All Night Awake (23 page)

It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

“If it was not for me that you came to London, for whom, then?” Despite Kit’s best efforts, his voice echoed shrill, like a fishwife’s asking her man for an account of his time and ill-spent affections. “Is it for Will Shakelance?”

Quicksilver answered not, turned not.

Kit forced himself to laugh, a hollow laughter that seemed to rake his throat like a pestilent cough. “Surely not Will, the very married burgher of Stratford. He’ll never make it, you know? Not in London. Not in the theater. He could, I suppose, make it as a wool merchant in London. But for a playwright, he lacks the fire, the verb, and the glory that could play well upon a stage.

“Will is like all other country boys and will spend his meager money upon London for a few years, only to go back home to his wife and die, many years hence, prosperous and bitter, talking ever of how great his plays were that London has forgotten.” Kit’s voice lost force as he spoke, till his very last words came out as little more than a whisper supported only by bitterness and bile. Because halfway through, Kit had realized how he envied those young men who, indeed, had something to go back to in the country.

“Is it Will you love?” he asked.

Quicksilver, his back turned, spoke as if from a long distance off. “I am no longer a prince, Kit, nor a youth. I’ve come of age within my own sphere. In my own race I’m a king, and within my estate there are duties and ranks and obligations, as there are in mortal life. I’ve a kingdom to run, and I have a wife. To my wife I owe what I promised her and that already sullied by . . . . But no, it’s not your fault.”

Quicksilver turned and set a hand on Kit’s arm, only to withdraw it, too quickly. “It’s not your fault. It is mine. I did remember you, Kit. Much too well. Memory entangled in my speeding heart and led us both to trip.” He glanced at the bed, then at Kit.

“But I promised my wife there would be no others—as mortals do promise at their weddings—and all I can do now is hope she forgives my transgression. I have a duty to her. As for what brought me to London . . . . A darker errand than I intend to tell you about, Kit. An errand bound with kingdom and elven breed and the safety of both spheres. Indeed, you are in danger while you are near me.” While speaking, Quicksilver looked down and, as if his gestures were disengaged from his voice, frowned at Kit’s doublet.

Unbuttoning it with nimble fingers, he buttoned it again, the proper way, and patted it into place, like an adult straightening a child’s attire.

Looking up at Kit’s face, Quicksilver started a smile that reverted to an intent frown. “Go, you fool, go, before you force me to commit I don’t know what madness.” His hand caressed Kit’s face in a fleeting, soft touch. “Go before the forces that I came to do battle with smell you out and come for you.”

Kit felt a surge of hope. He raised his eyebrows. Quicksilver wished to protect Kit. Did not that mean that the elf still cared?

He straightened himself, anxious, eager, ready to die if needed to keep his tenuous hold on this worshiped creature’s heart. “I’ll fight beside you, if that is needed,” he said. “I’m not afraid of anything that comes for you. I’m not a child any longer, Quicksilver, I have worked for the secret service. I have fought, I am not afraid of a fight or of killing or dying. I have—”

But Quicksilver shook his head. “It is the stain of what you have done, your betrayals, your compromises, that makes you all the more vulnerable to this attack. Go, Kit. And don’t come near me again.”

The elf marched to the door and opened it wide to the too-real night outside, with its smells of sweat and vomit, of wine, and frail humanity.

Kit walked down the steps, a brittle imitation of his normal smile plastered on his face, his eyes blurring everything through the lens of tears.

His love had turned to a lump of ice within him.

Oh, that he could reach the cruel elf and with ready hand tear that heart of stone from that soft chest.

Oh, that he could hurt Silver as she’d hurt him and bring Quicksilver to reckoning with the passion he so carelessly ignited.

“Master Marlowe,” said a voice behind him. “I’ve been looking for you.”

A smell of lilacs filled Kit’s nose, but it was a slightly
off
smell of lilacs, a smell of flowers that, having fallen to earth during a wet day, rotted and perished on the muddy ground.

A mingle of Silver’s smell and London’s, Kit thought, as he turned around to see a tall, dark-haired gentleman with a perfect, well-sculpted beard and ringlets of dark hair falling to his shoulders.

Something about the man’s stealthy look, something to his appearance of having hidden long in darkened rooms, gave Kit the feeling that this was a secret service man, like Poley.

“Yes,” Kit said. “What do you wish of me?”

The man smiled, revealing sharp teeth almost like fangs. “No, Master Marlowe. What do
you
wish of
me
?” Advancing, he put an arm through Marlowe’s arm and, with his arm in Marlowe’s, walked forth like the dearest of friends. “I believe you’ve been offered an offense?”

“Offense, I?” So many of them crowded at Kit’s tongue that he knew not what to say. There were the beatings of his uncaring father, the sneers of better-born boys at Cambridge, and now this light, uncaring dismissal from Quicksilver.

Oh, that Kit had enough tears and he would cry his sorrow in volume to drown the salty sea.

“Come see the whipping of the blind bear,” a tavern crier screamed, just to the left of Kit. “See the blood run down his hoary back. A most droll show.”

“The offense done to you by a certain poet—and by an elven lady?” the gentleman asked, leaning close.

Kit’s arm that the gentleman held felt ice cold.

The stranger smiled. “Be not amazed. It is a gift I have of seeing the future.”

“The future?” Kit asked.

“Even so,” the man said, and smiled broader. “The future where we avenge ourselves upon them.”

Them. Silver and Quicksilver and Will, whom the elf preferred to Kit.

Kit would get revenge on Will soon enough. If Kit went to the gallows, then would Will precede him. But Silver, beautiful Silver, would go on laughing and living her immortal life, caring not where he was or what had happened to him.

“Card games and dice, try your luck within.” A street urchin grabbed Kit’s sleeve, while pointing at the dim interior of a tavern.

Kit wrenched his arm away and narrowed his eyes at the stranger. “Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Sylvanus. I am an elf, like the lady who offended you,” the creature said. “And powerful enough to take your revenge. Wish you for revenge, sir?”

Kit hesitated for only a minute, but his need for quenching his grief was unmistakable. The fire in his heart would answer only to the lady’s sorrowful tears.

For the moment he was lost to all—his love of Imp, his hope for the future. All was drowned in his need to bring the elf down. “Yes,” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “Yes, I do.”

“Oh, I knew we were kindred spirits,” the elf said, and led Kit insensibly away from the heavily traveled street they walked, and down an alley, to a less populated part of town.

Scene 22

Will’s room. Quicksilver, in his male aspect, paces back and forth in the narrow space.

Q
uicksilver still trembled and still felt as if a nameless fear traveled upon his limbs and knocked nonstop at the door to his reason.

Even as Quicksilver, as king of elves and possessed of all his power, he felt the sick-thoughted predominance of Silver in him.

It was Silver who cast her eye upon the bed, and smiled with remembering sweetness at the creases and folds.

And it was Silver’s thought that Marlowe had been still sweet after these many years, and twice as eager. Quicksilver, instead, dwelt on Kit’s unquestioning acceptance of both his aspects. No one else, not even fair Ariel, accepted him thus.

He sighed at the thought of Kit’s gentle, vulnerable love, that love too willingly given.

He’d thought his heart would break when he’d turned Kit away. And he could not explain his motives to the wounded mortal.

The human would never understand. But Quicksilver had broken his heart’s bond and rendered useless his carefully planned redemption.

He’d meant to kill Sylvanus and thereby to stop him from taking human life in London, or to control Sylvanus and return him to what he’d been before Quicksilver mistakenly freed him.

Instead, Quicksilver found himself turning into Silver and seducing a human to whom he’d already done much wrong.

But how? How had Silver overpowered Quicksilver’s will? Had Quicksilver not always been the dominant aspect? Would Silver now be it? And would Quicksilver remain but the pale reflection of the Dark Lady’s glory?

He shivered and crossed his arms upon his chest, and in doing so realized that the arms he crossed were rounded and white and bare, and that the chest upon which they crossed had lost its muscular tautness, and displayed, instead, the voluptuous curves, the rising mounds of Silver’s lace-encased breasts.

Silver stomped her foot as tears came to her eyes.

Oh, vile, insufferable submission. Would the king of elves then be this way, forever imprisoned in a woman’s body?

This change in body without Quicksilver’s meaning it was like the change of sea when the tide shifted, like all things obeying onto a season, like a human body pending onto death, like the shifts and motions in the power of elves.

This thought brought Silver up short.

Around Quicksilver’s feminine aspect so unwillingly assumed, currents blew, which made Silver tremble with their intensity.

A weather vane creature, Silver and Quicksilver had ever shifted and turned, locked in an endless, adversarial dance—now one won power, now the other.

Only now a shift in the prevailing wind, a permanent breeze blowing, from the shores of femininity made the dance one-sided.

And a disturbance like that . . . . It had never happened, in Quicksilver’s long life, nor in the history of his race, which he felt like a second memory.

He thought of the Hunter’s being injured. That, too, had never happened in elven memory.

Oh, were the beliefs of the first elves true? Had those first elves, those brutish ancestors little better than short-lived humans hiding within their caves, known about the universe more than civilized Quicksilver with his power and glory?

Was it true that there were two elements for each thing in the universe? That the all was composed of two elements, male and female, the two interwoven seamlessly?

Was Quicksilver’s obvious duality only more glaring than that of other creatures, but no more unusual?

And was the Hunter, then truly, as primitive elven religion had made him, one of the three parts of the male element?

And had the feminine element reacted to the injury of the Hunter by becoming overpowering?

But no. That made no sense. For the feminine element was not unfettered, nor could it subsist long without its counterpart, and in its brutish, primeval wisdom, it would know that.

Silver shook her head and sighed, and then trembled, as someone knocked on the door.

Opening the door, she found a little man, wizened and old, and looking much like one of the underbrush gnomes, who sometimes, for a grand holiday, visited Quicksilver’s court.

Yet Silver’s pulse sped at the sight of the creature. It was a male.

She shook her head and said, with a roughened, hasty voice, “What do you wish?”

The man opened his mouth wide and looked at her, and looked down at the road below, immersed in respectable late-night silence, then looked at her again. “I was seeking Master Will Shakespeare, ma’am, if you may. I brought him this letter from his wife, in Stratford. The first courier having died, I took the letter over.” His sly, narrowed eyes made Silver think that this man believed her Will’s fancy bit, and that Will was betraying Nan with her.

Yet even that knowing expression made Silver’s heart race, her pulse speed, and made her pause, enthralled, at the man’s balding head, his staring, motionless eyes.

The part of Silver that remained rational thrust her hand forward, and made her say, “Give me that letter.”

The man shook his head, looked at the ground. “You’re a fine lady, but as my name is Christopher Sly, and I’m a tinker from Burton Heath, when I do a bit of a favor for a neighbor, it is customary to receive . . .”

Silver thought of what he would like to receive, while Quicksilver, subdued, submerged within Silver’s mind, roared inaudibly with anger at the man’s daring.

Even Silver knew, though her baser instincts told her otherwise, that she did not truly desire this man, that what she felt was a mere result from a changing pattern in the world of archetypes.

The female side of things, Silver suddenly realized, was strengthening and growing—not in triumph, but more as skin thickens when it heals after a cut, to protect the body against further injury.

And that meant—what?—that Sylvanus intended greater harm? Did he threaten the female aspects as well as the Hunter? Was his intent, then, more than drinking the life force of humans?