Ill Met by Moonlight (5 page)

He rushed outside—past the black-diamond armored guards who bowed their heads to him—down the broad marble steps, to the cool dark night beyond.

He ran through the night, heedless, until he got far enough away from the bubble of light cast by the fairy palace. In the semidark, he leaned against the bark of a rough tree and took greedy breaths of air perfumed with the deep, earthy scents of trees and grass.

The voices of the small, scurrying creatures of the night surrounded him.
Hurry, hurry, hurry
, cried the mind of the mouse skittering through the undergrowth, while above him the sharper mind of the owl screamed of hunger and blood.

Quicksilver’s anger sang in harmony with the owl, and his fear of his brother and his brother’s power screamed in unison with the mouse.

Peevishly, he pulled off his gloves and, holding them both in his right hand, smacked them on his left leg as he resumed walking. His movement was intended to disperse his impotent anger, rather than to carry him anywhere. While he strode, unminding, through the forest around the charmed palace, his errors, his many-splendored mistakes, taunted him like mocking demons.

He should have said something in his own defense. He should somehow have salvaged his plans to leave the kingdom. He should have answered his brother’s derisive tones, Sylvanus’s implication that Quicksilver wasn’t a proper elf, his intimation that Quicksilver might conspire against the kingdom. And he should, he
should
, have answered the barbed arrows aimed at his youth, his inexperience, his mutable nature.

With such flimsy excuses, such vile murmuring, his brother had managed to snatch the throne away. And no one had protested the usurpation. No one. With such flimsy excuses had Quicksilver been robbed of his inheritance.

Flogging his thigh, as one would flog a sluggish horse, he welcomed the stings of his blows, the pain that came through the black velvet of his breeches to remind him always that he had no power. No power to rebel. No power to do anything.

Maybe he
was
a child, maybe he was ineffective and foolish. Why else would he have allowed his brother to thus dispossess him? Even there, in the salon, he had found no answer to his brother’s public mocking, his veiled challenge.

How could Quicksilver hope to prevail over Sylvanus’s perfidy if he couldn’t even reply to the king’s taunting?

“Quicksilver, my lord, wait,” a woman’s voice called from behind him.

This high, harmonious voice almost set Quicksilver to flight. Yet he checked his feet in their attempt at running, kept them immobile on the woodland ground.

Ariel had found him and pursued him here. Why? Even she was not usually that importune, no matter how besotted.

Besotted. Thinking of her devotion, Quicksilver felt something dark and deep uncoil within him, something serpentine and cunning, that wished to vent his anger on anything, anyone.

This elven girl, an orphan, Pyrite’s sister, even more powerless and even younger than Quicksilver, would be vulnerable to his wrath, his pent-up fury. And even if she was one of his few allies—and spies—in the court, Quicksilver knew he could safely hurt her. She would forgive him. She always forgave him.

Quicksilver breathed deeply, more furious than ever at Ariel’s folly, her soft, yielding nature. His own folly was such that he might have liked her better were she harsher.

He rounded on her, with a cat’s swift movements. “Milady Ariel.”

She’d been running, full tilt, after him, and stopped, ten steps away, suddenly wary, as though something in his movement or his voice had given away his mood.

“Milord,” she said, and struggled to catch her breath, and most becomingly raised her pretty, dainty hand to her pretty, dainty chest. “All evening long I’ve been wishing to speak with you.”

Quicksilver closed his lips tightly.

Dressed in creamy velvet and lace, Ariel looked fair in this light, her lack of proper womanly charms masked by the shadows, her face small and earnest and anxiously turned up to him.

Words pushed past his lips, his fury biting through them. “I do not wish for your company. Someone betrayed me to my brother and it might well have been you, Lady Ariel.” This statement sounded so unlikely that Quicksilver himself almost laughed at the words. Ariel could no more betray than plot, no more scheme than rebel. But it served to startle her. “It might well have been you.”

She took a step back. Her hand clasped the lace at her chest. Her other hand—still holding the closed, white, feathered fan she’d used inside the salon—came up. But she never opened the fan, just held it closed near her face.

Her pink lips shaped a round, afflicted “Oh.” She cleared her throat. “I’ve . . .” She shook her head. “As you know, I have my modest gift, my seeress gift, and last night I dreamed of your parents, the great Oberon, our Queen Titania that was. And in my dream, they—” She stopped abruptly. Her lips went pale and her eyes opened wide, as if something in Quicksilver’s face scared her.

Quicksilver’s heart beat faster, the very blood in his veins racing in frenzy, though he remained still. Ariel might be a twit, but she had a gift of dreams. And if she’d dreamed of Oberon and Titania, what had she dreamed? Was there hope his parents would return and reestablish the proper order of the world?

He clasped her arm in his hand, crushing her creamy silk sleeve to a crumple beneath his merciless fingers. “What dreamed you, fool girl, answer me?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it. For a moment it looked as if she could not command her voice to her wishes. “They came,” she finally said, “as those shades of mortals that depart this world not in peace. Our king looked wan and ragged, and our queen—” Here, Ariel, who had been one of the queen’s own maids, managed to squeeze from her eyes two crystalline tears, and stopped long enough to wipe them to a kerchief pulled from her sleeve. “Milady was also pale and wan, and devoid of substance so that through her, as though through great rents in her being, I could glimpse another world. It was a desolate world, as pale and devoid of life as she was. Naked trees stood out against a merciless sky, and the earth, the soil beneath her feet, boiled like a cauldron of evil. She wore only a white sheet, like the shroud in which mortals are confined at their death. And she said that by foul means were they slain, she and her royal husband, by foul means turned from this world to the place of shadows and nothingness—a place where no other elf has ever gone—where they expiate their former joys, their enchanted days. There . . .” Ariel paused.

“There where? There what?” Quicksilver’s fury had been replaced with shock and impatience. His parents had been murdered? By whom? And how? It wasn’t easy to kill an elf. It was even harder to kill those who held the power of the whole hill in themselves. Quicksilver thought of his own, impotent fury at his brother, his repeated, empty fantasies of killing Sylvanus.

“There, in the land of shadows, your parents will remain imprisoned, powerless, waning, until you”—Ariel blushed and looked away—“until you, who are the legitimate heir of their power, should release them. By your avenging them, they will be freed to be born again into this world and the kingdom of fairy.”

“Avenging them! How did they meet their death, then?”

“They said that they were slain when they rode north across the bridge of air, to sup with the Queen of the Northern Lights. They were stabbed through with a charmed dagger, by a mortal they met at the crossroads.”

“A mortal?” Unbelievable. Mortals could attack fairies and elves, even the sovereigns of fairies—assuming they could resist the glamoury of elven magic and the raw power of the hill that such monarchs embodied. But mortals could not hope to succeed in such attacks. Even their iron was powerless to kill magical beings. They could do no harm. Not in vain were elves considered immortals. “To murder a king, or a queen, it would take charms, powerful charms woven onto the weapon. Charms that only our kind—”

He stopped.

Ariel nodded, setting her baby-fine pale hair in motion, its waves shining like beacons in the dark night. “Yes. They said that the one who benefited the most from their death had thus prepared the weapon for the wretched mortal.”

The one who benefited most. Sylvanus. Sylvanus, the treasonous cur. Quicksilver had never suspected that much evil. Greed, yes—it lived in Sylvanus’s chest, and pride, and ambition, revenge and more offenses at Sylvanus’s beck than he had thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. But treason, that was sin of a higher order, a hand raised against the gods above and the spirits below. Quicksilver had never suspected greatness in his brother, not even greatness in evil.

In this new understanding, he looked all around with painfully clear vision. His parents’ disappearance was no longer a mystery, nor did he wonder at his brother’s usurping the throne.

He wondered, instead, why the moon still shone, on hearing of such horrors. There should be thunder and rain. Clouds should crowd and do battle in the sky. An earthquake should tear asunder Earth’s fragile crust, crushing trees and animals in its unfeeling hand.

How could everything look so calm?

Love, love, love,
thought the calling frog down by the river.

Life, life, life
, twinkled the firefly close at hand.

Quicksilver breathed air that felt by turns too cold and burning hot, that scalded and froze him, mind and heart.

For Quicksilver, neither love nor life mattered any longer. Nor could he expect them to matter, even in the distant future. Gone was his dream of escaping to Tyr-Nan-Og to live a quiet life in an unclouded court, as the prince consort of a powerful queen.

His parents had died, not just changed forms as elves would, but truly died, as no elf should die. They’d been cut off from the wheel of creation that compensated elves for their exclusion from the heaven of mortals.

Without that wheel, Oberon’s and Titania’s souls would hang outside the world, struggling against the currents of time, buffeted by the hopelessness of those who would never leave the land of shadows.

From this remote, improbable land, his parents had sent a plea for his help, through Ariel’s dream. They had asked the help of Quicksilver, their son, their darling, spoiled younger son, who was powerless to even prevent his brother’s humiliating him before the court.

If Quicksilver ignored their plea, if he didn’t aid them, they would fade away to nothing; to less than nothing, to that nothingness that haunted those who had never existed.

From what Ariel had said, they were close to nothingness even now.

He must avenge them.

But the one who had profited most from their demise was Sylvanus, and Sylvanus could not be killed. Not while he held all the power of the hill, the force of all the magic of every lord who’d sworn fealty to him—even, perforce, Quicksilver’s magic and power.

Sylvanus could not be killed by an elf, an inhabitant of the hill he ruled. And yet, an idea quickened in the outraged prince’s brain and all his other thoughts stopped, crushed and astonished under the weight of it. The traitor could not be punished by elven hand. But . . . by a mortal? Could Sylvanus’s own scheme be turned upon him?

Quicksilver looked at Ariel, her drawn features, her big questing eyes, and disciplined himself to a controlled nod of his head. “Milady, I thank you. You have done well to tell me this.”

“You—” She cleared her throat. Her long white neck stretched gracefully as she looked up at him. “You won’t do anything in haste, will you, milord? It would be madness for you to try to attack . . .” She stopped short of pronouncing the king’s name and, instead, waved her closed fan around helplessly. “To touch him would mean death for you, sweet my Lord.” Her white hand held his arm, pale fingers gleaming on black velvet.

Sweet, she called him. And inside him, all the while, such vile things rustled and crawled, tainting the unsullied ice of his soul with their dark trails. Thirst for revenge joined his aggrieved pride, and through this all Ariel would walk, like the child leading both lion and lamb.

Quicksilver shook his head. “Don’t fear for me.” His voice came out raspy and harsh with tears he could never, would never, shed, or not until vengeance was done. “But now you must return to the palace, before my—before
he
—wonders what you’ve been telling me, before
he
sends his spies for you.” Quicksilver’s feelings seemed strangely muted, like drums muffled by cloth. He should be raging and screaming, begging the heavens to avenge foul murder, yet he could manage no more than the feeling that he should do so. No accompanying echo arose in his heart.

Ariel nodded. Bobbing him a graceful curtsey, she said, “Yes, sweet lord.” She grabbed his arm, and raising herself on tiptoe, with desperate suddenness, she set burning lips to his cheek for a feverish kiss.

Then she was gone, running like a scared being of the night, up the marble steps of the enchanted palace.

Quicksilver stayed where he was, his gaze following her. His hand rose to touch his cheek, where her timid kiss had heated his skin.

He let his hand fall and looked down at his gloves, which he’d twisted into a knot between his hands. He smoothed them with slow, unwitting movements.

With his enchanted vision he watched as, inside the palace, the false king danced with the peasant girl, while the whole noble company followed, round and round, tireless, like painted figures marching along the sides of a battle drum.

There had been a time that Quicksilver, too, had danced thus, wearing his slippers away in the pleasure of his own movement, in the rapture of the music lifting him. In both his shapes, he’d danced, graceful and gleeful and unashamed. But the couple leading the dance had been his parents.

His parents.

He wandered around outside the palace, keeping well in the shadow of the forest, trampling branches and leaves beneath his fine black court slippers, and startling insects and mice to desperate flight.

Hurry, hurry, hurry. Run, run, run
, screamed small, afflicted mind-voices from the brush.