All Night Awake (57 page)

Who wanted to fight amid foreign marshes an enemy that vanished like fog on a sunny day, only to reappear again when the night fell?

She looked at Hylas’s insolent smile that displayed his golden teeth in glittering glory.

A superior people, he had said. She had heard the centaurs had haunted pixies down, and carried them, speared on the tip of their lances, and roasted them over big open fires.

The image made Ariel’s stomach tighten, while her vision yet remained dark.

“It is all well,” she said. “But my majesty will have to deliberate upon your request, before we can answer.” Even to her own ears, she sounded like Quicksilver.

She heard the disapproval from her people, their murmurs.

Was it her impression, or had she heard Sylvanus’s name pronounced by the crowd?

She tried to discern the faces of the assembly, but she couldn’t. Was it terror that was making her so faint? Terror of what? What evil loomed before her, that she could not see?

“Milady,” a male voice said, close at hand. “Milady.”

She blinked and took deep breaths, and forced herself to focus, until she saw someone else standing before her, so close that one more step would take him onto the stair to the throne.

It was a young elf, blond and slight and, like Malachite, displaying that want of total perfection that marked him for a changeling.

He was Malachite’s second in command. All of Malachite’s underlings were changelings. Ariel struggled for this one’s name. Aconite. Ariel remembered hearing Quicksilver refer to him as nimble of tongue and adept at gathering information. He was, to the faerie realm, what an intelligencer was to the mortal Queen.

Ariel brought her sight to bear on Aconite, and attempted to smile. “Yes?” she said. Perhaps this creature could explain her humors so at variance with her normal frame of mind.

Aconite had very straight, thin hair, which fell in front of his face as he bowed, and he had to pull it back as he straightened. His formal livery, green, edged with silver lace at the neck and sleeves, ornamented with broad stripes of silver down each of the arms and the legs, and belted with a heavy gilded expanse of silk was the same livery of all of Quicksilver’s servants, yet somehow, he managed to give it an impression of somberness. How, Ariel couldn’t tell.

“Milady, we know the lord left last night, and we know he told you it was upon state business. But we believe your majesty ought to be acquainted with.... There are facts your majesty should know. You are our Queen, and you should know the truth.”

Aconite looked very nervous. His eyes darted here and there, and he licked his lips with a quick, nervous tongue.

Ariel raised her eyebrows at him. Facts she should know? Was this creature attempting to intrigue between her and Quicksilver?

Oh, and why not, if sentiment against Quicksilver ran so high among the hill as it seemed to?

“If I might,” the youth said. “I would like to have your majesty’s ear in private.”

And yet, if intrigue were made, would it not be better it were made in the full light of day? Ariel glanced at the empty throne by her side, and sighed.

As uncertain as she felt of her own thoughts, she wasn’t sure she should trust her judgment upon anything. Whatever this creature had to say, would it sway a crowd as it might sway her? And if it did, would it not be better to know it had swayed the court also? Would she not feel less like a traitor then?

Feeling enough like a traitor now, because part of her wished this creature would say something damning enough to make her stop longing for Quicksilver’s return, she said, “There’s nothing you can say to me that you can’t speak in front of my people.”

Aconite hesitated. He looked towards Malachite, and a look full of meaning passed between them.

Holla, what was then here?

Ariel leaned forward. She forgot her fear, her mind wholly taken up with curiosity. What did these machinations mean? Had she been right in suspecting that private ill against Quicksilver moved here?

But.... Ill against Quicksilver from Malachite? Malachite, who was Quicksilver’s milk brother, his most faithful servant?

Ariel shook her head. “Speak here and now, or not at all.”

Aconite pulled his hair back, and looked at Malachite again, and colored, a deep, dark coral. He frowned. “Milady, if I might just give you....”

He advanced boldly, walked up the throne steps before she could stop him.

Ariel recoiled from his extended hand, before she realized that what he held out on the palm of his hand was a drop of water -- one of those dew drops that faerie kind had used, from time immemorial, to record images upon.

He dropped it into the hand that she extended for it.

At the touch of her hand, the drop of water grew in size and clarity, and displayed a shabby bedroom, and Lady Silver, disporting herself with a red-headed mortal.

Scene Fourteen

Will’s bedroom, late at night. The candle stands on the writing table, half consumed. The bed lies in some disarray, the cheap blanket thrown to the floor, the covers rumpled. Kit’s clothes lie scattered around the dusty wooden floor. Kit himself sits on the bed, looking dazed and lost, like a man who’s endured a blow to the head and hasn’t fully recovered. In his male aspect, fully dressed, his hair perfectly coiffed down his left shoulder, Quicksilver paces the room. The moon, circled with red, sends her light through the window, adding as if a blood tinged cast to the scene.

“C
ome and lie down,” Kit said. “Why did you change aspect, even as slept for no more than a moment? I can’t have closed my eyes for longer than a gathered breath. What can have disturbed you so in such a short while?” He looked with uncomprehending eyes at the elf and blinked.

“Come and be sweet, come and be mine, come and be Silver again. Come and lie down.” And with what enticement he could muster, Kit patted the rumpled bed beside him.

But Quicksilver only cast him a vague glance, as if in that space it had taken Kit to close his eyes and open them again, Quicksilver had forgotten Kit’s name and visage and the joy of their erstwhile embraces.

How he frowned, and how his countenance changed, moment by moment, like a motley moon.

Staring at him, Kit couldn’t help thinking that the change between male and female was a small thing and this changeableness, from smile to frown, from hesitant hope to utter despair, from love to scorn, the greater change.

Nor could Kit, despite his wishing to hold on to what had just happened and the recent memory of his kind welcome by the elf, help but remember the last time he’d been dismissed by this creature, and in what manner.

He stared, and waited for the ax to fall and hoped it mightn’t, and craved yet more of what had failed to evoke satiety however greatly enjoyed.

“Quicksilver?” he said, at long last. Not a call, so much as plaintive questioning.

The elf stopped. Red moonlight bronzing his golden air, he stopped. He turned to face Kit, but what he said were not so much words as something that sounded like the fragment of some lost poetry. “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame, ‘tis lust in action.”

Kit shivered. Sweat cooled fast upon his body. He reached for the blanket that he and Silver had tossed to the floor in their exertions, and pulled it over himself. Caught on the edge of the bed, it would only come up at an odd angle, covering Kit’s legs and little more. Not enough to stop the chill that climbed up his body, as he looked at Quicksilver.

Once before had this elf dismissed him. Once before, had Quicksilver, in his most foreboding mood, barred Kit from touching Silver.

It was as though this creature were not one and the same with his lady love, but someone else, a tyrant brother or a harsh father bent and determined to keep her under lock and key.

And yet, Kit recognized Silver’s gesture in the hand that Quicksilver lifted to the air and then let fall in a vain swoop that maybe signified the impossibility of all human endeavor or of human loving elf. And those hands were the same -- they were so white, and long and more perfectly shaped than mortal hands ever.

Kit wanted those hands and that touch, and the magical entrancement that came with elven love, and didn’t care in what form he got it, so long as he attained that state where he was lifted out of his mortal nature, and touched the heavens with an immortal madness. “Come to bed,” he said, aware that he sounded peevish and whined with a child’s ill-hazarded tantrum. “Come to bed.”

Quicksilver looked at Kit -- a long, hard and appraising look. Who could read those moss-green eyes? Were Quicksilver human, Kit might have ventured to guess at pity and sorrow, and perhaps a touch of affection, a hint of remorse, a brief lament over lost pleasures, fleeting across that gaze.

But Quicksilver was not human and all these emotions flashed in his countenance, one after the other, like shapes within the golden flames of a blazing fire. They darkened the glow a moment, then were gone, leaving nothing but a blank slate, a diamond perfection, a face etched by eternal fire and eternal ice, and not created or doomed by human love.

“No, Kit,” Quicksilver said.

Bending in a fluid movement, the elf gathered up clothes where they lay -- Kit’s discarded hose, his breeches, his fine lawn shirt, his well-cut boots -- and, with cold efficiency, set them on the bed. “You must dress,” he said. “And go.”

Kit couldn’t believe he’d heard right. Even before, when Quicksilver had dismissed Kit, he’d never been that curt, never that facile. “But why?” Kit asked. “In whose name should I leave now?”

“In mine,” Quicksilver said, and something like a somber shadow descended upon his face, like the darkness of eclipse defacing the moon. The moss-green eyes seemingly turned one shade darker, and the soft mouth, so well suited to pleasant smile, shrunk upon itself and closed more firmly, before opening to say, “In mine. It was a mistake all, and I do regret it. It was only my loneliness.... Silver’s loneliness, these many years when she’s not even been allowed to exist.” The perfect face flinched in momentary pain, then smoothed itself out. “Ah. It matters not. What matters is that you must go, Kit. I bring danger on you. Nothing better than danger.”

Kit opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. He knew he looked like a fish, newly pulled from Neptune’s blessed abyss and drowning in the air that sustains other creatures.

He felt like such a fish, too, and knowing it, felt angry at his weakness and his mistreatment. He felt angry on behalf of this poor Kit, this much-abused sometime scholar and present playwright, who loved only once and that once truly, only to have his love twice turned on him, twice rejected, twice flung in his face like refuse. Twice.

This Kit who was threatened by powerful, dark personages, and had naught to defend himself with. This Kit who had, despite himself, betrayed his own best feelings, his own best conscience and had not even the consolation of his own honor to take with him into dark loneliness.

He felt it as if this Kit were someone quite other, a dejected, sad being not himself.

Himself was still caught, breath suspended, from the impossibility of his dismissal.

From the moment he’d first glimpsed Silver in Paul’s Yard, the day had turned into a dream, a mad dream, a dream now turning dark and dreary and foreboding, as dreams do when the sleeper turns in bed and startles at his own movement.

Kit closed his eyes, heard the mad drum of his own heart, entrapped within his chest and seeking escape. He bit his lips hard, seeking pain and the taste of his own blood that might awaken him. But even the pain and the blood wouldn’t bring him to his full senses, and nothing would undo these last few hours.

He was trapped in this nightmare like a sprite that once conjured by a dark magician must remain sewn to someone else’s schemes and unable to beat the air free with his wings.

Kit opened his eyes again, and Quicksilver stood there, his back to Kit, all the way across the room, seemingly entranced in the view from the window, the nightlife of Southwark in full swing.

Faint sounds of that nightlife reached Kit. As from a long distance off, came a bawd’s high, insane laughter, and a horse’s mad gallop, and someone singing a bawdy drinking song.

Oh, to be out there, in that life and know nothing better. Oh, to be in the real life, of real, mortal men. To smell the reek of urine and vomit and human sweat that pervaded these streets nightly, and not to long for the scent of lilac that came from the elves, nor for their immaculate, light-filled world, or the luxuriating of their touch.

Oh, to never have known this love that now kept Kit as if apart from all others, separated by a sheet of something as hard and clear as diamond, and as impossible to shatter.

Blinded by tears, Kit reached for his hose, with trembling hands, pulled them on, and then, standing, pulled his breeches on and fastened them. He tried to do it all without looking at the bed where his clothes sat.

Each of the creases and folds on the sheet, marking as they did the path of his recent delights, now choked him with resentment. The cloying sweetness that had filled his heart rose to the back of his throat like bitter bile.