Any Man So Daring (25 page)

Scene Twenty One

The beach where all this started. Proteus sits on the sand, dazzled, looking lost. Miranda emerges from the forest. As she runs towards him, he lifts his head and, with joy shining in his eyes, extends both hands to her.

O
h, how could she have abandoned him?

As Miranda walked upon the cold shifting sand of the beach and saw Proteus sitting on the sand, looking sad and deserted she couldn’t comprehend her own thought.

Gray waves still pounded the shore, but the magical wind no longer howled. The crux, having absorbed its invaders, had calmed its magical fury. Only the unseen beating of ghostly waves upon the gray edge of the beach, gave the impression of continuing tempest.

How tired Proteus looked. How wan his complexion. How his shoulders sagged in despondence.

Had Miranda’s desertion hurt him so?

And how ragged his clothing looked, how ill his whole aspect. Had his uncle then fought back, after Miranda ran? Had his uncle hurt him so?

Proteus looked tired and ragged and destroyed by the encounter with his uncle, by Miranda’s desertion.

His hair was disheveled, having escaped the leather binding with which he normally confined it. In a blond mess, it surrounded his face, making him look wild, barely civilized.

Blood that had trickled from his nose had dried upon his skin, marring its smooth whiteness.

When she first arrived upon the beach, he turned at the sound of her steps. On seeing her there, his eyes seemed to fill with the joy of a man seeing paradise.

He stood up, but his attempt at rushing was betrayed by his left leg, which gave out under him -- as he stood -- and caused him to grimace in pain and steady himself upon the other leg.

Miranda’s heart misgave at that grimace, and she hurried to him and offered him both her hands, feeling guilty that she’d ever deserted him. For he was her Proteus, a hurt Proteus, a miserable and bedraggled Proteus, but hers nonetheless, her lord and her love.

“Milord,” she said, as her hands met his cold, too-dry hands.

Had Quicksilver, then, hurt him so much? Was Quicksilver, perhaps, one of these villains who held their temper a little but, when aroused, did more damage than any other?

But she would not think on it.
 

Had she not seen Quicksilver hold still while Proteus attacked him?

The matter was too complex for her mind, and she’d not judge Quicksilver, yet. Or Proteus.

If Quicksilver had defended himself, he’d done no more than any elf would, stopping the knife that would slay him, the hand that would hurt him.

If he’d hurt Proteus, maybe Proteus deserved it.

Yet need he have hurt Proteus so badly?

Proteus squeezed her hands hard and said, in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “Do you forgive me, then? Does Miranda speak, yet, to her misguided Proteus?”

“Misguided?” Miranda said. His voice was so sad, so full of remorse that she had no trouble at all calling a smile upon her face. “How can Proteus be misguided when he loves Miranda? Isn’t loving Miranda the fact and essence of sanity, the measure of good taste, the exactness of fashion?”

Proteus smiled, in answer to her smile, but his smile was wan and half-hearted, the sickly wince of a patient who tries to forget his pain. “Oh, how kind my lady, who yet saw her lord act worse than any villain and attack, again and again, a man who sought to do him no harm.

“Look here, these wounds.” He moved the tattered bits of his suit, to uncover a red gash upon his leg, and yet another upon his arm. “These wounds I got when I tempted that poor king, my uncle, beyond his endurance.” Tears appeared in Proteus's eyes, making them shine brightly with something like a light of remorse. “He, who could have killed me where I stood, only did this harm to me and no more.”

Miranda, her heart clenching at the sight of those piteous wounds, those tears upon Proteus's fair, smooth skin, thought that Quicksilver might very well have forbore from inflicting even those wounds upon her love.

“You’ve changed your mind about your uncle, then?” she said. “You do not wish to kill him?”

Proteus shook his head. “Aye me, no. Long life and prosperity to the king of fairyland.” He squeezed her hands hard again. “I’m not saying he always acted right, but the quarrel was between him and my father. And my father being dead, who I am to carry it forth? If Quicksilver would not kill me — me, who had attacked him — even while I lay unconscious upon the sand of this supernatural place, then surely, surely, he cannot be evil. All will be understood when I speak to him, for I’m sure he meant no ill to me. Know you where my uncle Quicksilver lies, that I might be reconciled?”

Miranda shook her head and congratulated herself on Proteus's excellent head, his great mind, that he was already ready to forgive Quicksilver, to believe the best of him.

And if Miranda now doubted Quicksilver’s peaceful intentions — if she thought that perhaps, just perhaps, the villain had faked peaceful behavior for the sake of winning Miranda’s support away from Proteus — if she doubted Quicksilver, yet it was good that Proteus was willing to consider all angles of this.

It was good that rage no longer blinded her Lord.

Proteus had an excellent wit, she decided, and their life would be such as fairy legends promised at their end — a happy, ever after for the whole of eternity.

“I know not where my uncle is,” she said. “But I have thought myself on a greater responsibility.”

Proteus frowned on her, puzzled. “Responsibility?” he asked.

“That child,” she said. “Whom we—"

“Of course,” Proteus said, and his eyes softened with eager gentleness. “That child, that poor creature of mankind that we lured to the crux with our black arts. He must be allowed from hence, to his mother’s side, where he’ll be safe. We must go,” he said, and picked up her hand and pulled her towards the forest. “We must go to the castle at the center of the crux. Can you feel the true path? I cannot. The battle and the exhaustion from it,” he said. He put his free hand on his forehead as though cooling a raging fever. “My ill-conceived attack on my cousin, and his just response, have left me too tired to find the magical feeling of the true path.”

“The path is this way,” Miranda said. “And I will guide you if you desire it of me.” What sort of an attack could Quicksilver have inflicted on him that would make him blind to the feel of the path? She looked at Proteus's pale face and felt dull resentment at Quicksilver.

Justice need not to be reckless.

Holding his hand, she led him tenderly to the edge of the forest and set Proteus’s feet upon the path that would take them both to the heart of fairyland, the castle in the crux.

She looked back and saw his smile and smiled at it.

“Where is that net that you took from me?” Proteus asked. “The magical net?”

Miranda’s smile faltered. Why did he ask about the ill-omened object?

What did he mean to do with it?

And how would he react when Miranda told him it was wholly lost?

Scene Twenty Two

The misty clearing where Will stands before the Lady Silver who, naked and unashamed, looks at him.

“D
o this once thing for me, Will,” the Lady asked, her voice soft and gentle. “If ever my love meant aught to you, do this one thing for me and I shall never ask another.”

He felt too sorry for her, in whose voice there still echoed the remnants of tears so recently cried, to tell her no. Yet, knowing the creature, he could not say yes before she told him what the favor was that she requested.

For it might well be his love, or his attention, or his lifelong faithfulness.

Silver smiled on him, an apologetic smile, as though guessing his hesitation and forgiving it. “If you see my Lord Quicksilver -- my brother, my spouse, the other half of my soul born with me in a single birth -- tell him that I crave his company, I crave being whole with him once again.

“But he kept us apart when I would have rejoined him, and now it is he who must accept me, call me back. It is he who must want me to be a part of him once more — want it with every fiber of his body. And he must call to me, and tell me so.

“Then will I come back to him and, reunited, shall our flesh be one once more, shall we be saved....” She looked at Will and sighed, and fresh tears rose to the fountain of her glimmering eyes. “But I fear it is all for nothing, and he won’t wish it intensely enough; he won’t truly want me part of him again. At least not before the division is irreversible, both halves of the soul scarred over where they split, each one lonely and on its own forever.”

Will shook his head, bewildered. “If I see him, I’ll tell him, but why should the king of elves listen to me?”

Silver smiled, revealing a row of small and very sharp teeth that made her look, for a moment, wholly feral and all without mercy. “The king of elves listens to no one,” she said. “It was to stop listening to me that he divided us. He wanted his attention given only to cheerless duty and aching toil and all must be done according to the way of his revered ancestors. Nothing more.” She sighed again. “And yet, if he listens to someone, it will be to Will, whom he loves despite his own wishes.”

“But how will I overtake him, Lady? I know not where he’s gone. And more, yet, I came here to rescue my son that was trapped by an elf – by whom, I neither know nor care. I want to rescue my son and nothing more.

“If I chance upon Quicksilver I will tell him your message, but surely my first duty is to my son.”

Here the lady smiled, a tear-streaked, weak, tremulous smile. “Aye, Will, but so will Quicksilver also view it as his duty to rescue your son. He’ll see it as his duty as a king, his duty as the man who first introduced you to fairyland, to rescue your son and restore him to you. So, in rescuing your son shall your paths meet. Only you try to find your son, and sooner or later you shall find Quicksilver.”

“And how to find my son, Lady?” Will asked. He remembered his lonesome walk out there, in the shifting path, amid the tree roots. “How to find my son in this land where even the trees have thinking life and all shifts and changes beneath my feet at every moment?”

Silver frowned--not a frown of disapproval, but a frown of thinking, the expression of someone remembering long-ago heard lore. “There is a path,” she said. “A true path. There always is one through magical forests.

“Could I but go with you, I would gladly lead you. But you see that I am this ethereal creature, chained to this point of great magic for my only existence, now that Quicksilver has cut me loose from his magic and the magic of the hill.”

She frowned more intensely. Her small, pale fingers drummed upon her white, naked thigh, a gesture that would have looked natural were she drumming upon the silk of a court dress.

“Take you a twig,” she said, pointing at a tree nearby. “Cut one from that tree, and bring it here.”

Will stepped towards the tree and reached his hand up for the thinnest twig.

A scream, like a wounded child’s sounded, growing till it seemed to fill the whole isle. Will froze, quivering, his hand half-raised towards the tree.

“Take it,” the Lady said. She sounded tired, forceful, like an adult controlling a child’s foolishness. “It will no more hurt it than paring your nails hurts you. It is being a coward and quaking only at what it doesn’t know. The trees in the crux have never been broken or put to the ax, and thus they fear what they have never felt.” She sighed. “As I fear eternal separation and all-engrossing death.”

Gingerly Will reached for the twig at the end of the branch nearest him, a twig to which only two leaves and one bud clung.

He took hold of it and, in a single movement, broke it from the tree.

The tree shrieked.

Shimmering sap sprang from it, like water pouring from a living newborn.
 
It felt hot and sticky on Will’s fingers.

The shriek ended in the whimper of an injured child.

Will, feeling cold down his spine, tried to ignore the scream still reverberating in the air and the sap like blood pouring from the stick.

Quicksilver had told Will that everything Will did in the crux -- everything -- would have an effect on the world of magic and that other world of men — beyond the crux.