Any Man So Daring (12 page)

The forest by the Hunter’s castle, where Proteus and Miranda stand, side by side, and watch through a magical window as Hamnet clambers into Arden forest, tripping over branches and roots, as a mortal will who chases elf illusion
.

“W
hy is the child rushing into the forest?” Miranda asked, watching the boy in fascination.

Pixie-led
, her mind whispered. Yet a charm was magic and had Proteus not said that he could not use magic without the tyrant knowing of it? Was that not the only reason to have Miranda perform the transport spell in the Hunter’s great book?

She lay her hand upon the cold page of her adopted father’s spell book, as though through that hand, from the page, through her cold fingers, she could drink up the Hunter’s eternal strength.

Pixie-led.

Proteus looked at her and smiled, the fond smile of an adult looking at a child. “We’ve set a charm on him,” he said. “To go into the forest.” He shrugged at what must have been her shocked expression. “It is easiest to spell him from Arden forest, the land that has been magical to our kind from time immemorial.”

Miranda felt cold at his words. “We’ve laid a charm?” she asked. “We?”

Since the war had ended, there had never been mention of anyone helping Proteus but Miranda.

Was he indeed a liar?

She looked at his golden hair, his perfect features, his dark eyes. Perhaps he had lied with good intentions, for no one who looked so beautiful could be evil.

And yet, if he had lied, how could she trust him?

Seemingly unaware of her moral struggle, Proteus chuckled. “Some friends there remain to me from my father’s coalition.” He looked at Miranda and smiled, and, reaching for her hand that rested upon the book, petted it reassuringly. “They are, to be truthful, immigrants in our land and therefore they feel not the pull of the hill. Though their magic, like mine, is Quicksilver’s tribute, his to unjustly control, yet have they some arcane powers that the king cannot compass.

“But nominally they are Quicksilver’s subjects and, like me, they pretended to submit. But they’re still on our side and they will help us.

“Who are they?” Miranda asked. “These, our allies, of whom I’ve never heard before?”

“Princes and nobles all,” Proteus said.

“Of elvenkind?”

Proteus shrugged. “Of a great magical race, no worse issued than ours, and no less ancient. Some would say more.”

It was clear Proteus wished to say no more about it and — knowing that when he avoided to speak of something it was to protect her — Miranda forbore to ask.

Just in such a way had he avoided speaking of her father’s deposition — seeking to give her no pain.

Perhaps, from what he had already said about these allies, a better-brought-up elf, cognizant of her own kind, would have guessed the race he alluded to.

And there was the reason for his not telling her of these allies before. He suspected her ignorance and wanted to protect her from humiliation.

She looked at him through moist eyes.
 

Kind, kind Proteus.

Proteus made a gesture in the air which closed the window through which Miranda had seen the mortal boy rushing into Arden woods, magic-led.

But in Miranda’s mind, she could still see the boy rushing forth.

She looked at Proteus and, anxious, set her hand firmly about his wrist in warm entreaty. “The boy will not be harmed,” she said.

Proteus looked back at her, surprised, as though she’d spoken a different language, so arcane that he could barely divine its meaning. “The boy?”

“This boy.” She pointed towards the place where the magical window had hung suspended, the place where she’d seen the boy. “This mortal boy. He is no enemy of ours, no part of our injury. He will not be harmed but will, never knowing what happened, be returned to the safety of his mother’s arms.”

“Oh, we can return the boy to his mother,” Proteus said. "I confess to you I scarce thought on him. He’s but a tool and mortals are such beings who live such ephemeral and inconsequential lives that sometimes I count them as no more than flies on a summer’s day and give them not a thought.” His hand closed over her hand, though, and he smiled. “But if fair Miranda wants the human boy returned to kith and kin, to kith and kin shall the child return.” He smiled, his smile that made all thought vanish from Miranda’s mind, her heart radiate with warmth, as her knees went weak.

She nodded but sighed as she thought of what they would do. “And yet,” she said. “It is wrong to kidnap the boy, is it not? It is murder to kill even a tyrant when he cannot defend himself. And I fear me on this, and on adopted father’s judgment. Only...hear me not. Do as you will.”

Proteus looked away from her and down on the book again. His smile of indulgent amusement slowly changed to a frown that knit his brows together over his dark eyes.

“Is anything wrong?” Miranda asked.

He looked up. In his gaze there was an exasperation that Miranda had rarely seen — or rarely seen displayed towards her.

“Nothing is wrong,” he said, but his mouth twisted in wry contradiction of his words. “Nothing is wrong, save only that everything is. For my efforts I am rewarded with this, a book I cannot use.”

“You cannot use?” Miranda asked and, with quick, reprimanding tongue, “Woe is me, then, that brought you the wrong book.”

Behind her, Caliban snorted and Miranda shot him one quelling glance over her shoulder.

Proteus's hands closed around hers. “Woe rather to me, Miranda,” he said. His voice was slow and doleful, full of quiet acceptance, of tolling defeat like echoing bell over a dark night and an open grave. “Woe to me, who wanted with this to achieve revenge, to cleanse my father’s blood from the kingdom of elf. Woe to me, who wanted to defeat the tyrant and set you, milady, on fairyland’s throne. Woe to me who--” He let go of her hands and, with a final sounding bang, closed the heavy cover of the ancient book.

“But no, milord, no,” Miranda said, nettled by his passivity and grieved by the grief she read in his eyes. “No. Look at me. There is still hope. If this is not the right book, I’ll get you another. If this is wrong, I--”

“But it is the right book, Miranda,” Proteus said. “It is just that within the compass of my ability and the measure of your power, I believe even you lack the strength and magic to make this spell work.”

Again he opened the book to the last page, and looked longingly at the spell, as though it contained all his dreams and as though all of them were set upon an unsteady bark in a deep sea. “I cannot use the power and you lack it. My father would have been able to do it, but alas, my father is dead.”

Miranda looked at Proteus's hand, poised atop the cover of the book. She remembered how the letters of the spell seemed, alive, to contort and writhe with their power.

She had not enough power?

But Proteus had told her, once, that Miranda, of all those born of elf, had the greatest power, the strongest natural magic.

More, the Hunter had told her that she did.

She grabbed Proteus's wrist again, where his sleeve ended and before his glove began. His skin felt icy cold. “Milord, what will happen if I have not enough power to actuate this spell?”

He looked at her, his dark eyes shining with moistness. “It is dangerous to you, Miranda. If you lost control of the spell mid-use, it could kill you. I cannot allow it.”

“I ask you not to allow it," Miranda said, and opened the book. “I tell you I will do it.”

Proteus opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again, as though surprise had stolen his power of speech. “You’ve never done the like magic, have you? Never done such magic, never used such power. How can I trust you now?”

“How can you not trust me," she asked, as she felt her enthusiasm rise and heard her voice high, excited, ringing like merry bells over the desolate landscape. “How can you afford not to trust me when I am the only one who can do it? I am the only one who can rescue your plans for revenge, aye, and buy the kingdom for both of us, withal. I can set the crown upon our brows. I can. Only let me try this spell.”

With impatient hands, she tore at his hands, pulling the book from his grasp.

“Then you no longer feel ill at ease about the trap? Your conscience will allow you to do this?”

She thought on it. She didn’t like the thought of murdering Quicksilver by ambush, but then how else should tyrants die?

And as for the child, she would ensure that he returned, unharmed, to his mother. “If it is to be done,” she said. “It is better it were done quickly.”

And, touching the spell with eager finger, she thought how she would be the one to rescue Proteus's cause. In years to come the kingdom of the hill would make songs to her courage, her bravery, her magic use, as well as to that beauty that Proteus never tired of praising.

Proteus would thank her. He would be forever in her debt.

She looked at the words upon the page, as they twisted and writhed — symbols of fire and air and water entwining, now forming this, now that, compound, eternally mutable and forever themselves.

How could one read a language that changed? How could any book mutate thus, the words imprisoned upon the paper, yet free to twist and acquire new forms?

She blinked at the words as they wended, and writhed, like worms crawling one upon the other, so that one became the other and it was hard to see where one ended and the one began.

She stared and her eyes burned with the sight of it, and a headache pounded at the back of her head.

She could never read this, let alone perform the spell.

But even as thought it, as she felt the dull, aching misery of defeat, the horror of failing fair Proteus, a realization formed from the mutable words and her mind.

She could read it.

Aye, and she could magic it, too.

Or rather, while the words changed and transformed, while the very trappings of the spell seemed to hesitate and dissolve into another form, yet the essence of it remained untouched — and in that being untouched showed something — the instructions for the spell.

It was, she thought, as though the page displayed a changing front, a mutable facade to the world. Beneath the facade, the real spell lurked, immutable and unvarying like the stars affixed to the dark sky.

For, even as each word changed and flowed, Miranda realized that the essence of the spell remained the same.

Reading the words as a man that treads upon debris on the surface of a river to reach the safety of the other bank, she focused her mind on the unchanging — on that, which, at the back of the spell — appeared to be constant and eternal.

“Miranda, wait,” Proteus said. “You must remember the boy you saw. You must call him and none other. You must bring him here.”

He touched her hand and, from his mind to hers, an image fluttered like a leaf dropping from a high tree: the boy with curly hair and golden eyes forging his way into the forest.

Part of Miranda’s mind received the image and thought on it, and how odd it was that the boy felt like part of her very soul.

She gave it not much thought, though, not much attention: the boy was a means to an end, and their presence in his life would be but a brief hindrance.

He would be there and gone, and his life would change but little if at all.

He would perhaps imagine that he’d slumbered in the woods and there had a dream of magical creatures. Then he’d dust himself off and go home to his mother.

But Miranda’s life and Proteus's would be changed forever. She would be free of this life of shadows and solitude. And Proteus would...Proteus would have his revenge and her hand.

Reaching for the boy in the woods with a part of her magic, keeping her ultimate objective in mind, Miranda lifted her small soft hands, so unaccustomed to this work, and traced high the cabalistic spells that she could perceive through the mutable surface of the changeable words.

There, there, there — she traced symbols of fire upon the still air of this forgotten place.

There, there, there — the symbols glowed and shone and twined — fire and air and earth and water, the elements in conjoined upheaval wrought what they’d never thought to form.

From the stillness of the air, the accustomed certainty of this place outside time and space, something emerged — a tunnel, a black howling vortex.

It opened in front of Miranda, and she, startled, hoped it was the means to bring the boy here, nothing more.

Caliban whimpered, a high, animal sound.

Miranda felt as though her hair, her clothes, all had been caught in a storm of light, in a haze of energy, in a glow of magic. Her hair, her clothes flowed around her as though immersed in water, or rather, like living things swimming in water.

She set up the spell and caught the boy in it — a wriggling silver fish in a sturdy net — and opened the howling tunnel to this dark corner of fairyland and raised her arms to the heavens, and, with sure voice she called “So be it.”

At that very moment, she felt two minds touch her own — two other minds, their thoughts alien to her inner voice.

One had the familiar feel of her adopted father’s thoughts and words, his protective gentleness, his eager affection. This mind voice echoed, fear-laden,
Child, child, what have you done?
it asked. And added,
be careful, for there are traps ahead.

The other mind was unknown to Miranda. It gave the impression of a cold, glimmering crystal, hard but brittle.

It screamed in her mind,
You can’t do this.

The moment froze, like an animal caught in ice, slowly freezing, slowly dying, everything guttering through time like a dying candle, the slowness excruciatingly painful to the unsure heart.

The tunnel stopped howling and screaming and, through it, pulled by magic, a boy shot, yelling who knew what.

But he did not land in the clearing near the castle of the Hunter. Rather, he gained altitude and, like a bird flying high above the black turrets, he passed. In a moment he was gone.

Then something else, someone else — more than one person, if the feeling served — hurtled after him.