Ill Met by Moonlight (4 page)

Quicksilver’s anger spiked, sharpened, like the new pain received when an old wound reopens.

Just at the mention of his strange power, Quicksilver fancied he heard tittering here and there in the assembly. Even the small fairies, the servants and helpers of Elvenland, skittered about on golden wings, casting wild patterns of light. Their own version of laughter.

Heat flared and waned on Quicksilver’s cheeks in waves. His shame coursed through him like pain.

From across the room, he saw the lady Ariel, Duchess of the Air Kingdoms, beautiful, blond, and soft-hearted, stare at him with a pitying look. Her pitying gaze was yet another insult heaped upon him. Even when the pity arose from love, Quicksilver would not suffer pity.

And yet, what else could he do, but suffer it in good stead? The power of the hill, his need for it, bound him hand and foot to both pity and scorn. He was a prince with neither honor nor power.

If he left here, he could only go to another elven kingdom. And that pathway had just been barred. His careful plans of escape to Tyr-Nan-Og, the nearest and friendliest of the elven lands, had been discovered, betrayed, destroyed with a flick of the royal hand. Betrayed by whom? Quicksilver returned to the question with burning interest. Did his brother, then, have spies everywhere?

Quicksilver bit his lower lip, trying to call forth salty blood from flesh, trying to give himself pain that would remind him of his vulnerable nature, his undeniable need for the hill.

“Stay.” The king leaned forward and watched Quicksilver as though reading his thoughts. Condescension mingled with a sharp, cunning look on the royal features. “Turn your thoughts, my brother, to the bright new day, and your joy to me, your rightful sovereign.”

Quicksilver’s blood thundered in his ears, a noise like a storm at sea. “I thought, milord,” he said, “that we were supposed to be mourning for your own dear wife, that mortal lady of passing beauty, who died just this week, giving life to your daughter.”

Silence fell over the palace. It seemed to Quicksilver that even the servants in the distant rooms had stopped moving, stopped speaking. He knew he’d made a fatal blunder. He knew well that his brother—with his cold nature—had forgotten his wife before she lay deep in the dark ground.

Quicksilver had heard rumors of the new royal nursemaid, arrived this day, who was expected to replace the queen on the throne and the king’s bed as well. But to know it was one thing, to speak it aloud another.

Sylvanus, knowing that Quicksilver had no love for the late, mortal-born queen, would guess that by speaking of mourning the dead queen, Quicksilver meant only to taunt Sylvanus himself.

Holding his breath, Quicksilver waited for the ax to fall, for the royal displeasure to cut him off from hill and power, and send him into the world as a wraith, a powerless, hollow being, neither elf nor mortal, neither ghost nor living. None in the hill would oppose that punishment, either, for such provocation. One does not taunt sovereigns.

Quicksilver waited, knowing himself doomed. What could have called his brother’s renewed attention to him now? What could have sparked this need to render Quicksilver harmless, defanged; this wish to torment Quicksilver until, like a pup attacked by an old wolf, he rolled on the floor and exposed that which made him vulnerable?

Quicksilver’s heart thudded erratically within his chest, like a trapped bird flinging itself at the walls of its cage and getting no more for it than torn wings.

Sylvanus laughed, a singing metallic sound, like the hiss of a blade sharpened on good stone. “Yes, my dear wife is dead.” He composed his face to sadness for a moment, then laughed again. “But, dear brother, your rightful sovereign is blessed with a daughter to lighten his days, a daughter who will have a nursemaid most fair. . . .”

At the words
rightful sovereign
, Quicksilver’s nails dug with renewed vigor into his palms, exacting blood to punish his meek acceptance of his brother’s foul lie. He must leave the hill. Oh, he must leave. And yet, he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave. Like a chained bear, baited by merciless, raging mutts, he must stay, helplessly straining at his bonds, while pain tore and rent his living flesh, his quick brain.

Quicksilver had so long clenched his fists that the pain of his nails biting his skin had dulled, had become an old, accustomed torment, like the pain of his having been passed over, like the aching torture of being who he was and not able to fix his nature to one, proper thing.

“Ah.” The king’s watchful attention, which had been intent on Quicksilver like the gaze of a cat on the mouse he tortures, softened and wandered behind Quicksilver’s left shoulder and up, toward the open door of the royal salon. “The nursemaid that the raiding party has found to nurse my daughter, the princess, has arrived. Tonight, she is introduced to the court. Is she not passing fair?”

Forgotten, Quicksilver edged away from the throne, and melted again into the crowd of colorfully attired noblemen. With them, he looked toward the door of the salon.

The mortal had been arrayed in elven finery, decked out as the most worthy of the elven ladies, in a pale green gown studded with pearls. Through the deep slashes in her sleeves, a silvery fabric shone. A tiara of crystal and pearls had been set on her hair, and she wore pearl earrings on her too-large, too-red earlobes.

She advanced in the small, hesitant steps of one bewildered. All around her danced the small, chattering sprite fairies, skittering and flying, looking now like small humans with wings, and now like no more than pale, glowing lights.

As humans, they grabbed at the woman’s arms and her skirts, and pulled her from the front and pushed her from behind. As lights, they danced ahead of her, enticing her forth.

Out of the corner of his eye, Quicksilver could see bevies of the fairy ladies across the room gather together, hide their faces behind their jeweled, plumaged fans, and whisper.

Oh, how they would dissect the stranger’s dress and her looks, talk of her too-bulbous nose, the altogether common shape of her round face. Her feet would be judged too large, her hair too coarse, her hands too broad and work-callused.

Quicksilver wished he had worn his female aspect today, because the males among whom he stood had nothing but slavish approbation and simpering, whispered admiration for the mortal their king had already pronounced fair.

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” Pyrite said. The shimmering green suit he wore lent brilliance to the brassy yellow hair that fell in curtains on either side of his mobile face. “Beautiful to take your heart away.”

“Her eyes, like twin moons, have enchanted my soul.”

“Her hair looks like wheat ready to be gathered at harvest,” another nobleman put in.

Quicksilver gazed down at his open hands and saw the half-moon shapes his nails had cut into his palms. Dipping the ladle of his need in the river of the hill’s power, he gathered magic to heal the wounds he had given himself. Even in doing it, he was aware that his brother had allowed him the use of that power; aware of Sylvanus’s amused disdain that came with this gift.

Another young lord, dressed in silk that owed pattern and coloring to the blooming rose in a summer afternoon, laughed musically. “May this woman soon become our king’s wife, and bring our sovereign lord a bountiful harvest indeed.”

Others giggled.

The mortal advanced past them, too dazzled or perhaps too scared to look in their direction. At the foot of the throne, she curtseyed.

This grace, Quicksilver thought, might well have taken her the livelong day to learn.

She didn’t look like a court lady, but like a broad-hipped farm girl, a peasant accustomed to harsh work. And perhaps the king meant it thus, having required a sturdy maid this time, since his last, highborn bride had proven so frail.

Quicksilver’s hands tingled with new-healed wounds. His mind still seethed at being humiliated in front of the court. He focused his many-sided discontent on the nursemaid and thought that he couldn’t imagine what possessed everyone to suddenly see this creature as fair. Except, of course, that Sylvanus had declared her so and Sylvanus did not brook dissent.

The mortal straightened and looked around like a sleeper wakening. It seemed to Quicksilver that she trembled slightly.

“Ah, my dear,” Sylvanus said. “How are they treating you? Have you all you need?”

She opened her broad red-lipped mouth, closed it with a snapping sound. A red flush tinged her pale, round cheeks, giving them a passing resemblance to harvest apples, a simile that, all gods be praised, went unremarked by the fawning noblemen who surrounded Quicksilver.

“Milord,” the woman said. The broad vowels and rolled
r
’s of the region tainted her pleasant, low voice. “I do not have all I require. Your servants have seen me well lodged and I lack for no comfort, yet I shouldn’t be here at all. My husband will be coming home and needing me, and missing his daughter that I brought with me.”

The king’s eyebrows arched. A vertical crease formed on the bridge of his nose. His pout came back, a dissatisfied sulking.

Quicksilver truly wished he’d come to court as a woman. Though it might have reminded everyone, once more, of his unseemly power, it would also have provided him with a fan behind which to hide the smile that kept trying to curl his lips upwards. He’d not expected the little peasant to be outspoken.

The storm gathering in the king’s features dispersed as suddenly as it had begun. He leaned back. His powerful body relaxed visibly. His laugh rang out loudly, echoing through the halls and setting the whole, splendid company to fits of sympathetic giggling. “Thus I and all my enchanted kingdom are to be disdained in favor of a farmer, a butcher’s apprentice or perhaps a lowly clerk in some law firm.” He laughed on. “I’m offering you, milady, all the riches of both elves and fairies, the tall inhabitants of the hills and the small magical lights of the evening, all their riches, all their magic and”—he smiled seductively—“since you’re so fair, even my hand in marriage, and a throne by my side. Yet, you stand there and tell me you require a husband. Well, and I grant you I’d be husband enough for you.”

The company tittered again. The winged fairies flashed around the room, flaring into pale lights.

The woman recoiled, taking two steps back. Her fair but abundant eyebrows descended over her eyes, and she licked her lips, her expression one of shrewish calculation, like a goodwife at the market faced with a higher price than she wishes to pay. Her hand went to the front of her pearl-embroidered pale green gown, as though searching for the pocket of her accustomed apron. “I do not disdain anyone. My husband is alive and well. I should be with him. I seek no other.” She raised her head a little, defiantly, and one of the many tiny braids affixed beneath the tiara on her head, fell and dangled beside her ear, making her look yet more mortal and more common, and somehow, perhaps because of that, more alluring—like freshly baked bread and homely meals, next to which the dainties of kings paled.

A hushed silence fell over the assembly. In the five years of Sylvanus’s reign, since King Oberon and Queen Titania had disappeared one winter night and their power vanished from amid their people, there hadn’t been such frank talk heard in this court.

Quicksilver could swear that even the sounds of breathing stopped in the salon and the wings of the serf fairies were arrested midbeat, as though each fairy, each highborn elf held his or her breath, waiting for the king’s fury to be unleashed.

Instead, the king laughed again, his merriment echoed by a string of relieved titters, an echo of flashing lights and dancing winged sprites.

“So.” The king grinned at the mortal. “So. But you can’t leave and return to your husband. It’s my decree that you shall remain here and nurse my daughter and raise your own daughter as her sister. Soon, soon, we’ll see if you do not perceive the advantages of my kingdom, the joy of my near-immortal people. We’ll see if you might not long to join us.” The king rose to his full height, taller than any mortal man. His limber figure made him look like a mortal of twenty though among his own people he neared middle age at three thousand years. “And now, we shall dance.”

The woman’s eyes clouded with tears, and her hands clenched into fists, the twin of Quicksilver’s own. But she was even more powerless than Quicksilver, against the might of the hill embodied in the king.

That she had resisted him so far was miracle enough. That she denied him in front of his courtiers was astonishing. Most humans bent and swayed in the power of the hill, like limber pines tilting in the wind’s fury.

The musician elves in the farthest corner, who’d been playing soft, subtle music, rose and struck up their instruments louder and faster, in a dancing tune.

“You, my dear, will dance with me.” The king extended his hand to the mortal.

For a moment it all hung in the balance, and it looked as if she’d refuse the proffered royal fingers.

But a farm girl couldn’t resist the elven king’s glamoury. Her work-roughened hand, reddened by a hundred wash days, rested in his.

Before other couples joined in, Quicksilver had time to wonder at her grace, the skipping step with which she led the dance by the king’s side. Then he noticed a young lady in white cutting through the crowd, toward him.

Ariel.

Her blond hair shone like a halo of light around her small, intent face which was set in unbearable longing, and her graceful figure seemed to lean forward, striving to reach Quicksilver. Her pale clothing lent her white skin a creamy pallor, like that of the finest silk.

She would come to Quicksilver, she would ask him to dance and loudly repeat it, making it unseemly for him to refuse.

Prince Quicksilver had no time and scant patience for lovesick kings, and even less for lovesick elven maids of high birth and little mind.

Turning abruptly, before Ariel could reach him, he made for the wide, arched opening to the outside world, beyond the palace, beyond the enchanted realms of fairyland. He escaped toward the world of mortals, that place of crude and simple beings, which seemed to him, suddenly, to beckon like a promised land.