Ill Met by Moonlight (3 page)

Every rough spot on the path, every stone, every twig, made itself felt through Will’s worn-out soles. His legs ached with a dull fatigue. He should have had his supper and he should be going to bed. He should be lying beside his Nan. But Nan was gone.

What if she hadn’t gone to the Hathaways? What if she’d run away? She used to escape from her father’s strict household, he remembered. She’d dressed in her brother Bartholomew’s old clothes and gone tramping about the forest of Arden for whole afternoons. Will wondered if she missed that freedom.

After Susannah’s birth Nan had turned so silent. She no longer laughed at his jests. Waking up in the night to tend the baby made her look perpetually tired. And there wasn’t ever enough food, either, only the meager white meat of egg and cheese, with the occasional bit of mutton. With her feeding the babe besides, Nan had grown thin and wraithlike. She didn’t seek Will’s pleasure as before, nor did her sight inflame him as it once had.

The trees whispered ominously around him, disturbed by wind.

Will sighed.

Things scurried and chattered in the undergrowth on either side of the path.

Ahead, some creature cried like a wounded child.

Could a gentleman really have been courting Nan? One of the richer merchants who came for the Stratford market, perhaps?

Will thought that Nan—Nan who labored nonstop, cooking and washing, mending and weaving and tending the garden—might well have taken the promise of a better life, had a gentleman offered it to her. What fool wouldn’t?

Yet Nan was a fool in love. Nan loved him. Will was sure of this. He remembered the soft look that veiled Nan’s deep blue eyes when she gazed on him. Yes, she loved him, too much and too well.

In the distance, a dog, or perhaps a wolf, howled at the moon.

Moonlight scarcely penetrated the deep darkness of the timeless forest, where each tree cast a whispering shadow, each bush resembled a skittering, squirming monster.

Sweet music sounded out of nowhere, rising like a river current, surrounding and enveloping Will.

He stopped, startled, at the sounds that were soothing, cool and harmonious and rousing all at once, gripping him in the tide of their smooth, sweet emotion.

Ahead of him, on his right-hand side, a great flash of light surged, like a flame that suddenly catches.

Fire. He flinched in panic, and put up his hand to cover his face. Fire, now. Fire come out of nothing. The forest, dry with midsummer heat, would catch easily. Will was too close to run from it.

But, as his dazzled eyes adapted to the light, he realized the blaze shone too pale, too mild, to be a conflagration. He lowered the hand that had shielded his eyes.

The flash of light solidified into a tall, white castle. Because its walls had an uneven transparency like clotted milk, Will saw rooms within it and glittering servants and courtiers in velvet and jewels walking up and down white marble staircases. At the center of the castle, a vast salon sprawled, furnished only with a red carpet and a massive gilded throne.

Noblemen and fine ladies, wearing jewels that sparkled like rival stars, stood in groups on either side of the throne. Brightly garbed minstrels played sweet music on strange instruments.

In front of the throne, on the red carpet, stood Nan, her fair hair arranged in heavy coils braided through with pearls, her slim body garbed in fine cloth that gave off the sheen of silk.

Around her, lights sparkled and twinkled, like the blinking beacon of the firefly.

Scene 2

A palace in the air, sparkling with white walls and spacious marble floors. Columns like those in ancient Greek buildings support the far-distant ceiling, but these columns rise lighter and thinner than ever the gravity-bound laws of human architecture could permit. The ceiling itself shimmers in deep tones of pure gold, as does the throne. On the throne sits a creature who looks like a bearded man in his middle years. But his dark hair is smoother, his features more perfect than man ever possessed. He wears a crown and looks complacently around at an assembly of extraordinarily handsome courtiers. Around the walls and up near the ceiling, little fairies fly, their human shapes aloft on dragonfly wings. In a corner, a gathering of young courtiers play instruments with talent beyond mortal reach.

“
W
hy, now, my brother. I’m glad you’ve graced this assembly.” King Sylvanus, Lord of Elven Realms Above the Air and Beneath the Hills of Avalon, leaned forward on his gilded throne to look at his younger brother, Quicksilver.

The king’s oval-shaped face composed itself to show eager interest. His dark blue eyes, his small pink lips, all of his well-proportioned features, arranged themselves in an expression of solicitude. Yet beneath all that good will, lurked something very much like disapproval.

Quicksilver sighed. He’d been hoping to go unnoticed, amid the group of youths, more or less his own age, who huddled to the left side of the throne and traded gossip and news about the birth of the king’s new daughter, the death of his mortal spouse, and the human who had been kidnapped to nurse the royal baby.

What other gossip had they traded, and what news had leaked from their easy prattle to the vigilant ears of the elven king?

Fearful but determined not to show it, Quicksilver stepped forward, onto the red carpet in front of the throne.

He should have known that he could not remain hidden for very long. Quicksilver saw himself clearly, in his mind’s mirror, and knew himself for the most lovely elven lord of his age. Besides, unlike the other courtiers, he recoiled from gaudy clothes, tinted in colors borrowed from butterfly wings and grafted from summer gardens. His grief at his humiliating submission drove him to wearing dark clothes. His court slippers were black, as were the gloves on his long-fingered hands and the hose and breeches that molded his long, well-shaped legs. His velvet doublet, dark as the midwinter night sky, outlined his broad shoulders and narrow waist in gloom.

Quicksilver even disdained the white collar fashionable among mortals and aped by most of his elven companions. He wore nothing contrasting, save a large diamond clasp that closed his doublet at the throat, and his own long, glimmering, moonlight-colored hair, combed over his left shoulder to his waist.

The jewel had come from his mother, sweet Titania, late queen of the Fairy Realms. It was all Quicksilver had inherited from his parents. Quicksilver’s heart ached within him, mingling resentment and mourning. He should have inherited the kingdom. By elven law, the youngest child should have inherited, and that was Quicksilver. The youngest child, aye, and cosseted and coddled as the heir by fair Titania and her husband, Oberon, before their deaths. But all that, all law, all justice, was as nothing to the tyrant, Sylvanus.

The anger that coursed through Quicksilver tinged red the deep dark river of grief that drowned his soul. Yet, anger and humiliation, a bitter brew, hid themselves well in his sweet features, lurked unnoticed in his round, dark green eyes, as he danced forward, with mincing steps, to pay his respects to the usurper on the throne.

What else could he do? The fairy hill had accepted Sylvanus, goaded by Sylvanus’s smooth words, his depiction of Quicksilver as a lowly shapechanger. That done, Quicksilver had been defeated. He could no more live without the hill, and its power that supported his elven soul, than a mortal could live without air or food.

Quicksilver tightened his hands into fists, until his well-kept nails bit into the tender flesh of his palms.

At fifty, Quicksilver had scarcely shed his elven childhood. He was barely old enough to speak for himself.

Five years ago, at his parents’ death, he’d been a child in mind and law, more interested in his play pleasures than in the throne. By the time he’d realized he’d been robbed, the game had been played and the victor had claimed his place for good and ill.

Rightful king or no, Sylvanus was now the lord of fairies and elves, possessor of their vows of submission and, through those, of their glamoury, their supernatural strength, their very souls.

The might of all those conjoined powers surged through and from Sylvanus, like the discharge of heavenly power erupting from the thundercloud to char the Earth.

Quicksilver breathed deeply and stood before his brother, bowing his fair head slightly to the dark-haired, bearded majesty on the throne. “My lord.”

His brother smiled. “I am amazed, my brother, that you come to us thus and grace the court with your presence. I heard you wished to leave our realm, entire, for another kingdom and its fair monarch.”

Quicksilver barely stopped himself from gasping. His breath froze in his chest. The king had found him out. He knew of Quicksilver’s plans, those ideas carefully spun in the dark recesses of the night, in the confidence of Quicksilver’s intimates.

Who could—who would—have revealed to the king Quicksilver’s plans of escape? Lady Ariel? He looked at the slim blonde on the other side of the room. No, she loved him too well to want him thwarted. Pyrite? Quicksilver forbore to search out his childhood friend in the group of male courtiers. He couldn’t be the traitor, anyway. Bright, fair, prattling Pyrite didn’t wish to keep Quicksilver near. The comparison between their looks bode ill for Pyrite. He’d much rather be friends with Quicksilver at a distance.

Quicksilver heard his own voice shape well-formed, facile words. “I do not wish to leave the realm of my birth, my brother, the realm of my parents.” He meant it, as far as that went. He had no wish to leave, but leave he must, to avoid the usurper, his long reach touching Quicksilver’s own soul. He must, to avoid the corruption of having to draw force from the tyrant who had stolen Quicksilver’s own inheritance.

Sylvanus smiled. He extended his right hand to the thin air beside him. One of the flying fairies landed on it, dropping a rounded pearl of dew onto the monarch’s palm. “I have here, my brother, a copy of a message from you to the lady Amaris, Queen of the fairy realm of Tyr-Nan-Og—asking her for the sanctuary of her kingdom, maybe the grace of her hand.” The king held the dew between thumb and forefinger and, in that magic globe Quicksilver’s miniscule image pranced, begged for refuge, and preened to entice that stranger, the maiden Queen of Tyr-Nan-Og. “Will you explain, my brother, then, what you meant by this message and”—the king gestured toward a troop of little flying fairies each holding a pearl drop of dew—“by the ones that followed it, and the ones that you received in return, in which Queen Amaris does not spurn you and even makes arrangements for your travel—all without consulting me?”

Quicksilver felt color burn in his cheeks, then vanish as he went cold with fear at the possible consequences of his failed plans. To contract marriage, or even to seek it out, without his king’s consent would be treason, of course. To leave the kingdom without consent would be treason, also, for a member of the royal family.

“I meant not to displease you. Nor did I wish to. In faith, I had no great design in mind. But you know, my brother, that since our parents’ death these five years ago, my heart is yet full of mourning.” On a wild, crazed chance, like a deer brought to bay by a pack of hounds that will yet try to spear them on his antlers, and fight even as he bleeds into death, Quicksilver added, “If you’d give me a chance to go to another kingdom, and there pursue my studies and heal my pain . . . I’ve scarce completed the training in magic use that a noble in my position must endure. And the Queen of Tyr-Nan-Og will, I’m sure, vouchsafe me a stay in her court. That’s all I wished of her.”

And this was true, though the lady no doubt also wanted Quicksilver in her bed. But Quicksilver would rather not. He had been born with the capacity to change shapes between male and female at will—an ability more befitting lowly forest shapechangers than a member of the royal family—and in his duality he’d never found true love or even lasting desire with either gender.

Oh, Quicksilver would have married the queen for the power and the safety such a marriage promised. If that was the price for peace, then he would pay it. If he couldn’t avoid matrimony, then he would marry rather than die. But matrimony had never been his intent. He’d just resigned himself to its inevitability. “I wanted a respite in different surroundings. Nothing more.”

The king’s eyes opened, in startled surprise, as though he’d never expected to hear a defense. For a moment he frowned; then he pouted. His small pink lips, so much like Quicksilver’s own, drew into an unsatisfied expression, a pinch of disappointment, like the mouth of a child denied a sweet.

“No,” he said. “No, my brother. You’re needed here, not in Tyr-Nan-Og. You’ll stay where it can be seen that we two live in harmony and that there is no dissension between us. Abroad, who knows what fools might start intrigues or deceits around your fair head. Young, innocent and trusting as you are . . . and with your dual, changing, capricious nature, your uncontrollable mutability . . .”

His brother always spoke thus, in veiled terms, of Quicksilver’s power of changing between the male and female form, that gift—that curse—come to Quicksilver from some unknown ancestor. At least that was how the king alluded to it in Quicksilver’s presence. Quicksilver knew too well that behind his back Sylvanus referred to his younger brother as the spawn of some dark thing that had crept, unbeknownst, into their parents’ bed. Quicksilver knew that this had been one of the arguments employed to steal the crown from his too-young head.