All Night Awake (20 page)

He pushed Silver away. He fought free of her. He spoke in fast and breathless words. “Kit Marlowe has arranged for the Earl of Southampton to hear my poetry.”

He picked up the note from Kit and waved it around, before stuffing it into his doublet sleeve. The small tears on the sleeve would have to do. He would have to hug the shadows and stay in the darker portions of the room. Unlikely, anyway, that he would get invited to the high table, being only a poet and an unknown one.

“But Will, you must understand, you’re vulnerable to magic now. You—” She had her hands on her waist, her black hair undone and wild with her fury. Her silver eyes blazed in anger.

She had never looked so seductive.

He scurried away from her, backward, opened his door, and escaped to the tiny perch atop the staircase that led to his room. “I understand, my lady, that it is likely that Kit Marlowe’s good will would mean more to me than all your magic.”

He started down the stairs, holding fast to the tilting banister.

She leaned down. “It’s Sylvanus, you fool, Sylvanus you have to fear. Sylvanus, remember that. There are legends that elves, and creatures like elves, who’ve forfeited their material bodies can possess the bodies of humans, claim them for their own. And humans marked with the Fairyland touch are more vulnerable . . . .”

Will was almost at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up and yelled, “A pox on your Fairyland touch. I want no part of it.”

Such was his furious despair that only afterward did he think that doubtless he’d wakened his landlord and that doubtless in the morning he’d be accountable for keeping company with a well-dressed lady definitely not his wife.

At that moment he was conscious only of Silver, more beautiful than ever in her wild ire, stomping her foot atop the tiny perch in front of Will’s lodging.

That image stayed with him while he hurried to the bridge and to Southampton’s house on the other side of the river.

It took all his willpower to keep walking.

Scene 18

The fairy palace. Ariel leans over an elf lord who lies in a bed in a small—if still sumptuous by mortal standards—room. She looks worried, worn out, and her white dress for once seems to leech color out of her drained cheeks. The elf lord looks near death. In the doorway, an ill-looking Malachite gazes in.

“H
ow bad is it, milady?” Malachite asked.

Ariel heard the words, and knew their meaning, but she could no more than shake her head in response.

She felt her patient’s cool forehead, bathed in chilly sweat.

The small, confined room smelled of this sweat. The smell of death.

The elf was a changeling, Lord Geode, but he’d been high in Quicksilver’s favor and powerful enough. Now, his power burned around him as it left him, with the waning flame of Fairyland’s spreading blight.

How to cure such an ill? How to prevent this stalking death that, day by day, moment by moment, robbed Fairyland of its bright lords, its fair ladies?

Two more days, and would the blight stalk higher in the ranks, to Ariel? Or to Quicksilver’s uncle, noble Vargmar?

And what could Ariel do to stop it?

Despair burnt within her, high like a well-fed lamp.

“He was the eldest changeling in the hill,” Malachite said. “Placed the highest of all changelings when I was a child, and he looked after us and made sure we were happy.”

Malachite’s voice, hesitating and small, dipped and wavered as his strength failed him and emotion overcame him. “Faith. I’ll be next.”

Ariel took Geode’s pulse to find it faded and light, a whisper of life against encroaching death.

The waning of magic hurt all. Ariel could sense it, like a damping of power, like a dimming of light and life, coursing throughout the hill like an illness. But it did not affect the elves born to the hill so much as it did the changelings.

Natural-born elves had stronger power.

Would the killer blight stalk them thus, through the ranks, up the power scale of Fairyland?

And how to stop it? Would Quicksilver’s return stop it?

Ariel couldn’t tell. She’d cast her net and scried upon water and upon pure crystal mined from within the deepest mountain.

She’d found nothing.

Less than nothing—a black and forbidding nothingness, as if a great wall barred her way, a great will, stronger than her own.

And she feared, with a dread she dared not fully face, that this will was the will of Quicksilver, her errant lord.

Was he taking his joy in London, as Silver or Quicksilver, or both? Was that what brought this blight to his people?

Oh, cared he not if they lived or died?

She reached for his mind, as she held the dead-seeming hand of Geode.

Nothingness answered her call. Nothing.

“Oh,” she said. “It seems to be that my lord cares not for me.” She spoke in a whisper, and felt tears tremble beneath her voice. “It seems my lord cares nothing for the hill, nothing for any of us. How can he be lost to all this, Malachite? He is your milk-brother. He is my husband. Yet because of a disagreement will he forget all this, the multivaried bonds that tie him to this hill? Oh, he’ll forget crown and shame and all, for the sake of that human whom he’ll pursue.”

“Lady—” Malachite started.

On the bed, Geode’s power flared in a little explosion as magic left the body no longer able to contain it.

Geode’s body changed.

It shrank, shriveled. The long, blond hair turned whiter than the sheets upon which it lay, then fell, all in a breath, leaving the scalp beneath bare like wintry earth. The perfect face, with its small nose, its mobile lips, wrinkled and crinkled and seemed to collapse in on itself.

Ariel let go of the arm that, still living, still warm in her hand, had turned skeleton thin, its skin like paper.

She said, “Oh,” as she watched this rapid semblance of human aging.

She could say no more.

Malachite sobbed.

Where Lord Geode had lain, the shriveled yellow creature took a breath that looked as though it would blow away what remained of him, and shuddered as life left him.

On the bed remained nothing but a pile of earth—that dust from which mortals were fashioned, as elves were from fire—that dust to which men returned upon death.

“Oh,” Ariel said, and rubbed her palms upon her white dress.

Malachite drew in a deep, sobbing breath. “Oh, lady. Oh. He was a hundred, and now is reverted to what he would be had the essence of Elvenland never infused him. He was a hundred and now he’s dust.”

Ariel turned around in time to see Malachite sink to his knees. “And I am sixty, the Lord Quicksilver’s very age, born the same day.

“If my magic vanishes, where will I be? In second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

While Ariel stared at him, her lips bereft of any consolation, Malachite approached her, on his knees, arms raised as if to the highest worship. “Oh, lady. Lady, marry me.” He crept closer.

She stood, amazed, unable to respond.

“Only you leave him, and marry me. Make me king of the hill and thus possessor of everyone’s magic with that great honor. And in that honor will my honor bask, and that power will protect mine.”

The lean face, the intent green eyes, turned up to Ariel with an intensity not to be vouchsafed. “Only do that, milady, and the two of us, King and Queen of Fairyland, and for once whole, will lend the mending hand to this affliction. Then won’t the lord’s absence matter.”

Looking at Malachite’s face, remembering the horror of the thing on the bed and knowing that half of Malachite’s treason hailed from desperation, yet Ariel bridled at it, and felt a shiver climb along her spine. “You would do that?” she asked. “You would do that and thus dispossess and kill your lord?”

“Oh, not kill him. Not kill him.” Reaching for the hem of her gown, he held it in his hands like a holy relic, and looking up at her with panic fear, he said, “Oh, lady, he’s elf born. His life is not at stake. It is our lives he risks with his folly. Not his.”

Ariel’s mind chided and complained that Malachite was right, that it was Quicksilver’s base lust that undid them all.

But in her heart, in her faithful heart, Ariel loved Quicksilver still and she couldn’t believe that ill of him, her lord.

Hadn’t she loved Quicksilver ever since they were elven children, growing up in the palace? Hadn’t she trusted him through his wild youth and come to fruition of their love as maturity molded Quicksilver into a man at last?

And how could she betray him now, even if . . .

No, Quicksilver couldn’t have betrayed her. She suspected it yet couldn’t fully believe it.

Something else must have taken him away . . . . Something.

She shook her head.

She stepped back away from Malachite. “I have no proof that my lord plays me false,” she said. “I have no proof and I am his true wife.”

Mad despair burned in Malachite’s pale features and a madness was called to battle in his gaze.

Malachite got up. He stared at her with fever-bright green eyes. He swallowed.

“Oh, I’m sure he plays you false now and then, and always has. I remember his father.” He met Ariel’s shocked look with sudden sobriety. “Wish you for proof?”

“Proof of what?” she asked, all amazed. “Of what accuse you my lord?”

Malachite’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “If it’s proof you want, then proof you shall have. Would you actually wish to see him topped?” He shook his head. “No, it matters not. Some proof you shall have before the night is through. And then will you marry me and we shall cleanse this hill.”

Malachite was mad, burned insane by his fear. Tears that shone in his eyes, but did not fall, made his gaze hard and cutting like a blade.

He walked down the hallway and Ariel was left alone with her doubts. She wouldn’t think that Quicksilver had left her to satisfy his base lust. But then, why would Quicksilver have left else?

And oh, what damned hours told she over, who doted yet doubted, feared yet strongly loved.

Scene 19

Kit walks by the riverside, having just disembarked from a ferry from Southampton House. The riverside is deserted on that side, bordered by dark warehouses and empty or at least darkened houses and shops, not a few of which are boarded and bear the plague seal, warning passersby to keep away. Kit, wrapped in a dark cloak, starts to make his way inward when a child approaches.

“K
it,” Imp yelled as he ran on the darkened riverside wharf filled with the stench of fish, its streets slippery with carelessly discarded entrails. “Kit.”

Just returned from Southampton House, Kit had been all immersed in the trap he had built. But seeing Imp, he forgot it all.

He looked at the small running figure and for a moment felt a pang.

What kind of father encouraged his son to be out of doors at these hours when who knew what doom might overtake him?

Yet, he reminded himself, Imp would not be kept indoors, not even by his ever-vigilant and severe mother.

Kit reached out his arms, and caught the child and picked him up, and lifted him, and shook him with mock violence. “Now, you scamp, now, you rotter, what are you doing abroad at this hour and tramping where no honest soul ever sets foot?”

Imp giggled. “You told me to watch for a visitor to the bald man,” he said between giggles, his voice distorted by his being shaken. “And he has one. Now the bald man is gone, but the visitor remains. And I knew you would be coming from the ferry for, pray, you said you were going to Earl So-and-so’s house, and that would mean the ferry and the other side of the river.”

“You’re a good scamp,” Kit said, and shook Imp again lightly. “A smart rogue, and with two more like you, you would take over the country and rule it like three Caesars in a new triumvirate.” He smiled, but his heart was not in it. Gently, he set Imp down, and bent over him, to talk to him. “You go home now, boy, go to your mother, eat your supper, and go to bed.”

Imp blinked up at him. “And you?”

“I’ll go look in on this man’s visitor, and then to bed anon. Who is the visitor?”