Any Man So Daring (6 page)

“H
ush, Caliban,” Miranda said, over her shoulder, directing a stern gaze at her brutish companion. “My father is yet by.”

“Why must we come here now?” Caliban asked, fixing her with a pleading gaze. He shuffled his great hairy feet, making his uncut toe nails shriek against the mosaic floor. “Why now? Why not wait till the master is gone. Why come at all? When the master finds out...”

“We must get the book in time for my lord Proteus to--” Miranda stopped, put her finger to her lips and glowered at Caliban.
 

  
From the bowels of the palace came the sound of heavy striding boots as the Hunter’s decisive steps fell upon the polished marble floor of this, his palace.

The Hunter’s voice rumbled like thunder, calling to the cursed dogs that, nightly, he led on their hunt for lost souls. “On Malice, on Envy, on All Unkindness,” the Hunter called.

His voice reverberated from the high ceilings, echoing on the walls of the vast building, like the sounds of an approaching storm.

In response, whines and barks sounded. They might be the answer of any dog when called by his master. Only these were louder and, withal, more cutting, the sound of damned souls baying and whimpering at their captivity and torment.

The Hunter laughed and more dogs bayed, and the Hunter’s heavy steps sounded overhead, and Miranda’s heart sped up.

She closed her eyes, and she swallowed hard. What would her father, immortal Lord of Justice, do if he found her here, in his library, where he’d often forbidden her to go alone?

She tried to still the scared flutter of her heart. Nothing would happen. Nothing. She prayed to the gods of the night to make it so.

She heard the front gate open and the sound of horse hooves upon the hard rock path outside. The gate closed. Her father was leaving on his nightly rounds.
 

What kind of a daughter was she, that so disobeyed her father? That she must hide and fear her discovery? She shook her head.

The Hunter was not her father, but her adopted father. A minor difference, but a real one, for the duty she owed him, for her upbringing, was dwarfed by her duty to her real blood and to those over whom she should have ruled as queen.

And yet, how hard it was to think she was disobeying the Hunter, for he was the only father she had ever known.

For most of her life, she’d thought herself the daughter of this striding, immortal giant, this creature of primeval cold, this justicer that had existed before mankind and would go on living long after mankind had ceased its vain striving upon their ball of mud.

For years, while he’d stooped to her small size, and watched with proud smile her hesitant first steps, and taught her to form the words of men, and schooled her to play the music of elves, and held her fiercely to his inhuman heart, she’d thought he was her father and she his daughter and that this solitude of hers, here at the far ends of elvenland, was no more than the result of her immortal, exalted parentage. Oh, sometimes she minded the solitude and sometimes she cried for the company of others like herself, or sat at the window looking down upon the ground frozen in black waves, or at the distant tops of the immutable forest and it seemed to her as though her heart would break.

But she believed this was her destiny, as the daughter of the dread Hunter.

But then one day — oh, happy day -- two months ago while the Hunter was gone, she’d heard a song from outside the palace, a heavenly song.

Nothing, beyond her own voice, her own playing of the virginals, had ever delighted her ear in any way close to those sounds.
 

She’d gone to a high window transported, wishing to see more, to hear more of this miracle, this eruption of joy in the dark fabric of her days.

And there she’d seen him. Proteus. Ah, Proteus.
 

On first seeing him, she was overcome. She’d thought him a spirit, a thing divine, for nothing natural had she ever seen that was so noble.

He was the first elf that she ever saw, the first male besides the Hunter or her troll serf, Caliban. The first that she ever sighed for. What a piece of work was elf. In understanding, how like the gods. In look, how like the angels.

On seeing him — his noble features, his light-spun hair, his luminous black eyes, she knew that nothing ill could dwell in such a temple, for if the ill spirit had so fair a house, good things would strive to dwell with it.

She’d come to the window and listened to him. He’d sung to her beauty. She’d gone to the door at his behest and for his sake, opened the back gate of the castle, ever kept locked.

In the wood outside, which had always seemed to her forbidding and shifting, like dreams remembered in the waking morning, she’d talked to Proteus.

They’d met, they’d wooed each other, they’d made exchange of vows.

What Proteus had told her had shattered her heart, then built her a new one.

To vows of love — and of those there were plenty — there had joined other, more substantial information. Stories of the fairy kingdom, the resplendent court that gathered around a tyrant King: Quicksilver. And more, he’d told her in that long night. So much that she feared that her reason and her understanding would sink under it all, like an overburdened bark.

For how could what he’d told her be true?

He’d told her she was not the daughter of the Hunter. She was no kith and kin of the cold immortal creature. Instead, she was the daughter of the late and virtuous king of Fairyland. Her father was Sylvanus, whom his brother, Quicksilver, had tricked into deposition and shameful death.

Here, Proteus had rushed his narration and refused to give her the details of it.
 

Miranda credited it to his kind heart that avoided giving her pain.

And though his news be strange, like a window opening to an unknown world, she’d looked at his face and read there the volumes of truth and the chapters of love.

He’d left her before the rosy morn of humans that looked like dim sunset in fairyland. He’d left her when the horse of her adopted father loomed in the horizon and the barking of his dogs could be heard over the eerie, still landscape of frozen waves of rock and millenary trees.

Proteus had come again the next elf-day and the next and the next.
 

His beauty assured Miranda of his truth when he spoke to her of his love for her and of the just war he and his father, Vargmar, waged against the evil tyrant, her uncle.

For Miranda knew, from legend and tale — all that had kept her company through her lonely childhood — that the good were always beautiful, while the evil carried some obvious deformity upon themselves.

There was nothing deformed in Proteus, and so he was her true and gallant knight.

When they won the war — Proteus had told her -- Miranda would be Queen of fairyland, and Proteus her trusty husband.

At such prospect, Miranda grew giddy, even as, in the Hunter’s library, she waited for the hoofbeats of her adopted father’s horse to vanish into the thunderclouds that announced the sunset of mortals, the dawn of fairykind.

She wished her errand could have waited longer, till she was sure he was gone for the night and would not return.

But outside the wood, Proteus would already be waiting her, and he’d told her their errand was likely to need all the time in the day of fairy, the night of mortals.

Proteus had asked Miranda to search for one of the Hunter’s books from these shelves. He’d shown her the symbols that should be on the cover, and he’d told her it was a book of arcane and powerful spells.

For Proteus’s side had lost the war and his father would soon be executed by the tyrant, Quicksilver.

Nothing remained for Proteus but one more desperate spell, one last magical attempt.

At which Miranda must help, for his magic was tied to the hill, and any magic he used would be noticed by the evil king, Quicksilver, or his spies.

She felt her heart hammer within her chest, part excitement and part fear, for what if Proteus failed...what if he died?

But no, she would not think on it. Nay, she would refuse.

On such decision, she shook her head and drew a deep breath and, hearing Caliban moan a complaint behind her, she snapped, “To it, Caliban. Here, here are the symbols that will be on the cover.” She withdrew from her bosom and displayed to him the piece of paper upon which Proteus had traced the figures. “This is what it will look like, and you’ll help me look.”

“But mistress--” Caliban started.

“Don’t 'mistress' me. Just search for it.”

Well she understood his reluctance, for Miranda knew in her inner heart that the Hunter would not be pleased if he caught her here. And he would punish Caliban doubly were he to find the brute here.

The Hunter had taught her magic — some magic — and he’d told her that barring the eternal creatures, creatures like the Hunter himself, she had more power than any man or elf.

But he’d never told her to look into the arcane books, never taught her to read the strange language they spoke. He’d forbidden it, indeed, professing himself afraid for her safety, her sanity.

A treacherous thought crossed Miranda’s mind, that perhaps the Hunter had kept her from the books to thus seal her away from discovering her true origin.

She stamped down the thought.

The truth was that her adopted father had never been less than kind to her. The innocent devilry of her childhood, the temper tantrums of adolescence, all had met with a bemused affection, a gentle joy in her presence.

She thought, as she looked through the volumes, and climbed a ladder to reach the upper ones, that the Hunter might be hurt. Just that. He wouldn’t blame her and he wouldn’t turn on her. But his eyes might acquire a wounded look, and she might know that she’d hurt this immortal creature who’d never done her aught but good.

She would know she had returned kindness with ill-will.

Could she bear it?

She gritted her teeth, thinking of her adopted father’s wounded expression. Force, her heart would break. She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, like the swelling of rain-laden clouds that must burst in water or else break in storm.

Then she thought of Proteus, poor Proteus, whose father had been defeated in battle, whose last hope had been dashed.

She swallowed back the pressure of her tears and told herself that she must hurt the Hunter to save Proteus, and that Proteus, the weaker, needed her more.

On this resolution, she reached for the shelf, and found her fingers brushing the symbols Proteus had drawn on the spine of a blood-red leather bound book.

“I’ve found it, Caliban,” she said, and, holding her green dress up away from her rushing feet, she climbed down the ladder.

Caliban hadn’t been making much effort to look at books. He’d been standing by the bookcase, glaring at Miranda with an air of aggrieved dignity. Now, he followed her out of the library with dragging step.

“Mistress, I don’t think you should trust--”

A look quelled him. When Proteus had first appeared near the castle, Caliban had made such comments, and indeed, enlarged himself upon the theme that Miranda shouldn’t trust the stranger, that the stranger was just that, and might bring danger and treason to her life and him and even the Hunter.

Miranda had answered his doubts then, and clearly enough. By accusing him of jealousy of Proteus’s clean beauty, she’d reduced the beast to sputtering tears.

Since then, Caliban had been quiet on the subject till now.

What did he sense now, that pulled such words from him?

Miranda gave her beastly servant a searching look but saw no more than his normal, surly, red-eyed boorishness.

He’d been taken from his parents as a cub by the Hunter, who’d wanted him to be a serf to Miranda.

Did Caliban miss his parents' smelly cave in the far northern mountains?

Did he crave the companionship of his litter mates?

“What, Mistress, what?” Caliban asked.

Miranda realized that she’d been staring, thinking odd thoughts indeed. Trolls were brutes with no feelings or memories.

Yet, why did Caliban look ever so mournful?

Oh, nothing, it is nothing
,
Miranda told herself.
No thoughts, no feelings does he have that are worth my concern.

She held the magical book to her chest, and tried to think only of Proteus as she climbed the spiral staircase that led to the back door of the tower.

Outside the tower extended a vast garden, a thing of marvel built by the Hunter for Miranda’s delight.

On this expanse, flowers grew together that had never, in either geography or season, known each other’s company. Lilies intertwined with roses and those with tulips, and those yet with the exotic orchid that grew in colors so perfect and absolute that they would have been worth a king’s ransom in the world of men.

Miranda paid no attention to the flowers, or to the singing of myriad multicolored birds, or to the smell of warmth and life that diffused into the crisp morning air. All of it had amused her when she was a child, but now she was a woman, and she must put her childish toys by.

She walked along the path between the tower door and the gate that opened in the encircling wall, the gate that led to the forest and to Proteus.

The book in her arms felt very heavy and cold, and she couldn’t help but hear, in Caliban’s shuffle behind her, an ominous question.

Why did Proteus want this book?

Thinking about it now, Miranda realized she did not know. She’d been lulled by Proteus's talk of love, of proving her love and of righting the great wrongs done to both their families.

And yet a book of spells was for spelling — and what spell would change the outcome of the elf civil war? What spell would restore Miranda to the throne? What spell could bring back the brave rebels who’d lost their life in the war? What spell could give Proteus back his father?

Spells — Miranda had learned — rarely could perform even one such miracle, much less all of them.

Miranda doubted not that Proteus meant well. It would be going against her very soul to doubt it. But what if Proteus over-extended his power? What if he misjudged some spell’s power?