So Silver Bright (15 page)

“I am Fenek, personal courier to Her Gracious Majesty.” A servitor in a feathered cap appeared beside them like something conjured out of a hat. “Might I have your name, please?”

Mindful of the guards from the previous gates closing in at a run, Bertie answered in a rush, “Beatrice Shakespeare Smith and Company.”

Fenek snapped to utter attention, his demeanor changing from one of welcome to urgency with the blurred motion of a white-gloved hand to his forehead. “Good Mistress of Revels, you are expected! Her Gracious Majesty feared you hadn’t arrived before the gates were locked.” Bertie made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat that ended abruptly when the servitor added, “Please follow me at once! She has said your performance shall take precedence over all others.”

“At once?” She glanced over her shoulder, catching sight of their pursuers. “Of course. Lead the way!”

If he was puzzled by her vehemence and swift dismount, the servitor concealed it well. “Do bring your binoculars.”

Hurrying behind him, Bertie passed through massive Venetian-mirrored doors. Delicately etched and beveled from floor to ceiling, they fragmented her face into flower petals. The Queen’s garden entered the castle with them, bedecking the satin-clad walls of the corridor with ivory butterflies, dragonflies, and rocking horse flies. On the carpet underfoot, tiger lilies nodded to roses, daisies whispered to violets.

Probably muttering their disapproval of my disheveled appearance.

Bertie knew her only option was to explain the circumstances of their arrival and beg the Queen’s forgiveness, not only for the gate, but for their lack of preparation. “I have something very important to explain to Her Gracious Majesty—”

“Shhhh,” Fenek admonished, his footsteps the scuttling of a nervous rabbit’s late for an appointment. “Someone is currently performing. Take care to enter quietly.”

But there was no need for the warning. When the Company entered the Grand Hall, Bertie hardly drew a breath, and for once, the fairies weren’t making a sound. It was the largest room Bertie had ever seen, larger by far than anything she could have ever imagined. Countless glittering chandeliers descended from a ceiling that seemed to extend to the very heavens, while the floor spread out underfoot in a dozen impossible directions at once. Tiered seating ringed the outer perimeter of the performance space, occupied by countless spectators: courtiers in grand dress the color of black pearls and antique silver coins, performers in gayer costumes that were bright splotches of color against the rest. All eyes were trained upon the countless enormous mirrors that reflected the image of their Queen and the performing singer:

Ariel.

Without the mirrors, it would have been impossible to make him out. Distance reduced the Queen’s magnificent dais, encrusted though it was with gold and silver and canopied with white velvet, to something belonging in a doll’s house. Her Gracious Majesty was a near-featureless poppet whose presence was the only doorstop preventing the space from expanding forever. Amplified by enormous horn speakers set at intervals, Ariel was mid performance, and more than just the song prickled the hairs along Bertie’s arms.

“This way, if you please.” With hippity-hopping steps, Fenek led the troupe past chairs toward the performance space, ignoring the curious looks of those around him, the spreading whispers that began as no more than a few words then built in strength and number to rush toward the Queen. Unseen musicians ceased their ministrations to flute and violin.

In the resultant silence, a voice from the dais that could only belong to Her Gracious Majesty bellowed, “What is it, Fenek?”

CHAPTER TEN

Tell O’er Thy Tale Again

Before the servitor
could answer, Ariel spoke up. “It is the one for whom you’ve been waiting, Your Gracious Majesty.”

When Bertie raised her binoculars to her eyes, the air elemental’s features came sharply into view. Lowering the magical magnifiers with haste, she discovered that she stood only inches from the first step leading up to the dais, transported there much as the caravan had been whisked to the glass outer gates.

Close enough now to take her by the hand, Ariel presented her to the Queen with one of his graceful flourishes. “Permit me the honor, Your Gracious Majesty, of introducing Beatrice Shakespeare Smith and Company.”

She immediately dropped into a curtsy. The rest of the troupe must have employed their binoculars as well, for they appeared like rabbits from a magician’s hat behind Bertie with the noiseless pops that accompany surfacing alligators. Varvara executed a most graceful obeisance, and Nate fell to one knee.

“Get down,” he muttered to the fairies, neck bowed.

They complied, flinging themselves at the floor and hitting the marble in four noisy belly flops.

“Ow,” came the tiny protest from Moth.

Again, the Queen’s voice rang out. “Approach, so that we might look upon you.”

Swallowing hard, Bertie rose and stepped closer to the dais. Well-meaning streamers of wind teased about the grubby edge of her sweater, tugged at the hasty arrangement of her silver hair. Bertie had yet to look upon Her Gracious Majesty’s face, though she could feel the Queen’s gaze upon her, at least as sharp as Mrs. Edith’s.

“For pity’s sake, child, what is so interesting about the floor?”

“Nothing, Your Gracious Majesty, my apologies.” Bertie raised her eyes to the person occupying the throne. The Queen was a woman in her middle years, magnificently upholstered in silk taffeta, the fabric embroidered with the unicorn-and-lioness motif. The crown atop her head was thickly jeweled, and Bertie could well imagine seven dwarfs toiling their entire lifetimes to ornament it. For all the grandeur of her trappings, the Queen’s regal appearance went far deeper than her clothes. Her Gracious Majesty was, in some indescribable way, entirely different from the other queens Bertie had known at the theater, perhaps merely because the quality of her silence was more impressive than the loudest of Gertrude’s shouts.

“Is she a relation of yours, Ariel?” the Queen asked after a long moment. “There is the faintest of resemblances.”

He gave her a ghost of a smile. “A relation of sorts, Your Highness. Once upon a time, she was my wife.”

Bertie nearly choked. She wanted to protest but swiftly decided that would only make her look the greater idiot.

“Was your wife, but is no longer?” The Queen’s interest was piqued. There was the unmistakable rustle of her skirts as she sat up straighter in her chair. “What curious circumstances brought about your separation?”

Though the air elemental looked properly somber, the sharp brightness of his eyes gave every indication he was enjoying himself hugely at Bertie’s expense. “At the time I took her to wife, she was already wed to the mariner kneeling before you, Your Gracious Majesty.”

A scandalized murmur spread around the edges of the hall. Bertie’s cheeks blazed with mortification when she caught bits of whispers that included the words “the little harlot” and “that’s a deed most foul!” Behind her, Nate exhaled slowly, his low, water-serpent’s hiss filling the air. Though he’d told Bertie Ariel wasn’t his enemy, his hackles were raised as he stepped forward to take his place at her side. Bertie’s hand immediately sought his, the scars from their handfasting meeting once more.

Don’t do anything stupid
.

Though she didn’t dare speak the words aloud, he must have understood. Shoulders shaking with the effort, Nate forced himself to relax.

Lifting one finger on her right hand, the Queen wrung silence from her subjects. Bertie wished she had similar powers, though she would have taken pleasure in using all ten of her digits to choke the words from Ariel’s throat. She turned pleading eyes upon the Queen—

Ask me what really happened. Ask me for the truth of it.

—but Bertie was greatly disappointed when Her Gracious Majesty raised her voice only to note, “She hardly appears woman enough for one man, much less two.”

This time, the courtiers responded without fear of repercussion, so their laughter was the roaring of lions and the gentle whickering of one-horned horses. The fairies vibrated with barely concealed temper. Nate’s expression suggested the awful things he planned to do to the air elemental, and Bertie wondered through the haze of her humiliation if Ariel would survive to see another dawn.

The Queen marked none of them, her gaze still upon Ariel. “Would you wish that she was still your wife?”

His respectful mask slipped a bit. “I will admit my heart still suffers the wounds of a man denied, but I’m afraid she has parts aplenty to play without also assuming the role of wife, Your Gracious Majesty: the Mistress of Revels, Rhymer, Singer, Teller of Tales, Emissary of the Théâtre Illuminata.” He rolled Bertie’s many titles about his mouth like marbles before adding, “Forest Queen.”

Here, the Queen’s penciled eyebrows nearly skidded off her face. “And just who crowned you such a thing, Beatrice Shakespeare Smith?”

The truth spoke itself. “I was born to it. I am a daughter of the earth.”

“Yet you presume to call yourself a queen, as well as a handful of other titles that sound altogether very impressive but mean relatively little.”

One couldn’t exactly be rude to royalty without fear of head choppery, so Bertie only nodded and replied, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

The Queen settled back into her throne. “You may tell me how all this came to be.” When Bertie hesitated, Her Gracious Majesty smacked her hand against the arm of the throne, causing everyone else in the hall to start as though she’d slapped each of them personally. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

Though it was difficult to manage in jeans, Bertie curtsied again, because it gave her time to sort out her words. “I am afraid we haven’t yet had time to prepare a performance, Your Gracious Majesty, and I need to apologize for a mishap at the lower gates—”

“Never mind that now, I’m asking for your story, Teller of Tales.” The finality of her tone gave no room for importuning. “Begin at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, then stop.”

Bertie swallowed hard and nodded her assent as she knew she must. “Of course, Your Majesty.” It was only as she backed away from the dais that she permitted herself to exchange an agonized expression with Nate, that she entertained thoughts of kicking Ariel quite hard in his shins, that she motioned to the fairies to clear the space around her with a smile that didn’t reassure anyone.

To stand ill-dressed and even more ill-prepared before an audience was an actor’s worst nightmare, really, recalling the velvet-curtain and spot-lit dreams Bertie had experienced as a small child in which she was thrust onstage in a costume not hers to recite lines she didn’t know before an audience armed with rotten fruit and moldering tomatoes. It had taken repeated lavender-scented reassurances from Mrs. Edith that such a travesty would never come to pass, that Bertie was a little girl and not a Player, that no one expected her to ever tread the boards.

She was mistaken about that.

At least I’m not naked.

Small consolation, but a steadying one nevertheless. Bertie took a deep breath, caught hold of the audience’s attention like ribbon-reins in her hands, and began. “It starts with a meeting most curious.”

A dim shape appeared alongside her to suggest Ophelia’s water-soaked chiffon and flowers, then the Scrimshander’s winged arms bore that young woman to a cavern in the cliffs. In delicate detail, Bertie described the ivory rafters of the Aerie, its scrimmed whale ribs coalescing overhead for everyone to see. The courtiers gasped and clutched one another when the tentacled shadow of Sedna towered over Bertie’s parents and flooded the cavern with the suggestion of water. In great gushes, the imagined ocean swirled about the Queen’s Great Hall, snaked under the seating, and sluiced across the marble.

The room wasn’t the only thing transformed by the telling. Each word Bertie spoke added a flounce upon a dress not there, a bit of embroidery, an inch of lace, a jewel to her hair, throat, fingers, wrists until she stood before the Queen and her court, not in rags, but properly attired as the Mistress of Revels. Power filled Bertie with wildfire. Excitement poured through her veins, rouging her cheeks brilliant pink as she shifted the scenery about them, breaking their hearts as Ophelia’s had broken upon her return to the Théâtre Illuminata.

The Mistress of Revels conjured its velvet-and-gilt grandeur for Her Gracious Majesty’s pleasure. Moving among ghostly Players, the years skimmed around Bertie, her childhood passing in a sentence or two. The events of the past month spun out like spiderwebs, threads crisscrossing; some—like Ariel’s and Nate’s—were stickier than others, trickier for the storyteller to traverse without unbalancing herself. Easier to manage were the mechanical horses, the rollicking caravan, the sandstone of the Caravanserai, the terrible glory of Sedna’s Hall, their escape from a watery tomb, a journey toward a distant silver spire, the attack by the band of brigands. Peaseblossom’s death brought the audience to tears; as the courtiers wept, Bertie wondered how best to bring the performance to a close.

It had to end with Varvara, she decided. Bertie placed a finger to her lips and waited for the utter silence that followed.

“If the fire took her from us, the fire can give her back,” she promised them.

About Varvara, Bertie built a massive opal, smooth surfaced and gleaming. All the ethereal lights of the aurora borealis shimmered around the fire-dancer, painting her costume and pointe shoes with sky-burning blues and greens and golds. When she emerged from her jewel cocoon, Peaseblossom clung to her bodice, face puckered with the effort of glowing orange-gold.

As Varvara began a series of pirouettes around her, Bertie caught hold of Peaseblossom and held her aloft. Marigold sparks cascaded over the entire room, pouring from the chandeliers, the mirrors, the very ceiling. Careful not to squish her friend, Bertie brought her hands together with a thunderclap, and when Peaseblossom emerged from an explosion of glitter, the audience leapt to its feet with a collective gasp, bursting into applause for her resurrection.