Ill Met by Moonlight (20 page)

The thought was like a chill wind, and leaves and plants around him fluttered with it, as if it had been, indeed, physical wind. Quicksilver wrapped his arms around himself. How could he exact vengeance from his oppressor? How could he regain his position in Elvenland? He had no power, and he was alone. For the first time in his life, he had neither friends nor admirers, not even one sycophantic hypocrite wishing him well.

Hatred gathered within the huddled mass of his misery, like thunder that erupts from dark clouds. Hatred for Sylvanus, for the hill, for the broad halls, the marble floors, the delicate, impossible columns, the trappings and settings of Quicksilver’s own former happiness.

Standing alone in the forest, he sent his hatred outward from him. Hatred for the tyrant who had despoiled him and, not content with that, had torn him from the hill and as good as killed him. No, worse than killed him. Quicksilver smarted at the pain, the injustice of it, and thought of Sylvanus in a hot gust of detestation. Oh, that hatred could be all that Quicksilver was, and Quicksilver become his hatred and his hatred Quicksilver, so that no more would the prince be fallible or scared, or hurting, but would be instead the towering rage, the diamantine edge of hatred. Oh, that his hatred could grow hair and teeth and claws and fangs, and crawl through the forest like a beast, and steal upon Sylvanus’s satisfied majesty, and satiate its raw craving in the steaming heat of Sylvanus’s entrails. He wished for no more.

A noise like horses, the echo of a hunting bugle sounded, over the roiling discontent of thunder, echoing Quicksilver’s own cravings, his painful thoughts.

For a moment he thought that the sound came from within, that it was the echo of his own call to the hunt—the hunt for his vengeance and the satisfaction of his hatred. Then the bugle sounded again and with it mixed the joyous barks of dogs who have uncovered prey. Quicksilver realized that the sound came from outside, from the forest drowned in unseasonable rain.

Who would be hunting in this weather? Certainly no human. The puzzle awakened Quicksilver’s rational mind, and he worried at it as a dog at his bone. Sylvanus? But no. Sylvanus would be busy appeasing the nursemaid and any—did Quicksilver dare believe it?—voice that might be raised to protest Quicksilver’s expulsion. As for the other lords and ladies of the court, Quicksilver couldn’t imagine their braving the ruin of their silken clothes on such a pursuit as hunting during a storm.

No, none of them would. They were too satisfied with their condition, too contented with their honors and powers. Too satisfied, even, to protest the expulsion of the crown prince, the rightful heir to the throne, the one who should have been king. Quicksilver ground his teeth and, while the barking of dogs sounded ever closer and the hunting bugle made itself heard again, he wished he could walk into the court and strip the lords and ladies of their finery and of their power, beat them, and throw them out of the palace and make them all go bruised and naked into the storm outside, so they would know, for once, what had been inflicted on Quicksilver, their unmourned prince.

You can.
Out of nowhere, a voice came, a booming voice filled with the sonorous echoes of rolling thunder, with the thunderclap’s majestic uncaring.
You can.

The words were not pronounced and the voice echoed not so much in Quicksilver’s mind as in his sinews, in the very fibers and nerves that wove his body into being. His heart started up, of its own accord. The Hunter? Oh, nonsense, the Hunter didn’t exist. It would be another of the pantheon of beings that elves or humans or both had created and given life to by their belief. A jumped-up supernatural phantom who thought to scare the more ancient and true race of elves.

Smarting at the insult, Quicksilver managed to stand up by clawing his way up the trunk of the oak tree, then leaned against it for support. He’d not let some godling see him as weak and damaged and easy prey for its tricks and goading. His macerated body hurt with every movement, but he stood, and with his magic vision alert peered around tree trunks, and behind and beyond them, for a hint of this being’s nature and appearance. He saw nothing.

Some of these once-divinities had become so debased as to be little more than insects. Yet the voice had sounded booming, as if it brought great power behind it.

Supernatural laughter sounded.

Great. It would be a prankster god, or a minor faun, one of those who had clung to the elven race and, on the peripheries of it, gone on existing. With their goat feet tapping to the beat, they’d often join dances in the woodland glens. But they were minor nuisances, with little status, no more important than the serving fairies. How would one of them dare address a prince of Elvenland, even a fallen prince? Quicksilver clenched his hands tight, in painful, angry fists.

The bugle echoed again, and a great wind shook the trees and swayed the bushes. Like frozen breath, it gusted over Quicksilver, making him shiver and causing his teeth to chatter.

Up
, the voice said. A hunting horn sounded.

And up Quicksilver looked, past the sparse canopy of the trees, to the lowering skies that hung over the ancient trees of Arden.

Against the leaden grey skies, a darker shape loomed, the shape of a gigantic man astride a horse, holding a horn. Around that shape, other shapes, immense feral-looking dogs, clustered and growled, and nosed forward with impatience, as though smelling Quicksilver’s weak magic, his dwindling strength.

Fear clutched at Quicksilver like nausea, coiling around his bruised body like a chain of good forged iron that sucks away what strength and power it finds in elven flesh. The sound of his own heartbeat deafened him. He wanted to run, but he could do no more than take a step back and shake his head, and say, “You don’t exist.”

The figure on the horse threw its head back and laughed, a full-throated laugh. Its mirth made Quicksilver shiver and he clamped his teeth together, to avoid their chattering noise announcing his cowardice to the forest. Through clenched teeth, he spoke, his voice indistinct and flat. “And if you exist . . . if you exist . . . then you prey on us.” His voice lost itself without echoes into the roaring storm. “On my kind. And I’m your quarry.” He wished that his kind had prayers, aversion rituals, of the sort with which humans used to attempt to exorcise elves. Ineffective those rituals might be, but they gave the one who used them a momentary feeling of protection. Quicksilver hadn’t even that delusion to hold as a shield between himself and his approaching end. He thought of Pyrite cursing him to be devoured by the Hunter, and his mouth worked, worked, searching to create the words of an nonexistent prayer, a protective spell.

The Hunter shook his head.
Some of you are my prey, but not you, little one. What you have, the power you hold, is not worth my harvesting. I prey on those still connected to the hill, so through them I can suck the hill’s living power. Not on you, little one. Not on you.

His words dripped with derision, revealing Quicksilver as a small, scurrying thing, a hare with fur and tough, gristly meat, a prize no hunter would claim. He was just that now, no more. A creature that might be trampled beneath the hooves of the Hunter’s supernatural horse, but one that had nothing to fear from the Hunter’s weapons, his well-aimed lance.

In a voice that barely sounded above his booming, beating heart, Quicksilver asked, “But then why . . . why come for me?”

Because you have vengeance in your heart and hatred in your soul and both call to me, as to a like mind,
the Hunter said. He climbed down from his horse, each motion so human, so natural, that it made his dark shape, the power that bristled from it, seem even more obscenely impossible. Striding like a man or an elf, the Hunter stepped down onto clouds and descended majestically, as though walking down an invisible staircase toward Quicksilver. His horse and dogs stayed behind, and the horse neighed softly, extending its neck as if to look down at its master.
For you, and others like you, I have an offer. Take the power from me, and I’ll give you enough for
your vengeance. Enough for all you wish.
He stood quite close to Quicksilver, and close by he looked even more impossible and more human, both. His face was chiseled with beauty that made elves seem half-haphazard things, lumps of clay thrown together by a blind potter. His black curls looked like they’d each been sculpted and woven and made the most perfect expression of his nature. But his thundercloud-grey eyes seethed with coldness, with dark that was the absence of light. And, though he wore a normal enough velvet suit of dark red, the color of old blood, over his perfect humanlike shape, where the chest should be that housed a living being’s heart, was nothing: a void, a roiling darkness, boiling like a cauldron and swirling like a dark, sucking whirlpool.

You have great things in mind, that you’d do if you had power,
the Hunter said.
I’ll give you power.
Slowly, the Hunter extended his hand to Quicksilver. It looked like a human hand, strong and square, covered in dark red gloves. From that hand, all around it, a river of power flowed, such as made the hill’s power small and miserly.
Take it
, the dark, booming voice said, sounding like velvet sliding across the night sky.
Take it, take it, little one, be done with it. Why hunger when you can have it all, the strength and power of the beings that existed before humanity? Take this old power, from when the stronger ancestors of your kind reigned alone and romped through the sacred glades, feasting and flirting and fighting and, in their wars, their feuds, their assassinations, offering sacrifice and homage to me.

Quicksilver stepped back still farther, though everything in him called him to that supernatural, extended hand, to the power that flowed from it like manna from the human heaven. Hungry, cold, filled with fear, Quicksilver longed for that power, for that strength. Strength enough to crush Sylvanus like a gnat. Strength enough to live and love and be loved. Strength and power enough to make Quicksilver the greatest sovereign of elvenkind.

Yet some ancient instinct spoke in Quicksilver, whispering amid the thundering of his desire for power. Some instinct that made him step back and back and back, feeling roots under his feet and sliding around the trunks of trees. That power came from sacrifices, from unhallowed sacrifices of elven blood and elven might. The Hunter had said it. The power would be tainted and, like the creature’s clothes, stained with old blood, with magical perversion. This was no benevolent sprite of the woods, but an ancient, dark predator, full of hunger and evil. Why would such a one offer Quicksilver strength and power?

“The price?” Quicksilver asked, his voice just above a rasp. “The price?” He remembered Titania telling him, in the happy days of his long-ago childhood, that a magical being must always tell you the price of his magic.

The booming laughter sounded again.
Cunning, are you?
the Hunter said.
Oh, we’ll be great allies, little one. Yes, there is a price, but a small one. After an eternity of enjoying my power, or when you have nowhere else to go, you will be called.
The Hunter lifted his other hand, which held a dark bugle.
And then must you come and be with me, throughout eternity.
Around him, dark furry shapes clustered, as though called by his words.
But you’ll never die, and you’ll never fear again, and you’ll be stronger than all men, stronger than all elves.

The dogs nuzzled at the Hunter’s legs in a confusion of grey fur and glittering red eyes. They gave off a smell, not the normal smell of canine fur and well-fed flesh, but a smell as of an open grave. Quicksilver gagged and stepped back.

They looked more like wolves than dogs, but even for wolves they sported too heavy a jaw, too massive a skull. They must be primeval wolves who first had clustered around men’s fires, and fed on men’s scraps. Or maybe on the scraps from primeval elven fires. The Hunter was that old. Quicksilver could feel that in the ancient, sparkling power that ran from the Hunter’s hand, and clustered around the creature’s shape, and stretched blue-white tendrils toward Quicksilver, calling to him with its promises of vengeance and power.

The dogs neared Quicksilver, sniffing at the reaching tendrils of power, whining. They looked at the power and then at Quicksilver, with baleful glowing red eyes.

Come, boy, come,
the Hunter said.
Will you take my power or not? I’ll not wait forever.

Quicksilver’s head reeled, and he trembled. This was how it must feel to Will to face Quicksilver himself. To him, Quicksilver must be as the Hunter to Quicksilver, a strange, unfathomable power. Only Quicksilver was using Will for his own purposes. How did this creature mean to use Quicksilver? “I don’t know,” Quicksilver said. “I don’t know if you mean me no harm. I don’t know what your question is, nor what I’m answering.”

To be or not to be?
the Hunter asked, a suggestion of laughter behind his words.
To be alive and well and powerful, or to dwindle away until you’re nothing, less than nothing, not even a memory in your people’s mind?

To be or not to be, Quicksilver thought, and repeated the words to himself like a prayer, a magic talisman. His knees shook and his body ached. He longed for the power in that proffered hand; longed, like men long for immortality. He could feel it, sparkling and cold, and strong. His for the asking. He could mend the bruises and tears on his body. He could avenge himself on Sylvanus and his treasonous court, and crush to nothing his enemies beneath the heels of his dancing slippers. Only touch that open hand, only accept that power, and Quicksilver could have it all. Power and life everlasting. The price was no price. No price at all. To be one like the Hunter, to live with him. Quicksilver smiled. Why, to live forever was a reward, not a price.

Almost on its own, Quicksilver’s hand started forward, to meet the proffered source of such blessings.

The clustering shapes around the Hunter growled and stared, and whined for the taste of Quicksilver’s flesh. But if Quicksilver lived with the Hunter, he’d be protected from his dogs, would he not?