Ill Met by Moonlight (19 page)

He was not a prodigal, he told himself. Nor was he coming home. This was not home, but a dark hideout, into which had vanished his parents’ good fortunes and what had been once a happy family life.

“All wet,” Edmund told Will, still looking up at him, still smiling.

“You’re right, I’m all wet,” Will said, conscious of his soaked wool suit for the first time since entering the house. He smiled down at Edmund and ruffled the boy’s curls.

Edmund watched him with a gap-toothed smile.

Would Susannah one day smile at her father like that? Would he recover Susannah before she was this age? And if not, what would Susannah think, what would she say, of her father? Would Susannah be raised in that not-quite-real world of fairyland and grow up calling father to that creature on the throne?

Will’s mother had said to stay away from the hill people. And had not his father, before him, fallen into the trap of agreeing to kill a sovereign of elves, to his own undoing? Had it been Lady Silver who’d gulled Will’s father into such precipitous ruin? That would explain how both she and her brother knew of John Shakespeare’s downfall.

And yet, Will would swear that the young gentleman, Quicksilver, had been shocked at the knife, and at its being in Will’s hand, and at its effect on the blond assailant.

Will remembered Quicksilver’s grief. He’d cried true tears over his friend-turned-enemy. Could it all be a lie? Had such a cunning play been enacted for his father too? Or was this different and would Will be righting what his father had set wrong?

Will wished he could see the future, scry the entrails of events to be, tell what would happen tomorrow and the day after, and know his doom or his fortune beforehand so that, knowing them, he could lay his plans accordingly.

His mother bustled to the keeping cupboard and then to the fireplace, poured some greasy broth into a clay cup for Will, and set it, with a piece of bread, on the table, next to Gilbert.

A glance at his brother’s work showed Will a laboriously written essay, full of corrections and erasures. Gilbert lacked the quick mind that had allowed Will to sail through grammar school with little effort and time enough for pranks and carousing. In contrast, Gilbert, who looked much like Will in stature and feature, earned each one of his achievements, through painstaking study, much repeating, and effortful memorizing of every required thing.

Strange thing, at least as far as Will believed, was that all the masters seemed to prefer Gilbert to his brother. Perhaps because Gil was slower to laugh at their mistakes and would never, ever, dream of making a joke at their expense.

Richard, too, like Gilbert, was slow but conscientious, working laboriously and doggedly, at schoolwork.

Only Edmund, Will thought, promised to be like his eldest brother, a free spirit, laughing and full of joy. Although, Will thought ruefully, perhaps Edmund should learn by example to look where his joy took him so that he didn’t find himself early married and ill-paid.

Edmund, seeing his brother gazing at him, clambered up on his lap and leaned his face against Will’s soaked jacket.

“Put the babe down,” Will’s mother said. “Or he’ll be catching his death from your wet clothes.”

Will and Edmund ignored her. Will gave his mug of broth a dubious look, thinking death might very well lurk in that also.

But he’d eaten nothing at the alehouse, though he’d drunk more than his rightful fill, and, tortured by alcohol and hunger and the tension of the last few hours, his stomach turned on itself, in acid rage.

He took his bread and dipped it into the broth, fishing out a tangled forest of fine-cut cabbage and a couple of fat pieces of mutton. Normally, he would have turned his nose up at it, but not now. He was too starved from the long walk home. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, having neglected both to have breakfast and to take anything with him to eat while at Wincot.

Even so, with his taste sharpened by hunger, the broth did not taste good. But it was edible. Will ate the solids, fished out by the bread, then drank down the liquid in a quick swallow.

“How do you expect not to catch a fever yourself, sitting there soaked?” Will’s mother said. She stood in front of him, hands on her hips, on either side of her broad, black skirt. The apron in the middle of that skirt was not so much white as different tones of yellow and green, where different spills had tinged it over the week.

Nan always kept her apron white, and changed it when it got dirty. She had three or four of them, always ready, fresh-washed each Thursday.

Will sighed. “Hard to catch a fever,” he said. “In this warm weather.”

His meal—to grace it with such an undeserved name—was done. Leaning against him, Edmund breathed regularly, slowly. Had he fallen asleep, then, despite the wetness of Will’s clothes?

“Oh, I suppose you’d know it all,” Will’s mother said. Her hard, dark blue eyes glared at him. They’d been soft, he remembered, when he was very young. Soft and yielding like a spring sky, always ready to grow moist with tears of joy or sadness and shower those blessings upon all comers. They’d grown hard like the waters of the Avon veiled by ice. “You’d know it all, and guess it all, and go about your life as if you learned better than your elders and those who have established the way of life we lead.”

“Mother,” Will warned, guessing where it would end, from past harangues.

“No. No. But listen to me in this, if nothing else, child, listen to me. Do not become entangled with them, under the hill.” Once more she crossed herself, on the words. “Give them a wide berth and trust them not. For lies are their very essence and substance, their being engendered by the father of all lies.”

Will started to rise, slowly, slowly easing Edmund onto the bench, and attempting to lean him against Gilbert, who recoiled from the babe’s touch. He needed to think, but he couldn’t do it in his mother’s presence and under the heavy shower of his mother’s philosophy.

Abandoning his efforts to balance the sleeping, limp Edmund against the skittish Gilbert, Will stood up and carried the babe to Joan, by the fireplace.

Joan looked up with a scowl. “Can’t you see I’m mending?” she said, lifting a wool stocking with a puckered seam along its length. The seam looked to Will like a mouth pursed in displeasure.

“Aye,” Will said, and smiled at Joan, ignoring his mother’s continued ranting. “You’re mending very ill. But take the babe, take him to his bed. I must be gone.”

“Be gone where?” his mother asked, picking up on the conversation, as if the comment had been addressed to her. “Be gone why? The strumpet has left and taken her child with her. You can have your old room back and live in it, with Gilbert and Richard and Edmund. Why don’t you go up and change your clothes? There’s an old suit of your father’s—”

“No, Mother.” Will raised his eyebrows, expressing long-suffering lack of patience to Joan.

Joan giggled, put down her sewing, and opened her arms to receive the sleeping Edmund.

“There’s a girl,” Will said. “There’s a good girl. Thank you, Joan.”

“And where will you be gone? To the empty house?” his mother asked, from behind him.

“Yes, to the empty house.” Will turned around and faced his mother, squaring his shoulders. He was taller than Mary by a full head. When had that happened and why hadn’t he noticed until now? “To the empty house, Mother, to think.”

His mother started crying. “Only promise me you’ll leave the hill people alone,” she said.

Will shrugged and made toward the door, but Mary interposed her own body.

She wiped at her tears with her stained apron. “When I bore you, how happy I was, and how I thanked God for sending me a son to replace the two daughters who had died. And now, how I wish it had been you and not Margaret who lay in a coffin in the churchyard. For a strumpet’s sake, you’d get yourself killed and leave your family unprotected.” She cried with abandon. “Is this the gratitude you owe your sire, who gave you life and who supported you above your deserts when you were little? Is this it?” Again, she took her apron to her cheeks and wiped her tears, leaving behind more green and yellow smears. “Promise me, Will. Promise me you won’t meddle in such matters.”

But Will walked around her and out into the rainy night, his thoughts in turmoil. He scarcely paid mind to his mother’s crying, her loud wailing, the tears that rolled down her cheeks, and the increasing smears left by her apron on her wet face. His father had trod this same road before? He wasn’t in this nightmare alone? His father had tangled with
them
before?

He thought of Lady Silver hanging on his arm, telling him that if he killed the usurper of the elves’ throne, he would have his Nan and little Susannah restored to him, and set the world aright. He thought of her perfume, her warmth, her cloying nearness, and felt a tightening in his groin, and wondered if the thing that had thus affected him existed at all. Or was she an illusion, nothing more?

He would go to his house and there he would wait for Silver’s appearance, and her explanation. And then he’d decide. But he feared no ghost and no apparition, like the ones who tortured his father, if by braving them he could get his Nan back.

As he opened the back door to his empty, dark kitchen, he thought that a haunted life with Nan would be preferable to a quiet one without her.

Scene 11

In a clearing in the forest of Arden, Quicksilver sits against an old tree, in his male aspect, one hand at his sword, another on his belt.

Q
uicksilver sagged against the trunk of a large oak tree, and tried to gather the strength to walk farther. He’d had enough stamina, barely enough, to drag himself away from the palace, out of sight of those who would rejoice in his weakness and his torment.

But here, a scant hundred yards from the palace, he collapsed against the tree, and slid down till he sat on the spongy moss of the forest floor. He let tears of fatigue and pain run down his bruised cheeks, mingling with the cold rain that soaked through his fine clothing and turned it into a sodden mess.

Beneath his right eye, his cheek throbbed, where he suspected a purple bruise would form later.

His power suffered like a creature eviscerated, raw and bleeding where its innards had been torn out of its living body. It screamed pain along his physical nerves, pounded his brain with the thought of its torment. His body, his physical body itself, felt not so far from evisceration. He’d examined himself for broken bones and found none, but his bruised and abraded flesh throbbed with rhythmic pain from his fall down the stairs.

Tears flowed down Quicksilver’s face, while the night turned darker, the rain heavier, and lightning zigzagged across the sky, far away.

Through the fog of tiredness in his mind, Quicksilver knew that he was late, that he should have been somewhere, that he had an appointment. Like an image from someone else’s dream, he remembered himself and Will walking and talking along the forest path. He’d promised Will that Lady Silver would come to him tonight, hadn’t he?

But how to manage it? The transformation itself would take no power. In fact it took power—a small but continuous drain—to prevent himself from changing between male and female aspects at random. But he would need to change his clothes before meeting Will, and that would require willful use of his magic skill and his dwindling, painfully raw power.

Oh, there was still magic in Quicksilver, to be sure. There would be. Not in vain had he been engendered by the sovereigns of the elf race. But the magic in him was only his, a small trickle when compared to the great river of the hill—a small spider web, nothing more, while the hill’s magic was a net tied together with diamond threads.

Quicksilver felt tired, old, worn out by this hour’s severance from the hill more than by the fifty years before it.

He must gather himself together, call to himself what power he had. He must avenge himself on the traitor. He must recover his position and his place in the hill. . . which was to say that he had to become king, since Sylvanus would never allow Quicksilver back in the hill while Sylvanus ruled.

Quicksilver recalled Pyrite’s death and wished to the human gods and the terrors of elvenkind, that he didn’t have to drag his own, worthless carcass through his futile life. If only it had been him and not Pyrite who’d vanished in a flickering of color, a scattering of nothing, echoes of power eaten up by the forest and carried somewhere by a supernatural wind. If only it had been him, bleeding his supernatural life onto the forest ground.

If only his too, too solid flesh could melt, taking with it his pains, his bruises, his cowardice, his all too fallible character. Oh, if only he’d never been born and Sylvanus, happy and powerful, were the rightful king of Elfland.

But thinking of Sylvanus reminded Quicksilver of his parents, of Pyrite. All of them were gone; all of them now resided in a world of dwindling shadows, and would remain there till they ceased to exist or until Quicksilver, their son, their friend, won their release.

Quicksilver cackled. He could no more release those loved shades than he could run, or fly, or rule elvenkind.