threw the force of his new-found power, his love for Will and all its strength, toward Sylvanus, to make him kneel.

The knees of the king buckled for just a second, but then he stood again, and smiled. “Kneel to you? Sooner would I kneel to the Hunter himself.”

Quicksilver held fast, but Sylvanus laughed and strode about, mocking Quicksilver’s new-found power. What power could Quicksilver have that was greater than Sylvanus’s?

With all the force he could summon from his aching body, his fearful spirit, his loving heart, Quicksilver pushed at Sylvanus. His power was the only thing keeping Sylvanus from throwing another power charge at him, and he meant to keep Sylvanus thus incapacitated until he knelt. Sylvanus would kneel or Quicksilver would die. And if Quicksilver died, what would become of Will?

Quicksilver pressed fast, fast, and held Sylvanus in an unmerciful grip, and sweated with the effort of it, while Sylvanus laughed.

“Dark spawn of a mistaken night, return to the shadowy place where you were conceived and plague us no more,” Sylvanus said.

Quicksilver could see the faces of the dancing court, who had not yet judged this important enough to interrupt the sacred dance for the sake of it. Lords and ladies smiled at the innuendo about Quicksilver’s origins.

“Why do you not rule together?” a courtier asked, dancing by, and smiling, only half-mocking. His name was Basalt and he, a great southern lord, passing fair, was ever ready to broker a peace or offer a solution for any striving. “It is plain you are both great lords.”

“I cannot rule with a murderer,” Quicksilver said. He wished to clean the mud from his golden suit, but he could not, not while he had to use all his strength against Sylvanus, just to keep Sylvanus from attacking. And all his strength was insufficient. Sylvanus appeared not to feel it, countering Quicksilver’s strength with another power, stronger than the hill power and deeper than hill power had ever run. Sylvanus’s power pushed back Quicksilver’s, as a stronger opponent will overpower the other in a wrestling match. Soon, he’d be wholly free. Soon, he would attack Quicksilver with renewed fury. “And my brother has stained his hands deep in regicide.
He
killed our parents.”

At such a statement even the sacred music, that must go on the whole half-hour before and half-hour after midnight, stopped. The dancing couples trembled in their dance, then came to a standstill, amazed.

“I never killed our parents,” Sylvanus said. He looked shocked, his honest face strained with the surprise of such a base accusation. The accusation had, indeed, surprised him so much that Quicksilver managed, for a moment, to get a firmer grasp on him. But as he recovered, his strange power, once again, gnawed at the edges of Quicksilver’s hold on him. “How could I, and the stain not be visible to the whole court?”

“You did, villain, you did.” Quicksilver was aware of sounding insane. Even Will, standing across the clearing, stared at Quicksilver with disbelief. “You killed them by another’s hand.” Quicksilver reached into his doublet and pulled out the cloth-wrapped knife he’d concealed there almost two days before. He held it up by the handle, and the cloth fell away from the blade and, in that assembly of magical beings, the cursed iron blade shone with an evil blue-white light. “You had this blade fashioned, perhaps fashioned it yourself in the darkness of the night, in those days when you were supposed to be courting your now late wife, and you gave it to a mortal named John Shakespeare, and had him use it to sever the life thread of Titania and Oberon. You. Murderer.”

Quicksilver let the knife drop, blade down, so it stuck and vibrated in the muddy ground, giving off an eerie glow.

Sylvanus looked at the knife and then at Quicksilver, with the sheerest incomprehension. “John Shakespeare? I know the burgess. Does he not keep a glover’s shop and is he not alive? How could he be alive, brother, if he had slain royal elvenkind?”

Here Quicksilver was caught short. He knew not how John was alive, nor how Sylvanus had managed to preserve him from deserved death. Sylvanus’s power started reaching behind the binds, bursting through Quicksilver’s hold, here and there, like a sleeper thrusting an arm through moth-eaten cloth.

A murmur grew around the clearing, and the small fairies flew here and there, blinking their concern, their doubt of Quicksilver’s accusations.

“You lie,” Sylvanus said. “And facts give you the lie. You see, my fair lords, my kind ladies, this base creature lies and sullies my name that he can rule alone.” As he spoke, he opened his hand, and, as if without meaning to, let a concentration of power fly at Quicksilver’s mouth.

Quicksilver saw the gesture and put up all his power as a shield, from which the power charge rebounded with a fizzling sound. But to put up his power, he had to let go of Sylvanus, who seemed to grow and visibly gain power in that instant.

“I don’t need to lie,” Quicksilver said. His voice had an hysterical edge, and he tried to think, to think what he could do to prove Sylvanus the liar and the murderer he was. “I alone am the rightful heir, and though I cannot prove your greater crime, I can prove others. You have interfered with the spheres of man. Against our ancient law, you have got a nursemaid for your daughter and have no intention of returning her to her husband when her term of service is over. And more, you didn’t leave convincing stocks in their beds, either the woman’s or the babe’s, so that they both are known to have disappeared. If you hadn’t committed that even grosser, darker transgression of parricide, this would be enough to set the worlds of men and elves at war, and that would make you unfit to rule alone or by my side. Give up, Sylvanus. Kneel to me. I am your king.”

Sylvanus stared at him, his expression diamantine, his eyes unfearing. “Liar,” he said. “Liar. May the Hunter consume your treasonous soul. You killed your own best friend for no reason, and his shade walks the world and will consume you. How dare you aspire to the throne of Elfland, and accuse others of the heinous crimes that taint your perverse soul?”

Quicksilver flinched. In his mind, he again saw Pyrite, bleeding in a dark clearing, saw him dissolve, felt the dread of his death anew. He looked at Will and faltered. Will and he, himself, and their love, had killed Pyrite—driven the enchanted dagger into the body that should have been almost immortal. Pyrite’s bright, handsome face flickered, in a countenance of death before Quicksilver. Will and he, both, were tainted by Pyrite’s death. Pyrite had cursed them. How could Quicksilver’s love for Will, then, give him power?

As Quicksilver’s resolve faltered, Sylvanus bared his teeth in a smile. “Be gone from the hill, liar, traitor. Be gone. Dare not approach this hill again.”

The order was given with power that turned it into magic. Quicksilver, defenseless, felt the compulsion to obey, and had to grit his teeth to remain in place. Only Ariel’s hand on his arm, Ariel’s fingers grabbing firmly enough to make him feel pain, steadied him and prevented his feet dragging the rest of him away.

Sylvanus had turned from him as if he’d ceased existing. “And you, good man.” The king looked at Will. “You will forget the wife, of whom you were never worthy, and you will also go—”

“I recognize Quicksilver as my true lord.” Ariel’s voice rang, high and desperate. “And give him all my power.”

Like that, her power joined Quicksilver’s, bracing and shoring up his failing strength, and clearing away all but the bare remnants of Sylvanus’s compulsion.

Renewed, Quicksilver realized that the king was trying to make Will forget and leave Nan. And that, Quicksilver could not allow. Will could not be made to leave Nan. Quicksilver swallowed, and, still feeling the vapors of the compulsion that Sylvanus had imposed on him—a shuffle of his feet, a fading desire to be out of the clearing—he realized that the only way to corner Sylvanus was to put him under compulsion to tell the truth. Such simple magic, worked in full view of the court, would be understood by all. They would all know that an innocent man would tell the truth. But a guilty one would not speak, would fight the compulsion with all his might. And Sylvanus was guilty.

With new power and renewed outrage, Quicksilver flung compulsion at Sylvanus in clear-spoken words. “Tell us what you know of our parents’ death,” he said, and pushed the compulsion, like a sharp prod, onto Sylvanus with the words. “Tell no untruth, but tell us all the truth.”

Sylvanus opened his mouth and then closed it, and bit his small, pulpy lower lip so hard that it bled. A tendril of blood ran down his chin, as he glared at Quicksilver and swallowed audibly.

“My power is yours, Lord Quicksilver,” Basalt said. “If he’d committed no crime, he would have spoken.”

Basalt was duke of an immense domain, leader of a faction almost half the size of the main hill. His considerable power allowed Quicksilver to throw his compulsion forth with even more force, trying to drag truth from Sylvanus’s reluctant lips.

Sylvanus stood and swayed, and looked as though he’d like to swallow his tongue before it betrayed him.

“If he lied not, he would tell,” someone else said.

“Lord Quicksilver, you are my king.”

“My one king.”

Through his fatigue and his concentration on the compulsion he wove, Quicksilver heard them. He felt their fresh power join his, healing pain he hadn’t realized he still felt, the pain of severance from the hill, the raw, bleeding edges of lone power. His aches, magical and physical disappeared, as one by one, more lords pledged to him.

From the feel of it, he thought, Sylvanus and he received the hill’s loyalties equally, Quicksilver having fewer lords, but among them, those with the greater power.

The court argued and worried, and both sides tried to convince others to join them.

“If he is innocent, why will he not talk?” someone said.

“Yes, but do you want Quicksilver for a sovereign?”

Yet the ones who mistrusted Sylvanus slowly increased and a slow, steady trickle of power drifted into Quicksilver’s growing reserve, increasing his strength like reviving water and a good night’s sleep, and fresh baked bread, and all that was wholesome and good and nourishing.