All Night Awake (26 page)

He heard Silver’s small protest as he pulled away from her, while, in the same step, he tore Nan’s letter open.

Nan had written to him—or rather, Nan had asked someone to write to him. Nan rarely did this. She didn’t like to admit that she couldn’t write, nor did she enjoy asking someone more literate to write her words. Not unless there were something terribly wrong at home.

Will thought of his father, who was aged and declining inexorably toward the grave.

His breeches, undone, slid down, over his stockings, to puddle around his boots.

But he ignored them and pulled the pages apart, unfolded the cheap paper.

The handwriting was Gilbert’s, his younger brother’s.

Nan, who could not write, would not have bothered Gilbert, a promising glover apprentice, with anything short of necessity.

Silver, who’d been pushed near the bed, now returned, her hands stretched and open to engulf him.

Will held his arm out, as far as it would go, and kept her at a distance, while he stepped away, hampered by the breeches around his ankles.

Nan’s letter was short—as they all were, Nan being a woman of very few words. It said that there had been a fire in Stratford. She said the fire had been odd, starting everywhere at once after a show of fairy lights. Many houses had been consumed, and though the Shakespeare house had not been touched, helping their neighbors had emptied the Shakespeare pantry. The season was bad, food scarce and expensive. If Will could not send some money, Nan could not see how Hamnet could be kept in school, since the fees were so outrageous. She signed herself his loving wife.

His loving wife.

Will felt the weight of the coins in his sleeve, felt the ridicule of his breeches around his ankles. He set Nan’s letter on the desk.

He looked at the date. Before Silver had come. Yet Silver had never told him of the fire. Why not?

This being who’d almost seduced Will for the second time had not told Will about this fire that had endangered Will’s family.

Will reached for his breeches and pulled them up.

Silver clung to him while he fastened them, and she tried to find his lips with her blindly searching ones.

He turned his face away. All excitement was gone. All enchantment, all the feel of new wine in his mouth.

Nothing was left but stony cold and dark suspicion.

“Madam,” he said, his voice loud enough that Silver stopped her attempts at kissing him. “Madam, what have you done?”

The beautiful silver eyes blinked, close to his, with every appearance of confusion. “Done?” she asked. It was her own voice, not Quicksilver’s. Her own voice, small and slight. “Done?”

“The fire in Stratford, why did you not tell me of it?”

She flinched as though slapped. She stepped back, she swallowed hard.

“The fire,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know.” Her long, white hand went to her neck, as if to ease an invisible constriction. And Quicksilver’s voice slipped out of the parted lips. “I hoped you’d never find out.”

Rage boiled within Will. Silver had hoped Will would never find out. Anne’s letter spoke of the fire starting everywhere at once, suddenly, after a show of fairy lights.

Fairy lights. Gorge rose in Will’s throat. “Milady, what have you done?” he asked.

Silver laughed. Her eyes wild, she charged toward Will, open arms inviting, bosom rising and falling. “Forget the peasant, Will,” she said in the voice of a drunken woman, in the voice of a madwoman. “Forget the peasant and be mine. I need you, I. I’ve never ceased loving you.”

Will met her enthusiasm with his coldness, met her eye, and did not flinch from her desire. But he pushed her away when she would cling, and he would not relent, he would not let her touch him. “You tried to kill my wife, madam. And I love my wife.”

Silver stepped back. Her laugh rose higher and higher, to peels of insane amusement. “Kill your wife? Kill your wife, Will? You think that of me?”

Tears tainted her voice and Quicksilver’s voice, the two of them mingling as they came from behind Silver’s hand, which covered her mouth.

“Kill your wife? You think me such a villain? Oh, curse you, Will Shakespeare. Why did I think you’d help?” She gathered her arms around herself, as though protecting her body from an invisible wind. “I have other help. I have others who love me better. I’ll seek them out.”

On those words, suddenly, Silver disappeared, leaving no more than a sparkle of light in the still air of the room.

Standing in his empty room, Will took a deep breath of relief. His trembling eased. He swallowed. He would send Nan some of this coin. Hamnet, his only son, must be kept in school.

At the back of his mind, something wondered where Silver had gone, something worried for Silver. But he wouldn’t think about it. Not any more than he would think about the odd dream, about the three Fates, the three creatures who’d given him such an odd mission.

His chances of being a great poet lay with Marlowe, not with Fairyland.

Scene 25

The fairy palace. Elves lean on columns or sag to the floor. Some lie on the floor itself, looking dead—though their chests still rise and fall with breath. Healthy elves kneel by the ill ones, and try to revive them, or just wail their fate. Ariel stands in the middle of the room, her dress torn, tattered, and askew. She looks pale, her lips tremble, and her eyes have that haunted quality of someone who’s lived through the end of the world.

A
riel heard the voices around her: the moans of despair, the cries of the afflicted.

And all of it echoed within her head as, “Lady, lady, lady,” a cry for help she could not give.

She felt her people’s plight and she reached for the reserve of her power, for the fire of power in the hill, to heal the blight.

But the power had waned and burned low: the steady fires had become embers only, beneath a fall of ash. Like a flame beneath a cooling rain, elven power sputtered and burned lower and with a colder light.

The light wouldn’t warm, the magical power wouldn’t spell, and there was nothing else that Ariel could do to heal her people.

In her despair she’d tried herbs and spells, and hallowed, ancient medicines of elvenkind.

Nothing worked.

The hill power burned ever lower, and more elves died.

At her feet, on the white marble floor, lay Lord Slate, hardly breathing.

Lord Obsydian had died yesterday. Lady Pearl, Obsydian’s wife, mourned still even as she herself bent under the blight. Soon there would be no changeling left alive in the hill.

Tears ran down Ariel’s cheeks, and her hands twisted at her dress.

“Milady?” a faint voice asked from behind her.

Turning, she saw Malachite standing nearby. His face looked gaunt and pale so that his skin resembled parchment stretched thinly over sharply carved ivory.

From amid the pallor, his eyes burned fiercely like emeralds in which the light caught. “Milady,” he said.

Now Malachite would die, Ariel thought, and hurried toward him, supporting him with her arms so that he wouldn’t fall.

He let go of the pillar on which he leaned and looked at her, as if from a long way off. “Milady,” he repeated, and then his voice dropped, hesitant. “You asked for proof and I have proof.”

“Proof of what?” Ariel asked. Then she remembered Malachite’s insinuations, his wild plan to marry her.

She’d thought he was ill and raving. He was ill and raving.

Yet he had proof.

Proof of Quicksilver’s betrayal?

Was Quicksilver’s betrayal, then, causing all this?

But no,
she
raved. It was naught. A mad thing, a glitter of suspicion such as will catch the eye of a babe or the mind of an insane person. It meant nothing.

She would accommodate Malachite’s mad humor and deal with him gently, for he was as close as Quicksilver still had to a brother.

Gently, she held Malachite up, feeling as though he, too, might at any minute vanish in a pile of dust, as so many changelings had.

She got him to the relatively deserted hallway before he managed to say, “Here, milady,” and hand her a drop of water.

Looking within the drop, Ariel saw Quicksilver, saw him as Silver, smiling on another, a mortal, a young man. And not Will.

This was a redheaded young man, his body twined with Silver’s in the rites of love.

It had come to this, then, that Ariel’s lord—her lord’s other aspect—would be a bawd onto humankind?

He had promised Ariel—promised—upon their wedding day that Ariel would be his only love, lifelong—a promise most uncommon for a marriage between near-immortal beings.

She looked at the image in the water and felt her heart break. Fool she was, she had believed in him.

Opening her hand, she let the water drop roll out of it, roll onto the floor.

Shaking, she turned to Malachite.

“The water . . .” she said. “Silver.” She could say no more.

“Two of the small winged ones who remain alive got it. They went to London at my bidding,” Malachite said. “And at my bidding did they find milord and take this image. It is a true image. I would have faked it if needed, but this is a true image.” He turned to look at her. His hands trembled, and his lips, and though he’d found this proof himself, yet it grieved him, for his eyes filled with tears.

She patted his thin, emaciated arm that so ill fitted the uniform it had once filled.

She never doubted but that it was true, and her heart wandered, parched, a deserted landscape, with no relief in sight.

So it was true that Quicksilver loved her not.

The love she’d sought her life long, the love she’d thought she’d earned ten years ago, that love had been a lie, no truer than illusions spun in a lazy moment.

Oh, curse the day. Curse Ariel with it. Curse all of fairykind with such an inconstant king who, breaking his vow, had broken his realm.

Ariel scant heard Malachite, who pleaded for her hand in marriage, for an alliance that might heal fairykind.

She must find Quicksilver.

Her hands dealt roughly with the soft fabric of her gown. Her mind reached for the power of Fairyland, while she remembered Quicksilver’s glittering magical pattern.

But she could no more home in on that strong beacon than she could get the full strength of the hill power.

She felt the darkness of in-between worlds enfold her, and for a moment, she thought she’d be forever stranded in this no-world, this world of shadows and dreams between the fairy world and the human.

The cross between the two spanned the distances of human land through an abyss outside time, and through this abyss elves could move quickly like a dream, between two points in the human world, no matter how far apart.

The instrument they used for this travel looked to elven eyes as a graceful arched bridge, spun of purest light, shining like gold in the dark night.

The elves called it the bridge of air.

Tonight, before Ariel ever set foot on the glittering construction, she noticed that it seemed grey and dimmed, and that it swayed as though on unseen winds that made it appear and disappear into flickering unreality.

Midbridge, in the ascending curve of her journey, she faltered.

Quicksilver’s voice echoed in her mind, as if he’d been beside her, as if he’d touched her gown and yelled in her ear, “Betrayed. I am betrayed.”

Something dark and cold passed by Ariel, moving fast.

The bridge wavered and splintered.

The pattern of Quicksilver’s power vanished from Ariel’s mind.

She tried to grab for it, but she could not.

She felt herself plunge through boiling air and freezing loneliness, through screaming silence and pulsing nothing.

Materializing, she saw towering buildings around her, and muddy street underfoot. She smelled the reek of mud and refuse.

Her lord she did not see.

Scene 26

Marlowe’s lodgings. On the bed, on his stomach, Marlowe lies. His clothes are tattered, and bloodstained, as is his hair, his hands, and his face.

B
efore Marlowe awoke, a feeling of heaviness hung upon him, a heaviness such as one feels when illness is eminent, or when, having slept after a great grief, one wakes to find that grief undiminished.