Ill Met by Moonlight (24 page)

Will wanted to point out that she was a woman and that, at most, she might have been queen, but not king. He dared not. She looked like Nan used to look when describing the men her father had thought suitable for her, and the marriages he’d tried to force her into by intimidation and guilt.

Silver’s eyes flashed, like droplets of molten silver, and her white face became whiter, while her lips retracted to show her sharp white teeth beneath, clamped tight and menacing.

Will wouldn’t point out anything at all. He stood up and backed away, awed at this fury, this unleashed storm.

The lady’s gaze fell on him and seemed to remark his furtive shying. Her expression softened, her face relaxed. Her lips let go their raging tautness and went soft, shapelessly soft and yielding. “Oh, Will,” she said. “Oh, Will, not you. I’m not angry at you.”

Like a high-tempered stallion that takes its own way regardless of the wishes of its rider—like a storm that rages despite human prayers—like any other natural force, the lady changed her mind and her course. She stood and approached him. Her hands reached for Will’s shoulders and pulled him close, and her soft, trembling lips pressed upon his.

The world contracted to that kiss. All of Will’s wishes, all of Will’s senses, all of Will’s thoughts became no more than that mouth that opened onto his, that tongue that probed his, those white teeth playing against his own.

Running his tongue over the lady’s sharp, pointy teeth, brought Will an odd pleasure on the edge of pain.

Never had a woman kissed him like that. Not like that, till he felt his whole body and mind consumed and that his soul itself was in danger of igniting at this touch. The only woman he’d ever kissed was Nan, and Nan . . .

Nan mattered not. Her image crumbled within Will like a dried flower, long kept in an unopened book. All thought of his guilt and atonement left with her. Nan was like the memory of a childhood toy, enjoyed while childhood lasted and then forgotten. She was a pale tatter in the wardrobe of memory, compared to Lady Silver’s purple splendor.

Will encircled Silver’s waist with his hands, and she fought not. He kissed her hard and deep, and she shied not away. His hands roamed everywhere, learning the depth and breadth of her flesh, and she protested not.

Their breathing accelerated in unison until, breath by breath, they raced each other to a pinnacle of dizzying, gasping ardor.

The lady untied her dress and let it fall, then dropped her chemise after. They swept down like curtains that open, and revealed her tall, limber body. Will had to lift the hands he’d placed on either side of her waist to allow the fabric to drop to the floor. The shimmering cloth puddled around the lady’s ankles. Amid it she stood, like Venus born of water and from it engendered, clean and guiltless.

The light of the fire shone on her white body, her perfect skin. No hint of blemish marred her. No childhood illness had left its mark there, no scarring had formed from early falls. The virgin silk of her skin looked as if it had but just left the weaver’s loom. The slight broadening of her hips looked large only because her waist was so narrow that Will could encircle it with his two hands.

Encircle it he did and, pressing close, he made bold to steal again a kiss she would willingly give.

He’d never been thus tempted, he’d never craved this much. His hands on that fair skin felt like pilgrims that, having crossed the parched desert with no sustenance, had reached the shrine where they longed to worship, and there worshipped again and again, unsatiated.

She pressed close to him, her firm, round breasts heavy and hot against his doublet. Her hands unfastened his doublet and shirt, breeches and hose, as though she knew those clothes as well as she knew her own. Those small white hands worked fast and silently, seemingly self-willed, even while her mouth remained joined to his and her tongue disported amid his teeth like a hunter in accustomed glades.

When Will was naked, shivering in his drafty kitchen, she knelt and showed him the other secrets her tongue knew and other hidden, shadowed valleys of pleasure that Will had never visited.

The flames in the fireplace leaped in newly minted golden splendor and cast a molten heat over their conjoined forms.

Nan’s cat spat and hissed atop the keeping cupboard.

Later they went upstairs, to the oaken bed, and there, while the rain tapped on the roof and the wind whistled a mournful tune through the cracks in the shuttered windows, they strained the rope supports of the mattress and wore out each other’s sportive invention.

Scene 13

Will’s bedroom. It is yet dark, but greyish daylight filters in through irregular cracks on the shutters. In the light, dust motes dance. On the bed, half-uncovered, Will sleeps with a smile on his face. Standing beside the bed is Quicksilver, naked, returned to his male aspect.

Q
uicksilver could not believe what he had done. He stood by the bed and shook with righteous indignation at his own folly.

It must have been the cutting off from the hill, the withdrawal of his ancestral power. It must have been meeting the Hunter, feeling so small, and the loneliness, and the rain and that damned knife, which the boy bandied about so cavalierly. It must have been seeing his best friend cut down, and losing the regard of the only elf lady who’d ever regarded Quicksilver.

He glanced at the bed. Well . . . All that and Will. The boy was sweet and gentle and oh, so preoccupied with the lady Silver’s distress. He’d offered sympathy, and sympathy was something that Quicksilver had been offered but rarely.

Kind, brave Will had come to protect Quicksilver in the forest, even though he had to have known that Quicksilver was an elf and, as an elf, commanded powers and strength that Will could not even guess at.

Quicksilver thought of all his friends, everyone who, during his maybe too contented childhood had never offered smiles, or attention, or reproof, to Quicksilver, the crown prince, the great one, who needed nothing from anyone.

Here was someone who thought Quicksilver needed help and gave it unstintingly. Help and love, and sweetness besides. Much too good, much, to waste on vengeance and bitterness.

Quicksilver let his gaze frame the boy’s black curls, the soft curve of his youthful cheek. Damn, but Will looked good, and loved better. Almost as well as Kit, maybe more eagerly.

Yet, was that reason for Quicksilver to allow his wits to be overwhelmed? Was it reason enough for him, like a fool, to get himself naked, and vulnerable, in the mortal’s own house? Damn it all, Quicksilver knew very well that whenever he woke up, he found himself back to his male aspect and how would young Will Shakespeare react to a naked male in his bedroom?

Even now Quicksilver trusted not the lady Silver’s desires. Should he allow himself to change into her, she might well remain here, contented, the rest of her mischanced life. And doom the boy to madness.

Quicksilver started walking away from the bed. An ill-laid foot made a floorboard squeak, and the bed covers rustled as Will stirred. Quicksilver looked toward the bed and sighed and, almost without thinking, lifted his hand and held Will’s sleep over the boy’s dark head, keeping him submerged in dormancy, quiet and dreaming, until Quicksilver should leave the house.

For this Quicksilver still had enough power. Meek and soft power, like the light of a guttering candle, but strong enough to subdue mortals.

Quicksilver hugged himself against the chilly air. He longed for his own room in the hill, for the satin sheets, the broad, soft bed, in which he’d slept most of his life. He longed for his bath, where he could rid himself of dried sweat and grime. But the hill was barred and nothing for it, now, but the narrow beds of humankind and humankind’s rare and inconvenient baths. Unless . . .

Again, Quicksilver looked toward Will and frowned, and sighed, all in one. A beautiful mortal, Will was, but what good would he be, once the insanity that started with the love of elevenkind commenced coursing through his veins, turning his blood mad?

Quicksilver shuddered thinking of Kit, the timid divinity student whom he had loved for a scant summer and who had become a vociferous heretic, a promiscuous lover of bawdy houses, a spy and counterspy in the deadly realm of mortal politics, running hither and thither, from France to Scotland and everywhere between and offering his services to the Crown and the Catholics and everyone who promised him money and thrills.

Quicksilver had used Kit, he now saw, just as the Hunter had proposed to use Quicksilver. A like mind calling to like mind, and nothing more, but Quicksilver had not paid for it. Kit had.

No. Quicksilver did not wish that for Will.

A voice still within Quicksilver, the voice of the Quicksilver who’d ever got his way and done what he wanted, told him that he must go on with his plan, that Will might as well die killing Sylvanus as go insane by craving the supernatural love he could not have, the warmth that elvenkind could not bestow.

But the other part of Quicksilver, the part that had resisted the Hunter’s evil, and listened to Ariel’s speech and been heartily shamed by it, cringed from such thought.

No, no, it had been a night, a night and nothing more. Will would live, Will would survive this. He would grow to be a prosperous fat burgess, happy in his wealth, who would buy himself arms and land and, eventually, a nice tomb upon Stratford church. His little daughter that the fairy land now held would marry some wealthy Puritan, a doctor or a lawyer or some sort of learned man, and Will would brag of them both and their connections. One of his descendants would attain nobility.

As for Quicksilver’s vengeance, Quicksilver would forget it. Forget it and leave Will, and go, like the cursed thing he was, and dwell in some vile part of the forest, and there dwindle away peacefully.

Will’s forehead had beaded with the fine sweat of contented sleep. His rosy lips parted. He snored softly. He smelled warm and young and healthy.

Quicksilver looked on him, transfixed.

No, Quicksilver would never again cause another’s death. Pyrite had been enough of a sacrifice to Quicksilver’s vanity, his cursed pride.

Let Sylvanus rule Elvenland. He would be good enough with it, now that Quicksilver, that thorn in his side, was gone.

As for Titania’s and Oberon’s shades. . . Quicksilver felt tears sting his eyes. He had failed them. Another guilt he’d have to learn to bear.

The thought of his parents put a chill in Quicksilver’s body. The wind outside picked up, blowing through the cracks in the shutters with renewed force. Rain rattled against the shutters, too, a rat-a-tat-tat of ominous portent.

Where had Quicksilver left his clothes?

Hugging himself, trying to collect his scant wits about him, and think where, in the wild lovemaking, his clothes had been taken off, he started down the stairs, step by step, then step by step retraced his steps back up, for one more look at Will sleeping on the bed.

Pleasure and sleep, mingled, had painted Will’s cheeks a light pink and touched a deeper tint to his lips, like nature upon ripening an apple will make it blush a more intense red. One of his arms lay flung above his head, curved somewhat, like the arm of a conjurer about to unveil some grand trick. His other arm was crossed over his still hairless chest, which lay uncovered. Below that, the covers gathered in a tumble, hiding the middle of Will’s body. From beneath the tangle, Will’s legs emerged, long and almost hairless, shapely and muscular, the legs of a man who walked much.

Quicksilver leaned over the bed and touched his lips to Will’s sleeping lips.

In his sleep, Will smiled and sighed.

Quicksilver turned his back on him, resolutely this time, and forced his feet, step by step, down the stairs. No, and no, and no, and no. He would not make a fool of himself, nor could he afford to. He would not ruin Will’s life more than he already had. Enough, enough already. Now Quicksilver would go, in shame and penance, and expiate his reckless joys in the darker recesses of the forest. There he would die, like some hermit of old, if not saintly nor blameless, at least having worn the edge off his sins, blunted them, made them homelier.

With such worthy thoughts, Quicksilver made it downstairs.

Crossing the dark, shuttered workshop, Quicksilver wrinkled his nose at the smell of rotten eggs and aged pelts that were part of the glover’s trade. That such a base creature as Will’s father, one who dealt in the skins of dead animals and cut and fashioned them into gloves, that such a creature had sired Will . . . Worse, that such a creature should have the power to kill elvenkind. . . And where had that dagger come from? And wouldn’t it be better if Quicksilver took it with him?

Quicksilver ran down the hallway and into the kitchen.

His clothes lay where he remembered them, all of a pile by the now cold fire. Will hadn’t banked those fires the night before, busy as he’d been feeding other fires. And neither he nor Quicksilver had cleared the remains of the banquet with which they’d fortified their flagging appetites halfway through their sport. Quicksilver had conjured bird and fowl and fine venison from the lands hereabouts and, by his power, had them arrive roasted and prepared to the Shakespeare kitchen. There, Will and he had eaten until they had satiated that appetite. Now, the remains of their meal cluttered the uncleared board, looking faintly repulsive. The same fat black-and-white tomcat who had, the night before, observed their lovemaking with curious eyes, now rooted amid the food, and cast a suspicious look and a warning growl at Quicksilver.