All Night Awake (53 page)

The terrace of the faerie palace, where Ariel stands, as if turned to stone, gazing disbelievingly at a centaur.

“W
hat did you say, Sir?” she asked, her voice an unaccountable whisper. “I’m afraid I must have mistaken your meaning.” Though in fact, she was quite, quite sure she hadn’t. She saw and heard everything with unusual clarity those few moments: the rustle of the leaves in the trees, the moonlight shining on the dappled horse body.

She smelled the centaur’s smell, too, mingled with human sweat, beneath the odd scent of cinnamon. The whole of it, suddenly, felt as if it would turn her stomach. She put her hand back to the cold stone balustrade, and held tightly.

The centaur smiled, flashing golden teeth in the moonlight. “Ah, my pretty, do not pretend.” He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her unresisting body forward. Ariel felt too stunned to find the strength to fight.

“You cannot pretend to me you’re so much in love with your dandy of a husband.” The centaur laughed, a raw, hoarse chuckle. “The gossip is that he is not even a proper male, but a creature that changes between male and female with the seasons. Surely no elf such as this, no such low creature, deserves to sit on the throne of faerieland. And from your looks to him last evening, I can very well tell that you don’t hold him in very high regard.”

Ariel struggled to talk, but the sweat of the creature, the smell of him -- animal and human and spicy -- combined to make her feel that if she opened her mouth, she would throw up. She kept her lips tightly clenched and tried to take two steps back.

But Hylas kept his arm around her, his tail whipping contentedly at the evening air. His chuckle ground out again, harsh, like two stones, one pushed against the other. “I wager he hasn’t performed the proper duties of a husband very well either. If you ever see him in your room at all, I’d be amazed.”

The revulsion reached a peak within Ariel.

If she had indeed enjoyed Quicksilver’s favors these past months, his words might not have stung as bitter as they now did, but the sting of the centaur’s blow was bitter and ardent and gave her renewed force to pull back.

She lifted her hand and, almost before she knew what she was doing, slapped the creature full hard on the face. She was but a weak woman and he was a centaur. But this week woman was the Queen of faerieland and a bit of power had gone with her anger along her arm and into her slap.

The centaur bellowed and reared, and Ariel stepped back quickly and hugged the marble balustrade to evade the horse hooves that flailed at the air in front of her.

If the centaur had chosen to strike then, he could have thrown Ariel down over the tree tops of Arden, because she was so startled that she didn’t resort to magic to shield herself.

But the centaur controlled himself, and brought his hooves down, side by the side on the cool marble ground.

His features were set in haughty anger, his eyes blazed and he held his mouth tight. On his golden left cheek, the imprint of Ariel’s hand glowed red as if branded there.

He made Ariel a stiff bow. “I see, milady, you do not take jest very well.”

Ariel half leaned back over the baluster, took a painful breath. “Jest?”

“Surely, a lady of your experience and intelligence must know I jest when I say these things.” He bowed. “But I see that the mortal’s day -- our fair night -- is well advanced, and I’ll to my bed in search of rest, that I may plead my case before your majesty again tomorrow.”

Like that, nimble and impossibly swift for so large a creature, Hylas cantered across the terrace and into the palace, through the double glass doors.

Ariel was left on the terrace, trembling slightly. She did not believe, not for a moment, that the centaur had spoken in jest. The utter seriousness of his proposals was what turned her stomach and gave her a dizzying feeling that she had, somehow, betrayed Quicksilver.

Had her expression looking at her husband been so derisive? Had she looked like she cared so little for his fate or his heart or his throne that this creature, this wild creature from the wild marshes of the South should presume.... Should presume....

She couldn’t complete the thought. She stood, transfixed, taking deep breaths of the night air.

She loved her lord. She knew she did. How could someone mistake her so?

“Milady?” someone said quietly from the corner of the terrace, where the deep shadows of the building cast a dark spot, hidden from the searching moonlight. “Milady? Are you well?”

She stirred and looked at the darkness. Would this be another conspirator?

But the tall figure who detached himself from the building and walked towards her was all too familiar, his dark hair tumbled down his back, his bright green eyes attentive and he wore the sort of exquisite green livery that could only belong to Quicksilver’s personal servant, his commander of armies.

“Malachite?” Ariel asked, catching her breath and not knowing whether to be embarrassed or afraid. Should Malachite himself prove unreliable, should he make her proposals of sedition and revolution, proposals of treason to her lord just now Ariel thought she would willingly fling herself over the low parapet.

But Malachite bowed at the waist, and said, “Are you well, Milady?”

“You heard.... You heard.... What did you hear?” She pulled her disarrayed hair back, fretfully

Malachite sighed. “That which brings no dishonor to anyone but Hylas. You acquitted yourself well, milady.” Malachite smiled, slightly, a respectful smile that still betrayed he was impressed by his frail queen. “I came in as he made his dishonorable proposal to you, and I would have intervened, only you acquitted yourself quite well and I thought it better to stay away from him. He looked enraged, I didn’t feel any calmer, and it seemed a bad time to start a squabble. He is an envoy of his tribe.”

Ariel took a deep breath. “I know,” she said. “I know. Think you that the entire tribe partakes his sedition, or is this his own desire?”

Malachite shook his dark head. His features, more incisive than those of normal elves, set in an expression she couldn't identify. “I don’t know milady. The lord.... It is a fact that there is sedition abroad amid the tribes and races. The lord.... My Lord Quicksilver....” He always stopped short of completing some sentence.

“He’s weak, he’s weak, he’s weak,” Ariel chanted to herself, feeling her own cheeks flame at saying it. Such a thing to say about her own husband, and yet, perhaps it was better to say it, to leave it out there, in the open, shining with the moon, than to have the thought betray itself from her gestures, move from her fingertips, drip like treason from her eyes. “And this weak and idle theme will undo us all.”

Malachite flamed at the word, a pallor first subduing his features and then a dark blush, like spilled blood, climbing upward from the collar of his green suit to the roots of his black hair. “Milady,” he said. “Milady.”

Such a wild cry, and Ariel thought he would reproach her, but what he whispered next -- a meek, slow whisper -- was worse than reproach.

“There’s some who say the old king would be better, murderer or no.”

“The—” The thought choked Ariel’s throat. She remembered the vision she’d had, the wild wolf thing with its dark, dank, blood-stained cravings. They’d prefer that to sweet Quicksilver. Oh, the damage was great indeed. Perhaps it could not be repaired.

“You know what evil such thoughts bring,” Malachite said. “If enough of us have them, and us being creatures of such power. Is it not possible—” He blushed even darker, though she would have thought it impossible. “Is it not possible that us being magical creatures our very thoughts caused -- ” He sighed. “You must pardon me, but I overheard your conversation, before the king left, and I wonder, I wonder very much if it weren’t the thoughts of all these magical creatures that woke the evil and brought it back to existence, that brought him breathing down our necks again. And if the master isn’t wrong in leaving his kingdom unattended to go search for evil in another place.”

Ariel felt her heart contract, but didn’t wish to tell Malachite that Quicksilver rather wished to defend anyone but his wife. Instead, she changed the subject completely. “Ah, Malachite, a strong king would have slain the evil outright.”

But Malachite shook his head. “No, in that you’re wrong. I don’t think the lord could have done that, not unless he wished to go head to head with the Hunter himself when the Hunter came to claim Sylvanus as a fee. I don’t think the lord could even try to slay Sylvanus, but, of course, others might think so, and might think that it was this failing that taints his whole reign.”

“Or maybe it is his love for humans,” Ariel said.

Malachite started. “Milady. No. He loves only you.”

Ariel laughed, a soft giggle twinkling in the warm night air. “You’re a good servant, Malachite, and a loyal one, defending your master who has left us defenseless.”

The moonlit night of faerie no longer felt pleasing or safe. There was a rank smell to the buds, as though canker ate them before blooming.

Ariel sensed that this spring was doomed to the same sort of slow, dreary death as her marriage. Taking a deep breath, she started walking towards the double door. “Come, Malachite, we’ll go inside.”

She felt as if a bloodthirsty, dark creature rounded the palace. If Sylvanus won whatever the battle was to be that would take place in the heart of man, how could she prevent him from taking over the hill also? Was Malachite right in saying that tribes, clans and courtiers longed for his return?

Scene Ten

Will’s lodging in Southwark -- a small, cramped room beneath sloping eaves, in what was, at one time, obviously someone’s storage room. A shabby bed, with a sagging mattress and a cheap, dark-brown blanket takes up most of the room, leaving just barely enough space for a small clothing trunk and a narrow table by the lead-framed windows. Manuscripts litter the table. On the bed lies the lady Silver, her black hair tumbled over a perfect, white shoulder that her position has left uncovered. She looks still pale and tired, but somewhat revived.

W
ill helped Silver to the bed, then closed the door to his room and sat on his hardback chair, beside his writing table, and looked at this strange creature, this elf lady in his room.

She looked so resplendent, so magnificent, lying on his worn-out sheets, his threadbare blanket. She also looked frail, feminine, irresistibly soft and beautiful.

Will shook his head, and tried to think of his Nan, but the image he conjured was of Nan chiding him for some trivial fault.

Silver would never chide him. And Silver was here, in this room, where Will had been so lonely for so long.

Will’s heart beat with unusual vigor in his chest, and he took breath as if it hurt him. “What brings you from Arden?” Will asked. “What brings you from your Queen?” Will had an uncomfortable feeling that he was what had attracted Silver hence.

Perhaps it was his vanity that whispered it to his heart but for that moment, a moment of erratically beating heart, of short breath, of confused racing thoughts half of which Will would not admit to himself -- for a moment Will thought that it was he who’d brought Silver here, and on the next thought, that it was not. Not sure which response he feared more, he waited.

“I had a dream,” Silver said. And on those words, her eyes went dull and dark, as if glancing inward.

Will thought of his own dream for the first time since he’d first glimpsed Silver at Paul’s yard.

Thinking of it made his heart stop beating the tune of infatuation and arrest itself mid-beat as if squeezed in a gigantic fist. For the first time he realized there was more at work than coincidence in his dreaming of Sylvanus, the wolf-like lord of faerieland on the night before Silver came to Will in London.

And how had she come to London? Why? What foolishness could bring a creature of moonlight and trees here, to the harsh city?

“I thought you might be in some danger,” Silver said, her voice echoing in a disheartened, weak way that made it sound as if she weren’t so much speaking as thinking loudly.

Her words leaked into Will’s brain like remorseless rain piercing through old thatch.

Her chest moved with her breathing, freeing more of her voluminous, satin-skinned breasts beneath their flimsy confines.

Her white skin looked so fine that Will thought he could discern the contours of her beating heart beneath it. She looked frail and weak, and, for that, more entrancing, like the frail cobweb that catches the rays of morning sun and looks, for a brief moment like an ephemeral jewel.

Will shook his head.

Her coming here had been cocky daring, brave folly and insulting presumption.

Yet, a drained Silver, a tired Silver, her immortal nature made more vulnerable, weaker even than mortal nature, didn’t leave Will able to scold, able to expound. It barely left him able to think. Her lilac smell filled the air, penetrating the close room, and giving it the feel of Spring in Stratford, the garden of Will’s home.

Will remembered what her body felt like against his; the firm softness of her flesh. He remembered the magic those sensuous bow-shaped lips could wring from his body.