All Night Awake

Sarah A. Hoyt

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

All Night Awake © 2002 by Sarah A. Hoyt

All Night Awake (Original Version) © 2011 by Sarah A. Hoyt

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

eISBN: 978-1-61824-039-2

All Night Awake

Sarah A. Hoyt

Prologue

SCENE: A wooden stage, looking very real and solid, amid swirls of yellow-green smoke or fog. On the stage three women sit on wooden stools, beside a painted hearth. A beautiful maiden spins the thread, a strong matron measures it, and a wrinkled crone cuts it with a pair of golden shears. A man appears at the edge of the stage. He’s a middle-aged man who looks insignificant, with his receding hair- line and dark curls that brush the shoulders of his cheap russet wool suit. Only his eyes, sharp and intent, golden as a bird of prey’s, hint at curiosity and intelligence. He walks to the center of the stage and faces the women.

Will does not know if he dreams or wakes.

He walks on a creaking stage with hesitant steps and knows not how he got here. Only minutes ago he slept in his own bed, in his rented room in London. By what magic has he been brought hence?

Three strange women face him. Women they look to be, women they seem to be, and yet something about them proclaims them something else.

“All hail Will Shakespeare!” The maiden lifts her head from her spinning. As her blond hair falls back, it shows that she lacks ears. “Hail to thee, great poet.”

Will jumps back, shocked both at deformity and greeting.

Great poet? Did she indeed greet Will thus? He could scant believe it for he knew that his poetical talent was as yet all dreams and none of it survived the harsh light of reality.

“All hail Will, whose verse generations yet unborn shall recite.” The matron looks up from the thread she winds and measures. Her smile shows feral, serrated teeth.

“All hail Will,” the crone pipes. Lifting her head, she shows no eyes amid the wrinkles on her withered face. “All hail Will, whom death shall not defeat.”

Scared, Will takes three steps back. This is a mocking dream that thus torments him with the possibility of his dearest hopes. He takes his hand to his collar and seeks to loosen it, as though by breathing deeply he might regain his footing in real life and the waking world.

“Live you?” he asks. “Are you aught that man ought to question? Do I dream, or am I awake? You look not like the inhabitants of the earth. You should be women, and yet strange women you are. What are you?”

“We are not women but that of which women are spun. We’re images of dream, creatures of the mind. Through us do human minds perceive all. Through us, the mold and form of female reality, do human minds see the force like a womb that, within the universe, spins all that’s female in the world of men,” the maiden says. “We were created before man was man, from the dim minds of brutes in their caves, and since then have we been in human minds and actions and dreams. Our presence the more real for being illusory, our power the more true for being imagined, encompasses all and shapes all. Thus does the imagined mold the real and the real the imagined again.”

“By us is all life threaded and measured and cut, ours the weaving of human fate,” the matron says.

“But ours will be the undoing and the death, should we not find a champion to defend us.” The crone’s hair flies wild, framing her face in snow-white tendrils.

“Defend us,” the maiden says. “And you shall be the greatest poet born of woman’s womb. Your plays will be heard, your verses repeated world without end.”

Will clenches his fists. They mock him. Surely they mock him. “Six months I’ve been in London and no one will listen to my poetry. Six months of starving and spending. Now are all my money and all my hope run out. And yet you mock me.”

The maiden shakes her head. “We do not mock, but promise.”

“Only do as we wish,” the matron says. “And fame and ever-living poetry shall be your reward. For we command that part of the human mind that, dreaming, imagines itself awake and in that same place does poetry reside.”

“The kingdom of elves is in turmoil and the disarray of that sphere threatens ours. Sylvanus, who should be the Hunter’s slave, plots to rebel against his master, who, like us, is an ancient and powerful invention of humanity, an element and avatar of all that’s justice in males,” the matron says.

“Sylvanus, who was king of elves, and for his foul deeds was enslaved to the Hunter, the justiciar, the provider,” the crone says.

“Sylvanus will destroy us and thus remove both the male and female pillars that hold up the world as human minds have built it. Thus, like a cloak unraveled the universe shall fall, in tatters and threads with no meaning.”

“Into our place Sylvanus shall weave himself, within the mind’s warp,” the maiden says. “Like a rotted patch shall he sew himself upon a new cloth of dream, rendering the whole worthless.”

“Why do not you stop him yourselves?” Will asks.

The maiden shakes her head. “We can no more stop him than we can stop the tide. We spin the thread, we wind and cut. But our tools must be the human mind, the human heart. We cannot weave our own fate. We do not tie our own knot.”

“Stop Sylvanus.” The matron smiles, sharp teeth gleaming. “And the reward shall be yours, your poetry remembered, your words echoed through the ages unending.”

“Stop Sylvanus,” the crone says. “And we shall make you greatest of his kind, for words that burn and spell and bind.”

“I am dreaming,” the man says. “And in this dream, uneasy, do my fondest hopes mock me.”

He vanishes like smoke upon the stage, leaving the three women behind, spinning and cutting and measuring the eery thread that glimmers white in their laps.

Scene 1

The nave of St. Paul’s Cathedral, or Paul’s Walk, as it is called in Elizabethan England. People of all descriptions crowd every corner of the ample space—tailors, factors, lawyers, pickpockets, sellers of racy woodcuts, bawds, and chimney sweeps—all of them do business here, beneath the soaring arched roof and between the lofty columns. The imposing stone tombs of the nobility, the rood loft, even the baptismal font are used as money-changing counters. Dandies stroll aimlessly, displaying their fashionable clothes. An ill-dressed young man in his late twenties, with the beginnings of a receding hairline and long black curls that brush his frayed lace collar, stands by the eastern door, anxiously perusing a confusion of papers glued there, each headed “Si Quis.”

Will Shakespeare looked at the Si Quis notices posted on the door. There were so many that one was glued upon the other, till the whole door appeared to be made of paper.

Si Quis meant if anyone. Si Quis would be tailor, Si Quis would be serving man, Si Quis would be fencing master.

All the jobs in London were spread before Will, like the countries of the earth before the tempting devil.

Yet Will remained unemployed, his stomach empty, his rent long overdue. Only an hour ago, Will’s landlord had awakened Will from uneasy, fitful sleep to demand payment for lodging that he’d long occupied but not paid for. Another day, and Will would have no lodging, either.

Si Quis would be chimney sweep. Si Quis would be gardener.

All these professions, though many, were to Will’s purpose none.

His head hurt with a thunderous headache, and clotted remains of his dreams haunted his mind.

A great poet, the creatures had said Will would be.

Will. A great poet.

A middle-aged man, with fading looks, a provincial grammar-school education, and next to no friends in London, Will felt as though his fortune were as out at heel as his suit and his frayed lace cuffs.

No one wanted a would-be poet. No one was looking for an aspiring playwright. No one craved to hire even someone with Will’s other, meager abilities: a petty schoolteacher, or a glover with little more than apprentice skill.

“Sweep chimney sweep, mistress,” a man’s baritone boomed just behind Will, deafening him. “With a hey derry from the top to the bottom.”

A chimney sweep advertising his services.

The smell of roasting meat, seasoned with nutmeg and ginger, drifted up to Will’s nose, tantalizing his stomach with savors of a supper he couldn’t afford.

“Well met, Richard, well met,” a man said to Will’s left, hurrying forward to clasp another man in his arms. “Would you take ale with me? And sup?”

Will dearly wished someone would invite him to sup. But in his six months in London, he’d formed near to no acquaintance and been befriended by none. He’d been cozened and fooled and stolen from. He’d been duped and mocked and betrayed, but he’d formed no useful connection, no gentle friendship that might ease his penury.

The little money he’d brought to London with him—scraped together from his father’s failing business and his wife’s selling of homegrown vegetables—had fallen drop by drop into an empty barrel of despair from which the sweet wine of hope had long since evaporated.

Now he had nothing. Not money enough to buy supper, not even enough to return home.

Nothing was left to him but to walk to Stratford, which would take days. Will would starve long before that.

Tears prickled behind Will’s eyelids. How confident Will’s wife had been, his Nan, when she’d pressed the few coins of their meager savings into Will’s sweaty hand before he left home.

She’d kissed Will and told him that with his words and his wit he could pry London open like a treasure coffer, and make his fortune and the fortune of his whole family.

Oh, deceived wife. Oh, poor, way-led woman who—despite having lived with Will for ten years and borne him two daughters and a son—still believed her man to be a Hyperion, a sage, the form and glass of all mankind.

Poor Nan, who would never even know that her husband had starved in London, dead of his own folly and inflated pride.

“Help, help,” an old man screamed to Will’s right. “Someone has cut my purse. Help. Cozenage and damnation.”

Behind Will men swarmed and pushed around the Si Quis door. Some were dressed as poorly as he, others arrayed in fine silks and velvets. All, by Will’s side and pressing, shoulder on shoulder against him, read the notices on the door with the kind of hunger for employment that bespeaks the specter of starvation nearby. Each made a little triumphant noise or read the words aloud when he found a likely position and then tore off the sheet and sauntered away.

A man in a sky blue doublet, three finger-widths of creamy lace peeking from beneath his sleeves to shroud his hands, put a well-tended finger on the paper asking for a fencing master, and pushed Will out of the way to tear the sheet off the door.

It was no use, Will thought, jostled and pushed, feeling lost and hopeless. He would go back to his lodgings and dream for his supper while he starved.

In his dreams he’d been a poet, but waking no such matter.

His gaze swept over the yellowed papers and the crisp white ones, perusing the words scrawled upon them with desperate longing.

Si Quis would be smith. Si Quis would be weaver. Si Quis would be horse holder outside the bear garden.

Will’s breath arrested. Wait. He could do that. He put his finger on the paper.

He could look after horses for customers who went inside to watch the bear baiting.

He grasped the corner of the sheet, meaning to tear it out and follow instructions on how to apply for the job.

“Holding horses,” a man said, so close to Will that his breath tickled Will’s ear. “Well, I could have done that.”

Looking over his shoulder, Will saw a blond man as threadbare as himself. He looked back at Will and smiled, disarmingly. “Though, for my money, I’d rather have been an actor.” He grimaced as though he’d named the lowest profession he could think of.

Will sighed. “I came to London to be a playwright,” he said.

“No.” His new acquaintance looked skeptical. “Did you indeed?” He pointed with sudden animation toward a man a few steps from them. “Look, there, in the red doublet and green hose. That’s Philip Henslowe, the owner of The Rose, as I live and breathe.”

In a moment, Will let go of the paper and turned, the thought of a job vanishing from his mind. The idea of holding horses in front of the bear garden became abhorrent, as did the idea of any job not in the theater. As abhorrent as stale beer when fresh wine is offered.

If Philip Henslowe was the owner of The Rose, in Southwark, then Henslowe was the owner of the largest and most successful theater in London. In The Rose were enacted Kit Marlowe’s plays, the most acclaimed shows of the age. Even in far-off Stratford-upon-Avon Will had heard of Tamburlaine the Great and, with trembling admiration, read its lines printed on the cheap paper of a hastily copied booklet.

All his dreams reviving, Will thought that if only he could meet Henslowe, if he could impress Henslowe—why, Will would conquer the theater and become as great as Marlowe, and perhaps greater. He blushed at the hope, which he would never dare voice, even as it beat madly in his shying heart like a bird imprisoned in a glass dome.

The man in the red doublet and green hose stood in the center of the nave, right in the middle of Paul’s Walk, talking to an auburn-haired dandy in a dark velvet doublet slashed through to show flame-colored fabric beneath.

The dandy didn’t matter, but Philip Henslowe did. In six months, Will had yet to meet someone as important in the theater. This could be the turning point of his luck that led to the fulfillment of all his hopes.

Now he would brave Henslowe on his own, with no introduction. Or, Will thought, clenching his fists while his lower lip curled in disdain, Will deserved no better work than to hold horses in front of the bear garden.

Will elbowed the surrounding men out of the way, cut through the middle of a group of loudly arguing dandies, and extending his hand, as though to beg, charged toward Henslowe.

His extended fingers touched shabby red velvet and he spoke indistinctly through a mouth that suddenly felt too dry. “Please, Master Henslowe, I am a poet.”

At that, all of Will’s wit fled him and he stood, mute and frozen, before the theater owner.

Will wanted to say that he would like to write plays, that he was sure he could write plays as fire-woven as Marlowe’s, or better. But he could say no more.

Up close, Henslowe looked older than Will had expected, his face as suntanned and worry-creased as the face of Will’s wife, back in Stratford.

Will’s mouth opened, but his tongue could not find the turn of a rounded phrase or even the trick of a single word.

Philip Henslowe looked average: a man with brown eyes and longish, straight brown hair.

His bold-colored doublet and bright green pants showed as much sign of wear as Will’s russet suit. At elbows and knees, the fabric had worn old and thin, all the pile gone and nothing but the threadbare weave beneath.

He looked back at Will with lusterless eyes and arched his eyebrows. “A poet?” he said, as though the word were a fantastical sound referring to some obscure occupation or some marvel told by sailors returned from distant lands.

“A poet, Philip,” the dandy to whom Henslowe had been talking said, and tittered. He glanced at Will, and his long-lashed grey eyes sparked with humor. “You know them, surely. They grow under rocks and in untended places, and hide in clusters in universities.”

The dandy smiled, showing white teeth that went well with his fine-featured, smooth, oval face, his well-clipped beard, and the fine moustache that traced his upper lip like a well-drawn line. He turned to Will and winked. “Tell me, good man, did you go to a university or to an inn of the court and there tend your wit as others tend vegetable patches, with the manure of learning and the heat of argument?”

Henslowe looked at the ceiling, as though beseeching a far-off divinity.

Will’s mouth remained dry. He shook his head.

Who could this be, whose clothing looked newly made, whose auburn hair showed the darker roots that indicated art aiding nature, whose every trait and feature betrayed a nobleman? Why would such a one talk to a theater owner, the impious rabble of society? And why would such a one bother to mock Will?

The dandy’s grey eyes looked a question, and his eyebrows arched. “Not a university man?”

Will cleared his throat. “I’ve never gone to university.” He bowed slightly. “I went to grammar school and then I taught for a time in the country. Then I helped my father in his shop.”

The finely drawn eyebrows of the auburn-haired gentleman arched upon his white brow, a movement more intent and meaning than Henslowe’s similar look. “Not gone to university? And your father had a shop? Why, that’s fatal.”

The dandy pulled from within his sleeve a kerchief edged with lace worth more than all of Will’s clothing. He waved this foppery in front of his nose, as though to dispel a bad stench. “A poet should never be a useful kind of person, capable of handling the grosser stuff of life. Tell me, your father is, mayhap, not a butcher, or some such gross occupation?”

Will shook his head, bewildered, “I pray, no. He’s a glover, but—”

“Ah, he busies himself with the egg and flour of tanning, does he? And was it at his foot that you learned the fine chervil leather of a couplet, the whiting of poetry?” The gentleman smiled.

“I . . .” Will swallowed nervously. “I’ve always made poems, pray, to the local girls and . . . . And I admire Marlowe’s plays much.”

The dandy laughed, a delighted cackle that jangled in the air, mingling with the calls of tradespeople, the enticements of bawds. “A good thing to love Marlowe’s plays. I sometimes enjoy them myself. Do you not, yourself, enjoy them, Phillip?”

Henslowe rolled his eyes in silence.

The dandy laughed and turned to Will with sudden, giddy enthusiasm, “So, say a poem for us. A poem.” He stuffed his handkerchief back into his sleeve and stepped back, as if to make room for Will’s expansive wit.

“Declaim,” the dandy said, and waved a hand encased in pearly grey chervil gloves with a heavy golden fringe at the end that dangled over a dainty wrist.

Will glanced at Henslowe, who stared not at Will but at the other man, with something like wonder or alarm.

Would Henslowe listen? Could Will earn his place as a playwright this way?

Standing with his feet close, Will cleared his throat.

When he’d dreamed of a moment like this, he’d imagined a tiring room, the air thick with the smell of grease paint, the actors all bespelled by Will’s very presence.

A theater owner, or perhaps even a nobleman, would ask Will to recite a poem and all the actors would fall silent, all movement stop, till, in the end, nothing stirred amid props and costumes, nothing moved except Will’s voice rising and falling and dazzling all.

But Will’s reality always fell short of his dreams, and therefore, he cleared his throat and made to start.

“I have Dutch coins, and German, and French too. Change your coins here, before you set abroad,” a money changer yelled near Will’s ear.

Will jumped, but his would-be listeners didn’t move. The dandy looked attentive, the theater owner bored.

His voice shaking, Will started, in measured cadences, to speak his best sonnet.

It was the one he’d written for Nan when they were courting, the one that ended in hate from hate away she threw / And saved my life, saying not you.

When Will had finished, the noise of Paul’s had not died down. From somewhere came the high-pitched laughter of a bawd, and somewhere behind Will two gentlemen argued loudly.

“The sad ballad and sorrowful fate of Romeo,” a ballad seller called out, just to the right of Henslowe, waving a sheaf of smudged printed sheets just within the theater owner’s field of vision. “How he did kill himself for love unrequited.”

And the dandy, his eyebrows more arched than ever, looked puzzled. “A fine sonnet, to be sure,” he told Will. “A fine sonnet.” Despite the man’s words, his lips worked in and out, battling some emotion that Will feared was mirth.

With sudden heat, Will attempted to explain, “Your lordship will allow,” Will said. “That my lady’s name is Hathaway, you see.”

The small, neat mouth—whose corners trembled upward, beneath the narrow moustache, when Will addressed its owner as “lordship”—opened in a round “o” of astonishment.

“Ah. Hathaway. Hate from hate away. Why it’s marvelous, man. No more than a poet in two would think of such a clever pun, I say. What say you, Henslowe?” He turned to the theater owner.

Suspecting he was being mocked and feeling his heart droop down to consort with his worn-out boots, Will, too, turned toward the theater owner.

But Henslowe never once glanced in his direction. Instead, he looked impatiently at the dandy and flicked him on the shoulder with a shabby glove, as though to call his attention. “I think you have strange amusements, Kit.” And before the dandy could more than open his mouth for what promised to be a droll reply, Henslowe added, “And I think your time would be better employed in writing me a play that I could stage. What, with the plague raging over this winter and the playhouses just reopened, we could use a new play to pack the groundlings in. Faustus has run its time upon the stage. Give us something new. I have a new playhouse to pay for.”

In Will’s brain the given name of Kit added to Henslowe’s request for a new play, and to the name of Faustus, and as Will turned to gaze on the dandy—Will’s mouth opening in wonder, his eyes wide—he realized that this creature, with his slashed-through sleeves, his immaculate, white silk hose, his expensive boots, his lace handkerchief, and gold-fringed grey gloves was no other than Kit Marlowe, the leading playwright of the age, the Muses’ darling, the light of the London stage.

“Many good simples for all illnesses,” a shrunken man in a black cloak called out, walking between them and away, waving a large, dark bottle. “It cures the French Pox, the ague, and the plague.”

Kit Marlowe laughed.

“In time, my dear Henslowe, in good time. I’ll write another play.” Marlowe smiled on the theater owner. “But first I’ve promised my lord Thomas Walsingham to write a long poem on the sad tragedy and most sorrowful death of Hero and Leander.”

Philip Henslowe made a rude noise at the sad tragedy. “And on their romping, perforce, beneath a silken sheet. No. Don’t answer that.” He waved away Marlowe’s attempt at speech with a hand clad in a glove dark with wearing. “Don’t answer that. It doesn’t bear discussing. I know why lordlings care about long-dead lovers. More honest, I say, to write for the people.”

“And make sure plenty of blood spurts, to make the populus throw its greasy cloaks in the air,” Marlowe said softly. “More honest that might be, Henslowe. But not nearly so profitable.”

Marlowe swept his hand left to right through the air, describing a perfect arc and as though signifying the futility of human life. “Stay.” He held Henslowe’s arm as Henslowe made to turn away. “Soon as I’m done, I’ll write you something new. A piteous doomed romance, maybe. Or would you prefer a revenge tragedy, like Thomas Kyd’s?”

Kit’s eyes acquired a faraway look as if he were reading in the entrails of his future for plays not yet written. “Perhaps I could write on the legend of Hamlet, the Dane, and how he avenged the murder of his heroic father.”

Henslowe sighed. “Write on what you will, so long as you write. Marlowe’s name on a playbill still draws them in.”

Marlowe laughed. “For which you pay me enough to buy the buttons for one of my doublets. No. Mind not. I’ll write my poem for Walsingham and get my money there. I would be finishing my poem even now at the lord’s home of Scagmore, had not urgent business called me to London yesterday.” He sighed and grinned. “Be gone with you. When I have my play, I’ll come searching.”

The playhouse owner patted Marlowe on the shoulder, as if acknowledging a joke or thanking Marlowe for a favor.

“But pray what did you think of my poem?” Will asked. His voice, strangled and small, did not carry very far and missed Philip Henslowe altogether, as the theater owner turned his back and disappeared amid the throng.

“He didn’t listen to your poem,” Marlowe said and smiled at Will as though this too were droll.

Will’s stomach twisted in hunger. Did Marlowe not understand that this was Will’s very life in the balance of the theater owner’s attention?

“They never do. Why would you wish him to? They know nothing of poetry, the unfeeling philistines. Theater owners listen only to the soft tinkling of coins, the whisper of gold.” Marlowe adjusted the gilded fringe on his gloves, and bent upon Will a look of disarming honesty. “No, do yourself better, friend. Write a long poem. Know you the classics?”

Will’s mouth went dry again. Marlowe, who had translated Ovid’s Amores, asked if Will knew the classics. Even the Amores, Will had read in translation. “I have little Latin and small Greek,” he stammered.

“Well, then, enough, I say. Write yourself a long poem, say on the subject of Venus and Adonis, and have the lovers disport in the glades of Arcadia and any nobleman will give you coin for it. What, with your clever punning style . . .”

“But my lodging—” Will started, intending to explain that he was already overdue in paying for that and must make some coin or perish.

“Your lodging is not convenient to gentlemen’s abodes?” Marlowe asked.

Will shook his head. “I lodge in Shoreditch, at Hog’s Lane,” he said. “Over the Bonefoy hatters there, and I—”

He would have said more: that he owed money to his landlord, that soon he would be turned out, that he hadn’t eaten in a whole day, that he knew no noblemen, no one who might help. He might so far have forgotten himself as to ask for the help of this stranger, of this crowned, gilded king of poets. And Will less than a peasant

But before he could speak, two men emerged from the crowd, like wrathful gods from stormy waters, pushing aside money changers, ballad makers, and smirking, tightly corseted bawds.

The men flanked Marlowe, one on either side.

Will stepped away from them.

Somberly dressed, in black with no adornments, the two men looked like Puritans.

They were not the sort of men that Will expected to see with a playwright.

Marlowe looked at one, then the other. His whole face contracted, aged, soured, as if he’d tasted bitter gall.

One of the men had narrow-faced, thin looks that reminded Will of a rat in a house with a fast cat. The other one was round, but old, his face wrinkled and his chin sporting only a dismal growth of beard, like grass striving to thrive on poisoned land.

Will expected Marlowe to dismiss them or make fun of them.

Instead, Marlowe turned to face them and gave them his full attention and a weary look. He bowed to each one in turn. “Gentlemen?”

“If you would come with us,” the small one said, his voice echoing with an incongruous boom.

Marlowe smiled, an oddly forced smile that lacked the mobility of his amusement and the malicious quickness of his teasing. It looked like the grin of a death mask, like the drawn lips and vacant eyes of a final rictus.

Funny how, when people died like that, their neighbors said they’d gone to their reward smiling. Will would never believe it again.

Marlowe bowed as a statue might bow, all stiff poise and graceful dignity. “I am, as always, at the council’s disposal, am I not?”

The three of them walked off, the two men on either side, hemming in Marlowe. Despite Marlowe’s smile, his easy walk, he looked like a prisoner led to the gallows.

Will stared after them, blinking. It couldn’t be. What would a playwright be arrested for? His writings?

No. The Queen’s censor approved all plays, did he not? So, how could something libelous get on the stage?

No. Those men must be Kit Marlowe’s friends, and Will’s foreboding the fruit of his own sick thoughts.

Hunger gnawed at his entrails like a sharp-toothed rat, and all dreams of work in the theater had vanished before Will’s eyes like a lacy fog that—lifted—uncovers dismal reality.

He rubbed his calloused thumb and forefinger across his eyes, trying to thus remove the veil that tiredness and faintness dropped in front of his vision.

Earlier that afternoon, to evade his hunger, Will had taken a nap. In that sleep, a strange dream had visited him, a dream of womenlike beings, who’d hailed Will as a great poet and forecast such a great future for him.

In this, his dismal waking reality, such dreams must be dismissed with a smile and a shrug. But tears prickled hard behind his eyes at the loss of that dreamed greatness that had never been his.

He retraced his steps through the thronging multitude, past a woman selling grilled chicken meat, to the Si Quis door again.

But the notice for the horse holder job was gone, as was the man who’d pointed Henslowe out to Will.

Will would find no work in London. He was too simple a man for this town. In Stratford, respectable men were honorable and people acted as they seemed. Nothing had prepared Will for the widespread deception he’d found in the capital. Each day in London, it seemed, Will had been ill used by someone. His purse had been cut, his meat begged away from him, his bread shorted, his room overcharged for.

Yet, he could go nowhere else. He lacked the money.

He’d die in London.

He might as well return to his lodgings. If he were lucky, his pious Protestant landlord would already have gone to bed and would not demand the rent that Will could not pay.

Thus, Will would have a bed for yet another night. A postponing of the harsh fate he could not avoid forever.

Scene 2

Arden Woods, near Stratford-upon-Avon. These ancient trees are all that remain of the primeval forest that once covered all of the British Isles. As befits their antiquity, the woods are the run of fairy kind and the abode of elf. On a clearing, amid the trees, a tall translucent palace rises, more graceful and perfect than any built by mankind. And in the gold-and-white-marble throne room, the King and Queen of Elvenland sit on their gilded thrones, and receive a centaur ambassador from the far-off reaches of their realm. Tall, regal-looking, Quicksilver sits on the throne, his long blond hair combed over his shoulder. He wears a magnificent suit of dark blue velvet and pale blue silk stockings. Queen Ariel, smaller than her husband, and paler, sits next to him, wearing a white dress that makes her look at once too innocent and too young for the heavy crown that rests upon her head.

Running steps approached the throne room of Fairyland.

“Lord,” a breathless voice called. “Lord, our boundary is breached.”

Quicksilver looked away from the ambassador of the centaurs.

The centaur ambassador shrugged his broad human shoulders, while the glossy black legs of his horse half tip-tapped uneasily on the marble floor.

The ambassador had been in the midst of one of the long speeches beloved of his people, mingling Greek and English with artless effusion.

Now he, like all of the court, turned his attention to the broad-arched entrance to the palace, from which a breathless voice called, “Milord, milord, a breach. A breach in our defense.”

An elf careened through the marble archway that opened to the outside of the palace.

His eyes wide with fear, his breath ragged, a tall, dark elf male stumbled into the room to collapse, prostrating himself in a panting heap on the red velvet carpet in front of the throne.

The centaur ambassador cantered away from the newcomer, closer to the magnificent lords, the bejeweled ladies of Fairyland that, in two sparkling aisles, lined the room.

The ladies’ fans moved nonstop, their lips whispering fast behind those fans, of the shocking alarm and what it might betide.

Quicksilver rose to his feet, recognizing the elf, whose sturdy body betrayed human origins, but who wore the green velvet of Quicksilver’s own private guard, and whose black hair sported the golden coronet of a prince of Fairyland. “Malachite?”

This was Lord Malachite, Quicksilver’s childhood friend, his milk-brother, raised with the king at the feet of the late fairy queen, Titania. A trusted friend, a keen advisor.

Quicksilver’s pulse sped in alarm. Brave Malachite thus alarmed? What could this bode? Decorous Malachite disrupting a royal audience? It could mean nothing good.

As the whole court recognized Malachite, the elven ladies’ fans moved faster. Whispers rose from amid the elven gentlemen. Queen Ariel gasped and leaned forward. Her small, rosebud mouth opened in startled alarm.

Malachite knelt, gasping for breath, and half raised his face, his mouth working, trying to say something for which he had no breath. His great jade-green eyes were full of that speaking force which eyes have when lips lack the strength to utter.

Ariel stood and rested her arm on Quicksilver’s. Together, the sovereigns of Elvenland descended the ten marble steps from the platform on which their throne sat. They flanked Malachite, who, still kneeling, managed to draw in full breath that whistled through his words as he spoke.

“If your majesty pleases,” he said, turning wide eyes to Quicksilver. “If your majesty pleases.” He looked at Ariel. “Our defenses have been breached.”

Quicksilver knit his brows. If your majesty pleases. What a phrase. He pleased no such thing. Not sure what Malachite meant, yet he was sure it betokened no good. “The defenses?” he said. “What defenses, man? Speak.”

For they were not at war, nor were there defenses around the realm that another realm might break through. No. Nor such realm as might wish to do it.

“The defenses to Avalon, milord. The defenses set around this palace, around this forest.” Malachite gulped in air like a starving man will devour food. “The living defenses that ever protected our kind from evil beings abroad.”

Still kneeling, he straightened so that his knees supported his weight, the rest of him upright. His earnest face, with its too-sharp nose, its jade-green eyes, faced Quicksilver.

“While we were on patrol, we sensed it, Igneous, and I, and Birch and Laurel. And then we ran to the place where right away we saw the breach blooming in our magical defenses, evil resounding through it.”

The muttering of the court stopped, every breath suspended.

Quicksilver shook his head. He could not doubt Malachite. Yet the defenses could not be broken.

These magical wards and spells and dread enchantments of which Malachite spoke had been placed around the capital of the magical kingdom, time out of mind, by Quicksilver’s ancestors.

They protected the source of the hill’s magic, the collective strength of hill power, the core and Soul of elvenkind.

Humans and other natural creatures could wander through the defenses, in and out of the forest, and disturb nothing. Most humans, blind, ephemeral creatures that they were, couldn’t even see the fairy palace and that great, gilded land that coexisted along the human world like two pages of a book, touching but never mingling.

But any enemy with ill intentions would be kept out by these defenses, unable to come near the ancient, sacred palace of elvenkind, unable to touch the living force of their magic, the fountain of elf power.

There was no record, ever—either in Quicksilver’s memory, or in the collective memory of his race which, as a king, Quicksilver held—of the defenses being disturbed, much less broken.

This elven kingdom had fought and won and lost wars against other magical kingdoms. It had suffered encroachment by humanity and dissension within its ranks, and yet those defenses that protected the core of the kingdom had remained inviolate.

Until now.

“You must be wrong,” Quicksilver whispered. Yet he trembled with fear that they might not be. For if they were right, then Elvenland met a threat such as it had never encountered.

Malachite shook his head, pale lips compressed into a straight line.

Quicksilver’s court fell mute. The ladies blanched so that their cosmetics stood out in vivid relief. The horror-stricken faces of the lords looked like wax above their vivid, colorful garments.

Feeling his hair stand on end, Quicksilver bent down, grasped Malachite’s shoulder, and pulled up, forcing his lieutenant to stand. “What force is it, Malachite? What force?”

“Oh, milord, it looks . . .” Malachite swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down on his long neck. “It looks like the force of the Hunter, milord, like the Hunter’s magical power has borne upon this your kingdom with unsheathed malice and, overcoming these ancient wards with his greater might, affixed his cannon against our hill.”

The silence of the court broke on a collective gasp from many throats. Looking up, Quicksilver saw alarm, surprise.

But most of all, he saw fear, fear of the Hunter, a dread creature of elven legend, said to punish the wrongdoers and collect the souls of criminals.

The Hunter was older and more magical than elves, a creature of primeval darkness and unbound might. In the old days, elves and humans both had worshiped him as a god. Whether he was such, Quicksilver couldn’t hazard.

But Quicksilver had met with the Hunter face to face, and knew the creature’s power to avenge, the creature’s strength to do justice upon evildoers.

The Hunter had visited this hill only once in living memory, and that for dread purpose.

Compared to the Hunter’s power, all of Quicksilver’s might and power and kingdom were as a child’s wooden dagger to a man’s sword.

Quicksilver pushed his features into a smile and straightened up. “Come, come, you must be mistaken.” He forced hearty heat into his voice and looked doubtingly at Malachite. “The Hunter? What would the Hunter, that great lord of justice, want with us?”

His voice fell—hollow—upon the still room.

Quicksilver’s father, Oberon, had once said that a quiet court was a sign of danger, that the flutter and gossip of Fairyland were a sign of health as telling in absence as the silencing of a beating heart.

Around the vast hall, nothing moved, and Quicksilver felt the gazes of his subjects resting on him like so many drawn daggers pointed at his chest.

Even the servant fairies—the tiny, winged beings who did all the hard work of Fairyland—seemed to have stopped midflight, the iridescent pattern of light they used for speech stilled.

Malachite shook his head. “I know not, milord. I know not what he wants with us.”

He looked away from Quicksilver as if he suspected his king of some crime so foul that only the supernatural vengeance of the Hunter could expiate it. “Not in fulfillment of his natural fate since that would not demand his breeching our defenses. They gave him entrance easily enough when he had business among us.”

Malachite spoke business with a heavy tongue.

Only ten years ago, the business of the Hunter in Fairyland had been the collecting of the king, Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother. Sylvanus had committed parricide, and thus enslaved himself to the Hunter. In forfeit and payment for his many crimes, he’d been condemned to becoming one of the Hunter’s dogs, enslaved for eternity to the dread lord of justice and slaying.

Quicksilver shivered. He was Sylvanus’s brother. Could the taint extend to him? But he had committed no crime.

“I must see this breach,” Quicksilver said, drawing himself up with regal might he did not feel and drawing a hearty breath.

“Milord, I will go,” Ariel said hastily, nervously. Small, slight, she stood beside her lord like a page boy who showed the meaning of courage to mature royalty. “I’ll go see what the Hunter seeks.”

Quicksilver flinched. Why would she think he needed protection from the Hunter? He spun around, looking at his court, and in every eye he read horrified suspicion which Ariel’s gallantry had only encouraged.

Of what crime did they suspect him? Why feared his lady for him?

Quicksilver said, “You dare too much, milady. You dare too much and you’re too bold. I am the king, and I need no protection. Not from the Hunter.”

And though he shivered, thinking of the dark being and unfathomable power he’d encountered before, he tried to look brave.

In an indecent display of magical power—what he hoped was a reassuring flaunting of his might—Quicksilver frowned down at his clothes, which changed, in that look, from silk to well-cured leather, and from tailored doublet and exquisite hose to crimson leather armor over well-padded tunic and breeches.

Pulling his hair back and knotting it behind his head, he bowed to his alarmed wife, as suede gloves materialized upon his long-fingered hands. “Milady,” he said. “You must do the honors of my court. I, the king, will defend my kingdom.”

But Ariel stepped close to him and laid her hand on his leather-gloved arm. “At least let me go with you, milord. At least let me help—”

Quicksilver drew himself up and away from her. “Milady, indeed, I need no help.” He shook her hand from his sleeve and turned to Malachite, giving his back to his queen. “Igneous and Laurel and Birch?”

“Waiting outside the palace, milord. But should you . . .” Malachite shot a glance at Ariel, who stood behind Quicksilver, and swallowed. “Is it wise to risk your majesty?”

Was it Quicksilver’s fate today to suffer fools? Did every one of his vassals believe Quicksilver a secret criminal?

He exhaled noisily. “My majesty was made for risk and to brave danger that my people might be safe,” he said. With a quick eye he spied the incredulous looks of his courtiers, and this tempted him on. “Come, Malachite. We’ll go and heal the breach that would undo the peace of this kingdom.”

Quicksilver kept one step ahead of Malachite as they jogged out of the broad throne room, and through the arched door of the elven palace to the imposing entrance staircase outside.

On the broad white marble steps, three guards—Igneous, a languid blond, and Birch and Laurel, dark-haired twins—looked awfully young and painfully eager.

They bowed to Quicksilver, their flushed faces and impatient breath like that of a maiden at her first ball. They longed for danger and thought to court her as a fiery and fulfilling mistress.

They knew not the Hunter, Quicksilver thought. They knew nothing of that eternal, immortal darkness nor the danger it engendered.

Scene 3

St. Paul’s Yard, the marketplace of choice for book printers and booksellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll in their finery and velvets, and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Along the center aisle between the tents, Marlowe walks toward the outer gate, at a clipped pace imposed by the two men who flank him.

Kit would not be scared.

Over the gallop of his heart, he ordered his hands not to clench one upon the other, as though in prayer to the God in which Kit no longer believed.

This was the second time in two days that Kit had been seized by envoys of the Queen’s council.

Only the day before, Kit had been dragged from Scagmore—his patron’s home—by one of these men, Henry Mauder, and brought to town in such a great hurry that he’d not been given the chance to change out of his indoor slippers.

Treason Abroad, a pamphlet pinned to the side of a printer’s tent, slapped in the breeze, catching Kit’s gaze as he was hurried past. The cover displayed a caricature of the King of Spain.

Yesterday Kit, who had worked covertly for the Queen’s council since his days at Cambridge, had invoked names of those he had served as a shield against those who would now arrest him. Blithely, he’d named the late Sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil, the Queen’s present secretary.

Yesterday, Kit had been let go.

But look how he’d been apprehended again today. Had those names, then, so quickly lost their power to protect him?

“What do you wish with me, milords?” Kit asked, casting his voice just so, attempting to keep it from showing shaking anxiety, attempting to keep his fear from the sure knowledge of all the men walking past, all those scholars shopping for pamphlets and books, as Kit had done so many times before.

Henry Mauder, on Kit’s left, cast Kit a brief, triumphant glare. A messenger for the Queen’s chamber, Mauder looked perpetually scared and angry in equal measure. Kit had learned there was none so dangerous as a scared man.

Kit’s mind cast about for the cause of today’s arrest. What had Henry Mauder found out? What did he know? What did he hold over Kit like the sword of Damocles, precariously suspended?

All of Kit’s sins, remembered, danced before his eyes with lewd display. He’d blasphemed and gambled and once, drunk, said a whole lot of nonsense on the subject of boys and tobacco, to see the shocked expressions in the pious faces surrounding him. Could any of these have come home to him? “Pray, pray, he said, his voice thin and dismal. “What think you I’ve done?”

Henry Mauder shrugged. “You are being taken for to answer some questions.”

A trickle of sweat ran from Kit’s forehead, past the ineffective dam of his thin, arched eyebrows, to sting in his eyes.

His captors enforced a fast step. He saw a friend passing by, a friend who was also a secret service man.

This friend who had defended Kit in street brawls and been one of the first critics of Kit’s poems now passed by Kit as though Kit didn’t exist, his gaze not answering Kit’s beckoning recognition.

So word was out among secret service people that Kit was taken, Kit thought, chilled. Word was out that Kit was lost, caught in the net of official displeasure that fished him forth from his natural element to a terrible fate.

“What questions can you have that you did not ask yesterday?” he asked the fat man at his right.

The fat man didn’t even look at Kit. Swollen and wrinkled at once, like a prune too long forgotten in sugar water, he looked unimportant. A mere secretary. A witness.

Or a nobleman in disguise?

In the secret service, one could never tell. Fair was foul and foul was fair, each thing turned from its true nature.

Henry Mauder pursed his mouth into close semblance of a chicken’s ass and tilted his head sideways. “I see, Master Marlowe,” he said, “that heavy deeds weigh upon your conscience.”

Kit’s throat seemed to close upon his breathing, and his brain felt as if it had become a single teeny drum echoing only What do they know? Out of his panic, Kit spoke blindly. “I’ll not meddle with a conscience,” he said, in reasonable imitation of his normal teasing tone. He forced his lips into a smile again. “It makes a man a coward and it fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust himself to live without it.”

He took a deep breath and resolved not to show fear. Like rabid dogs, justices and officers of the crown were very like to smell your fear and, smelling it, to react to it like a hungry man to meat and bread.

They were now almost through Paul’s Yard. Almost to the outer iron gate. Almost past any hope of rescue.

Passing the tent that displayed the sign of the white greyhound, where John Harrison, printer, should be indebted to Kit for many weighty purchases and many, even weightier profits, Kit found neither recognition nor interest in his plight. The printer and his apprentices glanced past Kit as if he were suddenly invisible.

It was as though Kit were a dead man already, the lid of his tomb closed upon him, cutting him off from the world and his imagined friends.

“So, you had no conscience, then, when you wrote down that Jesus was not truly God’s son, and twenty other such blasphemies, that you proclaimed while in college?” Henry frowned again, his lips contracting into their narrowest moue, his eyes no more than slits on his suspicious face.

Kit started and drew sharp breath, turning around to stare at Mauder and needing not to fake surprise. He was astonished. While Kit had been in college? Eight years ago?

Beggar the fools, had they all gone mad?

He stared, his mouth hanging open, while in his mind he reviewed the riot of mad living he’d engaged in at Cambridge: the drinking, the gambling, and the carousing.

With those, like a man given weak ale after strong wine, Kit had in vain tried to rinse away his memory of his first love, his elf love.

Oh, Kit had not been so bad. He’d not stolen, nor killed, nor any other of those offenses that rightly might have brought a man to justice.

As for what he’d said . . . . What might he not have said? Those had been years of pain. Years without hope.

The memory of the elf lady, Silver, his lost love, had made Kit mad enough for anything. Even now, he shivered at the thought of Silver: dark silken hair, pale silken skin, and a mouth that tasted of new wine.

He stared at Mauder. “Who told you this?” he asked. “That I wrote any such thing?”

“Never mind who told us,” Mauder said. “We have proof enough, in a paper penned by your own hand.”

Mauder smiled wider, showing crooked teeth, yellow and savage. A wolf’s teeth, which would maul and tear. “Master Marlowe, what we have against you is right enough to see you three times hanged or disemboweled or quartered, or indeed all of them.”

Marlowe drew in a quick breath.

Unlike the boy he’d once been, who’d entered Cambridge hoping to be a minister, Kit had lost all hope of paradise beyond. Death meant nothing, save only keeping company with worms. Of his shattered faith no hope at all remained, only the fear of something worse hereafter. Doubting heaven, he kept the suspicious certainty of hell. Therefore death scared him more than it had in his young and pious days.

“Well, then,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and yet striving for a note of bravery. “Well, then, you can kill me but once.” He took off his gloves and put them on again, to give his hands some occupation. “Are we headed, then, to execution?” Even pronouncing the word made his voice tremble and he bit the inside of his cheek hard, willing pain to steady him.

Outside Paul’s Yard, just past the gate to which they hurried, he saw that a dark, boxy carriage with no markings waited. Four dark horses pulled it, driven by a black-attired coachman who might have been the devil himself.

Was this Kit’s final conveyance?

Henry Mauder looked gravely at Kit.

“We would prefer if you would do the Queen a service and reveal where you might have heard those foul heresies you then wrote down,” Henry Mauder said. “For certainly, you realize, the mouth of so dangerous a member of society must be stopped.”

The coachman descended from his perch and opened the door to a spacious but dark interior. Black seats and heavy black curtains seemed all the darker for light of the lantern suspended from the side of the carriage by iron brackets.

Kit took a step back, shying from the carriage like a nervous horse will shy from battle.

“Do you not have friends?” Henry Mauder asked. “Do you not have friends who speak such vile lies, as Christ not being divine?”

Kit could not imagine of whom they spoke. He had very few friends. He took care not to form friendships he might be forced to betray.

Mauder huffed, exasperated at Kit’s silence. “Climb on, climb on, Master Marlowe,” he said and gestured cordially to the dark maw of the carriage.

With Mauder on one side, Mauder’s silent companion on the other, Kit could no more avoid the route thus indicated than he could hide from spiteful fate. These men were not just two but a multitude. Behind them stood, arrayed, law and might. They were the crushing arm, the overreaching might of the Queen’s council.

He climbed into the carriage on trembling legs, trying to hold his head high and pretend a light step.

The two men sat together on the bench that faced his, thus both staring at him like unavoidable judges.

Mauder arched his eyebrows. “Come, come, Master Marlowe. Do you not remember? Did someone not read you an atheist lecture, that you have since then repeated to others? Was there not something called a School of the Night that mocked the teachings of the Church?”

The words fell like a strong light upon Kit’s thoughts. It seemed to him that the sounds around him receded and his head grew faint. He took a deep shuddering breath.

A School of the Night. That was what they’d been aiming for.

By the mass, they were talking about Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter Raleigh, who’d befriended Kit years ago, when Kit was only a penniless student, Sir Walter Raleigh, who had enlarged Kit’s perspective of the world a hundredfold. Sir Walter Raleigh, generous enough to speak to Kit as to an equal when Kit was but a poor cobbler’s son, attending Cambridge on a scholarship.

These two men wanted Kit to denounce Sir Walter Raleigh for an atheist and thus doom him to death.

The coachman closed the carriage door, and presently, the vehicle moved. Marlowe heard the clopping of hooves on the ground, but through the dark curtains that covered the windows, he could not see where they were headed. His heart told him his destination lay in some prison’s oblivion. Cold sweat broke upon Kit’s brown.

Once before, while at Cambridge, Kit had been arrested. He’d made friends with Catholic students. At the time innocent, an ardent Protestant, in his missionary zeal he’d thought to talk them out of their grievous errors.

The council had seized him and asked him what incriminatory things he’d heard of them. Kit had refused to answer, all high-minded indignation and strong-worded pride.

But Kit’s bravery had earned him naught.

Alone, friendless, with no powerful connections, Kit had thought all lost and the pit of the grave had yawned at his feet.

Where his actions had not, his fear made him a traitor. He had given the names of those students who, in the heat of theological argument, had admitted their beliefs to him. He’d betrayed their dreams, their hopes, their not-quite plots.

He’d watched his friends die on the gallows, and he felt happy enough to have escaped. Since then had the secret service men known his limits and had tapped them again and again, sending him to parties where he would listen for the traitorous joke, the incautious remark, watch for the impolitic friendships.

Thus had Kit been seduced to working for the Crown and that first misstep, caused by fear and rewarded with gold, had gained him other secret offices till Kit’s conscience, blunted like an ill-used knife, troubled him no more, or only a little sometimes, late at night, when the ghosts of betrayed friends seemed to gather round his solitary bed.

And yet, Kit must have felt put upon. Something in him, some secret stirring, must have censored him.

Six months ago, when Thomas Walsingham, an old schoolfellow newly ascended to family honors, had offered Kit lavish patronage, Kit had shed the coils of secret like a snake that sheds its skin. He’d told Cecil he was done with it. From that moment on, he’d be a poet. A poet, nothing more.

And yet, the business would not leave Kit be. Like a sleeper returning to the same nightmare, Kit now found himself at the starting point of all his treasons. They wanted him to denounce a friend again. They wanted him to denounce Raleigh.

He looked from one man to the other and found nothing encouraging in those countenances.

This must be a plot of Essex’s, Kit thought. Essex was Raleigh’s rival for the Queen’s attention and her affections.

Two noble cocks strutted for an aging hen, and Kit would be caught in the middle of their bloody fight.

If Kit denounced Raleigh, the council would let Kit go. But if Essex’s plot failed, Raleigh could avenge himself on Kit in a more terrible way than Essex could, for Raleigh was an imaginative man, as Essex was not.

And besides, even Kit’s ill-awakened conscience yet rebelled from his being called again to the office of traitor.

He took a deep breath. “If I’m guilty of atheism, then it’s my own guilt,” he said. “I will name no other.”

Mauder chuckled. “A fine stand, Master Marlowe. A fine stand.” He grinned, showing yellowed teeth.

The carriage smelled of wet wool and sweat.

The curtains were closed. An oil lamp fixed on a bracket lit the carriage and gave off a greasy, burnt smell.

Mauder rapped on the wood near his head, and the carriage slowed to a funeral pace.

“Have you heard of Master Topcliff?” Mauder asked. “Master Topcliff, now.” Mauder shook his head and smiled with admiration. “He’s the Queen’s own torturer and he can break a man on the rack in an instant. Or make him sweat with all his weight suspended from manacles. Or other things, some of them so secret only he knows them. Why, it is said he can cut into a man for days, and take one sense at a time from him, all without killing him, while, little by little, crippling him forever. What think you, Master Marlowe?

“Hard to hold a quill when you have no fingers, hard to write when your eyes are gone, hard to court ladies when you have lost that which makes you a man.

“You’d be advised, Master Marlowe, to confess now, before you’re put to the torture, while you might yet walk away free.”

Kit felt cold, yet sweat dripped down his back and soaked through his fine velvet suit. He smelled it, rank and sharp.

He could see himself, a shapeless cripple, crawling on the filthy street, a begging bowl clutched between his few remaining teeth. Alms for the cripple. What good then his wit, his fine grey eyes, his Cambridge education?

He shivered.

Removing his right glove, he clenched both hands tight upon it, as if by squeezing it he could throttle his vile tormentors. “I have nothing to confess that could be said after torture—or before,” Kit said. He meant it as a courageous scream, but instead his voice echoed the cringing, begging tones of his cobbler father.

To Kit’s surprise, Henry Mauder sat back as though conceding the point.

“It was at your lodgings that they told us you’d gone to Paul’s,” Mauder said softly.

“At my lodgings?”

Into Kit’s mind, unbidden, came an image of the modest house where he lodged in Southwark and, with it, an image of Imp, whose real name was Richard.

Save that Imp was barely seven and that his hair yet retained a natural trace of red without need for the artifice of henna, it could have been Kit’s own face. And a good reason for that, as Kit had long suspected that Imp, the son of Kit’s landlady, was the result of his desperate attempt to put off paying his rent long ago. A miraculous result of so base an act.

These men would have asked Imp where Kit was. That was sure, or they’d never have found Kit. Only Imp always knew or cared where Kit went.

Henry smiled, showing his bent teeth. “That is a fine boy your landlady has, Master Marlowe.”

Kit flinched. Imp was Kit’s religion. At the innocent’s foot he worshiped and for that small creature had he such hopes that they beggared heaven.

Kit wished Imp away from these unhallowed plots and trembled to know him so close to them, so near the sprung trap.

“A fine boy. A shame if something were to happen to him, but a high-spirited boy might do such things—steal an apple, say—as would render him fit only to be hanged,” Mauder said.

Kit’s hands trembled. He’d sacrifice anything, anyone, give anything up. Anyone but Imp.

In his life, he’d loved but twice. The first time, when he’d been barely more than a boy himself and he’d fallen in love with a dark-haired elven maiden. And the second time—quite a different love—Imp, the result of Kit’s pleasing sin.

Yet Marlowe could not betray Raleigh. Raleigh was powerful and rich enough to take revenge and to avenge himself on Imp as well as Kit.

Kit’s head felt as dizzy as if he had worked long on a hot summer’s day. Snapes lay on either side of him. He took a deep breath. It did not steady him.

“Are you ready to talk now, Master Marlowe?” Henry Mauder asked, his gaze steady upon Kit. “Are you ready to talk and tell us who taught you vile disrespect of religion?”

Scene 4

The place where Arden Woods and the town of Stratford-upon-Avon meet. It is a warm summer night, and the few noises of the town—the distant singing of a drunkard, the voice of a man calling an errant dog—mingle with the sounds of the woods—the hooting of an owl, the shriek of a scared mouse. To the human eye, it all looks calm, but the elven eyes can see a blight like a blot of darkness spreading at the very edge of the woodland. There, no howl hoots and no creature moves, as though everything alive knows the presence of a predator.

“Ill met by moonlight, my proud brother.”

At the voice in front of them, Quicksilver and his guards stopped.

A chill ran down Quicksilver’s back like a cold finger dragged along his spine. The voice he heard was the voice of his brother. Changed and disembodied, but his brother’s voice, nonetheless.

The voice issued from the tendrils of light that, to elven eyes, marked the boundary between the human village and the sacred forest.

There, a blot of darkness marred the pure light, the shimmering strands of Fairyland’s protective enchantments.

The words themselves seemed to pulse through with the very essence of distilled darkness.

The younger elves shied back from it.

Only Quicksilver advanced, with Malachite close by.

“Sylvanus?” Quicksilver said. The word dropped from between his lips, unmeant, as a coin will drop through the tear in a rent purse.

“Quicksilver, wait,” Malachite said, and, a step behind Quicksilver, he laid a hand on the king’s shoulder.

“Aye, wait, Quicksilver, wait.”

The darkness throbbed with laughter that bespoke no mirth, but only a cold amusement, a distant mocking.

Then the dark node parted, like an eggshell cracking, and birthed a creature: an elf, goodly built, with dark hair and beard and features that resembled Quicksilver’s, from oval face to pulpy lips.

Though this elf looked half-transparent, like a painting on glass, like a cloud passing in front of the moon, his cold blue eyes appraised Quicksilver with amusement.

“Fares it then so badly with my brother?” the elf asked. “That he must thus consort with changelings?” He spared a cold, calculating eye to Malachite. “Is this your leeman, Quicksilver, that he thus calls you by your given name and lays hands on you?”

Quicksilver felt hot blood ascend his cheeks in shameful heat, and wrenched his shoulder away from Malachite’s clasping hand.

Yet Malachite reached, yet he persisted, yet he said, in a strangled voice, “Milord!”

Quicksilver gave Malachite a withering glance, over his shoulder. “Go, Malachite, I order you. I’m man enough to handle this villain alone.”

As Malachite stepped back, the transparent elf grinned, showing teeth larger and sharper than elf’s teeth. “Aye, brother, man enough and woman enough, too, I grant you. How fares my sister, Silver?”

The blood on Quicksilver’s cheeks flared and burned, the color of a red rose, hot as a poker fresh from the fire.

Now had Sylvanus’s ghost, Sylvanus’s emanation, touched the secret shame that had dogged Quicksilver ever from his birth.

Quicksilver had been born a shape changer, with the capacity—the need—to become a dark lady, with midnight black hair, the Lady Silver.

On Ariel’s request he’d forsaken the aspect, and forbore to change if he could control it. Yet, the Lady Silver was still within him, and he would change, sooner or later, meant or not.

This ability, more suitable to a lowly woodland spirit than to a royal elf, had almost cost Quicksilver the throne. He often feared his vassals still mocked him for it.

Quicksilver glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see his young guards fleering at him.

Instead, he saw them staring at Sylvanus, their faces stripped of all their cocky self-confidence, and infused with the pale strained look of fear.

Their fear lit a rage within Quicksilver. Looking back at the flickering elf amid the dark core that floated near the houses of Stratford, Quicksilver squared his shoulders, and made his face stern. “What want you, Sylvanus? Speak fast, for I’ll be done with you.”

The grin died upon the transparent face, like a candle blown out.

Sylvanus’s eyebrows gathered, his mouth pulled in a rictus of pain. “You were done with me, brother. Or so you thought. Done with me when you turned me out of Fairyland and stole my throne.”

A hunting horn sounded in the distance.

Sylvanus’s transparent shape wavered and trembled with each note, as though the sound injured him.

Quicksilver looked up at the sound, because he knew that horn well. Louder and clearer than any human instrument, it was the call of the Hunter, a being who had existed before the elves, a being whom the elves themselves believed embodied a fundamental thread in the fabric of the Universe. God or demon he might be. But powerful he was. Years ago Sylvanus had been made the Hunter’s dog, the Hunter’s slave.

Up on the horizon, in the purpled sky where thunderclouds began massing, a dark shape showed, looking like a hunter on horseback, his silver horn at his lips, calling to his dogs that clustered, growling and threatening, around his horse’s legs.

Twice before had Quicksilver met the Hunter, twice before, once in sorrow and once in joy.

But neither time had he escaped unscathed. The terror of the Hunter, the knowledge of something that, beyond elf and man, judged both and cared for neither, had chilled some core of Quicksilver’s innocence and forever ended his prolonged elven childhood.

Now, feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck, Quicksilver looked over his shoulder at Malachite and the three younger elves, all them terrified looking, all pale, all trembling.

“Go,” Quicksilver said. “Go, all of you. Stand back. Take refuge.”

The three younger elves ran madly toward the trees, but Malachite stayed, stubbornly, rooted to the spot, staring at his king.

“You, too, Malachite. Go.”

Malachite shook his head slowly. “No, milord. There’s something you must know—”

Sylvanus, in the center of the darkness, screamed, his voice changing from elven speech to a wide baying.

Quicksilver turned. Sylvanus transformed.

He transformed as if he were being burned, as though his substance had ignited in the hottest breath of a blazing furnace.

Twisting and writhing like a bit of hair that, caught in a candle flame, curls and twirls and is finally consumed by heat, Sylvanus dropped to all fours and trembled, and changed, and transformed, until in his place there was only a squat, square-headed, heavy-jawed dog.

One of the Hunter’s own dogs, which Sylvanus had become, in punishment of his many crimes.

In that shape, a form neither wolf nor dog but something predating both—a creature that had rounded and nipped at man in his cave and howled around the mountain holds of the elves when the world was young—Sylvanus turned baleful eyes to the Hunter.

The Hunter had stopped, amid the thunderclouds, and with outstretched arm, incited his dogs forth.

The dogs ran down from the sky, seemingly descending a staircase woven of darkness and steps made of roiling purple clouds.

As they neared, Quicksilver trembled. Panic closed his throat and ice gripped his stomach. What dread creatures, these, square and squat, broad of head and shoulder, low of legs, creatures made to hunt in ice eternal and eternal night.

How would it be to be hounded by them?

Sylvanus trembled and looked as piteous, as forlorn as a deer faced with the baying dogs that would tear it apart.

Whining, he backed away from the other dogs, his belly close to the ground, his tail tucked between his legs.

His squat body trembled, his hirsute fur ruffled at the neck, and his piteous eyes, Sylvanus’s incongruously blue eyes, turned to gaze at Quicksilver as the dog slid and shied away from the Hunter’s mastiffs.

“Brother,” Sylvanus said, his voice composed of growls and low baying, which yet formed intelligible words. “Brother, they’ve come and they’ll rent me limb from limb, or yet worse, they’ll take me with them. They’ll take me with them forever, to be one of them.”

He had time for the words—no more—as the dogs closed around him, screaming, nipping, baying, a pile of fur and open maws, of claws and blood-lapping tongues.

Quicksilver gaped at the mayhem of fur, the melee of furious canine bodies. His heart contracted in horror as fur covered fur and jaws snapped, and teeth met teeth in ferocious clash.

This was his brother there, he thought. His brother, turned to such a low, demeaning form. Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother, born of the same noble Titania, sired by the same majestic Oberon, once Queen and King of Fairyland. Sylvanus’s birth had been welcomed, celebrated through the hilltops of many lands. Sylvanus had been a pampered prince, once.

And now this—this pile of fur, this bestial strife.

Quicksilver heard Malachite draw breath behind him.

With scant breath, Quicksilver asked, “How does he not come to us? How not run this way?”

“I’ve tried to tell you, lord,” Malachite said. “The barrier hasn’t really been breached. Your brother has projected the illusion of it being so. But it remains whole. Whole enough that he can’t crawl onto our side.”

“An illusion?” Quicksilver asked, and yet dared not look away from the giant figure of shadow, with glimmering red eyes and a shining silver horn, who climbed down from his horse and strode down the same stairway his dogs had used, toward them, toward cowering, pitiable Sylvanus.

“How an illusion?”

“How I don’t know, Quicksilver.” Malachite spoke in a whisper. “But that is all. It is all delusion. He has no power such as would breech our defenses. Yet he fooled us, and me first of all. What a trick to master! I think it was that he knew the defenses so well, having once been . . . . our king.”

Once the King of Fairyland and now a cur.

Quicksilver shivered.

Why had his brother wished him to see this? Had he meant Quicksilver to have nightmares over it, all his life long?

“Come,” the Hunter said, and his speaking rustled the leaves of the trees like an icy wind, freezing Quicksilver’s mind and heart. “Come.”

At this word, the dogs parted and heeled to him, gamboling and frisking like happy puppies on seeing their master.

On the ground lay a pile of fur, wet with blood, stained with the iridescent saliva of the creatures. Nothing more.

The Hunter took the horn to his lips and blew upon it. The cold, silvery sound wove itself into the surrounding trees like a mist of ice, bringing a reminder of winter to the summer night.

“Come,” the Hunter said.

At that one word, the pathetic remains quivered.

At that one word, the bloodied piece of fur moved.

Legs grew on it, and a muzzle. A cowed, shivering dog stood on uncertain paws, bleeding from myriad wounds.

You see how it is, Quicksilver heard in his mind. Neither death nor eternity will free me. I was greedy, brother, but I meant no harm. I thought you not able to rule the land, and so I tried to rule in your stead. Does this deserve punishment eternal?

The voice was not a voice, but a thought, whispered close into the ventricle of Quicksilver’s brain. But that thought was Sylvanus’s. The voice of a scared elf.

It echoed a voice Quicksilver remembered from when Sylvanus had been but a young prince and faced with the monumental sky-cracking rages of their father, Oberon.

And though Quicksilver knew that his brother had done more than enough to deserve this fate, though he knew Sylvanus’s crimes mounted to the sky and raised bloody hands to the heavens, craving the gods’ revenge, yet in his heart Quicksilver pitied the vile thing.

Sylvanus had once reigned in Fairyland.

Now Quicksilver was the king of elves.

In vain he told himself that a king must be impervious to the hurts and lacerations of his subjects.

Yet if Sylvanus was his subject, then couldn’t Quicksilver decide to stop Sylvanus’s punishment?

Ten years, Sylvanus had endured near the heart and center of a vengeful force, his elven body consumed away, his elven nature distorted. Was that not enough?

Behind Quicksilver, Malachite withdrew his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry, milord. I—”

Raising his hand, Quicksilver spoke, his voice small against the gathering thunder, the baying of the dogs that clustered around their master, Sylvanus’s whimpers of desolate pain.

“Stop, Great One,” Quicksilver said. “Stop, I beg you.”

The Hunter turned to Quicksilver a face that looked almost human or elven, save that no human, no elf, could even envision the perfection of the Hunter’s noble look, from curly dark hair to chiseled features. As he turned, the Hunter exposed his chest where—in the place a human heart would lodge—an empty darkness, an absence of all, reigned.

“You beg?” the Hunter asked. Laughter poured out, as cold as ice, as chilled as winter fog. “You beg me to stop? Who are you to beg and to demand how I should punish this cur, and when I should stay?”

“But justice—” Quicksilver said.

Again the Hunter laughed. “Justice is a word you don’t understand, oh king, who judge everyone according to your changeable measure. This is true evil, and this I will punish.”

The Hunter’s arm rose. Upon it something crackled, a whip of light, a cord of lightning.

He raised it and let it fall upon Sylvanus’s canine form.

Sylvanus howled and fell, bleeding again, yet rose again as the Hunter called, “Come.”

Quicksilver could not endure it.

He could neither watch it nor turn away. His heart pounding, his blood raging through his head like a fever, he raised his hand.

“No,” the Hunter yelled. “No. Give way. I’ll take what’s mine.”

Sylvanus, the dog, whimpered, belly to the dirt.

Before Quicksilver knew it, he lifted his hand. He summoned to him his magic and the gathered strength of his hill, that gathering of elven souls and bodies and magic over which Quicksilver reigned, his to command. He aimed a bolt of destruction at the Hunter’s feet and threw it and felt the burn of power leave his hand.

The power of the hill, in a form like the thunderbolt, flew from his open palm.

Quicksilver meant only to let the ball of fire land between Sylvanus and the Hunter, and thus call the Hunter’s attention and give his brother respite.

But as the fire crackled, bright, from his hand, it flew past the dog and the dog, somehow, reached out a hand that looked like Sylvanus’s and caught the fire and spun it off again—toward the thatched roofs of Stratford.

Fairy lights burned in the mortal night, a trail of power splitting the mundane peace of mortal repose.

Fire hit the roofs of the nearby houses.

The thatch blazed.

Dogs howled, men screamed, babies cried.

“Milord,” Malachite whispered.

“Stop,” the Hunter yelled. “Stop.”

Quicksilver took a deep breath, tainted with the smoke from the burning houses. One breath to realize he was alive.

Another breath as the smoke grew worse.

Another breath and Quicksilver saw Sylvanus writhe to human shape and grow and smile, a smile of satisfaction such as babes show after milk and men after love.

“He’s feeding on the deaths,” the Hunter yelled. “He’s feeding on the life force of dead mortals. From me he learned that, but I refrain unless the life comes from evildoers.”

Sylvanus’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed in satisfaction, his small, pulpy lips widened in a broader smile, and he waved a hand that looked more solid than before, in the direction of the fire that spread, from roof to roof and from thatch to thatch, like vermin that jump from one body to the other and consume all.

“Thank you, brother. Thank you. I would have lived my whole life as the Hunter’s dog, but for you. By setting this fire have you given me lives that, in the manner of the Hunter, I can collect to grow my own, and increase my force.”

As Sylvanus twisted and writhed in his obscene pleasure, he grew. The dark mist around him overspread, darker and darker, like a killing frost, its tendrils reaching out to the burning houses and by them growing in strength and force, like a dark octopus that grows and spreads over the floor of a blighted sea.

There was plague in that wicked mist, Quicksilver thought, the pestilent touch and evil humor of illness.

And other things, other dark things that would bring death to most and feed Sylvanus’s swollen appetite.

What was this creature Sylvanus was becoming? What powers would it have?

Never in the collective memory of Fairyland had something like this happened.

Never had an elf been king and slave to the Hunter and then . . . what?

Quicksilver broke into a sweat of shame and fear.

Never had a king been so weak as to help free his mortal enemy.

Quicksilver wished he could hide, wished he could crawl away in shame.

Screams echoed from everywhere in Stratford. Women and children and men woke to find themselves engulfed in flame.

Some ran out of the houses, flaming like living torches, to burn and die on the street. Others ran here and there, with buckets of water, throwing these at the flames, which mockingly grew despite all.

Quicksilver, unable to breathe, unable to think, looking at his brother grow in power, looking at Stratford being consumed, sank to his knees and screamed, “What have I done?”

“No time for that, no time,” Malachite said. “No time for that, milord. These your vassals await orders. Should we not fight the fire?” He gestured to the elven youths who stood behind Quicksilver and waited.

“Listen to him, listen, brother,” Sylvanus said before Malachite was even fully done. His words echoed of amusement and mockery. “Listen to him, for he’s a man, his wit greater than your womanly wiles.”

Quicksilver wanted to scream, he wanted to rage. He wished he could throw fire again, this time the fire that consumed his heart and burned his soul. But instead he nodded to Malachite and said, “Aye. Go. Help them.”

Aware of what he must look like to the young people he commanded, he stood up and, trembling, tried to brush the knees of his breeches.

Sylvanus’s power still grew and Quicksilver must do something.

Steeling himself, knowing he gazed on his own death, knowing nothing would come of this but his own destruction, he stepped forward.

The Hunter stepped forward also, in giant steps, approaching Sylvanus. “There will be an end to this, cur,” the Hunter said. “You cannot thus break your bond.”

Once more, Sylvanus changed, as if the sound compelled him, his well-formed humanlike form compacting and shrinking into the shape of a square-headed, squat dog.

Only the dog was bigger than he’d ever been, almost as big as a dog as he’d been as a man.

The Hunter looked puzzled for a moment, then his voice sounded so loud that it seemed to make both earth and sky tremble, and almost obscured the screams of the dying humans. “Come to heel, you creature.”

He advanced on Sylvanus, like a displeased master calling his puppy. “What? You dare defy me?”

Sylvanus hunkered down and showed his glowing teeth as the Hunter approached.

Suddenly, Sylvanus leapt. His glowing teeth pierced the darkness of the Hunter’s arm.

The Hunter screamed, a sound such as had never been heard before. Reality wavered and turned and reeled, like a windblown paper dancing in the whirlwind that announces a storm. What light there was, amid the smoke of the fires and the darkness of the Hunter and his dogs, seemed to waver also, the very moon growing pale as if in distress.

Drops of glowing blood fell to the earth, withering and blighting the very weeds it touched.

Around them, as if this were a contagion-infested breath, Quicksilver could feel crops withering and dying in the fields.

Time was out of joint and the mechanisms of the world jangled off-key.

The dog charged again, this time sinking its teeth into the Hunter’s leg. He pulled, seeking to bring the Hunter down.

The Hunter wrenched away and turned, his misty shape looking sickly green where it had been pitch black and alive before. “This is your fault, oh Quicksilver, king of elves. And I will come for you in judgment,” the Hunter screamed.

With his scream he vanished, like a fog upon the air. With him vanished his waiting horse, and the pack of his cowering dogs.

“My first victory is won,” Sylvanus crowed, his voice changing from a low growl to a smooth human voice as he shifted and unfolded into his elven form once more. “Now for the others.”

Quicksilver realized he was covered in a sweat of fear, as he hadn’t been in many a year, not since acquiring the rule of Fairyland and all the power that came with it.

Trembling, he watched as Sylvanus grew and seemingly called to him every tendril of darkness that touched on every one of the burned houses. He changed and shifted to a dark miasma and transported himself somewhere.

To London. Quicksilver felt it both as a word and an image impressed upon his fevered brain. Sylvanus had gone to London, the largest city in the land. It wasn’t so much knowledge but a deeper certainty, born of blood, of sinew, of Elvenland magic.

Sylvanus had transported to London, capital of this human realm whose boundaries overlapped sacred, elven Avalon—like two pages in a book will share a leaf, each taking up a different face, the two touching but never mingling.

What would Sylvanus want with London? What would he do there?

Quicksilver looked at the charred ruin around him, heard the lamentations of those who’d lost loved ones, and trembled.

What would Sylvanus not do there, in that London of packed multitudes?

More than half of Stratford had burned. Only a few houses stood amid the destruction caused by magical fire. Quicksilver’s magical fire.

Where the town had been silent, now it echoed the screams of widows and the inconsolable cries of orphans.

And all because of Quicksilver.

The Hunter said he would come for him. Come for Quicksilver he would, doubtless, as soon as the Hunter had recovered.

If the Hunter recovered. Quicksilver shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling small and young and foolish. Oh, curse the day he’d become king, he who was so naive, so dumb, so frail, so divided.

What if the Hunter didn’t recover? Quicksilver would willingly suffer any punishment to be assured of the Hunter’s recovery.

For what would happen if the Hunter did not recover? What would become of the workings of the world?

Quicksilver hadn’t even known that such creatures as the Hunter could be hurt. He’d never suspected it. And now the Hunter was injured. With the Hunter’s scream of pain something seemed to have changed about the very nature of reality, the truths that held everything in its place.

He watched through the smoke his elves, like unseen angels, smothering the last magical fires.

What did it matter, this belated charity? The damage was done.

Done through Quicksilver’s hand.

Quicksilver had set the fire, and Sylvanus had fed upon it.

Distracted, Quicksilver stared at the house closest to the forest, the double wattle-and-daub house of the Shakespeares. It still stood, undamaged.

Will’s wife, Nan, had organized her in-laws and her own three children—the older girl, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to carry buckets of water from the river and thus soak all before flame ever touched it.

Quicksilver thought of Will, who was in London. Once upon a time, the Lady Silver, Quicksilver’s female aspect, had loved Will with all-consuming passion.

Even now, thinking of that young man with the golden falconlike eyes made Quicksilver’s heart quiver.

Will was in London. Quicksilver remembered hearing elven gossip from one of Ariel’s maids, Peaseblossom, who’d seduced a mortal youth.

Will was in London and Sylvanus had gone there.

Quicksilver realized he was trembling again.

He must go to London and stop Sylvanus. He must keep the evil creature from wreaking havoc upon the unprepared humans.

Quicksilver must, if nothing else, keep Sylvanus from hurting Will.

And Quicksilver should stop Sylvanus, rein him in, atone for his crime against Stratford by keeping Sylvanus from destroying London.

He, Quicksilver, was the king of elves, and responsible for all other elves, even those who had ceased to be of elvenkind.

It fell to him to protect London from Sylvanus.

“Malachite,” he called, and his friend approached. “Go to your mistress. Tell her I’ve gone to London, and whatever you do, do not disclose this sad fray here. No reason she should fear.”

No reason fair Ariel, who loved Quicksilver enough to imagine him a good king, should know that he had brought doom on innocent humans and loosed plague and danger upon both fairy and mortal.

Scene 5

A road running along the Thames River. On the other side of the river, the impressive mansions of the nobility line up in impressive display, their stone facades vying to outdo each other in grandeur and architectural ornament. On the nearer side, only a few houses, hovels, and decaying warehouses cluster. Amid them, a small shop remains open, a lantern burning over the sign that advertises used clothes for resale. Will Shakespeare enters the shop, where clothes hang from the ceiling and lie in neat piles upon the two tables that take up most of the scant interior space. An old man sits at the back, by a small table at which a wavering oil lamp burns. Two other, younger men argue with him.

“Not worth three pennies.” The old man turned a dark red velvet doublet over and over in his dried-up clawlike hands. He squinted at the fabric and squeezed his lips together, multiplying the wrinkles on his already wrinkled face.

“I need five pennies, please, master,” a tall man in his twenties, obviously the owner of the doublet, said. “I must have five pennies to pay my gaming debt.”

“Three pennies,” the man said. “And I’m being too generous. I’ll ruin myself this way.”

He waved the tall man aside, saying, “Think it over.”

The blond youth, no more than sixteen or so, pushed a folded dark suit at the man.

The boy looked scared and his anxiety mounted as the old man picked at seams, and turned sleeves, and made smacking sounds with his mouth.

Will Shakespeare held on tightly to his best suit, of much-washed black velvet, and waited his turn.

His suit had been new ten years ago when he’d married Nan. It was not, Will knew, nearly as well made as the tall man’s wine-colored doublet.

And yet Will had to have ten pence for the suit.

It wouldn’t pay Will’s rent, but it would—if he husbanded it right—feed Will through the days it would take him to walk home.

But what were his chances of getting that much when the much-better doublet was held so cheap?

Will watched the old man purse his lips with finality and look at the young man. “Poor quality,” he told the boy. “Poor quality. I don’t think I can—”

On those words he checked and arrested.

The young man had started quivering, like a leaf upon a tree in high wind.

He stumbled, gave a strangled cry, and fell toward Will.

“What’s this, what’s this?” the shopkeeper said.

To save himself from being toppled, Will dropped his suit and put his hands out, easing the tall, thick-boned youth onto the beaten-dirt floor of the shop.

“He’ll be drunk,” the tall man said. “Drunk or hungry. It’s hard days in the country and many young bucks come to town searching for work and food. As if we had it to give.”

Will shook his head. He’d come to town in search of work, but no one would call him a young buck.

He knelt beside the young man on the floor. He looked like a farmhand and he smelled neither of ale or wine. Will lay his hand on the youth’s forehead, as he would have on Hamnet’s, back in Stratford. It was hot enough to feel burning to the touch.

“He’s ill,” Will said. He fumbled with the man’s shirt, trying to open it, to give him air.

But as Will pulled, the worn-through shirt ripped, exposing the man’s underarm, and the huge, pulsing growth beneath it.

“Jesu,” the seller said. He got up and bent over the youth, staring at the growth. “Jesu. It’s the plague.” The old man’s lips quivered. His hand went to his forehead, tracing the papist sign of the cross in atavistic exorcism. “My shop will be closed now. What will become of my grandchildren?”

“How long have you been ill, good man?” Will asked. He wanted to ask where the man had been, where he might have contracted this illness, whether in London or the countryside.

For a moment he thought the man was too far gone to answer. His pale blue country-boy eyes looked at Will uncomprehending.

But then he cleared his throat and coughed, and whispered, “Faith, I’ve not been ill. It was just now, this pain . . . . I’ve not been ill. Tell my mother—” He stopped, and coughed again, and his body convulsed, in a long shudder. “Mother,” he said and he was still.

Will saw that breath didn’t rise in the broad chest.

Dead, the boy was dead. And he’d said he was well till just now, till that pain beneath his arm.

It could not be true. It could not be true. Even the plague took time to kill people.

Yet something told Will that this was true. He remembered the boy walking down the street, ahead of Will. He’d walked like a healthy man.

Trembling, Will stood up. Trembling, he wiped his hands to his pants.

Mercy, let him not catch the plague. Oh, mercy, not so far from his wife and children. How horrible it would be, dying here all alone and being buried without name or care. His sense of his mortality, awakened, beat afraid and agitated wings against his reason. Oh, fool he was to have left those he loved and for the sake of an illusory dream of poetry to have come so far to so dangerous a city.

“Out,” the old man said. “Out. I’ll not be buying any clothes for a long time.” With fumbling urgency, he pushed Will and the tall man with the wine red doublet from his shop.

Will could but stop and pick up his suit on the way, as he was being pushed out.

Outside, the cold air allowed Will to think more clearly, despite the bitter complaints of his empty stomach.

The plague. In truth, it was that—the growth beneath the arm that sapped a man’s vital humors.

But the plague came on slowly, took days to come on.

What strange plague was this that killed so quickly?

A strange plague, like a curse, like a supernatural miasma.

Will wiped his hands on his breeches again, one at a time, and he shoved his suit under his arm.

Oh, let him not catch the plague.

And yet, he thought, his despair mounting as he looked back at the closed shop, let him catch it, for the plague, this fast plague, would kill Will faster than starvation, and starvation was his only other choice now. He knew there were other used clothing shops in London, but this had been the most accessible, the one that catered to the poorer people who might indeed wish to buy Will’s cast-offs. All other shops would sneer at Will’s velvet suit.

Outside the shop, Will stood on the narrow road beside the Thames, with his nose full of the stink of the great river that served London as well, sink and sewer.

The Thames looked oily dark in the moonlight, like the River Styx flowing through a realm of the dead.

Along its dark waters, barges slid.

On the nearest barge, upon a chair like a throne, a creature sat, who, as the barge neared, Will discerned to be the golden majesty of the Queen of England: Elizabeth, just over sixty years old and still ruling the country with unfaltering hand.

From this far away, she looked young and majestic, easily as young as twenty years ago, when Will had seen her in Coventry, where she’d come for a pageant put on by the Duke of Leicester.

Will frowned at the barge and at the Queen, and at the gentlemen in attendance to them, all of them unaware of, uncaring about the starving English subjects, threatened by the plague.

How much of this majesty was true? It was said that the Queen wore makeup thick with lead, hard with egg white, glazed with the perfumes and lacquers of Araby.

The Queen and London were one, the Queen and London alike. This glistening London to which Will had come in search of fame and fortune had proved itself a pit full of villains, into which Will’s energy and fortune vanished.

London was naught, Will thought, like the Queen might be naught beneath her grand clothes, her makeup.

A plague-eaten naught where he would die alone.

Will’s dream had died. He’d never be a poet.

That had been a dream. A dream and nothing more.

Scene 6

The fairy palace, rising amid the trees of the Forest of Arden. Queen Ariel, in her room, sits at her vanity, before her silver brushes, her unguent bottles, attended by her maids, who comb her hair and lay out her nightclothes.

Sitting in front of her crystal mirror, Ariel, Queen of Fairyland, King Quicksilver’s wife, found herself more restless and more fearful than ever before.

So many times she’d sat at this table, late at night. So many times had her maids, Peaseblossom and Cobweb and Cowslip, tended to her needs. And how often had Quicksilver, himself, been standing behind her, watching her nightly preparations with a smile.

But this night Quicksilver wasn’t there. This night, Quicksilver had left, to face some threat, some evil on the boundary of elven Avalon—a threat that bid to be more monstrous than anything Fairyland had ever faced. And Ariel must wait here, in the false safety of the palace.

Oh, she knew she had upset Quicksilver with her offer of help. But why could her lord not understand that Ariel would rather be there, beside him or instead of him, facing whatever danger threatened to swallow the land, than here, in the palace, slowly driven mad by waiting anguish.

Oh, the traditional lot of females, human and elf alike, was much crueler than that of males. Females must wait and seem to smile while out on the field of battle their loves might be breathing their last.

Ariel could not endure it. With a gesture—raised hands, exasperated expression—she bid Peaseblossom stop running the soft brush down Ariel’s pale blond hair. “Stop, Peaseblossom. Stop. I cannot endure touch. Only tell me if there’s word . . . any word of my lord?”

Peaseblossom shook her head. She was one of Ariel’s prettiest maids and today looked tired and out of humor. But she’d looked thus before the boundary breech had been announced. What hailed was the absence of her human lover, a Stratford weaver named Nick Bottom, who’d gone to London on guild business.

Ariel wondered if the silly thing even knew that the whole hill was threatened and that Ariel’s lord and king might be dead at this moment.

And yet, he couldn’t be dead, could he, truly?

For Ariel, besides being queen, was the seeress and prophet of Fairyland, her powers acquired through having been born at summer solstice, the blessed night for her kind.

If Quicksilver were dead, surely she would have felt it.

And yet she couldn’t be sure of it, and yet she sighed, and yet she frowned at her maids and wondered what could be delaying her lord and why her lord tarried so.

A knock sounded upon the door, a sharp knock, almost martial.

Quicksilver.

“Peaseblossom,” Ariel said, gesturing toward the door.

But the door, opening, revealed no more than the long face, the dark hair of Malachite, his features pinched into worry such as Ariel had never seen.

Ariel rose hastily, breathlessly, her heart at her mouth, her fear in her face, not knowing what she feared until she should hear it, refusing to fear that her lord was dead, for fear the confirmation of it should slay her.

Would she not know Quicksilver was dead? Would she not? Was she not queen and the seer of Fairyland, and were their hearts not united?

“Milord Malachite,” she said, hurrying toward him in a flying flurry of her nightgown’s lace. “Milord Malachite? What of my lord and husband that you come here, thus, without him?”

Malachite, pale of cheek, wide of eye, showing fear on his face and smelling of smoke and death, shook his head.

“Milord—” Malachite shook his head and looked at his feet. “Milord bid me to tell you guard his kingdom and look after his subjects as he would himself, and in all obey his will, as though were you him, milady.”

Oh, was Quicksilver dead? Why else would Quicksilver bid her to watch over his subjects as though she were himself?

Hand to her chest, as if seeking to still her heart from beating through the slight ribs and the skin that covered them, Ariel gasped. “What happened to my lord? Oh, tell me and be done with it. Is he then dead?”

Malachite shook his head. “No, milady. No.” His denial had no joy. “The breach of the wards was an illusion, an effect of . . .” He visibly hesitated. “Of an ancient curse. That is all solved.” His eyes, dark with worry and small with sadness, would not meet her gaze. “Only . . . only . . . only some urgent business calls my lord to London and he might be some days upon returning. He begged me to tell you from him that you should watch for his return and meanwhile guard his kingdom with your heart and govern it with your own solid mind.”

Ariel breathed fast as she stood staring at Malachite, torn between relief and doubt. She could not believe the breach had been of so little account, after such an alarm. And why would Quicksilver so hasten to London? What had he to do in London?

What could be the truth? Was Malachite lying to hide Quicksilver’s death?

No, that could not be. Quicksilver could not be dead, or else would Ariel have felt it. As King of Fairyland, Quicksilver held in his own the power and the souls of all his subjects.

Quicksilver’s death would have thrown all that power and might on Ariel, the Queen of Fairyland, and she would have felt it, felt it through and through, the loss of her lord, as strongly as the loss of her own life.

No, Quicksilver wasn’t dead. But then Malachite must speak truthfully and Quicksilver must have gone to London. Why to London? Why would the King of Fairyland go to that land of dirt and iron and massed humanity?

She wished Malachite would give her an explanation of this sudden departure.

The cold upon her chest, the horror trembling through her limbs, all of it bespoke what she feared, perhaps more than death.

Her attempt at protecting Quicksilver had offended him. It had been too much. Humiliated, fearing that she loved him not enough, Quicksilver had returned to a former love—that human whom the Lady Silver had loved so dearly, that William Shakespeare, who had taken himself to London six months ago.

Ariel had loved Quicksilver ever since she could remember, since they’d been toddlers together in the vast palace hall.

For Ariel, Quicksilver’s love was more important than life, or hill, or indeed the whole world entire and filled with all wonder. For without his love, neither life nor hill nor world could exist for Ariel.

Was his love for her threatened? Had he left for London just because he resented her offering to help with defending the boundaries?

Was his love for her so frail? A firefly in a summer evening, the inconsequential dust of Fairyland?

Ariel shook her head. She felt tears heavy beneath her eyelids, like threatening grey clouds hanging over a fair day. “Thank you, Malachite. No. I need no more. Thou hast comforted me marvelous much.”

She returned to her vanity and to her mirror, and contemplated her features in the mirror. An unexceptional face, oval and pale.

Did her lord still love her? Would he ever come back?

And if not, what would become of the hill without him?

What of poor Ariel, without his love?

She’d be a shadow, no more. A captive spirit doing his bidding and devoid of all self-worth.

Scene 7

A narrow street on the outskirts of London. It is obviously a not-too-prosperous but respectable-enough area, the lowest floor of each of the five-floor houses a modest shop. Hatters and glovers, printers and bakers. By a dark brown building, with a ramshackle outside staircase that climbs, crookedly, to a door on the fifth floor, a dark-haired lady in silk appears, as if birthed out of the air itself. No one else is on the street, save for Will, who approaches the woman cautiously.

The Lady Silver stood at the foot of Will’s stairs.

Will’s heart raced. His breath caught. Was this an illusion spun off from hunger?

Or was the elf lady truly here, so far from her green glades?

The dark, silken hair of Lady Silver fell, unfettered, down to her waist, over a white silk dress that Will knew could scarcely be lighter or silkier than the skin it hid. Will felt dizzy.

Suddenly, he was once more nineteen, and tramping unawares the paths of Arden Woods only, to be seduced by the Lady Silver in all her splendor.

Silver’s tiny waist emphasized her abundant womanly charms that overspilled from her tight white bodice. Will felt as though he were falling, headfirst, into a dream of love.

He smiled. He hurried toward Silver.

She smiled at him, her dark red lips promising velvet touch and the sweetness of newly pressed wine.

In Will’s mind, Nan’s face rose in remembrance.

Nan, Will’s wife, was not as beautiful as Lady Silver. Mortal and ill used by fate—hard worn by life and children and husband—Nan had aged in the last ten years, as Silver hadn’t.

Nan’s hands felt calloused and rough compared to the Lady Silver’s soft, smooth silk skin.

Yet, when night came, and when old age robbed food of its flavor and the sky of color, Will knew it was Nan he wanted by his side. And if he died before that, it would be only because of Nan that he regretted it.

He hesitated. His steps slowed.

This fine lady was no more than a passing fancy, a diversion. A fleeting pleasure, fleetingly enjoyed and ever afterward bitterly regretted. Like fairy gold, the love of elven kind turned to dust and nothing all too quickly.

Such momentary joy bred months of pain. This hot desire converted to cold disdain.

The last time the lady had seduced him and made him break his vow to Nan, Will had promised it would not happen again.

He would not break this second vow, not while starving and with death so near.

Oh, he could ask the elf for money or food, but what would that Fairyland aid not oblige him to do in return?

Making his face hard, he stopped and spoke from steps away. “What do you want?”

Silver laughed. Her musical laugh, sweet and soft, rose over the shabby neighborhood, like wine-filled cups tinkling in a golden afternoon pouring mirth over a perfect assembly. “Will, Will,” she said. “Is that the way you greet an old friend?”

Her laughter moved Will. Again, in his mind there rose a younger man he’d been, full of hopes and dreams never yet tried and with a good opinion of himself never yet tested and therefore never proven futile.

But the older Will, this Will who had lost his hopes of being a poet and eaten his fill of failure and frustration, shook his head. “We are not friends,” he said.

Silver looked confused, lonely, like a child who enters a familiar home and finds it changed and a friendly door barred to her access. She blinked. “Not friends?” Her large, silver eyes glimmered with the moisture of tears. “How can you say that, Will? We are friends, aye, if we are nothing else.”

She walked toward him, and he stepped back. She arched her eyebrows in sharp surprise, and advanced still, holding on to his arm, her hand hot and firm even through the bulk of his doublet and shirt. “Oh, come, Will, be not that way. I must talk to you, must have your help. I came to London sensing your sweet soul, and on your sweet soul did I home as a bee onto freshly distilled honey.”

His soul?

Will had never understood elves. Old legends heard when he was young had said elves were ghosts or demons or a long-lost people.

Did Silver truly want Will’s soul? Oh, he’d lost much, but he’d not give that up.

Were elves, then, the demons some legends claimed they were? Or the unquiet dead seeking revenge on life?

Will pulled his arm away from her, and stepped back. He remembered the lying dream that spoke of elves, but he could not remember the details.

It had been a mad dream, a dream that promised Will greatness, only to let waking reality disappoint him.

He remembered the time he’d fallen into the tangled affairs of elves and how Silver’s seduction then had been naught but an attempt to involve him in killing the fairy king, her brother, and stealing the throne from him.

Had Silver succeeded, indeed, Will would have been dead long ago.

Would not her plots now be similar to her traps and schemes then? Self-serving plans that bode Will no good.

And did Will believe this immortal creature would have shed a tear for him, had he died in fulfilling her plans?

He looked at the reflective, shining silver eyes that, overshadowed by a rich canopy of black lashes, stared so enticingly into his own eyes.

His body’s weak senses longed to be overwhelmed by all her beauty and to lay complyingly within her enticing arms. But his mind knew better and whispered to him of treason and mistrust.

He stepped away from her. The movement wrenched at his own heart. He shrank away from the reach of her soft, white hand, though he needed that touch more than he needed the air he breathed.

He stepped back till he found, behind him, the decaying wooden wall of the house where he lodged. “When has elf been friend to man, milady? When have you been my friend? You would use me for your purposes, nothing more.”

Silver shook her head, the silken sheaf of her hair rustling in the too hot, too still, too humid night air that was as bad breath, tainted with the odors of London and its wastes.

“You use me ill,” she said.

Her face, frantic with some passion, her eyes narrowed and blinking to keep tears away, she looked human and frail and without cunning. “You use me ill and you should not use me thus. For I come in great important business, not just for me, but for mankind entire.”

The thought of Silver caring about humanity seemed incongruous enough, unlikely enough to keep Will from the depths of desire and awaken in him a shocked interest. “Mankind?” he asked.

She nodded.

Will shook his head and swallowed hard. Her beauty had its effect upon his heart, like the flame of a candle that, shining upon wax, will soften it. Yet he could resist the melting warmth and the molten beauty that gazed upon him from those shimmering metallic eyes. But the thought of Silver concerned with low, ephemeral humans puzzled him so that he could not walk away from that. If she lied not, then here was wonder indeed.

“Please, lady,” he said, both voice and words less resolute than he’d hoped. He wanted to know why she cared for humans, and yet he wanted her to leave him alone. “Please, lady. I am but a fool, but not such a fool who doesn’t know the havoc your kind can wreak. Please go. Be gone. For you must mock. You, care for humans?”

The lady trembled. From the melting eyes, two tears dropped, rolling down her curved cheek like twin crystalline globules, upon which Will saw all his future.

He’d die in London, a lonely, desperate man. He’d never again see a glimmer of magical beauty. Never again would he touch something like the silk of Silver’s skin. Never.

“Humans and elvenkind, in this conjoined,” she said. “Will meet twin dooms if you help me not.”

This was fantastical and unbelievable. “Lady, you have to go.”

Silver looked down at him, her eyes like a wet day, all rainy where it was wont to be bright. “I have nowhere else to go,” she said. “I cannot—

“I cannot go,” she screamed. She covered her face with her pale hands and the whole of her slim body trembled.

She reached for his arm, and encircled his wrist with her small hand. The touch of her hand, soft upon his skin, made her seem human, frail, in need of protection. It made her seem like the Silver he remembered.

“To whom will I go if you don’t let me abide?” Tears chased each other down her face. “I’ve had to come to London.” She stomped her foot and bit her lip, but resolution crumpled upon her face and her eyes filled with tears. “In London I have to remain till I find my brother Sylvanus.”

“Your brother?” Mention of the deposed King of Fairyland, the same mention that the three creatures had made upon his dream, riveted Will’s attention. He remembered Sylvanus as even more scheming than the run of elves. Sylvanus had tried to steal Nan before the Hunter took Sylvanus. Sylvanus would have had Will killed to leave Sylvanus’s path free to wooing Nan.

“Your brother? Is your brother in London? Why would he be?” Creatures of glade and dale, elves both good and bad, did not belong in London’s reek, in London’s crowded, teeming streets, with their tall houses that obscured the daylight.

“My brother . . .” Silver sighed and cried, tears chasing each other down her little rounded cheeks to drip upon her bosom, where they ran down in rivulets between the twin globules of her breasts like a mountain stream disappearing into a deep crevice. “My brother has . . . . He attacked the Hunter. He . . .”

“But your brother is in thrall of the Hunter,” Will said. His astonishment made him forget his hunger, his fear of Silver, his desperate straits. “The Hunter’s slave. The Hunter’s dog. Can a slave thus attack his master?”

He tried to keep his eyes away from the destination of those drops of water that left her eyes only to travel to more intimate locations, and yet his eyes traced their path down her cheeks, to her velvety bosom, and imagined the course beyond, beneath her perfumed garments.

He forced his gaze up as one who forces an errant child back to his books. He made himself meet her gaze. “When last we met, you told me that the Hunter was stronger even than elf and that no elf could escape his thralldom. Now you tell me Sylvanus has escaped?”

Silver trembled, and could do no more than multiply the soft progression of her tears.

She nodded, though, and sighed, her sighs like a gentle spring breeze.

This close to her, with her body touching him, Will didn’t smell the rot and garbage of London’s least fashionable district, but the warm scent of lilac from Silver’s skin.

It reminded Will of spring in Stratford, that hometown he despaired of ever seeing again.

He marshaled all his power to resist her, but all his power broke like a dam, carried away by her flood of tears. How could he be her enemy when she was thus, soft and broken and defenseless? How could he call on the iron of his will against an enemy whose weapons were gentle words and desperate pleas? How could he turn harsh and savage when she cried and begged his help?

Yet she was no more, no less than the other aspect of the king of elves and that Quicksilver was neither soft nor defenseless. But knowing this didn’t help. What Will saw overwhelmed what he knew, his eyes reaching for his heart and past his mind.

It didn’t matter what Will’s reason said, when argued against the persuasive argument of his vision.

What mattered it if Quicksilver’s muscles lay hidden beneath this silky skin, these tender charms? It was the Lady Silver whom Will beheld. It was she who cried.

He found his arm, as though of its own accord, encircling those shoulders that felt so frail.

And all the while—while Will’s mind censured him his easy giving in and what would be yet another betrayal of Nan—Silver’s hair tickled his cheek, her perfume filled his nostrils and her beauty dazzled his mind.

He felt giddy. Giddier than hunger alone could make him.

This wasn’t love. Oh, Will knew that.

He knew what love was—Nan’s companionship, her loyalty, her sleeping form warming him through the night.

That was love. That, and the respect that came from knowing and believing in another’s mind and reason as in his own—that alliance of two beings against the madding world.

But this quickening of the blood, the sudden pulses that thrilled upon his veins like perdition; this whispering of a reason older than man that spoke not to the brain but to the eyes—this was much like being drunk, like being crazed, like being a babe, innocent, and led here and there in the arms of a loved nurse.

It was like iron pulled by a magnet, like rain falling helplessly to earth, like a boat drifting on a current, like praying and trusting a higher power.

Will let his body act and let it go, arm over Silver’s up the rickety steps to the door to his room.

Standing on the tiny platform, outside his door, his arm around Silver to balance her, Will slipped the key in the lock and opened it.

And all the while his hands trembled, and it was like an ague, like a fever—like anything which mere man can’t help.

He knew what he wanted, what he craved, the longing for her that drove all his senses. But even to himself he could not confess it, lest removing his denial would render him her too easy prey.

In his room, he wrapped his arms around the immortal creature that trembled and sobbed within his embrace.

His sagging, small bed, with its worn blankets, the lopsided old table that served him as a desk, even his better suit which he threw down as he came in, all looked shabbier, older in her presence.

His room smelled of old meals, of dirty clothes, of dust.

The taper he lit smelled of burnt bacon and smoked, casting only a timid and dismal light.

Her perfume filled his nostrils, and his mouth ached to feel the soft caress of her skin, to taste the exquisite wine of her tongue.

He closed his eyes and pulled her tight. He lowered his mouth to hers.

Her mouth tasted like wine, her skin felt like madness, his heart beat like the rhythm of a youthful dance.

The knock upon the door startled them both. They sprang apart. She laughed, a high silvery laugh.

But the knocking had awakened Will’s reason.

With no money, he couldn’t even afford to pay his back rent, much less the standard fine for adultery, which would be levied should his pious landlord denounce him to the Church.

And Will’s landlord, who was bound to be at the door, having been awakened by their movement, their talk, would want the back rent and, finding this dazzling lady here, in Will’s quarters unchaperoned, would denounce Will for adultery.

Trembling with fear now, all lust dispersed, Will shoved Silver into a corner of the room, where she couldn’t be seen from the door. He whispered fiercely, “Hush, milady. Don’t move and not a sound, if you ever prized my friendship.”

On such flimsy warranty, and fearing very much what she might not do, Will ran his hand back through his hair, smoothing the imagined mark of her hand.

And he opened his door.

Scene 8

The tall, closed carriage trundles by, not far from Will’s lodgings. Inside it, Kit Marlowe looks rumpled, sweaty, and very scared. He stares from Henry Mauder to the other man, his eyes twin mirrors of despair.

Kit Marlowe was scared.

From outside the carriage, the softer fall of the horses’ hooves told him that they’d left behind the paved area of town and moved now at the outskirts of London.

Were they headed to the tower?

Kit almost smiled at the thought.

Kit was but the son of a Canterbury cobbler, with neither title, nor connections, nor fortune. How could he be taken to the tower like a nobleman? It would almost be an honor in itself, were it true.

Yet the death that would find him in the tower’s stony rooms would be as silent, as worm-eaten, as perpetual, as a humble death in a cottage.

The smile faded from Kit’s lips.

Dark prospects loomed before him as he stared at Henry Mauder’s yellow teeth, Mauder’s disdainful smile. He could see himself dead, and worse, he could see Imp dead beside him.

From the racing river of his fear, words issued, spoken in a cringing, lost voice that reminded Kit of his own father talking to an important customer.

“Your honors, I am a playwright. This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, evolutions.”

As always with Kit, panic betrayed itself in a running of the mouth in incessant, high-sounding, little-meaning words. He tried to check the words but he couldn’t, they would go on flowing from his mouth—a river of incontinent explanation.

“These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.” By an effort of will, he managed to arrest the flow, his words checking upon a deep breath, something like a ghostly sigh.

Mauder and the other man look puzzled.

Kit bit his lip, and found his Cambridge diction once more. “That’s all I am, all. Just a playwright and a poet. Nothing more. Too much for me these intrigues, too high for me these philosophical opinions. How can you accuse me of being an atheist? Atheist, I? I studied divinity, your honors. Would an atheist undertake such study?”

“You studied divinity before someone corrupted you. It is the name of the corrupter we want, and you may go, if you promise to reform,” Mauder said with the careful certainty of the self-righteous.

If only it were that simple. If only, indeed, Kit told all and were allowed to go. Even turning in kindly, learned Sir Walter might be worth it, to keep Imp safe.

But it wouldn’t be so. Kit would not be allowed to go that easily. Imp would be in danger, either way. For like a wolf, ravenous and confined, these intriguers, once fed the morsel they craved, would demand more and more until they’d devoured Kit and Imp also.

Yet even through Kit’s despair, a plan formed in his mind. Or if not a plan, a shadow of it, the bare bones and architrave of a plan as like onto a plan as the painted scenery on stage was like the place the playwright hoped to evoke.

He was a playwright, a maker of illusions.

If he couldn’t turn in Sir Walter Raleigh, then Marlowe must be able to turn in someone else and, with that someone else, buy time, until Raleigh turned the plot away from himself, or until Marlowe could find something else with which to hold doom at bay.

“I do know something,” he said, his voice low and hesitant and fraught with thought, as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to speak.

“Ah,” Mauder said, and sat back. “I knew you would be reasonable, Master Marlowe.”

“Yes. I meant to be, but . . .” He shook his head. “What I know is more complicated than what you meant. After all, what would it be to you, if I said that this person or that taught me heresy and atheism?” He waved his hand in the air. “It can no more than give the Queen momentary displeasure, but she will not be likely to take action against one highly placed for such a simple offense, will she now?” He flicked the fingers of his naked hand dismissively. His gloved hand still gripped the other glove tightly. “She cares not a fig for religion, does she, sires, when the heretic can defend her realm or . . .” He forced a smile. “Or bring home ships overflowing with gold.”

In his mind he cast about for a likely victim, around whom to weave his web of deception.

Outside, the horses raced, their hoof-falls muffled against soft ground.

Will Shakespeare. Was that not the name of the would-be poet at Paul’s? He’d seemed unprotected, unconnected. A country boy just come to London, full of fire and ambition and little else.

Will. Yes, he might do very well.

“But there is a conspiracy I know. Indeed, I’ve been following it for weeks. It touches the highest heads of the kingdom.” Kit wove his intrigue with facile speech. “I need but a few more days to be sure,” he spoke on, improvising, like an actor upon the stage, spinning seeming truth from his lying words.

From the quickening of Mauder’s eye, the sharp look of Mauder’s silent friend, Kit could tell indeed that the trout came to the tickling hand. He spoke fast and persuasively, as if this were a speech declaimed on the stage.

As it happened, they were so enthralled that they didn’t stop Kit when he twitched the curtain aside and saw that they trundled along a narrow street. From the signs on the shops, Kit recognized Hog’s Lane in Shoreditch. Did Shakespeare not live here?

“Would you let me out, gentlemen?” he asked. “I’ll look for you anon with more information.”

And unbelievably, Mauder gave his signal and the carriage stopped. The door opened, and on trembling legs, Kit stepped onto a muddy street in Shoreditch.

The carriage splattered Kit with mud and filth as it started up again.

He didn’t mind. It took him two breaths of the dank air, tainted with smoke and cooking smells, to realize he was still alive. Surely, no after-death smell could be that bad.

He was alive, but at what cost?

Could he run now? But run where? If it were only himself, he would escape this instant, board a ship to France or Spain, and there live by his wits and his work. But he could not leave Imp behind, to suffer the revenge of Kit’s enemies.

Nor could Kit take Imp with him without being sure they’d have lodging and food and ready friends on the other side.

Kit looked at the retreating carriage and thought he would have to concoct a plan now, a plot as elaborate as any ever discovered, a plot that would implicate Essex and thus let Raleigh, and Kit, and Imp go free.

He walked down an alley, and up another, to where his memory told him a hatter’s should be.

Across the street from him stood a tall, narrow, dark building with a hatter’s sign. Two people climbed a precarious staircase to the fifth floor, over the shop.

The man was Will Shakespeare. The woman, dark-haired, beautiful, wore cloth of silver and was . . .

Kit stopped. It couldn’t be the Lady Silver.

What would an elf do in London?

Kit stared as the couple disappeared through a door into the fifth floor the shabby building.

What could Will be doing with such a woman? Would this be Will’s wife?

Kit smiled at the thought. How could Will, with his much-mended wool suit, his receding hairline, his meek look, procure a wife like that exquisite creature?

How lovely she’d looked, even from the back, with her dark silky hair, her gown of silver cloth, her steps like a soft, hypnotic dance.

She reminded Kit of his first love, that elf lady that he’d loved perhaps not wisely, but too well.

Again, the thought of someone like Will winning the hand of one such as she made Kit smile.

But why would a woman have Will for a lover, who wouldn’t have him for a husband? And if not his lover, why would she go into his room alone with him?

Or was there some conspiracy already here?

Did this woman—by her looks, a great noble lady, or a great whore—seek Will for something other than his looks and his homely charms?

More likely she sought him for secret messages, secret plotting, secret maneuvering. London was as rotten with plots as a stray dog with fleas.

Relief washed over Kit like a breath of fresh air. The conscience he’d not been aware of disturbing ceased troubling him.

Maybe he was not concocting a plot unaided. Perhaps Will was not the sweet innocent he appeared to be.

Perhaps Kit would find true guilt where he’d thought to find gullible innocence.

Maybe Will’s involvement with this court lady spelled doom for Essex—deserved doom—relieving Kit of the dread guilt of entrapping someone as innocent and unsullied as Imp himself.

Kit climbed the rickety wooden stairs with a light step. Every step creaked beneath his boots and the banister shook like an unsound tooth.

Kit would find out what the good burgher was up to.

Knocking on the door, Kit waited. He could hear rustling on the other side of the door, then an urgent whisper.

He’d just raised his hand to knock again when the door opened.

A flushed Will stood in the doorway, raking his scant hair back from his domed forehead with the gloved fingers of one hand, and wiping his mouth on the back of his other glove.

Shakespeare looked as embarrassed and surprised as a cat caught at the cream.

Kit smiled at him, his slow, practiced smile. “Good eve, good Shakestaff.”

Kit couldn’t, of course, just ask Shakespeare who the woman was that Will had hidden in his room.

Shakespeare would lie or, worse, not answer, not even giving Kit the benefit of guessing the truth behind a lie.

No. Kit would use other bait to work his way into the house, to work his way into Will’s confidence, to find out all there was to know about this man that he might more easily entrap him.

The man was desperate for a job, any job. Kit remembered seeing Will in St. Paul’s standing in front of the Si Quis door. A job in the theater would seem to him his heart’s desire, a very dream come true.

“I thought on your plight,” Kit said, and smiled at Shakespeare, who looked more than a little bewildered. “I thought on your plight, good Wigglestick, friendless and jobless in London, and I thought on your poem and your excellent taste in playwrights.

“If I were to give you a note for Philip Henslowe, he would surely hire you to play odd parts in the theater. Not big parts, mind, only this man’s servant, that man’s mute friend. Yet you’d be paid from the common take.”

As Kit spoke, he leaned in, to look at Will’s room. He leaned now this way and now that, discerning the inside of very poor lodgings.

The wooden floor was strewn with rushes, in the old-fashioned country way. But these rushes looked old and dusty. The table, upon which an ink-stone, pens, and paper rested, was old and sagged upon one leg shorter than the others.

Nowhere could Kit see a trace of the fair stranger, the woman with the dark hair, the body of an angel, that he’d glimpsed all too briefly.

Had his mind played tricks on him? Did the memory of his elven love, coming upon the shocks of the last hour, make him suffer illusions?

It couldn’t be. Kit had done much in the way of madness, but never yet dreamed a woman out of the whole cloth of his mind.

Were he ever to do that, they might as well come and take him to Bedlam.

Yet, as if to tantalize him with his own possible madness, a smell of lilac wafted to his nostrils—the smell of the magical fairykind, the smell of Kit’s lady love in that distant summer, the memory of which still quickened his blood and sped his thought.

He shook his head to clear it.

Will Shakespeare, who’d done no more than open his mouth as if to make some answer, closed it again.

Trust the clod to think the head shake applied to him.

“Speak, good Shakestaff, speak,” Kit said.

Will took a deep breath and inclined his head briefly. “I thank you, good Master Marlowe, I thank you. To own the truth . . . I dare not lie to you, as I could use a job and the coin it brings. But I had just latterly . . . that is, today, on the way home, I saw a man . . . . I believe there’s plague in the city, and I believe the theater might close again.”

Oh. Plague.

Plague again, after the plagued winter. The plague, a summer disease, had ravaged all through the cold winter in London and seemed to have vanished early spring. Let it not be back again. Kit hated the plague, the stench of death wafting through the narrow streets, the miasma of rotting bodies blanketing London as it were a vast, open graveyard.

Yet, plague or not, Kit must make sure that Imp was safe of the stalking danger of the secret service, that other plague that moved through this twilight of the Queen’s realm plucking at will the innocent and the guilty alike.

And to save Imp, Kit must sacrifice Will Shakespeare.

To sacrifice Will, Kit must know him better. Every play necessitated research. Yes. Kit would make himself Will’s friend.

“You must not fear,” he heard himself say, and with eager hand he clutched at the rough stuff of Will’s sleeve. “There will be no plague. You must try the theater. You have talent for poetry—talent such as the gods give, such as must be used for the good of all humanity. Trust not vile fate. Make your fate. Take your destiny in your own hands and mold it. Here, Will Shakespeare, let me give you that note of which I spoke. Let me get paper.” Saying this, he tried to push his way past Will and into the room, toward the table, where pens and papers lay in disarray. From that room wafted the smell of lilac, the smell of elvenkind, the smell of the only woman Kit had ever loved. The only woman and, aye—Kit remembered as the blood rose, bold, to his cheeks—the only man. The elf of Kit’s worship had been both by turns, now Quicksilver of the moonlight-bright hair, the broad shoulders, and the moss green eyes, now Silver with her rounded body and her metallic eyes.

Could it be Silver, now within that room? Kit pushed forward.

“No,” Will yelled, his face contorted in anguish, even as his solid, country-boy body blocked Kit’s access to Will’s rooms. “No. I pray, wait. I’ll get the paper myself.” And taking a deep breath, Will flung the door closed.

Hearing the latch slide to, Kit blinked.

Will would lock the door? Why?

After all the good Kit had done to Shakespeare—well, all the good Shakespeare thought Kit intended to do for him—Shakespeare would shut the door?

Was Shakespeare perhaps not what he seemed? Was he so sophisticated that he saw through Kit’s deception?

Or had he decided that Kit was insane or drunk and took this opportunity to thus rid himself of an inopportune visitor? Or was Will’s visitor that important that Will must hide her at all costs? Oh, Kit must devise a watch upon Will’s house, to wait for this woman’s return.

Imp might do it. Anything to get Imp away from that house where the councilmen might seek him out.

Kit stared at Will’s unpainted, splintered door rancorously, wishing to know the secrets it hid.

Would Will ever come out again?

But the latch slid back, and Will handed Kit two sheets of rough paper and a quill, and held an ink horn in his hand, ready for the dipping.

“I thank you, Master Marlowe, for your pains. Indeed, I find not the words to express my gratitude.”

Kit forced a smile to form upon his face, a smile that hurt his muscles with forcing it—like aching legs will hurt with one further step, like an aching head will rebel at the prospect of one more thought.

If so grateful, why not innocently honest? If not honest, then why did he look it and torment Kit’s conscience thus?

Did Will conspire? Indeed, it seemed so.

Oh, that Kit could uncover this plot. Tomorrow night, he must get Imp to watch Will’s door. One more urchin wouldn’t be noticeable in the melee of Shoreditch at night and Imp was ever good at escaping his bed and his mother’s vigilance.

Kit struggled to think, struggled to speak, in his honeyed tones, in his most polite patter. “Good Shakesstick, I treasure your gratitude, but this . . .” He lifted the quill and the paper in his hand. “This will hardly do for writing, and I would more appreciate if your gratitude were translated into a ready table upon which to write.”

Kit thought he heard a muffled giggle answer his words and again tried to walk in past Will, who without seeming to do it, adroitly blocked Kit’s path with simple stubbornness and wide countryman shoulders.

“Dear Wigglespear,” Kit started.

“No, please, Master Marlowe, do me the honor of not stepping into my abode, for like onto the abode of the Roman centurion, it is unfit for your presence.”

Kit blinked, stopped by such a heavy metaphor. “I’m neither God in man, nor are you . . . . No, Master Wigglestaff. I thought to do you a kindness, but I will not write on mine own knee while perched on this unsteady platform of yours.” His hand that held the pen gestured toward the precipice, unguarded and deep, on the side of the stairs that didn’t lean against the house.

“No.” He handed Will both quill and paper. “If this is how you treat your benefactors, Master Tremblelance, I can see well enough that you wish for no benefice. I shall be gone.”

A flush, like a dark red tide, climbed Shakespeare’s thick neck to tinge his cheeks. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple rising and falling above the frayed, dingy lace collar of his shirt.

“If that’s how you see it . . . . If that’s how you must do, Master Marlowe, I understand. Though I, myself, appreciate the attempt at helping me and wish you’d not take offense so easily. But I see . . . . I see it’s useless and I thank you for the good deed you would have done, even if averted.”

Kit turned his back and took two steps down the narrow stairs. Two steps, and he stopped, looking down at the smelly, muddy alley below. He expected Will to change his mind, to beg him to come back, to beg him to come in.

Then Kit would see the woman Will hid, and maybe learn what plot lurked behind Will’s innocent look.

But looking up, he saw that Will had started shutting the door slowly and reluctantly, as a man that sees opportunity vanish down the staircase of misfortune.

“Wait,” Kit yelled. “Wait. God’s death, man, you’re more stubborn than I.”

He forced a grin upon the creases of anger and frustration that plied his skin. “You’re more stubborn than I and that has to be good. That has to bode well for your chances to make a living in this madhouse we call London, in this plague-infested bedlam we call the theater. Here, man, here, here.” Climbing the steps in a hurry, Kit stood on the narrow perch at the top, and pulled paper and quill from Will’s hands.

“Stand not amazed,” Kit said as he squatted and set the paper on his knee, half closing one eye against the precipitous drop on one side of him. “Stand not amazed. Reach me that ink horn.” And yet, as he sat there, uncomfortable and dangerously balanced, he cast an eager eye inside the room, at the comfortless bed, the draggled stool, the precarious table.

But nowhere did he catch another fleeting glimpse of skin like cream, of hair like midnight spun, entire, from the dreams of man. Or yet of golden hair and broad shoulder and the regal bearing of the elf prince that was the Lady Silver’s other aspect.

Will knelt and offered the ink horn.

Kit dipped his quill in it and wrote quickly, with the practice and ease of one accustomed to such task. And to none other, he thought, making a face at remembering how clumsy he had been with his father’s cobbler tools, in his far-off, despised childhood. He remembered his father’s frustrated rage at what he viewed as Kit’s intentional clumsiness, and Kit’s mind skittered away from further memory.

Philip Henslowe, he wrote. I beg you as a favor and a consideration, if you wish me to bring you my next play first, that you look upon my friend, Will Shakespeare, of Warwickshire for a role in the play you currently present. It need not be a great part. A mute servant, a silent friend will do, provided he gets paid at the end of the day.

He underlined the last line three times, well acquainted with Henslowe’s occasional lapses from honesty, with the actors that never got paid until they cornered the theater owner and, by the force of fists and daggers, demanded their share of the day’s take.

But if you would, of your kind heart, do my friend a favor, this poor playwright would feel indebted enough not to show his next play to milord of Pembroke’s men first.

He signed it with a flourish, writing his name with the same spelling he’d used at Cambridge, Christopher Merlin.

The more ancient spelling of his patronymic appealed to Kit’s sense of being a wizard, a supernatural being, in control of his destiny. Of being other than a poor cobbler’s son, circled by plotters, a long way from home and terrified.

He remembered the dark, swaying carriage, the threatening voices all the more threatening for rarely rising above a whisper. Sweat sprang upon his brow.

Fearful that his fear, his sudden recoil, would show in his face, he handed the paper to Will and started, quickly, down the steps, not waiting for thanks, not trying to force his way into the room again.

It was not until he was on firm ground that he realized, by the thin light of the distant moon, that he’d stained his fine new gloves with ink. The left one had a spot of ink near the index finger.

He rubbed at it to no avail as he hurried home through darkened streets.

Home to Imp, whose life depended on the cunning of his undeserving, unknowledged father.

Will would do for baiting Kit’s trap, but now the trap remained to be built.

And could Will indeed be made to appear the mastermind of a great plot?

Kit shook his head. Hard to tell. For who knew what hid in the hearts of men? Kit had always been good with words and the building of fiery illusions with his rhetoric. And he’d ever been bad—bad indeed—at guessing what other people knew or felt.

What if Will was truly a mastermind? What if he had secret contacts of his own?

Scene 9

Will’s room. Amazed, Will closes the door and turns to Silver, who stands at the farthest corner of the room, leaning on the dingy wall.

“Will?” she asked, and her voice trembled in asking it. Silver bit her lip, but it didn’t help. It would not keep the tremor at bay, and her voice trembled again as she piped uncertainly, “Was that Kit Marlowe? Was it Kit Marlowe at the door?”

Through her mind ran memories she thought long forgotten, memories of Kit Marlowe as a shy, demure divinity student.

At least half the fun of seducing him had come from that shy way of his, his uncertainty about how to act, how to behave, his conviction that he was doing something horribly wicked and out of bounds for a Christian soul.

Which—Silver knowing precious little of mortal souls, Christian or else—he might very well have been.

But she remembered Kit’s eager enthusiasm, once his hesitation had vanished.

Silver remembered Kit’s lips searching, seeking, attempting to drink her very soul, his lust such as only a young man can feel in the early spring of his years.

She remembered their bodies entwined beneath the ancient copse of trees in the abandoned monastery at the outskirts of Canterbury.

Once he’d lost his reserve, how he had loved, and how the love of elvenkind had maddened him, beating upon his heated blood like the smith’s hammer upon red-hot iron.

Kit had loved Silver and Quicksilver both, the elf in both aspects, not caring under which form the elf embraced him, so long as the elf did.

Silver herself hadn’t loved Kit, couldn’t pretend to. As for Quicksilver, as much as Silver could understand that side of her nature, Quicksilver had nurtured for Kit a tender infatuation that yet fell as short of true love as the light cast by a firefly fell short of the shine of a star.

But she remembered that fevered love of Kit’s, that adoration that had perfumed her nights like incense.

Remembering it, her heart beat faster, her heart beat kindly for the man she’d just seen—his face pinched by some unnamed worry, his smiles all cynical pretending and his generosity a strange, imposing one that made no sense and seemed to strike against the normal way of courtesy.

“Was that Kit Marlowe?” she demanded, grabbing Will’s sleeve and holding it until the man, seemingly waking, blinked at her.

“Kit? Yes, it was Kit,” he said. “And look you here, he has given me an introduction to the theater owner and told me if I go early, I’ll surely get a job. Look, and he signed it with his own hand.”

Looking over Will’s shoulder, Silver read the signature and felt a sick turn in her stomach.

Merlin.

Oh, Kit was of that race well enough. It had been the unused elven magic burning in him, the unaware icy power hidden beneath the eager human fire that first had called her to him. But his being of Merlin’s race meant not that he had Merlin’s power. With Sylvanus raging free, Kit’s heritage was a dangerous flag that he should not wave.

She wished Kit would not blazon forth that name as a shield, when it would shield him from precious little.

When it could well call the attention of Sylvanus, Sylvanus who fed on death and suffering, Sylvanus . . . .

Silver felt as though she’d swallowed a lump of ice whole and it had nestled in her stomach, leeching her limbs of strength. She’d thought she cared not for Kit and yet, at the thought of what might happen to the man should Sylvanus find him, both her heart and Quicksilver’s outraged feelings rose in alarm.

She had thought she cared not for Kit, but still something in her did care for him or for that memory of their joint youth so conjoined with the tender memory of his love for her.

Once more, Silver fell short of true elven ice and detachment. Sylvanus would have laughed at her.

But she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d kept track of his movements over the years. Some protective quality remained after the lust had burned out.

And she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d never thought to worry for him as she worried for Will.

Now panic quickened and outraged dormant affection. It was as though her youth itself were threatened and her tender memories under siege.

“Why is he in London? What brought him here?” She felt something like a premonition, though her power didn’t run to prophecy. She felt a cold despondent fear, a thing somewhat like what humans talked about when they said as if someone walked over their grave.

Will waved her away. “It matters not. Look here, it gives me the power, it gives me a chance to get a job in the theater. Look here, it gives me a chance to learn how to write plays by watching them acted and how the audience reacts. And you heard what Kit Marlowe said, about my talent. You heard what he said, he who is the very Muses’ darling.”

“What did he say?” Silver asked, not caring, feeling only that though elves had no graves, their stuff melting into the magic and fire that had first created the universe, something had touched her and foretold . . . death. For her or for whom? For Kit? For Will? For the whole cursed world?

Though Kit was vain and shallow, though Kit had grown older and pinched, yet Silver remembered him in the warm heat of his youth. And though there was to Will that meanness which tightened his eyes and focused him only on his wife and brood, yet Silver had loved him once, loved him truly. Perhaps—she thought, as she looked on those golden falcon eyes, the intensity of the emotions that showed on his face—perhaps she loved him yet with some corner of her being, some particle of her magical might.

As for the world, she would fain save that, too, if for nothing else because human and elven worlds were linked and a blight on one was a blight on the other. And because Quicksilver had loosened this doom upon the world.

She thought of the withering crops, the mist of magical plague spreading as Sylvanus’s dark might swept over the fields toward London. The plague had been birthed by Sylvanus’s monstrous corruption of his state.

What was the equivalent of that withering, in the elven world?

She couldn’t contact Ariel with her mind. Not without Ariel’s finding out more about Silver than Silver wished Ariel to know. She hoped the hill was well.

Will was telling her about what Kit had said, and what he had implied, about Will’s wish to succeed.

“Listen, listen, Will, you must listen to me,” she said, possessed of renewed energy and attempting to make the mortal hear her as he had not before. “You are in danger. That is why I came here. I didn’t know that Kit was in danger also. But he is, and you must listen. My ill-begotten brother has hurt the Hunter and thus made the world rock upon its foundations—the plague, you mentioned it to Kit—the plague is the effect of what my brother did to the Hunter.”

Will looked up from his paper and swept her with an unattending, uncaring gaze. “The Hunter? What am I to the Hunter or the Hunter to me? Why come you to London to tell me that woodland divinities are threatened?”

“The Hunter is not a woodland divinity. The Hunter is . . .” Silver’s words failed her. She put both of her hands on Will, one on each shoulder.

She looked intently into his eyes. “The Hunter is ancient and important and I did not know he could be injured, and he says, he says if—”

She shook her head, stopped. She did not wish to tell Will about the fire in Stratford.

She could well imagine how he would react to such a threat to his family.

Even less did she wish to acknowledge Quicksilver’s guilt in what had transpired.

What Will would think of this, she also knew well. That she was a temptress, a danger, and that he must get well away from her. No. Warn him of the immediate danger and be done.

“My brother has learned to feed on human suffering, on human pain, on human death, as the gods of old did. He has no true body and yet, incorporeal, he can feed and gain power from death. I’m sure he’s come to London to feed on the deaths from this plague. We cannot afford to let him do so.”

Will’s eyes narrowed when she mentioned the plague, but he shook his head stubbornly. “Milady,” he said, and his voice had gone all cold, dripping with icicles and foretelling separation. “Milady, what is your brother to me? What is his power? Why should I be the arbiter and judge of elven disputes?” His eyes narrowed further, but with suspicion. “Do you think to make me your dupe once more? To make me commit your crimes for you?”

Silver gasped at the surprise of this accusation.

Her crimes? What did he think of her?

Her eyes filled with tears, and while she stomped her foot at the humiliation of being thus reduced to tears by a mortal, she heard her voice issue through her lips, shaky and high, “Oh, that you dare. Oh, that you say such things. Will, I would never . . . . That was before I loved you.”

She stretched her hands for him, and he pushed them back, his hands firm and unfeeling.

“Lady, you never loved me.”

And before she could protest, he added, “Lady, I care not.”

“You must care,” she said.

Didn’t the fool man see that his own world depended upon that other shadowy, supernatural world, like a tennis ball tethered to a paddle, which can no more go than the string will let it, and which must burn if the paddle burns? Did he not understand that Sylvanus would grow with his feeding, and need more death to feed him anew?

Did he not know that whatever Sylvanus meant, surely he meant to destroy the world?

All this she flung at him in desperate shrilling.

Will shook his head. He set the paper on his desk, and looked up at her. “No more. I care not for you nor for your world. I care for my family, for my wife and children, for my poems that I might perfect and which might bring me fortune and the ability to make my son Hamnet a fine gentleman, and to buy fine clothes for my daughters and give them a dowry that will make them gentlemen’s wives.” He crossed his arms upon his chest. “I care not for you nor for your kingdom, nor for your shadowy plots that always bring me misfortune and blight what I hold dear. It is my wife I love, Lady Silver, not you.”

The words hurt. Being compared with Anne Shakespeare, with her coarse hands, her coarser figure, nettled the Lady Silver like a well-applied bur will nettle the body of a sleeper.

She heard her voice, shrill, a fishwife demanding accounting for her husband’s misdeeds. “You mean that not. How can you mean it? Your wife more than I? Have you forgotten?” And on an unconsidered, reckless impulse that swept over her as if come out of elsewhere to overwhelm her reason, she advanced toward him, arms extended.

Will put his hands forward, and pushed her away. “No. Be gone. I have no time for your mad games. I must be at the theater early morning.”

Checked in her advance, Silver trembled. She stepped back, trying to recover what of her dignity subsisted. What had she been going to do? Kiss Will? Make love to him?

Hadn’t Quicksilver promised Ariel never more to change to Silver? Never more to let Silver have her way with Will?

Bad enough he’d broken the first promise. Bad enough, though perhaps justified by his need to seek Will’s help. Will was as much more likely to give in to Lady Silver than to Quicksilver.

But that was not working, and besides, what justification could Silver have for seducing Will?

Double adultery it would be. And a breach of promise and honor. No.

She must go. She must control herself and go, as Will wished her to go.

She must go out into the streets of London. She would get no help here, no rational word from Will. And she must find what had brought Sylvanus to London.

Without knowing how or why, Silver knew that Sylvanus meant to dethrone her—him—meant to destroy all that she had ever held dear, even Will and Kit.

But she wasn’t sure how Sylvanus could hope to do that, could hope to prevail against the might of the fairy hill, or the strength of mortal reality.

And not knowing it, she knew not how to battle it.

Scene 10

A neighborhood in Southwark. Amid the muddy fields, the reeking, unpaved lanes, some poor houses stand, tall but graceless and looking like slums anywhere and any when—as though built by children, hastily, with the poorest materials available. Down the narrow, dark street, Kit walks, his clothes strangely out of place in this poor working neighborhood.

Kit walked blindly. The memory of the elf lady he’d once loved overpowered him—the dark lady who could also be a fair youth—took over his senses. He remembered hair of black silk and pale golden hair like moonlight overspilled through a dark night. He remembered hands now soft and small and now large and weapon-calloused. But both hands had been, alike, knowing and daring, both full of arts that humans had never learned, of pleasing vices and gentle sins, of sweetness and tempting older than any human.

Kit remembered the scent of lilac permeating all and making him drunk.

Walking, Kit found, unbidden upon his lips, the simple poem he’d written for Silver—and Quicksilver—in the too brief flowering of his youth.

“Come live with me and be my love,” he sang. “And I will give you beds of roses and a thousand fragrant posies.”

Somewhere, in the darkened upper floors of the nearby houses, someone cursed loudly.

“It’s that creature, Marlowe,” a louder, shriller female voice answered. “He’s drunk again.”

Marlowe smiled and, drunk on nothing but memory, lifted his voice that had once been famous in the Canterbury Cathedral choir, “Our fair swains will—”

A dog barked, and another, shrill voice rose from a window, far above the street, this one saying, “Oh, not again.”

“Kit, Kit, Kit.” Someone small and looking, in the distant moonlight, like little more than a dark shadow, came running down the center of the street and threw himself at Kit’s midbody.

Hit, Kit shut up, jumped back to regain his balance, and reaching forward, grabbed his small attacker around the waist.

“What is this?” he said, recognizing Imp full well, but pretending not to. “What is this? Pray, do footpads come this small?”

He lifted the squealing boy up, till Imp’s face was at a level with his. “Speak, sirrah, want you my purse?”

A small image of Kit’s own face looked at him—the grey eyes the same, cut in the same almond shape and surrounded by the same dark lashes. The child wore his hair long, tied back with a leather strap, and his clothes were much too fine for this poor area of town.

For years now, Kit had formed the habit of giving his old clothes to his landlady, Madeleine, who, with great cunning and ability, cut them down and took the best portions to make perfect clothing for Imp. So Imp wore a velvet doublet and hose in the best style of two years ago, with a fine lawn shirt whose collar showed, clean and unpatched, around his small neck.

“Ah, a well-dressed footpad,” Kit said, marking how much more the boy weighed in his hands than a month ago.

Imp would be what . . . . seven, for it had been almost eight years ago that Kit, first come to London and penniless, had succumbed to the blandishments of his landlady, then so newly a widow that the ensuing product of their brief, unloving tryst was taken by all to be her husband’s get.

By all who had no eyes, Kit thought, marveling once more that every neighbor didn’t point a finger at him and name him Imp’s father, when Imp’s paternity was written all over his son’s guileless face.

He shook the child with mock fierceness. “Tell me, rogue, are you one of these scions of nobility who go around robbing poor people for their fun?” he asked.

Imp opened his eyes very wide. As always, he seemed none too sure that Kit was joking. “I am Richard. Richard Courcy, as you well know, you fool.” He kicked his legs. “Put me down. Put me down. You were making the fool of yourself again, Kit. And you are drunk.”

It was Kit’s turn to laugh as he set the child down. “Peace, Lord Morality. I am not drunk, haven’t drunk anything since I took dinner, much too long ago. And that was but a vile ale, milord, as you would not give your dogs, and certainly not enough to make my spirits soar.” He tugged on the child’s ponytail. “It must be the joy of your presence, milord.”

Imp looked up, and frowned slightly. He had this trick of narrowing his eyes, of lowering his eyebrows upon them, while pinching his mouth in something not quite a smile.

It reminded Kit of his own mother, and of the loving, patient way in which she’d endured his childish follies.

Unlike Kit’s father, who usually made his leather strap speak and loudly, too, being convinced that sparing the strap would spoil the child.

Kit put his hand on Imp’s shoulder, very gently, almost as an apology to that other Kit long ago, who’d endured not so gentle a father.

But who had a father who acknowledged him, Kit’s conscience reminded him. A father willing to call him son, as Imp lacked.

“Mock not, Kit,” Imp said. He looked grave and something sparked in the grey eyes, something that made Kit think of tears. “Mock me not, for I must tell you something serious.”

Kit picked the child up again, carefully—Imp’s legs on either side of his waist, his hands supporting the boy. Kit did not care if Imp’s muddy shoes ruined his fine clothing.

“What, child?” he asked. This was the closest he’d ever get to calling his boy son. “What? What is so serious that you must look at me like a preacher displeased with sinners?”

“A man came by,” Imp said, and his voice trembled. “An evil man, with dark hair and a nasty face. And he told Mother that you . . . He told Mother he must speak to you, or else all was up with us.”

Tears formed in the child’s eyes.

A man with an evil smile?

Oh, curse Henry Mauder, curse the creature. He’d been scaring Imp, too. Not content with making Kit himself ill with fright for Imp’s sake, he’d frightened Imp.

Kit felt a murderous rage, such as, had Henry Mauder been to hand, Kit would gladly have broken Mauder’s skinny neck with the legs of Mauder’s clerical black hose.

Imp put his forehead against Kit’s shoulder, while Kit walked home along the darkened street.

His steps resounded, lonely, off the facades of surrounding buildings, and each whisper seemed magnified by the darkness.

“Mother says if you bring danger to us, you must go,” Imp said. “She says you’re a dangerous man and I should not let you . . .” A long silence. “She says you’re not a man like other men and that you’ve spent too much time around the theater and got confused by boys who dress like women.”

Oh, by the devils and the eternal fire, Kit thought, and tightened his hold on Imp. “Your mother is scared and knows not what she says,” he said. Which was true enough, though Madeleine had come up with this explanation long ago, to excuse Kit’s not wishing to repeat their clumsy coupling.

She could never understand that it was other arms he longed for, nor could he tell her that her love paled when compared to that of elvenkind, like coarse bread paled next to the dainties of kings.

No, he couldn’t tell her that, and Madeleine Courcy had first conjectured then decided that Kit must prefer embraces of another kind, and finally told one and all that Kit sought this illicit love in alleys and darkened places.

At first it had amused Kit who, relieved that Madeleine no longer pursued him, had taken her ready explanation for his tastes and even let her spread it, thinking that illicit dealing of this kind—rarely persecuted and mostly winked at—would mask other illicit dealing, his presence and his actions in other places as his majesty’s courier, or as a secret service man.

And then, in a way, Kit felt as though he could not deny it. In the memory of his one love there commingled Silver’s soft charms and Quicksilver’s broad back, Silver’s silken midnight hair and Quicksilver’s golden hair for which the youth of Greece would surely have risked much more than for the golden vellum.

Oh, true, it was Silver who had first attracted him, when he was young and innocent. He’d endured Quicksilver for Silver’s sake. But in small steps, so small that Kit wasn’t himself sure how he’d got there, Kit had found that he loved Quicksilver as much as Silver and, when his love affair ended, missed them both equally. And sometimes, to dull his longing, he’d taken consolation of that kind, as fleeting and unsatisfying a consolation as his encounter with Madeleine had proven—as futile and as far short of his elf love.

So, he’d not contradicted Madeleine, feeling she was justified in at least a part of her mad suspicions.

But that she’d tell Imp to be wary of Kit, as though Kit’s cravings would run to children, as though Kit could be so unnatural and accursed—that shocked Kit to his core.

“Your mother knows not what she says, Imp. I love you as though you were my own son.” His voice caught in saying the words, and it hurt, as if in speaking he had torn the skin of his throat, the restraint of his truth.

“What about the man?” Imp asked. “The man who came? Mother said he was dangerous and you are dangerous and you must give up your rooms.”

Kit shook his head, and swallowed hard. This time as other times past, the two times Kit had got arrested for being caught amid street brawls, the third time, a year ago, when Kit had been arrested for counterfeit coining undertaken as part of a project for the secret service—every time Madeleine protested and threatened to throw him out, it was but a plea for Kit’s money, maybe for Kit’s love.

His love he couldn’t give her, but money he could and aplenty.

Long ago he could have traded these threadbare lodgings, which he’d once shared with Tom Kyd, another playwright, for better lodgings in a better part of town.

Thomas Walsingham’s patronage assured Kit of that ability.

But Kit liked these lodgings, and needed to be near Imp, even if under the pretense of a renter and a family friend.

He shook his head. “Fear not, my Lord Despair. Your mother is a mother and she worries and in her worry she says who knows what.”

Imp was Kit’s well-loved son, and Kit would stay nearby and would protect him, and would ensure the boy went to university when the time came.

Imp would be a great philosopher, a great master, greater than his father by that much as Kit was than his cobbler sire.

“What about the man with the teeth like a wolf?” Imp asked, and sitting up straight, held his two fingers in front of his mouth, as prefiguring cruel fangs.

“Teeth like a wolf, had he?” Kit laughed, thinking of Henry Mauder. “I rather thought him more like a dog who craves a bone and has none. A wolf’s teeth would be like this.” Giving low growls, Kit pretended to ravage Imp’s shoulder.

The child smelled of herbs and rosewater.

It made Kit wish he could be a child again, running free in the abandoned orchards of the monastery in Canterbury. It would almost be worth enduring again his father’s beatings for that.

Imp laughed loudly as Kit, who’d kept walking, carrying the child, arrived at the door to his lodgings.

Before he could open it, the door was thrown open, by Madeleine Courcy.

Imp’s mother had never been beautiful. Or never since Kit had known her.

At least ten years older than Kit, when he had met her she had already shown a severe face, a closed, hardened expression, probably acquired from living for years under the thumb of a ponderous Puritan husband.

One beautiful feature she’d had then which had drawn Kit like a magnet. Her waist-long hair had been midnight black and silky, so that if Kit put his face in it, he could pretend to himself that this was his love, the elf lady Silver.

But Madeleine’s hair had coarsened and turned white and her figure, once good enough to pretend it might be Silver’s, had thickened, leaving her with an immense, shapeless bosom that overshadowed a body where no waist emphasized the broader hips.

“What is this?” she asked in the sharp French accent she hadn’t lost after fifteen years in England. “What is this? You debauch my son? Why is he not abed?”

Kit swallowed. Lifting Imp, Kit handed him to Imp’s mother. “He came to meet me,” Kit said, feeling like he’d committed some crime. “He came to meet me, and I brought him back.”

Madeleine’s black eyes, which he’d never been able to convince himself were just like Silver’s shiny metallic ones, narrowed and looked at him with unabated suspicion.

She took her child in her arms, and pushed Imp’s face against her shoulder, as if to cover his eyes.

Kit cleared his throat. “I hear you’ve had an unpleasant visit.”

“One? We’ve had them all day and they haven’t ceased yet,” Madeleine said, and compressed her lips as she glared at Kit. “It is time you should be quitting your rooms, Master Marlowe. You pay me not enough to endure the thread of constant feet, the suspicions of countless officers, the danger to my child. If my husband were alive, he’d have thrown you out long ago.”

If her husband were alive, likely Imp would never have existed, and Kit would have no reason to be here.

“Nothing will happen to Imp, madam,” he said. “And as for paying you, tell me how much you want, and like enough, I can find it.”

She glared at him over Imp’s shoulder.

Imp turned to look back at Kit, his pale little face anxious and drawn, visibly resenting the harsh words flying around him.

Kit remembered when he was very young and his parents argued, how it made him hide under the bed, how it made him wish he could stop existing.

Later, when he’d been scarcely older than Imp, he’d stood in front of his mother, protecting her from his father’s rages.

Madeleine opened her mouth and Kit drew breath, ready to counter imputations and insinuations, fearing she’d air, in front of Imp, what she thought she knew of Kit’s interests and amusements.

But instead, her mouth, which had learned her severity too early to be able to soften now, said, “His name is Richard, and I wish you’d stop calling him the name of a kind of demon. His name is Richard, after my sainted husband, his father.”

And as if she could rewrite Imp’s origins with her short words, she turned her back on Kit and vanished, down the long narrow hallway, to where her room and Imp’s lay.

Kit sighed and took his way up the stairs, to his own rented room.

That night, carefully watched, Imp would never dare climb the stairs in the dark and beg Kit for a story, as he did almost nightly.

So, Kit had time to plot the snare that would catch Essex and hold him at bay and thus allow Kit and Imp to go free.

First he must make sure Will voiced treacherous opinions and had contacts beyond his sphere with noblemen in Essex’s field.

Then it remained for Kit to invent a goal for this conspiracy—killing the Queen would always serve. Everyone feared the death of the childless monarch. It had become a national nightmare. And then Kit would denounce Will.

He paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling over his bed, remembering Will’s innocent look, his effusive gratitude.

How could Kit ensnare such a lamb?

He closed his eyes.

It must be.

If the noose thus designed to keep Imp alive and safe must catch in it that poor fool, Will Shakespeare, then so be it.

For one Imp, would Kit sacrifice the world.

Scene 11

The fairy palace. Queen Ariel sleeps on her high, gilded bed, beneath a green silk cover embroidered in gold thread. Suddenly, the darkness above sparkles with pinpoints of light that, like falling stars, burn for only a moment and then are gone. They leave behind a sulphurous stench of waning magic, and objects rain down on Ariel’s bedspread like large hailstones.

Ariel dreamed that Quicksilver was a child again, fourteen or fifteen no more and barely into the prolonged elven adolescence that would last till he was fifty.

They played together under a mighty oak, Quicksilver trying to steal a kiss and Ariel avoiding his advances and laughing.

Rain started pattering on them, heavy rain that quickly turned into gigantic rocks, which cut through leaves and broke the branches, and shred the wood of the wondrous overarching oak.

The air smelled of waning magic, of magic gone wrong.

“Beware, milord,” Ariel screamed. “Someone attacks us.”

But when she turned to look at him, Quicksilver was not beside her. He was away, at the edge of the human town, talking to a young man with dark curls and the golden eyes of a hawk.

Ariel woke with a muffled scream.

In her dark room, flashes of light showed her bed, her bedspread, all of it unreally lit, too white, too bright.

Something fell on her bed, something small and heavy. The smell in the air was real, not dreamed.

The smell of magic gone wrong.

Ariel reached for her bedside table where, at her word, a tall, never-consuming candle lit up, bringing cool, sane lighting to the room.

On her bed lay the countless bodies of many servant fairies, some lifeless, others yet twitching. Dying of some plague, some curse.

Ariel screamed. People ran down the hallway toward her room.

First arrived her maids, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Cowslip, in their nightly finery of silk lace and embroidered caps. They put their hands over their mouths and joined their screaming to their mistress’s.

After them came Malachite, who threw the door open and ran in, dagger at the ready. He didn’t scream, but sheathed his dagger, made a sound like a man drowning, and went pale, his legs visibly buckling beneath his long, white nightshirt.

He approached the bed and, with horror, poked his finger at a lifeless dragon-fly-fine wing, a small, perfect, humanlike body.

“They’re dead,” he said. He looked at Ariel with horrified green eyes, grown unusually large and scared upon his pale face. He swallowed. “They’re dead.”

He gaped at Ariel as though he expected her to explain the mystery of the servant fairies’ deaths. The dread wonder of death in deathless Fairyland.

His lips trembled.

Other people had come into the room, by twos, by threes, by trembling loneliness.

All of them, including Hyllas, the centaur ambassador, wore their nightclothes, which for Hyllas seemed to be a cap all askew on his dark curls.

And all of them looked horrified.

Ariel recovered her senses first.

“Stop screaming,” Ariel snapped at her maids, while yet servant fairies glowed and—their magic burned out—fell to writhing on the bed. “Stop screaming and fetch me my wrap.”

Peaseblossom, the quickest to recover, handed Ariel her gauzy wrap—though the maid’s gaze remained on the bed, her eyes yet wide and wondering. Ariel wrapped herself and stood up.

“Lords, ladies,” she said. “There’s nothing here to see, nothing. Our servants are suffering and I must minister to them, but for that I must have silence and peace.”

As she spoke, she noticed that several of the servant fairies, seemingly untouched, still flew amid the crowd. She stared at them, wondering what made them different from their stricken fellows, while the ladies and lords, muttering, withdrew to the door of the room.

They walked out but went no farther, collecting in little nervous groups and gossiping crowds in the hallway.

Ariel closed the door in their faces unceremoniously, and left alone with her servants, she walked back to the bed.

It didn’t take Ariel’s gift of second sight, acquired by being born on summer solstice, to allow her to see that what had killed the winged fairies was lack of magic. Their magic had failed somehow. That power that had come to elvenkind from the very first formation of the Universe had now deserted these small beings.

And not all of her gift could show her why the fairies’ magic had failed.

While Ariel watched, several of the dead fairies winked out, returning to the nothing that had birthed them, their bodies disappearing as their magic had.

“Milady, what is wrong?” Peaseblossom asked. The maid held her hands in front of her mouth and spoke through her fingers, as though afraid that her words would give yet more force to dread reality.

Ariel shook her head and, with imperious thought, sent for the leader of the servant fairies, a prim and proper small creature called Marmalade.

Marmalade had tawny hair and a bronze-colored body. Today, her tiny features looked as sick, as bleached of color, as Malachite’s had.

Winking her light in the speech of the winged ones, she told Ariel that the servant fairies who were dying were the least powerful of them and that power blight and death seemed to be escalating, climbing the ranks of power.

A mysterious illness, Marmalade said.

Soon, Marmalade said, all servant fairies would be dead. And who after them? As she spoke, tiny Marmalade cast a frightened eye to the bed, where fairies still dropped and writhed and vanished.

See, she winked and blinked her light in fear. See, oh, lady, how they came to you for help in their extremity. Who will be next to feel this blight?

Changelings, Ariel thought, though she didn’t say it. Changelings—though given elven power and elven nature at their adoption—never completely lost their mortal dross, nor did they ever acquire as much power as those elven born.

They were the members of the hill who had the lowest magic, after the servants.

She thought of Malachite’s color, wan and pale, turned from its normal on seeing the dying fairies.

He’d looked like he knew what was wrong and that he’d be next.

Faith, Malachite, Lord Malachite, Quicksilver’s right hand, Quicksilver’s friend, knew more about this blight and its likely course than anyone in the palace.

And Malachite alone had been with Quicksilver when they’d met whatever the menace was at the boundary of Fairyland, near Stratford-upon-Avon.

Thus thinking, Ariel opened her door, and ignoring the many high lords and dazzling ladies of Fairyland who crowded around her and pressed her with questions and comments and condolences, she searched for Malachite.

Not finding him, she grabbed the arm of Igneous, Malachite’s friend and also a changeling.

Igneous was as blond as Malachite was dark, but his features also showed that blurring of perfection, that inexactitude that denoted a human-born elf.

However, unlike Malachite, he looked unconcerned by the fairy blight, or no more concerned than the true-born elves to whom he spoke. Resplendent in a bloodred nightshirt, he talked and gossiped with the crowding lords, venting opinions about foreign attack, or friendly fire, or perhaps a civil war amid servant fairies.

Ariel grabbed his arm and said, “Milord Igneous.”

Sobriety and seriousness came ill to Igneous’s face, with its small nose and broad, mobile mouth, but he strived for it, facing her. “Milady.”

“Have you seen Milord Malachite?”

“Nay, milady. Or rather, even before you asked, er, ordered us out of your room, Malachite walked out and, I thought, as far as I could discern, back to his room.”

“Thank you, milord,” Ariel said, and though knowing that her manner had startled the elf, she knew he would resume his peacock-bright preening as soon as she turned her back.

“Ariel, what’s this? And where is Quicksilver?” An elf of imposing presence pushed in front of Ariel. He looked not like Quicksilver but much like Sylvanus used to look: dark hair and beard, dark eyes, oval face, small pulpy mouth.

This was Vargmar, older brother to the late Oberon, Quicksilver’s uncle.

“I don’t know what this is, milord,” Ariel said, all cold disdain. “But milord the king, I wager, is attempting to remedy it.”

“Bah, king!” Vargmar said. “The impudent brat. A bastard of Puck’s, a low shape changer. Too young to reign. Too unstable to control even himself, less this mighty kingdom.”

Ariel would not argue with Quicksilver’s uncle. She turned her back on him and, aware that—around him—a small group of malcontents had started to gather, she headed for Malachite’s room.

Malachite’s bedroom door was down the hallway from Quicksilver’s, where he could be ever ready to run errands at the whim of his inconstant lord.

She knocked on it once, twice, knowing that she was watched by the entire court of Elvenland and a sleep-befuddled centaur in a night cap.

Twice more, and a faint answer came. “Yes?”

“Lord Malachite, I would fain speak with you,” she yelled.

Malachite opened the door. His pale face looked draggled and tearstained, his eyes swollen, his lips thickened with prolonged crying. His hands trembled, and his lips, too.

Ariel heard questions fly through the crowd, and fictions, too, about Malachite having done magic that caused the servants’ death.

Malachite raised lachrymose eyes to her, “You wish to speak to me here?”

Ariel shook her head. “In your room,” she said. “Milord.”

From his scared looks she imagined that he thought she believed the crowd. She pushed him into his room, where he went reluctantly, like a lamb to the slaughter.

The room was small and Spartanly furnished: a narrow oaken bed, covered in green silk, a narrow desk, a small trunk where Malachite, no doubt, kept his personal effects.

Only a large, whole-body mirror in a corner distinguished Malachite and the room as receivers of the king’s favor.

Yet, the view of green trees through the large, sparkling glass window, the warmth and cleanliness of the room, all these were what Malachite might never have aspired to, had the elves not kidnaped him from his cradle in Stratford so many years ago, leaving in his place a charmed piece of oak that to mortal eyes had looked like a sickly babe who had, presently, died.

“Milord, tell me why this is happening,” Ariel said.

He trembled worse, and gasped. “Lady, what is happening?”

“Do not mock me, milord, you know well. The servants are dying and a plague, a lack of power, clutches at the heart of Fairyland. Why, milord?”

Trembling and pale, Malachite shook his head. “I have done naught,” he said. “Naught with magic.”

Ariel felt her own lips press into a tight, tight line. “I never believed you had.”

And on those words Malachite paled yet more, when he should have been relieved. Ariel noted the change and sighed. “Milord, I cannot protect the hill as my lord ordered me if you do not tell me what’s causing this.”

“I promised not to tell you,” Malachite said.

“Promised? To whom could you have promised such?”

“The king,” Malachite said. “The king,” and his body trembled like a leaf in a storm.

Ariel stared at him, uncomprehending. “Why would the king exact such a promise?”

But he only threw himself on the floor and, pressing his face to the cool tiles, murmured, “Lady, I cannot tell you. Lady, the king made me swear . . . . I’m not to tell you.”

“Swear? Swear silence? What would you keep from me? What would he keep from me?”

But Malachite answered not, and in Ariel’s mind, a monstrous idea bloomed, like a poisonous flower upon an unsuspecting night.

“If your lord were here,” Ariel said, “would then magic be whole?”

Malachite gave her a sideways look, a small, surprised look, as if this thought had only now come to his own mind, as if he’d never thought it else.

“If he were here, then would all be well,” he said in a whisper.

Ariel took in breath. The air smelled still and dusty, as though the servant fairies, in dying, had tainted the very atmosphere with the mustiness of death, the dust of the tomb.

This was all caused by Quicksilver’s absence? But then why had Quicksilver gone to London? Why?

She remembered Malachite, pale and drawn, coming back from the confrontation at the boundary. How nervous he’d looked. How equivocal.

The menace had not been what they’d expected, he’d said. They’d taken care of it, he’d said.

But he looked like he lied, with his face tense and his eyes darting here and there, firefly afraid.

And Ariel had believed the expression and not the words. Fool Ariel.

Malachite, truthful Malachite, a changeling with hardly any power of his own, had told the truth while appearing to lie, and thus had he lied to his queen, while proclaiming verities.

They’d taken care of the menace indeed, which meant that Quicksilver must have gone to London upon his own pursuit. But what pursuit of his could cause this blight?

Malachite had lied with his hands and his eyes, and his sharp, timorous glances.

Quicksilver, irked at Ariel’s resistence, smarting from her offer to help him, which had insulted his insecure pride, Quicksilver had rushed to London, like a fool to soothe his offended love with . . . what?

Ariel was not such an innocent nor did she live as retired from the gossip of the hill as Quicksilver thought. She knew well enough who was in London. Will Shakespeare. Will. Shakespeare. Will on whom Silver had doted and for whom Quicksilver, himself, had borne quite an unseemly love.

That explained the blight and the crops withering in the fields, and this strange, humid heat that seemed to suffocate even as it warmed.

Ariel remembered well enough, from her childhood, the epic fights that had shaken the palace.

Unlike herself and Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s parents, Queen Titania and the great Oberon, had made no vow of fidelity to each other, nor would they have kept it if they had.

Yet, their jealousy was as furnace-hot as their mutual love was fierce, and their separate affairs and joint raging had shaken the foundations of the palace, the roots of Arden Woods.

And when they argued thus, ever, the disturbed magic had put a chill in the air, brought unseasonable warmth or cold upon the nearby humans, threw the spheres into inharmonious clashing.

Nothing like the blight had happened, but then Oberon and Titania had never separated. He’d never stopped loving her, nor she him till death had overtaken them together one night, in a sacred glade.

Ariel remembered the cold glare of Quicksilver’s moss green eyes, and his quick, impatient step as he left her that night.

Not there, any longer, the soft touch of their honeymoon. Not there, any longer, his eye pliant to love and quick to find favor.

No.

Quicksilver had left her. He cared no more. His love was dead and would not return.

And from the death of that love—from the divided powers of the hill—there came the blight that killed the weaker members of the elven realm.

“It is Will Shakespeare, is it not?” Ariel asked. “My lord has gone to him, has he not?”

Malachite scrambled up from the floor, and stared at her with uncomprehending eyes. “He homed in on the thought pattern of Will Shakespeare, sure,” Malachite said. “But only as a beacon to be found in a stormy sea.”

Or as a light of love, a taper, to light his way bedward. “This is a blight of unlove, a cursed blight. My lord has left us, has he not?” Ariel asked.

Malachite looked scared, but it was an odd fear, filled with a quickening of understanding behind the bold green eyes.

Something like hope? Or simply understanding?

Perhaps Malachite, himself, hadn’t understood what happened till now.

“My lord loves only you. Sure, he might stray but—” Malachite said, his voice low. “But I’m sure my lady . . .” He hesitated, and his voice broke.

Truthful Malachite, Ariel thought, who could tell no untruth, found lies coming oily and evasive to his mouth. He looked away from his queen, and like a child who knows he’s lying and doesn’t expect to convince, he said, “He loves you only, mistress. Beware, oh, beware jealousy, milady, for it is the green-eyed monster that mocks the meat upon which it feeds.”

Too late came his warning, too late his halfhearted assurance, for—already imagining Quicksilver changing to Lady Silver, imagining Silver or Quicksilver himself cavorting with a human in some shady London purlieu—Ariel could feel jealousy tearing at her heart like a hungry beast.

Outside, in the hallway, the centaur waited, tapping his hooves nervously upon the marble floor. He leaned in close to Ariel as she left Malachite’s room.

His hair smelled of olive oil and strange perfumes.

“It is a curse, is it not?” he asked. “This kingdom is cursed.”

Ariel nodded, not knowing what she did.

Scene 12

A street in Shoreditch, dark and narrow, hemmed by old buildings in dire need of painting. The street is deserted in the early morning hours, before sunrise. Many of the houses are boarded and bear the plague seal. Quicksilver walks in front of the sign for a hostelry: The Golden Lion. His light blue cloak billows in the early morning breeze, but his hair falls limp from the unnatural warmth and humidity of this unhealthy summer.

Quicksilver followed Sylvanus’s magical pattern here. The pattern and marks of Sylvanus’s dark power, which were to an elf’s souls like a signature to men: indelible and unmistakable.

He’d followed it through the dark night of men—the day of elves, feeling and sensing his way, darkly, amid the confusion of human souls and human minds, some vile enough to rival Sylvanus’s.

But he had it now. It was here.

Sylvanus lodged here, or hid here, in the upper floor of this ramshackle building.

Quicksilver pounded on the door. “Holla,” he called. “Awake within.”

For a while nothing answered him, then there was the rumble and knocking of furniture being pushed out of the way, and a low voice that approached while muttering.

“Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key. Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty: come in time; have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t.”

Quicksilver knocked again, impatient.

“Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other devil’s name?” The voice on the other side of the door neared very slowly, as if the speaker walked erratically. “Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: O, come in, equivocator,” the voice within muttered.

Quicksilver knocked in earnest.

“Knock, knock; never at quiet!” The voice was now right on the other side of the door, and Quicksilver could hear, with it, the sliding and thumping of locks and deadbolts.

The voice muttered still, “What are you? But this place is too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further: I had thought to have let in some of all professions that go the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”

The door started to open, but before it could, a voice called, “Quicksilver.”

Quicksilver looked up at a face that appeared on the window, in the second floor.

It was a face Quicksilver knew and had seen, at Arden revels in the green forest. It was the man from Stratford, the mortal who courted Peaseblossom and often came to join the fairy dance.

He looked like a man of Stratford, and open enough, with a round face and round, pale blue eyes.

But now, superimposed on those familiar features, another face moved, another set of features held sway: sharp, features, lupine in hunger and elongated with ill desire.

“Quicksilver,” Sylvanus said, speaking through the mortal’s mouth.

Quicksilver’s hair stood on end. What was here? What evil was this?

“Milord,” the tavern owner called, finally having thrown open the door. “Milord.” He was a big man, as wide as tall, with a scraggle of red hair on his amiable face. “You’ll pardon me, I didn’t know it was your highness knocking. I thought it would be a ruffian, a cutpurse.” As he spoke, he wiped his hands on the front of his white nightshirt, as no doubt he would wipe them on his apron during the day.

Quicksilver looked at him for a moment.

“Trouble you not about my intent,” Sylvanus’s voice yelled from the window above. “For soon nothing will matter to you.”

And on those words, energy—a bolt, a searing flame of magic—flew past Quicksilver’s face, to singe the door post.

The hosteller stepped back, shocked, while Quicksilver wheeled upon his heels to look up.

Where had Sylvanus got so much power? And if he had it, why misspend it so? Sylvanus could not fail to aim well.

“Canker blossom, dog, bastard,” Sylvanus’s voice yelled from above.

The face retreated within, and beyond the window, a man’s shape twisted and writhed, as if fighting something invisible. He looked like a puppet, ill-commanded by an inexperienced puppeteer.

Quicksilver stepped back, ready to hold the power of the hill as a shield between himself and eminent attack. But no attack came.

“He’s drunk, milord. Just drunk,” the hosteller said. “You there,” he shouted, looking up at the window. “Stop that, and do not defile my premises.”

“You will do as I command,” Sylvanus yelled.

The man at the window turned. His face emerged again. Then, with a violent, writhing twist, he fell from the window.

Quicksilver jumped back as the body hit the hard-packed dirt of the lane with a sickening sound.

Quicksilver’s heart pounding fast, he thought the man would be dead, would he not?

Had Sylvanus killed this man?

But even as he thought it, he heard Sylvanus’s voice, no longer coming from the man’s throat, “It failed this once, little brother. But triumph not, I will be back. And then will you rue the day you were born.”

“Sylvanus?” Quicksilver asked, stepping forward. Charity dictated that Quicksilver see if the man was still alive, that Quicksilver lend what help he could. But what if this was, again, Sylvanus’s trap, as the one back in Arden Woods?

As he neared, the man’s eyes fluttered open. Pale blue eyes, guileless and round.

“I got rid of him, didn’t I?” he asked in a thread of voice.

Quicksilver nodded, amazed, yet shying away from the still body.

“You’re the king,” the man said. He spoke slowly, in a voice little more than breath. His body lay twisted on the pavement, and he moved nothing save his eyes and lips. “The king of my lady’s queen.”

Quicksilver nodded.

“Tell her, tell Peaseblossom that Nick Bottom didn’t kill himself. He jumped from a window, aye, but to kill the bastard who had taken control of his body. Will you tell her that, lord?”

Quicksilver nodded, swallowed. “He took control of you? Sylvanus did?”

“Aye, if that’s his name. If that’s his name, he did. Last night, while I was drunk he approached me and then—he wore me like a doublet, milord.

“But an ill-fitting doublet I proved. I surprised him. I threw myself down. But I didn’t kill him. He ran off. I will die for it.”

Nick Bottom’s words came further spaced, and his eyes had acquired a stillness not likely to be dispelled by reviving life.

When Quicksilver thought he was dead, Nick Bottom yet revived, and taking a noisy breath, he said, “Only tell Peaseblossom, would you, lord?”

“I will tell her,” Quicksilver said.

“And would you have, milord, a bard set my story to music, the story of a weaver who loved an elf lady?” The blue eyes seemed to look onto the distant yonder, a distance even Quicksilver’s immortal eyes couldn’t penetrate. “And it shall be called Bottom’s dream, for it has no bottom.”

A last breath whispered through Nick Bottom’s lips and he lay still.

Quicksilver remained, horror-stricken.

So Sylvanus had learned to take over the bodies of men.

Oh, elven legend spoke of that, of dark elves who did so. The humans called it possession and blamed it on demons.

But it had not been done in millennia, and it had come to be doubted.

Why had Sylvanus chosen this man? How had Bottom managed to rid himself of Sylvanus?

“And now he’s dead,” the hosteller said, wringing his hands upon his nightshirt. “He was drunk and now he’s dead and what am I to do with him?”

Numbly, Quicksilver reached into his belt purse and handed the man coins. “Here is for burial,” he said. “And to send word to his family.”

“Thank you, milord. But will you not stay?”

The last question the hosteller yelled at Quicksilver’s retreating back as the king of elves walked down the street.

Here was an enigma, for which Quicksilver had no answer.

Why would Sylvanus need to take over the bodies of humans to drink the life force of other dying humans?

None of it made sense.

Scene 13

Kit Marlowe’s room, where he shaves at a basin set in an ornate iron stand, in front of a polished metal round, nailed to the wall. Imp, squeezed between the wall and the stand, beneath the improvised mirror, holds an empty ceramic jar of water, and stares at the movements of the blade with utter fascination.

Kit shaved.

His troubles whirled around in his mind, while his hand, unfailingly, scraped the blade against his cheek.

He must get to The Rose and intercept Will. He must get to know Will better and introduce the man to high personages.

Kit rinsed the hair from his dagger in the basin of water in front of him.

A twelve-penny dagger and it wouldn’t last him long, at this rate.

He remembered, when he’d been at Cambridge, where a barber attended to the students’ shaving needs daily, the barber complained that Kit’s red-tipped beard, light and downy-looking, did more damage to his blade than the hirsute cheek of the most black-haired of villains.

“Will my beard come in soon?” Imp asked. His large, almond-shaped grey eyes watched the dagger, fascinated.

“Aye,” Kit said, and dipped the dagger in the water of the basin, to rid it of the tips of hairs and of soap. “Aye, soon enough.”

Imp ran a long, thin finger along his smooth, pale cheek. “And will I have to do that every day, then?”

Kit paused in his shaving because his face insisted on flourishing a smile, and how could he shave himself while grinning like a lunatic?

“Ah, no. You need not shave, Milord Laziness. You may go about unshaven and hirsute like a savage.”

He dipped the tips of his fingers in the cold water of the basin and flicked the droplets at Imp. “I tell you what, Milord Adventurer, I shall speak to Lord Raleigh for you and he can take you to his lands in Virginia, where you may join with the savage tribes of men there, and not only need not shave, but run about naked and barefoot, if you well please.”

Imp giggled as the droplets of water hit him and he squeezed away from his perch, but only to return again, to watch Kit.

He ran his hand, wishfully, down both his cheeks. “My mother says that my father had a big black beard.” He sighed and squirmed and stared at Kit, as though expecting from Kit a confirmation of his paternity.

Or else, perhaps the child suspected . . . . He looked at Imp’s features, a mirror of his own, and wondered how Imp could not suspect. But the human eye was thus, in thrall to the heart and ever ready to see only what it wished to see.

Besides, Imp had never known his mother’s husband. For all the child knew, Master Richard Courcy had looked exactly like Kit, but with a black beard.

Kit made a sound in his throat, neither assent nor denial, more of an invitation to proceed.

“My mother says he was a man like no man,” Imp continued in a needling voice, prodding like a butcher that searches the tenderest part from which to cut the steak.

He blinked at Kit and almost smiled. “And that she could never find his like.” He paused, and shifted his feet, rustling the rushes on the floor. “Kit, why don’t you marry Mother?”

The words so surprised Kit that he cut himself and, feeling the bite of the dagger upon his cheek, cursed, and reached for his handkerchief from within his sleeve.

Kit hated pain, even so small a pain as this.

He remembered his sisters mocking him when he was a child and cried at having skinned his knee. They said he made as much fuss over that small injury as soldiers wouldn’t make over battlefield wounds.

He thought of the threat of torture that hung over his head and shuddered. How could he take torture when he couldn’t even take this?

Staring at the small flower of blood on his handkerchief, Kit gave Imp a wary eye. Had Madeleine put her son up to this?

No. Kit shook his head to his own question. No. From the anxiety in Imp’s look, the mock-relaxed posture of his body, the idea was Imp’s entire.

“If you married her, she wouldn’t turn you out,” Imp said. “And then you’d be my father.”

Kit swallowed. Oh, to be extended such a bait on such an enticing hook and by such an unwary fisherman.

A day ago, two, Kit might well have been fool enough to take it.

Marrying the dour Madeleine would be worth it, so long as he could stand up and announce to the world, full voice, “I am responsible for this Imp. I am his father.”

Yes, twenty-four hours ago, had Imp said these very words, Kit might well have sent him to his mother, as a pleasing Cupid, to press Kit’s suit.

But in twenty-four hours, all had changed.

Kit’s admission of fatherhood would do no more for Imp than bring the knife nearer him, tighten the noose of conspiracy closer round Imp’s unsuspecting neck.

Torture and prison rode at Kit’s back, and death not far behind.

And Kit had seen someone uncommonly like his Lady Silver. Silver, that dream that Kit had given up but not forgotten, that dream that made the reality of any human love pale and shrink in Kit’s mind.

Kit had seen someone like Lady Silver with Will Shakespeare.

Kit closed his eyes, and behind his eyelids as on a stage, he saw the Lady Silver—graceful beauty, ethereal grace—and he could almost smell her lilac perfume making him dizzy and drunk.

He opened his eyes and saw, beyond the opened door of the room, beyond Imp’s anxious glance, a fine gentleman in green velvet pants and doublet.

A gentleman with blondish hair and a fine, open face, which added bonhomie to his sparkling blue eyes and seemed to announce to the world that here stood a man who liked all men, a man who’d never betray any, a man full of the milk of human kindness.

With a chill down his spine and a burning acid at the back of his throat, Kit recognized Robert Poley—Sweet Robin Poley—master spy, the uncoverer—many said the engineer—of the Babington conspiracy, which had sent fifteen hapless men to the gallows.

It was said that these men had tried to kill the Queen, that they planned to install Mary, Queen of Scots, in Elizabeth’s place, but Kit, who’d been close enough to the apprehension to hear the behind-the-scenes stage setting—even if he’d taken no real part—had long suspected the plot had been no plot.

Kit thought that Cecil and this, his minion, Robin Poley, had hatched the whole thing entire from their heads, Zeus giving birth to Athena. Without them there would have been no plot, only the stray words of foolish young men. Without them, Mary Stuart would still be alive in her captivity. Without them, the Crown would be no shakier than it was and Queen Elizabeth no more threatened.

Babington himself had been in Robin Poley’s room, supping, when he’d been arrested and so deceived that he’d sent Poley a letter from jail, begging for help from Poley’s true affection.

Since then, Kit had never been able to face Poley without feeling a sick pang to his stomach and a strange, shrinking fear, like that of a rabbit scenting fox.

Now he felt all that, added to the heart-tightening sense that he was no better than Poley. He was, after all, planning to involve Will Shakespeare in a plot like the Babington plot, wasn’t he?

Kit’s knife clattered into the wash basin.

He reached blindly for the much-worn towel that hung beside the wash stand, and wiped his hands and the remaining soap from his face.

Kit dared not tell Imp to go away.

He didn’t want to call attention to the child, but he frowned ponderously at Imp who, not seeing Poley, stared back with wide open, uncomprehending eyes.

“Well met, Kit,” Poley said from the hallway. “You do not seem happy to see me.”

“Surprised,” Kit said, and forced a smile. “Surprised.” Robin Poley was not someone he would want to show a sour face to. Not a courtier or a fine gentleman, yet Poley’s displeasure would have more material consequences than a royal frown or a lost benefit. The first consequence would be a whisper in the night, the second a misstep in the dark, and the third a dagger in your bosom.

“Glad that you were only surprised, Kit.” Poley walked into the room with a stealthy, feline confidence which suggested that he had spent too much time in dark alleys, too much time following traitors, real or counterfeit, with his cat step, the claws and fangs of his cruel intent. “Glad that you were only surprised.” Poley smiled, in good nature. “I wouldn’t want our friendship marred.”

Kit retrieved his dagger from the water and dried it carefully, glad of its weight in his hand.

He wouldn’t use it, nor would it be of much effect against Poley’s kind of stealthy menace, and yet Kit felt better for having a weapon in his hand, and an excuse to hold it so.

Poley’s gaze flickered to the dagger. He smiled. “Wouldn’t play with that too much, Kit. Lest someone use it on yourself. The strangest accidents happen . . . .” Poley turned, his gaze fell on Imp, and he smiled, putting his small hand, covered in pearly suede gloves, on the boy’s bright hair. “Such a beautiful child, is he not? Harry Mauder told me of him and how much he looks like his father.”

“You knew my father?” Imp asked.

“Exceedingly well, child. Exceedingly well,” Poley said and smiled, a smile full of paternal encouragement, avuncular tenderness.

“And had he a great big black beard?” Imp asked.

“No. More a small, reddish, well-trimmed one,” Poley said, and stared at Kit.

Though the laugh wrinkles remained, cozy and comforting like a nest around Poley’s bright blue, innocent-looking eyes, the glint in those eyes, the intenseness in that gaze, shone like a naked blade, like a drawn dagger.

Kit grasped his own dagger harder, and took a deep breath. “Go, Imp. Go to your mother, child.”

Imp blinked. “But he says—”

“Go, child. God’s death. Your mother will be wondering where you are. I don’t want her plaguing me. Go, child.”

Imp started and jumped. Never before had Kit raised his voice thus to him. Never before had Kit cursed at him.

“But—” he said.

“Go, damn it,” Kit yelled, fierce and dark and full of thunder. “Go. Plaguing me day and night. Impossible brat. What time have I for you? Do I look like the sort that consoles the orphan and talks to the widow? God’s death, if that were my vocation, I’d have taken orders. Go, curse you, and do not come back.”

Something like pain showed in the squint of the little boy’s almond-shaped eyes—a shine of tears, a startle at finding disapproval where he’d met only caresses and praise before.

He opened his mouth. He swallowed.

And Kit, longing to apologize, longing to take the small child in his arms and console him for that wounding so necessarily inflicted, maintained his face in a thunderous disapproval, as strong as Jove’s own before flinging the bolt.

Oh, only let Poley believe in this display. Oh, only let him believe in this and not in the fleeting resemblance, the tenderness of Kit’s gaze when it rested on Imp.

Imp stared and, finding no comfort, grabbed the empty water jar from beside the washstand and ran down the hallway, and down the stairs, the too-large empty jar of water clattering.

“He is his father’s glass, is he not?” Poley asked, turning to Kit with a smile of friendship, a seeming open smile of cajoling.

“I don’t know,” Kit said and felt dark red blood flower beneath his cheeks. “I didn’t know his father.”

“Ah.” Poley’s eyebrows rose. “I daresay you still don’t. And yet, what was that proverb that the Greeks had . . . . Know thyself?”

“Poley, be done with it,” Kit said sharply, his irritation having the best of his determination to remain impassive and civil. “You did not come to me to discuss the child, did you?”

Poley smiled. “I came to ask what story you spun to that fool, Henry Mauder, that he let you go so quietly yesterday.”

He opened his eyes, palm outward, spread wide.

“No story,” Kit said. “No story.” His heart had started, fast, fast, like a trapped bird flinging itself on the bars of a cage. “No story but the truth. I know of a conspiracy. I know, and I thought you’d like to know.”

Poley laughed, his big, hearty laugh. “A conspiracy. No. True? Kit, you amaze me. You—Kit Marlowe. A conspiracy. How would you come by it?”

“I heard it in my circles,” Kit said.

“In your circles?” Poley laughed. “The circles of penniless poets? Or the circle of foolish actors? Maybe perhaps the circle of those who seek illicit love in bawdy taverns?” He made a moue. “Oh, how the council should fear those . . .”

“You forget, milord,” Kit said, drawing himself up to his full height, re-gretting for the first time in his life that his gracile, agile body owed more to his mother’s side of the family than to his father’s thundering, majestic brutishness. “You forget that I live in other circles. I have a patron—Milord Thomas Walsingham. And before him I courted the favor of Milord Southampton.”

Poley chuckled. “Courted Southampton, more like. Not that, from what I heard, he’d have made himself a hard catch. And what manner of conspiracy do your circles cross that you could use it to gain your freedom and that child’s safety?”

Now the heart that had beaten madly in Kit’s chest felt as though it had won passage to his throat and beat there, suffocating him, making him dizzy. Through his heart he spoke, hearing nothing but the rush of blood in his own ears. “A plot against the Queen’s very life. A plot to put another upon her throne.”

“Another?” Poley’s eyebrows climbed up his forehead, in disbelief. “Who?”

Kit shook his head. “I don’t know that much yet. I’ve heard whispers, nothing clear yet. But I know there’s something there and I mean to find it.”

Poley narrowed his eyes at Kit. “If you’re lying, God’s death, Kit . . . .”

“Would I lie?” Kit asked.

“If you’re lying,” Poley repeated, ignoring him. “Remember that last year we plucked you entire from that counterfeiting charge, but you’ll wish we’d let them disembowel you then.

“If you’re lying, you’ll beg to die in that manner. You’ll beg to see your entrails burned before your eyes. But first you’ll see that child of yours maimed and his dam dead. Do you hear me?”

Kit, hands trembling, forced himself to sheathe his dagger, forced his voice through his constricting throat with what he hoped was a semblance of strength, a timbre of certainty. “I am not lying.”

Sweat dripped from his forehead. Fool that he was, fool. In this foolish life he led, always in danger of being arrested, always at risk from the secret service work that had fed him for so many years, always nourishing upon that which destroyed him, Kit had no business living near Imp, no cause to bring their relationship to the attention of these vultures that, in the dark, moved behind the Queen’s court, using the Queen’s age, the growing mistrust of an older woman.

Save he’d no more been able to stay away from Imp’s joyous innocence than a bee could stay away from nectar.

“If you’re not lying then, surely you can name us someone—someone whom we can question, who will reveal this grand conspiracy?”

Kit looked up, startled. “I don’t know the all of it yet,” he said. “I don’t know the all of it, and what I know is unprovable.”

Poley stepped closer. He was not much taller than Kit, just enough that he could look down upon the poet, sneer down his menace upon Kit’s upturned gaze. “Some of it has to be provable, Kit Marlowe. And someone there should be whom we can take and make sing. You’d be amazed how men sing on the rack.” He looked down at Kit as he walked round the poet.

Kit turned round and round, keeping his eye on Poley. Robin Poley was not one on whom you’d turn your back. Round and round they went, in a lethal dance. Poley circled and Kit turned, like inimical planets locked in opposing aspects.

“Give us a name, Kit Marlowe, so we know you truly do have something. Just one name. An earnest of your faith.”

Round and round, and the sick, despairing feeling gnawed at Kit’s belly.

He had to turn someone in? He had to stain his hands yet again? An earnest of good faith for his bad faith?

Will Shakespeare? But no, unprepared and unconnected, Will would never pass for a conspirator, nor could they, no matter how they tortured him, exact anything incriminating from that man.

Either that or they’d extract too much.

No.

Will Shakespeare was the main actor in this tragedy that Kit was creating. He could not be sacrificed so early in the game and for so small profit.

Who then?

His mind ran over the ranks of his college friends, searching the vulnerable—just connected enough to be a credible conspirator, just unconnected enough to be harmless; just eccentric enough to have something incriminating to say; just normal enough to pass.

The mind alighted on John Penry—two classes above Kit and known for creating enemies with his fervent Puritanism, his inflexible certainty. Penry was well born enough to know the high-born and stubborn enough to stick out wheresoever he went.

“John Penry,” he pronounced, saying the name before he repented his treason. He pushed John Penry’s serious countenance out of his mind’s eye. “John Penry, I heard, was involved in this conspiracy. He is a Puritan and would rather have another such on the throne.”

Poley smiled. “Ah. John Penry, now that’s a name. And where does he reside?”

“Bishop’s Gate,” Kit said. “I heard he came recently from seeing the King of Scots.”

“Ah,” Poley said. “The King of Scots, now that’s interesting.” And with a smile that showed teeth but no warmth, he bowed and he said, “We’ll talk to Master Penry, then.”

He walked out, feline and soundless.

What had Kit done? What had he done?

He remembered Penry’s austere, faith-burned countenance.

Not a pleasant man, Master Penry, and often had he upbraided Kit for Kit’s late hours, his drunken bouts.

But how earnestly he’d discussed gospel and philosophy. And how quietly he had argued against Kit’s arguments, never once denouncing Kit for atheism, though he’d heard more than enough for that.

Kit closed his eyes.

His empty room seemed cold and stark.

It was the room of a plotter, one who would turn on anyone, and whom everyone should fear.

A wolf at bay, his fangs at every throat.

Kit’s bile rose at his throat, burning.

Yet he thought of Imp, and what could he do but save all the hope Kit had for the future, and what goodness Kit still believed in?

To save Imp, let all of Kit’s goodness burn away. But how many others must be killed in those flames?

Scene 14

Will’s room. Will, who lies on the bed, stirs, obviously waking up. Next to him, ensconced beneath his arm, lies the Lady Silver, fully dressed and asleep.

Will dreamed that Nan lay beside him; dreamed that he was back home, back in his room, safe in the attic of the Henley Street home, in Stratford-upon-Avon.

But as he stirred toward wakening, even before he opened his eyes, he knew it was not Nan’s hair that tickled his arm, knew it was not Nan’s soft, whispering breath that rose and fell beside his.

The smell of lilac, the smell of the fairykind, hung heavy on his nostrils.

He sat up, with a curse on his lips. With a curse on his lips he looked beside him, to see the still, resting form of the Lady Silver, her hair loose and tangled upon his pillow, her arm spread the width of his narrow bed, her face pale and tired-looking and, in sleep, appearing young and fragile.

“Wake, milady,” he said. “Wake.” What had he done that the elf would pursue him this way? What had he done that she would follow him, and come to him like this?

Ten years ago, in a night of impetuous insanity, he’d made love to her.

Ten years ago. Since then Will had been faithful to his Nan. And yet the elf followed him; the elf would come to his rooms and try to seduce him.

He groaned as he got up.

Having slept in his shirt, he searched around the room for his pants and doublet, and slipped them on.

He must go to the theater. He must present Henslowe with Marlowe’s note.

Well had Will seen how much Marlowe’s opinion was respected, how regarded. Surely Henslowe would give Will a part in his play just to please Marlowe.

Thinking this, Will tied his pants in place, and put his doublet on.

Dismal light shone through the dirty diamond-shaped panes of his window, and though it must still be early morning—certainly not afternoon—yet the air felt too hot and too humid.

Plague weather, Will thought, and shook his head, shaking the thought out of his mind. No. He would not think that. He’d not think of that man, so suddenly struck down with unnatural illness.

It was nothing Marlowe had said. Another illness that looked like the plague. There had been no rumor of the plague, no thought of the plague since early spring. Surely it would not come again now.

Fully dressed, Will went to the bed, bent over the Lady Silver, and shook her. “Wake, lady, you must be gone. This is senseless. This is foolish. I am not yours and you not mine.”

The thought that this fair lady was also the king of elves made Will angrier.

What was Quicksilver doing? What was Quicksilver playing at? If there was danger, why was Quicksilver here, leaving his hill unprotected? And if there was no danger, why was he here?

Oh, curse the creature, the mutable magical creature that no mortal could understand, no mortal hold.

Looking at her, Will could have wanted her, Will could have loved her. Again as in that night, so long ago, Will felt the enchantment of the creature, the magic of the woodland, the spell of the shaded glen that no man knew and no man could conquer.

His gaze traveled her soft skin and dwelt on the graceful form of her. Oh, to touch such treasure. To dwell in such palaces.

Nan had never been that perfect. Nan had never been that full of charm. Nor had any mortal woman. Ever. No queen’s majesty rivaled the pearly perfection of Silver’s skin, the unfathomable depth of her eyes.

And yet, looking on Silver, Will saw, as if with double vision, Quicksilver’s broad shoulders, his taller form, the waist that narrowed from the muscular chest, the arms accustomed to fighting, the hands large enough and strong enough to ply a sword as it should be plied.

Again Will reached, again his hand touched the bare shoulder above the ruffled dress. Again, he shook it.

“Wake up, lady, curse it all. Your seduction is not going to work. I have one wife only, and she’s alive.”

Her shoulder felt hot to the touch and silky smooth, and she looked, in her sleep, vulnerable and almost transparent, like a feverish child who struggles through the night from breath to breath, while his trembling parent stands vigil.

And this, Will knew, had to be glammour and disguise, for these creatures were neither soft nor vulnerable.

For a moment Will hesitated.

Silver looked so tired. As though she’d been doing battle. And she had said something about the Hunter and Sylvanus, the same things Will had heard in—and barely remembered from—his odd dream.

But it couldn’t be true. Furious at himself, Will poured water into his cracked ceramic basin where it sat, atop the trunk at the bottom of the bed. He washed hands and face with scrupulous care. He pulled his hair back and ran his fingers through it.

He cast another resentful look at Silver. She couldn’t have been telling the truth and well did Will know that the only reason this seductress would have come to London would be to lose Will to his marriage vows, to lose Will to his own conscience.

He knew that her still looking like Silver in her sleep was deliberate, malicious.

Will remembered well enough that this creature, when asleep, reverted to his primary form, his male form. But Quicksilver would not have moved Will thus.

Will pulled his gloves on, and stepped toward the bed.

Yet, after two steps, he stopped, and stared at her sleeping form. He felt as if his fingers still burned with the touch of her skin.

He did not trust himself to touch her again.

And she looked so tired, so forlorn. If he touched her again, he would long to console her.

If Will touched her, he would be her lover, enslaved by her, like people in the stories old men told taken forever into the bowels of Fairyland, into the heart of illusion and away from the sane world.

Away from the world where Will had three children and a wife he loved, and a job waiting for him at The Rose, if only he would take it.

He took a deep breath. Mentally, he said goodbye to Silver and her enchantment, and walked out the door and down his steep staircase and onto the road below, to meet his destiny in the theater.

But there, in the midmorning bustle of street vendors and apprentices hurrying away to dinner at the nearest tavern, and forges and small factories working in the tiny, ramshackle hovels and huts of Shoreditch, there, he found the broad gate to the enclosed precinct of The Rose closed, and nailed shut.

The paper glued to it was already curling in the hot sun, the sticky, humid air.

The writing on paper began with “By the order of the Bishop of Winchester,” and went on to say that the theater had been closed for fear of the “great and common plague” ravaging London anew.

Will’s fingers touched Marlowe’s note within his sleeve. Useless now. Will’s stomach hurt and growled with hunger.

Blinking back tears that sprang, unbidden, to his eyes, he turned around.

Another hour without food and he would lose consciousness. How long from there to death?

He’d never seen anyone die of hunger. No one had died of hunger in Stratford in living memory.

He was like the prodigal son who’d left his father’s plentiful table to pasture swine in a foreign land and crave in vain the husks which the swine did eat.

Who had told him he could be a poet? Who had told him to come to London?

On that thought, he heard a cheerful voice, with a cultivated Cambridge accent. “Holla, Will. Will Shakeshaft.”

He turned.

A smiling Kit Marlowe walked toward Will, cutting through the dusty, dark-dressed crowds of Southwark like a ray of sunshine through grimy glass.

Marlowe wore a bright sky-blue doublet, figure-molding blue stockings, fine velvet breeches, and his beautiful gloves and boots.

And he grinned like a man who has eaten enough and has money in his pocket.

He clapped Will on the back familiarly, and cast a casual, uninterested glance at the door of the theater. “Closed. Oh, the luck. Never mind. We’ll find you something else. Let me buy you dinner.”

Will would have followed Marlowe into the very mouth of hell on that promise.

Scene 15

An Elizabethan tavern, furnished with long pine tables and benches that have seen better days. The walls are dark with the soot of torches, yet more torches burn in the metallic holders that protrude from the walls. Their burning smoke smells of rancid bacon grease, and it mingles with the smell of mutton and pork from the broad cooking fire. Men, most of them in the workaday dark clothes of laborers, crowd shoulder to shoulder at the vast tables, and eat meat. No natural light penetrates beyond the immediate area around the door. Will and Kit enter, and Kit, assuredly, leads them to two open spaces, side by side at a table near the broad fireplace, around which five cooks labor over the carcasses of dead pigs and cows and sheep.

As they entered the tavern, Kit glanced at Will, taking in Will’s swollen eyes, his pale face, his whole look like that of a man condemned to die an ill death on the gallows.

At the thought Kit shivered, thinking that he, himself, might very well end up being the one who would die such a death.

No. Better turn in Will. And look at the hapless fool, in his old doublet and with no money. Kit would warrant that the man hadn’t eaten in more than a day.

What good was he doing? None, losing time and money and happiness in London.

And as for Will’s poetry, Kit still winced at the thought of it.

No. No. Will was, at any rate, doomed. That much bad luck could not be fought. Kit might as well help Will to a quick end.

He escorted Will to the empty broad bench at a table by the fireplace. Will sat down beside Kit.

Almost immediately, the wench came. Kit knew she would. He was a customer here and well known for his liberal purse. Besides, this middle-aged woman hadn’t yet given up on attaining Kit’s love. And Kit’s purse, too.

What fools women were.

Feeling superior, he gave the faded blonde, with her much-mended shirt, her pale, reddish-looking brown kirtle, orders for two full dinners of mutton and bread.

When the plates came, filled with steaming portions of boiled mutton and large pieces of bread, Kit allowed Will to eat a little first, to fill his mouth.

The silence in which Will greeted his food, his haste in eating, the gratitude in his voice as he turned to Kit and said, “I am not able to pay you, Master Marlowe,” all of it gave Kit a measure of the man’s hunger, all of it convinced Kit that Will was doomed.

Doomed, doomed, before Kit ever stepped into his life, before Kit had need of Will as the moving piece in the plot that would save Imp and restore Kit to the world of honest men.

If Will were a conspirator, he was a poorly paid one.

“Pay?” Kit asked. “Pay? Why, good Shakestick. It is a matter of courtesy, almost a matter of duty, for a poet to feed another. Other professions have leagues and guilds. Tinkers and weavers and even players, all have someone to resort to when their luck runs out, but not poets. When I came into town, I was like you, starving and poor.” For a moment, in his mind rose the image of the despair he’d felt when he’d been forced to pay for his lodging in Southwark with his presence in his landlady’s bed.

Who would know that such despair would lead to Imp? Still smiling, Kit took a piece of his meat upon his knife, and tore a bit of his bread. “I’ll feed you now and someday, mayhap, you’ll feed another starving poet.”

Will shook his head. Stuffing the stale, dry bread in his mouth as it were manna of the gods, he shook his head. “Nay. I’ll be gone come morning. Gone back to Stratford.” He paused in his eating for a moment, then said, “Mayhap I can send you the money to pay for the meal then. If I don’t starve on the road.”

The bread felt drier and even less appetizing in Marlowe’s mouth. No. Will couldn’t go to the country . . . . Or more likely starve on the way.

Kit needed Will. Penry—he thought with a pang of his sometime colleague—Penry would not hold the questioners that long.

Soon the torturer would find out that though Penry was a heretic, he had no such knowledge as Kit had claimed for him.

And yet—perhaps Penry did.

But Kit dismissed such hope out of hand. Life had never, in her kindness, handed Kit any favors.

Everything Kit had achieved had been hard won, step by step and inch by inch, like a climber working his way up a narrow slope by the strength of his frayed nails, his skinned hands.

No.

Kit needed Will Shakespeare in London, near Elizabeth’s court.

He needed to weave a web of deceit and conspiracy around Will. He must make Will seem like an archvillain, part and parcel of that rolling machinery of conspiracy that was London.

Then the maw of the secret service would swallow Will alone, and let Imp and Kit go free.

Then would Kit be able to consider whether to marry Madeleine or just take Imp and go with him somewhere—France, or Italy, or another country where Kit Marlowe could start anew.

Looking at Will Shakespeare devouring his food with well-mannered hunger, Kit thought all this, and lies came to his tongue in facile speech. “You’re a poet, Will. I can’t allow you to go back to Stratford or wherever it was, and there pasture your father’s cows or run your butcher shop. Stay in London.”

“Not a butcher shop.” Will looked at him, his forehead wrinkled. “There is no theater in London,” he said. He held a slice of mutton, dripping greasy water, above his plate on the tip of his dagger. The grease dripped on Will’s dingy lace cuff and stained his gloves. “There is no employment for poets in London now.”

Kit looked away. He smiled. Funny how, if you allowed them, people had a way of playing into your hands and establishing just what you wished them to establish. He’d wanted to give Will connections to the Essex field, so that he could hold Essex hostage on this poet’s incrimination, just as Raleigh was being held hostage by Kit’s involvement.

And here was Will, obligingly asking if there was some other way a poet could earn a living in London.

“You could follow my own example,” Kit said, and seeing a combative look in Will’s eye, added, “I don’t mean the theater. I mean, lately I have got the patronage and the very great favor of my lord Thomas Walsingham. These young noblemen like long poems that speak of some ancient theme, something that evokes learning like Greece and Rome and yet describes a pleasing couple engaging in that which pleasing couples do.” He caught Will’s amazed eye and grinned. “And then the nobleman gives the poet coin and keeps him in style, in exchange for the poet’s writing one or two lines of dedication, extolling the nobleman’s great learning and generosity.”

Kit grinned at Will, till his face felt like it would crack. “These noblemen will have their pet hounds and their pet peacocks and their pet poets, perforce.”

Will looked back.

He had yellow-brown eyes, golden and clear as a hunting bird’s eye.

Eyes like that, Kit thought, made a man feel discovered and seen-through, as though he wore a glass-front window that Will Shakespeare could penetrate with his intellect.

Never having been transparent, not even to himself, Kit Marlowe very much hoped he was not transparent to Will either.

“I don’t know any noblemen,” Will said.

The game was played as Kit had anticipated.

Step on step, as if in a game of chess, did Will Shakespeare fall into Marlowe’s trap and, without cunning, put his head in the noose.

Why, then, did Marlowe’s stomach hurt and why did Marlowe feel as though a great, nameless doom hung suspended over his own head?

Was he growing a conscience? Oh, Kit could not afford a conscience now.

“There’s Southampton. Henry Wriosthesley, third earl of the name. He’s young. He’s vain. He fancies himself a patron of the arts. I was mid-courting his patronage when Walsingham—an old friend—succeeded to his family’s title and offered me his own.” Kit pushed away the plate which he’d scarcely touched. “Here, I vouchsafe that if you offer Southampton a long poem on such an heroic theme as lovers parted or united.” He did his best to leer at Will’s amazed expression. “I warrant if you do that, he will give you his kind patronage and enough money to remain in London.”

He would, too, if Kit could make enough rumors fly ahead of Will, of Will’s ease with a sentence and the way his words could set the blood aboiling.

And Kit could do that, having enough acquaintances and even well-disposed friends amid the servants and retainers, the hangers-on at Southampton House.

“Here,” he said. “Here. I know there’s a party at Southampton House today.” There was a party at Southampton’s house every day. And Southampton was a devotee of Essex, as close to him—many said—as man could be.

Kit lifted his hand and gestured to the serving wench, mimicking the action of writing midair.

The serving wench hurried over, carrying ink horn, paper, and ink well. She lay it all upon the grease-stained table in front of Kit, and Kit grinned, and handed her a couple pence as a thank-you.

“I am known here,” he told Will, seeing Will’s amazed stare.

“Would that I were known thus,” Will said. “Would that I were known to need pen and ink anywhere.”

Kit elbowed him gently and grinned. The thought crossed his mind that he looked like his own father with his guild friends in the tavern, late at night. Kit had never had friends like that, never experienced the supportive, quiet security of male friendship.

One brief moment of intense desire, intense love, with the elf so long ago, and since then the whole world had gone drab and grey-looking so that nothing mattered, nothing. And human affection, human friendship even, also was taken to mean nothing.

“There will be a time,” he told Will. “There will be a time when you will find your reputation as a poet flying ahead of you.” Dipping the pen in the ink, Kit wrote rapidly. What he wrote didn’t so much matter, as long as it identified the bearer as Will Shakespeare. Before Will ever got to Southampton House, Kit must lay the groundwork that would make Will’s name known there.

He would do that, promptly, as soon as Will was gone.

For now he wrote an introduction, and he sealed it with the wax brought to him by the wench.

Handing the paper to Will, Kit felt as though he were handing the country man a death sentence, sealed and ready to be delivered by the condemned man himself.

Not that it would be that easy.

Will must still say, in that august company, things that would incriminate him—best if they would incriminate Southampton also and, through Southampton, Southampton’s protector, Essex.

“Make sure you deliver that to Gildenstern,” Kit said. “He is the Lord Southampton’s secretary and he knows me passing well. He will admit you to his lordship’s presence.”

Will ducked his head, while he slipped the paper into his sleeve. “I thank you, Master Marlowe. I thank you as I cannot express. Why you’d take so much trouble with such as I . . . .”

Kit smiled magnanimously and patted him on the sleeve, but looked away, looked into the far distance, finding that Will’s easy gratitude made even hardened Kit feel guilty.

He’d thought his conscience more jaded. He’d thought himself harsher. He turned away from Will and said, “Well, and well. It is what I can do. And call me Kit. Aren’t we much of an age and aren’t we in the same profession?”

Will gave him a quick, amazed glance, as though shocked at hearing himself admitted to the lofty company of Kit’s own status.

Before he could pour forth more thanks that would further make Kit feel like a two-face Judas, Kit spoke. “So, tell me of yourself. Your tongue proclaims you from Warwickshire and you mentioned Stratford, a fine market town, if I remember. You said your father was a merchant there . . . did you not?”

“A glover,” Will said. “A glover.”

Kit felt a sudden pang, identifying with Will more than he wished.

A glover was much like a cobbler, a skilled worker with a small workshop. He could well imagine that Will, like himself, had grown up with the smell of tanning hides, the cutting of the hides, the fashioning of them, and aspiring to poetry the whole while. He made a face. “Ah, the smell of tanning leather, the suede, the fine chervil.”

Will looked up surprised and smiled, the first genuine smile that Kit had seen from him. He’d finished his food, picked the ribs of the lamb clean, and now held his tankard of ale within the clasp of his two hands as if warmth came from the ale to his hands.

Noticing the tankard mostly empty, Kit gestured for the wench to refill it. “My own father was a cobbler,” he said. Something he’d not admitted to strangers in a very long time. Bad enough how they’d taunted him with his origins at Cambridge.

The wench refilled Will’s tankard and topped off Kit’s.

The food here was passable, but the ale, sweet and tangy, was worth coming in for, worth whatever the price.

Kit drank it, savoring it. “So you have no great relatives either, no one with power and money, that would justify your aspirations as a poet?” he asked.

Kit had no hope. Chances were that Will didn’t have, even at a remove, the sort of relatives that would be involved in any court intrigues.

Though rural families were peppered through with gentility, as full of noble relatives, as sprinkled with bastards of lords and royal retainers, as a rabbit peppered with shot—yet, Will Shakespeare would be the one who had none.

Again and again, life would make Kit find his own way, do everything on his own.

Nothing would be free, nothing freely handed to him.

Will shrugged, the movement straining the worn-out fabric of his doublet and showing the shirt beneath. “No. My mother comes from gentry. Local gentry. The Ardens.” He drank his tankard dry. “Robert d’Ardennes, her ancestor, owned all the land thereabouts and the wide forest in it.”

Kit again gestured for the wench, and leaned forward, waiting for Will to say more, waiting for Will to reveal more of these Ardens. Local gentry were good. Local gentry often placed maids in the Queen’s court, or married them to soldierly lords who were much at court.

“But they’re Catholics,” Will said as soon as the wench, having refilled his tankard, walked away. “Recusants. One of them was even involved in the Babington plot. We . . .” He shrugged. “We would not associate ourselves with them. My father is a good Protestant.” He made a face and looked as if he would bite his tongue as he added, “He was an alderman, when I was very young.”

Kit grinned, finding in this again a resonance of his own life, one he’d not expected to find with this provincial clod. “My father was a constable,” he said. And grinned. “I mock you not. Marry, a provincial constable, full of his own importance and misapprehended words, who thought being called an ass was high praise, and often used words too large for his mouth, sentences whose meaning he didn’t know.”

Kit remembered the last time he’d met his father in that capacity, the last time he’d met his father. “He arrested me, once. When someone attacked me and a friend, and my friend killed one of the attackers.”

Kit remembered his father’s brutality when questioning Kit, and how he’d preached on dishonor and shame. Kit could no further worm his way into Will’s confidence. Not tonight. The Ardens and whatever connection they might have had to the Babington plot would suffice. Suffice to put a veneer of truth on Kit’s contriving of Will’s guilt.

He looked at Will, sidelong, “And here in London, where the theater is, friend, Will. Who have you met who might help you?” He grinned and again plied his elbow conspiratorially against Will’s ribs. “A man like you and alone. Any great dame taken you in for her leeman?”

Will’s eyes opened in surprise. “Oh, no,” he said in shock. “Oh, no.” A dark red tide flowed up his neck to his ruddy cheeks, making them ruddier. “Oh, no. I am a married man, you see, and I do love my wife, my Nan in Stratford. We have two daughters and a son.” Suddenly, Will’s golden eyes lit up as though a sun shone inside his very soul. “My son is seven. He’s the smartest, most devilish little scamp you ever wish to see.”

In Kit’s mind, Imp’s image formed. Imp, whom he’d scared away with harsh words, Imp, the most devilish little scamp who’d ever lived.

Tears filled Kit’s eyes, distorting his view of the tavern, his view of the assembled men eating and drinking.

Will was like him. Just like him. The son of an artisan who craved fame and fortune such as fate didn’t hand to those lowly born.

Turning Will Shakespeare in would be too much like turning himself in.

Kit grasped his tankard with eager hands, drank down its contents with an unquenchable thirst that ale itself would not cure. He longed for friendship such as even his father had enjoyed. He longed for love such as natural humans couldn’t give. He longed for a life as Imp’s father, a life he would never have.

He drank and he drank till his head swam. He ordered more mutton and more ale. For a few hours, he’d pretend he was a common man, sitting beside his friend in a common tavern.

A few hours later, maudlin and lost, Kit heard Will singing softly. “When that I was and a little tiny boy, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” he sang, his voice picking up strength. “A foolish thing was but a toy, for the rain, it raineth every day.”

The tavern was almost empty by then, save for a snoring drunk and a man who tapped his mug to the tune.

Will lifted his eyebrows and his mug, daring Kit to pick up his challenge and improvise the next verse.

The wenches grinned at them.

Kit smiled, bemused.

As a little boy, he’d watched his father and his father’s friends play this game. But he’d been a quiet child, apart from the euphoria, the socializing of such convivial evenings. And later, later he’d been a learned child, who intimidated his father and his father’s friends.

Now, at long last, in the maturity of his years, he was being included in a game men played with their tavern friends. He grinned broadly. Only Will Shakespeare would dare do this with someone of Kit Marlowe’s jaded reputation.

Grinning, Kit picked up the tune in the voice that had made him the star of Canterbury choir—a clear, resounding voice, if made lower by age and manhood—“But when I came to man’s estate, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ’gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, for the rain, it raineth every day.”

Will raised an eyebrow and smiled, as though asking if that was the best Kit could do. Kit chuckled.

“But when I came, alas! to wive, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, by swaggering could I never thrive, for the rain, it raineth every day,” Will sang.

Kit picked it up before the last line had died in the still air that smelled of ale and smoke. “But when I came unto my beds, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” He grinned at Will, and lifted his ale mug in silent salutation. “With toss-pots still had drunken heads, for the rain, it raineth every day.”

Will laughed at that, and Kit laughed in return.

For a moment, in the glow of the ale, Kit relaxed and thought this was what having friends felt like and how he would like to be friends with Will.

Kit could picture many meetings like this. They’d dine and drink, walk together, and talk. Kit could improve Will’s mind and Will’s writing. They could discuss poetry, and Kit could learn the easy joys of undemanding friendship that required neither secret nor betrayal.

It was only a moment.

At the tavern’s door, they clasped hands and clapped each other on the shoulders.

But when they left the ale house, the cold wind sobered Kit, and watching Will retreat down the street in unsteady steps, Kit asked himself whether Will would be going home, home to his great lady.

Would Will not already be involved in intrigues of his own? Was Will not playing a game of his own?

Perhaps Will worked for Poley. Perhaps . . . .

In the dreary world Kit inhabited, too much warmth was as threatening as too much aloofness. Will was too open, too warm, too easygoing. Too good to be true.

“Kit?”

Kit looked down. Imp stood beside him, looking up, his eyes fearful as they’d never before been, his pale skin marked by the trail of tears. Had the child cried, then, at Kit’s rebuke?

Kit wished to undo each of those marks, take back the words that had hurt Imp.

He looked down. He smiled.

“Well met, Imp. Well met.” He grinned. “Is Lord Morality come to chide me for my shortcomings?”

As he spoke, he looked to the west, where the sun set in a glory as red as spilled blood behind the tall, dark wood buildings of London.

Kit must go to Southampton House and finish laying the trap for Will, before Will came with his note, to Lord Southampton this evening.

Kit must make sure that one or more of Southampton’s servants praised Will’s poetry before then, so that the gullible lord would fall for it, would give Will his patronage without even having heard Will’s poetry.

And yet, Kit wished he could know if Will was meeting with his high-born woman . . . . Or with Poley.

The wind clearing the fog from his mind, Kit took Imp’s hand in his own and walked down the street, measuring his steps with the child’s. “Listen, I need your help, Imp. I’m sorry I spoke to you so fiercely this morning, but that man who visited me wasn’t a good man. He was a wolf man, gross and evil, and I didn’t want him to think I loved you, for then he would . . . . He would hurt you to hurt me.”

Imp looked up and blinked, his grey eyes looking again older and more understanding than they should—as old and understanding as Kit’s mother’s eyes. And as weary. “You’re doing something dangerous, aren’t you? Mother says—”

Oh, no more of Madeleine’s maxims. Kit squeezed Imp’s hand hard and looked away from Imp’s searching eyes. “Look, it is dangerous but I must do it, and once I’m done, then we will be safe, we will all be safe, and mayhap I’ll even marry your mother and be your father.”

“You mean it?” Imp asked, his voice full of a strange joy.

“Aye, if she’d have me.”

“Oh, she’d have you well enough. She sometimes looks at you that way.”

“That way?” Kit asked. He picked the child up and held him, and looked into the veiled gray eyes which were so intent and yet revealed nothing of the emotions behind that little, peaked oval face.

Were Kit’s own eyes that unreflective? No wonder men didn’t often offer him friendship.

And perhaps, he thought, remembering Will’s unsuspecting friendship, Will’s trustingly offered confidence, perhaps those men were right. If Will’s friendship, thus proffered, was true, how foolish and how dangerous.

“What do you know of the way a woman looks on a man, Lord Curious?”

Imp shrugged, and looked away. “I’ve seen it,” he said.

“Well, and right. But you must stop following me,” Kit said. “Besides, I’ll need your good services, milord, if you wish to gain the boon of such a distinguished father.” He winked at the child, who giggled back.

“What do you want me to do, Kit?”

“I want you to go to Hog’s Lane in Shoreditch. Did you see the man who was just with me?”

“What?” Imp asked. “The one with the head like a polished dome?”

“Right,” Kit said, and smiled at the image. “Yes. Would you go to Shoreditch? He lodges above Bonefoy Hatters, and I wish you to spy him out, and find when he leaves, when he comes. And report to me any visitor he has. Would you do that, Imp?”

Imp nodded.

Kit set him down and watched his streetwise, London-bred son lose himself amid the crowds of Southwark.

How could Kit feel such trembling anxiety for such a self-sufficient creature? And yet he did.

As for him, Kit must go to Southampton House and lay the trap that would catch his hare.

Scene 16

Kit’s lodgings. The door is open and Madeleine, in a dark cap, and dark, prim clothes, stands in the doorway facing the splendorous Lady Silver. Humble apprentices and workmen walking by give Silver curious glances.

“Milady, I’m sure I know not.” Madeleine Courcy tightened her lips in a disapproving, ponderous frown.

Silver knew she should be here as Quicksilver. Silver’s splendor and her looks were bound to offend Madam Courcy. But that morning her body had taken Quicksilver’s shape only reluctantly, and had flickered back to Silver instantly.

Silver held both her hands demurely in front of her, the fingers entwined.

They stood in front of the good wife’s house, a ramshackle building whose door opened onto an immaculate hall strewn with fresh rushes.

Silver piped in her most innocuous honeyed voice, “This is about my husband, good wife, I’m sure you understand that. He frequents places where he should not go, and finds his pleasures elsewhere. I can no more control him than control the moon above, the inconstant moon that waxes and wanes with every changing day. But I must know. For my ease I must know.”

Silver squeezed what she hoped were convincing tears from her metallic-colored eyes.

To be honest, she did need to know.

Searching the dark trail of Sylvanus’s power, of Sylvanus’s tainted soul, she’d followed it to this unassuming house in Southwark. “Lives a woman here?” she asked, looking demurely toward the upper windows. Glazed, as she would not expect in such a poor place, and clean, too, shining in the scant light of early evening. “Lives a woman here with whom my lord might be consorting?”

She had heard in the neighborhood that Madam Courcy ran a boarding house, and it might well happen that one of her guests was the deposed King of Fairyland.

Silver must find the dark creature and return everything to the way it was before Quicksilver’s unwitting sin had released it.

Madam Courcy twisted her mouth into an expression of distaste, as she followed Silver’s eyes to the high, lead-paned windows. “No woman lives here. I have only one lodger now and he has been with me for long enough. His name is Christopher Marlowe. He is a man of unrighteous living.” She looked at Silver. “Should your husband have been visiting him, it would bode nothing but ill for your husband, aye, and your home also.”

Kit Marlowe. Silver gasped at the name. Kit Marlowe, again.

She thought she detected something like a glimmer of amusement in Madeleine’s eye, and heard Madeleine’s lightly accented voice, “Ah, but I see you know him, the villain. Then you know well enough what it means for your husband to be seen visiting him, no?”

“Has a man with dark hair, and a dark beard, and wearing dark clothes also been here?” she asked. “Has anyone asked for him whom you’re not accustomed to seeing?”

Madeleine shrugged. “People ask for him every day that I don’t know and have never seen.” She looked away from Silver and spat daintily onto the muddy ground of the alley. “Master Marlowe is a spy, an assassin, and other things that even though true, I wouldn’t say for a true lady shouldn’t speak of that.”

A spy? An assassin?

Possible. That was often the way with mortals loved by elves.

After the love of fairykind, the love of human paled, and the human must seek his excitement in other ways: in theater and politics, in crime and high charity. Some became monsters and some saints, according to the bend and dint of that one soul.

But one thing happened to one and all.

Every man touched by Fairyland—and every woman, too—became more vulnerable to the supernatural in the world, to the other things that traveled through the world of mortals, unnoticed by most, disregarded by others.

Pixies that flew in the motes of light, and fairies in woodland glades late at night, became as visible to those people as the twigs and sticks of everyday reality.

It was belief that did it, and not some ointment as old people would say was rubbed on the eyes of the captives in Fairyland. It was only that those who’d once believed in faerie could never again ignore it.

And those who saw more were also more vulnerable to the things that went unseen by others.

Silver sucked in breath as she realized that the only common link between the unfortunate Nick and Kit was their having been touched by fairykind.

Was that, then, the only indication of peril?

But then, what about Will, Will who had been Silver’s, Will who had been loved by fairykind? Loved with a love hotter than that of Fairyland’s normal run?

“Where did Kit—Master Marlowe—go? Know you that?” Silver asked.

The woman shook her head. Her suspicious look had returned. “He could be here or there. More than likely whoring in some tavern.”

Whoring in some tavern, he would be safe. Even Sylvanus couldn’t cut out a human from amid a crowd and claim him in public.

But Will . . . . Where was Will? Was he, likewise, safe from Sylvanus?

Silver wrinkled her brow in thought, and clenched her hands on the fine silvery fabric of her dress. If Kit was vulnerable to Sylvanus, then so was Will.

And where would Will be at this hour, with the sun going down and the creatures of the night becoming more powerful than they were in daylight?

She must find him.

Silver thanked Madam Courcy and, giving her two coins from the store of old gold coins that Silver carried about with her—the store scavenged from old lost treasures that men had forgotten—Silver bowed and walked away fast.

When far away enough that she’d be lost to Madeleine’s sight within the crowd of apprentices and artisans hurrying home for supper, Silver ducked into an alleyway.

There, she winked out of existence.

She materialized again in Will’s room.

Scene 17

Will’s bedroom. Will is in the middle of changing his clothes. He has his hose and shirt on, and is inspecting his doublet by the insufficient light of a small taper set on his table.

Will thought that his doublet looked well enough.

His best suit, purchased ten years ago at Will’s wedding, it had developed weaker spots and places where the nap had not worn so well. But all in all, it looked well enough.

Nan had mended it, once or twice, with her large, uneven stitches. Will smiled at the stitches, which were so characteristic of his wife.

An excellent woman, was Nan, but always more adept at fishing and walking through the woods, at digging in the garden, and even at cooking, than at the daintier arts of womanhood.

When she’d been a young girl, Nan had often escaped a house ruled over by an unsympathetic stepmother and several large, bossy brothers to wander the Forest of Arden till she came to know all its paths. Will smiled, remembering the young, tomboyish Nan.

He started slipping his doublet on when Silver materialized beside him in the still, shadowy air.

Will’s heart skipped a beat.

He’d thought himself well rid of her.

When he’d returned from the tavern, feeling the glowing warmth of his unexpected and much-needed meal, he’d found his house empty, no Silver in sight.

He’d been relieved. He’d thought the elf had finally desisted of seduction, finally given up on whatever deranged lust and wanton craving had brought her to London.

Instead, here she was again.

Will stepped back away from her. “Milady. I didn’t expect to see you again.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. Her bosom, overspilling from the tight confines of its lacy nest, rose and fell rapidly, as if animated by some uncontrollable passion.

“I had to tell you,” she said. As she spoke, she stepped closer, and held each of his arms in one of her long, white hands.

Her hands felt so hot that, even through his doublet, he feared they would burn his arms.

He tried to step back, but found the wall behind himself, found himself surrounded by her lilac perfume.

He could go no farther.

“Lady,” he said, and turned his face away.

She moved her face closer. She pulled his face forward to look at him earnestly, with her large, silver eyes. “I must tell you, Will Shakespeare, that you’re in danger. Those who’ve once been touched by the fairy realm always crave fairy love and as such—”

Will slid away from her and, diving under her arm, made away. “Lady, for Jesu sake, forebear. I crave nothing. It is you who seem to have uncontrollable cravings.”

She looked surprised, offended, as if he’d slapped her.

Her dainty foot in its silver slipper stomped hard. The dusty rushes on the floor crumbled. “My cravings do not matter. It is those who’ve been touched by Fairyland, you see, who forever crave excitement. Almost always in their souls there remains an unquenchable thirst, like a hole that swallows normal human emotion and normal intercourse and that . . .”

Will had ceased listening to her. Her voice faded out of his ears as he looked at his doublet, where she had held him.

The force of her holding him, the force of his pulling away, had left several tears in the fabric.

Will could not go see an earl attired in this way. Oh, curse the elf and his-her mutable needs and his-her annoying demands.

Opening his clothing trunk, which was in the main empty, Will rummaged inside for a needle and wool thread. He knew that Nan had packed him some, when he’d left Stratford. If he could only find it.

He turned over his possessions, two shirts and some spare, much-worn stockings.

“Will Shakespeare, are you listening to me?” Silver asked, and grabbed him by the sleeve once again.

Will straightened. His long-simmering acceptance of her needling was at an end. “No, my lady. No. I hear you not. And you will not entice me with your charms, no matter how you try. So cease already.” His gaze persisted, nonetheless, in visiting the milky-white mounds of her bosom. “I have to mend my doublet so I can go and see the Earl of Southampton. Kit Marlowe has arranged for me to be introduced to the earl.”

“Kit Marlowe?” It came as a shriek, and the Lady Silver stomped her foot harder than ever. Dry dust of rushes rose from the floor. “The wolf has gone to search for Kit Marlowe. The dog is for him, Sylvanus is. Can’t you see the danger? Can’t you see he’ll come for you next?”

Will was tired. Silver spoke in riddles and, even now, held on to Will, leaned into him, her warm bosom against his shirt, soft and resilient against his arm.

If she persisted, he would hold her. He would take her in his arms and he would hold her, and then he’d be as unable to stop as he’d been ten years ago.

And what would he tell his Nan when he returned? How would he explain, once again, violating their sacred bond, their joint sacrament? Or could he lie to Nan? Deny this ever happened?

No, Will couldn’t countenance it.

He pushed Silver away. He fought free of her. He spoke in fast and breathless words. “Kit Marlowe has arranged for the Earl of Southampton to hear my poetry.”

He picked up the note from Kit and waved it around, before stuffing it into his doublet sleeve. The small tears on the sleeve would have to do. He would have to hug the shadows and stay in the darker portions of the room. Unlikely, anyway, that he would get invited to the high table, being only a poet and an unknown one.

“But Will, you must understand, you’re vulnerable to magic now. You—” She had her hands on her waist, her black hair undone and wild with her fury. Her silver eyes blazed in anger.

She had never looked so seductive.

He scurried away from her, backward, opened his door, and escaped to the tiny perch atop the staircase that led to his room. “I understand, my lady, that it is likely that Kit Marlowe’s good will would mean more to me than all your magic.”

He started down the stairs, holding fast to the tilting banister.

She leaned down. “It’s Sylvanus, you fool, Sylvanus you have to fear. Sylvanus, remember that. There are legends that elves, and creatures like elves, who’ve forfeited their material bodies can possess the bodies of humans, claim them for their own. And humans marked with the Fairyland touch are more vulnerable . . . .”

Will was almost at the bottom of the stairs. He looked up and yelled, “A pox on your Fairyland touch. I want no part of it.”

Such was his furious despair that only afterward did he think that doubtless he’d wakened his landlord and that doubtless in the morning he’d be accountable for keeping company with a well-dressed lady definitely not his wife.

At that moment he was conscious only of Silver, more beautiful than ever in her wild ire, stomping her foot atop the tiny perch in front of Will’s lodging.

That image stayed with him while he hurried to the bridge and to Southampton’s house on the other side of the river.

It took all his willpower to keep walking.

Scene 18

The fairy palace. Ariel leans over an elf lord who lies in a bed in a small—if still sumptuous by mortal standards—room. She looks worried, worn out, and her white dress for once seems to leech color out of her drained cheeks. The elf lord looks near death. In the doorway, an ill-looking Malachite gazes in.

“How bad is it, milady?” Malachite asked.

Ariel heard the words, and knew their meaning, but she could no more than shake her head in response.

She felt her patient’s cool forehead, bathed in chilly sweat.

The small, confined room smelled of this sweat. The smell of death.

The elf was a changeling, Lord Geode, but he’d been high in Quicksilver’s favor and powerful enough. Now, his power burned around him as it left him, with the waning flame of Fairyland’s spreading blight.

How to cure such an ill? How to prevent this stalking death that, day by day, moment by moment, robbed Fairyland of its bright lords, its fair ladies?

Two more days, and would the blight stalk higher in the ranks, to Ariel? Or to Quicksilver’s uncle, noble Vargmar?

And what could Ariel do to stop it?

Despair burnt within her, high like a well-fed lamp.

“He was the eldest changeling in the hill,” Malachite said. “Placed the highest of all changelings when I was a child, and he looked after us and made sure we were happy.”

Malachite’s voice, hesitating and small, dipped and wavered as his strength failed him and emotion overcame him. “Faith. I’ll be next.”

Ariel took Geode’s pulse to find it faded and light, a whisper of life against encroaching death.

The waning of magic hurt all. Ariel could sense it, like a damping of power, like a dimming of light and life, coursing throughout the hill like an illness. But it did not affect the elves born to the hill so much as it did the changelings.

Natural-born elves had stronger power.

Would the killer blight stalk them thus, through the ranks, up the power scale of Fairyland?

And how to stop it? Would Quicksilver’s return stop it?

Ariel couldn’t tell. She’d cast her net and scried upon water and upon pure crystal mined from within the deepest mountain.

She’d found nothing.

Less than nothing—a black and forbidding nothingness, as if a great wall barred her way, a great will, stronger than her own.

And she feared, with a dread she dared not fully face, that this will was the will of Quicksilver, her errant lord.

Was he taking his joy in London, as Silver or Quicksilver, or both? Was that what brought this blight to his people?

Oh, cared he not if they lived or died?

She reached for his mind, as she held the dead-seeming hand of Geode.

Nothingness answered her call. Nothing.

“Oh,” she said. “It seems to be that my lord cares not for me.” She spoke in a whisper, and felt tears tremble beneath her voice. “It seems my lord cares nothing for the hill, nothing for any of us. How can he be lost to all this, Malachite? He is your milk-brother. He is my husband. Yet because of a disagreement will he forget all this, the multivaried bonds that tie him to this hill? Oh, he’ll forget crown and shame and all, for the sake of that human whom he’ll pursue.”

“Lady—” Malachite started.

On the bed, Geode’s power flared in a little explosion as magic left the body no longer able to contain it.

Geode’s body changed.

It shrank, shriveled. The long, blond hair turned whiter than the sheets upon which it lay, then fell, all in a breath, leaving the scalp beneath bare like wintry earth. The perfect face, with its small nose, its mobile lips, wrinkled and crinkled and seemed to collapse in on itself.

Ariel let go of the arm that, still living, still warm in her hand, had turned skeleton thin, its skin like paper.

She said, “Oh,” as she watched this rapid semblance of human aging.

She could say no more.

Malachite sobbed.

Where Lord Geode had lain, the shriveled yellow creature took a breath that looked as though it would blow away what remained of him, and shuddered as life left him.

On the bed remained nothing but a pile of earth—that dust from which mortals were fashioned, as elves were from fire—that dust to which men returned upon death.

“Oh,” Ariel said, and rubbed her palms upon her white dress.

Malachite drew in a deep, sobbing breath. “Oh, lady. Oh. He was a hundred, and now is reverted to what he would be had the essence of Elvenland never infused him. He was a hundred and now he’s dust.”

Ariel turned around in time to see Malachite sink to his knees. “And I am sixty, the Lord Quicksilver’s very age, born the same day.

“If my magic vanishes, where will I be? In second childishness, and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

While Ariel stared at him, her lips bereft of any consolation, Malachite approached her, on his knees, arms raised as if to the highest worship. “Oh, lady. Lady, marry me.” He crept closer.

She stood, amazed, unable to respond.

“Only you leave him, and marry me. Make me king of the hill and thus possessor of everyone’s magic with that great honor. And in that honor will my honor bask, and that power will protect mine.”

The lean face, the intent green eyes, turned up to Ariel with an intensity not to be vouchsafed. “Only do that, milady, and the two of us, King and Queen of Fairyland, and for once whole, will lend the mending hand to this affliction. Then won’t the lord’s absence matter.”

Looking at Malachite’s face, remembering the horror of the thing on the bed and knowing that half of Malachite’s treason hailed from desperation, yet Ariel bridled at it, and felt a shiver climb along her spine. “You would do that?” she asked. “You would do that and thus dispossess and kill your lord?”

“Oh, not kill him. Not kill him.” Reaching for the hem of her gown, he held it in his hands like a holy relic, and looking up at her with panic fear, he said, “Oh, lady, he’s elf born. His life is not at stake. It is our lives he risks with his folly. Not his.”

Ariel’s mind chided and complained that Malachite was right, that it was Quicksilver’s base lust that undid them all.

But in her heart, in her faithful heart, Ariel loved Quicksilver still and she couldn’t believe that ill of him, her lord.

Hadn’t she loved Quicksilver ever since they were elven children, growing up in the palace? Hadn’t she trusted him through his wild youth and come to fruition of their love as maturity molded Quicksilver into a man at last?

And how could she betray him now, even if . . .

No, Quicksilver couldn’t have betrayed her. She suspected it yet couldn’t fully believe it.

Something else must have taken him away . . . . Something.

She shook her head.

She stepped back away from Malachite. “I have no proof that my lord plays me false,” she said. “I have no proof and I am his true wife.”

Mad despair burned in Malachite’s pale features and a madness was called to battle in his gaze.

Malachite got up. He stared at her with fever-bright green eyes. He swallowed.

“Oh, I’m sure he plays you false now and then, and always has. I remember his father.” He met Ariel’s shocked look with sudden sobriety. “Wish you for proof?”

“Proof of what?” she asked, all amazed. “Of what accuse you my lord?”

Malachite’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “If it’s proof you want, then proof you shall have. Would you actually wish to see him topped?” He shook his head. “No, it matters not. Some proof you shall have before the night is through. And then will you marry me and we shall cleanse this hill.”

Malachite was mad, burned insane by his fear. Tears that shone in his eyes, but did not fall, made his gaze hard and cutting like a blade.

He walked down the hallway and Ariel was left alone with her doubts. She wouldn’t think that Quicksilver had left her to satisfy his base lust. But then, why would Quicksilver have left else?

And oh, what damned hours told she over, who doted yet doubted, feared yet strongly loved.

Scene 19

Kit walks by the riverside, having just disembarked from a ferry from Southampton House. The riverside is deserted on that side, bordered by dark warehouses and empty or at least darkened houses and shops, not a few of which are boarded and bear the plague seal, warning passersby to keep away. Kit, wrapped in a dark cloak, starts to make his way inward when a child approaches.

“Kit,” Imp yelled as he ran on the darkened riverside wharf filled with the stench of fish, its streets slippery with carelessly discarded entrails. “Kit.”

Just returned from Southampton House, Kit had been all immersed in the trap he had built. But seeing Imp, he forgot it all.

He looked at the small running figure and for a moment felt a pang.

What kind of father encouraged his son to be out of doors at these hours when who knew what doom might overtake him?

Yet, he reminded himself, Imp would not be kept indoors, not even by his ever-vigilant and severe mother.

Kit reached out his arms, and caught the child and picked him up, and lifted him, and shook him with mock violence. “Now, you scamp, now, you rotter, what are you doing abroad at this hour and tramping where no honest soul ever sets foot?”

Imp giggled. “You told me to watch for a visitor to the bald man,” he said between giggles, his voice distorted by his being shaken. “And he has one. Now the bald man is gone, but the visitor remains. And I knew you would be coming from the ferry for, pray, you said you were going to Earl So-and-so’s house, and that would mean the ferry and the other side of the river.”

“You’re a good scamp,” Kit said, and shook Imp again lightly. “A smart rogue, and with two more like you, you would take over the country and rule it like three Caesars in a new triumvirate.” He smiled, but his heart was not in it. Gently, he set Imp down, and bent over him, to talk to him. “You go home now, boy, go to your mother, eat your supper, and go to bed.”

Imp blinked up at him. “And you?”

“I’ll go look in on this man’s visitor, and then to bed anon. Who is the visitor?”

“A fine lady in a silver dress, with hair as dark as coal and skin as pale as moonlight,” Imp said.

Kit nodded.

The woman.

She existed, for Imp had seen her. And before his plot proceeded any further, Kit must make sure that this woman would not protect Will Shakespeare.

He must verify that Will was indeed friendless, indeed bereft of courtly favor, indeed safe to set up as a sacrificial lamb.

“Now you run home,” he said, and ruffled the boy’s hair.

“Will you come home anon?” Imp asked.

Kit nodded.

“And will you tell me a story when you do?”

Kit nodded. He ruffled the child’s hair again, and the boy was gone, running down the street.

Kit turned his steps toward Shoreditch, up the narrow, muddy road where Will Shakespeare lived, up to where a light shone on the highest window of the otherwise darkened house.

An odd light, not like the light of any earthly tapers, but a shine diffused and glowing throughout the entire space at once, a shine like a million fireflies, captured and held within that room.

Kit had seen that light once.

It was the light of Fairyland.

His heart beating at his throat, his hands trembling, his mind protesting with desperate certainty that such a thing could not be, that it happened not, that elven ladies—or lords—didn’t haunt squalid rental rooms in London, Kit hurried forward.

He grasped the slippery banister of the staircase and he climbed, step on step. Had it been the stair to paradise, he would have been no more eager.

Kit knocked at the door and heard an exclamation from inside.

Though yet he could see nothing, standing on that tiny platform outside the scabrous door, he fancied he smelled, all around him, the smell of lilac, intoxicating him like the best wine.

And something like a voice from his heart whispered that the Lady Silver loved him. Aye, and so did Lord Quicksilver. His elf love had come back to Kit.

The door opened.

Silver stood there, the elf’s female form, her black hair falling unfettered down her back, every strand seemingly charmed into place. And her broad silver skirt had been slashed to display a diaphanous white fabric beneath, which revealed, in its transparency, the length of Silver’s white legs. That inner gown that, beneath her bodice, cloaked her arms in long sleeves was yet so molding, so transparent, that he could see all of her revealed, save for the narrow waist hid beneath the silver bodice. And that mattered little as her breasts, rounded and pale like twin moons rising above a silver sea, were more than half exposed, lifting with her every deeply drawn breath that matched Kit’s own aching, slow, painful breaths, and played a dancing tune to Kit’s mad, beating heart.

“Kit,” she said, her voice little more than a breath, taken by the wind as soon as it was pronounced. “After all this time! Kit.”

He touched her hand. In touching it, she trembled.

Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands. True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Thus, while dumb signs their silent hearts entangled, the air with sparks of living fire spangled.

Kit’s breath, drawn, brought him her perfume. Her perfume swelled his heart in further breath. Not knowing why, nor how, nor when, they closed the door behind them and, still no more touching than their hands met, stumbled inside the dim, shabby room.

“I thought you away,” she said, her voice still rushed and wind-driven, as if passion pushed breath and hurried it through her soft red lips. “I thought—”

He touched her lips with his, not so much kissing her as a pilgrim acknowledging his reaching the shrine of his desire. “Away?”

“Away from London. In Lord Thomas Walsingham’s estate. Scagmore. I thought you living there and away, and safe, from all the madness that might come.”

Kit, his ears love-stopped, heard no more than that she’d informed herself of his place of residence, and known, known with certainty where he should be at this time. That was enough. That was plenty.

He’d never thought she’d have allowed a stray thought to venture his way, and here she was, confessing that she knew his current estate.

He kissed and kissed, and again he kissed, those lips of whose taste he’d dreamed, those lips like liquor that no mortal vine could ever equal.

With his love he assayed her, till in his twining arms he locked her fast, and then he wooed with kisses and, at last, her on the bed he lay, and tumbling upon the mattress, he often strayed beyond the bonds of shame, being bold.

And craving, joint craving ignited, that which, lonely, might have stayed itself for eternity. It ruled them and held sway.

The mattress protested beneath them, the bed shrieked and complained like the much-abused thing it was.

Silver said, “Stay.”

She cried, “Forebear.”

But all and all were taken as enticements aimed at making his trespass sweeter.

Kit, surrounded by the lilac smell of faerie kind, her taste on his tongue, the smoothness of her skin traveling like alcohol through his own skin into his veins to intoxicate his brain, thought to die and knew he lived, and knowing he lived knew he died of bliss.

Why did he love this creature and no other?

Why this elf, this fleeting being of moonlight and shadows and deep forest? Why this creature, neither man nor woman—neither and both—and not a mortal chained by the thrall of time? Why was it this creature he must love, in both its bewildering aspects and thus trespass beyond the boundaries of human love?

Why love here, not elsewhere?

Why one especially does the heart affect, of two gold ingots, like in each respect?

No more was there an answer to this riddle than to Kit’s heart-pounding, driving need.

The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, love is slight.

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

Scene 20

Will walks in front of the grand houses on the expensive shore of the Thames toward a particular grand house—the town house of the Earl of Southampton. Two iron gates stand open to a small quay, and past that, broad marble stairs disappear into the green shade of a large garden. At the quay someone in rich livery—presumably a footman—waits. He steps forward.

Will’s legs hurt.

He’d had to cross the Thames by the bridge, as he lacked a penny to pay the ferryman.

In front of Southampton’s garden gate—seven feet tall and twice that much wide, of wrought iron worked in fantastic shapes—Will put his hand inside his sleeve and touched the paper Kit had given him. Here was his safeguard, here his passport, to that life of ease and fame that he wanted. Here his way to send money back home, to make enough money for Hamnet to attend the inns of the court, or some college, enough money for Judith and Susannah, both, to marry well, enough money to make Nan into the lady she didn’t wish to be . . . . But enough surely to get Nan a kitchen wench or two, and let her rest and lose some of those wrinkles that marred her face.

Will walked down a long path that bisected a garden, with millenary trees on either side and flowers that dizzied the air with fragrance.

A part of Will felt amazed that he dared be here; him, Will Shakespeare, the son of the Stratford glover.

But he had to go in and pluck fortune up by her few, thin feathers, did he not?

Just at that moment, in the dark of night, something moved and a voice said, “Good Shakespeare, I can help you.”

The voice resembled Marlowe’s and Will turned on his heel and faced the place whence the sound came.

He stared at a face, surrounded by dark, curly hair, tipped with a well-trimmed black beard. Dark eyes laughed at him.

“You need better clothes,” the creature said.

Will was sure it was a creature, not a human, because a thick smell of lilac, almost too heavy, almost gagging, filled his nose. “And shoes, and you must look better, if you wish to get the patronage of the lord.”

It had taken Will a moment, but in that moment he recognized the face and the look, the expression, the voice.

It was Sylvanus, once King of Fairyland, Quicksilver’s deposed brother.

The last time Will had seen this creature, it had stolen Will’s wife, and bid fair to keep her a prisoner in Fairyland.

Through Will’s mind, in a tumbled confusion, came that impression, and Quicksilver’s warnings about Sylvanus.

Will backed away from the dark creature, and he said, “No. I’ll have nothing from you.”

A carriage went by him, in a rumble of horses’ hooves, and voices of merry youths singing merry songs.

Some clots of earth splattered onto Will’s suit, and he brushed them off despairingly.

By the torches on either side of the carriage, Will saw there was no one close by, certainly not Sylvanus.

He took a deep breath and shook his head. He was scaring himself with nothing. His contact with Fairyland was indeed driving him crazy, but it was Silver herself who ensured his madness.

To be one of those youth in the carriage, born to wealth and fortune and all that was good, oh, what he would not give.

But Will had been born to a failing business, to a medium station in life in a small town.

He turned a curve in the path and saw the house before him: a massive stone building, looming against the moonlight sky, its every window displaying a taper or a lantern and making bright heavens dark with its riches.

Will fingered the note inside his sleeve anew.

At the top of the steps, a footman blocked his path.

“Your business, master—?” he said, looking at Will with a gaze that implied that Will might have as much business here as a cow in a palace—or perhaps less.

Will handed the man his note, his hands trembling.

The servant received it and looked at the address: from Kit Marlowe to the most High and Honorable Henry Wriostheley, Earl of Southampton. With raised eyebrows, the man appraised Will again, from the top of his domed, balding forehead, to his ill-shod feet, and something very much like puzzlement lit his gaze.

Will could almost read in the man’s eyes how unlikely an acquaintance Will was for the glittering Marlowe circle.

But after a long while, the man nodded. “Follow me, please.”

He took Will into a vast, glimmering salon, and through it, into a narrow hallway, and through this again, into another salon.

From somewhere came the sound of music and men’s laughter.

Another servant appeared, barring their way, and Will’s guide into these secluded regions whispered something to this new man, as if it were of great import, and handed him the paper.

Reading the address, the man raised his eyebrows and gave Will a puzzled look. Then, with a nod and a wave of the hand, he indicated that Will should follow.

He opened gilded doors, and again passed Will onto a fellow servitor’s care.

That way they went, seeming to circle the palace, past magnificent rooms and statues such as Will had only read about—statues of heros and statues of nymphs and gods made to resemble carvings of Greek antiquity.

Along the gleaming marble hallways and through halls plated with leaf of gold, farther into Southampton House they went until, at long last, they fetched to a door, from beyond which male laughter rang clear.

By this time, Will’s legs were trembling, and the butterflies in Will’s stomach had risen to a fever pitch, flying up his throat and making him feel nauseous.

The servitor lowered a massive, golden carved handle and a heavy oak door flew open.

Within opened a smaller room—smaller than the ones they’d crossed—and filled with minuscule tables that tottered on thin golden legs.

On these tables games were laid. Backgammon and dice and other games for which Will lacked names. At each table sat several men.

Servants circled, mute and stone-faced amid this babel, carrying trays with drinks and dainties, which the gamers quaffed and devoured without ever once losing the thread of their betting, the elation of victory, the disappointment of loss.

Youths pushed money back and forth upon the tables, as the turn of fortune brought forth a lucky win or a dastardly loss.

More money than Will had seen in any single room, in his whole lifetime, now winked and shone at him from every corner.

For this much money one could buy a house in Stratford, aye, even buy New Place, the best and most spacious, the grandest house in Stratford, whose possessor was assured of a pew close up by the altar to listen to the service at the church.

This much money, even half the money in this room, would assure Will of his highest ambitions—of a better house for his family, servants to help Nan, an education for Hamnet, and even money to purchase himself a device and become a gentleman.

He watched, fascinated, as the glimmering coins passed around, tossed from one to the other of the careless young men, with no more than a mock expression of disgust, a mock sound of indignation.

So absorbed was Will in this contemplation, he didn’t notice that the servant stopped by one of the tables, looking pointedly back at Will.

“Ah, Shakespeare,” someone said. From the table near which the footman stood, a young man rose, holding Kit Marlowe’s elegantly penned note in his hand.

For a moment, still dazed, Will thought that this person was Quicksilver.

There was the same finely sculpted face, the same high bridged nose, the expressive eyes, the gold-spun hair combed over the left shoulder to the waist over a velvet suit of dark blue.

But Will knew that this was a human, younger and, perforce, less perfect than the lord of Fairyland.

This resemblance disquieted Will, who had just left the female form of Quicksilver in his room, after being unable to rid himself of her.

More disquieting yet was the way the lord gazed eagerly at Will and extended both hands to him. “Welcome, Master Shakespeare. Welcome. I’ve heard from my servants, all around, that you are the next great poet. A very sweet swan of the Avon.”

Will felt his face heat, as his cheeks colored. This had to be a lie, for who in London knew of his poetry?

Uncomfortable, he bowed and murmured something, even he knew not what.

And Southampton laughed, and gestured for a chair to be brought forth and placed next to his, and when it was, he sat and waited for Will to sit. “You are too modest, I know you are,” he said. “A rare quality in an accomplished poet.”

Will felt uncomfortable and hot in his worn suit.

He noted how everyone’s gazes fell on him. In some of those stares he fancied he saw something less than bonhomie.

“Kit says you intend to write a long poem on a worthy subject,” Southampton said, and as he spoke, his long-fingered hand tossed the die upon the polished dark wood table. He looked at the result and watched, with a small smile, while other gamers heaped coin upon the table in front of him. “Would you tell us what the subject would be, Master Shakespeare?”

“I intended it to be . . .” Will raked his brains and came up only with Marlowe’s suggestion that this be about a famous couple and much be made of their embrace. Out of this confusion, he murmured, his voice catching, “Venus and Adonis, your lordship.”

Southampton, who’d been counting the money, turned and looked at Will. “Indeed? You mean it so?”

He placed all the money again forward, indicating a new bet. “And when might we expect this masterpiece?” The hand that held the die and rolled them displayed as many rings upon it as fingers could hold—ruby and diamond and sapphire—so many rings, any one of which would have given Will more than he could expect to earn his life long even if all his dreams came true.

“I do not know, your lordship, for I lack the wherewithal to write it. I’m at the end of my stipend and must find other work.”

“Indeed?” Southampton asked, without turning, as he supervised the other men’s handing over of the money they’d bet.

Southampton raised his hand and gestured.

A servant appeared, carrying a small sack. Into the sack, Southampton’s careless, bejeweled hand scooped his win for the night. At a glimpse, Will counted over ten pounds.

The earl grinned at Will. “Poets should have the money to write poetry. Take this and write about Venus and Adonis. And mind you, compose me a pretty dedication.” He grinned at Will, looking, in the grinning, more mischievous and more like elven spawn.

Breathless, still expecting all this bounty to melt like elven gold, Will held the purse. “Milord,” he said. “The love I bear your lordship—”

“Oh, take it, take it,” Southampton said. “It is a trifle. Only, mind the dedication.”

He turned his back and forgot Will. But the other people in the room did not.

Servants, as though wakening to his presence, plied Will with honey cakes and cheris sack.

Unused to any drink stronger than small ale, Will drank the sack with relish and soon felt the dizziness that often comes with unaccustomed indulgence.

Around him conversations swirled, on matters of importance and state, on the pressing matters of the realm.

“But she is old,” one of the younger men said, “Gloriana is.”

And before Will recovered from realizing it was the Queen they spoke of, in such a careless tone, the same cultivated, measured cadences, sounded again, “Why, I hear she has grown so suspicious, like old women will, that she holds an old rusted sword in her room, and thrusts it into the arras cloth in the evening before she lies abed, to ensure no assassins hide beneath the tapestry.”

The rest of the room tittered.

It seemed to Will, dizzied by the wine and made sluggish by the unaccustomed pastries, as if too many eyes turned in his direction, to observe his reaction to that story.

He strived to show nothing. He was an honest burgher, a faithful subject, and it did not become him to mock royalty.

But later in the evening, a languid, black-eyed dandy approached him. “And what think you of the Queen’s age, and lack of heir, Master Shakespeare?”

Someone else, a creature with a sharp face, who looked somewhat like a fox, pressed close in. “Pray tell us,” he said. “We long to hear the opinion of the intellectual elite.”

Will, caught with a pastry in his mouth, choked, the taste suddenly sweet-cloying upon his tongue. “I think King James of Scotland will inherit,” he said. “When our Queen is gone to her reward and that no one will be the worse.”

“Oh,” a sharp, high-voiced creature to the left of him said. “You think then that King James will be better?”

Will knew not what to say, but someone else behind him attested, “Well, he is a man, and younger than the old woman. Why, it is said that, as in the days of her youth, she roams the streets of London, in disguise as a common gentlewoman, listening to the opinion of the people, for she’s convinced her councilmen deceive her.”

Will had scarce absorbed this when someone else asked, “What think you of that, Master Shakespeare?”

“I think that, if it’s true, then it’s a great folly.”

Will felt very hot and had reached that stage of light intoxication when every voice appeared to come from a long way off. “Anyone could kill her in the streets, late of a night, and leave the kingdom in chaos till an heir prevailed.”

In the silence that followed that comment, several people in the room traded dark glances. Will wondered what it meant. Had he said something wrong?

No, to his unfocused eyes it appeared more as though these people traded secret glances of satisfaction.

He could understand none of it, and he endured, attempting patience until, later in the night, he could run out through the sweeter, fresh perfumed gardens and hasten home thereby.

Scene 21

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 a blood-tinged cast to the scene.

“Come and lie down,” Kit said. “Why did you change aspect, even as I 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 blinked uncomprehending eyes at the elf.

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

But Quicksilver only glanced at Kit, as if in that space that Kit had closed his eyes and opened them again, Quicksilver had forgotten Kit’s name and visage and the joy of their erstwhile embraces.

How Quicksilver 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 the elf’s kind welcome, help remembering 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. “Quicksilver, if you so wish to be, I love you as I love Lady Silver. Only be mine again . . . .”

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

Kit shivered as sweat cooled upon his body.

He reached for the blanket that he and the elf had tossed to the floor earlier, in their exertions, and pulled it over himself. Caught on the edge of the bed, the cover would only come up at an odd angle, hiding Kit’s legs and little more. Not enough to stop the chill that climbed his body.

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 swoop. And those hands were the same, oh, different sizes and yet the same—they were so white, and long and more perfectly shaped than mortal hands.

Kit wanted those hands and their touch, the magical entrancement that came with elven love. He didn’t care in what form he got it—Silver’s or Quicksilver’s well-loved shapes—so long as he was touched by burning elven love and thus attained that state where he was purged of mortal dross, and reached the heavens with an immortal madness. “Come to bed,” he said, aware that he whined. “Come to bed.”

Quicksilver looked at Kit—an opaque 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, flying fleetingly 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. Behind them remained only 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 this curt. “But why?” Kit asked. “In whose name should I leave now?”

“In mine.” Quicksilver’s moss green eyes seemingly turned one shade darker, and the soft mouth, so well suited to pleasant smiles, and pleasanter sporting, shrank 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 and Silver’s loneliness, these many years. Or maybe—” 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 water and drowning in the air.

Quicksilver stood by the window, looking out.

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 and know nothing better. Oh, to be in the real life of true, 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.

Blinded by tears, Kit reached for his hose. With trembling hands, he pulled them on. Standing, he slid his breeches on and fastened them.

“Is all my hope turned to this hell of grief?” he asked aloud, in bitter, querulous tones born of his pain on behalf of that poor Kit who still seemed to Kit’s confused emotions to be someone else, some poor, deluded fool he hardly knew. “On seeing you after all these years, I thought, fool that I am, that you remembered me, that you had cared, cared enough to know where I lived and what I did after that cursed day when you pushed me, ice cold, from your sight.”

Kit fastened his shirt whichever way, then pulled his doublet on and started buttoning it, noticing halfway through that the button was in the wrong hole, and that the doublet pulled askew on his body, rising at a tilted angle at his neck, and protruding oddly below his waist.

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.

Quicksilver 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?

More than possessing them? Toying with them? Did Sylvanus mean to take over the world?

Oh, indeed, Silver had a lot to atone for.

Blindly she thrust her hand into her sleeve and pulled out the purse of coins that she’d brought with her for such necessities.

She handed the old man a golden coin, sporting the effigy of a forgotten king, and to his bumbling thanks, for only answer, she stretched her hand.

The letter was set into her hand, sealed. She set it on the lopsided, peeling table that served Will for a desk.

Slamming the door shut, without seeing nor caring if the man outside was startled, she backed onto the bed and sat down.

She knew, without fully knowing how she knew, what Sylvanus’s plan was. Within her mind the older memory of elves, and her own, feverish emotions, had congealed, and she liked not the shape of this scrying of hers. For she was sure that Sylvanus meant to take over the universe, to replace the very fabric of reality with his own essence—to be sole master, sole owner, sole god of all.

Fear trembled along her every limb and she thought the world was dying and Silver with it.

Scene 23

Kit Marlowe walks along increasingly narrowing streets, with a dark-haired, darkly clothed man who seems to become transparently ethereal when moonlight shines upon him.

Kit was scared.

He didn’t know what this creature beside him was. But he felt a fear, a panic, a scared, shying distrust of it. It was an animal fear, all skittering and hiding and small paws hurrying away from danger.

Now looking at him this way and now that, it seemed to him that Sylvanus was a man, or an elf of ethereal beauty, or only something dark and twisted, with long fangs, and sharp lupine hunger etched on every feature.

Kit had calmed. His temper, so inflamed by Quicksilver’s turning him out so bluntly, had cooled.

“I fear . . .” he said, and let the words hang, midair, not knowing how to explain what he feared. For indeed his fears crowded around him, many and clamorous, like dogs around a hunted hare.

Kit feared the man beside him, and he feared the depths of his own anger, the enthusiasms of his own sudden and dangerous passions.

He’d been thrown in prison twice for brawling. On less provocation than he’d received from Silver.

He still felt the injury of his dismissal, and with it, a muted, roaring anger. An anger that scared him.

Kit realized he’d been ever cleft in twain: the scholar, calm and impenetrable, above the world with curious eyebrow cocked at human follies—and the enraged, betrayed, mocked cobbler’s son that moved through the night, his dagger out, seeking revenge on those who’d done him wrong.

He cast a look at the man—the creature—beside him. The elf’s arm weighed like cold, dead iron in Kit’s.

The creature turned his perfect face and smiled at Kit, showing teeth that were just a little too long, a little too sharp.

But more than the teeth, what scared Kit was the hunger in the eyes that regarded him.

“I’ll get your revenge for you,” the elf said, and he smiled. His tongue appeared, sharp and pink between his teeth—the lolling tongue of a dog.

Kit thought of what Imp had said, of the man with the face of a wolf. He looked at Sylvanus with new eyes. Had this been it? Kit felt his heart race.

Was this the creature who had sought him at home? And for what purpose?

He tried to pull away from the arm that encircled his, and the arm’s grasp tightened.

What had Kit done? What? What had he agreed to when admitting he wished for revenge on Silver?

“All that I will do, and yet more,” Sylvanus said, his voice as gentle as a spring breeze. “All that I will do, and yet I’ll grant that Kit Marlowe will not squander his life, that he shall not give up breath and heart for the heartless elf, the foolish peasant.”

The gentle wind carried a smell with it, a heavy, gagging stench. Kit felt as if the elf’s voice had a physical presence that rubbed against his leg like a large dog.

Kit looked down, but where he thought there would be a dog, he saw only a darker patch of night, as if a concentration of darkness. The darkness crept up, like a miasma, and engulfed the shape of Sylvanus, making the elf look as if he’d emerged, half formed, from overarching dark.

What was this creature?

Kit pulled away, but the strong, cold arm would not let him go.

Kit thought of Imp. He thought of Will and his easy friendship, in the tavern, the day before. Those thoughts were rays of light in the gathering dark.

But Imp was threatened and Will must be sacrificed to Kit’s and Imp’s safety.

Kit felt trapped in one of those dreams where one wishes to stand up but can’t, the dream wrapping around him tightly, like a suffocating blanket.

Like a swimmer amid overpowering waves, crossing the broad arm of a perilous sea, Kit, wave on wave, saw his death near, and felt the abyss rob him of his very breath and life.

Kit thought of Imp and plunged headlong toward the promise of air and life, even should that air prove stale, that life fickle.

They were now in a part of town where no living thing walked. Houses, many houses, were marked with the seal of the plague that had so suddenly returned to ravage the city.

“Who are you?” he asked the elf, while the air around them grew very still, filled with the smell of the grave and of rotting flesh. “What are you?”

An apprentice, clad all in black, walked by on the other side of the street.

Kit struggled to cry for help, but he could not form the words. And if he found words, what could he say? That the gentleman at his arm was molesting him? Kit Marlowe, a grown man, who’d survived a rough and secretive life of London for so many years, would now ask for help from an adolescent?

The apprentice walked past. He gave Kit a sidelong glance over his shoulder, then with an obvious stare at the tavern sign above Kit’s head, shrugged his shoulders.

And perhaps I’m drunk, Kit thought. Or perhaps dreaming without sleeping.

But what dream of his had ever smelled so foul?

Laughter, unmistakably male in its low accents, and yet laden with soft, flowing promise, echoed all around Kit, seemingly wrapping him in coils of the mind. The creature grasped Kit’s arms with both hands. His fingers looked like claws and felt like crushing bonds.

“Who are you?” Kit asked again.

“I am that which can grant you your heart’s desire,” a male voice said, soft and slow. “Your desire of revenge and love and life, and everything you ever wanted.

“Only take me in, give me asylum, and shall your brow be crowned with a poet’s crown, and future generations will compare their meager efforts to your greater worthiness. And all your enemies will be destroyed and you shall reign, effortless and fair.”

Kit cleared his throat against the foul stench that surrounded him. He did not know why his heart beat such a disordered dance within his chest.

This was all a dream. It had to be a dream.

Did he not stand in a Southwark street, looking on mundane facades of wooden buildings, and watching apprentices walk by? Was the morning breeze not cold upon his skin? Did his clothes not feel clammy with his own sweat? Was he not in the world of real things, the world of the living?

By asylum, the elf could not mean more than for Kit to hide him for a time.

And yet, the elf offered to have all of Kit’s enemies destroyed . . . .

Kit thought of Poley and of the dark coils of the secret service. He thought of them threatening Imp. Oh, to see them laid low and Imp free. “How do I know you can do this? Who are you?”

“I told you, I’m Sylvanus. I was once King of Fairyland.”

“How do I know that you speak true?”

The elf laughed. “Because I know your future, Master Marlowe. Aye, and your past, too. Your future is to reign upon all earth. As for the past—did you not once stand in an ancient grove of trees, in a garden in your own home town, when you beheld Lady Silver? Aye, and when you rushed to her embraces, and submitted to those of Quicksilver, too?”

Upon all earth? It was insanity. As for the rest, Kit’s throat closed. How could this creature know the secrets Kit had told no one in all these years?

This dream knew too much and was too mocking. This dream knew about Quicksilver? If a dream of his own, it was a foul dream that lifted the scab off the not-yet healed injury and exposed Kit’s own heart to the cold and bitter bite of memory. And if it came from elsewhere, this creature knew too much, human or elf.

It seemed to Kit that a blanket of darkness enclosed him, a warm fog that obscured his vision.

Darker flecks floated in this black haze, like black diamond dust tossed in the wind. And a voice came from it.

“You must share my life and I yours, and in that life will you gain immortality, so that not only will your poems be remembered through the centuries, but you’ll be there to hear the praise and reap the accolades.”

The blanket tightened around him, keeping the cold breeze out. A different scent than the smell of rotting flesh surrounded Kit, again a smell not unlike that smell of lilac that he associated with Quicksilver and Silver, but grown overpowering, so as to become rank, cloying, like flowers arrayed around a funereal urn. “This I’ll do for you and more, if you take me in and give asylum to my high and lofty purpose. Rulers of the world, we’ll conjoined be, if only you keep me within your heart and mind. You rule humankind, and I Fairyland.”

“Fairyland?” Marlowe asked, the one word costing him all the accumulated breath he’d gathered, while the blanket coiled and coalesced around him. The creature had said he was King of Fairyland before, but how could that be, when Quicksilver had made the same claim? Did Fairyland have many countries? Many kings? “Where in Fairyland?”

“From Fairyland I hail,” the thing said. “From the hill within the Arden Woods. And there I ruled, before that demon, that low shape changer, Quicksilver, took my place, and with cold, unloving hand, thrust me from my race to die.”

“Quicksilver? Quicksilver banished you?” Kit asked. In his own mind was the image of Quicksilver, the fair youth in all his noble splendor turning Kit away from his love, and from his true lady’s bed.

“Banished?” A bitter laugh echoed on the heels of the word, and the darkness coalesced, so that over Kit’s shoulder, Sylvanus reappeared, this time much taller than Kit, and better formed for war, with broad shoulders and powerful arms so that, beside him, Kit felt like a child, less than half grown.

Kit made as if to move away, but a hand grabbed him around his middle, a powerful arm held him immobile. “The vermin had no right to banish me, nor to punish me, nor did he have power to do so. I was his king and he a foolish boy, playing with his mortals and his maidens. Yet, like the snake, well nurtured to the bosom, did he despoil me of kingdom and of country, and send me wandering the desolate darkness, with no one and nothing to sustain me. But give me asylum, and together, we’ll recover my land, my kingdom entire, and lay the worm in the darkest dungeon that the imagination of man has ever built.”

Kit felt he should say that he did not wish to see Silver harmed—nay, nor Quicksilver either, harsher though he was—nor did he wish their enchanted life brought low.

Yet she should be punished, and Quicksilver, too, for their wanton disregard of Kit’s love. But no more than a rebuke, a soft rejoinder.

Just as he thought this, another thought intervened, that Quicksilver had cast him from his bosom and from Silver’s warm favors.

Twice.

Into that thought wrapped the memory of disordered sheets and warm bed, of the soft, silken body beneath his own. He sighed and bit his lips, and didn’t say anything, did not defend his erstwhile love, nor attempt to turn away condemnation from that fair head.

In that moment this other elf was upon him, seemingly still blanket-shaped and yet human-formed, his hands everywhere, and prying upon Kit’s breast, his thighs and every limb, and up again, and close beside him pressed, and talked of love.

Gasping for breath, scared and giddy and confused, knowing what he’d allowed Quicksilver but not ever truly craved from mortal, Kit made reply. “You are deceived, I am no woman, I.”

The elf smiled at that and said, “It is no love such as human love I crave, but the fair use of your fair body that we will become one and the other and both interchangeable.”

Too late, Kit thought to run. Too late he thought that if it were so, if this creature were to have use of his body—whatever that use meant—Kit, the weaker, would lose his body, aye, and his soul, too, and all that went with life.

What good was life, if just a semblance, if Kit seemingly would walk and talk, but another creature use his mind and limbs?

He ran, pushing his feet hard against the dusty ground.

The elf ran with him, the darkness clinging around Kit’s cold limbs. Laughter, immortal laughter, stopped Kit’s ears.

Kit ran and ran, in disordered running, till each breath made bid to burst his lungs, and upon each breath he thought it would be his last.

Then in a dark place, far away from the awakening street where he had started, his legs gave out. He fell down. His knees bent, bringing him to his knees upon a muddy street, wet with slops and smelly discards.

Kit’s eyes stung from sweat. Blinking, he looked around, and saw that all the houses here, once taverns and bawdy houses, were blocked, the board nailed across their doors, the seal of the Queen upon the board and a warning that here reigned the plague.

Kit Marlowe made as if to rise again, but his knees wouldn’t support him.

Kneeling like a penitent on the muddy street, he heard the elf laugh and felt a touch, upon his whole body at once, like a million wanton hands seeking to explore his skin, to know his every pore, and trying to possess him and have him and win him as never human lover could have done.

He tried to shrug away from this feel, too intimate and knowing to be pleasurable, but found nowhere to turn since it was everywhere, and his legs would not allow him to rise.

Trembling, he knelt and wished that he would die, or else that he would, instantly, be consigned to the raw attentions of the torturers Poley had threatened him with, torturers which, not feeling this soft, would yet be kinder.

The myriad hands seemed to sink deeper and, through his clothes, touch his very skin.

Then the touch turned burning, hot, intemperate, and sank lower and deeper into Kit’s being, so it seemed to have captured not inconsequential flesh, but his very soul.

Like a bird trembling between the hands that would crush it, Kit sought to escape, but couldn’t. What lay inside could not be escaped.

With a fearful burning upon his every limb, he collapsed to the muddy street and thought that he’d sealed a hellish bargain.

But something in him laughed, something pushed, like a rider will set spurs to a sluggish horse, something whispered within his brain, “You will rise and do my work now. Morning is nigh, and from now on, must you spend all night awake and doing my will, if we are to achieve our revenge over our mutual enemy.”

Scene 24

Will’s room. Silver has made an attempt at straightening the disordered bed and paces, back and forth, her dainty silver slippers ticking a fast rhythm on the floor. Now and then her long, white fingers tug at her neckline, pushing it ever lower, to reveal more of her white, rounded breasts, as if she were too hot to bear the contact of the creamy lace. Will opens the door and steps in.

Will opened the door to his room, his head still swimming with confused elation.

The Earl of Southampton had given him money—given money to Will Shakespeare, the boy from Stratford, the provincial that no one believed could be a poet. The earl had given him money to write a long poem.

Will felt drunk without drinking, tingling with excitement and trembling with fear at his own daring.

This one evening Will had been treated like a poet, accepted into the highest circles of nobility by the power of his mind, the strength of his learning. Why, the gentlemen with the earl had asked Will’s opinion on politics and religion and important, weighty matters, and they’d listened to his words as if he held a secret to knowledge they could but guess at.

On this wave of triumph, he opened his door, on this wave of triumph he stepped into his room, to be engulfed in Silver’s arms, enveloped by the cloying lilac perfume of fairykind.

“Milady,” Will said.

Silver’s skin burned, like the skin of a feverish child, and her arms around Will scorched like brands pulled from a blazing fire. Her breasts pushed against his chest, so that he could feel them even through his doublet and his shirt.

“Milady,” he said. He could say no more. Her lips, hot, searched for his with the blind eagerness of a child’s.

For a moment her lips touched his. For a moment their mouths joined, and he breathed in the taste of her—like wine, newly bottled, full of spirit and bursting with life.

He thought of Nan. Nan in Stratford. Nan patiently waiting for Will beside their hearth. Nan, who should hear of Will’s triumph. Nan, who deserved not to have her husband betray her with an elf—something not human, something beautiful but also cold and distant like stars twinkling in the velvet of the night sky.

His hands lifted and rested on Silver’s shoulders, and pushed away at her till she stepped back. Looking dazed, she tried to approach and kiss him again.

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, wiping the taste of new wine from his lips, and pushed away harder.

Silver lost her balance, with his too-rough shove, and stepped back, till she stood against the bed and looked at him with wide, unfocused eyes. The eyes of a drunkard.

“Milady,” he said again. “Milady, you forget yourself.”

Silver opened her mouth. She took a step toward him, then a step back. Her hands trembled, and her body, too, giving the impression of a great struggle, as if she were two people, one rushing eagerly toward him, the other holding back, pulling back. Like an eager horse being restrained by a severe trainer, like a chained bear struggling against the chains to reach the dogs that wound him.

A mewling sound came through those parted red lips. A sound of complaint. “I don’t wish . . .” Silver said, her voice low and rough. Quicksilver’s voice. “I don’t wish to do this. It is the universe-ordering thought, the elements and images through which elves and humans perceive the universe. It’s all disturbed. The female element—the triple goddess, the eternal trinity, maiden and mother and crone—feels threatened. And like a person preparing for a blow, it increases its strength, it rules all, trying to appear powerful, trying to . . .” Silver’s mouth opened and closed, her body trembled.

Will thought of his dream, his odd dream. He thought of the maiden, the matron, and the crone.

He shook his head. He did not wish to think about it.

He wanted nothing to do with the slippery world of the supernatural. He wanted his solid home, his commonsense wife, his profitable career, his coat of arms. He wanted his son to attend a well-regarded college.

His hand within his sleeve touched and felt the solidity of the leather purse he’d got, the metal coins within. He took a deep breath. The world of reality called him, the world of coin and work and family. The faerie world was delusion, a mad dance of nonsense that permeated reality yet didn’t impinge upon it.

He walked toward his bed, intending to put the purse beneath the mattress.

Silver cut his advance.

Her trembling hands stretched toward his shoulders, her chest rose and fell in fast, eager breaths—reaching breaths, imploring breaths, demanding breaths. Her lips parted, promising a heaven within—the taste of fresh wine, the caresses of her searching tongue.

Will looked at her lips and at her rising and falling breasts, and heard his own voice come small and strangled from a throat that felt suddenly tight. “Madam,” he said. “Madam, you forget yourself. I am married, and so is Quicksilver.”

As he spoke, he stepped backward, toward his desk, hoping nothing was in his way.

If he fell and she touched him once more, it would all be up.

Will might resist temptation while looking at Silver, but resisting temptation under the touch of those long, knowing fingers—resisting temptation then would take a less lively saint than Will could ever hope to be, a saint of plaster and painted wood like those the papists venerated.

He smelled Silver’s heady scent and felt as though his very blood responded to it, flowing through his veins in a heat of fire and air, demanding action where honor dictated restraint.

She stepped forward, as he stepped back. Her tongue flicked over her half-parted lips. Yet the words that came through those lips were Quicksilver’s, steady and rational, spoken in Quicksilver’s rough, preoccupied voice. “There is some way, Will, that my brother is threatening the female element. He holds one of its aspects hostage, or he will soon kill one of them. And the only way I can think for him to hurt them, the only way that would require a human body, is sympathetic magic, which is a magic stronger in humans than in elves.”

Will blinked. He couldn’t think of Quicksilver’s words, while desire for Silver’s offered body assailed him so. He stepped back, and back and back, and stared at the lovely, unfocused silver eyes, and asked, his own voice too low and gruff, “Sympathetic magic?”

Silver smiled as she gained space, and through her smiling lips Quicksilver’s voice said, “Yes, like when you make a doll to figure a man and upon that doll perform the magic with which you wish to influence the living creature. Thus by affecting a symbol of one of the female aspects, Sylvanus will wound the deity itself, and wound femininity throughout the land, as he’s already injured maleness.”

Will hit his writing table behind him, and felt it totter, and turned around, and reached with hasty hands for the trembling candle, and rescued it just in time, before it overturned and its flame caught the papers strewn about.

In that fatal moment Silver caught him, and her soft, rounded arms surrounded him, her soft, rounded breasts pressed against his back.

In that moment he felt her breath hot against his neck, as she parted his curls, and kissed him beneath his ear and whispered into it, in Quicksilver’s hard and clear voice, “But what would be strong enough to prefigure the female prototypes with which humans and elves have imbued the immense and indifferent universe? Something strong enough to represent at least one of them?”

More soft kisses.

Will trembled as one with the ague, and tried to keep from turning around, from putting his arms around that willing body. He would not meet Silver’s kisses with his own eager lips, he would not let the elf show Will the decadent, exciting ways of elven love.

He tried to tell himself that the thing embracing him was not even human and not even whole. Quicksilver spoke through Silver’s mouth. How fractured had this strange creature become? How much did Silver desire Will?

Or was it Quicksilver, lord of elves, who tormented Will thus, attempting to entrap him with Silver’s favors?

Staying still, staying turned away from Silver’s love, took all the power of Will’s mind, all the strength of his heart.

And through the fever of his struggle, through the sweat that sprang at his neckline and ran down his back in hot rivulets, through the veil of pleasure at Silver’s soft kisses, Will heard Quicksilver’s voice. “Will, do you have a female deity in your society? A female priestess? A vestal virgin?”

Will thought of the virgin that the papists had worshiped and shook his head, “No, that was the papists, that was . . .” He could speak no more.

In his thoughts, he saw the image of the virgin that his mother had kept hidden in the attic, the chaste image of plaster, painted white, the female form swathed in mantels and voluminous dress.

In his mind, the image divested itself of mantels and cloth, and appeared naked, triumphant. Her form was Silver’s—the large breasts, the tiny waist, the flare of hips—beautiful and tempting and clad only in silky white skin.

Silver’s perfume enveloped him like a heady dream, and saliva gathered in his mouth, as though he were a child longing for some tempting confection.

Silver’s arms, reaching around him, unbuttoned his doublet and reached beneath—hot, hot through the flimsy, worn-down material of his shirt.

Will thought of Nan, but he was like a man drowning and reaching for a shadow. He had no more power to fight off Silver than a drowning man to beat back the raging waves.

“Milady,” he said, his voice strangled. “Milady, please.”

Was he pleading for her to leave him alone, or was he pleading for the full satisfaction of the desire she aroused?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t say. His blood ran like a mad spark of fatuous fire along the taut strings of his nerves.

Her hands had found their way beneath his shirt. Her long fingers struggled, blind, with the fastening to his breeches.

He flinched from the heat of her fingers and yet wanted her touch, wanted to feel her whole body burning his, cleansing from him his rough human stuff, replacing it whole with the pure, purged metal of elvenkind.

“Milady,” he said again, in a begging tone.

And Silver’s laughter, her clearest laugh, which he hadn’t heard in ten years, echoed triumphant in his ears.

His thought subsided beneath currents of desire, his hands groped the stuff on the table.

Suddenly, beneath his hand, clear, hard, he felt something that shouldn’t be there.

It felt like sealing wax. It had that rigidity, that round shape.

Will opened his eyes, lifted his hand, looked down.

On the table was a folded letter, sealed with a round, rough blob of red wax—with no impression of a ring.

The outside address—he read it as if through a fog, while Silver’s hands, which had finally triumphed with the tie of his breeches, ventured beyond, beneath, more intimately. The outside address on the letter read: To Master Will Shakespeare, from his wife, Anne.

Nan.

It was like a glass of freezing water poured over Will.

He heard Silver’s small protest as he pulled away from her, while, in the same step, he tore Nan’s letter open.

Nan had written to him—or rather, Nan had asked someone to write to him. Nan rarely did this. She didn’t like to admit that she couldn’t write, nor did she enjoy asking someone more literate to write her words. Not unless there were something terribly wrong at home.

Will thought of his father, who was aged and declining inexorably toward the grave.

His breeches, undone, slid down, over his stockings, to puddle around his boots.

But he ignored them and pulled the pages apart, unfolded the cheap paper.

The handwriting was Gilbert’s, his younger brother’s.

Nan, who could not write, would not have bothered Gilbert, a promising glover apprentice, with anything short of necessity.

Silver, who’d been pushed near the bed, now returned, her hands stretched and open to engulf him.

Will held his arm out, as far as it would go, and kept her at a distance, while he stepped away, hampered by the breeches around his ankles.

Nan’s letter was short—as they all were, Nan being a woman of very few words. It said that there had been a fire in Stratford. She said the fire had been odd, starting everywhere at once after a show of fairy lights. Many houses had been consumed, and though the Shakespeare house had not been touched, helping their neighbors had emptied the Shakespeare pantry. The season was bad, food scarce and expensive. If Will could not send some money, Nan could not see how Hamnet could be kept in school, since the fees were so outrageous. She signed herself his loving wife.

His loving wife.

Will felt the weight of the coins in his sleeve, felt the ridicule of his breeches around his ankles. He set Nan’s letter on the desk.

He looked at the date. Before Silver had come. Yet Silver had never told him of the fire. Why not?

This being who’d almost seduced Will for the second time had not told Will about this fire that had endangered Will’s family.

Will reached for his breeches and pulled them up.

Silver clung to him while he fastened them, and she tried to find his lips with her blindly searching ones.

He turned his face away. All excitement was gone. All enchantment, all the feel of new wine in his mouth.

Nothing was left but stony cold and dark suspicion.

“Madam,” he said, his voice loud enough that Silver stopped her attempts at kissing him. “Madam, what have you done?”

The beautiful silver eyes blinked, close to his, with every appearance of confusion. “Done?” she asked. It was her own voice, not Quicksilver’s. Her own voice, small and slight. “Done?”

“The fire in Stratford, why did you not tell me of it?”

She flinched as though slapped. She stepped back, she swallowed hard.

“The fire,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know.” Her long, white hand went to her neck, as if to ease an invisible constriction. And Quicksilver’s voice slipped out of the parted lips. “I hoped you’d never find out.”

Rage boiled within Will. Silver had hoped Will would never find out. Anne’s letter spoke of the fire starting everywhere at once, suddenly, after a show of fairy lights.

Fairy lights. Gorge rose in Will’s throat. “Milady, what have you done?” he asked.

Silver laughed. Her eyes wild, she charged toward Will, open arms inviting, bosom rising and falling. “Forget the peasant, Will,” she said in the voice of a drunken woman, in the voice of a madwoman. “Forget the peasant and be mine. I need you, I. I’ve never ceased loving you.”

Will met her enthusiasm with his coldness, met her eye, and did not flinch from her desire. But he pushed her away when she would cling, and he would not relent, he would not let her touch him. “You tried to kill my wife, madam. And I love my wife.”

Silver stepped back. Her laugh rose higher and higher, to peels of insane amusement. “Kill your wife? Kill your wife, Will? You think that of me?”

Tears tainted her voice and Quicksilver’s voice, the two of them mingling as they came from behind Silver’s hand, which covered her mouth.

“Kill your wife? You think me such a villain? Oh, curse you, Will Shakespeare. Why did I think you’d help?” She gathered her arms around herself, as though protecting her body from an invisible wind. “I have other help. I have others who love me better. I’ll seek them out.”

On those words, suddenly, Silver disappeared, leaving no more than a sparkle of light in the still air of the room.

Standing in his empty room, Will took a deep breath of relief. His trembling eased. He swallowed. He would send Nan some of this coin. Hamnet, his only son, must be kept in school.

At the back of his mind, something wondered where Silver had gone, something worried for Silver. But he wouldn’t think about it. Not any more than he would think about the odd dream, about the three Fates, the three creatures who’d given him such an odd mission.

His chances of being a great poet lay with Marlowe, not with Fairyland.

Scene 25

The fairy palace. Elves lean on columns or sag to the floor. Some lie on the floor itself, looking dead—though their chests still rise and fall with breath. Healthy elves kneel by the ill ones, and try to revive them, or just wail their fate. Ariel stands in the middle of the room, her dress torn, tattered, and askew. She looks pale, her lips tremble, and her eyes have that haunted quality of someone who’s lived through the end of the world.

Ariel heard the voices around her: the moans of despair, the cries of the afflicted.

And all of it echoed within her head as, “Lady, lady, lady,” a cry for help she could not give.

She felt her people’s plight and she reached for the reserve of her power, for the fire of power in the hill, to heal the blight.

But the power had waned and burned low: the steady fires had become embers only, beneath a fall of ash. Like a flame beneath a cooling rain, elven power sputtered and burned lower and with a colder light.

The light wouldn’t warm, the magical power wouldn’t spell, and there was nothing else that Ariel could do to heal her people.

In her despair she’d tried herbs and spells, and hallowed, ancient medicines of elvenkind.

Nothing worked.

The hill power burned ever lower, and more elves died.

At her feet, on the white marble floor, lay Lord Slate, hardly breathing.

Lord Obsydian had died yesterday. Lady Pearl, Obsydian’s wife, mourned still even as she herself bent under the blight. Soon there would be no changeling left alive in the hill.

Tears ran down Ariel’s cheeks, and her hands twisted at her dress.

“Milady?” a faint voice asked from behind her.

Turning, she saw Malachite standing nearby. His face looked gaunt and pale so that his skin resembled parchment stretched thinly over sharply carved ivory.

From amid the pallor, his eyes burned fiercely like emeralds in which the light caught. “Milady,” he said.

Now Malachite would die, Ariel thought, and hurried toward him, supporting him with her arms so that he wouldn’t fall.

He let go of the pillar on which he leaned and looked at her, as if from a long way off. “Milady,” he repeated, and then his voice dropped, hesitant. “You asked for proof and I have proof.”

“Proof of what?” Ariel asked. Then she remembered Malachite’s insinuations, his wild plan to marry her.

She’d thought he was ill and raving. He was ill and raving.

Yet he had proof.

Proof of Quicksilver’s betrayal?

Was Quicksilver’s betrayal, then, causing all this?

But no, she raved. It was naught. A mad thing, a glitter of suspicion such as will catch the eye of a babe or the mind of an insane person. It meant nothing.

She would accommodate Malachite’s mad humor and deal with him gently, for he was as close as Quicksilver still had to a brother.

Gently, she held Malachite up, feeling as though he, too, might at any minute vanish in a pile of dust, as so many changelings had.

She got him to the relatively deserted hallway before he managed to say, “Here, milady,” and hand her a drop of water.

Looking within the drop, Ariel saw Quicksilver, saw him as Silver, smiling on another, a mortal, a young man. And not Will.

This was a redheaded young man, his body twined with Silver’s in the rites of love.

It had come to this, then, that Ariel’s lord—her lord’s other aspect—would be a bawd onto humankind?

He had promised Ariel—promised—upon their wedding day that Ariel would be his only love, lifelong—a promise most uncommon for a marriage between near-immortal beings.

She looked at the image in the water and felt her heart break. Fool she was, she had believed in him.

Opening her hand, she let the water drop roll out of it, roll onto the floor.

Shaking, she turned to Malachite.

“The water . . .” she said. “Silver.” She could say no more.

“Two of the small winged ones who remain alive got it. They went to London at my bidding,” Malachite said. “And at my bidding did they find milord and take this image. It is a true image. I would have faked it if needed, but this is a true image.” He turned to look at her. His hands trembled, and his lips, and though he’d found this proof himself, yet it grieved him, for his eyes filled with tears.

She patted his thin, emaciated arm that so ill fitted the uniform it had once filled.

She never doubted but that it was true, and her heart wandered, parched, a deserted landscape, with no relief in sight.

So it was true that Quicksilver loved her not.

The love she’d sought her life long, the love she’d thought she’d earned ten years ago, that love had been a lie, no truer than illusions spun in a lazy moment.

Oh, curse the day. Curse Ariel with it. Curse all of fairykind with such an inconstant king who, breaking his vow, had broken his realm.

Ariel scant heard Malachite, who pleaded for her hand in marriage, for an alliance that might heal fairykind.

She must find Quicksilver.

Her hands dealt roughly with the soft fabric of her gown. Her mind reached for the power of Fairyland, while she remembered Quicksilver’s glittering magical pattern.

But she could no more home in on that strong beacon than she could get the full strength of the hill power.

She felt the darkness of in-between worlds enfold her, and for a moment, she thought she’d be forever stranded in this no-world, this world of shadows and dreams between the fairy world and the human.

The cross between the two spanned the distances of human land through an abyss outside time, and through this abyss elves could move quickly like a dream, between two points in the human world, no matter how far apart.

The instrument they used for this travel looked to elven eyes as a graceful arched bridge, spun of purest light, shining like gold in the dark night.

The elves called it the bridge of air.

Tonight, before Ariel ever set foot on the glittering construction, she noticed that it seemed grey and dimmed, and that it swayed as though on unseen winds that made it appear and disappear into flickering unreality.

Midbridge, in the ascending curve of her journey, she faltered.

Quicksilver’s voice echoed in her mind, as if he’d been beside her, as if he’d touched her gown and yelled in her ear, “Betrayed. I am betrayed.”

Something dark and cold passed by Ariel, moving fast.

The bridge wavered and splintered.

The pattern of Quicksilver’s power vanished from Ariel’s mind.

She tried to grab for it, but she could not.

She felt herself plunge through boiling air and freezing loneliness, through screaming silence and pulsing nothing.

Materializing, she saw towering buildings around her, and muddy street underfoot. She smelled the reek of mud and refuse.

Her lord she did not see.

Scene 26

Marlowe’s lodgings. On the bed, on his stomach, Marlowe lies. His clothes are tattered, and bloodstained, as is his hair, his hands, and his face.

Before Marlowe awoke, a feeling of heaviness hung upon him, a heaviness such as one feels when illness is eminent, or when, having slept after a great grief, one wakes to find that grief undiminished.

Awakening, opening his aching eyes to the bright light of day that entered through his sparklingly clean windows, Kit smelled a heavy scent of rotted flesh and spoiled meat.

Kit’s head pounded with the worst of hangover headaches. His mouth tasted like a midden. Every small movement of his waking body caused untold agony, as though a fiend armed with a sharp dagger worked him over, pushing the tip into his skin, piercing his muscle.

Aching, Kit lay still for a while.

A heaviness rested upon his stomach as though hot lead had been poured down his unsuspecting throat in the night.

He moved not, and he hurt, and hurting, he thought he might as well move.

He pulled himself up on his arms. Hellish pain ran from his wrists to his shoulders. He rolled on his side and lifted himself on his elbow. As he rolled, the cover of his bed came with him, glued by a black substance.

His head pounded and he saw everything as if through a dark veil.

Memories of the night before came in fits and starts, each of them hurting as much as physical movement.

Kit remembered Silver, beautiful Silver, and he remembered their love-making, though both mind and heart flinched from the memory as a man will from touching a bruised spot.

After that, his memories became tangled, like a thread that the cat has got at.

There had been . . . an elf? As Kit tried to bring his memories into the light, they shied away farther into shadows and his head pounded to the rhythm of his vain efforts.

Kit sat on his bed and tried to shake his head, but stopped as sharp pain made it feel as if a dagger were worked into his left temple.

Had he got drunk? He might have. He probably had. Yes, no doubt about it. Wine was the best way to drown the sorrows of lost love, and perforce, Kit had used it. And in his cups, what had he done?

He cradled his head in black, sticky hands, and wondered how and with what he’d got himself so befouled. He remembered the mud of the alley, the stickiness of it, but this stickiness was greater than any clay, and it had the heavy smell of the slaughterhouse.

The thought gagged Kit, his throat working against his mind and body to close and stop all thought, all breathing, with overpowering nausea.

He must wash. Whatever it was, he would wash, and it would be gone.

Getting up on unsteady legs, Kit reeled to the washbasin. His landlady, or Imp, had set a large pitcher full of water on the dresser, beside the metal stand that supported the ceramic washbasin.

Kit poured water into the basin, dipped his hands in it, preparing to splash at his face.

He stopped. The water in the basin, into which he’d dipped his hands, had turned a deep, dark red, like freshly spilled blood.

Kit looked, with wide open eyes at his sleeve, caked with the same black that had been on his hands.

Blood. How had he got himself all over blood?

Had he gone to a bear baiting? To get this fouled, he’d have needed to participate, to climb into the ring with the dogs and tear at the bear with his teeth and hands.

Gagging with nausea, he washed, with his eyes closed. Rushing to the window, he opened it, and threw the bloodied water out of it, to the outcry of inattentive passerby whose clothes got bespattered.

Had Kit himself got bloodied in this way?

But so much blood . . . .

He poured fresh water into the basin, and again washed his face and hands.

The water ran out, and wrapping himself in a blanket, Kit ran to the door of his room to ask for more.

Upon first touching the iron doorknob, Kit flinched, because the thing felt red-hot, and burned his palm. Why and how had this knob got heated?

He shook his head. No matter. Grabbing his blanket around his fast-blistering hand, Kit used a tip of it to protect his hand as he opened the door.

With the door open, Kit hollered into the cool, dark interior of the house for more water to be brought. While waiting, he paced back and forth the narrow confines of his room.

How could this have happened and what had he done?

The memory ran away from his searching, hiding in the shadows of his mind, whence nothing but evil dreams come to torment unknowing reason.

Imp’s small, curious face showed at the turn of the steps, looking up into the hallway and into Kit’s eyes. He carried a large pitcher in his hand.

Kit bowed, wondering how fearful his countenance might be, if it were as blanched by fear as his heart was and said, “I thank you, I thank you. I got fearfully spattered. A dog run over by a cart and I was near and suffered the blemish. A dog. A dog. Thank you for the water.”

But Imp, setting down the jar, lingered, and watched Kit with wide and worried eye. “Are you well?” he asked, his serious eyes looking like the eyes of Kit’s mother watching over him. “Are you well, Kit?” He wrinkled his small nose. “It smells in here.”

“A dog,” Kit said, not sure what he said. “Go, Imp, go. I must clean myself.”

Kit closed the door after Imp, wondering at his not remembering all this blood, wondering at how much he must have drunk the night before.

With a pang of inconsequent guilt, he remembered that he’d never told Imp the story the boy had requested. Where had he been instead?

He removed his clothes and, scooping clear water with his hands, threw it at his face, only to see it fall, again, as crimson as blood.

Looking at his reddened hands still filled him with nausea.

Deep from within the house, he heard steps and noises, and stopped, imagining the constables, come to arrest him for capital murder that he couldn’t swear he hadn’t committed. Although if he’d murdered someone, perforce the creature had too much blood in him.

He thought he heard a knock upon the door but, listening, heard no more. “Whence is that knocking?” he said, startled upon saying it, and chuckling in his throat, he trembled at the sound.

“How is it with me?” he said. “When every noise appals me? What hands are here?” He lifted his hands from the basin and stared at the red stains in amazement. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.”

Talking to himself, he knew himself already mad. And with a plot hanging about his neck like a noose and the plot he must create to counteract it, Kit couldn’t afford to be insane. He must make madness sane, or else die, and thus end all reeling thought.

The knocking came again, steady, and this time it seemed to Kit that it came from his door.

Not Imp again!

With shaking hands, he reached for the knob. With shaking hands, burning pain making his hand smart, he opened the door.

“Come,” he said. “Come and I’ll explain.”

But neither of the two people who strode through his open door was Imp.

One of them Kit had seen the day before: it was none other than soft-talking, false-dealing Robin Poley. And with him, beside him, was another face that Kit knew well: Ingram Frizer, personal servant to Lord Thomas Walsingham, so recently Kit’s own patron.

What could Ingram’s presence here mean? Was Lord Walsingham also deserting Kit? Was Walsingham part of the conspiracy to make Kit entrap Sir Walter Raleigh? Did Thomas Walsingham, for whom Kit had written such inspired lines, mean to have his pet poet killed?

With what mind Kit could, with his teeth chattering a mad dancing tune to his aching brain, Kit tried to think of his cunning plan.

He was going to turn in Will, surely he was, and save himself and Imp, and he would marry Madeleine, and . . .

Poley strode in, dressed in an immaculate cream-colored velvet outfit, and matching suede boots so clean they looked as though they were meant to stride on the very clouds and step on the moon. He held an immaculate glove in a spotless, gloved hand, and smacked it upon his bare hand, as though with contempt. The ruffle on his shirt bobbed. Behind him strode Ingram, his plain face set in square discord, his dark, serviceable wool suit betraying no stain.

“We’d love to hear your explanation, Master Marlowe,” Poley said, and raised a brow at the stained water in the smeared basin, at the blood-splattered room, at Marlowe within his blanket.

Together Ingram and Poley wrinkled their noses at the smell in the room. Poley waved his glove in front of his nose, and Ingram twisted his lips as though he would be sick.

Kit stepped back, in his grubby blanket, tripping over his own feet as he backed up. “I thought . . .” He swallowed down the evil taste in his mouth. “I believed . . .” He stopped short of saying he’d believed them, one or both, to be Imp. He did not want to mention Imp, he didn’t want to remind them of Imp’s existence. He rallied, and managed to stand and square his shoulders, despite the blanket, despite the blood on his hair, despite the smell of carrion in his room. “What should I explain?”

Poley smiled. Walking around the room as though it were a curious exhibit open to the public, like the rooms of Bedlam where the lunatics were displayed for a few coins, Poley looked debonair, controlled, amused. “Signior Marlowe, bon jour! There’s a French salutation to your French slip. You gave us the counterfeit fairly last night.”

“The counterfeit?” Marlowe asked, composure gone. “The counterfeit, I?”

How did they think he had fooled them? Had they found that John Penry, poor pious John, knew less of conspiracy than of heresy? “Good morrow to you both. What counterfeit did I give you?”

“You escaped our watch,” Ingram said.

Slow, direct Ingram walked right up to Kit and poked a large, sausagelike finger into Kit’s chest. “Last night. You gave us the slip.”

Poley only smiled. He stood over the basin. “What was here, I wonder?” he said. “It looks like murder, murder most foul. Is it murder, Marlowe? Did you murder someone?”

Marlowe shook his head.

Had he? And if he had, why would he reveal it? The slip? What did Ingram mean? Had they been watching him?

Oh, but if they had, then they knew of his visit to Will’s lodgings. How could he convince them that his visit to Will had been in the service of the state, in the service of uncovering conspiracy?

Shaking, Kit wondered if they’d even now arrested Will and put him to the question. If they had, then no chance remained of Kit’s making it appear that Will was guilty, no chance of escaping the noose closing around Kit’s neck.

Kit shook his head, not knowing at what, and opened his mouth to deny an accusation never made.

Poley sighed. “No use lying to us, you know. We will find the truth. Even if you so cleverly evaded our vigilance yesterday, even if you seemed to vanish into thin air outside that door in Shoreditch, we know you didn’t vanish. You went somewhere. You did something. You’d best tell us what.”

He looked directly at Kit with his frank, amiable gaze that was neither.

Kit shook his head again. “I know not what you mean,” he said. This, at least, was true.

Poley stepped away from the basin with its red contents. Looking vaguely disgusted, he waved his glove in front of his nose once more.

At the gesture, the glove’s perfume, like the smell of a hundred pines, diffused through the room, mingling with the smell of carrion.

“Come, come, Marlowe. We are not fools, though you think us so. All your running and all your lying, the stories of a big conspiracy. There’s no conspirator here but you, Marlowe. Let us be well understood.”

“But, John Penry . . . .” Kit started.

Robin smiled. “Aye. John Penry. The songbird sang a song treasonous enough, of desire for Scottish rule and Puritan control. But no hint of a conspiracy in that song, no hint of a false note. The false note is with you, Marlowe, and you must be made to sing. Tell me, will it take the wheel to draw your song from you?”

Once more, he’d got close enough to Kit that their faces almost touched. Once more he started rounding on Kit, around and around and around. “The wheel stretching your body, breaking your legs, wrenching loose every bone from its appointed socket.” Poley smiled and walked around Kit.

Thus, in a display of marvelous beasts from overseas, had Kit Marlowe watched a slick black panther go round and round a dog it meant to eat.

And like the dog, Kit Marlowe turned, trying to keep the panther within the scope of his sight. “I know not what you mean,” he said.

“Well, then, I’ll speak plainly,” Poley said. “For I’m a plain man.” He grinned at this, enjoying his own, self-conscious irony. “Let me remind you, then, Master Marlowe, that a paper has been discovered amid your affairs, written in your hand, a paper proclaiming offensive heresies and denying the divinity of our lord and savior, Christ. This paper you wrote while at Cambridge. What say you to this? Who taught you heresy? We have it on good authority that you learned it from a nobleman, even one close to the Queen. Who was it? Name his name and you shall go free. Do not, and you shall sing upon the wheel, even a higher and sweeter song than was ever heard.”

Kit sweated. It was back to the paper again, back to the accusations of heresy. Enough to hang him. Enough to burn him.

He couldn’t remember such a paper, but it might well have existed. In those days, Kit hadn’t yet learned caution.

And if they had that paper, there was no escape.

And yet . . .

“This paper must be old,” he said. “And some two years hence, I had a roommate in this very room. Thomas Kyd, who wrote The Spanish Tragedy. A loose-living sort of fellow. A theater man.”

Before Kit had finished his sentence, before he had finished turning in yet another innocent lamb to the maw of official condemnation, a smirk passed between Poley and Ingram Frizer.

Kit followed that smirk, mutely, feeling his hopes sink with it.

“Thomas Kyd was questioned,” Poley said gently. Too gently. “Questioned before we came to you. For it was amid his effects that the damnable paper was first found. And he said it came from you.” He seemed to think on this point and ponder it. “But he only turned you in after much wracking, Kit Marlowe. I fear your friend Tom Kyd will never write again. There’s one who doesn’t turn in his friends lightly . . . .” Poley shook his head, as if at the folly of such loyalty. “As for you, Master Marlowe, you’ll come with us. If you wish to put down that ridiculous blanket and—”

Tom Kyd questioned? Poor Tom Kyd, broken at the wheel. Not a genius, never a promising playwright, and yet what a friend he’d not been when they’d shared a room.

And yet, Kit himself had been ready to turn him in.

Guilty for a sin he’d never got to commit, afraid for what was to come, Kit muttered, “But, masters—”

A small creature burst into the room, a fury of whirling fists and kicking legs. “You’ll not take him, cowards. Not unless over me.”

“Imp,” Kit yelled. “Imp, to your mother.”

But he might as well have ordered the devil to absolution or the Protestant Queen to the Pope’s bosom.

Imp threw himself on Poley, biting and gouging, his small hands scratching at Poley’s fine clothes.

Ingram Frizer grabbed Imp by the back of the collar and lifted him from the ground, looking on him as though Imp were a noisome insect.

Imp wrinkled his face in rage, but his lips trembled on the verge of tears.

Kit, thinking only that the child was in danger once more, said very softly, “Go to your mother, Richard, for Jesu’ sake.”

And as though the unusual exhortation, the unusual name, had scared Imp more than screaming, more than the strange men in Kit’s room, Imp’s face melted like wax too near a flame.

The wrinkles of anger turned soft. Rage became grief, as tears overflowed the wide grey eyes. The child took a deep breath and sobbed. “They’ll take you,” he said.

“Aye,” Kit said. “And best for all.”

To Ingram, in a tired voice that yet betrayed the certainty of being obeyed, Kit said, “Put him down. He’s not worth your time. You may have me.”

Poley laughed. “Thus is the wiley playwright brought to bay. So easily does his run end. Good Kit, kind Kit will do what we wish for the sake of this cub. Should we take the cub then as surety?”

Kit swallowed. He shook his head. Oh, let Imp go free, and then Kit would do as Kit best pleased.

“No,” he said. “No. You need no surety. I’ll say what you want me to, or else die.”

Ingram put the child down.

Poley waved the child away, “Go,” he said. “We know where to find you, should Master Marlowe not behave.”

Imp hesitated on his normally fleet feet, turned and stared at Kit, and said, “They’re going to take you.”

Kit shrugged. He couldn’t answer. He felt tears prickle their way beneath his eyelids, felt them tighten a knot at his throat.

And then, as Imp walked slowly away, as Poley and Frizer stood there, he felt something else.

He heard an inner voice, clear, in his mind. “Let me,” it said. “This is ridiculous.”

And then a dark tide, a dark wave, engulfed Marlowe’s mind and took over his thought. From that dark wave, words ensued, spoken by Marlowe’s mouth but not, for that, his—or at least not his in any conscious sense.

What was this, then? What was this thing? It was as though another Marlowe lived within Marlowe, another creature within his deepest bosom, a smoother talker to his smooth-talking ways.

He could hear convincing arguments, rolling honeyed, word upon honeyed word from his tongue. They assured Poley and Frizer of Kit’s verity, of his certainty of a conspiracy.

Yet, the words in themselves would not be enough. The words would not suffice to turn the threat from Kit’s door.

But with the words he could feel magic flowing. Magic sparkling and tangy on the tongue and soft-stinging on the skin.

Whence came the magic? How had Kit got it? From his fabled ancestor, Merlin?

And how could he use it thus, so easily?

He told Frizer of the big conspiracy about to be uncovered, and suggested that Frizer, Poley, and a servant of Milord Essex should all meet at the home of Mistress Elinor Bull, in Deptford.

Kit had no idea why Deptford, nor what he intended to do at such a meeting that would keep the threat from his door, keep him out of jail, and keep Imp safe.

Like a lame beggar trailing after a good walker, his mind limped after his lips, unable to catch up to the wit of his speech.

The meaning of the words sank in slowly. Kit was not used to listening to himself speak, even less to having to think of what he meant. How smooth he sounded, he thought, how plausible.

How strange this.

Had Kit finally become two? Had his soul, ever divided between love and hate, violence and beauty, finally cracked?

He knew not what tale he spun, yet he saw Frizer and Poley exchanging looks, at least half convinced.

Inside his own mind, Kit Marlowe screamed in despair. His mouth was not his to control.

He would save his life, that was true. Maybe even Imp’s life in the bargain.

But what would become of Kit’s mind?

His reason followed his words, made sound of them. Links fell together in his mind and he second-guessed his own ideas. Elinor Bull, a distant cousin-by-marriage of Queen Elizabeth herself, was not at all wealthy. For adequate compensation, she’d long permitted her house to be used as a safe house by the secret service.

Kit could get all those men there, each of them a servant of a member of the Queen’s inner circle.

The Queen herself, who now resided at Greenwich Palace, near enough to Deptford, was known to have grown fearful and suspicious in her old age.

If word of the meeting got to her ears—and Kit had enough acquaintance at court to ensure it would, the Queen would perforce eavesdrop on it. She’d probably send her men to arrest the whole group and let it be sorted out later. In which case, Kit could convince the Queen herself that these men were involved in a plot.

Yes, he’d trust his silver tongue to let him walk out free.

Even better, the Queen, who was said to be suspicious enough to often check such meetings and conspiracies herself, might come by herself to Deptford. In which case, in the confusion, Kit might well walk away free without even the need for being interrogated.

Kit Marlowe’s headache was gone. Never had he felt so lucid. Never had he spoken with so facile a tongue.

It was, he thought, as though he’d become a whole new man, one with a magical capacity to manipulate others.

After Poley and Frizer had left, Kit finished washing and dressed himself.

He wrote letters to his acquaintances at court and sent them off by messenger. In each one he hinted at the events to take place in Deptford, and at a plot against the Queen, ensuring he said nothing too clearly.

If he succeeded, not only would the Queen’s suspicions be awakened, but other people’s, too. Aye, when he was done, Elinor Bull’s house would be creeping with so many spies that none would be safe. None save Kit Marlowe, himself.

He smiled and set about ensuring that Will Shakespeare would be in Deptford, too—one more lamb that must be led to the slaughter for Kit’s safety.

And yet Kit, a stranger to half of his own mind, wondered what he was saving and how long before the tear in his soul widened and he went quietly into that good night of oblivion, from which there would be no return.

Scene 27

Will’s room. He sits at his table, writing. His hands are covered in ink stains, as is the top of his tottering writing table. The papers in front of him are an unsteady tower, displaying scrawled writing and checks and crosses aplenty. He has pushed back the sleeves of his black doublet. His eyes are circled in dark, bruised rings, and sweat drips from his forehead.

Will paused in his writing and looked up at his reflection, dimly seen as a ghost upon the grimy surface of his window.

His eyes looked back at himself, full of fear.

Fear, he realized, had installed itself at the back of his mind when he wasn’t thinking, and from there mocked all his endeavors at poetry.

He surveyed his work, his crossed-out sentences, his poor constructions, his unreliable storytelling.

No, this would not do at all. Will couldn’t seem to work poetry and sense into a single piece.

And yet, Will had been given money for this piece in advance. What would happen if he displeased the nobleman who’d so financed him?

Nothing good. Worse yet, Will would see himself without disguise, and know that he truly was no poet, no smooth weaver of words.

And yet Kit Marlowe made it all look so simple.

Perhaps Will should ask Marlowe’s help. He’d been so kind so far. Yes, Will thought, he would ask Marlowe.

Will had no more than stood up and started toward his door when someone knocked on it.

With his hand on the latch, Will thought he smelled, through the door, a smell very like Silver’s. He hesitated.

The thought of Silver—of how forward, how brazen the elf lady had been—still made Will tighten his fists in anger.

That Silver thought he would be an easy mark. She dared . . . . She’d endangered Nan. Oh, the idea galled him.

The knock sounded again, impatient.

It could not be Silver, after all.

Silver would have come in by now, through her magic means.

He opened the door.

Marlowe stood on the precarious perch atop the steep staircase.

“Ah, the man himself,” Will said, and smiled at Marlowe’s slightly startled expression. “I would have gone see you.”

“You would?” Marlowe asked.

He sounded eager, anxious, perhaps a little too eager and anxious. Yet, he smiled smoothly and his grey eyes sparked with humor.

Will could swear that the heavy smell of lilac came from Kit. Was this the new fashion in London? Perfuming oneself like the fairykind?

No, normal people didn’t know of the fairykind. Will forced a smile, pushed thoughts of the supernatural world to the back of his mind, and told himself he wasn’t worried about Silver.

“Truth is,” Marlowe said and grinned, “I need your help, friend Will.”

Friend. The great Marlowe had called Will his friend.

On this word, Will forgot his misgivings at Kit’s strange smell.

Kit had called Will his friend, and on this friendship, Will dared fund his hopes. Certainly more than on any world of fairy.

“I will gladly help you with whatever you need,” he said, and smiled. “Provided you lend me your help.”

“Surely, you may have it. But I need your help, Will, with attending me to Deptford tomorrow, where I am to pay some creditors a debt I owe them. I would fain have a friend to witness my payment. Would you do it, Will?”

Will looked up. “Gladly,” he said, and smiled. As he said it, he thought of all the times he’d been cozened in London, of how easily he’d so often lost money and purse and all.

But surely, he had no reason to fear this from Marlowe. Marlowe had already proved himself Will’s friend so many different ways.

Will had been afraid that Kit wanted him to second Kit in a duel or to help him with a rhyme, or something else for which Will was wholly unqualified. But to witness something, Will would do well enough.

His eyes were as keen as the next man’s.

“And you wish my help with . . . ?” Kit prompted.

Will sighed. He explained his interview with the Earl of Southampton and how unwarrantedly the earl had thrown money at Will’s untested poetical skill.

“I’ve never tried anything this long before,” Will said. “All my poetry has been sonnets, and I find that when it comes to this, I am wholly unprepared.

“No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor can I woo fame in festival terms. As for the subject, well . . . Leander the good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole bookful of these quondam carpet-mangers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, none of them will do for my verse.

“Marry, I cannot show wit in rhyme; I have tried: I can find out no rhyme to ‘lady’ but ‘baby,’ an innocent rhyme; for ‘scorn,’ ‘horn,’ a hard rhyme; for ‘school,’ ‘fool,’ a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings.”

Kit laughed.

He touched Will’s arm, and in that touching, Will saw the palm of Marlowe’s hand and upon his palm a mass of bubbling blisters and burst blisters that showed raw flesh.

He stared at Kit’s hand till Kit looked down at it. Will would swear Kit looked surprised.

But how could a man take such injury and not notice?

Kit grinned at Will, a forced grin that showed all his teeth and made him look, for a second, like a wolf, a carnivorous animal. “Aye, a burn, a burn, ’tis but a burn I got, upon my spit.” He grinned, but his grin seemed hollow. A baring of teeth against the world and little else besides.

After Kit had left, that grin haunted Will’s thoughts.

How strange it all seemed.

Will had wanted to come to London and be just like Marlowe, and now he wondered if Marlowe was as Marlowe wished to be.

Scene 28

Tyburn Square, midday. Walking back from Will’s, Kit chances upon an execution. The gibbet is mounted midplaza. Official-looking buildings—their stone facades imposing, hem in a varied crowd of Londoners. Vendors and sightseers circulate. On the gibbet, a man stands between two executioners.

Kit stopped, staring at the gibbet.

He knew the man upon it, the condemned man.

His mind, searching, brought forth a name.

John Penry.

Kit reeled. John Penry had been arrested, of course and Kit knew he would be put to the question. But—condemned?

Around Kit, the crowd milled and swirled. A few souls watched the gibbet attentively, but most were there to see and be seen, for a meeting point, for a break in routine.

“An orange, ducks, fresh off the ship from Spain,” a woman in dark garments said. She thrust a golden fruit in front of Kit’s eyes. “A penny, no more.”

Kit sidestepped the proffered orange.

His eyes upon Penry, Kit neared the gibbet. The executioners were demanding a last speech of the prisoner, last words, a token of repentance.

Kit stared, fascinated.

But for him, Penry wouldn’t be here. But for him, Penry might be well, walking the streets, minding his own business.

How he looked, too, how much thinner than he had in his Cambridge days. And his arms hung in an odd way, within their long black sleeves.

Had Penry been broken on the wheel?

Something like remorse tore at Kit’s conscience, something like empathy knocked and hit upon his mind, with no more effect than a moth flying at a glass window.

He felt sorry for John Penry, well enough. Yet Imp must be saved.

With that thought he looked up, and chanced to meet Penry’s eyes, and in Penry’s eyes he saw a hint of recognition, a hint of gratitude.

Gratitude that, of all their Cambridge fellows, Kit had come to see Perry’s end? Did Perry think Kit had come to lend him comfort? Oh, Kit wished he could.

Something almost like a smile twisted Penry’s pale lips up, and he nodded toward Kit as he said, “God have mercy on us all. I have no more to say. God have mercy on us.”

On those words, the executioner kicked Penry’s feet out from under him.

Penry fell from the platform that supported the gibbet, and the noose tightened.

A spasm, a gasp, and a body was carrion.

A nearby church bell tolled dolefully.

Kit felt something—breath? life?—fly by. It felt like warm wind, like a sigh.

Old women rushed to the gibbet to collect pieces of hair and bits of nail, to conjure upon.

That pious Penry should be used for black magic beggared the mind.

Disgusted, heartsick, not knowing why he felt so hollow, Kit turned and walked away.

He had been forced to turn Penry in. He had been forced to save himself and Imp, and Penry was their only salvation.

But no matter how many times Kit repeated these words to himself as he walked amid the festive crowd, he kept hearing Penry’s earnest words, God have mercy on us all.

Kit shivered and wished he still believed in a God of whom to ask forgiveness for what he’d had to do.

Scene 29

A narrow Elizabethan alley, dark and murky. It is nighttime and only faint lights of candles shine in some windows of the five-story buildings that loom overhead, on either side, obscuring the view of distant stars, the cloud-flecked sky. Through this alley, Kit Marlowe stumbles, looking like a somnambulist.

It was midnight on the clock, and Kit bumbled abroad, not sure where he was, walking the dark alleys in a restless search for something he couldn’t understand.

He felt as though some dark core of his soul had control of his body, and he were a horse that the rider impelled on and on, with fierce jabs of spurred boots.

The horse knew not where he went, nor did Kit. Only that he must go on and on, breathless and tired, longing for sleep, longing for rest, but craving . . . craving something he could not explain.

Where was he?

Nothing in the houses around him gave him a hint of his whereabouts. The houses were tall and narrow, not mean looking, and yet not great. The muck underfoot smelled no worse than it did anywhere else.

And yet, muck and mud though it was, it made Kit wish to lie down in it and sleep, he was so tired.

Stumbling he walked.

Thoughts of life as food, of living force, living strength as fodder, streamed through Kit’s mind, making him crave—crave life? Or death?

Kit thought of John Penry’s shuddering, suspended from the gallows. He trembled and licked his lips.

Impulses and thoughts for which he had no name used his body for their lair.

Ahead, on a low window, a light flourished.

Kit rushed, put his hand against the door trying it.

What would he do if he got in? Why did he wish to get in? Thoughts of biting living flesh, the longing for fresh blood upon his tongue, the need for something else—for the life that fed some power, some weakening strength. His thoughts shocked him before they were even words.

Kit pulled his hand away from the knob. What madness was this? What was happening to him?

“Soft, soft,” Kit said. “What light beyond yonder window breaks. Oh, go to sleep whoever you be, maiden or man, or child. Go to sleep, stay safe from such as me.”

His words, though whispered, caused a sound behind him—a scuffling sound, like someone faltering.

Kit turned around.

And looked into Poley’s well-meaning eyes, Poley’s calm, agreeable face.

Poley and Frizer had followed Kit again.

Kit felt no fear, not even anger. Instead he thought of Poley’s and Frizer’s lives and strength, and craved those lives like men crave food.

Kit craved killing.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life, Kit’s mind cajoled, and Kit recoiled at the thought.

Kit bent his knees, not knowing what he did, and crouched like an animal about to spring. His hands formed into claws, and as he watched, he swore his nails grew longer.

Something else must be happening to him, something visible in his countenance. Kit’s features must have changed, because Poley whispered softly, “Marlowe.” And Poley’s voice vibrated with trembling fear.

Kit looked up at Poley and bared his teeth, feeling a crazed hunger, a need to kill. His reason screamed at him to stop.

What loss would Poley be? Kit told his reason. What loss to the world?

He could not answer. But just then, as he meant to spring, someone else approached, walking stealthily along the narrow dark street.

Someone who’d been following Poley as he’d been following Kit?

This person walked with uncommon majesty, with squared shoulders, a confident stride.

It was a woman dressed in a gentlewoman’s attire.

Closer, she hesitated, her commanding walk halted. A beam of moonlight shone up on her features.

Kit saw the face on every coin, the pattern handed out for painters to draw the Queen.

The Queen.

But the woman wore a dress of dark stuff, and her hair was white and not the red of the portraits, and Kit wasn’t sure.

Within him the demand for life and strength, the hunger for the fluid substance of breath that had consumed Kit’s inner core, now changed.

It changed to a snickering joy, a happy smugness.

Kill the Queen, the something whispered. And the game will be won.

Kit screamed at his own thought, a muffled, strangled scream.

The woman stopped, staring at him.

She screamed at whatever she glimpsed in Kit’s features. Something within Kit sniggered.

The Queen blanched. Her hand at her throat, she stepped back. Poley half moved forward, and made as if to talk to her.

Kit stared Poley in the eye. Poley stepped back, against the wall, actually paling in his fright.

The Queen turned and ran unsteadily down the street, tottering on high heels.

Yet, Kit recoiled, sweat beading on his skin. The fight within him was similar to the fight within a starved man who wishes to fast.

Part of him wished to kill Elizabeth, wished to kill her more than he wished to draw the next breath.

Yet Kit knew what would happen if Elizabeth died here, without descendants, with no appointed successor.

The many pretenders to the throne, from Spain and France, Scotland and principiates in Germany, would fight it out for England’s Crown. When they were done, there wouldn’t be two villages in the country that would be together, belonging to the same lord.

Whence this dark need to kill her, then? Whence this craving?

His own impulse scared him. He arrested his movement with overwhelming willpower.

Scared of himself and his darkest urgings, Kit Marlowe stepped back, and back and back.

Poley, across the alley from Kit, made a strangled cry, and took to his heels as Elizabeth had, running down the alley with scarcely more grace than the aged Queen.

Kit stepped back farther. Everything in him clamored for pursuit of this strange prey.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

One more breath and Kit would give in to his urges.

Horrified, he took another step back.

With a clang, he fetched up against the broad iron gate of a private backyard. The gate felt red-hot against his flesh.

Kit screamed.

His hands and his neck, unprotected, burned, as though they touched fire.

Even through Kit’s velvet suit, his lawn shirt, heat shot in continuous, searing waves.

Kit lacked the strength to move away.

The metal in the iron gate burned him like pitchforks heated by a thousand fiends in the deepest hell.

Blue light burned all around Kit, as the pain leeched away his strength and power to think.

Kit screamed as the pain shot through his every limb.

Slowly, he fell to knees that could no longer support him.

Contact with the iron gate broke.

His pain still lingering, his strength drained, he rolled on the muddy ground, screaming his torment.

When he came to an exhausted, trembling stop, covered in the foetid mud of the alley, he was soaked in sweat and weak, and his heart thumped within his chest like a prisoner begging for release.

Yet his brain was clearer than it had been in a long time.

Kit thought how strange it was that he’d wanted to kill the Queen. How strange the thought that had crossed his mind that he’d set such a careful trap for her in Deptford, and she’d just walked into him in this muddy alley.

He hadn’t set a trap for the Queen, had he?

How foolish the Queen of England. How foolish the woman who’d been so cunning and intelligent in her youth. How could she go walking alone in the dark, where anyone might kill her?

Where Kit might have killed her.

Kit didn’t mean to kill the Queen, did he?

He blinked drops of sweat from his eyes.

Poley and the Queen were nowhere in sight.

And Kit had finally fractured, he thought, finally become cleft in twain. The spy prone to secret violence and the poet enamored of beauty were now truly two, two souls fighting within the one narrow body.

“I’m for Bedlam,” Kit whispered, picking himself up from the muddy ground and surveying the damage to his suit with despair.

Yet little by little, at the back of his mind, the hunger for life resumed, stronger, harder, beating with horrific insistence against Kit’s reason.

He must have life. He must have living force. He must kill.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

“Kit?” a small shadow asked from a doorway two doors down. The little shadow detached itself from the building, revealing a child with auburn hair, wearing a fine blue velvet suit.

His eyes widened in surprise and shock at Kit’s appearance. He looked up into Kit’s eyes.

“Kit?”

Scene 30

Ariel walks, dazed, along the same streets where Kit has been. Her eyes are sunk within dark circles brought on by sleeplessness, her dress rent, her whole countenance pale and pinched. She walks with a staggering, limping gait. She looks as she is, a fairy princess lost in an all-too-mortal world.

Never so weary, never so in woe. Ariel’s legs could not keep pace with her desires, and longing for her absent lord tore at her heart.

She dragged her feet, which hurt, unaccustomed as they were to walking this long.

Under the moon of Elvenland, the bright sun of mortals, she’d sought for Quicksilver all over bustling, heartless London.

Her aching, blistered feet, her muddied dress, stood as mute witnesses to her travails.

She’d labored in vain.

She’d braved the unaccustomed smell of refuse in her nostrils, the shrieks of children, the barking of dogs, the grunting of pigs—all of them feral, all of them uncontrolled. She’d seen executions and duels, and rough men had attempted to lay rougher hands on her.

But she’d not found the pattern of power on which she homed, her sovereign lord, King Quicksilver, whom she’d come to seek, whom she’d come to upbraid with righteous anger.

Did he hide from her? Should she not have come looking for him? Did the hill need her more?

And yet without Quicksilver, the hill could not be healed.

Without Quicksilver, Ariel could not be happy.

And she remembered, with icy fear, his cry of I am betrayed.

Had that truly been his cry? And if so, what had happened to Quicksilver, to Ariel’s brave, loving lord?

Ariel felt tears prickle in her eyes. If he had been attacked, by whom had he been attacked?

Had he been doing battle all this time? Had she been misled as to his intent and actions in London?

Her feet hurt and bled and she wished she could fly, as she was wont to do in Arden’s green woods. But the power of the hill, like a distant, vacillating light, would not allow her such strength as would lift her toward the heavens. She must continue crawling, footsore, upon the earth.

If only she could use her scrying power, and look through the surrounding houses for her lord. But no, she could not.

The houses hereabouts contained too much iron, too much cold metal, too much that was poison to the gentle ways of elvenkind.

No, Ariel must go on searching for her lord with her eyes only, on foot and sleepless, through the smelly, dark alleys of London.

Ahead of her, something stirred, a feeling of power much like hill power, a feeling of power much like Quicksilver’s.

But this power felt corrupted, dark, blotched with evil and full of unrighteous anger.

Had Ariel then driven her lord to this?

Oh, let it not be so.

Let her find him, unscathed and clean and capable of coming back to the hill. Never again would she complain about Silver. Never again would she, with shrewish voice, tell her lord how much she wished he were a proper man, a proper male elf and not a mad weathervane shape changer.

But as she walked closer, around the tall house ahead of her and into the narrow little alley behind it—so narrow it barely admitted her—she saw the marks of darkness and evil stronger and stronger upon that power that glimmered softly at the end.

She knew the whirls and twists of that light radiating ahead between the two buildings like she knew the lines and etchings on the palm of her own hand.

From the same place, a very small scream emanated, followed by grunts and sounds of pain.

Ariel’s elf senses knew what the sounds meant.

Ahead someone died.

Ahead, someone else drank that life.

But only dark creatures fed on death: the Hunter fed on the life of wrongdoers, as did the dogs of the Hunter and other, minor spirits linked still to the darker spirits of antiquity who used to be thus fed.

“Quicksilver,” she said.

She walked into the alley.

In front of her was a scene such as she’d never before witnessed, such as took her a while to comprehend.

On the ground lay a small body—it looked like the body of a child. It had been gutted and lay still, obviously dead.

The thing stooping over the child raised a bloodstained face.

It was a human face, yet it looked—for just a moment—as though it possessed a snout and powerful jaws such as hadn’t been seen on any creature on earth for millennia.

As it straightened, the snout disappeared, and the man standing in the clearing would have looked normal, and perhaps comely, were not it for the blood dripping from his face, staining his clothes, pasting his hair.

He grinned at Ariel, showing bloodstained teeth.

“Not Quicksilver, milady. That fool is where he should have been consigned by our long-suffering mother at his birth. In Never Land, where, amid the potentials never realized, his magic shall drain away to nothing. He shall trouble us no more.”

Though the voice issued from a mortal’s mouth, from the bloodstained lips of a man that Ariel had never seen, never met, yet the voice, smooth and honeyed, velvet soft and flowing like fresh water, was well known.

“Sylvanus?” Ariel said, and stepped back, step by step, while her mind reeled.

It couldn’t be Sylvanus here, Sylvanus the parricide, Sylvanus the murderer who had killed his parents so he could inherit a throne that rightly belonged to Quicksilver.

It couldn’t be Sylvanus.

But the bloodstained creature bowed and chuckled. “At your service, milady. Though you’ll soon be at mine, for I have now secured this body you see.

“With it I shall slaughter the maiden, thus unseating the three aspects of the female element through which humans and elves perceive reality. I have already, with your husband’s help, dethroned the Hunter, my erstwhile master. I shall soon be the master of creation, and creation’s sole arbiter.”

He walked toward Ariel with a smile.

Quicksilver was in Never Land? Quicksilver had helped unseat the Hunter? Why should he? Could Ariel trust this creature to tell the truth?

Yet, if he wasn’t in Never Land, where was he? And how had Quicksilver helped Sylvanus defeat the Hunter? Had Quicksilver, then, been so lost, so alone, that he must go and find camaraderie with his evil brother?

Sylvanus’s new body stepped nearer Ariel. She could smell the blood and gore in his clothes, and face, and hair.

The closeness of pure evil sent a shiver through the queen of elves.

What did he mean to do to her?

Nothing good. That much was sure. Nothing good.

Quickly she raised her hand.

She reached for the weak power of the hill, that burned through her like a dying fire, all embers and smoke. Wishing it stronger, she interposed it, as a flickering shield between her and Sylvanus.

Sylvanus attacked. His raised hand came down, and she heard the crackle of magical power, the fizzle of a transportation spell that didn’t work.

If she hadn’t shielded, she, too, would be in Never Land. Lost to this earth, lost to any hope of helping Quicksilver.

How had Quicksilver been so surprised by his brother that he hadn’t shielded? Did he know this mortal? In the scant light the man’s hair looked red and his form and figure reminded Ariel of what she’d seen in a water drop, disporting with the Lady Silver.

Trembling, she called the power of the hill back to her. It burned into her, slow and hesitant, like a light with insufficient fuel, like a candle near its end.

Whatever the blight was that consumed the force and strength, the nobility and fine flower of elfdom, it tapped, too, the force that the elven queen could use for defense.

Her shield would not endure. She would not be able to use it again.

Yet Ariel saw Sylvanus raise his hand.

She would not have the power to shield from him.

In a fright, Ariel turned and ran away, heedless, into the dark night and the labyrinthine alleyways of London.

She ran because she had no power to fight. She was doomed if they met again.

The laughter of the creature behind her told her that Sylvanus knew this as well as she.

Scene 31

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and the bed and himself are covered in blood.

Kit Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

Curse the world and the light and the blood, and his headache, too.

From the street below came the calls of wakening vendors, the hurried footsteps of apprentices and laborers, children’s voices raised in high, playful calls.

Kit’s head throbbed.

He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

He pulled the blanket away from his body—he appeared to have lain abed naked—and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange, and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed.

Thus step by step do humans become used to their own sins.

Thus had he become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service.

He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in it the cool clear water from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched the water turn red. He realized, with a sob—caught in his throat and suffocating his emotions—that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

He remembered craving life. He remembered . . . . What had he done?

All this blood, whose was it? Where had it come from?

Some knowledge, some thought, tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

He’d done something horrible. The darker half of his mind had committed what crimes? Oh, better die than live so.

And yet no.

All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger?

No. It was useless.

Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation. Indeed, he was not all that unusual. As he’d written in Faustus, Kit had for some time suspected that all on earth were in some way damned—Hell was empty and all the demons were here.

“I am in blood steeped so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go over,” he told himself reasonably, while staring at his hands, submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

What land this England was, what a place this London that a man might pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he’d poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered clearly.

He remembered John Penry’s prayer and his death.

He remembered the dark alley and Poley’s face, and the woman behind him.

Had it really been the Queen?

Marlowe couldn’t help remembering her face, and juxtaposed on his memory of royal portraits, it looked like the same woman.

He’d long heard that the Queen, mistrusting all, her mistrust growing as she got older, often personally followed the high personages of the court, spied on them, and sometimes, attired as a peasant woman—unguarded, alone—sneaked out of her palaces and her keeps, to listen to the common people.

But that she’d spy on her own spies . . .

Kit washed his face, and watched the water run red into the basin. He’d almost attacked the Queen of England with his bare hands.

Why? He couldn’t even guess. His mind was a foggy mirror that reflected nothing to his questing reason.

His father had been right, then, when he’d told Kit that too much reading would disturb his reason. Kit almost smiled at the thought, and yet indeed, here he was covered in blood and without knowing how.

If he was not insane, then who was?

He finished the water in his jug, opened the door, and called for more.

He hoped Imp would bring it, and not Madeleine. He could not explain to Madeleine how he’d got all bloodied again. Had Imp told his mother about Kit’s state the day before?

He heard steps coming down the hallway. Heavy steps. Madeleine’s steps.

She came into the room, perfect and immaculate, in her starched apron, her impeccable white cap, and looked at him with raised eyebrows, but said nothing.

The two heavy water jars which she carried she set on the floor beside his washbasin.

“Thank you,” Kit said dismissively.

It must be fear, fear of the secret service and their revenge, that drove him insane. Well. After tonight he’d be free and safe.

He must go to Southampton House and gather from his friends anything else Will might have said to incriminate himself. He must go to Will, himself, and attempt to gather more details of his life that could be woven into a plausible conspiracy.

Though Kit couldn’t quite forget Penry’s death, nor absolve himself of that guilt, yet he must go on. His life—Imp’s life—depended on it.

This work was not so different, after all, he thought, as he poured fresh water into the basin, from the work of writing plays about events and people so long gone that all that remained of them was a vague impression, like that left by a foot on the river side, and then erased by the tide.

Now he must weave treason where there was none. Only those who died in this play would not come back again for a final song.

He washed his face, and looked up.

Madeleine stood by the door, staring at him.

Her thin lips writhed, and her eyes had a strange, tremulously tearful look.

“Yes?” He kept his voice cold, trying to prevent an outburst of Madeleine’s righteous morality.

Her plump hand searched inside her dark sleeve, and came out with a handkerchief. She touched it to her eyes.

Oh, not crying, Kit thought. Aloud he said, “Madam, I am in a great hurry. You must know—”

“It’s Richard,” Madeleine said.

“Imp?” All plots vanished from Kit’s mind. The thought of Imp brought a flinching inside, as though thoughts and memories skittered away from a raw wound.

“Imp,” Madeleine said, for the first time calling the child by that name, and taking her handkerchief to her lips, and covering her mouth with it. From beneath the handkerchief, she spoke, with a voice that trembled and fluttered. “Have you . . . have you seen Imp yet today, Kit?”

Make that two firsts, for his given name hadn’t crossed her lips in many years.

“No. I’ve not seen him. Is he ill?” Alarmed, Kit advanced toward her, hands extended, meaning to shake sense out of her.

But she backed away from him, step by step, and he remembered his gory condition, and that he was naked.

He backed away from her. “Speak, woman. What has happened to our son?”

Her eyes veiled, she sniffled her righteous sniff, and for a bare breath Kit thought she would chastise him for calling Imp his son.

She did not. Instead, she let out a sob and said, “I’ve not seen him this morning. His bed is unslept in. And all over London people are talking of animal attacks, of beasts who savage people. And you come home . . . . all over blood. I thought . . .”

Now Kit thought, too. His head spun. That feeling of dread, that curious flinching that his mind effected when he pushed the memory of last night to the fore, now seemed ominous.

The need for life force within him. The taste of blood on his tongue.

He had a vague idea of bodies: of apprentices and prostitutes, of incautious people caught out of doors and devoured.

Devoured by Kit?

“Go woman, go,” Kit yelled. And in a frenzy that mirrored more than masked his internal strife, he pulled on clothes, blindly, and rushed like a madman out of the house.

Scene 32

A London street market, ending in a copse of trees. Tents flutter in the street. Peasant women display bread and fruit within them. A man walks through advertising pamphlets.

To Will’s accustomed eye, the street market in Hollywell Lane looked half-empty, just as the streets between Hog’s Lane and there had looked still sleepy and vacant.

It was the plague, making her rounds, Will supposed.

Yet, with it all, there was a sense of excitement in the air. Perhaps a sense of fear.

“A bear, I tell you, a bear,” a portly gentleman screamed as Will passed.

Will ducked past the gentleman and his interlocutor, whose conversation he’d obviously interrupted, and walked past bread and fruit uninterested.

His destination was the copse of trees, as it was old enough to, maybe, harbor elvenkind.

Will couldn’t believe he was looking for Silver, yet remembering their last conversation, he felt anxious for the sovereign of Elvenland.

He’d gone out and paid his overdue rent early morning and, by means of a pedlar, sent money to Nan.

Now he should be writing, but he couldn’t sit still. His anxiety for Silver would not abide.

What she had said about female goddesses and Sylvanus was too close to the half-remembered fragments of Will’s own dream. He must find her.

“A fox,” an older man, with white whiskers, pontificated. “It will be a fox. With the crops as bad and the weather as perturbed as it’s been, foxes must find their rabbits few and far between.”

“But a fox maul a human? And to death?” a younger man asked, facing the older.

What did they talk of?

How excited everyone looked, how red of face, how fleet of tongue. And on every tongue, the same words maul, death, animal, attack.

Though sparser by half again than usual, people were more animated than ever.

It was the same combination that Will had ever noticed during bad plague years. Despite the boarded doors, the taverns and ale houses emptied by the plague, yet people laughed louder and talked in higher voices.

Will had thought it the bravery of life in the face of death. But maybe it was something else.

And there were those disturbing words. Maul. Attack. Animal.

Animal attacks in London?

“Ten people mauled in the night in London,” a pamphleteer called, waving papers. “A demon dog roams the city, punishing our sins and eating the entrails of sinners.”

Could this have anything to do with Silver?

No.

Now that Silver was gone, now that her presence didn’t make itself offensive, her seduction inescapable, Will found it hard to even believe Silver had started a fire.

Silver was malicious and often a prankster. But her pranks were in the manner of a child who played practical jokes upon his elders. She might be irresponsible, and trample, with immortal feet, mortal morality and mortal tradition.

But when had Will known her to be evil and seek the death of mortals? No. Not Silver. Nor Quicksilver either.

And her manner had been so odd, so disconnected—Quicksilver’s voice whispering dire warning in Will’s ear, even while Silver’s body pressed itself on him.

Something was wrong.

As a Sunday child, able to feel what passed beyond the curtain of mundane events that hid the supernatural from other men, Will could feel something wrong, could sense it as a disruption.

Something disturbed time and space alike. Something moved between this world and the elven world. Something . . .

He’d tried to ignore it. He’d still ignore it, if he could.

But something was rotten in London, and Will’s intuition whispered to his reason that he should not have turned Silver away, that he should have listened to Silver.

What if Silver were dead now?

But how could she be dead? Silver was immortal or as near it as made no difference.

Will neared the trees, shaking his head.

“A wolf, I tell you, man, it was a wolf,” another man shouted. “I caught a glimpse of it, early morning, a grey thing with bristling fur.”

“Bahh. Wolf, this far in London. When have you seen a wolf, sirrah? Dog, more like, gone feral,” the man’s interlocutor argued.

But in Will’s mind, an image formed, of a wolf-dog with a square head, powerful jaws, and a squat, low-slung body.

Sylvanus. Hadn’t Silver said something of it?

Will must find Silver. Without thinking, almost without trying, Will followed his instinct to the only place in London where he could imagine an elf hiding.

It was a large abandoned garden.

There, beneath the centenary trees, lovers would go to tryst, poets to write, and youths to practice archery.

Its green shadows hid all, and kept all safe, save sometimes from the stray arrow.

Bending his steps to it, thinking it was the only place in London where Silver might be hid—at least if she were still alive—Will crossed Hollywell Street market and soon found himself at the edge of the trees.

And smelled something soft, sweet—a lilac smell. No such plants grew hereabouts.

He thought of Silver.

Looking through the trees, he saw a glimpse of white, a shape that, from this distance, looked as feminine and imbued with grace as Silver’s.

Should he continue? Silver needed him. He knew that as he knew himself alive. Yet, how offensive Silver’s behavior had been; how she’d tried to trick him into an affair.

Silver might well have caused the Stratford fire that had almost killed Will’s family.

No. Silver would do no gratuitous evil and some reason there must be for her odd almost-seduction.

Approaching the vague white form in the garden, he called out, “Milady?”

The woman who turned to face him looked too slim and blond and too delicate to be Silver.

Will recognized fair Ariel, Quicksilver’s indomitable lady, who’d dared marry and try to tame the King of Fairyland.

“Milady?” Will asked again, his voice rising on a note of his own uncertainty.

That Silver would come to London to seduce him made sense, or at least Silver sense in that Silver—or Quicksilver for that matter—was a cold, magical being never much interested in anything beyond its own good, and its own wishes.

But Ariel? Ariel had ever been better than the other elves, who often resembled immortal spoiled children who went about the world throwing tantrums and flinging their toys about.

Possibly Ariel had come to London in pursuit of her errant husband. Possibly, Will’s assessment of Silver’s intentions had been right. Possibly, Quicksilver had argued with Ariel, and as a revenge, Silver ran rampant through London, intending to seduce balding poets of dubious genius.

Yes, and possibly the animal attacks were nothing but that—attacks by a bear tired of serving for human amusement and being flogged for human entertainment.

And yet, up and down Will’s spine a chill worked, like an icy finger moving and pointing and moving on, an icy finger that forecast other things colder and more terrible than what had already happened.

“Milady?”

Ariel turned. She looked drained and pale, her eyes sunken and dull, and leaking tears. “Who—” She wiped her eyes on the back of her white sleeve that, now that Will thought about it, looked more frayed and far greyer than an elf’s sleeve should look. Her mouth formed a slow oh, as her eyes showed signs of recognition. “Nan’s husband,” she said.

Will, who had been known by worse epithets, bowed and smiled.

Nan herself, who, ten years ago, had spent some time captive in Fairyland, had told Will that of all the multitudinous, changing, possibly evil creatures she had met, Ariel was the best, the most humanlike.

The daughter of a human and a high duke of Fairyland, Ariel was an orphan whose only brother, Pyrite, had been killed ten years ago.

Now Ariel advanced on Will, hands extended, looking as threateningly enthusiastic, as animated of purpose, as Silver. Only her purpose didn’t look like seduction, her enthusiasm extended not to Will’s body.

Her small pink lips strived to form a smile, against the downward pull of her grief, as she closed the distance between them. “My dear Will,” she said. “Have you seen my husband?”

Will blushed, as naturally he would, in remembering how he’d last seen Quicksilver and under which guise.

“Two days ago, milady, two days ago and she . . . Silver . . . She . . .” He floundered, neither his pronouns nor his language equal to telling Ariel what he thought Quicksilver’s intent had been, or Quicksilver’s purpose, or even why Will had thrown him out. “I asked him to leave, and he did, for I thought his purpose ill,” Will said.

At this, Ariel withdrew her hands, and a fresh burst of tears issued from her eyes, fountainlike, while her small foot, in a muck-covered slipper that looked like it had once been mother-of-pearl, stomped the dirt of the garden. “Oh, cursed be this,” she said. “Cursed.”

Will took a step back, because when elves cursed things, it might very well be more than just an expression of distaste.

But Ariel’s cloudy-day eyes lifted toward him, as fresh water issued anew from the wellsprings of her grief. “I believed so, too, milord, I believed so, too, save that I . . . . Since coming to London I’ve started to think otherwise, and then yesterday . . .” On these words and whatever recollection they evoked, tears ran down her face in such a flood that they drowned out her voice, and make it squeak with uncertain accents. “I saw Sylvanus in an alley and he said . . . He said he had sent Quicksilver to Never Land.”

“Never Land?” Will asked.

“A place . . .” Ariel struggled, her lips working to form words that human language didn’t accommodate. “A place that never was, never will be. A land of shadow. A cold land. Any elf lost in it will die by his second sunset there, his energy and magic dissipated beyond recall.”

A fresh burst of tears issued from Ariel’s pansy blue eyes.

Will, not believing himself that he was doing this—encouraging an elf—offered Ariel his arm.

“Milady, you’re not well,” he said. “If you wish to come to my quarters, you may rest there.” He thought of his landlord, briefly, as Ariel’s hand clasped on his arm, but then he threw caution to the winds.

Ariel, with her restrained, high neckline, was no more likely to invite assumptions of her being a harlot, than was Will himself.

Should the landlord complain, should he ask, Will would say that Ariel was his widowed sister, come to town to consult with him on some family business.

Surely, Ariel’s crying eyes, swollen with tears, gave the truth to recent widowhood. Will shivered. He hoped Ariel wasn’t widowed.

Silver was in Never Land? Oh, he should never have sent her forth, should never have repelled her. Would she die so soon?

By sunset this day, he thought. But she’d tried to seduce him. Yet she’d warned him also.

And how could Sylvanus catch her unawares? Didn’t she know his tricks and accustomed ways?

She’d said she was going to someone who’d help her. She’d said . . .

Will’s head reeled with guilt and worry.

Ariel’s hand upon his arm felt light, ethereal. The creature looked half alive. Something was indeed wrong, something that extended to Fairyland.

“How can Sylvanus be free, though?” he asked Ariel. “Was he not in thrall to the Hunter?”

Ariel shook her head, then nodded. “Aye, he was, and aye, how he came to be free I know not. Only, there was a menace, an alarm, and my lord went to look at it, and my lord returned not.” She took her hand from his arm to wipe her tears on the back of her fragile-looking hand. “And Sylvanus says Quicksilver helped free him.”

Will fished in his sleeve for his rumpled, clean kerchief and pressed it into her hand.

Ariel took it and wiped her eyes, with an almost impatient gesture. “Ever since Quicksilver left, the hill has been blighted, power draining from it like grain pouring forth from a slit sack.” She was quiet a long time. “The servant fairies, the winged ones, have died. Almost all of them. And the changelings . . . .” She spoke in a whisper, a low whisper, for which Will was glad since, all about him, people walked, and there were people who lived in the area they crossed, only two streets away from Will’s own lodgings, only too close, and neighborly enough to take an interest in Will’s affairs.

Ariel’s lips trembled. “Oh, Master Will, you do not know how we suffered.”

Her little face—yet oval and pale and perfect—hardened. The lines of her delicate bones became more solid, more square, her little lips firmed into something like a straight line of disapproval.

She swallowed once, as though she swallowed things she wished to say but could not. “I thought it was Quicksilver’s absence that did it. I thought . . .” She wiped her eyes, with decisive swipes of his handkerchief. “I know that he was unfaithful, that he disported himself with someone, that he . . . I thought it was that, nothing more, causing the blight in the hill, and I came to London to call my lord to his senses. But midway here, I heard him cry, as if in my mind, I am betrayed. And then I could not find him.

“Then, last night, in an alley, I saw Sylvanus, the evil one.” Her voice trembled, and her arm also, within his grasp. “And he told me he’d sent Quicksilver to Never Land. And he told me that my husband had helped free Sylvanus from the Hunter and that Sylvanus meant to destroy both male and female elements—the fundamental essences of the universe that compose all that is male and female in both elven and human realms—and in their place weave himself, and thus master and control all.”

Male and female elements from which all was woven. Will thought of his odd dream, the three women saying they were that of which all females were made. Was his dream then right? Was his dream more, then, than the foolishness that his mind spun in his sleep?

While Will’s mind reeled at the thought, Ariel’s small, determined voice went on, “And there was a child, the remains of a child, that this creature—this creature that was Sylvanus and yet not him but a mortal man—had eaten. Oh.” Fresh tears burst forth, and Ariel covered her eyes in the handkerchief.

A child had been eaten. The animal attacks. The animal must have been a wolf-dog, a creature that Will had seen once, in unhallowed circumstances. In Will’s mind, the square muzzle formed, remembered, with its cruel, massive teeth.

Will heard again Quicksilver’s words, while Silver’s sweet breath tickled his ear. He’d spoken of possession, of elves possessing humans.

So, Sylvanus had possessed someone.

Will thought of his impression that he’d seen the wolf in Southampton’s garden. Had he been so near danger, and not known it?

But who could Sylvanus be possessing? And why? Even Quicksilver didn’t seem to know that.

They had arrived at the bottom of Will’s staircase and clambered up. Atop the narrow platform they squeezed, one against the other, while Will opened his door.

No one on the street below seemed to notice them, Will thought, and his landlord, duly paid from the Earl of Southampton’s purse, now seemed less interested in following Will around and pursuing him. Or perhaps Will, his conscience appeased by the payment of his debts, imagined his landlord’s prosecution of him less, and disdained to see the man in every shadow.

Inside the room, he led Ariel to the bed, and bade her rest.

As for him, he must find the reason for all these mysteries, and his poor mind was not up to all of it. It would take a genius.

Will thought of Kit Marlowe. Kit Marlowe, worldly Kit Marlowe, might not believe Will. Aye, he might even think Will was insane. But Will had to try. Kit was the only kind person Will had met in London, and kind Kit would have to help Will save human and elf worlds.

Will could always show him Ariel for proof of his words, and thus bid Marlowe believe in the impossible.

Scene 33

The alley where Imp’s body lies. It’s undisturbed, abandoned in this isolated spot. Kit runs in, looking bedraggled, and drops to his knees on the mud.

The memory of the night past had guided him here, fogged and twisted though it was. He knew he’d gone down one road and then the other, and there it was the alley where he’d walked, the very gate he’d touched.

Though his steps shied away from it, he went into the alley, step by step, each step pushed against the instinct to stop.

His mind slid sideways away from full recollection, yet he knew this mud, these buildings. He remembered the hunger and the need, and the hot blood upon his tongue.

Imp’s body lay in the mud that his dried blood had turned glossy black.

The boy might have been asleep, save only for his rent and tattered suit and the undeniable fact that the body had been gutted.

And yet Kit felt nothing. Nothing at all.

He advanced, step on step, sure this was a nightmare, sure it must soon end.

A high, keening scream of someone nearby disturbed him. He wished it would stop and looked around for the screamer.

But his throat hurt, raw and aching, and he realized that he was screaming.

He checked his scream on a deep sigh and in that sigh he heard his own grief and was shocked by it. A half-startled sob followed the sigh. Kit pressed his fist to his half-open mouth, surprised that such a sound should come from it.

He stood over Imp’s body and met the sightless gaze of those grey eyes. Imp looked puzzled in death. As if he could not understand this visitation.

Kit’s knees went slack. He sank to the mud of the alley. He reached gingerly, and lifted Imp’s rigid, cold hand.

Only yesterday the child had come to him. Only yesterday. Kit’s mind remembered, with remorseless clarity, Imp standing in this alley, saying, “Kit, you were late coming home. Kit, you promised you’d tell me a story.”

And instead, what had Kit given him?

Kit stared, in dim-witted incomprehension, at the dead child. How could Kit have done this? How could he? What evil lurked in him? How dark was that dark side of his soul? How could Kit’s nature have separated so—the poet and the spy thus divided?

And how could Imp be caught in Kit’s internal struggle?

Only yesterday, the child had been alive, Kit told himself, as though by telling himself this he could turn back the clock and undo the damage. Alive, he’d been and now he was dead, and this transformation was too sudden and too final.

How could such a thing as life be lost forever in such a moment?

He held the cold little hand in both of his, and wished it warm and moving.

“No, no, no life!” he whispered. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and you no breath at all?”

The glazed grey eyes stared at him but saw him not.

“You’ll come no more. Never, never, never, never!”

From outside the alley, just steps away, came the sounds of the city, the cries of fish sellers, a woman’s high, sweet laughter, a man’s hurried steps.

How could life go on like this? How could no one notice that Imp was dead? Kit trembled with the force of the grief and guilt that rose, battling, within him.

“Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stone: Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so that heaven’s vault should crack,” Kit said. “Look, how he stares at me and all unmeaning. He stares at me as he so often did, those grey eyes so reproachful and so knowing. Well did he know and well should he have reproached. Look what my keeping from the right hand the deeds of the left has wrought. Look.”

Steps had entered the alley and approached.

“Marlowe? Kit?” Will Shakespeare stopped steps away from Kit. “I heard your voice and I—”

“Oh.”

Kit saw Will’s worn boots through his tear-distorted vision, and glanced upward, and up and up and up, at Will’s face.

How Shakespeare had blanched. How shocked he looked. Or how surprised, as though he thought Kit insane.

And well he might.

“What grief was here?” Will asked hesitantly.

Kit held Imp’s hand and caressed it.

“My poor fool is dead. He’s gone forever,” Kit said. “I know when one is dead and when one lives. He’s dead as earth.”

Will’s well-meaning face looked like something carved in marble and worn down by time. He looked with horror on the scene before him. “But dead how? How did the child die?”

Kit shook his head. Hot tears ran scalding down his face and his throat tasted bitter with salt.

How had Imp died? How could Kit explain such horror to Will, the good burgher of Stratford-upon-Avon?

“Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree,” Kit told Will’s impassive face. “All several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, Guilty! guilty! I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”

“But you’d never have done any such a thing,” Will said. “Your guilt is misplaced, your grief distorts all. Who was this child?”

“It is mine only son!” Kit said, and as tears multiplied upon his face, he stroked Imp’s blood-soaked hair. “Ah, boy, if any life be left in thee, throw up thine eye! See, see what showers arise, blown with the windy tempest of my heart, upon thy death, that kills mine eye and heart.”

“Courage,” Will said. “Courage. You’ll get other children.”

But Kit shook his head. How could he explain to Will that love of elven kind had cleft him from humans, that spying had separated him from reason, that his multitudinous treasons, multiplied, had turned him into this thing—this divided thing, a half of which had just killed the one love the other had to live for.

Looking up at Will through the distorting veil of tears, Kit wailed, “Oh, can’st thou minister to a mind diseased?”

But Will only shook his head and, practical and kind, put his hands on Kit’s arms, helped him rise. “Get up,” he said. “Get up. We must take the body to his mother, must give him Christian burial.”

And covering Imp with his doublet, blocking the sight of those piteous open, surprised eyes, Will made as if to pick up the child.

“No,” Kit said. “No. I must do it. For he is my son, and the burden no burden.”

How strange that now, when it was too late, he could recognize Imp and call him son.

Lifting Imp, Kit felt hot tears roll down his cheeks. “Alack. Poor Madeleine. Harsh she is, but she deserved not such a blow. And I bring her this grief. And yet I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.

“Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury, in the highest degree.”

Will gave him a piteous look, no doubt thinking that Kit raved from his grief.

Kit could not explain it. Oh, yes, it was grief and mourning, but it was guilt, yet stronger than both and well deserved.

Kit had feared so much and dared so much, he’d got involved in so many schemes and deceptions. He’d flaunted his meager knowledge, he’d braved hell itself, in betraying others for his son’s sake.

And now, watch how from his own corruption his son’s death had bloomed like a rank flower from an abominable stalk.

His gloved hand stroking at Imp’s auburn hair, Kit felt his tears renew and spoke louder, as though to drown out the cold, implacable voice within his brain. “O, pity, God, this miserable age! What stratagems, how fell, how butcherly, erroneous, mutinous and unnatural, this deadly age daily doth beget! Oh boy, thy father gave thee life too rashly and hath bereft thee of thy life too soon!”

Grief washed over Kit’s mind, bringing with it thoughts and images that might be unconnected, but that in his heart seemed to fit with this most mournful occasion.

Kit remembered his childhood in his father’s small workshop: his clumsiness with the leathers and needles, the easy gallop of his mind in school.

He remembered the masters who had praised him, the neighbors who had envied him, the father who had scolded him for daring his mind to stray beneath the bonds of decent piety.

He remembered his scholarship and how hard he’d worked for his masters at Cambridge. He remembered his plays and what acclamation they brought, the recognition and the wild bouts of drinking and discussing poetry with the fashionable youth and other poets in the Mermaid.

And Kit had spied, and Kit had betrayed, and Kit had turned himself from what he was so that like a sleeve made of coarse stuff but lined with satin, he’d turned himself inside out to become something that he was not: a spy and a dandy, a knower of lies, a friend of corrupt aristocracy.

And through all this like a thread of gold in the base stuff of Kit’s heart, Imp had run. Imp’s innocence, his simple trust.

From the moment of Imp’s birth, from the moment that Kit had beheld his own face sculpted small in another soul’s possession, Kit had done everything for his son’s sake.

The love Kit’s father had denied Kit and that natural pride that did stem from having begotten his like and his successor, all that he had invested in Imp’s skipping grace, Imp’s quick mind, his irreverent wit, his daring ways.

And all for this. Bloodied meat in the mud of an alley. Nothing more.

Carrying the child, he walked slowly across London streets.

His appearance and bloodied face and hands made passerby recoil, but he noticed not.

He would go, like one on penance.

If another had done this, then Kit would have killed the other.

Yet, he himself had done it though he remembered it not, or only as through a glass darkly—the darker, secretive half of him was a murderer—and upon that must Kit take revenge.

At the door to his lodgings he hesitated, delaying the moment of grieving Madeleine, and almost laughed at his own scruples.

How considerate of others he had grown, now that there was so little to consider. He saw Will standing by, Will looking at him. Will had followed him here, and would follow him further.

Will, whom Kit had sought to implicate in his own treasons, in his dark plots. Will, who would have died, as surely as John Penry, to keep Kit and Imp safe.

Only there was nothing to keep safe anymore.

The motor of the world had come to a stop, and in this halt, by the sudden clarity of his grief, Kit realized that there was nothing left anymore, and no reason to tie Will, who was also a father, to the ill-fated coils of his fallen plan.

Kit put his bloodied hand out and surrounded Will’s wrist with his cold fingers. “Leave me now, friend, leave me now.”

Will said something of which the word “Deptford” emerged.

Remembering his plan and recoiling from it, Kit shook his head. “There’s nothing to go to Deptford for now,” he said. “Pray, friend, Will, stay away from it. Even if . . . . Even if I should, myself, entreat you. Do not go there.”

And leaving Will amazed on the doorstep, Kit turned and went in to discharge his fell duty.

Scene 34

Will’s room. The fairy queen sits upon the shabby bed, her torn skirt neatly arranged, her muddy shoes demurely together. Will comes in, looking stunned.

“Did you find him?” Ariel asked.

The question took Will by surprise. “Find whom, milady? Whom should I have found?”

“The man to help us,” she said. She stood up. “You said you knew someone.”

Will sighed. He closed his door slowly. His mind was full of what he had just seen. Too full.

He thought of Kit and the boy. Had Kit ever acknowledged his paternity? Will could not credit that, yet how fully did Kit reap the grief of the child’s death.

How dubious the joys of fatherhood. Will’s mind returned again and again to his children, Susannah, Judith, and Hamnet, who, in Stratford, might meet an evil fate at any moment and no one know.

“He won’t help us,” Will told Ariel. “His son has died. I couldn’t ask his help now. He’s insane with grief.”

“His son?” The Queen of Fairyland stopped her pacing and stared at Will.

She trembled. Her eyelids fluttered, as though in the gale of memory. “His child? The child I saw . . . last night?”

Will nodded. “Possibly. It was a boy. If only there would be a way . . .” he said. He knew he spoke nonsense, knew he spoke out of a heart too full and a mind too drained. Yet he spoke. “Could not the magic of Fairyland . . . . Couldn’t the child live again?”

Ariel shook her head. Tears from her eyes fell down her face. “No, Will. That is beyond my power, beyond Quicksilver’s even, even when the hill is at its most powerful. And now . . . . And now Quicksilver himself is in Never Land and will be dead before this day is through, his magic drained by nothingness. And once he’s dead, not all the magic of Fairyland, and not all my wishing, can get him back. We have limits also, Will.”

“Oh, you magical creatures and your limits,” Will yelled. He paced back and forth across his room.

Ariel watched him, her eyes wide, looking every wise shocked and alarmed.

He did not know whence his rage came, but he felt angry, an anger without measure. How odd this world, how odd this magic, that magical beings had to ask Will for help and depend on Will’s good grace for shelter. How strange that these same beings who turned Will’s life upside down and played upon him as upon a fiddle knew not how to save themselves.

“First the Fates, the three women, in my dream, telling me they needed me to save them,” he said. “Then Silver coming to me in search of help, though she didn’t seem to know what help she needed or why, and now you!” He flung the words at the queen’s little drained face, her swimming blue eyes. “What good is magic if you must come to me, poor man that I am, a poor poet, a man without words or power, without magic, or money, or knowledge.”

Ariel’s mouth hung open. She sought to close it, looked as though she’d speak, but her eyes betrayed fear of Will’s sudden rage.

“Oh, speak, tell me what a fool I am, why don’t you?” Will said. “Tell me what a fool I am, because I’m not immortal, not one of your charmed circle. Milady, I wouldn’t want to be immortal if in all my immortal years I learned so little and were so helpless as to need Will Shakespeare to protect me.” He stood in front of her, his hands open as if to denote his impotent rage. “Will Shakespeare, forsooth?”

“Three women?” Ariel said. She reached a hand for Will’s sleeve and grasped the rough wool between thumb and forefinger, as if she meant to hold him and yet were afraid of his reaction to her touch. “Three women? Pray tell, Will, when did you see three women?”

“In my dream,” he said.

His rage left him suddenly, but something else remained. Anger still, at this fairy world, that so enmeshed itself in his world and yet would not help him, and could do no good. An impotent magic it was, a vain enchantment.

“In my dream, I saw three women. They said they were the three aspects of the feminine, part and parcel of all that’s female in the universe. That humans had created them—created them—from their thoughts and dreams and their mad need to order reality.”

In Ariel’s eyes, something like hope quickened. Her breath came fast, through half-parted lips. She swallowed, and spoke again in a trickle of voice. “What did they tell you, Will, in your dream?”

“They told me they wanted me to save them,” Will cackled. “I, Will Shakespeare, should rescue them from Sylvanus, who meant to murder them. But lady, it was all a dream, a dream and nothing more.” He stopped. Sylvanus was free. Sylvanus had injured the Hunter. Will remembered Quicksilver saying so. Was it only a dream?

“Murder the female element? Yes, Sylvanus spoke of it. I thought it was vain bragging.

“But if they felt it, if they came to you in your dream, then perforce he can truly do it. Will, what else did they say?”

“They said if I rescued them, they would make me the greatest poet ever alive,” Will said, his voice drawing out, and drowning itself in empty despair. He made a face.

But Ariel stared at him, serious and solemn. “Then I say it’s time you earned your fee, Will,” she said. “Sylvanus is abroad and possessed of a human body, which he must be using in some way. Why would Sylvanus need a human body, Will? He could kill well enough without it. The pestilence, alone, that he unleashed upon the world, the blight of power that drained Fairyland, could have decimated half a continent. So, why did Sylvanus need a human body? To kill one of the female aspects, you say, but how?”

In his mind, Will heard Silver babbling about the female elements and sympathetic magic. He could feel Silver’s hands upon him, her breath hot and sweet on his ear, and he could hear Quicksilver’s urgent, businesslike voice speaking to him.

Will stopped his pacing, faced Ariel. “Milady,” he said. “What’s sympathetic magic?”

“Oh,” Ariel said. “Oh.” Her eyes grew big. “It’s when you take an object and, prefiguring upon it a person, maim or wound the first object, to hurt the being symbolized. Did the three aspects speak to you of this? You must tell me, Will.”

In a panic of anxiety, she grasped at his doublet.

He shook his hand. “No, lady, no. Silver—Quicksilver—told me about this. He told me that Sylvanus must be trying to perform sympathetic magic, and asked if we had a female priestess or a great female figure that could incarnate the female aspects, or one of them.”

Ariel’s mouth half-opened. “And do you?”

Will took a deep breath. His mind was clearer than it had been with Silver’s arms around him, Silver’s breath upon his face.

He thought about the maiden, the matron, and the crone.

There was only one woman in all of Britain who could figure one of them: the Virgin Queen worshiped by her subjects as much for her royalty as for her virginity.

“No,” he said when he could get breath. “No. It’s monstrous.”

In his mind he saw the Queen, in her barge on the Thames, gliding regally over the black water, oblivious and impervious to her subjects’ sufferings and the plague that ravaged the land.

Who could kill the Queen? Who could get past her bodyguards, her menservants, even her ladies?

But he heard again the conversation he’d heard in Southampton’s study, the talk of how the Queen wandered abroad, mistrusting her counselors, spying and cheating on those who should keep her safe.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be that Sylvanus would mean to kill Queen Elizabeth.”

Scene 35

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. He stands alone, still blood-spattered, in the middle of his room. The bed remains in disarray, the basin blood-stained. His bloodstained suit lies crumpled by the door. From beneath the floorboards come the sounds of women mourning. Kit holds his dagger.

“Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?” Kit spoke to the empty room, the dagger in his hands, the bloodied suit. His own voice, little more than a whisper, startled him.

He tested the dagger tip upon his finger.

He’d thought of this from the moment he’d first found Imp dead. But the thought hadn’t fully bloomed upon his tired mind until he’d left Imp with his grieving mother and come here, to his room, to the bloodied suit, the mute witness of his crime.

If he could no longer control himself, if his body would wander the night killing even the one dearest to him, then Kit must die. It was the only way to avenge himself upon himself.

Feeling the dagger tip, wondering how he would take the pain of its entry into his body, when he could barely stand a cut taken upon shaving, Kit sighed.

For how could he, who had so often written about death and murder and terrible events, in fact, be afraid of death? He who had sent others to the gallows, yet recoiled from an easy end. And why did he? What had he to live for?

He spoke, his words hardly moving the cold fear in his mind. “By my troth, I care not: we owe God a death: I’ll never bear a base mind.” But he didn’t believe in God, and yet, from the darkness of his mind other thoughts issued. He’d murdered, he’d killed, he’d betrayed.

If there were a God—oh, what vengeance would not that God wreak upon Kit after death?

He thought of John Penry. God have mercy on us all.

Oh, if Kit only believed upon a merciful God.

But if he tried to picture God, Kit always saw his father, and he could not imagine mercy there.

“To die, to sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub for in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” Would he dream of Imp? Or forever be shunned by the beloved shade? Oh, heaven if there was heaven, judge upon Kit’s unworthiness for all but eternal torment and damnation.

He shook his head.

Holding his dagger gingerly, he looked at his own reflection in the polished round that served him as a shaving mirror.

What good was earth, when Imp was gone from it? What good living, when the future had died?

It was time Kit should brave the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.

If nothing else were earned, at least Kit would not remain upon earth to be guilty of other deaths.

Holding the dagger gingerly, he stretched his neck and took a light swipe across his skin.

The skin parted, a line of blood appeared. Not deep enough to kill, not deep enough to bleed much, in fact not much more than a cut in shaving.

The sting from it protested along Kit’s nerves, but he would not listen.

“It will not hurt,” he told himself. “Or if it does, I’ll scarce be alive to feel it. Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.”

He raised his arm, meaning to bring his dagger down and cut his throat, and let that blood flow freely for whose continued existence so much blood had been shed.

But his hand stayed in midair, suspended, the dagger glinting in reflection upon the polished metal round.

Kit tried to pull it down, but it would not move. He tried to bring the edge of the blade down on his skin, but his arm would not obey him. “What wonder is this?” he asked. “What wonder? Am I such a coward, then, that my own limbs rebel at the thought of death, and won’t do the deed?”

He tried harder, his hand barely moving.

In the metal upon the wall, he saw his mouth open, and though he meant not to speak, a voice issued through his lips. “You cannot kill yourself, Master Marlowe, for killing yourself would kill me also. I’ve been with you through a sunset. We are entwined, enmeshed, so far involved, that your body and my soul are one. And I don’t wish to die.”

For just a moment, Kit thought that it was himself talking, his other half, the dark, secret half that had turned in John Penry, that had killed Imp.

Then he remembered where he’d heard that voice.

The elf in the alley, that night.

Kit looked at his blistered hand and remembered the burn of the iron gate in that alley. He remembered elves hated iron.

Kit was not an elf. But he was elf-possessed.

Kit’s hair rose at the back of his neck as he realized what had happened. The elf had possessed Kit, taken over Kit’s limbs.

Kit was a prisoner in his own body.

Scene 36

Will’s room. Ariel and Will stand facing each other, looking shocked, scared.

“Oh, if only Kit weren’t so immersed in grief,” Will said. “If he could speak to me, and understand what I ask him. He’s the only one I know who has acquaintance at court, and who might tell us which of the courtiers might be harboring the wolf.”

“Kit?” Ariel asked. “Kit Marlowe?”

Will sighed. Even the fairy queen knew Kit Marlowe. That was fame as a poet. “Do you know him, milady?” he asked.

Stepping forward, he felt something under his foot, something soft, quite unlike the rushes that covered his floor.

“Not know him, no.” Ariel shook her head. “But Milord Quicksilver did. I mean . . .” She blushed.

Will looked away from her, well understanding what she meant, by the high color of her cheeks. He remembered how he, himself, had known Silver, ten years ago, and felt heat upon his cheeks.

Looking down, to hide his embarrassment, he saw, beneath his feet, a grey object.

Bending down, he picked it up. It was a suede glove, well cut, with fringes upon the wrist and an ink stain on the index finger. Kit Marlowe’s glove.

“When Quicksilver was younger and Kit Marlowe . . .” Her blush increased and she lowered her eyes. “And Kit Marlowe also.”

Kit Marlowe? Kit Marlowe was Quicksilver’s lover? And why not when Will, married and with more reason to abstain had fallen to Silver’s charms?

In his mind, Will heard Quicksilver saying that those who’d been touched by Fairyland would be more vulnerable to Sylvanus, but he shook his head. It was an insane thought.

Yet, this glove proved that someone had consorted with Silver in Will’s absence. And it proved who it was. Did it not?

He smoothed the glove in his hand.

“You say Kit Marlowe knows people at court?” Ariel asked. “Could he . . . Could he be the one that’s been taken over by the wolf?” she asked. “I remember Quicksilver said that Kit was smart and socially adept. Could Kit contrive to kill the Queen?”

Will shook his head. The idea was bizarre. The idea was unbelievable. It was but a dark cobweb of horrible thought stretching tendrils onto sunny reality. “No, no,” he said. “A thousand times no. I’ve known nothing from Kit but kindness.” He looked at Ariel, to meet her skeptical gaze. “Milady, his own son was murdered.”

“Yes, and how came that child to be with that man, so late at night? Will, what does Marlowe look like?”

Will shrugged. “It cannot be.”

“Just tell me, Master Shakespeare, please.”

Will shrugged again. Ariel would see it was nothing. She would see it meant nothing. “He’s a small man,” he said. “Shorter than I. With auburn hair, and an oval face, a small moustache, and grey eyes.”

Ariel’s gaze sharpened. Her breathing quickened. “He is the one, Master Shakespeare, he is the one.” She looked at the glove in Will’s hand. “Is that his glove?”

“Why, I believe . . . But how could you know?”

“There’s a lingering mind print upon it, one that is not yours. I shall home in on that mind print, and I shall rescue my lord. Even if he’s taken over by the wolf, the wolf won’t be so powerful in daylight.”

She put a dainty finger forward, and touched the glove.

In the next breath she was gone, leaving nothing behind, but only a spark and afterglow in the air.

Will looked at the glove in his hand.

Kit Marlowe, a murderer? The murderer of his own child? The harborer of the wolf? Kit Marlowe plotting to murder the Queen?

Will could not credit it. Kit Marlowe was a good man, the best poet Will had ever heard. And he’d helped Will so, finding him patronage that would allow Will to live.

But Will remembered St. Paul’s, and the amusement in Kit’s gaze at Will’s poetry. Why would Kit help a poet in whose words Kit held so little faith? And who had been those men who took Kit away? And how had Kit got free of them?

He stared at the glove in his hand. It was Kit’s glove, indeed. Will remembered the ink stain upon the index finger.

But Kit had never come into this room while Will was here. Once he’d stayed at the door by Will’s choice, and once by his own.

So, he must have been here when Will was not. Kit must have been in while Silver was in here alone.

Will remembered Silver saying she was going to someone who would help her. And Silver had come no more. She’d been transported to Never Land.

Will squeezed the glove. If he could not trust Marlowe, whom could Will trust?

Yet Silver had gone to someone she trusted. And found Sylvanus in that guise.

Scene 37

Marlowe’s room. He holds the dagger in his hand, and looks, amazed, now at the dagger, now at the hand that holds it, and now at his own face, reflected, haggard and shocked-looking, from his mirror.

Kit stared at his reflection, disbelieving.

Was it his imagination that prefigured another’s will where his own cowardice prevailed?

Again he tried, with renewed fury, to bring the blade to his waiting throat. His hand moved not. His mind raced.

Was an elf within him, controlling his every thought? Not Kit’s own damned soul at all, not his darker half, but something like this, something evil, come from the darker reaches of the under world to plague him.

“Ah no,” the voice of the elf spoke through Kit’s mouth, in more pedantic accents than Kit had ever used. “Ah no, you won’t lay all the blame on me. For it was your own dark soul that called to me, your tainted heart that held me fast.

“Twice, before you, did I try to possess those touched by fairykind. The first died before I’d fully installed myself. He died at the thought of blood, the thought of killing. The second rebuffed me before ever I got near.” Kit’s mouth twisted upward and smiled at him, in a suave, superior way that reminded him of the dark elf in the night. “But in you I found my match and my mark, and you will serve my turn.”

Before Kit’s tongue rested, a scream in his own voice tore through his lips. It surprised him as much as the voice of the elf, and yet he knew it was his own, his own anger and injured grief screaming out of his grief-bruised throat. “Oh monster, oh creature from the abyss, I will avenge me.”

Laughter echoed through Kit’s mouth, stopping the grief there with bitter gall, and smooth words poured out. “Vengeance? What? Thyself upon thyself? How will you contrive such, Master Marlowe? When your own hand plays you false and will not ply your dagger to seek your death?”

Kit’s eyes looked at the mirror, horrified.

“Yet will you do my bidding and attain my goal, like a good servant who does his master’s will.” Kit’s lips smiled at his blank, shocked stare in the mirror. “Ah, good Kit, you shall be tame, a common household Kit. Your evil called to mine, your darkness bound me to you. You shall reign with me upon the earth once we have conquered. And to that end, we must only kill a Queen. A Queen ephemeral and passing as is the common run of mortals. And she is old. We’ll be robbing her of a few years. Nothing much.”

Kit thought of the Queen, of his plan of gathering all warring courtly camps, and the Queen, too, in Deptford.

Had that been the wolf’s doing all along? Kit had thought himself free. Kit had thought it his own clever plan. He’d thought he’d contrived it to free himself of Poley.

Oh, how cunning, how marvelous a genius Kit had believed himself, seeking to lure the Queen to Elinor Bull’s. How great he’d believed the workings of his mind to be.

And all the time, there had been another, within his mind, spinning his own plans.

If Sylvanus took Kit to Deptford, if Kit allowed himself to be controlled thus far, then would Sylvanus kill the Queen.

And war would rage, bloody, over fields and towns. England would erupt in fighting and blood, should Elizabeth die without an heir.

To the murder of Imp, Kit would add the murder of England.

A frozen terror clasped Kit’s heart in a band of icy panic.

Kit didn’t know, didn’t fully understand, why the elf wished this, but he could see the deaths, many deaths.

All those Kit knew, Will and Tom Kyd, and even cursed Robin Poley, dying side by side in senseless fray.

And Madeleine, and Kit’s family too: that uncaring father, Kit’s soft-eyed mother, and Kit’s three younger sisters, in far-off Canterbury. All would be caught in the maw of the disorder to come.

It would all come through Kit, yet Kit could do nothing to prevent it. Carried like a lamb bound for the slaughter, he would be both victim and sacrificer, see his world destroyed, his present as obliterated as his future had been by Imp’s death.

“This is hell,” Kit whispered, his lips barely moving. “Nor are we out of it.”

Yet what could Kit do? How could Kit prevent it?

He stared at his own wide-open grey eyes that gazed upon him from the mirror.

And in the mirror, he saw a flash.

In that moment, without his thought, without his saying so, Kit’s body turned.

The elf’s voice returned to his throat, the elf’s roar of surprise, of anger erupted from his lips.

“Dare they?” the elf said.

Kit’s hand, still raised, dropped his twelve-pence dagger.

It fell, point down, and stuck a-quiver on the floorboards.

Kit’s heart sped up. Was this Silver? He couldn’t let this elf hurt Silver.

But the elf who’d materialized in the burst of light looked slighter than Silver had ever been, a blond girl-elf, blue-eyed, with a child’s wide-eyed innocence, a child’s wide-eyed despair.

She stared at Kit with anger and disgust. “Sylvanus,” she said.

Grasping her skirt all into her right hand to uncover thin legs in white stockings, she marched forward in broad strides. “Sylvanus. Give me my husband.”

She raised her hand also, the mirror image of the gesture Kit’s body made.

“Milady,” Kit Marlowe said, amazed. “Milady. I have not the pleasure—” And then, before his lips fully closed, before he gathered his dispersed breath, a voice spoke through his lips, a cold, cold voice that chilled him to the soul. “Ariel. Well met. I’ll be more than glad to help you along to Quicksilver’s company.”

Ariel stomped her foot. “You’ll not find me as unprepared as Quicksilver,” she said. “You will not find me so easy to defeat.”

Raising her own hand, she did something, and a shimmer like diffused light from a candle played up and down her pale, slim figure.

“You oppose me with that?” Sylvanus asked through Kit’s mouth. “Think you that the waning power of the hill can withstand my power? Did I not show you otherwise but yesternight?”

“That was the night,” Ariel said. “This is the day. And you’ll not have such full control of your body under the blessed mortal sun.”

Sylvanus laughed. “You’re wrong, milady. I fed long and well, and the strength thus gained, on sweet mortal lives, more than compensates for the loss of magic that the day brings.”

A tingle ran along Kit’s lifted hand.

All of a sudden, Kit realized what that meant. Magic would issue from that hand.

Understanding seared into his mind. This elf had done something to Quicksilver, and would now do it to Ariel, whom Kit deduced to be Quicksilver’s wife.

With roaring intensity, Kit awoke within his own body. He threw all his willpower at his hand. With all his strength, he commanded it down.

Down and down and down, by slow, measured inches. He closed it, too, though the tingle continued, running through his arm, up and down.

“Milady, run,” he said, forcing his words past the wolf’s incensed roar that would have used up all Kit’s breath. “Milady, run. Be gone. He has the power to send you somewhere—I know not where, but I know there you’ll die.”

Ariel shook her head. She looked amazed, hesitated, as if noticing the difference in the voice, but not sure who spoke. “To Never Land, he’ll send me, aye, where my lord is, where no elf can survive a second sunset. To Never Land, where my lord is dying.” Tears drowned out her blue eyes. She lowered her hand to wipe them.

“You will obey me,” Sylvanus’s voice screamed through Kit’s mouth, and Kit’s hand, breaking free of his control, raised itself.

In vain Kit struggled to pull it down. In vain did he try to regain control of his own body.

The anger of the elf surged through Kit. Kit’s hand lifted. The tingle on Kit’s arm was unbearable, a scouring pain.

“Slave, vassal, vile villain, you will obey me,” Sylvanus roared, and as his hand lifted, a burst of light erupted and engulfed the blond and fragile fairy queen.

“Oh, help, help, help me,” Ariel screamed. “You are our only hope.”

Her voice died away, as if swallowed by a merciless distance.

When the light flickered down, nothing was there, no one was in Kit’s room, but Kit and the elf that possessed Kit’s body.

The elf let go of Kit’s body, then. Kit fell, exhausted, limp, to the floor.

His face to those rushes so recently stained with bloodied water, Kit realized that he’d been the undoing of Silver and Quicksilver also, as well as Imp.

Covered in sweat, too tired, too weak to rise, he whispered his grief to mingle with the howls of grief from below the floor, the female lamentations so loud that they blocked even all that had passed in this room.

“Twice I’ve loved, twice,” he said. “And both loves dead by my hand. How this hand smells still of blood. All the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this hand again.”

But already the elf quickened within Kit and cut Kit’s breath with a chuckle. “Repine later, now you have my work to do. We have a Queen to kill.”

And on those words, Kit’s weak body rose from the floor, and washed itself carefully, and shaved and attired itself in Kit’s remaining clean suit.

Through it all as a man in a nightmare from which he can’t waken, Kit watched himself act, watched his body perform the routines he’d so often performed, and marveled at his former blindness.

How vile this captivity, how base. He would go to Deptford and destroy the world, in the command of a master he could not disobey. He, Kit Marlowe, who’d never been true to friend or foe before.

He’d do the command of the thing that had slain Imp.

And yet, and yet he would have it otherwise. For it was right and meet he should avenge his son’s blood upon the foul being.

Looking at his smooth face in the mirror, the face from which the elf’s possession had erased all brand of grief, every wrinkle of care, Kit sighed.

But for his own cowardice, this would never have happened. He should have braved the council’s pleasure and by other means confronted the noose encircling him. By means that didn’t require sacrificing others. He should have cut loose the noose by means of truth and courage. Else, should he have run.

That many years ago, in Cambridge, he should have refused to turn anyone in. He should have stood his ground. He should have remained clean and loyal and got his money from poetry only.

“A plague on all cowards,” he whispered to the uncaring face in the mirror. “A plague, I say, and a vengeance, too!”

He must find a way to defeat the elf. But how could he, when he was but a helpless slave?

Scene 38

Will sits at his table, in his room. Scribbled-on papers litter the floor. Ink blots mar the table top, and a large bluish black block of solid ink sits nearby, waiting to have water added to it, and thus be converted into usable ink. Beside it sits a bag of fine sand, used to dry the ink after writing.

Will sat at his table, his head in his hands.

How was he supposed to write? His words, never plentiful, now came haltingly and slow to his hesitating pen.

The dream he’d had—of the three women and their threats—and Ariel and her suspicions, all danced in his head, a ceaseless, threatening jig.

How could Ariel believe that Kit Marlowe was possessed by Sylvanus? When had Kit done anything less than honorable?

No. Nothing was wrong. Kit had lost his son and mourned for him, and Ariel would soon see the folly of thinking Kit the vessel of the evil elf, Sylvanus.

Will reached for his pen, dipped it in the ink.

The pen hovered over the new blank leaf of paper in front of him.

Venus and Adonis. He must write about Venus and Adonis.

Something, something, rosy-fingered dawn.

His mind almost touched the words he should use, stretching toward them like fingers.

But—if Kit Marlowe didn’t harbor the wolf, who did? Surely Sylvanus was still loose, surely dangerous, whomever he’d possessed?

The words vanished from Will’s mind, and into it, another voice, another thought poured—clear as words screamed in that very room. Oh, help, help, help me, Ariel screamed. You are our only hope.

Will stood up, startled. His chair fell with a crash to the floor and splintered into many bits. His ink bottle spilled, pouring blue oblivion over the few words he’d scratched on the page.

Still holding the pen in his hand, Will looked for the fairy queen. Where was she, and why had she screamed?

His heart still racing, he remembered what Ariel had said, about hearing a mind cry from Quicksilver. Was this then it? A mind cry?

Had Ariel been taken then? Taken to the same place as Quicksilver? The place where Quicksilver would soon die?

But that meant Marlowe truly must be guilty . . . . No, it could not mean that.

Will righted his ink bottle, set his pen down in the midst of a pool of spilled blue, and stared at Marlowe’s glove, which was fast becoming dyed a deep azure.

Yet Will remembered the fear in Kit’s eyes when the two men had flanked him in Paul’s.

Kit had gone away with them, and soon after had come to Will with a job offer, with an invitation to dinner, with marks of kindness such as Will could never have anticipated.

And it was not that Kit believed Will to be a great poet. No. Will knew better. Something had changed, but what? Had Kit thought to involve Will in some secret dealing? Will remembered the invitation to Mistress Bull’s in Deptford.

And then how Kit had told him not to go there, under any account.

What did it all mean?

Will’s hands shook so that he couldn’t attempt to write, couldn’t attempt even to right the mess on his desk. The puddle of ink had started dripping onto the floor, staining the rushes and the floorboards beneath.

Will wiped his hand on his doublet.

He was their only hope? He?

He supposed that meant Marlowe really was the harborer of the wolf. And if that were the case, what could Will do?

The two sovereigns of Elvenland had gone to face this adversary, and both had lost.

Why should Will go now, after them? Will, who had no knowledge of magic, no power of deception? Will, who until just now had believed fair behavior to bespeak fair thoughts and hadn’t realized that a man may smile and smile and be a villain?

Will’s heart beat a marching rhythm, but he did not know where to march. He swallowed hard. He must do something. The three old women—aspects of the female element, Ariel had called them—had told him he was their champion. Those shadows of human thought that enformed multidinous reality had chosen him. Silver had come to him for help. He’d failed them all.

But now Ariel herself had asked for his help, and how could he fail her?

Kit had told Will not to go to Deptford. Yet if Kit were evil, then Will must do the opposite of what Kit had entreated.

Therefore, Will must go to Deptford, go as soon as possible.

Will covered his eyes with his inky hands. To go to Deptford, he must ride, and Will had no horse. He looked toward the mattress that hid his purse.

Will was fast becoming penniless once more.

Groaning, he went to get the money.

Groaning, he thought what a fool he was to be doing this.

When magical might collided, shaking heaven and earth with its clash—what could a mere mortal do?

Scene 39

Never Land, the in-between worlds—a desolate place with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overweening cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now palaces. None of the shapes remains in solid reality but it all changes like shadows of wind-whipped branches. Amid these shadows Ariel walks, her eyes now dry but looking as if they have dried from crying every tear that could be summoned to their bruised, reddened orbs.

Where was Quicksilver? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?

Ariel stumbled on a grey root that momentarily sprawled across her path. Before she’d regained her feet, the root vanished.

Oh, what a terrible land, worse than anything that she could have imagined. How lost she was. How much she wanted to see her lord. Oh, that Ariel could cry, that her tears might warm this frozen place and bring a living ocean to this world of shifting nothingness.

How cold the shifting shapes made her feel. And her lord had been here almost three days. Lived he yet?

She must find him. She must see his sweet face again and drink the words of his sweet address.

Tattered rags of trees with things like moss or mourning grey cloth hanging from them brushed across Ariel’s face, moved by an unfelt wind.

Sometimes, through the shadows of trees and the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw Quicksilver. But running forward, through the shadows and the shades, she found him not.

Like a rainbow, forever receding from the reaching hand, so her lord to her straining heart.

Where was he now, for whom her heart longed?

She wanted to apologize for all her misdeeds—for her distrust of him, her assumption that he had left her to disport himself in London.

He’d left to defend Fairyland. He’d done what any noble king would have done. That he’d kept it from her and would not let her help him was no more than the excess of his love and the trembling insufficiency of his self-confidence. Quicksilver had, by virtue of his division, an over sensitivity to what others might think and a tender, overgrown conscience that would not allow him to have others risk themselves in his steed, or take any part of his responsibility, though his shoulders should crack from it.

His infidelity, if it had been such, was probably no more than a symptom of the disturbance in the cosmos, the swaying winds of feminine alarm.

And if not, then it was Ariel’s fault, for so wishing Silver out of sight until Silver’s desires burst from their bounds and became uncontrollable in their swollen need.

Ariel walked here and there. She wished to call for Quicksilver, but the cold seemed to steal her voice. The cold was everywhere, came from everywhere at once and leached not only heat but life itself from her body.

Thus would death come, she understood, a sad death—a nothing, a final whimper in a frozen landscape.

The air smelled musty like the grave, like a never-inhabited womb, like all that might have been but never was.

She sighed as she thought that she might have been Quicksilver’s loving queen, but had not been such, and in her barren unlove, her love and her royalty belonged, rightly, in this land.

Her foot caught on something. She fell forward and the hands she put forth to save herself from hurt gripped solid shoulders and silky hair, which did not shift upon her holding them.

Quicksilver.

She knelt beside him. He wore white velvet, or perhaps the magical cold of this place had leeched color from his garments. All in white, he lay on his side, curled upon himself, his eyes closed, his blond hair spread out behind him.

For a moment, blinking, Ariel thought him dead and her heart shrank upon itself, clutching upon grief and mourning over the love she’d betrayed and could never right again.

Then Quicksilver stirred. He opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

He stood up. He put his arms out to her. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

“I thought you dead,” she said and put a hand out, to assure herself of his living reality. She touched his cold chest that yet moved, in search of breath.

He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength yet remains to me. It is not much and it might not last long.” He unfolded himself and looked down on her, his face set and grave and regal.

Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss green eyes so intent.

He had never looked so much like a king.

Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips, and after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold.

Quicksilver had lingered too long in Never Land.

“Oh, milady,” he said as their lips parted. “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch of the truth of all her features.

He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her, that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days—nay, in years.

Quicksilver raised one eyebrow. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him. As though her mirth warmed him, in his cold state in this desolate land.

She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I . . . I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demirounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

“Because I’m done being a fool, milord, and I only wish . . . I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

“Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done . . .”

“I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. I know somehow you freed Sylvanus. And I know you made love to the human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

“And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked. His face looked even paler than when she’d first seen it, his eyes wide with horror. “Half my people are dead, and you hate me not?”

Ariel shook her head and embraced him. How cold he was, how cold, how icy, how impervious to touch. Like snow, new-fallen, or like old ice on a cliff face.

“How can I hate him who is another half of me?” she asked. “Whose folly is, ever, but a reflection of my own?”

She wished she could share with him the heat of her love, the pulse of her life.

But she could not.

“And now we’ll die here,” Quicksilver said, his voice as cold as his body. “And Sylvanus shall have sway over the world and all in it.”

But Ariel touched the marble-cold cheek, the icy hands, the cold, cold lips.

“No. No. We have hope. We have hope still. There’s Will Shakespeare free. He’ll find a way to set things aright.”

But she knew her own voice echoed with doubt, and she saw doubt in Quicksilver’s disbelieving look.

Scene 40

A London market, sprawling in all directions from a central point. Chickens and poultry, pigs and all manner of livestock are sold alive and dead, their feet bound or their carcasses swaying in the air. Women display baskets full of fresh-baked bread or farm-grown vegetables. At a corner of the market, horse dealers assemble. And there, Will wanders, with the look of a man who has shopped long and hard and found not what he sought.

To go to Deptford, Will must buy a horse.

But never having done it, he found it heavy going.

Every horse he saw looked half-dead or too expensive. Examining a half-dead one, Will sighed.

Kit—and Sylvanus—must be in Deptford by now.

Perforce, Kit had meant to involve Will in Sylvanus’s plan, and then, re-belling after his son’s death, Kit had entreated Will not to go.

Else, why would Kit have cautioned Will against Kit again begging him to go? Why else, but that he feared the wolf, within his body, would call Will to Deptford again.

But why Deptford? Did Kit mean to kill the Queen there?

Will must stop it. He was the last hope of humans and elves.

“He looks lame,” Will said, staring at the nag in front of him, a grey creature of indeterminate age, with patches upon its hide that looked like the discolorations of mold.

“Lame?” the dealer asked, standing beside Will and speaking so loudly that the whole fair would hear. “You insult me so? You say that of my horse? Why, he was only owned by an old parson, who rode him only to his church to preach, on Sundays, and the rest of the time was he kept stabled, and fed the best, and daily taken care of.”

Will wrinkled his nose. The beast smelled diseased, too, a pungent, acrid smell. And its lower legs were all covered in mud, though the legs of the other horses in the enclosure were clean.

Will was not so naive that he didn’t know the trick of covering a horse’s legs in mud to make it look hale and sound, where there might be deformity or injury.

But he’d asked about every other horse in this fair that would serve his turn, and he could not find better—not among those that he could afford with the five pounds remaining in his purse.

At this rate, he’d not make it to Deptford, nor save the magical pillars of the world from their doom. At this rate, the world would be lost to Sylvanus for lack of a horse.

“Master, this horse will do you proud. You’ll will him to your grandchildren, yet.”

Will ground his teeth. At least the horse hide, he would will to his grandchildren.

Did Will look so much the credulous fool that all felt they must make up outrageous stories and try them on him?

“How much for the horse?” he asked.

The dealer bowed and smirked. “For you, master, for you five pounds.”

And for everyone else two pounds? Will wondered if all the prices told him in this fair were like that, many times more than they should be.

Will’s grandfather had left twenty pounds in his will and had been considered a reasonably well-off man.

How could a fearful nag cost five pounds? Oh, all these men must be trying to cozen Will. He must look innocent as a mewling babe. No wonder even Marlowe had sought to cozen him.

And for Marlowe—to save Marlowe, to save the elves that Will had never trusted—Will would spend all the money he had left from what Southampton had given him? What would he do then, without the money?

“Will you take him, master?” the horse dealer asked, untying the horse from the post that held it in place—though the horse showed no inclination to roam.

The beast turned pitiful eyes to Will, as though asking for an end to its sufferings.

Will would very much like to see his own sufferings end, too.

If he paid for this horse, if he paid now, if he paid the whole five pounds in his leather purse, he’d be back where he was a couple of days ago, with no money to eat, with no money to return to his family in defeat.

No, no. Let Marlowe kill the elves, let Marlowe and Sylvanus take over the world. Let the die be cast and all come out as it would.

What could Will do anyway, unschooled in magic, against such great evil?

Will was a poor prospect for saving the world from a magical creature, a demigod. To own the truth, he couldn’t save himself from penury.

Will shook his head at the dealer, and started walking away, amid the crowd.

“Best poultry in London, buy it here,” a woman yelled, waving a live chicken, its feet bound, in front of Will’s face.

Will dodged the chicken’s beak. The chicken’s cackle rang like a trumpet of doom.

What mattered it to Will who ruled the universe—old pagan deities, or Sylvanus, or the God of Christians, or even the uncaring, amoral deities of Marlowe’s plays?

Surely Sylvanus couldn’t be any more vicious than the blind woman who cut the thread of life.

Yet in his mind, he saw the child, Kit’s son.

Whatever Kit might be guilty of, Will couldn’t believe he’d committed that murder willingly.

And what creature would force the hand of a father against his own son? Sylvanus had done it. If such a creature ruled the world—no, wove the world anew in its image—who would be safe? What world would this be, but measureless hell?

Will touched the coins in his purse, the coins that would allow him to go back to Stratford and see his son and daughters again.

But how would they be when Will got there? What if in Deptford, in Mistress Bull’s house, the final battle were won by the wrong being? What good would it do to Will to ignore it?

Would he not be like those who, in the time of Noah, feasted and drank, married and were given away in marriage, only to be swallowed by the impending flood?

Like Noah, Will was the only man, the only mortal who knew of the cataclysm coming.

And unlike Noah, Will wished to save all of the world.

Pray, how could he do this by hiding in his room and writing?

How could he do that by shying away from people who thought him a fool and allowing them to go on believing him so?

And how could he get to Deptford?

Will took a deep breath, tainted with manure and the smell of spoiled meat.

“Lace,” a peddler yelled, walking past, his wears spread across his arm. “Lace such as should grace your lady’s petticoats.”

His lady back in Stratford needed no lace for her petticoats. But she did need her life, and she did love her children, and by all that was holy, Will would keep that for his Nan.

Without even realizing it, he’d turned around. In the horse enclosure, he laid hand not on the fearful nag, but on a better horse, a dappled brown beauty that frisked about with impatient spirits.

“Ah, you came back, master,” the dealer said with a smirk.

“Yes, and I’ll take this horse, and I’ll give you two pounds for it.”

“Two pounds wouldn’t buy the shoes on this horse. Two pounds? Villain, you would despoil me.”

The scream of the horse dealer brought stares from every person around. Will should shy away. He felt his face color. He felt the impulse to hide.

He was a provincial here in cosmopolitan London. He must have broken some rule and revealed himself for the fool he was.

Yet, he remembered his Nan, he remembered his children, he remembered the little corpse in the alley, the symbol and sign of all that Sylvanus might do to the unsuspecting world he bid fair to rule.

And though Will didn’t fully understand the means and magic involved or all this talk of elements and aspects, he knew that there was another magical reality that twined his and that the two were linked. Through one, Sylvanus could control the other.

Will thought of Sylvanus, who’d bring children to such low ends.

He ground his teeth. “Two pounds,” he said, and held on to the horse’s rein more firmly.

A few breaths later, having paid three pounds, he rode the horse out of the fair headed for Deptford.

His mind was elated with his victory over the horse dealer, the respect he’d read in the man’s eyes at parting.

But now he faced a tougher adversary, one not likely to be impressed with a firm stand.

Scene 41

Marlowe, in a small room in Deptford, with Robin Poley and Ingram Frizer and a blond dandy known as Nicholas Skeres—a secret service man at Essex’s service. The three men sit at a table, playing a game of checkers by fits and starts. Kit reclines on the bed, attempting to look calm.

Through the window came the sound of a horn, calling warning to ships lost in the fog.

Outside, mist, thick as coal soot, wreathed every portion of this port town. The air smelled heavy, with decomposing fish and unburied plague dead.

Kit lay on the bed and trembled.

She’ll not come, Kit told himself, forcing deep breaths into his constricted chest. The Queen will not come. After her narrow escape the other night, she will not be so foolhardy as to risk her life in this small room, in the hands of secret service operatives.

But he couldn’t convince himself of it. The sun was setting. Night neared. The power of the elf grew within Kit. In Kit’s veins, in Kit’s brain, the elf’s hunger pulsed and the chant for blood, life, blood echoed through him like a drum.

Sylvanus hungered and Kit could not think of feeding for the creature once more, could not imagine tearing living flesh, killing men, not now that Kit knew what he was doing.

He shook with need to kill, and yet remained still by an effort of the mind.

Would the same veil of forgetfulness come over him now that Kit knew the truth? Or would he have to face the horror open-eyed? Had he only been aware of what had been done to Ariel because it had been daytime and, therefore, the elf had been weaker? Well did Kit remember that elves and fairies reigned in the night as men did during the day.

“Your conspirators come not,” Poley said from the table, casting a half-laughing look at Kit.

Kit sighed. He spoke through his teeth, against the veil of blood in his mind, “Please,” he said. “I’ve told you, my mind is disturbed. Arrest me now.”

Poley gave Kit a cunning glance, a halfhearted chuckle. “Arrest is too good for you. You’ll beg for it if you’ve lead us a merry dance in a fool’s paradise.”

But his chuckle and his cunning look told Kit that Poley believed in the phantom conspiracy, believed it more than ever. He cast the die again and said, “I believe the hand is mine, that will be your two pence gone, Skeres.”

“I’m tired of the game,” Ingram Frizer said, pushing the chair away from the table. “I’m tired of waiting.” He lumbered across the room to stand by the door to the garden glaring resentfully at Kit now and then.

Kit looked away and trembled. He wished they were all tired of this. He wished they’d arrest him and confine him in a solitary cell, with no one whom he could harm.

Then would the wolf spend his malice in those tight confines, and maybe even starve for lack of the life on which it fed.

Poley threw down his die upon the polished table and half turned, to look at Kit. “What say you, Kit? Your conspiracy takes long enough in showing itself, doesn’t it?”

“It is a shy conspiracy,” Skeres said mockingly. “A conspiracy that will come out at night only.”

Kit sighed. He closed his hands into tight fists. He could almost taste their blood upon his tongue. He could feel their lives pulse, full and vital and energetic as they rushed like a swelling river all around him. He longed, more than anything, to drink his fill of that current.

If only they knew how hard it was for him to keep the elf at bay. And the sun was setting minute by minute. Soon Kit wouldn’t be able to hold back anymore. The elf would have all strength and Kit none. Soon this hunger for life and need to kill would hold full control over Kit’s body.

Soon—in Never Land—Quicksilver would die.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

But the Queen wouldn’t come and soon, soon, even Poley’s cunning patience would exhaust itself, and they’d have to take Kit to some dungeon, give him to the tender mercies of some torturer.

How would the dark elf enjoy being tortured?

Oh, Kit wanted that more than anything, even if he had to suffer alongside Sylvanus. For between them, they’d killed the best child, the sweetest imp in the whole world.

Kit stood up, tripping and lurching as he fought against the sanguinary demands of the elf within his body. He tried to pace around the room, to dissipate some of his impotent anger, his painfully coiled feelings. But pacing was too hard when he was not fully master of his body. He fell to the bed once more.

Poley rose from the table, and Frizer and Skeres with him, their movement rocking the table and scattering the pieces upon the polished wood.

“Think not of escaping,” Poley said. “You have an appointment, Master Marlowe, with the questioner.”

“Oh, take me now,” Marlowe said, extending both his hands. His voice came strangled, through his need and the demands of the elf. “Take me now. Let the torturer do his worst. There’s reckoning to be done, and I’m eager to pay.”

“What mean you here? What strife is here?” a sharp feminine voice asked from down the hall, and quick, decided steps approached.

Kit turned, lurching, losing his balance.

The Queen of England entered the room.

Oh, Lord, she came unguarded.

Skeres and Poley and Frizer rose, all of them looking scared, guilty, as intelligence men always did when surprised.

Kit’s thought suspended, Kit’s amusement at the spies’ discomfiture halted. Upon that thought another thought came, trailing upon the heels of the first.

The Queen, the Queen. Don’t fail me now, vassal. We hold the world within our hands, the power of the ages within our reach.

Kit felt the wolf’s power expand and pull, extending tentacles of thought, reaches of feel to every limb of Kit’s to every pore, to Kit’s every nerve.

Like a conqueror entering a citadel whose gates have long been broken, thus the dark elf navigated Kit’s veins, and sent his orders along them.

Tear, slash, eat, drink the life.

Yet the sun remained up in the sky. Vassal, the thing called him, and vassal Kit might be, but Kit didn’t wish to kill his Queen.

For all his crimes, all his mad, reeling sins, Kit had never yet sacrificed a whole country, nor did he wish to do it now.

“No,” he said. “No. Run. Run, your majesty, run. Save yourself.”

The Queen stared at him exactly as though Kit were a dog turd freshly laid upon an expensive carpet.

“Run?” she said. “Run from whom? Run from where? This is my country, young man, and I rule it. Let rather all evildoers run from me.” Thus speaking, she withdrew her hand from behind her back, and showed that in that bony, wrinkled hand she held a massive sword, its edges corroded by rust and eaten by time.

The dark elf roared within Kit, throwing Kit forward.

The Queen flourished her sword. “What treason is this?” she yelled.

Poley, Skeres, and Frizer surged forward, seized Kit, pulled him back, away from the Queen.

But the elf had inhuman strength, inhuman power that flowed now through Kit’s muscles. While Kit struggled within his body, seeking to restrain the dark elf, the dark elf, driven by roaring anger, pulled away from the men who restrained him and, against their curses, their exclamations of surprise, jumped at the Queen.

I will kill her, the elf thought, his thoughts sounding trumpet clear in Kit’s fogged mind. I will kill her and through her, with sympathetic magic, will I kill the maiden, the female image that is a component of everyone and everything feminine in both worlds. With the Hunter already wounded, the fabric of the worlds will not withstand the death of the maiden. The stuff of the universe will dissolve within man’s minds, leaving all at our mercy. The worlds will be ours. You’ll rule mortals, vassal, and I’ll rule elves.

Elf-possessed, Kit’s body dove under Elizabeth’s sword-wielding arm and, teeth bared, jumped toward the Queen’s neck. Kit’s hands held the Queen’s arms.

The Queen screamed.

Kit smelled her perfume of camphor and stale roses. His teeth almost closed upon the parchment-dry skin.

And then he stopped.

A man entered the room, behind the Queen, another familiar face—balding forehead, dark curls, and falconlike golden hairs.

In that moment, Kit regained control of his body and stopped, still holding the Queen but not moving.

The elf protested and pounded upon Kit’s nerves like a man punching at an unmovable wall.

But all Kit could think, all Kit could feel, was how sorry Will had been at Imp’s death. A true friend and, oh, how kind and honest Will had been to Kit, always.

Of all the people in this room, Kit wished Will to remain alive, even more than he wished the Queen to live.

“Oh, Will,” Kit said. “Why did you come? Had I not warned you stay away?”

Scene 42

Will stands near the door of the room. Kit holds the Queen, who kicks and screams but whose arms Kit keeps immobile. Skeres and Frizer, at Poley’s gestured command, duck around the Queen to flank Will.

Will would swear it looked as though Kit had been going to bite the Queen and then stopped.

What was it, then? Was it the wolf in Kit, going to kill the Queen by the only methods the wolf knew?

But if so, then why had it stopped? And why did Kit look so stricken, and why had he reproached Will for coming?

“I came because I had to,” Will said, ignoring the two dark-attired men who flanked him. “I came because you needed help, and because Quicksilver and Ariel needed help, too.”

“So Kit had warned you away, had he?” a good-looking blond man said as he advanced, and pulled Kit away from the Queen. “And who are this Ariel, this Quicksilver? They sound like code names to me.”

Kit stumbled backward, as though not fully in control of his body.

Kit’s face had an intense look of concentration, as though every muscle were taut, every nerve straining. The look was familiar, but Will could not place it.

“You can’t help me, Will,” Kit screamed at Will, ignoring the blond man. His voice was a lost wailing, his eyes full of dread. “No one can help me for the night will come soon and then it will all be up.”

“I think it is all up now,” the good-looking man said. “I think it is all up now, Marlowe. Who are Quicksilver and Ariel?” he asked Will. “And what do you know of the conspiracy to kill the Queen?”

“Who is he?” Will asked Marlowe. He tried to duck past the Queen’s sword, and get near Marlowe, but the two tall, dark-attired men seized his arms.

What was this? It looked to him as though the knots of Marlowe’s life had all come to a tying point here, all entwining and enmeshing with each other. “Who are these people?”

“You’d have me believe you don’t know who we are? You, who conspire with Marlowe?” the blond man asked.

“Oh, good Will Shakelance, permit me to introduce the two men besides you. The one on the right is Skeres, the one on the left is Frizer. And the other gentleman is Poley, sweet, treacherous Robin Poley, who sends men to the gallows with a smile.” Kit’s voice had a mad echo of his old, amused drawl. “They are secret operatives. Spies. Spooks.”

He could talk, yet he remained immobile, Will thought. Immobile and strained, every muscle working at remaining still.

Suddenly, the expression on Kit’s face made sense—the poet looked exactly like Will’s seven-year-old son, Hamnet, when he tried to stop breathing, for a tantrum.

He looked like a man controlling the uncontrollable.

Sweat sprang from Will’s every pore.

Only Marlowe’s willpower stood between them and the unleashed might of the wolf—the might of a supernatural being in full rampage.

“Treason, foul treason,” the Queen yelled. She’d brought her sword down, but she glared at each of them in turn. “If these men be spies, they be not mine. I know naught of what they do. No one tells the truth to me, a fragile woman, and yet I am Queen and King enough for this kingdom.” She stomped her foot.

Kit’s eyes looked wild and he seemed just like Hamnet when he couldn’t stop himself from breathing anymore and must suck in living air.

“Kill me,” he yelled. “For mercy’s sake, Will, if you’re my friend, kill me.”

Skeres and Frizer and Poley, himself, stared at Kit as though he’d lost his mind.

Will unsheathed his cheap dagger, which he’d never used for more than eating his meat in taverns. Will had never with his own hand killed man or beast, save only a deer once, when he’d been practicing archery. And that he’d regretted enough.

Could he kill Kit? Could he actually plunge the dagger into the beating heart of the greatest poet who’d ever lived?

Faith, Will did not know.

But aye, he would try to kill the wolf.

Even if he must die trying.

Scene 43

The room as before, but seen through Kit’s eyes. He stands behind Poley, facing the bewildered-looking Queen and, beyond her, Will and Frizer and Skeres.

“You do not want to die,” the elf whispered through Kit’s lips. “You do not want to die, Kit Marlowe.”

And while Frizer, Skeres, and Poley stared, wide-eyed, the elf went on, speaking persuasively through Kit’s mouth, trying to convince Kit’s ears.

“Look, look at all you’ll have.”

Behind Kit’s eyes, like an awakening dream, images of food passed, and images of young bodies, young people, female and male, ready to obey his every whim, and images of Kit, crowned, upon a throne.

“If it’s the child you lament,” the elf said, “you can sire many.”

Those words broke the spell. The images disappeared from Kit’s eyes, leaving only the image of Imp. Imp, dead in that alley.

Nothing—no one—could ever replace Imp.

How could this creature, this being, so lack feeling and love that it did not even know that one child was not another, that a child could not be replaced?

And such an elf, such a creature, would rule the world?

The arms that had started turning pliable, the legs that Kit had almost yielded control of onto the elf, suddenly became rigid again and locked, with all of Kit’s strength, against the elf’s desire.

Kit had not wanted to die before. No, God’s death, he’d wanted to avenge himself on the elf, he’d been willing to endure torture for that, but in faith, he’d not wanted to die.

He still didn’t want to die. The elf knew the truth about Kit. Kit loved the world and its joys too much to wish to depart it at twenty-nine.

Yet he would die, he thought. He would die to take out the wolf with him.

He saw Will Shakespeare draw his dagger, a dagger cheap enough that it probably wouldn’t pierce a good suit, and Kit wished it would pierce a suit and more, wished it would plunge into his own treacherous heart.

Will jumped straight at Kit.

Skeres and Frizer moved too late.

Kit still remained immobile, holding the elf at bay, but just barely. Like two men, locked in arm wrestling, each just as strong as the other, they each kept the other from moving but could do no more.

And Kit wished that Will would kill him.

But Will stopped, the dagger poised, in front of Kit as though his courage failed him.

“I cannot kill you, Kit, I cannot,” Will yelled.

Within Kit the wolf roared, “Nonsense. All this is nonsense.”

He raised a hand so suddenly that Kit didn’t anticipate it or stop it.

Force flowed through the hand, magical force, the strange tingling sensation that Kit had felt before.

Was the creature sending the Queen to Never Land? Could humans be sent there?

But instead, the wolf seized Kit’s mouth and spoke through it, once more. “All of you,” he said as energy flowed through his hand. “Kill her.”

Poley, Skeres, and Frizer unsheathed their daggers.

Will looked confused.

Kit gathered all his strength. He’d die trying this, but he must shield the Queen with his own body.

Scene 44

The same scene as before, but through Will’s eyes. Will stares in horror as the two men beside him advance toward the Queen, daggers unsheathed. Marlowe steps forward, toward the Queen, in a slow walk, like an ill-controlled puppet.

For the oddest moment, for no more than a breath, Will wished to kill the Queen.

It was the voice of the elf, and whatever magical compulsion he’d thrown from his lifted hand.

But Will had been bespelled before, and had endured the spells and lived through them.

Will was a Sunday child, who saw the hidden and felt what no other man could feel. That gave him power for magic perceived is magic halved.

He shook the spell from his back, like a dog shaking water from his fur.

“You may come all, curs,” the Queen yelled. “I’ll see you all hanging high.” She twirled her rusty, edgeless sword with amazing agility, smacking Skeres’s, Frizer’s, and Poley’s daggers from their hand. “I will see you all hanging. I knew what villainy was passing. I knew Cecil hid things from me.”

In her triumph she didn’t see Frizer snatching Kit’s dagger from its sheath and speeding it toward her heart.

It all took the space of a breath.

Thoughts seared through Will’s brain like a dream. He couldn’t let the Queen die. The whole world depended on her, old and insane though she might be. Order must be preserved. Hamnet must be allowed to grow up. The wolf must be defeated.

As the thoughts flashed, already Will was airborne, leaping.

He jumped in front of the Queen at the same time that Kit, in his lumbering walk, had got close to her.

Not sure if Kit was himself or Sylvanus-controlled, Will gave Kit a shove, seeking to get him out of the way.

In that moment, Frizer lurched forward, and Kit, tripping, fell toward Frizer.

The dagger Frizer held, Kit’s own dagger, plunged into Kit’s eye.

Blood jetted forth.

Kit dropped to the floor, writhing.

Horrified, blood-spattered, Will stepped back. He thought that he heard Kit’s voice whisper “Thank you,” but he had to be dead before he even touched the floor, and from his dead lips the wolf screamed.

“Oh, curse the luck and the world and all of you. I will not die alone.”

Kit’s dead hand rose, and from Kit’s still-twitching fingers, magical sparks flew.

Will felt as if a roaring wind sucked him through unbelievable ice and unbearable cold.

Scene 45

Never Land, where Quicksilver and Ariel stand. Of a sudden, in an explosion of light, Kit Marlowe materializes, a dagger through his eye, bleeding profusely—from a certain transparent greyness, it’s clear he’s a ghost. And Will materializes after Kit, looking bewildered.

Where was Will?

At first Will thought he’d emerged onto a foggy shore, with the roar of the ocean in the distance, and sand swirling in the whistling wind.

Then he blinked and he realized that he stood in a vast forest, the trees towering overhead.

He blinked again, and saw himself in a city, with tall, baublelike, half-transparent palaces rising in all directions.

And through these half-perceived, half-seen structures, Will saw Kit—or was it Kit’s ghost?—a pale and wan Ariel and a Quicksilver so transparent, so weak, that he might well be a ghost himself.

“Never Land,” Will whispered to himself, remembering the place where Quicksilver had been sent. “I am in Never Land.” But saying didn’t help his bewildered senses to understand the place.

He stepped, half-dazed, toward Quicksilver while Marlowe, smiling softly despite his horrible, bleeding wound and the blood fast congealing on his blue suit, walked toward Will, his mincing step a fair imitation of his stroll at St. Paul’s.

“Friend Will,” he said. “I must thank you—”

“Will,” Quicksilver said. His voice was very faint, very cold, little more than the whisper of the icy wind. “And Kit. What happened to Kit? What woe is here?”

And Ariel said, “Milord, do not speak. Save your energy.”

Never Land, Will thought. Which meant that Quicksilver was nearly dead as the sun would now be setting in the mortal world.

A flash of light shone behind them, and the wolf materialized. Transparent, but not so much as Quicksilver, not even so much as Marlowe, it looked dark—dark and massive.

“You are my soul’s abhorrence,” the wolf growled. Though in canine form, he spoke with human words, words were shaped and built of growls and malice.

The landscape which, for the moment, had settled to gigantic trees with blowing sheets of moss hanging from them, seemed to become darker, whatever light there was being concentrated, caught by the wolf’s dark form, his dark core.

“You”—it turned to Kit—“have cost me my body, so hard-earned.”

“And you”—the baleful eyes of the beast turned to Will—“it’s the second time you cross me, and it shall be the last.” The wolf’s fur ruffled and his eyes seemed to flash with cold light as his fangs glinted by the pale light of an evanescent palace. “And you . . .” He turned to Quicksilver. “You, traitor spawn of a lowly woodland spirit, you who call yourself my brother, you and your half-changeling woman also shall die. All of you shall die here. All of you at my mercy. For I have more energy than any of you here, and here I shall ensure that you all die.”

Will felt as though fear froze him, terror gripped him, panic stopped his breath.

He’d never see Nan again. He’d die here in this land of half-reality and no one would even know where he had gone.

Or why.

Scene 46

The same scene as previously, but seen through Quicksilver’s eyes. The landscape seems to waver and shift even more than before, since Quicksilver is dying of weakness and lack of magic.

Quicksilver saw fear of death in Will’s eyes. Ariel, her arm around Quicksilver, attempting to support him, trembled at the wolf’s words.

And Kit—Kit was perforce already dead, already a ghost. Never Land would eat the substance of Kit’s spirit and wholly drain him away. Kit would be no more. No soul would remain of the great human poet. Kit would have no ever-after, no life after life such as other humans were entitled to.

And Quicksilver himself, feeling himself die, could only think that he couldn’t allow that.

He himself was dead. All his mistakes, all he’d done since taking the crown of the hill, had only justified Sylvanus’s belief that he’d bring ruin to all.

Ariel had told Quicksilver of the blight and the deaths in the hill, and on whom should the blame for those rest, but on Quicksilver?

Oh, let him die, but let Ariel and Will leave here in peace. And let Kit go free, while his spirit yet existed.

Trembling, but thinking that if the wolf listened to anything, it would be Quicksilver’s true submission, Quicksilver shook off Ariel’s arm.

He walked halfway to the wolf and knelt down on the shifting ground, now marsh now sandy desert.

How cold the ground. How cold Quicksilver. He gathered his meager force and spoke, his voice scarcely louder than the howling wind. “Brother, the time and case require haste: Look here, I throw my infamy at thee. I will not ruin my father’s hill, nor by demanding the crown see my friends dead. Maybe I was never fit to govern the hill. The present seems to confirm it.” Quicksilver took his hand to his chest in a show of honesty. Never Land had leeched him so, he could barely feel his own hand.

“I’ll no more bend the fatal instruments of war against my brother and my lawful king. Aye, have the kingdom, Sylvanus, return to the hill. Let the hill power cloak you in a new body. And be our king, and I your loyal subject. In witness of which, I bend my knee.” He opened his hands, as if to show that he was there, on his knees, and he bent his head in true submission.

Oh, only let Sylvanus believe his submission. Oh, only let the others go.

Behind him, Ariel said, “No, milord. You cannot give the hill to him.”

Quicksilver looked over his shoulder. A single look that commanded his loved lady to silence.

The wolf grinned, fangs exposed in a gloating smile. “You beg prettily, brother.” The smile broadened and green, glowing saliva dripped from the fangs. “See what fear does. And longing for life.”

His life? Quicksilver had never expected to get out of this with his life. “Life? Oh, I long not for life, nor did I ever expect you’d let me live. Only let these three go on whom my heart is set. Let Ariel to the hill, let Will to London, and let Kit go to whatever destiny awaits him, beyond this desolate land, where his spirit will be swallowed by nothingness.” He looked back over his shoulder, taking a last look at Kit, Ariel, and Will. “Listen, listen. I am so sorry for my trespass that I here proclaim myself ready to die. Ariel, you must be loyal to my brother, now your king. And Will, you must strive to be a friend to the king of elves. And Kit . . . . Fare thee well, Kit . . . and pardon me. I was wrong and so to my brother I turn my blushing cheeks.

“Pardon me, Sylvanus. Spare them. And take revenge on me as you will.” His words were exhausted with his breath. He knelt, and tried to hope.

Silence reigned yet after he had stopped speaking.

The cold, leeching wind howled around them and Quicksilver shivered with it.

Then Sylvanus laughed. His laughter, colder than his voice, visibly curled in coils of darkness around them all. “Brother, you call me? I have no brother, I am like no brother, and this word ‘love,’ which graybeards call divine, be resident in men like one another and not in me: I am myself alone. And what do you expect with your speech to excite: pity or fear?” The dog snarled and growled and, with bared fangs, approached Quicksilver’s kneeling figure, walked around and around him, in sullen menace.

Quicksilver quivered, but made no sound, nor did he change his kneeling, imploring stance. Was it all lost? Even this, his meager hope, that he might die here alone?

“You ask me to spare your loved ones? I, that have neither pity, love, nor fear.” More laughter echoed, chillingly, through the air.

“Indeed,” the wolf spoke again. “I often heard my mother say I came into the world with my legs forward. The midwife wonder’d and the women cried ‘O, bless us, he is born with teeth!’ And so I was; which plainly signified that I should snarl and bite and play the dog.”

With a low growl, half-laughter half-menace, the wolf said, “And so I shall. And so you die. All of you.”

Quicksilver saw the wolf jump through the air and tried to roll out of the way. But he had not the energy to be quick, and he knew he would die.

And the other three hostages after him.

Scene 47

The same scene, but seen through Kit’s one eye.

Kit saw the wolf leap toward the defenseless, kneeling Quicksilver. If any love remained in Kit’s stilled heart, it was his devotion to the dual sovereign of Elvenland.

He jumped forward, at the same time that Ariel did.

He smiled at Ariel, a flashing smile, and didn’t realize that his injury might make it look like a rictus, until he saw her answering, startled gaze.

The elf and the human who loved the same being looked at each other, both with a kind of wonder that the other should feel the same, then turned their attention to their beloved who must be protected.

Quicksilver must be saved, and for that he depended on them now that he was for once too weak to save himself.

Ariel folded herself upon Quicksilver, protecting his body with hers.

Kit interposed himself between them and the wolf’s snarling menace.

“No,” Kit yelled. “No, cur, no, mangy wolf. You shall not have him. Your crimes end here. I’m not afraid of you, for I have died already, and a man can die but once.”

But even as Kit yelled, the wolf jumped through Kit as though Kit weren’t there and set to, growling and snarling, tearing at Ariel’s arm that protected Quicksilver’s face.

Scene 48

Never Land from Will’s viewpoint, as he watches the wolf attack the Queen of Elvenland.

Will felt frozen with fear, iced with despair.

Watching the wolf bite and tear at Ariel’s arms, listening to her scream, hearing Quicksilver imploring her to let the wolf at him, listening to Marlowe bemoan his immateriality, Will thought the wolf would come for him next.

If Quicksilver’s courage wouldn’t move the wolf, if Ariel’s grace didn’t mollify it, if Kit’s mad rage was to no effect, what could Will do that would save him? Save them all?

Will was a mere mortal, without even the magic that Ariel must still have, after Never Land had leeched almost all.

Will was a nothing. A failed poet. An absent father.

The wind of Never Land robbed him of hope and strength.

And yet an idea formed in his mind. The wolf had taken human form to do a type of magic. Sympathetic magic. Will’s hand fell to his dagger.

The wolf was not truly alive, and he couldn’t be killed, and yet . . .

Holding his dagger, clasping it tight, Will said, “Thou art a dagger of the mind, and will cut through spirit.”

The idea was insane, yet the new Will, the Will who had learned to be foolish sometimes and expose himself to ridicule to save himself greater pains, would try this. And what could happen to Will that would be worse than shortening a life expectancy little worth mentioning?

He stepped up behind the wolf, who, absorbed in mauling the Queen of Fairyland, didn’t notice the mere mortal.

Will drew his dagger.

“No, Will. He’ll go for you,” Kit Marlowe whispered, his immaterial form touching Will. “And he can’t be killed thus.”

But Will raised his dagger and let it fall. The wolf could be killed thus, for it was magic. Sympathetic magic. Will would do the gesture and thus visualize the result and bring it about by the force of his wishing.

The dagger went into the wolf’s grey fur.

The wolf howled, letting go of Ariel, and turned his head to try to bite Will, but his fangs wouldn’t reach

Black blood poured out over Will’s hand.

And Will plunged the dagger again and yet again.

The wolf bayed and writhed.

Will visualized the wolf dead, the force gone out from the dread creature. “Now die, die, die, die, die.”

The wolf bayed a last, awful scream, half-human, half-canine, and then collapsed, rolling off the sovereigns of Elvenland.

Ariel stood, shaking, cradling her torn, mangled arm.

Quicksilver stood, quivering, almost wholly transparent.

Marlowe looked at Will amazed, awe in his one remaining eye.

Far in the distance, a Hunter’s horn sounded.

Scene 49

Never Land seems to stabilize and freeze in dark, dreary outlines, with towering trees from which hangs moss like winding sheets. From the grey sky marred by wisps of black cloud, the Hunter’s dogs, and horse, and the Hunter himself appear.

Strange how one’s idea of fear changed.

The first time Will had seen the Hunter, in the forest so many years ago, he’d thought him a dread being, full of majestic menace.

Now, standing amid a magical land that shouldn’t—that in a greater sense didn’t—exist, his hands tinged with the blood of a magical creature, Will found the Hunter reassuring. The Hunter was something of forest and glade and the more rational world of Fairyland. A lord of justice, justice that could not be averted.

Will sheathed his dagger, and stood beside the corpse of the Hunter’s dog, while the dread gigantic horse of shadow galloped down from the sky, and while the pack of the Hunter’s dogs approached, growling, threatening, fangs bared, menace in every limb.

Did the Hunter mean to take revenge for his dog?

Will couldn’t credit it.

The man who’d been afraid of approaching a theater owner, the man who’d let everyone cozen him and fool him, for once stood his ground, proud and sure of his actions.

The Hunter descended from his horse, and whistled his dogs to heel.

The creatures crowded around him, silent, menacing.

“How so now?” the Hunter asked Will. “How so now, mortal? You dare kill my dog?”

The Hunter’s voice was like icy daggers, his eyes—a blue burning within the perfect, immortal features—transfixed Will.

But Will gathered his voice, and threw his head back. “I did what I must do, to protect myself and those who depend on me for protection.”

Something like laughter rumbled from the Hunter.

What could laughter mean from such a creature?

“Did you now?” the Hunter asked. “Did you now? Then no more can be asked of you. I, too, do what I do for the same reason.” The darkness that was the Hunter’s face shifted and changed. Somehow it looked friendly, calmer. “And the dog’s death has healed me, and restored the world.”

The Hunter looked, Will thought, knowing it was insane, approving and benevolent. “None of you should be in Never Land.” He looked at Will, then at the other three. “None of you.”

He frowned at Quicksilver and Ariel. “You—you, sovereigns of the ancient hill. For what you’ve done to me, oh King, you’ve paid well. Since all is returned to its proper aspect, you’ll evade my vengeance. Get thee hence, before you die of it. Both of you will be well as soon as you return to the world of living. All your wounds will be healed. All your power restored.” The Hunter’s gigantic arm made a gesture, and in the air, glimmering, a bridge of golden light appeared. The other end of it fetched within the golden throne room of Fairyland, for the moment deserted. “Go,” the Hunter said, gesturing at Quicksilver and Ariel. “The blight is gone from your hill and evil from the land. Those who died are gone, but those wounded and ill are hereby cured by this restoring of the natural order. Go and reign justly.”

Slowly, incredulously, Ariel, still nursing her arm, helped Quicksilver up.

By the bridge, Quicksilver turned to Will and bowed, and smiled, a small, hesitant smile at Kit Marlowe’s ghost. “Good night, sweet prince,” he said softly. “And flights of angels sing you to thy rest. Forgive me, Kit.”

Kit bowed and averted his face, tears sparkling in his one remaining eye.

Slowly, haltingly, Ariel and Quicksilver turned and walked arm in arm across the bridge.

The bridge, the throne room of Fairyland, all remained visible, till Ariel and Quicksilver arrived there and set foot on the pristine marble floor.

Then they turned to look at those left behind.

Quicksilver looked strong, perfect. Ariel’s arm was whole. Then the bridge and the view of the Elvenland vanished.

The Hunter said, “Now you, Master Marlowe, to that judgment you’ve evaded too long.” With a wave of his arm, Marlowe also vanished.

“And you, my good Will,” the Hunter said. The smilelike something sparked in the Hunter’s majestic, thunderous face.

But Will had remembered something.

“Wait, my good lord,” he said. “Wait. For in Deptford, in that room, we left three men with the Queen of England.”

“And?” the Hunter asked. “What fear you? Fear not. None of them will hurt the Queen—none of them—once the wolf’s magic was gone. The Queen has returned to her palace. Her spies have arranged a tale, that says Marlowe was killed in self-defense. The gears of deception shall grind on, and soon everyone will believe the deception.” Something like a gigantic sigh escaped the Hunter. “Few men can believe the fantastic and many often prefer more work-a-day lies.

“However, perhaps the Queen will remember you, Master Shakespeare. Perhaps she’ll remember you defended her. Who knows what benefit might not come to you thereby?”

The Hunter waved his hand. “Go back to your room, Will, and sleep well. You shall find the money you spent on your horse multiplied, safe beneath your mattress. You have saved the worlds, Will. Now go and be a poet.”

Again the rushing wind, this time warm, and Will lay in his bed, wondering if it were not all a dream.

But he got up and found, beneath his mattress, that the lord’s purse was full again, fuller than it had ever been, with ancient coins and glittering golden jewels. A thousand pounds, perhaps. A fantastical sum, enough to buy a share in a theater company, if Will should decide to do that.

Epilogue

The primeval forest of Arden, as it once was, with large trees, crowded close. Upon the ground the three spinners sit, working the threads of life. Amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost appears and solidifies.

The three Fates spin beneath the trees of a forest, outside time and space. “

So the king has got his crown,” the youngest one says.

“And the queen’s web is spun,” the middle one says.

“And the traitor’s round is done,” says the oldest one.

She holds in her hand a dark thread, through which a vein of pure gold runs, and holds her scissors poised over it. A sigh makes her tremble. “And yet it is a pity to waste such thread. This stuff is hard to come by in this debased age. And a magic thread thus bequeathed by an ancestor full of power . . . .”

“It is illusion,” the middle one said. “Merlin never was.”

The younger one fingers the thread. “And yet, here’s the gold, here’s the vein of truth and the power and the word.”

“What would you do with it?” the oldest one asks, lifting her head.

A little ways away, amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost stands, immaterial, and yet possessed of Marlowe’s charm as we first saw it—his clothes are impeccably clean and the best cut, and he looks like a man on his way to a fashionable assembly. His ghost has both his eyes, both full of myrth.

A slow smile molds to his lips, and expands, into something like mischievous intent. He walks forward, charming, confident, his mincing step all that could be expected of such a London dandy, a protégé of noblemen, the toast of theatergoers.

“Give the words to the poet,” he says. “Let my words live on, even if another must write them. I bequeath my poetry and the power in it to William Shakespeare of Stratford. Let anyone find fault with that.”

On those words, the old woman cuts through the thread with her sheers.

Marlowe laughs. A small ghost appears beside his—a child who looks much like Marlowe, and who wears a miniature version of Marlowe’s velvet suit.

“Will you tell me a story now, Kit?” the child asks.

“Of course, Imp.” Marlowe extends his hand to the small boy, who takes it. “I have eternity to tell you stories.” Together, they walk away, growing fainter as they walk.

Marlowe’s voice comes from a long ways away. “There was once a King, and he had an only son . . . .”

“Humans,” the maiden mutters to herself, and joins the spun gold to a white thread. “The livelong day I’ll never understand them. Treacherous as the serpent and kind as the dove, full of bitter hatred and sudden, mild love.”

“Humans are as they must be,” the matron says. “And we as we are, that from their minds are born and control their fate only in this small degree.”

“Everything that was will be again.”

“Humans are all that is, and their heart our reign,” the crone completes. The thread measured out upon her lap is now white, but through it shines a single strand of pure gold.

Curtain Call

Within the too-solid city of London, in a shabby room in Southwark, close to the playhouses, Will Shakespeare sits and writes. Words flow from his pen, easy and clear.

Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face, he writes, Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh’d to scorn;

Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, And like a bold-faced suitor ’gins to woo him.

Though not sure whence these words came, Will remembered that Marlowe had died, and feared he’d simply inherited the great poet’s genius by some magical transference.

He thought of Kit’s too-brief life, his squandered genius, the son Kit had never dared own.

As soon as Will finished this poem, as it ever was, Will would go visit Stratford, and see Hamnet and Judith, and Susannah. Aye, and his sweet Nan again.

He smiled at the thought of his wife. She would soon live like a lady, if his money could buy it.

Will wasn’t quite sure why, but all of a sudden he knew he could finish the poem, too. Finish it well, and it would be good.

It would be admired and great, and live through the ages, long after Will himself had died.

In that space, neither asleep nor awake, where sometimes men know truths otherwise unknowable, Will thought he’d got something from Marlowe, some legacy bequeathed with the poet’s last breath.

And though Will needed not the money, he’d go on writing. The poetry itself—Marlowe’s or his own—called to him. And if it were Marlowe’s, it was as well—for when a man’s verses could no longer be read nor a man’s good wit heard, it struck a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room.

Outside, in the shabby street of Southwark, life ground on, the bawds went to bed, and the artificers woke and manned their workshops. The threat of evil and dark death had been lifted from the neck of humanity, where it had rested like a naked sword. The spheres spun on, as they’d been meant to do for eternity. In his palace the King of Fairyland made ardent love to his joyful wife.

And the one man who’d known about the threat and done what must be done to lift it from the unaware orb of the great world wrote poetry and thought with mingled gratitude and grief of the flawed genius who’d bequeathed him such a rare gift.

Author’s Note

In writing All Night Awake, I took certain liberties with history, sins of omission and commission which I should confess.

The fire in Stratford-upon-Avon took place three years earlier and not at the time at which I had it happen. It is true, though, that many houses were destroyed and the houses on Henley street were saved.

And while it is true that the plague tormented London through the summer of 1593, it is not true that it only started then. Rather, it was a continuation of the plague that had—unnaturally—persisted over the winter. And I’m afraid it did not stop, conveniently, when Kit Marlowe died. His death, in fact, was often ascribed to the plague. A fit end—so the Puritans thought—to his riotous living.

Also, although several of Queen Elizabeth’s biographers portray her as a borderline paranoid who trusted neither advisors, nor spies, nor even her ladies-in-waiting, yet it is unlikely she ever roamed the streets disguised as a commoner. But the legend of it persists and it was too charming to resist.

I committed what any student of Shakespeare will consider a more serious offense when I postponed to 1593 the poet’s arrival in London. This so called “late arrival” theory was extant through the beginning of the twentieth century. However, now we have too much evidence—albeit circumstantial—of his presence in London earlier. And we believe that by 1593 many of his historical plays, The Merchant of Venice, and Titus Andronicus (the greatest play Marlowe never wrote) were already in existence. I have no excuse for choosing the outmoded theory, save that it served my own work best.

Perhaps my greatest offenses against history pertain to Christopher Marlowe. The worst of these might seem to be that I gave him an entirely spurious son. Imp is my creation and there is no evidence for him. In fact, it might be considered that there is negative evidence. Such an egregious offense as Marlowe’s siring of a bastard son would surely have been written about.

Also, what we think we know of Marlowe’s sexuality would make the siring of a son highly unlikely. But renaissance sexuality doesn’t easily fit into our twenty-first-century mold. From Marlowe’s plays alone, it seems hard to deny that he had an interest in “boys” (which in this context doubtless means men). However, what one is interested in and even what one writes about sometimes has precious little to do with one’s private life, as any writer can tell you.

On that, as on other issues surrounding Marlowe’s life and death—his character, his supposed atheism, his supposed involvement in the secret service—for lack of space to address them all, I refer those interested to Charles Nicholl’s excellent (and deserving of more recognition than it has had) The Reckoning, the murder of Christopher Marlowe (Harcourt Brace, 1992).

I’m sure I’ve done Marlowe as much disservice as most of his other biographers.

Whatever he was as a human being, as a poet he was great and his death at twenty-nine was an injury done to the English language, a loss of what might have been its greatest riches. So, go forth and read because, to quote Shakespeare, “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”

On another note—to those who will resent my implication that Will Shakespeare inherited Marlowe’s words—fear not. This is not—yet—the last explanation I’ll advance. As unable to explain Shakespeare’s genius as all others before me, I can do no more than advance all the same theories others have advanced and, by advancing them all preempt them all.

The truth is William Shakespeare’s genius is beyond our ken and far beyond our attempts at explanation. On that, I’ll let Kit Marlowe have the last word: “The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes” and by our insufficient imagination . . .

Sarah A. Hoyt

March, 2002

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Bibliography

These are some of the books used in researching for All Night Awake. I have also resorted again to all the books used to research Ill Met by Moonlight, as well as a few others. A more complete bibliographical list will be posted on my website at www.sarahahoyt.com. However, for now, here are the essential ones, in no particular order:

Nicholl, Charles. The Reckoning, The Murder of Christopher Marlowe. Harcourt & Brace, 1992.

Haynes, Alan. The Elizabethan Secret Services. Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1992.

Rowse, A. L. Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work. Grosset and Dunlap, 1964.

Christopher Marlowe. Edited and introduced by Richard Wilson. Addison Wesley Longman, Ltd., 1999.

Bakeless, John. Christopher Marlowe. Haskell House Pub., 1938.

Weir, Alison. The Life of Elizabeth I. Ballantine Books, 1998.

Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age. Perseus Books, 1991.

Salgado, Gamini. The Elizabethan Underworld. Sutton Pub. Ltd., 1992.

All Night Awake (Original Version)

Sarah A. Hoyt

One of the frequent questions I’m asked is about how a novel changes from the time the first glimmering of an idea is formed to when it finally appears in print. So, to give everyone an idea of just what can happen, here is the version of All Night Awake as I first submitted it. There are, as you will see, a number of changes – some of which I made kicking and screaming and tearing my hair out – between this and the final version.

Sarah

Prologue

Scene: The curtain opens upon a dense forest. Beneath the overspreading trees, three women sit spinning. The first one, a fresh-faced maiden in a pastel green dress, spins the wool. The middle aged one, a buxom matron in stronger green, winds the thread. The oldest one, dressed all in black, leans forward, and, over the white spun thread, holds a pair of glimmering golden sheers, poised to cut.

The first spinner, whose sparkling blond hair half covers a body wrapped only in a gauzy gown, speaks while bent over the spinning wheel. “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain?”

The second spinner, her hair confined by her bonnet, her rounded body within a sturdy dress, rolls the thread between her work-calloused fingers and looks not at the speaker, but at the foggy air as she answers, “When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won. When the poet’s got his crown, when the traitor’s web is spun, when the king’s got his throne.” While her fingers work, she smiles, revealing sharp teeth, with which fate has ever mauled every mortal between cradle and grave. “When the threat of evil is gone.”

The older woman, silver hair loose and wild over her dull black dress, looks up with pale blue eyes. In looking up, she reveals that she has no ears -- for she who cuts the thread of life must be deaf to mortal pleas. “When our thread is cut and spun. When evil’s worst is done. When punishment and reward are won.”

“Where the place?” the blonde girl asks. She lifts her face up and for the first time shows that, amid the delicate tracery of her features, shine no human eyes, such as light mortal way. No space exists for eyes on her perfect face, nor scars where eyes once were, nothing but a blankness where eyes should be, for, like newborn life, is she blind.

“In the heart of men,” the old woman says and, as she speaks, the still air trembles and tears, like a paper burned, leaving an irregular hole in the scene, a hole through which a rich chamber can be spied.

In the burn, a creature appears -- looking like a young man, dressed in light blue velvet breeches and doublet, his pale moonlight-colored hair combed over his left shoulder, his moss-green eyes amazed. He looks at himself, as though disbelieving where he is and the form he takes.

The hole closes behind him, leaving him stranded in this odd forest, with these strange companions. He stands, his hand reaching to his side, as if for the handle of an accustomed sword that is not there.

All three spinners look up, displaying one’s lack of ears, the other’s empty eye space and the other’s sharp teeth in a smile.

The youth notices the spinners and starts. “Oh, what are these?” he asks, looking frightened. “Live you? Are you aught that even an elf such as me ought to question?” He puts his hands around himself and looks lost, like a small child in an unknown house. “What a strange chill and what a strange dream. And yet, I am in Arden forest, where the palace of faerie kind is set and where I reign as the king for faerieland. And you look not like the inhabitants of the earth, and yet are on it.” He frowns in wonder. “You seem to understand me, by each at once her chappy finger laying upon her skinny lips. You should be women, and yet strange women you are. Speak if you can; what are you?”

The maiden smiles. Her sweet smile makes her deformity all the more glaring. “All hail Quicksilver, king of Elves.”

The middle aged woman smiles in turn, displaying her carnivorous teeth, “And Lady Silver, his other aspect.”

As she speaks, the image of a beautiful lady with dark hair and pale, pale skin stands besides the blond youth. He spares it no more than an amazed look, because now the crone speaks, “Both Quicksilver and Silver will too soon be bereft -- of kingdom and happiness, and aye, of life itself.” She turns her intent eyes to Quicksilver. “Lest look you to your keeping and learn to be a king as king should be, and to be yourself, both entirely.”

“Bereft?” Quicksilver asks. Despite himself, his voice does waver. “Bereft how? Say from whence you woe this strange intelligence? Or why upon this forest you stop my nightly work with such prophetic greeting? Speak, I charge you.”

The maid smiles. “Such as us can no man charge, no man hold,” she says.

“Nor no elf either,” the matron says, “for you are no more to me than is a man -- a thread spun that may be rolled between my fingers as I see fit.”

“And cut as I list,” the crone speaks up in tremulous voice. “And yet we’d warn you, for you serve our purpose well.” She reaches into a basket at her feet, retrieves a thread sullied to an indifferent grey. “Listen to us, for your brother, Sylvanus, the king that was -- whom you entrusted in keeping to the ancient Hunter, and who’s become one of the Hunter’s dogs -- Sylvanus lives still and, uneasy within his confinement, he strives to cut the bonds that bind him.”

The middle-aged woman smiles, showing sharp teeth -- the merciless teeth of a famished wolf. Her voice descends to a confidential stage whisper, and her finger pauses not over the twisting thread. “You, fool that you are, Quicksilver, king of elves, have set old evil to guard newer evil. Old evil has blunted and aged like a dagger put to humble use chopping greens in a cottage kitchen. It cannot keep the edge off your brother’s pure malice that would devour the whole wide world with its open maw.

“If Sylvanus succeeds so shall the worlds go clashing, the spheres breaking, till nowhere is everywhere, all is nothing, and only that is which is not.”

The older woman sighs. Her scissors tremble over a white thread held beside the sullied one. “Aye, king, you are a fool indeed. As we speak your brother strives for the heart of those already touched by faerie. Should he find a human to give him asylum, then can he grow and grow and come back to defy you.”

“Touched by faerie?” Quicksilver sounds amazed, lost. “Mean you Will Shakespeare, or—?”

The three women shake their heads.

“Not for us to say how the thread should be woven, how the battle should be fought,” the maid says. “Only to spin and twist and cut.” She lifts the thread with her fingers.

The matron nods. “Then in the hearts of men shall we meet again.”

“After the hurlyburly is done,” the crone pipes in with her reedy voice. “And the battle is lost or won.”

They vanish into the air, and Quicksilver stands, alone, amazed, eyes wide. His lips shape a single word that his voice yet fears to utter.

“Sylvanus.”

The name of his unworthy brother whose throne and majesty Quicksilver has taken.

Scene One

The market town of Stratford-upon-Avon, nestled in the crook of gentle flowing Avon. It is spring, and the poplars that dot the town unfurl their new green glory. Above the town a thunderstorm brews. The roiling masses of clouds hang, threatening. No breeze moves the nascent buds or the fresh green leaves. In this uneasy calm, the good burghers sleep snug in their beds, by their good wives’ sides. But in the garden of a house on Henley street, on the edge of town, between the back alley that runs into Arden forest and the back doors of twin wattle and daub houses, a shadowy man stands, transparent and imperfect like a figure glimpsed in a dream.

How came he here?

Will didn’t know.

Standing in the middle of his parents’ garden, Will had no memory of getting there, no memory at all except of lying down in his bed, in far-away London.

Yet, this was no dream.

Taking a deep breath, he smelled the ripe fruit in nearby orchards, savored the warm breeze on his skin, listened to the babble of the Avon.

No dream had ever felt this vivid, this alive. He pulled back his dark curls that brushed the collar of his cheap russet suit. Though Will’s hair had started receding in the front, making him look older than his twenty nine years, it remained lush and long in the back.

Will remembered, with a dew of tears in the eyes, how much he missed his native town. The last three years Will had been in London, where the smells the fresh spring wind transported were likely to be manure, or the perfume with which foolish Londoners masked the excessive human reek. Will had craved the familiar smells, the familiar sounds and tastes of his home town as a child craves his nurse’s bosom.

He sighed and poetry came to his lips, with a fresh spontaneity that evaded him in London. “From you have I been absent in the spring, When proud‑pied April dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing.”

He’d never realized how much he missed his hometown till this moment. Had his desire for his home transported him here? Had some magical proportion of his longing brought him by blessed insensible transport from his rented quarters in London to this, the backyard of the house where he’d grown up?

But the theaters were closed for the plague, which swept through London like a flame conquering dry tinder. Will, never prosperous, now lacked even for the meager money that came from acting jobs. He did other, menial jobs and lived, quietly, in a small attic room. And he missed his Nan. How he missed his Nan.

Not a comfortable woman to live with, Will’s wife of ten years, his Nan, but yet not a woman he wanted to live wholly without. And even Nan’s domineering ways, the way she planned his life for him, were preferable to the loneliness of London.

He’d been happy with Nan, if a little too confined.

With a wry grimace, Will remembered the incident that had taken him to London, when, three years ago, he’d killed one of Lord Lucy’s deer, and the old idiot, in high dudgeon, dreaming of long past feudal times, had tried to claim his ancient privileges and have Will arrested.

Though Lord Lucy wouldn’t manage that, in a free town like Stratford, governed by aldermen and good burghers, going to London had seemed, then, the best means of avoiding the unpleasantness. Going to London and trying his hand at the tawdry pomp of the stage and there bid try to displace Marlowe’s stage-dwarfing presence.

And his Nan, Will’s Nan, had believed he could do likewise, as well, and encouraged him to seek his joy on London stage, while she stayed home and minded the babes. She asked only that he return to visit, very often and forget neither her nor his children. As if he could, when he thought of them so often.

Still, if he returned to Stratford, how would he quiet the neighbors' guffaws when they talked of Will, who’d thought to make his fame and fortune in London, and yet returned empty handed to his parents’ house, to his father’s glove shop?

The thought was sweet, yet tinged by defeat. Will had gone to London to attempt his hand at the actor business, his fortune at play writing. To return would be to admit failure.

With love and fear, he regarded the shape of the twin houses at the end of the garden, those dear buildings that sheltered his wife and children on the left, and his parents and siblings on the right. Nearer to him loomed the bulk of the barns, the ground-hugging shadows of the spring plants.

The blessed silence of Stratford hung over all of it. Stratford, where Will had grown up, and where he knew everyone and everything. Stratford that was knit to Will’s very bones, etched into his mind and body like a mother’s touch upon her infant.

Stratford, where no one would ever believe that Will, the glover’s son, the grammar school graduate, could ever be a playwright and famous and successful in London.

Will didn’t believe it himself.

He listened to the wind rustling the new leaves on the tall poplars interspersed with the houses of the town. A whisper known and dear to him as the restless babble and noise of London had never been.

Will was here. That he couldn’t deny. And the mystery of his arrival -- that he must adjourn for solving at a better time. He could always return to London later, though he feared the courage would fail him for such a second flight. For now, he was near his family.

At the thought, his heart sped up, like a horse does when sensing the familiar barn. He thought of Nan inside, and of their children, ten-year-old Susannah and the seven-year-old twins, Hamnet and Judith. They’d be asleep in the upper floor of the house, beneath the gently sloping eaves. How joyously they’d welcome him, no matter how he’d got here, or how long he’d been absent. Nan would throw her arms around his neck, and his children -- grave Hamnet who looked so much like Will himself; bright, inquisitive Judith; and serious Susannah, burdened with a maturity beyond her years -- all of them would rejoice in him and leap about and caper in their enjoyment.

Curse London and its promise of false riches. Maybe he would return to it, maybe he wouldn’t. So far, his courting of fortune had been less than successful. Perhaps he should stay in his own sphere, and resign himself to his destiny.

Walking the gravel path, between the patches of garden that Nan had carefully tended with flax and vegetables and newly planted herbs, with his nose full of the scent of the roses that were Nan’s special pride, Will felt joyous relief.

Oh, it had seemed lovely then, and simple, three years ago. He had known his verses would dazzle all of London, and multitudes would crowd around for the privilege of watching a Shakespeare play, for the sheer entrancement of his words.

But when he’d thought to dazzle as a poet -- when he’d auditioned with Lord Strange’s company, to write plays for the Rose, where Marlowe strutted his words of fire and air -- Will had recited his best sonnet to the assembled company -- the lord patron, and Marlowe, and the actors themselves.

Oh, how Will could still remember, standing there in the tiring room that smelled of grease paint and sweat, explaining meekly that his Lady’s name was Hathaway and clearing his throat and reciting the fine sonnet that ended in, hate from hate away she threw/ And saved my life, saying not you.

Before even Will had finished, there was Marlowe laughing into his lace-edged sleeve, and looking at Will with malicious mirth.

“Hate away,” Marlowe had said. “And your Mistress’ name is Hathaway. Why, that’s marvelous, prodigious wit. Why, I wager no more than a man in two would think of such word play.”

After that everyone had laughed, except Lord Strange who had looked kindly and asked if perhaps Will would like to try his hand at an actor’s job, while he learned the trade of play writing.

Will had strutted upon the boards for three years, wearing other men’s words upon his lips. He’d been king and tyrant, slave and lover. In the excitement of playing, he bid on in London, for the applause of the crowds, their greasy cloaks thrown in the air in enthusiasm. Will had been almost happy. He’d even written three plays, which the company had put on to moderate success, when no new plays of Marlowe’s were available.

But then a month ago, the great and common plague that ravaged London had forced the authorities to close the theaters. Will had lost his last hope of dazzling crowds.

Now, walking the garden path where he’d played as a child, in the middle of the sweet, quiet, country night, Will thought that perforce it must be a miracle he had come here, like this, transported by the effect of magic or its minions, to his home town. And when God effected miracles, something was meant.

Here he would stay and here he would bide, and here hoe the narrow furrow of his life, and seed his future in peace.

Leave the London stage to the fools, and to such dare-devils as Kit Marlowe whose plays always, always, drew in the big crowds at The Rose. Leave his uncertain courting of Dame Fortune and that Bawd Fame for the assured joy of his wife, Nan, for Nan’s love, for her tender regard. Nan’s demands could be no harsher than Fortune’s, and Nan meant well, which Fortune might not.

Will stopped in front of the sturdy oak back door to Nan’s kitchen, and put his hand out to knock, since this late at night, the door would be bolted.

Behind him a hunter’s horn sounded.

Will stopped. The crystalline notes echoed through the still air and all Will could think was, A hunter now?

Oh, sure, the noblemen hereabout hunted, like Lord Lousy himself. But like this, this late at night? Deep night, dark night, the silent of the night, the time of night when Troy was set on fire; the time when screech‑owls cried and ban‑dogs howled, and spirits walked and ghosts broke up their graves?

Impossible.

Yet his hairs prickled and his ears rang with the refrain of that hunting call.

No. Not impossible.

The hunting horn sounded again, a bright, silver sound splitting the dark of night.

Will’s hair stood on the back of his neck, with the fear of the hunted thing, the terror of the night, the panic that comes upon man alone in the woods, in the unpeopled wasteland.

Who would be hunting this way, at night, but a spectral hunter? Who but the Hunter himself, primeval and merciless, who rode through the very thunderclouds as they roiled? The Hunter, whose dogs were said to be tormented souls?

Sweat ran down the middle of Will’s back. He didn’t turn, didn’t want to turn, didn’t want to face the certainty of what he feared.

Ten years ago Will’s Nan and his oldest daughter, Susannah, then a babe, had been kidnapped by elves, taken to faerieland. In rescuing them, Will had encountered this Hunter, this creature older than the oldest nightmares of humankind, this creature who stalked the night and caught -- what?

Will caught his breath with a sudden inhalation into a gaping, dry mouth. How could one know for sure what this creature hunted?

Something that laughed and shrieked inside him, some ancestral knowledge, some leaping demon hooted and answered: Nothing and everything. The souls of men, the substance of elves, the pride of angels.

It was said that even elves, fairies, and the other folk rumored to hide in nearby Arden forest -- all that remained of the primeval forest that had once covered all of Great Britain -- feared the Hunter as much and with as much reason as humans.

Quicksilver, king of the elves, had once told Will that the Hunter had been a god and ruler of the elven race in the time before men and that he still remained, biding by, and time and again claiming those foolish enough to get ensnared in his coils.

Hair prickling as if with cold breath at the back of his neck, Will reached for the solidity of his door again. As he did, the call sounded again, and on the heels of it a storm of baying, a rising of howling, a wave of growling rose from the Hunter’s dogs -- their music frightful as the serpent's hiss, and bidding screech‑owls made the concert full. All the foul terrors in dark‑seated hell seemed to ride at Will’s very heels.

So, he’d not been transported here for good-chance, nor by a benevolent divinity.

Will spun around. He heard the clopping of hooves, and saw a dark and ominous shape amid the lowering clouds: a man riding a gigantic horse and raising a shining silver horn to his lips. The horn alone shone, like a new risen moon. The rest was dark, cloudy death.

The Hunter.

The shadow of the Hunter, his shape, and the turmoil of his snarling dogs filled the horizon.

The Hunter, lord of the storm, bringer of misfortune, omen of all ill change, who devoured souls caught outdoors, even the hard, brittle souls of elves made of moonbeam and primeval fire and little else.

They approached in a snarling tumble of fury, darkening the sky with their menace.

Will took one step back, then another, setting his back to the hard door. There he stood against those supernatural dreads, as the hope of Troy against the Greeks that would have entered it. Thus he barred their entrance into this most sacred precinct of his heart.

His heart beat near his throat and his blood roared in his ears, deafening him.

The shapes in the sky resolved themselves and became one, tumbling from its sphere to the world of men.

Will wouldn’t run. Once before had he seen this shape, while elves were embroiled in battle all around him.

Once before and then, like now, he had trembled at the sight of it. And yet, the horror had passed him by. The Hunter had wanted no more than to take Sylvanus, the elven king, who’d tainted his own soul with treason and parricide and who had deservedly been transformed into one of the Hunter’s own dogs.

Who had the Hunter come for now?

Only Will was here.

Will stared at the gigantic Hunter in mute horror. Had it come for Will? Had Will tinged his soul with the black of his greed, the red of his desire for fame? Had the Hunter come to punish Will’s pride and would Will go through eternity like a dog of the Hunter -- with slavering jaws and dark, hisurt body?

Swallowing hard, on fear and almost forgotten memories of supernatural dread, Will reached his hand out blindly and ran it along the side of the door, till he found the handle of a hoe, resting against the wall, no doubt forgotten from Nan’s planting labors, as it usually was.

The baying rose, unbearable, as the dogs drew near. Didn’t Will’s children hear it, where they slept, comfortable and covered in their beds? Were his children well? Surely the Hunter came not for children?

Will refused to allow fear in through that chink of sudden alarm in his mind. Sweat ran prickly-cold down his back. He adjusted his hold on the hoe to a fighting stance. The handle of the hoe was oak and should endure many an attack by the cursed dogs. And the hoe, itself, at least the end of it was iron -- good, honest forged iron such as hobgoblins should fear.

Though fear trembled steadily along Will’s limbs, and his heart fluttered near his dry throat, and though his mind -- what sanity remained in it -- told him that good wood and iron were no defense against such an enemy as the Hunter, yet Will held onto the handle, held it tight till his knuckles shone white through the stretched skin. Whispering an Our Father and swallowing at the bile of fear in his throat, Will thought if the Hunter had come for him, yet would Will fight as best he could.

Will would storm faerieland again, if it would keep his home safe.

Holding the ice-cold handle of the hoe with his ice-cold hands one at each end, Will advanced a foot, and flexed his knees for balance and waited, his back to his closed kitchen door.

Nearer and nearer the horse galloped and the dogs growled, in black mass. So near that Will swore he could see the grin on the Hunter’s face, though such a thing as the Hunter clearly could not grin.

They could have him, and good riddance to Will’s ill-starred existence. But here he’d stay and here he’d fall, and like a soldier defending a sacred trust, he would die before the shadow of evil touched Susannah’s blue eyes, Judith’s golden hair, Hamnet’s innocence.

Drawing closer, the dark mass in the sky resolved itself.

Will blinked, as, suddenly, with a shock, he saw that the Hunter’s dogs ran ahead of him and snarled and romped, closing in on prey.

Not Will. The dogs' prey was one of their number.

Will blinked again, unable to believe it. Yet, it was true. The prey that the dogs chased closer and closer to Will, looked like any and all of them: a dog, or rather a wolf, the supernatural creature's shape and nature clearly dating from a time when dogs had been perforce wolves, or perhaps a creature older than both wolves and dogs, with massive head, heavy jaws, short legs and squat, powerful grey body.

The hunted dog bled from many wounds, and it cowered and whined, pressed close and nipped by its fellows. Only now and then it turned and growled, snapping in turn at its tormentors, and by such means remained just ahead of the pack that would have torn it apart.

Nearer and nearer, the creature looked at Will with sly, yellow eyes. Mingling with the howling and the screaming, Will heard the thing’s voice and dazed Will wasn’t even shocked that it was a voice he remembered -- the commanding, velvet-soft voice of the once-sovereign of elven land.

Despair tainted it and a sort of cringing beggary. “You -- you, Will Shakespeare,” the voice said. “You who’ve been loved of elf, and know the power and the glory of my people. Only give me asylum in your home, and abode in your heart.”

The creature dove down, closer and closer, as though descending a stairway formed of floating clouds.

With the pack on its heels, nipping and barking and growling, it descended, swifter than the wind, darker than the nightmare, and suddenly, suddenly, it was there, at Will’s feet, barking and growling, then cringing and cowering like a tame house cat.

Yet, through the canine noises it made, its voice rang in Will’s mind. “You want power and riches and fame. You do, Will, you know it. Listen to me, Will. The London stage will be yours for your strutting and your words will be such as generations yet unborn will flock to see your plays and applaud the workings of your mind. You will be a god for all the centuries and as such worshiped. Only give me shelter, Will Shakespeare.”

While the creature cringed at Will’s feet, the pack caught up. Without thinking, Will raised his hoe. However, they stayed just out of range of that striking hoe, snarling and slavering. Their fangs glimmered though there was no moonlight to paint them silver bright.

Behind them came the dark figure mounted on his dark horse, the silver horn in his hand. A sound like a rumble of laughter came from him. “What, now, good man, will you protect that wretch, who would unseat me from my horse and rule the underworld in my stead?” The Hunter’s voice was dark softness, a splattering of ice upon the back of the neck, a clutch at the chest. “Will you protect him for the sake of his treacherous promises?”

Will took a deep breath. He remembered treacherous promises enough, from elven kind.

“You stole my wife once,” Will told the dog.

The laughter bark echoed again, tainting the quiet spring night with a note of madness. “Aye, and she preferred you, the better of two men.” This was said with bitterness, but the voice in Will’s mind soon picked up a light, bantering tone, “What have you to fear from me, Will, when even your Nan prefers your joys to my immortal arms? Only let me in and give me asylum, and I’ll be your servant and crown you the greatest playwright the world has ever seen, your talent at long last recognized.”

Talent recognized? Yes, Will had long thought that his words were better than Marlowe’s. And yet, Lord Strange had not thought so. He’d told Will to write a play first, and prove his mettle. And when Will had, the theater goers had refused to be dazzled by his words, to fawn over his poetry as they did over Marlowe’s.

And yet, were Will’s words good, or did he dote on them, as a blind father upon shrewish daughters? Something in Will knew that, as with the glover’s craft, he must learn this writing craft day by day, become familiar with the story teller’s tools and acquaint himself with the paring knife of the public taste.

And then maybe he’d be admired, but admired for his own mind and hand. What could this creature give him that he could not give himself? If this creature gave him words for the page, would they be Will’s?

And if not, if the creature simply made people worship Will beyond his deserts, would that not be a hollow triumph, empty and sad like a shell sucked clean of life?

And what would giving the creature shelter mean? What to Susannah and Judith and Hamnet? Could they share a home with such a creature and not feel it?

Will looked at the wolf thing, foul and rank at his feet. Would it not taint their childhood with darkness?

The creature at his feet drew closer, the tips of its icy fur brushing against Will’s stockings and, even through them, robbing Will of strength and warmth.

Sylvanus unfolded and stood, the King Sylvanus in his dark handsomeness, with his almond shaped eyes, his dark curls, his beard, his very pale, oval-shaped face. “Ah, Will, you and I will rule the underworld and the upper world too,” he said. “I knew you wouldn’t fail me. My brother, Quicksilver, he chooses his friends well. All the better for me to make them his enemies.”

The voice was soft, caressing, yet Sylvanus’ breath felt icy and smelled rank with the pollution of the graveyard.

Will shuddered. In his mind, as through an open window, he saw this creature consorting with his children, mingling with them, hypnotizing Judith, tainting sweet Susannah and bright, bright Hamnet.

He saw his children growing up in a world where this creature ruled, with his bared fangs, his icy grip.

He swung his hoe in a wide arc and jumped back, and brought the iron down upon the shape of the deposed king of elfland. “Foul fiend,” he said. “Foul devil, for God's sake hence, and trouble us not, for you have made the happy earth thy hell, filled it with cursing cries and deep exclaims. Rank, gross creature. To the realms whence you came, go. Leave a good Christian soul to rest alone.”

Like that, the spell was broken.

The Hunter’s horn sounded. The Hunter’s laughter echoed.

The creature turned and growled, in front of the cottage door was once more a dog-wolf, a barely tamed menace, bristling with dull grey fur, its heavy jaw open, slavering glowing green saliva onto the path. The dogs closed around it, a dark, roiling pack, growling, fighting, snarling.

The Hunter made a sound that might have been a chuckle, or a rumble of thunder in the distance and lifted a hand as though in salute to Will. “By the pact with Eve I couldn’t intervene,” he said. “I can’t catch a traitor protected by the blood of Adam. But now he’s ours. Now we’ll have him. Lest he find another human touched by faerieland who will shelter him.”

But on the heels of his triumphant gloating, the pack of dogs howled as one. They retreated. Their circle scattered, threatening, growling, to reveal Sylvanus wolf-form still intact, still living, still rounding and snarling amid them. And through Sylvanus’ growls, curses at Will poured out, curses at Will’s Nan and at the fruits of their union.

“I’ll come for them all,” Sylvanus growled and muttered, and snarled, saying nothing, yet threatening all. “One by one, I’ll devour you all. But first to deal with you, you fool. With you, who will never subdue me.”

And even as Will grabbed his hoe again, thinking his last breath arrived, Sylvanus jumped, not towards him, but towards the Hunter.

The Hunter struck out with the silver horn, that -- Will realized for the first time -- was the Hunter’s only real weapon. The horn missed the square head, as the wolf launched through the air, towards the Hunter, and fastened heavy fangs onto the Hunter’s arm, drawing bright, glowing red blood from the dark shape.

A scream like a thousand tortured voices tore the air.

The Hunter swung again, and this time the horn caught the beast, sent it hurtling through the darkness, to land, awkwardly, a ways from the Hunter, crushing Nan’s rose bushes.

The Hunter took the horn to his lips and blew on it, once, a clear note in which there was, nonetheless, the hint of shaking of a wounded creature making a brave effort.

The other dogs rallied. They gathered in a pack, snarling, baring their fangs, at the traitor in their midst.

For a moment it hung in the balance. Sylvanus the wolf faced his congeners with lowered head and snapping jaws. In his eyes, behind the brown, canine pupils, red fire of eternal coals blazed.

Then the Hunter blew his horn again, this time more forcefully. His shadow still showed the crimson marks of spilled immortal blood, but this time the horn sounded clear and sure and strong.

The dogs leaped and jumped, and snarled, and ran. And Sylvanus turned and ran, ahead of them, climbing the invisible staircase up to the dark sky, just ahead of the pack. Always ahead of the pack.

* * *

Will awoke, his heart pounding; his mouth dry and foul-tasting; his hands clenched hard on the sheet, as they’d tightened in dream upon the hoe-handle.

He swallowed and swallowed again, as his eyes took in the narrowness of his room, his single bed, the clothing trunk hard by, the table by the window with paper and inkpot and inkstone standing nocturnal sentinel to his interrupted work.

Through the window came the light of a waxing moon, its pale hand touching all with tips of silver.

On the wall, Will’s russet suit hung. In bed he wore nothing but his much worn shirt. He smelled his own sweat, rank with fear and effort, and felt as if the foul being still touched his stockings, chilling his legs.

Had there ever been a dream like this? What could it signify?

Was this a vision?

Was this a dream?

Did he sleep? Or was something else there? Had he in sleep visited some other realm, like that realm of faerie into which he’d once trespassed?

The moonlight from the window looked real enough. And the sounds coming through the window, too, the all-too-earthly sounds of Southwark at night: bawds calling customers, and drunkards singing, and -- from somewhere -- a riotous argument.

Will dragged himself up on trembling legs and, still shaken from his sleep-granted vision, ambled to the window and looked out at the street.

Down below, a crier called people into the Blind Bear tavern, whose great, painted sign swung in the wind showing a bruin with immense claws.

A cockfight was about to begin within, and the kind masters walking by -- some of them dressed indeed as great Lords, all silk and velvets -- were enjoined to come in and place their bets.

The kind masters went in, and the mean ones too, dressed in rags and crawling into the dark, open door to the tavern.

Southwark was at the edge of London and as such unregulated by the mayor of the great city. Here could everything flourish that good religious people disapproved of, from cutpurses to playwrights.

And here had Shakespeare come to rest, having moved here from more expensive lodgings: here, in this cheap outgrowth of London he made home after three years of vain striving in the city.

But none of this compared to the quiet of Stratford, just now so real in his mind. He thought of the Hunter and shivered. He must go home. He must go to Nan. Nan and the children needed his protection, and anyway, what could he do in London, with the theaters closed because of the plague?

He thought of the neighbors' jests, the pointing fingers that would greet Will’s return, and how the small community would laugh at Will’s pretensions that had come to naught.

He sighed.

Should he return and bid adieu to his dream of being a poet or should he stay and risk this nightmare befalling his family?

And did the nightmare mean anything but the vague uncertain substance that dreams were ever made of?

Scene Two

In an immense stone chamber, a slightly-built young man, with delicate features and henna-dyed hair, stands facing three men seated at a table. This table, massive and of dark carved wood, is the only furniture in the otherwise bare room, whose tall walls made of golden stones curve into archways far above the occupants’ heads. Those three old men dress in black, and look impressively magisterial. They question the other man who obviously prides himself on his sense of fashion and who wears a dark velvet suit slashed through to show a flame-colored satin lining, and who, despite all this, manages to look small and inconsequential in this vast salon.

“You know nothing, then, about this foul libel affixed to the wall of the church where the Dutch worship?” asked the man who sat between two others, behind the heavy oaken table, with a pile of papers in front of him, and an inkstand before him. He was a bewhiskered man, with a pale, scraggly beard like uncertain growth upon poisoned land. He peered at Kit Marlowe with uncertain, near-sighted eyes.

Beyond the table and his questioners, Kit thought he could glimpse the white cloth and red thread of a tall embroidered screen. No doubt the true instigators of his questioning sat there behind the screen. Some member of the Privy Council or other, no doubt.

“No,” Kit Marlowe said.

He didn’t know how long he’d stood in this resounding, gloomy room, facing the three men who sat at the broad table and asked the same questions, over and over. His interrogators had questioned him about his religion, his political opinions, the rumors of his homosexuality.

His legs hurt.

His questioners had gone the round twice already, all about some libel affixed to the wall of the Dutch church and signed Tamburlaine. Every time Kit had denied knowledge of it.

At twenty nine, Kit was not unacquainted with questioning. For many years, besides writing plays, he’d worked for the secret service and often been arrested on real charges proceeding from this work, and every time he’d been sprung from trouble by his superiors.

He saw no reason this time should be different. He was a slim man, of average height, who wore uncommonly well cut clothes accented his small, delicate features with a carefully shaped beard and gave his hair a reddish cast by virtue of henna dye.

He’d been born the son of a cobbler in Canterbury, and attended Cambridge on a scholarship. Though he had, for many years now, made his living from the not-so-well-regarded profession of writing for the stage, no one who saw him for the first time could fail to think him every inch a gentleman.

He gave the cool, appraising eye to his interrogators. All three were old, all three bearded, all three white-haired, and all spoke with that asthmatic wheeze that betrayed tiredness of breath and life. The table was the only piece of furniture in the room, or at least the only piece clearly visible.

“You’re sure you know nothing of it, though it was signed Tamburlaine?”

“Nothing, your Honor,” Kit said. He shifted his position, and adjusted his slashed velvet sleeves with absent care. “Anyone can sign that to anything.”

He knew not his questioner’s names, nor their ranks. Nothing, indeed, that could identify them, save their faces, and those he might well mistake, wreathed as they were in darkness, in this chamber insufficiently illuminated by the two few candles in the distant chandelier that depended from the penumbrous reaches of the ceiling. “I wasn’t here. I was at Scagmore, working on a poem about Hero And Leander. By gracious permission of Scagmore’s lord, milord Thomas Walsingham.”

At the noble name thus bandied about, all three men, at once, dipped quills into the ink wells that stood in front of them on the massive table at which they sat, and wrote upon the pieces of paper.

The scratch of the quill upon the paper echoed monstrously augmented in this room, where everything resounded and every step, every word, every breath assumed momentous volume.

Kit drew breath and heard the sound of his uneasiness ricochet off the stones and come back to him ten times increased.

His interrogators looked up, eyes alert for a sign of breaking down.

“Master Marlowe, how is it that your plays were used for this pamphlet?” The questioner on the right asked. “That your plays inspire sedition?”

This question was new, and disturbing, implying as it did that Kit was a seditious element.

“If it please your Honors,” he said, and bowed and cringed in a way he’d almost forgotten from his humble childhood as a cobbler’s son. “My plays were approved by her Majesty’s censor. I can hardly control what hot heads make of them.”

“Um,” the questioner said, and his pen scratched the paper.

How had it come to this?

Kit had been away at Scagmore, the residence of Sir Thomas Walsingham, whom it amused to keep the much admired playwright as a pet poet. He’d been working on Hero and Leander, which he hoped would make his name amid brainless young Lords who disdained true learning and yet despised play making as lowly. These young men liked a little tantalizing with their classical tales, and that Kit thought he could provide.

He’d not done anything connected with spying for six months. He’d left all that behind. His work for Robert Cecil, head of her Majesty’s secret service, had landed Kit in jail for counterfeiting, had made him a suspect of other more serious things, and had caused him to betray his conscience, to turn in men he thought were guilty of no more than a quickly whispered word, a hastily formed thought.

Kit had thought he got clear away from that. Yet, here he stood now, again in trouble with the law and again not quite sure how it had got this far.

Henry Mauder, a messenger of the queen’s chamber, had come to Scagmore and arrested Kit and led him away under police escort. To London. Here. For questioning.

Kit didn’t even know where here was -- having been let out of the closed carriage in front of an indifferent door, in an indifferent, dark street, then guided along unidentifiable corridors to this chamber. Was this one of London’s four common prisons?

Common born, Kit didn’t flatter himself that he rated the tower. And yet, if they thought he was part of a conspiracy, he might very well be in the tower, or in a secret chamber in some palace.

If Kit died here, would anyone ever know? What was happening in the other chambers, beyond the thick stone walls? Through walls like this, one wouldn’t hear even the desperate screams of a tortured man.

Kit’s knees felt loose under him.

The quill pen screeched over the paper, its sound slow and threatening like a distant rumble of thunder, coming closer, closer.

The man on the left lifted his head and piercing black eyes peered out, half-hidden in the shapeless flab of his face. “Um.... It says here you have been arrested for counterfeiting and uttering last year, Master Marlowe. Um....” He looked at the paper in front of him, and made a minute mark with his scratching quill. “What I’d like to know.... um.... what I’d like to know is....”

Kit drew breath and shifted his feet. This was definitely a new question and alarming, that such a thing, done in the course of his spying, should be brought up against him now. What did it mean? What was he up against?

His legs felt numb and aching. His interrogators talked and moved as if they had all the time in the world.

They were sitting down.

“What I want to know,” the man resumed, at long last. “Is why you were let go on such charges?”

Each of the questioner’s words reverberated off the far off ceiling, ricocheted from the walls, came at Kit from every direction, seemingly surrounding him.

Kit couldn’t answer the truth: that he’d been working for Sir Cecil and under his orders. True, his actions might be business Cecil would admit to and easily enough -- above board deception and blameless counterfeit in her Majesty’s service.

Or it could all have been something else, one of the many con games that Cecil and his associates ran and that, at times, blurred with their secret work, faded into it, so there was no telling where the catching of conspirators began and where the lining of Sir Cecil’s pockets ended. In that, Cecil was no different from his predecessor, Francis Walsingham.

If Kit spoke, he would be turning Cecil in, and he wouldn’t live long after that.

Kit cleared his throat. “It was judged, at the time, that I was innocent, your Honor.”

His voice echoed back to his ears, enormously distorted. The veneer of Kit’s Cambridge education quite stripped from the older, underlying working-class accent.

Kit sounded like his father, the shoemaker, cringing and apologizing to a customer for an ill-fitting shoe.

All his quick mind, his agile social climbing had gone for naught. Here he was, still the cobbler’s son from Canterbury’s narrower alleys, and facing the rope, like a base-born malefactor.

Kit let air out through his nose, an annoyed, vexed sound.

His three interrogators stopped writing and looked up at him.

He stood like a bird under the hypnotizing glare of a serpent, very still, hoping they didn’t notice his fluttering heart, his guilty mind that darted like a prisoner behind his open eyes, finding no escape.

The old men wrote for a long time. The scratch of their pens echoed in the room. Now one cleared his throat, and then another coughed, making a great show of it and retrieving from within his sleeve a lacy handkerchief to sniff into.

Kit found himself staring at their black garments. Why was black clothing equated with respectability? He’d been meant to wear just such dark, somber clothes when he’d been a student at Cambridge.

He’d complied well enough his first year, and small choice. A scholarship boy, whose father’s always meager, failing business left him with broth and bread for his supper and nothing at all for fine laces and ribbons, could do no better.

But then he’d made friends with the Lord Percy, Earl of Northumberland, a Catholic lord.

That was when Kit had first been arrested, the very first time.

Same as now he’d been taken to an unidentifiable chamber, and interrogated on suspicion of having converted to Catholicism and seeking to convert others.

Kit remembered how terrified he’d been. How he’d quaked, even more than he did now, at the thought of torture. His fear, his mindless, heart-stopping terror of the rack and the hangman’s noose had led him to talk. He’d told himself he couldn’t let his staunch protestant parents be thus shamed, to have their only son hanged for a Catholic. It would lessen his sisters’ chances at marriage and put the whole family under suspicion.

So, when the council had demanded he hand in others in exchange for letting him go, Kit had complied, spinelessly denouncing friends and acquaintances -- fervent Catholic missionaries and casual sympathizers alike.

The secret service had told Kit it would go ill with him unless he spied on those who attended upon the Lord Percy at his house, and reported any plots they might contrive. And Kit, scared, defenseless, had complied.

If it had ended there, then Kit’s conscience, though wounded, might still have been salved and rebuilt, his self-love managing to make him believe he was no great traitor, but only a desperate man.

However, the cunning Sir Francis Walsingham, then the chief of her majesty’s secret service, had rewarded Kit generously for the information so unwillingly provided.

Then had Kit known himself the equal of Judas, the kissing cousin of the creeping assassin, who, under cover of a fair smile, sheaths his dagger in his friend’s bosom.

Knowing himself thus, as such a low creature, how could Kit have stopped from giving further information? Indeed, how could he have demurred at any crime, hesitated before any bald-faced treason?

The honest man can say that he is honest and to his honesty sacrifice much. But the traitorous coward has no virtue, save the virtue of drawing breath, and for that virtue he will do anything.

So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, like a tree that looks sound and whole outside, though the worm has long since consumed the inside and nothing but dark rot and ash remains for its support. So had Kit Marlowe gone on living, aye, and enjoyed life.

The silver pieces from his treason had lined his pockets well. Aye, and bought him new lining and new pockets, too, these splendid clothes of velvet and silk he’d worn ever since, and a limner to paint Kit’s fine portrait, that hung still in Cambridge buttery hall.

“Master Marlowe, we have a paper here... yes, a paper....” The middle interrogator lifted and rustled a sheet with some minute writing. “In which it says that you hold atheistic opinions, mock the divinity of our Lord, and read an atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh. Is this true?”

“I do not know what this can be about,” Kit said, which was true. Even in his cups, he wouldn’t be so foolish as to say such things in the presence of others. Think them, maybe, sometimes, in his dark moments. But never to say them. Nay, Kit loved Kit too well for that.

Yet someone had accused him of it. And there was the name of Sir Walter Raleigh, his friend, almost a patron. The man who’d introduced Kit to tobacco and regaled him with tales of far distant lands and argued philosophy with him, and, withal, treated base-born Kit as an equal.

Kit felt sweat drip from his hairline and race down his forehead. He shifted his foot. He’d seen plots like this before, one person pulled in on false information, to incriminate someone bigger than himself.

Cold came up through the thin soles of his indoor slippers. He’d been indoors when Henry Maunder, the trusty messenger of her Majesty’s chamber had come to arrest him in Scagmore. He’d been forced away without even the time to change clothing or shoes. And, while Kit had clothing in his chambers at London, who knew when or if he’d be allowed to go there. “I can’t remember anything like that.”

“Then why was there a paper of vile atheistic writings amid the papers of Thomas Kyd, a paper that Thomas said was your own?”

Thomas Kyd? What could poor Tom have to do with this?

“Your Honor, I don’t know what this can refer to,” Kit said, and heard his voice reverberate back to him, ten times augmented.

Had they arrested Tom? Kit couldn’t imagine Tom denouncing him otherwise.

Thomas Kyd, fellow playwright and once, about two years ago, Kit’s roommate, was a sap, a bit of an innocent. No harm in him, and no possible way he had papers with atheistic positions amid his things. Not unless it had been deliberately planted. And planted by whom and for what? The name Raleigh turned in Kit’s head again like a bloated corpse resurfacing at the top of a drowning wave.

If this were a plot against Raleigh and Kit, himself, only a means to an end, then the plot must be moved by Lord Essex, Raleigh’s rival at court and with the Queen’s favor. What could he do, and what say in such a case as this?

Between two such opponents, Kit could manage no more than the mouse trampled underfoot by two duelers, each hot for the other’s blood.

Here, two noble cocks strutted for an old hen, and Kit Marlowe would lose his life in this.

The room ran away from him, sight and sound dimming before the certain beating of his heart, loud, loud, loud in his ears.

How long would his heart be allowed to go on beating?

“Did Tom Kyd affirm this page was mine?” he asked, hearing his own voice small and distant, a squeak in that dim, hollow chamber, from which his consciousness recoiled and struggled futilely, like a baited bear that the dog has got by the nose.

Now Kit would faint. Faint like a maiden with a guilty secret, and lay his fear open to these ruthless men.

His deafening heartbeat allowed him to hear words the men said, but just barely as if both his ears were stuffed with cotton.

“Put to the rack.... Tom Kyd....” he heard. And, “Confessed that you had said many blasphemous things.” The man went on to read the blasphemous things, starting with the most blasphemous of all.

Had Kit said any of it? Maybe he had. But nothing so open, nothing so crazy as denying the divinity of Christ. Nothing that could so surely speed Kit to his death.

How much had Tom suffered before speaking? What had Kit’s amused, distant friendship cost yet this other innocent?

Kit’s mind retreated, running, down the lanes of memory, till he found what mattered, the only thing that mattered to him. His safe mental place, his untouched core.

The one person he’d ever loved, Lady Silver, resplendent in her shimmering elven robes, her skin pale, her hair perfect black silk.

For a summer, when Kit was but seventeen, she’d been his love.

He came back from the memory calmer, more at ease. Or at least more resigned.

If he couldn’t have her again, then why not die? Aye, let death come and part him from his sorrow.

And yet, a clinging strand of hope and life struggled upward. And yet, were they talking of torturing him? Or had they tortured Kyd? Poor Thomas, who’d never done anything other than room with Kit.

Poor Kit, who would be killed now, as he would have been had he refused to talk, so many years ago. Now, damned and polluted, he would be killed. And all his crimes would have been for naught. He’d not even die for his own doings. No, he’d die like the worm, speared through the hook, so the fish may be caught.

Poor cunning Kit, all his ambition betrayed, all his treasons helpless in the face of this greater noose descending about his base-born, high-aspiring neck.

From the racing river of his fear words issued, spoken in that cringing, lost voice. His father’s voice. “Your honors, I am a playwright. This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish, extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, evolutions.” As always with Kit, panic fear betrayed itself in a running of the mouth in incessant, high-sounding, little-meaning words. He tried to check the words but he couldn’t, they would go on flowing. “These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion. But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.” By an effort of will, he managed to arrest the flow, his words checking upon a deep breath, something like a ghostly sigh.

He bit his lip, and found his Cambridge diction once more, and found his balance upon his icy feet. “That’s all I am, all. Just a playwright and a poet. Nothing more. Too much for me these intrigues, too high for me these philosophical opinions. Atheist, me? I studied divinity, your honors. Would an atheist study such?”

Breathing. He needed to concentrate on breathing, and rein his racing humors into composure, before he should collapse onto the floor like a woman on a hot summer’s day.

Breathing, breathing, breathing.

“Master Topcliff, now,” the middle man said, and chuckled. “He could break a man on the rack in an instant. Or make him sweat with all his weight suspended from manacles. Or other things, some of them so secret only he knows them. Why, it is said he can cut into a man for days, and take one sense at a time from him, all without killing him, while, little by little, crippling him forever. What think you, Master Marlowe? Hard to hold a quill, when you have no fingers, hard to write when your eyes are gone, hard to court ladies when you have lost that which makes you a man. You’d be advised, Master Marlowe, to speak now, before you’re put to the torture.”

Everything swam, and the room went black in patches, and moving, moving, all about Kit. He would stay conscious, he would. He wouldn’t disgrace himself.

But he was a poor thing when it came to physical pain. Hot to anger and as eager as any in a fight, yet Kit knew he’d prove a coward under torture, under slow, unavoidable suffering, and say anything, anything to end the slightest pain. Much less great pain such as Topcliff could inflict, the Queen’s torturer, whose skill was renowned all over London.

Kit’s mouth dry, and himself a distant thing, lost to all touch, all sound, all smell, he heard himself say, “Lord Cecil knows me well. He’ll vouch for me. Lord Cecil will.”

Before the echoes of these words died upon the thick stone walls, the distant ceiling, Kit knew he had signed his death sentence.

Cecil, if he were behind that screen, or his minions, who doubtless were there, would let Kit go now. For sure they’d let him go to seeming freedom before Kit could betray any guilty knowledge.

Oh, this court would let him go, and well enough. But only for the while and by the by. They’d let him go because Cecil would want him let go, before Kit could spill secrets that shouldn’t be spoken to the whole Privy Council.

But once they’d let him go, Kit’s days would be numbered.

He’d be a dead man, breathing and yet as dead as any corpse rotting in its coffin.

There were more ways to die than on the gallows or upon the torturer’s rack.

Scene Three

Near Stratford-upon-Avon, a clearing in Arden woods, those woods that are the last remnant of the forest that in the age of Arthur covered all of Britain. In this clearing, an ethereal palace rises, its white walls and tall columns seemingly woven of light and dream. It is the capital of the faerie realm, visible only to those humans with second sight. Within this palace, in a magnificent marble-and-gold throne room, the queen and king of faerieland sit on their golden thrones and hold court over their varied subjects. In front of them stands a centaur.

“Milord, you will have peace, if you give us our own land,” Hylas, the chief of the centaur delegation said.

Ariel thought he looked too bold for a pleader, his black curls done up in elaborate braids, from amid which golden chains sparkled, a muscular human torso gleaming with oil, and his well-brushed horse’s body white dappled with grey.

He spoke boldly and held his head up, as if owing no fealty to anyone. Facing the royalty of faerieland: fair haired young elven King Quicksilver, and Ariel, Quicksilver’s wife, Hylas acted as if he were a victor, come to claim spoils.

The Queen Ariel could admire the centaur’s muscles at the same time that she felt the impact of his words and heard the shocked gasps of her husband’s courtiers.

The centaur’s attitude caused titters and whispers to run up and down the vast salon, amid the splendidly dressed elf Lords and Ladies and, at a distance, the smaller, but no less splendid pixies, the sorcerers, the shape changers, the tree spirits of faerieland. Lords chuckled, and ladies laughed behind their fans. The servant fairies -- tiny, winged, perfectly proportioned human beings -- flew hither and thither flashing bright lights in their version of a chuckle.

Beside the centaur delegation stood the elf who’d brought them here, Quicksilver’s particular servant and confidant, Malachite. He put his hand on the pommel of his sword.

Ariel remembered that Malachite had wanted to subdue the proud centaurs and for the last seven years; he had pleaded in vain with Quicksilver to allow him to make war on the creatures. But Quicksilver had allowed no more than a small, woefully inadequate negotiating force, of which three elves had been killed before the centaurs had agreed to come to Arden and parlay.

Trouble had started right away.

But instead of private talks, the centaur had demanded -- and got from the too compliant King Quicksilver -- open audience in the throne chamber.

Obviously intending to humiliate Quicksilver.

Ariel, Queen of faerieland, wife of King Quicksilver, wished, very much wished she could take the matter in her own hands. She wished she could make the creature shut up. She wished he’d unsay his insulting words. Or else, she wished Quicksilver would have the strength to retaliate, to put the creature in his place, to remind the centaur of the might of the elven kingdom, which could subdue his people in a moment.

Though the ten years of her marriage to Quicksilver had taught her better, yet Ariel hoped against hope that her gentle, preoccupied king would find again the rash fire he’d displayed in his youth, when he’d fought for the throne and subdued his enemies, mercilessly. She wished he’d risk such fight now, without measuring the benefit of winning against the expense of magic, the distress in the cycle of seasons, the loss of elven lives.

But Quicksilver said nothing, and the minutes lengthened.

Ariel dared not turn her head to look at her husband’s expression, but she prayed to the any gods who might listen that he wouldn’t be simpering or, worse, looking scared.

Oh, Ariel wished that she could be the king, the lord of this land for just an hour, one brief moment.

Come, you spirits that tend on immortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top‑full of direst cruelty! she thought, clenching her hands into tiny, hard fists, just as her heart clenched within her chest, at her lord’s humiliation. Make thick my blood. Stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, and pall you in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes, nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, to cry 'Hold, hold!'

The centaurs had always wanted independence for the marshy land of the south of Avalon that they’d occupied ever since their ancestors had come over aboard Roman galleys. And, like the discontented, warlike race they were, they warred and harassed, rained destruction on their neighbors, quarreled with the native fairies and pixies, who were -- alas -- not able to defend themselves from such a strange foe.

Time and again Quicksilver’s father, Oberon of blessed memory, had sent expeditionary forces to put down the rebels. Time and time again such expeditions had bought peace with blood and the severed heads of centaurs had graced the front of the faerie palace.

But centaurs rebelled again and again, and again and again they fought, this time with impunity, as Quicksilver’s tender heart shrank from the thought of war.

Ariel clenched her hands tight, wishing she could use this force against the centaurs, or else to give Quicksilver some of her own daring.

Quicksilver and force were antithetical words. The brawling prince he’d once been, upon ascending the throne, as if remorseful of past error that had been no error, had laid by his weapons, and relied on kind words and soft wishes to keep order in his domain. As such, were things all disordered, and the realm broke out in a rash of brawls.

And Ariel, who loved Quicksilver well, felt her love cool before his endless retreat, his immutable submission.

Quicksilver didn’t answer Hylas, not even to put down the proud words of this most insolent creature that should have been his subject, and a meek one.

Ariel waited, and the seconds lengthened between the insult offered and the revenge that did not come.

Hylas smirked ever more broadly, as the courtiers tittered or sighed, or grumbled behind raised hands and fast-waving fans.

Ariel felt anger boil along her veins.

One could not rule without offending, and Quicksilver either feared offending too much or -- and Ariel shied away from this thought -- cared not for his kingdom and his people.

Ariel waited. And waited. And yet Quicksilver spoke not. Oh, calm, dishonorable, vile submission.

Hylas took note of this and advanced a sure-footed hoof upon the marble of the throne room floor. “You know, Quicksilver, that you can’t dispute it. Even amid our people it is known you art soft as a maid and a maid indeed in your other aspect. Consent to our demand and give us our land. Let the vermin, the mine-dwelling pixies, the gold-hoarding green men find their own place elsewhere. The broad marches of the south are ours and too fine for them.”

Ariel drew in breath. Quicksilver couldn’t be so insane that, even in his peace-loving heart he didn’t see the danger of these words.

The pixies and leprechauns might well go to war on the simple provocation of such a request, even without the support of the elves and the sovereign of faerieland. And, once engaged in a war, they’d not give out till the last of them fell bleeding beneath the centaur hooves.

Such a war between species, such a clashing of the spheres, hadn’t been seen on this sorry orb since man was but an unwashed simian in a cavern.

It would cause untold evil both in the faerie sphere and for human kind. And if humans should become aware of it, what grief would not befall? Men had picks and shovels and swords and axes, and greater number than ever faerie land creatures had waxed to. Humans would fight back. They’d fight both sides. They might very well win.

Quicksilver must put an end to this madness now.

Afraid of Quicksilver’s fatal lack of decision, Ariel reached for his hand, touched it, thinking only to encourage him to speak, hoping that her gesture would be interpreted as a wife’s affection, nothing more.

She reached for Quicksilver’s ring-covered fingers, where they sat on the arm of his throne, long and immobile and far too burdened with gold and glittering jewels.

Just before touching them, she thought how waxy they looked, how pale. Touching them, she found them rigid, cold.

A word caught in her throat, the thought, the disastrous thought that her lord had died, died on the throne while listening to the delegation, while --

Like the jolt of a thunderbolt, something -- a fire a flash -- shot from Quicksilver’s hand to her own.

Ariel tried to let go, tried to stand, but could not. In her mind, like images revealed by a sudden flash of lightning upon a dark, dark night, she saw Sylvanus -- her husband’s brother, who’d reigned in faerieland for ten years before his crimes had led to his deposition. She saw him first as king of faerieland, as he had been, fair of face, dark of hair and beard, an elf proper and perfect in every part.

The traitor thought flashed through her mind that for all his crimes, for the proven fact that he had committed parricide to inherit the throne, Sylvanus had made a better king than Quicksilver, a stronger one, who brooked no disorder, allowed no confusion amid the various races of faerieland.

Ariel fought the thought too late.

Something like Sylvanus’ own laughter answered that half-formed feeling, and then the image of Sylvanus as Ariel had last seen him, came out of the darkness -- rank and gross, a creature of the night, and blood, and suffering.

Sylvanus had made a pact with the dark Hunter, to obtain from the Hunter power to kill Titania and Oberon, his parents, sovereigns of faerieland, that he might inherit the throne. But his crimes had come back upon his head.

Imprisoned by that creature of ancient times and uncertain origins -- and in Ariel’s mind flashed the image of the Hunter, a gigantic man, astride a gigantic horse, galloping through the storm clouds -- Sylvanus had been turned into a creature half dog, half wolf, a creature of primeval fur and heavy jaws, with eyes the color of blood and lethal, sharp teeth. As such Sylvanus had been taken by the Hunter, to serve the Hunter throughout eternity.

But Sylvanus’s laughter echoed in Ariel’s mind once more, and now she saw the wolf, bare teeth, bared fangs, running free. The Hunter’s pack pursued him, but could not subdue him.

The other images were more confused, as if they were wishes rather than reality. They came to her mind superimposing -- the image of the young man, Will Shakespeare, who had rescued his wife, Nan, from faerieland ten years ago, and then other images, darker, more disturbing, each one piling horror on horror, till Ariel’s own mind collapsed, like a building beneath the weight of centuries uncounted.

Darkness and cold closed in and Ariel felt herself fall as though down an endless well.

She heard the sound of hooves. The Centaurs? The sound of elven feet, shuffling with quick grace, echoed. Hands, many hands reached her, touched her, lifted her.

“Milady?”

Was that Quicksilver’s voice? Was he, then, not dead?

Relief -- or regret? -- flooded Ariel and she cursed herself she could not tell which.

Ariel tried to open her eyes but they did no more than flutter, allowing some light, and snatches of images -- velvet, jewels, fine ladies, one hairy centaur tail -- into her fevered brain, diluting the horrible images that she felt must have come, could only have come, from Sylvanus.

“Milady Ariel?”

Yes, it was Quicksilver’s voice. Her heart calming, she sighed, and willed her feelings to be relief that Quicksilver was alive and well.

She loved him, did she not?

It was her love that made her impatient with his softness and smarting at his submission.

Quicksilver’s hand held hers, clenched upon it. “How cold she is, my lady,” he said, as if from a long distance off. “Moves breath there, between those marble lips? Give her space, give her space,” he commanded.

And, as bodies moved away and fresh air rushed in, Ariel was gently deposited on a cold surface. The floor?

She laid her hands flat upon it, feeling the cool, hard smoothness of marble tiles. The floor.

From this coolness, she drew strength, pulling to her the cold gentleness of the earth, the truth of what was solid and strong and didn’t shift beneath the fingers or change, like the images in her mind or like her mutable lord’s changeable nature.

She felt Quicksilver’s hand, too, strong, hot, almost fevered, grasping hers with bone-crushing strength.

Did her lord then, truly, have strength? Why hide it, then? Why hide it?

She wanted to ask just that, but could not command her lips.

Her mind clear, maybe too clear, ran through thoughts and feelings like knife through air.

Quicksilver was a dual creature, unusual even for an elf. Though his true form was male and to it he always returned, he could assume at will -- and sometimes even when he didn’t will it, didn’t wish it, and fought against it in vain -- the form of a dark lady.

In Ariel’s state, between sleep and wakening, between the land of the living and the shadowy realm of her own thoughts and visions, Ariel thought that Quicksilver’s weakness proceeded from that unsoundness in his being, that separation of him into two creatures who strived -- sometimes together, often against each other.

“Milady, stay with me,” Quicksilver said, his hand gripping hers with hard, feverish despair.

Holding onto that warmth, onto the coolness of the floor beneath her, Ariel fumbled her way towards life.

Walking like a blind woman who follows a rope stretched between her origin and her destination, she groped in her mind towards the lit salon, the murmur of so many voices, the hand that held hers and through which she could feel the too-fast beat of Quicksilver’s own heart.

She’d loved Quicksilver all her life, ever since they’d been mewling babes in the care of twin nursemaids. He might have proven a weak king and an uncertain ruler, but she could not desert him now.

No, this weakness of his must, perforce, be passing folly. She must change him, mold him, make him stronger from her own strength.

On that thought she opened her eyes and saw Quicksilver looking down on her, his normally white face gone the waxy pallor of old candles; his moss-green eyes looking darker, as if a shadow had interposed between them and the world.

Beneath the silk ruffle around Quicksilver’s neck, his neck quivered with hasty swallowing. She could smell his fear, sharp upon her nostrils.

All that fear because she was ill? She stared at Quicksilver, her eyes wide, and saw his lips tremble and attempt a smile.

“Oh, you are well,” he said. “You come back to us.” Tears of relief trembled in his eyes, and yet he looked still scared, still pale. He squeezed her hand in both of his.

He did not ask her what had happened, what had made her convulse and lose her senses. Had he, perhaps, before her undergone the same hell, the same assault?

Ariel remembered his wax-pale hands, cold to the touch and rigid like the hand of the dead.

It was upon touching him that those visions had come to her, like an attack upon her unprotected mind. And what of him? What had he suffered?

Ariel was the seer of this palace, born upon summer solstice night and thus endowed with vision of past and future and all the veiled ages. She had visions as other elves breathed. But Quicksilver? Why would he have visions?

Ariel drew herself to sitting with an effort, and found Quicksilver’s arms wrapped around her, supporting her, with a tenderness he hardly ever displayed to her in public.

His warm arms surrounded her and he spoke, soothingly to the courtiers who crowded around and demanded the cause of this illness, and its cure.

“Milady is a seer,” he said. “Of late have her visions been mild and controlled. But it is not always so, and when her visions come upon her, she does, perchance, fall. It means nothing. She will be well.”

His arm around her waist pulled her up; his other arm held hers and supported her. “Come, milady, let us retire. Come.”

And, leaving the chattering courtiers, the anxious delegations behind, Ariel felt herself led by her lord down the spacious corridors of their palace, to a thick oak door that opened and pivoted noiselessly inward at Quicksilver’s touch, to reveal the royal chamber -- not hers, but his own, such his confusion.

Though their chambers were next to each other, communicating with each other through a door, it had been long since Ariel had come into Quicksilver’s. He visited her in hers, sometimes, but even that of late only rarely.

Perhaps her disapproval kept him away? She looked at him, her earnest love and her earnest wish that he would prove worthy of it attempting to make themselves understood in her gaze.

He led her to his magnificent bed, a high, dark bed, curtained in dark green velvet. Around the room, male appointments -- Quicksilver’s as yet untried golden armor, heavy armchairs, massive wooden trunks.

Only a portrait on the wall that, now looked at this way showed Quicksilver in his male aspect, now looked at another way the magical canvas showed a beautiful lady with black hair and silver-colored eyes, hinted at Quicksilver’s other aspect, as the dark lady.

Ariel looked away from the portrait, which she’d never liked to see so plainly displayed, but which she had no right to ask be removed. It had been given to Quicksilver by his mother, Titania, on Quicksilver’s twentieth birthday.

Quicksilver drew back the curtains of his bed, with a hasty touch, and laid Ariel down upon the cool, smooth comfort of his green coverlets. “There milady. And now that we’re alone, tell me, was it the three women in the glade? And did they tell of doom and of... Sylvanus?”

Ariel stared. “Three women?” The chamber was silent, all courtiers, all servants having been left behind by Quicksilver’s for once masterful countenance. “Of what do you speak?”

He shook his head, impatient, and narrowed his eyes doubtfully. Despite his tenderness to her, Ariel could see that something fought within Quicksilver, some consuming dread attempted to surface.

“At least,” he said, averting his eyes, as if scrutiny of her had bothered him. “They were no more women than the Hunter is a man, creatures probably of the same vintage, all of them older than even our race. They stood in a forest glade and spun and measured thread of which they talked as it were the very fate and life of each man. Each man and elf.”

“The Fates,” Ariel said, as her brain and mouth, together, drew this conclusion. She drew deep breath and wished Quicksilver would look at her. “No. I dreamed not of them, but of Sylvanus, yes. I saw.... I saw him free of the Hunter and the Hunter’s dogs and searching for a human who will give him asylum.

"Should he get that, then will he grow in power and malice, till he overtakes the Hunter himself....”

The images in her mind, the confused images that she’d seen before but not fully understood now came tumbling -- images of a human world devoid of faerie, where iron ruled and iron shaped life, where enchantment had vanished and only brute force ruled, where strange fire come from still skies could sear millions in a moment’s rage. “He will destroy faerie and rule over human kind,” she said. “But I’m not sure of all the steps he means to take to accomplish it. Save he needs a human who will let him bide with him.”

“In the heart of man,” Quicksilver said. “The .... Fates said that the battle would be fought in the heart of man. But which man? Surely not just any man. Surely my brother can’t touch and seduce any human....” Thus speaking Quicksilver seemed to look inward, to fall into a reverie. “But a human who’s been touched by faerie, now. He’d be already unsound, already susceptible, already less than sure of the solidity of Earth underneath his feet. He’d be a man between worlds, belonging fully to neither.”

In rushing jealousy, Ariel divined of whom Quicksilver spoke. Will Shakespeare, whom Quicksilver -- in his female aspect -- had once loved well. That episode, Quicksilver’s remorse at it, at the chaos he’d introduced in the life of the beleaguered human, formed the other part of Quicksilver’s debilitating indecision.

Forever was Quicksilver afraid that his feelings would lead him astray and that he should cause ruin without meaning.

For that reason did he give way when he shouldn’t, to centaurs’ demands, to elves’ protests, to fairies’ clamor. Because of that did he withhold judgment in centaurs' squabbles, in elves’ brawling, in dishonorable dealing, in love strife.

And at the root of it all, and in Ariel’s mind too, was Will Shakespeare.

“Your brother tempted him,” she said, speaking still as out of a dream. Again she saw the images of Will very clearly and she knew how he was tied to this knot. “Your Will. He tempted him and he intimidated him, and he attempted to get Will to give him asylum. I saw that in my dream.”

Quicksilver shook himself, as if awakening. His hand went to his sword. For a moment the foolish courage of ten years ago shone in his eyes. “And did Will give in?” he asked. “Give Sylvanus asylum?”

Despite Quicksilver’s bravado, the smell of fear from him was now sharper, edged with a bitter edge of unreasoning terror.

Even though he stood by the bed, and she lay in it, more than an arm’s length away, Ariel could swear she heard each one of his fast heartbeats. Oh, could her husband not master himself?

She looked away from him. The other trouble with Quicksilver, the other reason he was not the king that he should be was that his old love festered yet within his heart.

How his interest quickened at mention of the human. How his breath came faster and how color touched even his ghastly, blanched cheeks. No wonder he cared not for realm or wife or court. None of those were to him what this human was: the breath of life, the lightning of desire, the heart’s blood that quickened all real interest.

“Ariel,” he said, his voice suddenly loud. “Tell me. I must know.” In a rush, he approached her, he reached for her hand.

Ariel pulled her hand away. He must know. When had he shown such a keen interest in anything else, these ten years?

It was Quicksilver’s shame, his undoing, to show interest in this mortal, this ephemeral, inferior creature.

And yet there was nothing for it. And yet Ariel must tell him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Quicksilver stood for a moment immobile, then took a deep breath as if awakening and stepped away from Ariel. “Then I must go and find out, and wage this battle in the heart of man, if that’s where it will be.” His features hardened with decision, and the sharp scent of his fear vanished from Ariel’s nostrils.

“Milord,” Ariel protested, a single, sharp cry.

She sat up in bed. He would go like this? For a mortal? Would he have rushed thus to Ariel’s defense? Well did she know that he would not. “Milord, but the mortal has gone to London. I’ve heard it from my maid, Cobweb, who has commerce with a human youth. Your.... Will Shakespeare has gone to London. Three years ago now.”

Quicksilver looked away. “I know. I scried his whereabouts a month ago.” He blushed dark. “I feared for his life, since I hadn’t seen him cross the forest in too long a time.”

“But then...,” Ariel said. He had scried Will’s whereabouts and feared for Will’s life. Oh, treacherous heart, oh, weak, improvident mind that could so abandon his realm for the sake of these trifles. The whereabouts of a mortal. These were the affairs of state that distracted her husband and king from her and from his domain.

“But then must I to London after him,” Quicksilver said.

“London?” She heard her own voice raised in disbelief. “All that iron and all those unbelievers, and not a wood large enough to shelter you, milord. Our kind lives and breathes from the hand of nature. London is not natural. You’ll not survive it.”

Quicksilver grimaced, a grimace that attempted to be a smile, but fell short, translating into no more than clenched teeth and hard, staring eyes. “If that’s where battle must be engaged, I will go there,” he said. “Am I one, milady, who ever ran from fray?”

She bit her lips. She would not answer, no matter how provoked.

Now he would find his courage. Now, when courage might well take him to his death. Reaching blindly, she grabbed his hands, held them close feeling their warmth. “Milord, milord,” she said. “You dare too much.”

He didn’t seem to hear her. He spoke as though out of a dream. “I’ll change aspect, though, and go as Lady Silver.” He smiled absently, color returning in a touch of peach on his cheeks, and his eyes acquiring a gentle animation. “I know I promised you never to change, but this is a need of the hill, and for the hill’s defense. If it’s his heart I must touch, Silver will be best for it.”

Ariel let go of Quicksilver’s hands. She didn’t think he noticed.

He’d turned to the mirror, and his eyes looked remote as he concentrated. In a shimmer of light he changed aspect, to a lady with long, dark hair and perfect oval features, who smiled at Ariel condescendingly.

Lady Silver wore a silvery, shimmery gown, a pale cloak and a creamy bodice.

“We’ll see if he’ll resist this,” Silver said, as she set dainty hands to either side of the bodice that cinched her already tiny waist and made most of her full breasts protrude, rounded and white, above her decolletage.

Scene Four

The nave of St. Paul’s cathedral, or Paul’s walk. People of all descriptions crowd every corner of this ample space: tailors, factors, lawyers, pickpockets, sellers of racy woodcuts, bawds and chimney sweeps, all of them do business here, beneath the imposing arched roof and between the lofty columns. The magnificent stone tombs of the nobility, the rood loft, and even the baptismal font are used as money-changing counters. Dandies stroll aimlessly, displaying their fashionable clothes. An ill-dressed young man in his late twenties, with the beginnings of a receding hairline, walks briskly amid this bedlam.

Will walked amid the press of vendors, his feet on the paving stones, his mind far away from it all, in Stratford. Like the homing bird returning to the nest, whenever not firmly tethered, his mind was wont to gather to Nan and Hamnet and Susannah and Judith. Today, more than ever.

Will remembered his dream, his ghastly dream last night, and wondered what it all meant. Having been born on a Sunday, Will could see into supernatural realms and often had dreams that proved true. He did not wish this one to be one of them.

In the ten years since Will’s last encounter with the topsy-turvy realms of faerieland, he’d told himself it was all fantasy: Nan’s kidnapping by the faerie king, Sylvanus, Sylvanus’s wooing of Nan, and even Will’s own seduction by the Lady Silver, the female aspect of the mutable prince, Quicksilver.

What could such things have to do with Will Shakespeare, of Stratford? He’d told himself it was all a fantasy, a mad spinning of his brain that had been so overwrought by early marriage, the birth of his first child, and economic difficulties besides.

And yet, the fantasy had come to haunt him again in his very solid world, in, of all places, bustling London.

Will’s receding hairline betrayed his fleeing youth, his cheap russet suit advertised his provincial origins and lack of money to one and all. He went unremarked here at St. Paul’s, or nearly so. Indeed, he’d never stood out in a crowd.

Everything about Will seemed designed to hide and mingle and look like every man: his median stature, his median build, what remained of his dark curls.

Only his golden eyes, intent and focused like a hawk’s, had just enough cunning in their gaze to keep away the cony catchers, the charlatans, the bawds -- all those worms that ate at the still-living carcass of London.

It was three years since Will had come to town, and wandered about, open-mouthed, slack-jawed at the sheer press of people, the multitude, the populous variety of faces and figures, and clothes and manner, the likes of which he’d never seen in his little native town of Stratford.

In those three years, though Will’s clothes remained the same, his mind had set aside its homely raiment, and put on new, cosmopolitan clothes.

Neither the majesty of St. Paul’s -- with its towering walls, its peaked roof, its massive pillars, and its imposing choir loft -- impressed him; nor did St. Paul’s decay -- its ruined walls, the remnants of its burned-up wooden spire that had once risen five hundred and twenty feet towards the heavens above, nor even the babel of merchants and con men within its walls -- shock Will any longer.

When he remarked the bustle of St. Paul’s at all it was to savor it with pleasure, like a man contemplating a beautiful tapestry. He could see the thread of sermons, preached from the great cross, the golden thread of baptisms still performed at that fount turned money counter.

He could gaze impassive on the bawds who, like unrepentant Magdalenes, displayed their tightly corseted bodies, their partially bare bosoms, their velvets and ill-got silks in this sacred precinct, and felt no shame. If only he could put it all into a play, he knew it would succeed.

The voices that rose around him -- speaking in every dialect of England, in every variation of note and tone -- wove like music in his mind, creating harmonics of true humanity, a magic whirlwind of minds and habits.

If Will thought about the crowd at all -- as he dodged its steps and wove his own uncertain path amid squabbling friends and quarreling enemies, lawyers lying out for their prey, and bawds angling for customers -- it was to wonder, with puzzled mind and wrinkled brow, how this could be allowed, if theater wasn’t.

Yet Paul’s remained open, and the Theater had been closed, to stay the danger of the plague.

If the danger of the plague were so great, that the theaters must be closed and the great seeming representation of truth stopped on the stages of the land, how could people yet be allowed to assemble, like this in great multitude? Would not the danger of contagion, the fear of the great and common plague be as great here as in the theater?

Oh, Will knew the answer too well, though it still nettled his mind to think of it. The theater was deemed sinful and, in itself, worthy of the plague and of punishment.

But Will, looking around at the scenes unrolling around him, couldn’t imagine how the theater could be sinful if this weren’t. Wouldn’t God approve of the truth you could create from your own God-given mind? And if not, was He a God at all to whom Will should give his worship and fealty?

Dangerous thoughts these, if spoken aloud, which Will knew better than to do. Even having the thoughts disturbed him. He’d always been law-abiding, and respecting of religion.

Yet now religion would deny him livelihood.

And if the theater were indeed sinful, was he committing a sin in writing for it? And if so, could his family in Stratford be afflicted because of his sin? He’d read his bible and studied his plagues. Was that not how sins were punished?

He thought of the wolf again and drew breath in, in fear. Should he go home?

What, go home on the threat of a dream?

What would his Nan say, his down-to-Earth Nan, if he showed up at her doorstep saying he’d had a dream?

And Nan’s sharp tongue would no doubt find a name for such exaggerated caution.

It was a dream. Nothing more. Will had come to Paul’s to try to forget it. And yet, it wouldn’t be forgotten.

Will wrinkled his brow upon this thought, and jumped in startled wonder, as a voice beside him said, “Good news, Will, I have it all fixed.”

The solidity of the broad Stratford vowels, the familiarity of this voice that had been known to Will since grammar school, identified the speaker, even before Will turned to gaze into the pale blue eyes, the round, solid countenance of Richard Fields.

Richard had been a school boy in Stratford-upon-Avon, only a couple of years ahead of Will. He was now a prosperous London printer, and still Will’s friend.

However, familiar as face and voice might be, the words nonetheless puzzled Will.

“You have it fixed? Pray, Richard, what can it be?”

Richard smiled, a broad, satisfied smile, that went well with the rest of him: his beefy build, his good-quality, dark wool suit, his well-made grey gloves and shining new shoes. “It, good neighbor, is a way for you to earn your keep while the theaters are closed.” And, smiling his satisfaction at such capital news, and the great benefit he meant to bestow upon Will, Richard added, volubly. “You see, to my print shop, yesterday, came the young earl of Southampton -- such a young man, Will, noble and proud, fair of face and nimble of mind.”

Will raised his eyebrows at this unbridled admiration, and looked at his friend, uncomprehending. “And I with the earl, Richard? Would you find me employment, or do you mistake me for a noble maid in need of a match?”

Richard waved his hand, impatient at the jest. “Employment. Employment that you find better uses for that golden mind of yours than abusing your old friend.” He put his hand on Will’s shoulder, earnestly entreating Will’s attention. “The earl has just built a theater in Tichfield, his family’s seat. A private theater, which falls not under the seal of the court that closes the other theaters. He now says he’s searching for a playwright who can make new plays and masques to entertain the earl and his friends. Right away, I thought on you.

"I vouchsafed the earl for your ability. He says, if you come to him tonight, at dinner time, he.... But Will, what’s wrong? Are you not pleased?” Richard’s beefy face fell, his blue eyes astounded at the change of Will’s countenance.

Indeed, Will knew he’d gone pale. He felt as if he might lose consciousness. “Marvelous pleased,” he heard himself say. His vision had dimmed and he expected the ground to open into a hole that would swallow him and his aspirations together.

Bless Richard and his confidence in Will’s ability. But all Will would accomplish would be to make himself a fool before the earl. “It’s just that I’m not sure my work will please. I’m no Kyd, no Marlowe, not even a Greene,” he said, thinking of all those other playwrights who exceeded him in talent and learning.

Richard laughed. “As for that, you’ll do well enough, I warrant. Well I remember how you used to make us all laugh at school, with your skits where you imitated our Welsh schoolmaster. And, besides, this is the earl’s dilemma: Kyd is in prison, Marlowe is away, and Greene is dead. So the chance is yours, and don’t forget, this evening at his Lordship’s townhouse.” He patted Will on the shoulder reassuringly. “Only you attend upon him, and be your own, sweet-talking self, and, sure as it ever was, you’ll find your pockets well lined.”

With that Richard bowed slightly, by way of a goodbye, and started walking away. But, no more than a step gone, he turned back. “Only you ask where the house is exactly. All nearby know which one it is, and the footmen know to admit you.”

He turned back, and disappeared, amid the crowd of St. Paul’s, walking quickly towards the far door that led to Paul’s yard and the bookseller’s stalls.

Will stared after him in mute wonder. Did Will dare show his meager talents before a nobleman again?

And then there were the other playwrights. Had Will’s dream truly been a portent of what awaited Will were he to persist in his unchancy profession?

Kyd was in jail. Marlowe away. Greene dead.

What private disaster would now befall Will?

His heavy gloom was broken by yet another greeting. “Good morrow, Will, why so pensive?”

Will turned. Who could call his name thus, with seeming knowledge? Yet, even as he thought this, Will had disciplined his face to indifference, steeled his expression to uninterested gazing.

It was a favored trick of London’s cony-catchers to seem to know you the better to ensnare you. And Will knew that. He knew it very well, having had been forewarned of it by his friend Hamnet Saddler, long before leaving Stratford and seeing it operated upon other country boys in London. That warning had saved him much grief when first coming to London.

So when he turned, his face displayed full composure to the man staring at him with amused gaze.

Just as well, since that amused gaze would have looked more so, and the man would have laughed outright had Will shown himself in anywise shocked.

The man indeed was well known of Will, and now away, as he’d just been reported. He was also not a cony-catcher. Or at least, Will amended himself, if a cony catcher not such a one who would plait his snares around Will. Not that Marlowe would scruple to con Will, Will thought, looking at his greeter’s auburn hair, whose darker roots showed that henna had been called upon for the red tone, at the man’s laughing grey eyes, his petulantly advanced lower lip, the beard trimmed just so, as to be no more than the hint of a beard, enough to let one know that he could indeed grow one, and yet leaving the cheeks smooth and bare as a maiden’s.

There was indeed to this man, Kit Marlowe, an unsoundness, as though.... Will looked up at the smiling face and frowned, in absent thought.

As though the face Marlowe presented to the world were but a mask, as true as an actor’s painted false face; as though beneath it something lurked. Something unsound or sound, vile or great, golden or decayed, no one could tell.

No one could tell anything but that a true face lay hidden and locked like a miser’s treasure behind the face so brazenly shown to all.

Walking beside Will and a study in contrasts with Will’s rough russet suit, Marlowe displayed the latest fashion of the age, in a broad, almost wing-shouldered doublet cut of the finest blue velvet, ornamented with large gold buttons, its sleeves slashed through to show bright red silk. Marlowe’s pants, too, were of the same fine fabric, and cut in such a way that they molded his legs, and stopped just below his knee, displaying a fine length of white stocking beneath. The stockings shimmered with the subdued richness of silk. And the boots that shod Marlowe’s feet, laced and finely cut.... Well, the price of Will’s suit would not have sufficed for those boots.

“I say, Will, have you gone distracted?” Kit Marlowe asked, leaning forward, and waving a hand in front of Will’s eyes. He wore clean white gloves. Kid gloves, Will thought. The best. Even in Stratford, the Shakespeare glover shop would never have sold those for less than seventeen pence.

But this was not Will’s father’s glover shop where things were simple and attainable by coin. Will was in London, where the price of raiment was not always money.

“No.” He blinked awake to Kit’s inquisitive stare. And, speaking out of his foreboding, he added, “I dreamed a dream tonight.”

Marlowe smiled. “And so did I.”

Will sighed inwardly, not confident enough to sigh outwardly. What game was there afoot? What joke did Marlowe mean to make? “Well, and what was yours?”

Marlowe’s lips turned downward at the corners, a dangerous turn, and his eyes looked into the middle distance at the trolling bawds and lawyers and capering, begging urchins, as if not seeing them at all. “That dreamers often lie.”

Will had the feeling that this conversation was not with him at all but with some unseen being, and he would gladly have disciplined his lips away from further talk.

Yet his dream turned in his mind like a plague corpse, hastily buried and uncovered at first thaw. Marlowe would not jest so had he encountered the wolf in full malevolence.

Aloud, Will said, in a voice as heavy as his heart, “Aye, dreamers do lie in bed asleep as they dream things true.”

Marlowe cast him a disbelieving eye, then laughed a single cackle of delighted amusement. “Oh, then, I see Queen Mab has been with you.” He raised his eyebrows. “She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes in shape no bigger than an agate-stone on the fore-finger of an alderman, drawn with a team of little atomies, athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep, her wagon spokes made of long spinner’s legs, the coer of the wings of grasshoppers, the traces of the smallest spider’s web, the collars of the moonshine’s watery beams.” His white-gloved hands drew out a wagon in mid air. “And her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film, her wagoner a small, gray-coated gnat, not half so big as a round little worm pricked from the lazy finger of a maid: her chariot is an empty hazel nut, made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, time out of mind the fairies’ coach makers. And in this state she gallops night by night thorough lovers’ brains and then they dream of love; over courtiers' knees, that dream on courtesies straight, over lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees, over ladies’ lips who straight on kisses dream, which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues, because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are; sometime she gallops over a courtier’s nose.” He drew a finger, feather light, across the bridge of Will’s nose. “And then dreams he of smelling out a suit, and sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail, tickling a parson’s nose as he lies asleep, then dreams he of another benefice; sometime she drives over a soldier’s neck, and then dreams he of cutting foreign throats, of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, of healths five fathom deep; and then anon drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes; and, being thus frighted, swears a prayer or two and sleeps again.” Kit’s smile had become fixed, his eyes alarmed, as though his mouth prattled independent of his mind, and in prattling so made Kit himself afraid. “This is that very Mab that plats the manes of horses in the night; and bakes the elf-locks in foul sluttish hairs, which, once untangled, much misfortune bodes; this is the hag, who comes upon my dreams and makes me dream on love that cannot be, and of death that must come, must always come, to all, no matter upon what glittering stage they thread, nor what words they spin from....”

“Peace, peace, good Marlowe,” Will interrupted, tired of the jest that he felt must be at his expense. He lifted a hand as if to push away Marlowe, who’d stepped uncomfortably close while speaking. But he didn’t touch Marlowe. Instead Will stepped away, himself. “You speak of nothing.”

Marlowe wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand, and took a deep breath, and sighed, and some fire in his eyes died down.

“True, I talk of dreams, which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy, which is as thin a substance as the air, and more inconstant than the wind who woes even now the frozen bosom of the North.” Marlowe’s eyes danced with strange mirth as, step by step, he kept pace with Will’s walk, slowing as Will slowed, only to start again, as Will hurried. “And being angered puffs away from thence, turning his face to the dew dropping south.”

“Oh, I see your words are as brilliant as ever, and you keep them sharp like a well-honed knife, ready to unsheathe them again upon the stage as soon as the plague is gone and the theater reopens,” Will said, stung with something not quite jealousy, more like an irritation born of defeat. “But you have not a wife and children to worry about. You have not a family to feed, in these days when a poet can’t earn a meager living.”

“Ah.” Marlowe’s lips arched upwards, in an ironic smile. His eyes remained cold. “The good wife. And how fares she and the.... Is it six little Waggstaffs you’ve left behind, all wearing your name?” As he spoke, he smirked at a man walking past -- a man that, by his attire was a puritan, as well clad in severe dark wool as Marlowe was in his manner -- who answered Kit’s smirk with a nod.

Will didn’t dare question that acquaintance, nor did he bother correcting Marlowe’s butchering of his family name. He was sure it was no more than Marlowe’s affectation to not remember it.

After all, Will had worked for Lord Strange’s company -- for whom Marlowe wrote. The company had put on three of Will’s plays in the last three years and, even if these plays two of them based on the War of the Roses and the third, Titus Andronicus, a desperate imitation of Tamburlaine, hadn’t been the gallery-packing hits that Marlowe’s were. Still, Will had often worked side by side with Marlowe, in the last three years.

In fact, three years ago, the lord had consulted with Marlowe on whether or not to hire this strange newcomer. Maybe it was Will’s fancy, but he still thought that if it had rested with Marlowe’s petulant lips and darting wit, Will would never have got even his meager start in the theater.

So, Marlowe must know Will’s name. Will frowned at Marlowe, and said, “Well and well, they are well as well as I know.”

But did he in fact know all? Or was his dream last night, so suddenly come upon him, a way of showing him that Nan and the children needed him, that he could no longer bide in London and pursue his idle hopes? Or yet, was his family truly threatened? Did these creatures like the Hunter and the dogs in his pack truly exist? Aye, and elven kings too? Or were they dreams like other dreams Will had entertained while young which in adulthood proved the stuff of lunacy?

Like the dream of making his living from poetry. Him, with a grammar school education.... Competing with wits such as Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, with their Cambridge training. Now, that had been a dream indeed.

Perhaps Will’s dream meant nothing. But that, too, he could not credit. Nothing does not haunt awaking hours till that nothing, turning itself in one’s mind swells and grows, like a grain of sand between foot and sole seems to grow and magnify itself by pain and grinding, till that little particle can consume all of a man’s thought.

Will expected from Marlowe some facile word, some jest. But Marlowe, who had reproached Will’s heavy brooding, seemed himself absorbed in some preoccupation, his brows drawn down over his grey, cloudy-sky eyes, his mouth set and straight and rigid with worry.

Marlowe brooded, dark and heavy, full of gloom and threat.

Marlowe looked like any of the other dandies that clustered around Paul’s walk, and lived of their prosperous looks, with which they attracted the unwary investor, the trusting provincial fool, the enamored older woman.

And yet, his voice was heavy, deep with thought, and his gaze darted fearfully here and there. He spoke as if out of a profound nightmare. “I pray you, good Shakestaff, let’s retire. This is no time for poets nor for fools. The day is hot, mischief is abroad. These hot days is the mad blood stirring.”

Will turned to Marlowe, gave him the jaundiced eye from Marlowe’s dyed hair to his too-good boots. “It is not summer,” he said.

“No,” Marlowe said. “And yet it were. The warmth in these days, unnatural as it is, brings the plague’s fetid breath upon our necks and drives men to mad fighting besides. These last weeks, I’ve seen seven acquaintances buried from pestilence or violence. And this heat dries the tender blossoms of May as though it were the dog days of summer. I feel as if disaster looms and waits, a monster with lolling tongue upon our back, which will pounce on us, should we relax.”

“But what expect you to happen?” Will asked.

“Oh, the blood stirs and men do things they would regret. And this unnatural May it is as if the underworld proper gave out its ghosts as exhalations from tombs,” Marlowe said.

Casually, Marlowe side-stepped a bawd who, attracted by his expensive clothes or, perhaps, by his fair countenance, thrust her corseted body in his path. “The apprentices are threatening riot, know you that? The apprentices of London, the great boiling mass of them, have gathered and threatened to take their clubs and their blood-thirsty minds to the strangers who live in town.” Behind Marlowe, the wench who’d sought to tempt him, gave vent to a loud opinion of Marlowe’s manhood or its shortcomings.

Looking at Marlowe, Will was surprised to see the other playwright smile at the words, as if they’d been compliments.

“The strangers?” Will asked, thinking there could be no greater stranger than this man who worked for the same theater he did, and whose plays he watched, and whose poems Will had read, entranced.

It wasn’t right. When you read a man’s poetry, you should touch his very soul.

But if Marlowe had a soul, it remained secure. Perhaps, like some sorcerer of old Marlowe had stowed his soul upon an animal, aboard a swimming fish, or in a magic ring which he never entrusted to anyone. In fact, Will had heard somewhere, from a common acquaintance, that Marlowe believed himself the descendant of Merlin the sorcerer.

Shivering despite the unnatural warmth of May, Will looked down at Marlowe’s gloved hands, and couldn’t tell if Marlowe wore a ring or, indeed, many.

“The strangers are those poor souls who, persecuted for their religion in the lands of popery, have come and sought a living among us. You’ve seen them. Indeed, you probably deal with them: the French tailor, the Dutch potter, the Spanish fruit seller....”

“My landlord is French,” Will said. “A finer, more worshipful family you could never see. And the apprentices threaten to riot against such?”

Marlowe nodded, his chin almost touching his fine lawn collar. “Aye. The disturbing hot, rainy weather has thwarted the farmers, crops have been bad and the plague rages. Food is expensive and scarce. Without theater, the apprentices have nothing with which to occupy their lusty minds. They gather in taverns and there they seek someone to blame for their present troubles. Their designs light upon the strangers for those are different. Unusual people are always an easy target for the discontent of crowds.”

For the first time since Will had met him Marlowe’s face displayed true gravity, and the sudden hardening of his features seemed to make him older, older than Will, more widely traveled and more bitterly tried.

They’d come to the back door of Paul’s, overlooking the yard, and Will waved away a wizened man in a ratty grey velvet suit who thrust in Will’s face a collection of cards engraved with woodcuts of men and women, and men and men, and women and women, in explicit, improbable couplings.

Marlowe slowed a step and appeared to glance at the cards, then shake his head slowly.

They stepped from the dark, shadowy confines of Paul’s church and into the noonday light of a blazing day full too bright and hot for May.

In front of them, the churchyard opened, filled with tents, and on the side of each tent, displayed, a sign or symbol of the printer: the white greyhound and the dying swan, and the knight in armor, and the swine rampant, each of them letting people know which printer abided within.

Clipped to the side of each tent sheaves and clusters of paper, and thick pamphlets and thin booklets waved in the breeze, one proclaiming a sad tale, another recording a ballad, and another yet the taken down words of a play performed on the stage before the plague closed it.

“And this with you?” Will asked. He was puzzled by Marlowe’s long soliloquy, centered as it seemed to be on another’s plight. “What matters to you if the strangers suffer in a riot?” He had never pegged Marlowe for a great, overflowing humanist that would take to his wounded bosom every persecuted thing.

Marlowe tightened his gloved hands into fists, fists much too solid and aggressive for his fashionable clothes, his petulant look. “Some fool has set his pen to paper,” he said. “And that paper to the wall of the church where the Dutch are like to worship. In that paper he said how the strangers would be killed. And that paper he signed Tamburlaine, as if the character and creation of mine had written those libels.” He paused, looked away from Will. “Or if I had.”

Will turned surprised eyes to Marlowe, trying to understand. He’d come across this riddle before, that when Marlowe spoke he often seemed to refer to a world which Will couldn’t divine, as though he were speaking of some truth plucked from distant star gazing.

Will never felt so provincial, so inadequate, so ill-prepared for his life in London and the theater as when coming across Marlowe’s mind and getting a peek of what hid beneath Marlowe’s sophisticated mask.

Like that, Marlowe’s countenance lightened, and the lines of his features loosened, making him look young, very young.

A building chuckle climbed out from his chest, booming in the blazing morning son. But, like a flame ill lit, his laughter extinguished itself suddenly. And the voice in which he spoke was full slow and bitter. “It means, good Wagglance that, as I’ve told you, this is an ill time for poets and for fools.” Something like a shadow crossed the grey eyes, giving the impression of shutters fleetingly thrown open and then just as suddenly closed, affording no more than a glimpse into a darkened house. “They took poor Tom Kyd and tortured him, and Lord knows what that sort of lamb -- innocent of guile and clean of crime -- will say of such as me, when under torture. Lord knows what you would have said.”

Will frowned, trying to follow the convoluted argument. Was he being threatened? “But I -- ”

Marlowe nodded. “You’ve done nothing to deserve it, I know, Shakestaff. But then neither has Kyd. Except that he did write for Lord Strange’s acting troupe, which, unwisely, thought to enact a play on the life of Sir Thomas Moore, who held a dim view of strangers, himself.” Marlowe turned away quickly, from Will’s bewildered look, and Will wondered if this was fair warning. Had Marlowe denounced him to the Privy Council for imagined crimes?

Will wished he was home, wished he could rest his head on his kitchen table and watch his Nan rustle about, cooking, and hear his Nan say that Will worried about vain fantasies only.

Nan had always been the strength of their family, and Will knew it. He wished he could have her strength now, and know that she would help him, protect him if needed.

He’d never felt so heartily sorry he’d come to London, never longed so much for his small house in Stratford and the constrained limits of his father’s glover shop.

At least in Stratford no one arrested you just because you knew guilty persons. Why, half of the Ardens, Will’s maternal relatives, were Catholic, and yet their allegiance to this forbidden faith hadn’t prevented John Shakespeare, Will’s father, from being alderman.

In that moment, if Will could have transported himself to Stratford by the force of his thought alone, he would have done it. But he couldn’t. And going back would be admitting he was defeated, done once and for all with London. Nan would not laugh at him, but aye, even in Nan’s eyes, Will would mayhap be diminished.

As for the neighbors, how they’d laugh and wag their tongues at the wit who’d thought to be a poet and come acrop, only to crawl humbly back to his father’s glover shop.

Will looked at Marlowe, who looked away from Will, as if absorbed in the contemplation of the printed pamphlets hung beside the tents.

Will wished he knew what was really happening and why the Privy Council should be meddling in the lives of poor play makers.

Easier to interrogate a sphinx than Kit Marlowe.

Having crossed a brief stretch of full sun, they now walked amid the printers tents, each tent displaying enticing books many of which Will would buy, had he the coin.

But the coin was scarce and scant and that must last until Will could find new work of some sort in London and make more money to send to his family.

He thought of Southampton. He’d have to try his luck, though it was all folly. And Marlowe was clearly not absent, though perhaps under a shadow. Would Will have to compete with Marlowe to be able to send bread home to Stratford to his family?

Will’s family mattered most of all, his family that expected him to restore their fortunes by his great wit.

Marlowe had said the crops had been poor. In faith Will hadn’t noticed, attributing any lack in his own diet to his lack of money. But what if Nan wanted for food? Or the children? He thought of Hamnet’s intent eyes, fixed on his, he thought of Hamnet asking why his father hadn’t sent money.

“How am I going to make a living without the theater?” Will heard himself ask. “I can’t even be a player, without the theater.”

Marlowe smiled. “The good wife lacks for coin? Fear you not. There is a potion that will get you coin. Write yourself a long poem, about some legendary love, throw in enough tit and leg and what not, and long descriptions of the lovers’ white bodies entwined, all wrapped in your best words, freshly clipped from the vine of verb, take you all of that I say, and crown it with tragic death -- tragic enough to make the whole seem a good lesson, lifted from a worthy book. Dedicate the whole to a foolish young nobleman, and there you have it. You shall be rich as Croesus and twice as regarded.”

As Will didn’t answer, Marlowe grabbed his arm and shook it. “Listen, Shakeshaft. I do not jest. If you want coin, that is what you must do, till the theaters open again. Why, I’m doing the same as we speak. I’ve chosen Hero and Leander, for a subject. All very proper and gentle and sad-sweet, and yet giving the good Lord Thomas Walsingham what he craves, that he might see with his mind’s eye the tragic lovers as they bend and sway and conjoin to part again, and having conjoined regret their folly. If I’ve done my job, he will crown my efforts with glimmering gold.”

Hero and Leander. Will tried to recall the tale but remembered nothing, save that it was one of those classical stories known by men better than he, like Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, who’d attended universities and learned proper Latin and better Greek, and of which they discoursed as if they’d drunk them in their mothers' milk.

While Will, with his grammar school education, his little Latin and small Greek, must limp behind and catch the grains of glitter that fell from the jewels these true poets fashioned.

How could Will write a long poem about some classical love? What did he know of classical love? And what nobleman would be susceptible enough to Will’s praise to consent to blessing such enterprise with coin?

Maybe Will could indeed write something, a long poem, something scholarly-seeming even if proceeding from no true scholarship. Something that might entice the good Southampton to give him coin.

But the image Will built in his mind vanished before his eyes.

No, it was all foolishness. When had Will written anything that anyone would wish to purchase for a great amount? Will should have stayed in Stratford, and there worked steadily to make Hamnet a better man than his misguided father.

Perhaps it wasn’t too late. Perhaps that was what his dream meant.

Perhaps Will ought to get himself hence, to his native town and there hew the familiar trade of his own father.

“Well met, Kit, well met.” A blond young man darted from between two tents, and extended both hands to Marlowe, in familiar greeting.

Marlowe smirked and gladly pranced there, without a goodbye, all ready smiles and easy wit again whatever his dark mood might have been dissipated by his making ill sport of Will and showing Will how much inferior Will’s wit was.

Will followed Marlowe’s retreating back with an envious gaze.

Oh, for an ounce of Marlowe’s talent, Will would give what hair remained to him, or his chance at happiness, or his hope of immortality. To reach with his writing hand the knee of that great, stage-bestriding presence and have Will’s own plays be known by everyone, Will would give the very blood from his veins, and everything, everything....

Upon that, Will remembered the wolf, and shivered and checked his mind upon its course. Everything except Hamnet and Nan and Will’s two daughters.

To whom he should return, since his hopes of ever reaching the heights of the Marlovian plays had been ever small and grew smaller each day the theaters remained closed because of the plague, and the multitudes were allowed to forget Will’s name as if it had never sounded upon their ears.

Will stopped. Ahead of him, in the crowd that milled among the booksellers stalls, amid well-dressed dandies, somber scholars and hollow-eyed students, he saw someone whose face he’d never forget -- a creature whose countenance had engraved itself upon Will’s heart and Will’s mind.

Her black hair fell like a silken raiment over her small shoulders, beneath which her large breasts bloomed, above a waist so narrow that Will could have encircled it with his two hands. Her features, arranged within her oval face, showed sweetness more than all the nectar of the world distilled.

She was beauty as no mortal woman could attain. She looked, compared to other women, like a snow-white dove amid crows.

As Will drew nearer her, and marked her close, her silver, shimmering gown, her shining black hair that fell like a curtain to her waist, the grace of her walk, the entrancing beguilement of her smile, Will knew that she was neither mortal, nor a woman, but the female form of the king of elves, Quicksilver. The Lady Silver, who had enchanted Will ten years ago.

He felt the snare of her enchantment engulf him once more. He told himself he loved Nan. Perforce, Will loved Nan, sweet Nan, his reality and his strength. Sweet Nan who was warm and kind as bread with honey, homey like a roaring fire on the Earth, and his, his, his, the mother of his children, his plowed field that brought forth great harvest.

His sweet Nan, who could be as forceful as she was kind.

Yet Silver’s hollow sweetness drew Will forth like sucking lips drinking in the juice of a ripe apricot.

As he stepped forward, in shock at seeing in London this being he’d last met in the shadowed green spaces of Arden wood, the Lady Silver -- as the creature called itself in this form -- looked at him, opened her mouth as if to speak, took a step forward, and fell senseless into Will’s arms.

Scene Five

St. Paul’s yard, the market place of choice for book printers and book sellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll, in their finery and velvets and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Between two of the colorful tents, Marlowe speaks to a young blond gentleman attired in blue silk.

Kit Marlowe went out to meet the young blond man, who, attired in faultless blue silk, coiffed to the height of fashion, his hair all in ringlets, held both hands out to Kit as if to the dearest of friends.

For a moment, Kit forgot Shakespeare and the conversation he’d entertained with the novice play maker.

The vague foreboding he’d felt all day receded but only because a creeping, crawling fear, like a chill finger drawn up the spine, like a drop of rain out of an unthreatening sky, took residence in Kit’s heart in its place.

Kit had no idea who this blond man might be, and yet here he was, greeting Kit with extended hands and ready smile and calling Kit by his Christian name.

Had Kit been another sort of man and his life another sort of life -- and how often he dreamed of that in the hollow darkness of his solitary nights -- he’d have thought this dandy had some plan, some scheme to do Kit out of money.

But Kit was the man he was, knowing London and its unsound spots, like a farmer knows the blight on the wheat he grows, aye, and what fields to grow good wheat upon, too.

His was a London of tavern and bank-side theater, of treason and intrigue, of fatal secrets whispered in the press of bodies around a bear pit, late at night, after much drinking, secrets that could shake the foundations of the court and topple the thrones of Europe. Secrets that could be sold, as Kit had sold them, now and then, back and forth, to Queen and Privy Council, and Catholic, and Puritan, and whoever would pay the most.

No con man, no swindler would think of stinging Kit Marlowe. Serpents did not bite each other, nor did tigers devour their congeners.

So -- Kit swallowed a lump in his throat, a raw, undigested fear that would not stay down -- so, this strange young man, whoever he was, could only be one thing and come from one person, and that one the one Kit least needed now.

Yet he plastered a smile on his face fearing that he must have gone the white of fresh snow, and, through the smile, spoke in what he hoped was a convincing imitation of his everyday banter. “Now, well met, well met, good fellow,” he said.

He allowed the blond to pull him, casually, laughingly, into the space between the two printers’ tents, towards the back, where the tall, windowless back wall of a house that encroached on Paul’s yard provided a safe harbor for conversation, a safe retreat for intrigue.

Anyone seeing them, Kit knew, would think that it was bawdy desire that drove them and that they thought illicit satisfaction in each other’s bodies. Surely, anyone who knew Kit’s reputation would think such.

An ill reputation could be a good thing to have, when perforce you must meet in dark corners with men you have no rational reason to associate with.

How shocked they’d be, those good citizens of London who turned their backs on Kit Marlowe’s lewdness and whispered behind their hands, and smiled into their ale mugs at his scandalous life, if they knew that the same Kit Marlowe, like the innocent virgin kept sheltered and confined until her wedding day, had known only one lover. One lover only, and that one neither man nor woman.

An image of the elf, Silver -- the dark lady with her pearl-white skin, her beguiling silver eyes -- flooded Kit’s mind like a high wave, like the sea at the filling tide conquering the helpless sand.

For a moment he looked amazed and stood still, thinking of that creature he’d not seen, not met, not touched for twelve years now, and yet whose very touch his skin remembered in soft velvet and tantalizing feather.

Silver was the female form of Quicksilver who had been an elf prince. Or at least, a prince who could be a princess and exchange body and manner as men exchanged moods. He’d met Kit when Kit had just turned seventeen, before Cambridge and London had put in Kit a strong distaste of the ways of the world and the minds of men.

In that golden summer, between childhood and manhood, Kit had fallen in love. He’d loved Quicksilver in both his forms, now a dark lady now a fair youth, both forms perfect and complete and more beautiful than even a young man’s dreams could aspire to.

Even the recollection of it, now, these many years later, put authenticity in what Kit intended to be the besotted smile he gave the strange blond youth, and it made Kit’s heart beat fast, and gilded his thoughts and sighs with an edge of innocent romance that he knew better than to believe in.

Much better, for even that frothy romance had turned to dust.

Quicksilver had dismissed Kit, curtly dismissed him at the end of that summer, and told Kit he’d not see him again, and not all of Kit’s tears, not all of Kit’s pleas had moved that faithless heart.

Now, sometimes, Kit wondered if he’d dreamed it all and if that summer, like his whole, remote adolescence as a cobbler’s son in the pious town of Canterbury had been a fantasy, spun of a fevered brain.

But this -- shabby encounters behind tents and between buildings, and in dark alleys late at night, where others saw passion and Kit and those he met knew there was only the urge to pass on a message, the necessity to let another spy know what Sir Robert Cecil, master of spies, knew and meant, and what orders he intended for his puppets -- this was reality.

Trembling, but not with lust, Kit stopped beside the blond man, in the sudden cool shade of the wall, behind the striped tents.

“What is it?” Kit asked, his voice cold and cutting and so business like that even poor Will Shakespeare would have been shocked. “Whence came you and what claim have you on me?”

“You don’t know me,” the blond said. His green eyes had that facile cockiness of someone still unaccustomed to secret dealing.

“Why, perforce not,” Kit said, and smiled, a smile that didn’t look at all besotted, but sharp and clean as a new-forged knife glinting in the noonday sun. “I’m not so old that I should wander in my wits and not know who I know. Yet I asked you your name, sirrah.”

The blond started, surprised, and blinked, again demonstrating to Kit that he was new to this and that this game, newfangled, new created, felt as odd to him as another man’s coat. He looked away, looked at Kit again. “We have a common friend.”

“Perforce, we do. And his name is Robert Cecil.” He’d been expecting this. Daily, he’d been expecting death to come, disguised as a greeting. Was this it? He looked at the man’s hands, but saw no flourished dagger.

Surely, they remembered Kit’s reputation as a street fighter. It wouldn’t be so simple to kill Kit.

At the name of the Queen’s secretary, the chief of her secret service, the blond’s eyes widened and he looked ever more shocked. He drew in breath all of a startle, then said, “You need not know my name.”

Kit sighed, and tapped his foot on the floor, the tip of it slapping the flagstones in an audible manifestation of his impatience. He crossed his arms on his chest.

So, it wasn’t death. Just a message. For surely not even idiots feared to identify themselves to men as good as dead.

Little boys and their little toys. How foolish these new recruits were. Had Kit ever been that foolish himself? Had he ever been thus unsullied?

“Your name, sirrah, and the real one. I don’t take orders from everyone who comes to me in Paul’s yard and whispers thus and thus upon my tired ear. Better men than you have tried that and failed. Give me your name, or else give me a sign of your intent. Did anyone send anything you should show me? A handkerchief? A ring?”

The blond looked vexed and a blush of embarrassment flourished upon his well-shaven cheek. “My.... My name is Nicholas Skeres, and I am milord Essex’s man,” he stammered. “He.... No one gave me anything to show you. Only I was to tell you to be at Deptford on the twenty first, where you shall be given a commission.”

Kit allowed his eyebrows to rise. “A commission? From Milord Essex? What have I with Milord Essex? My, that’s droll. What commission and for what?” Deptford was the docks. A seedy neighborhood in which a man might be slaughtered like a new-landed calf. Did Essex intend to make Kit read from Essex’s missal, and incriminate Raleigh on his command, or else die for it?

But the blond had found his feet. He might be new and he might be young, but something, someone, had given him the idea that Kit’s position was less than solid, and told him what to do to push Kit up against the wall. “Master Marlowe, you know better than to ask. Not that they’d tell me, and you know that. At any rate, why should they trust you? You’ve managed, have you not, to bring yourself under the scrutiny of the Privy Council, like a fool boy caught in the act.”

“There was no act I was caught at,” Kit said, bristling. “I did not post the Dutch church libel. I do not wish the apprentices to rebel. I--” His voice had risen with each syllable.

Now, Nicholas Skeres brought his finger to his mouth, commanding silence and making Kit aware of how he’d been yelling.

The smile on the young man’s face was enough to set Kit’s blood boiling. He’d let himself be goaded. He’d shown his fears, his vulnerability to this toy soldier in the wars of the mind. After so many years of this, he’d proved himself a fool, yet again.

“Goodbye, Nick,” Kit said, his voice suddenly low and harsh. “And if Essex did send you and truly wishes to see me, he can send a better messenger. And if it was Cecil, he can send a better cony catcher, a better cutthroat. I’m not in the habit of taking my orders from babes, and a lamb won’t lead me to the slaughter. And if not Cecil nor Essex, but his cousin, old Nick sent you, then may he welcome you in his fiery abode.” With that, Kit turned on his heels and, his mind a bubbling of rage and humiliation, walked rapidly the narrow alley into the main passage where people crowded and shoppers examined the latest offerings of the wits of London and the printing industry.

“Kit,” someone called.

This time the caller was a printer friend, someone Kit had known a long time. He waved at Kit, from the shadows within his striped tent, at the sign of the grey hound, and showed Kit a fat pamphlet. “Have you read the latest on what Harvey says of you?”

Harvey had been Kit’s master at Cambridge and always had fresh scorn to pour on Kit’s decision to abandon classical forms for iambic pentameter. Their sparring correspondence, not sent directly, rather published in the form of epigrams and letters and scathing references, was part of a larger war of wits going on between London’s playwrights and new poets and the guardians of the old form.

Kit smiled, though he still felt angry and scared, and composed his mouth to shout back something funny about Harvey’s hot air.

But he never spoke.

In the space between thought and utterance, as Kit raised his head to look at his friend and respond to his taunt, his eyes caught sight of someone in a crowd, and every thought abandoned his poor befuddled brain, leaving him like an unarmed man facing an assailant.

The creature he saw amid the crowd was a woman with dark, spun silk hair framing milk-white skin. Her perfect shape, encased in a white and silver gown that started low enough to display a generous portion of her rounded breasts, seemed to cast its own light. And her lips were dark red, her eyes pure silver temptation amid dark lashes. Kit had never managed to forget her features, though he’d tried for last twelve years.

A dream walking abroad in broad day light was a startling thing, a crazed thing. A young man’s dream coming to rouse his older self out of quiet cynicism created the sort of panic that sent grown men crying back to their cradles.

Smaller men than Kit, with lighter wit and quieter mind, might have gone screaming through Paul’s Yard, thinking themselves the butt of a joke, or the fools of an illusion.

But Kit, as his mind reeled, took a deep breath of the sweat- and garbage-tainted air of St. Paul’s, and took a step forward.

Silver had come for him. After all this time, Silver had come for Kit. She’d repented her curt dismissal of him, she loved him still, she remembered him, she craved his touch as he craved hers. She loved him still.

A joyous greeting starting on his lips, his mouth fixed in a manic, joyous smile, his heart beating on his chest with such strong incessant hammering that it might well be a prisoner trying to break out of Kit’s jaded exterior, Kit watched as the dark lady advanced through the throngs of Paul’s. Advanced towards Kit.

Well Kit knew that she’d recognized him, by her face turned in his direction, by her look of expectant knowledge.

And he, and he, who for so many years, in his solitary bed, had dreamed of nothing but her touch, had thought of nothing but Silver’s love, he met her knowledge with knowledge, her expectancy with expectancy and surged forward, elbowing aside strangers and friends alike, heaving them all away, leaving them all behind, wanting nothing, wishing for nothing but to touch her, to feel his arms around her once more.

He remembered the taste of her skin, the exquisite lilac perfume that rose from her. His skin remembered the electricity of her touch, the heart-rending sweetness of her kiss.

He forgot the threatening net that his secret dealing had conjured around him; forgot the death that hung over his head.

Surging forward on dancing feet, Kit saw his lady smile and then dart forward at a light, skipping step.

And fall into the dark-clad arms of a man ahead of him.

Shocked, startled, feeling as if the sky had broken to pieces and fallen upon his head with stunning force, Kit arrested his run.

The smile that had pulled his lips upwards didn’t so much die as fade, by slow degrees, like melting wax under a merciless sun.

Before he could think of what had happened, Kit saw Silver appearing to swoon in the man’s arms, and the man’s reviving shake, the man lifting her, putting his arms around her, talking to her with the earnest knowledge of old acquaintance, of old love.

And Kit, standing there, took a while, a long while, to recognize in that man that apprentice playwright, Shakespeare, the very-married country boy of Stratford.

Scene Six

The faerie palace. It is daylight in the world of men, night time in faerieland. The palace lies still, like an abandoned monument. Only the guards at the entrance, and those standing in the hallway, keep alert. Everyone else slumbers, oblivious. All except the Queen Ariel. In her frilly white-and-pink bedroom she sits up in her bed.

She had cried but was now done with crying. Lady Ariel sat on her bed, her eyes dry, her mouth clenched tight in a straight line, her arms wrapped around herself for protection and warmth, though the air in the room felt temperate enough.

Her pale hair, her small, peaked oval face, her white silk nightshirt, all made her look yet smaller, weaker than she was, and well she knew it.

But it was he that was weak. He. Her king, Lord Quicksilver whom she loved. Whom she loved to her grief.

Thinking of him, she crept out of bed, across the white, broidered sheets. The bed was high and for her descent from it, she must make use of a small, lace-covered footstool. Normally her lady’s maids would come and put the stool under her foot that she might not break her neck in coming down. But Ariel did not wish to call her maids to her, did not wish to wake them from their well-deserved slumber, did not wish anyone to know that Quicksilver had left with less than her approval and that she must go on, weak and bereft, looking after this kingdom that mattered not to him as much as the fate of one insignificant mortal.

She let air out of her nostrils, noisily, and, on her stomach, holding on to the sheets, extended her foot towards the floor, searching by touch for the stool’s padded surface. Finding it beneath her toes, she exhaled again, this time in relief and, carefully, lowered her other foot to meet the same surface.

From the stool, she stepped to the floor.

This room she had, Quicksilver had given her when she’d become his Queen. By his magic and to his taste, he’d furnished and decorated it and even now, looking around it, Ariel found that the space better suited Lady Silver than herself.

The bed itself was gilded, and high and wide and surmounted with a crowning canopy of lace and never-dying flowers. In the lace of the curtains, a silver thread wove through, that shone like light on the surface of water. The high ceiling of the chamber glimmered with heavy gilt, and the tapestries of the room displayed young nymphs and satyrs engaged in pleasing pursuit.

Even Ariel’s dressing table lay hidden under a suffocating cover of lace and her mirror, crowned by lace, likewise, resembled a bride arrayed for her wedding.

The rest of the furniture were fainting couches, covered all in pink velvet and placed so that one could strike a pose on one of them wherever one happened to be.

Looking at them now, Ariel thought that her husband struck poses on them much too often, on his visits to her chamber.

The door to the left of her bed led to Quicksilver’s chamber, now deserted. The door to the right to her lady's maids' chamber and that one, too, Ariel was not desirous of opening.

She retrieved her white silk dressing gown from where it lay, languidly thrown over the back of a languorous fainting couch, and tied it around herself with peevish haste.

That Quicksilver would go thus, on the strength of a dream, on a threat to the head of that mortal....

He, Quicksilver, who could never resolve upon the more important matters of the kingdom without a couple years deliberation. He, who could not even think through simple problems, like keeping the satyrs’ glades untouched, the nymphs' water clean. He, who in all must consult and conjure, wait and bide his time till the whole kingdom suffered and pined under his weakness.

But he would go like this, uncalled, to that most lethal of places, the largest city in the world, where the collective minds of unbelieving humans, the forged iron, even the very air, polluted by curses and low dealing, could not fail to injure him -- nay, maybe kill him.

For this he had courage. Courage born of love?

Ariel walked quietly across the vast marble expanse of her chamber’s floor to the oak door, which she opened with the gentlest touch and closed behind her with no more than the sound of a feather gently falling to a soft ground.

The guard by her door bowed to her, and she nodded to him, trying to look as if she had important business abroad at this hour, then turned her back on him and started down the long hallway, alone.

Serene at this hour, like never during the waking hours of the faerie realm, the palace looked like an undisturbed pool of water under a gentle sun.

Light from the mortal sun streamed in through the windows. Attenuated by the veil of magic that divided the worlds, it made a pretty sort of moonlight, bright yet not blinding, which shone upon the polished black and white marble-tiled floor, and gave off a gentle gleam.

Walking along this hallway, Ariel felt lonely, invisibly separated from all the sleepers in all the rooms to either side. It felt as if she were on a fast-moving river, unable to reach for those on the sides.

Ariel listened to the rhythm of her steps on the marble, a slap, slap, slap of bare feet. What would happen if she, too, left this palace, just left it, if she left behind her throne, her husband, her realm, everything?

Would anyone even notice she was gone? And when Quicksilver returned to his abandoned throne, would he mourn her loss?

She wished she could be sure of it.

Oh, she’d known when she married Quicksilver that he did not love her as she loved him. But she’d hoped that time would mend his inconstant heart, and she’d thought she had the whole eternity to teach him love and care.

She walked on down the hallway, her feet slapping the marble -- slap, slap, slap. The forlorn sound sang her loneliness back at her, making her feel even smaller and more alone.

She’d thought Quicksilver would come to love her and she’d overcome his self-centered, cold nature, as brittle and bright as his appearance. She’d thought she had eternity to achieve this in.

She’d underestimated the weary feel of loving so passionately when Quicksilver looked through her as though she were not there and dreamed of humans and their love.

Ariel sighed. The hallway ended in front of the double-door to the terrace. The terrace looked even lonelier than the inner palace. Under the moonlight, this expanse of tile, bordered by a marble balustrade, might have been a dream landscape, something out of an idle fantasy. She opened the doors and walked through, walked all the way to the balustrade and stood there, looking down.

The terrace projected from the fourth floor of the faerie palace and as such looked down upon the tree tops of Arden forest, now immobile in the attenuated light of the faerie realm. Closing her eyes, she opened them again, willing them to see the forest as it was in mortal land.

Glaring sun shone in her eyes and she heard birds sing.

Oh, to live in that world, to be a mortal -- a mere mortal -- in that busy, animated world so unlike the dead calm of elf land.

Oh, to have only a mortal span of years, a mortal coil that wouldn’t allow her to love Quicksilver as she did, and to love him forever.

A sound of hooves behind her broke her concentration. The landscape wavered, like something seen through water. Once more, she saw only the still silvery tree tops in elf moonlight.

Ariel turned.

The centaur who’d defied Quicksilver just before Quicksilver’s odd episode stood on the terrace behind her, a horse-step behind her. His dappled horse-hide gleamed. The human torso protruding where the horse’s neck would be shone golden and hairless.

“Milady,” he said, and bobbed his dark head up and down. He no longer wore the elaborate braids he’d worn for the audience. His hair fell free, unfettered, blue-black curls cloaking his back to his waist. Only a little bit of intensely blue ribbon around his head kept his hair confined. He wore no other clothing or ornament.

“Why...,” Ariel said, and tried to hide her surprise from his searching dark eyes. “Hylas.”

He smiled, showing a golden tooth in the front. She had heard centaurs often plated their teeth in gold as ornament. It seemed an odd ornament to her.

“Walking sleepless, milady? Have you not, then, recovered from your illness this afternoon?” As he spoke, he took a step forward, then another, his hooves making a very light sound against the marble, so carefully was he placing them. His tail twitched back and forth.

“I have quite recovered,” she said. “I am very well.”

He smelled of spices, of cinnamon, of sandalwood. She wanted to tell him she was well, but her lord had left her, to go defend some fool human. She wanted to tell him that she felt miserable -- unloved, unlovely.

The desperate need to tell someone her tale made her heart pound. But she didn’t dare.

The beautiful barbaric face gleamed in a smile. “Your lord is perhaps still indisposed?” the centaur asked. “I wage he’s not as strong as you.”

Hearing her own thoughts echoed from those sensuous lips, Ariel started. “Oh, my lord is quite strong,” she said, her voice raised higher than she intended. “Quite strong I assure you.” Her voice wavered and trembled, and she realized her defense sounded, even to herself, hollow. Hylas had walked all the way until he was quite near her. She wouldn’t even have to extend her arm very far to touch him.

His dark, dark eyes looked into hers, close up, and her own eyes seemed to be swallowed up by them. “And yet, not strong enough to give us our own land,” he said. “Nor to bring us to heel on the battlefield by proving himself a worthy foe. Not strong enough to rattle his saber, or to unsheathe his dagger, as we would say.”

Ariel opened her lips, but realized it would be useless to deny it. Quicksilver was not strong enough for that. He would never be strong enough to go to war, no matter how justified. If he were like this centaur here. If he had a tenth of the animal strength, the basic cruelty of this creature, Quicksilver could be powerful indeed.

But he hemmed and hawed and talked about how immortal life should not be squandered.

The centaur raised a hand, and, for a moment, Ariel thought that if he pulled her to him and kissed her, she would allow it. If Quicksilver could have his human sport, why should she not have her own? If Quicksilver could --

The centaur’s hand picked up a few of her hairs that had strayed in front of her face, and pushed them back into the blond mass. “Now, you, milady, you’re strong enough. I hear your lord has left. What say you we ensure he will never return?”

Scene Seven

St. Paul’s Yard. Will, holding the Lady Silver who leans limply within his hold, starts steering her out of the yard. They attract little enough attention, in this place. One or two scholars look startled at a bawd in such an unwonted place. But most just walk past Silver, oblivious to her and to Will. Three steps away, lost in the throng, Kit Marlowe looks as if stricken by a thunderbolt.

Will didn’t know what to do about the sweet weight in his arms, the wan face looking at his.

“Milady,” he said. Feeling her body warm and firm in his grasp took him back to days he’d sworn to forget. And though he knew half -- at least half -- her charm was the elf’s glamoury, yet the glamoury nonetheless enchanted him.

The every-day uneventfulness of his life had shattered like unsound glass beneath a sound blow, and revealed a realm of fractured, sparkling light -- the strange, wonderful realm of faerieland.

“Milady? In London? I’d never have expected.... I never thought.”

“London....” She leaned heavily on him, her arm folded into his left arm that he extended to her across his chest, while his right arm encircled her waist. “London is poison to... us. Like.... Like poison to humans. London is cold iron and unbelieving, cynical minds. London.” She spoke with a low, pasty voice, as if drunk, and walked as if she could barely stand. Her silver shoes that had, once, trod Arden forest with light skipping grace, now dragged on the flags of the walk of Paul’s, as if she could barely stand to walk at all.

And Will could think of nothing, nothing, save only that he must get her out of here. He cast a fearful look over his shoulder at the looming shadow of Paul’s cathedral. Once, in a different world, Silver had told him that elves had nothing to fear from what humans held sacred, that humans' prayers and thoughts affected not the realm of faerie.

Yet, here was the Lady Silver now, saying that the cynicism of men could do this to her and rob her of her sparkling magic, her vital strength.

Will did not dare drag her towards the church, or walk her through Paul’s Walk. Who knew what sacred precincts would do to her, when she was already so weakened.

“Here, here,” he said. “Milady, this way.” And, with his arm around her, the other arm supporting her, he dragged her through the crowd of scholars and fools towards the other side of Paul’s Yard, where the dilapidated gates stood askew between what remained of the walls. Sometime, long ago, those walls had ruptured, allowing the houses of merchants and burghers to encroach on the sacred precinct. Now, nothing remained of that once inviolate enclosure, except those leaning gates, always open. “You must tell me what makes you so ill, what brings you to London, what—”

But the Lady Silver didn’t answer. Her weight heavy upon his arm, she looked at everything, all around, with the startled, scared eyes of a deer seeing the hunter’s bow. And like the deer, she seemed incapable of saving herself.

Cold iron, she’d said. Cold iron, Will remembered, acted like poison to Silver’s glittering kind. Once, not quite knowing what he did, Will had encircled her in iron chains. With a shudder, he remembered how quickly that iron had almost killed her, and the blue, scorching flashes that had arisen between her flesh and the metal.

Now, as they crossed the gates, Will fancied he saw an answering blue flash from the gates. Weakened and mitigated compared to when he’d wrapped those chains around her, but a flash nonetheless.

And Will, half crazed with fright and compassion, felt he must get Silver out of here.

Oh, the glamour flowing off her might be untrue, and his passion that answered it was surely an illusion. Yet the need to save her was real, though he knew not how to accomplish it.

If the city itself was killing her, how could he, Will Shakespeare, save her? He couldn’t take her from London, could he?

Still, Southwark, where Will lived, could be said to be another place. A slummy place, full of taverns and bawds and light, easy women, yet less populated than London, certainly less populated than London during the day.

Perhaps Silver would receive material relief from being, however little, removed from this bustling crowd, this overabundance of iron in gates and grates, in signs and fastenings of signs.

Will dragged an almost unconscious Silver along Cheapside -- the broadest of London’s streets -- with its tall, stately houses, its signs, its carts, its press of shoppers and talkers and merchants and bawds. Never had Will noticed so much iron. Never had he thought that London could seem so confining, even here in Cheapside.

Will felt a hand on his side, reaching for his purse, and withdrew his left hand from Lady Silver, long enough to pull his purse to a more secure location, on the other side, where it would be trapped between his and Silver’s bodies.

In that moment, the Lady Silver started to fall forward, as if she could no longer stand on her own two feet, and Will hastily grabbed to hold her once more.

She seemed to remain conscious -- just -- with her silver eyes showing between eyelids so far lowered that they looked like slits upon her pale face.

“Just a while longer milady,” Will said, though it was a while longer indeed -- almost an hour's walk to his lodgings. And once there, what could he do? How did one revive a dying elf?

Yet, looking at the beautiful pale face, the ethereal sweetness of the delicately drawn features, Will knew he couldn’t allow her to die without fighting for her life.

She was a dream he’d dreamed when all the world and love were young, and now, in this time of dying dreams, Will did not wish to see Silver die also.

He grabbed a fresh hold on her arm, and, with his arm around her, prepared to drag her all the way to Southwark, if need be.

It would be a long way.

Scene Eight

Southwark -- a neighborhood of hastily built, slummy-looking houses, many of them leaning one on the other, like drunkards desirous of company. Where an alleyway or passage is left between two houses, it is invariably taken up with rickety stairs. One of these houses, the bottom part of which houses a hat shop, is a three-floor-tall, dark-brown, shabby building. The inevitable rickety stairs up the side lead all the way to the third floor. Across from the house is a tavern, whose sign “The Crook and Flail” swings in the modest breeze. Beneath the sign, Kit Marlowe stands. An older, shorter man in severe black clothing approaches him.

“And I thought I should tell you, Sir,” the short, man said, bowing slightly and speaking in the tone of one continuing a conversation.

“What?” Kit asked, startled, pulled forcibly back from his contemplation of the far-distant door, up the rickety staircase, and the seemingly even farther-distant dirty window up top, its diamond-shaped panes opaque with dirt and grease. Looking at the man, he amended, “Beg your pardon?”

The man looked pained at Kit’s rudeness, and barely contained a sigh. He touched his hand to his dark hair, nonetheless, and bowed again, with maybe too much show of respect. “I think I should tell you that this tavern only opens after sundown.” The man spoke with a deep nasal French accent and something to his tone, and the glance he cast Kit told Kit that the man thought Kit a reprobate lush, for being out at this hour, searching for a drink.

Kit looked up, realizing for the first time that he stood underneath a tavern sign. “Oh. I did not seek a tavern. I sought...lodging. Yes, yes, lodging.” Carried away by this happy idea, he forged on. “A friend of mine, a Mr. Will Shakespeare, has told me you rented rooms.” He assumed the little man had come from the house across the street, but even had he not, he would probably know Will as a neighbor.

“No, Sir,” the man said, and this time looked truly respectful, as he bowed again. “No, I mean, not really. Our only room is let to the good Will, as my wife and I and our daughter and my three apprentices take up the rest of the house. But, should Will leave the room, well, then I’m sure I’d be happy to rent to a gentleman such as you.”

The man cast a look at Kit’s attire and it was quite obvious to Kit that, despite his own puritan clothing, this man was skilled enough at evaluating clothes to have judged Kit a better -- or at least higher paying -- tenant than Will.

“Oh,” Kit said, and struggled in vain to find an excuse, any excuse that would allow him to stay here and watch the house for a sign of life.

He’d followed Will here, so entranced and hypnotized by the sight of Lady Silver that he’d cared little where he went. And now he knew not what to do or say, except that he did not want to go away from here. He did not. “You do not know if my friend Will would be home, then, do you?”

“Ah, m’sieur, no, he is not. The poor Will, how he’s been worrying himself over the theaters being closed, and the good wife back in Stratford, waiting for money. I fear, I very much fear,” the good French puritan looked duly pained, “That if he does not soon find a way to keep his income here in London, he will have to go back to the country.... In which case, Sir, you could have the lodging.” He cast a glance at Kit.

Kit nodded, and tried to show eagerness, but added, “But it would be a pity to lose Will.” In truth, he knew not what he said, only that he wanted to keep talking and stay here, so maybe Silver would look out of that window, or walk down that staircase, or in some other way make herself known.

“Well, he’s tried everything. He even held the horses, you know for pay, outside the Bear gardens, where the bear bating is, for a while. But he said he could not bear the late nights, used as he is to the country schedule of early nights and early mornings too. And, really, for a theater gentleman, Mr. Will keeps very regular hours and rarely goes out drinking.” He smiled at Kit. “As I suppose you know, since you’re his friend.”

“Oh, yes, yes, Master Will Shakespeare is a model of virtue,” Kit said, and something in his heart stung and protested that maybe this was why even elves preferred Will.

“But, enfin, today he stopped by an hour ago and, he has told us that this evening he won’t be joining us for dinner. He has an appointment with the young earl of Southampton who is a great admirer of theater, now, is he not?” The question was obviously rhetorical, as the little man plunged on. “He has an appointment to show the earl some of his poetry and maybe the good earl will give him a chance to put on his plays in the private theater the earl had set up for him, won’t he?”

This question was obviously not rhetorical, and Kit caught his breath and cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, who knows? Milord Southampton has given his patronage to many a worse poet.”

“Well, so Master Will will not be coming home for dinner, either, as he will, of course, be in the earl’s company at his house. But for that, you’d have the pleasure of seeing your friend come dinner time. Indeed, he has dinner with us most nights.”

“Ah, it is no problem. I’ll look for him tomorrow, then,” Kit said, and yet didn’t move. Unlike the little man, Kit knew that Will was inside. He’d followed Silver and Will here, breathless, attempting to catch up with them.

With his breath caught in his throat, he’d followed Silver and Will here, and watched them ascend the narrow precipitous wooden stairs that, climbing up the side of the house, led to Will’s room on the topmost floor.

He’d watched Will dart out and visit the little hat shop, then go back into his room again.

Since then Marlowe had been riveted to that spot, watching that door as though it were the door to heaven or the pathway to salvation. From those, Kit believed himself well excluded, but from this....

He remembered that short summer, now so far away and yet still fresh in memory, like yesterday’s meal or this morning’s awakening from slumber.

He remembered Silver’s hands, and her smile, and the sweet smell of summer sweat, beneath great trees, in the quiet woods. And like a fool who can’t let go of folly, like a child, ill-awakened from a dream who yet talks on the spinning toys and the glazed fruits of his fantasy, thus Kit stood, riveted by his desire to that mundane corner of that narrow Southwark street, watching that grim little door in the tall, grey, awkward building.

Apprentices and merchants walked past, busy with their own concerns, and if they gave him more than a passing look it was because his clothes looked too fine for this time of day in Southwark.

Marlowe watched. Up in the narrow window, he thought he caught a glimpse of dark hair, a body. He imagined it was Silver’s, but, at that distance, it might have been Will, or even just the reflection of the sky on the irregular glass of the window. Yet Marlowe wanted it to be Silver. He willed the window open, he willed to see Silver’s perfect features, even from this distance, even if it availed him nothing.

Would it avail him nothing?

Kit remembered too well the pain of parting, and the look on Quicksilver’s face when -- in his male aspect -- he had told Kit goodbye. Kit had wished to see pain or regret there, but all he could remember of pain and regret now was his own, embossed and embedded in the memory from which he still flinched, like a cur from a kick.

The look in Quicksilver’s moss-green eyes, those many years ago, when parting from Kit beneath the great, green trees of the forest where they’d loved so long and so well, had been boredom with a strange, overlaid mischievousness. Nothing else.

Kit shifted his feet, on the mud of the lane. Cursed be the day he’d beheld the creature and so shamelessly lost heart and reason. Cursed be it, as Kit was cursed. Because, even with the sting in his heart, from the elf’s remembered scorn, even with his head hurting from the memory of the elf’s dismissal of him, that dismissal of what could only have been an amusing pastime for Quicksilver and had been Kit’s own, life-twisting, heart clenching one love -- even now, Kit wished his false love to return.

Fool, fool that he was, but what could he do, but stand there and look at that window, and that door, and stare and wait for a glimpse of Silver?

He was not so foolish he’d climb the stairs and knock at the door. Oh, he remembered the scorn in Quicksilver’s eyes much too well.

Kit removed his fashionable gloves and worried at them, twisting and turning them between his sweaty hands.

The little Frenchman still stood, a little way off, staring at Kit. Kit sighed. He would have to go. He supposed in a neighborhood like this, even in London, neighbor watched for neighbor and, despite the richness of his dress, he would not be allowed to stand and loiter long beneath neighborhood tavern signs. He bowed slightly to the little man. “I will go now,” he said. “If you’ll so kindly inform me at what time you usually entertain Will for dinner, I’ll look for him tomorrow at that time.” Presumably the good Will, being a creature of habits, would search out his dinner today at roughly the same time he usually ate it. And then the lady would be alone in Will’s room.

“Of course, Sir. We usually have dinner around five o’clock, just as the taverns open.”

Again Kit Marlowe nodded, this time smiling. He’d come back at five, and if the taverns were open then, so much the better. Surely there would be many strangers in the area at the time, and that would give cover to Kit’s presence.

And tonight, win or lose, he would see Silver face to face.

Scene Nine

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

“What 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.

Will 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.

“Folly,” he said, but it was a weak scolding. “Folly to go out as a woman, unaccompanied. If any man should decide to think you a bawd -- ”

A smile crept upon Silver’s lips, joy surprising the elven lady like a thief in the night. For a bare heartbeat, mirth climbed to her eyes, and irony sharpened her features. “Oh, we wouldn’t want that, Will, now, would we?”

Will blinked, shocked at seeing a glimmer of the old Silver, the hint of that teasing flirtation that he’d fallen prey to, years ago.

He forgot everything, save his adoration of Silver, as he smiled back. And, like a man reaching out for a rope to steady himself against drowning waves, he said the first thing that crossed his mind, the first thing that might stay this elf from a course of seduction -- if she intended such. “How fares my lady Ariel?”

Silver looked surprised. For a faint moment, her form wavered, so that she almost became Quicksilver, in his fair youth aspect. But then her shape steadied again, upon the bed, and Will had the impression that she’d done so purposefully.

A faint flush tinged Silver’s cheeks pink and the words she said came oddly from the small, heart-shaped mouth. “Well, and well. My lady is... more than I deserve, and better. Gentler and kinder and more understanding than I could ever have hoped.”

Something about her words, a feeling as if she hadn’t quite finished the sentence, made Will carry on, “Were it not that...?”

Silver looked at Will, startled, then smiled. She lifted herself on her elbows, and looked earnestly at Will. “Were it not that she hates Silver, and she thinks me weak and a coward. But that is no fault of hers. It is all mine. Perhaps I am a coward. This thing I am.” Again the faint blush, again the wavering.

It was like meeting a friend, Will thought, from whom you’d been long separated, and feeling awkward and strange, not knowing what to do or say first, where before there had been familiar discourse.

And yet, there had never been comfort for him and Quicksilver or for that matter, Silver. They’d never been friends. They’d been enemies and lovers, and finally allies, but never friends.

As Will thought that and stared at the alien creature on his bed, Silver looked at him, with her bottomless silver eyes. “I’ve always thought you my friend, Will. My only friend, outside elven kind.”

Will inclined his head and said nothing.

“And to elven kind I can’t be a friend, really, because I’m their king. But you....” She shrugged. “I thought I’d come to you for help, as likely you’re in as much danger as I am.”

Will looked at this odd elf, at this wan elf, sickly and pale near London, though admittedly stronger than he’d been in the city itself. “Danger?”

“My....” Silver dragged the word out, as he dragged herself up to sitting. “My brother has fought free of his bonds to the Hunter. I think he already tried something against you....”

Will was moved. His heart relented. He thought of the dream he’d had, of standing outside his house and guarding it. The quiet spectator who had sat back, listening to this tale with dispassionate interest disappeared. So did the curious poet, entranced by Silver’s beauty.

In their place stood the husband, fearing for his family. “My wife?” he said. “My wife and babes?”

The dark Lady’s glamoury no longer mattered, no longer affected him. Who cared for satiny skin, bottomless silver eyes, perfect figures, when those dear splinters of his very heart might be threatened?

Silver looked sour, the softness vanishing from her features. “They’re well, they’re well. At least I believe they’re well. They’re well.”

She looked up at Will who now stood right close to the bed, looming down over Silver. Her dress fell at a most becoming angle, her hair shone like spilled silk, and yet Will wanted to know how his wife was, whom he had left at their humble cottage in Stratford.

Silver looked amazed, and Will couldn’t fault her. His feelings amazed even Will himself, and yet they were true.

“They’re well, they’re well, Will, but I can’t tell you how long they’ll stay thus, how long it will all stay thus.

“It is like this,” she said and drew herself further up, and faced Will. “The Hunter is an old force, a dark force. He was, I believe, once to the elves what your many old gods were to you.” Silver lowered her eyebrows over her eyes, not so much thinking as in an expression of intense concentration. “A personification of nature, a force given power because we believed in it. But like a force of nature it was, it is, not evil. Or not evil in the way men and elves understand evil, with free decision and power and the strength to choose. Rather old evil, impersonal evil. He’ll take you if, like Sylvanus, you’ve made yourself corrupt and rotted and fit only for his company. But he’ll not come and get you from your bed, uninvited. And, being part of nature, he’s a part and parcel of the spheres and their harmonious, eternal gyrations. He’d never dream of seizing power over the world of men, even if he could.”

She stared at Will as if not sure of getting this point across, then sighed as one who hopes that the human’s inferior reasoning will be able to follow. She was all business, having shed all tempting glamoury.

“But Sylvanus.... I believe Sylvanus is evil. Truly evil. Evil from within and through and through. Don’t know what he is or how he came to be born of my gentle mother, my honored father. But there he is, like a hyena whelp engendered by two lions, ferocious and dark in his bitterness and born with sharp fangs with which to do the world to death. And he means to do it, Will. Sylvanus means to do it.

“The impersonal evil of the Hunter could no more keep him confined than a net can keep a wild, wily wolf at bay. I was a fool to think it, a fool to expect it.” Small drops of sweat formed on Silver’s forehead as she spoke.

“I had a vision, and in my vision I saw not just my kingdom but all of it in balance, if Sylvanus should succeed in getting the help of just one man. Just one man and he’ll overthrow me. Just one man and he’ll undo everything and take over both worlds, and set the spheres clashing.”

She paused. “And Will, I fear for you, because of your contact with faerieland. I fear you’ll be vulnerable, specially you, being in London, where my brother would think he’d be free from me, the iron and the disbelief keeping me away. And as for the Hunter, he too is still enough a creature of glade and forest, that he cannot pursue Sylvanus here, either. But Sylvanus is dark enough, corrupt enough, that iron though it affects him, it will not weaken him as much as it weakens proper elves. It cannot kill him. And so, he might very well be free here. Free to seek his power and what will feed it, free -- in this safe haven of humanity -- to find ways to increase his power. Then will he go to Stratford and wreak vengeance on your wife; then will he destroy and level my palace, and turn it all to rubble and to nothing.”

She looked scared, her eyes wide, as if she looked on her own doom. “It will all be as if it never existed and in the enchanted glades of my kind, in the sacred glens, the peaceful woods, no more will elf or faerie, gnome or dwarf, sport, but only dark creatures, evil, transformed by Sylvanus’ rule over them. Then shall we like demons hunt the night, and lash out of our damnation, haunting your dreams, making the babe die between breaths in his crib, and the good wife cry in fright and say prayers that will never avail her. And, little by little, the spheres, poisoned and darkened by my brother’s power, by my brother’s taint, will clash and crash and climb the inharmonic scales of destruction till nothing is left, nothing....”

Silver had talked long. Her voice, that had been low and tired to begin with, descended ever lower, ever fainter, until in the end it sounded like a mournful wind rustling through the trees of Arden forest.

Will was thinking that this creature had once -- well, many times -- before lied to him, yet still felt enchanted by her fatal charm. He reached for the canteen from the corner of his table, and took it to Silver, and offered it to her with, “I don’t know if—”

Silver smiled and for a moment glamoury flared and lit up around her, making her seem the most perfect of beings, fit to be loved.

Then she damped it, giving the impression of doing it consciously, of consciously diminishing her brilliance, as if muffling a lantern by throwing a cloth over it. “It won’t hurt me,” she said, taking the ale canteen and drinking. “And I’m not near death, as I might appear. I feel better here, Will, in your room, in this quiet place, away from the crowds. The travel here, and London itself.... There’s a dark core to the city, something that rises, together with the smell from the Thames river and like fog blankets the city. Perhaps my brother is already here, perhaps already working his mischief.” She took another sip from the ale and made a face.

“Or perhaps my tiredness looms before me, making me perceive things, like a child who wakes in the night in his own, accustomed room, and, not having light, imagines every familiar shadow a monster and every piece of clothing an assassin with drawn dagger.” Silver smiled, though the smile seemed faded and turned faint.

“I don’t know. That is the problem and the misery of being in the city, Will. I will not die. Perforce, I will not die, in this fortress of cold iron, in this heart of disbelief that is London. But, Will, whatever the darkness is in your city, that very darkness covers my eyes so that I must go, blind like a beggar in strange territory, beseeching all I meet for direction and help. And I’m begging your help.”

His help. “What can I do?”

“I don’t know and I can’t tell you. Only to keep your eyes open for signs of corruption, for signs of wrongness. You’re a Sunday child, Will, able to see the invisible and know the unknowable, and perhaps Will, perhaps, your sight will avail you where my greater sight fails me. I don’t know. I know only that you’re my friend and I’ve come to you for help.”

Friend. Was Will the friend of this strange, magical creature? And was this creature good or evil, or yet, like the Hunter something else, something old and moss-eaten and corroded, like an idol found in an old cave, its features so time-eroded that no one can tell if it was once a god or a demon, an angel or a devil.

Did Silver indeed mean well? Did Silver even know what she meant, once a course of action was started, a decision undertaken?

Will stared at Silver, and silently thought that he would send Silver away and joyfully run from this threatened complication, this expected entanglement. Were it not for Nan and his children, and how the supernatural world might affect them. Oh why had his dream taken him to Stratford? If his dream was a true seeing of evil, did that mean that Stratford was threatened?

They’d left the elves behind, Nan and Will, the elves had left them alone and Will and Nan had hoped that would be all and that from that moment on, when they’d walked away from the lighted palace of faerie kind, that from that moment on their lives would be clean and rational and natural and human. Mortal. Nothing but mortal. But maybe it couldn’t be. Maybe such bliss couldn’t ever be. Hidden knowledge once obtained could not be forgotten.

As Will stared at Silver and thought of Quicksilver, he realized that he’d been, in a way, loved by a god. And those the gods love they first drive mad. Maybe he was being driven mad. He thought of Diana in her bath turning Acteon into a deer for spying her nudity. He thought of Venus who’d loved Adonis and yet let him go to a cruel death.

Perhaps, perhaps, Silver wasn’t the worst of it.

And perhaps Silver was truthful, or meant to be truthful. In the end, the last time they’d met, Silver -- or Quicksilver -- had helped Will win Nan back, hadn’t she? Even if that had meant a crown and throne for Quicksilver himself.

“So, friend Will,” Silver said. She had recovered a little, whether by virtue of the ale or of her rest on Will’s poor bed. Her voice came out stronger, with overtones of amusement. “Will you believe me? Or will you throw this supernatural pollution from your room and make me search my way alone and blind through London?”

Will shook his head. He couldn’t think of throwing Silver out there, into that cold city that seemed to eat at the elf’s own soul. Whatever Silver was -- and she was several things, several of them reprehensible in human terms -- in her own mind, in her own heart, she’d tried to be a friend to Will. And she’d called Will friend.

Will took a deep breath, which shuddered through him as if the air were too cold for his thought-fevered heart. “What can I do, Milady Silver? What can I do? I’m a small poet from the provinces, who knows no one. The company of actors with whom I sometimes worked, like a shadow upon the stage, that company is gone on tour of the provinces, escaping the closed theaters, the plague of London. And I, fool that I am, stayed behind thinking that perhaps I could find other work, work that would pay as the tour of the provinces won’t. I have a young son, two daughters and a wife to provide for. And these six months the only work I found was holding the horses of the gentlemen who visit the bear garden, the bawdy houses nearby. And that didn’t pay enough to keep my lodging and to eat. Barely enough to keep body and soul together, and was unpleasant besides. I’m hoping tonight to impress Milord Southampton and get the commission of writing masks to entertain his friends, till the theater opens again. Of course, Kit Marlowe told me this morning that I should—” Will stopped.

The most marvelous transformation had taken place in Silver, more wondrous than her change between male and female forms, because that was natural for Silver and this was quite different.

Silver had sat up, all in one movement, feebleness and exhaustion seemingly forgotten, shed like an ill-fitting dress. Sitting up in bed, her eyes animated, her cheeks and lips tinted with a faint blush, she said, “Kit Marlowe? Kit Marlowe, the playwright? He’s in London?”

Will all but groaned. Even in the realm of faerie, apparently Marlowe, the muses’ darling, held sway and made sovereigns and servant fairies alike swoon.

Will’s voice, as he responded, came out sharp, edged all around with professional envy. “Yes. He’s in London. Why? Do you perchance know him?”

Silver opened her little heart-shaped mouth, as if she were going to speak, then shook her head, and when she did speak, her voice sounded not faint and yet so far away that it might be coming from the faerie realm itself.

“No,” she said. “No. I thought I did. But it was a dream. A dream I dreamed, a long time ago.” And then, rallying with sudden animation, she sat up and smiled at Will. “Just give me asylum here, and assist me in looking for any signs of my brother, Will. You can look by day and I by night, since we fairies run in the night, by the triple Hecate’s team, from the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream. You search by day and I by night, and though we share a home, you’ll scarcely see me.” She smiled at Will, a melting smile, sweet and hollow like a confect built around an empty nutshell. “Day and night awake, evil will not surprise us.”

Scene Eleven

Night has fallen over Southwark. The many small workshops close, the bawdy houses open. If anything, the area is more animated than ever during the day. Gentlemen in fine clothing and of fine manner stream towards its narrow, crowded streets. And in one of those streets Kit Marlowe stands, in the shadow of a closed workshop. He moves out of passerby ways seemingly without noticing them. His eyes and his whole being are riveted on a window of a garret facing him, a window through which the faint light of a candle shines.

Kit stood at the corner, and looked up at the window of Will’s lodging.

He’d seen Will depart. When the door had first opened, Kit’s heart had sped and, breath suspended, Kit looked across a street alive with dandies and their light women; loud with shouting and greeting and joyous, wine-induced singing.

But only Shakespeare came out, old Shakespeare, with his harried look of one raised in a family mired in debt, his receding hair, his suit of old velvet, plain and black, well cut but worn through and of poor fabric, making war on fashion and taking no quarter.

Kit’s heart, which had risen to a fever pitch of crazed beating, subsided, like a disappointed child. And like a child at a big celebration, where he is ignored and forgotten, Kit now followed Will’s retreating back with anxious gaze, and now turned to the distant window and its flickering, distant light, like the same child wishing for a forbidden treat, placed out of reach.

Should he make bold to go up the steps? And why not? Who was there to see his humiliation, but the elf? The elf who already knew Kit lost to all care, forgotten to all decency. Forsooth, he would know so, as he knew Kit, and he knew Kit and had drawn Kit’s heartstrings like an easy bow, aimed at a target once and then dropped.

But yet, to face the same scorn twice.... Fearing the elf’s scorn, Kit poured scorn on his own cowardice. Was his liver so weak he would thus be, yoked to his fear where he might emerge victorious?

Kit Marlowe had faced men in lethal fights and had tinged his sword in blood. And now he’d stand, like a schoolboy, at a street corner, hoping for a token from his maid fair. His elf fair....

He sighed, a deep, drawn sigh, and the sound of it, plaintive, escaping through his half-parted lips, woke him to his longing, his desperate craving.

The shame of it, the shock of it, more than any new found courage, propelled him, up the stairs, and up and up and up.

The rickety steps swayed under Kit’s feet, as his well-cut suede boots, a gift from his cobbler father, landed solidly on the stairs. No guardrail protected Kit on the right side, which was left open over the abyss all those stories below. One sudden step and he’d have been lost, gone over the side, to splatter all over the dandies and their well-arrayed horses, aye, and their well-arrayed mistresses too.

But the abyss he faced was much deeper, the death he feared much stronger than a mere drop a few feet down, to the muddy street and the indifferent spectators.

Yet, his feet carried him, with winged force, and with winged fear, with sweat dripping from his hands, with his heart beating, beating madly beneath his fine lawn collar, and making his velvet doublet tremble with its beating force.

Kit’s hand hit the rough wood of the door, once, twice, hard, and yet, sounding timid compared to the deafening beat of Kit’s blood rushing through his veins, turning his thoughts to nothing but rushing water, rushing, rushing towards an unknown ocean.

There was a little window there, invisible from the street. It stood at the left of the door, a tiny window, no more than four squares of glass, held together by a cross-shaped frame of lead. Big enough that the person within could see who knocked at his door. A good precaution and fair, when living in Southwark, outside the city proper, where patrols were rare, where the apprentices often rampaged, and where such dubious element came to roost as jugglers and bawds and profligate noblemen attracted by the bear pits, the bawdy houses, the gambling in the taverns.

A roar rose from that night life down on the street, a threat like that from the serpent in the garden that, having slept all hot, livelong day beneath a moist, dark rock, rises and strikes and, with maddened force, seeks out some to tempt and some to kill.

But to Kit all the roar and the noise of the nightlife was as nothing, no, less than nothing -- the twittering of birds, in a garden far away, far removed from him in both time and space.

He heard nothing, and he saw nothing, save the quick steps inside the room, the shadow that obscured the small window, the vague shape of a face that shone through the distorting glass.

He knew that the person in there was Silver, Will having left. There was no escaping from it.

And Kit wondered how he looked through that glass, to Silver’s magic eyes. As dirty as the glass looked, a human would have had to open the window to look out. But an elf would see differently. What could an elf see? In his short time with Silver, Kit had learned that the elf could stop the rain from wetting them or command the trees not to rustle in the wind. What else could she not do?

Kit heard an exclamation from inside, too muffled and distant for him to be sure it had been anything more than a voice.

Too early to tell what form the elf took. It didn’t matter. Marlowe’s heart, once given, had been given to both forms and he felt as helpless to withdraw it from the possession of one as he’d been to give it to the other.

The door opened.

Silver stood there, the elf’s female form, her black hair falling unfettered down her back, every strand seemingly charmed into place. And her broad silver skirt had been slashed to display a diaphanous white fabric beneath, that revealed , in its transparency, the length of Silver’s white legs. That inner gown that, beneath her bodice, cloaked her arms in long sleeves, was yet so molding, so transparent, that he could see all of her revealed, save for the narrow waist hid beneath the silver bodice. And that mattered little as her breasts, rounded and pale like twin moons rising above a silver sea, were more than half exposed, rising with her every deeply drawn breath that matched Kit’s own aching, slow, painful breaths, and played a dancing tune to Kit’s mad, beating heart.

“Kit,” she said, her voice little more than a breath, taken by the wind as soon as it was pronounced. “After all this time! Kit.”

He touched her hand. In touching it she trembled.

Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled. These lovers parled by the touch of hands. True love is mute, and oft amazed stands.

Thus, while dumb signs their silent hearts entangled, the air with sparks of living fire was entangled.

Kit’s breath, drawn, brought him her perfume. Her perfume swelled his heart in further breath. Not knowing why, nor how, nor when, they closed the door behind them and, still no more touching than their hands met, stumbled inside the dim, shabby room.

“I thought you away,” she said then, still rushed and wind-driven, as if passion pushed breath and hurried it through the red lips. “I thought -- ”

He touched her lips with his, not so much kissing her as a pilgrim acknowledging his reaching the shrine of his desire. “Away?”

“Away from London. In Lord Thomas Walsingham’s estate. Scagmore. I thought you living there and away, and safe, from all the madness that might come.”

But Kit, his ears love-stopped, heard no more than that she’d informed herself of his place of residence, and known, known with certainty where he should be at this time. That was enough, that was plenty.

He’d never thought she’d have allowed a stray thought to venture his way, and here she was, confessing that she knew his current state.

He kissed and kissed, and again he kissed, those lips of whose taste he’d dreamed, those lips like liquor that no mortal vine could ever equal.

With his love he assayed her, till in his twining arms he locked her fast, and then he wooed with kisses and, at last, her on the bed he lay, and, tumbling upon the mattress, he often strayed beyond the bonds of shame, being bold.

And craving, joint craving ignited, that which, lonely, might have stayed itself for eternity. It ruled them and held sway.

The mattress protested beneath them, the bed shrieked and complained like the much-abused thing it was.

Kit, surrounded by the lilac smell of faerie kind, her taste on his tongue, the smoothness of her skin traveling like alcohol through his own skin into his veins, to intoxicate his brain, thought to die and knew he lived, and knowing he lived knew he died of bliss.

Why did he love this creature and no other?

Why this elf, this fleeting creature of moonlight and shadows and deep forest? Why this creature, neither man nor woman -- neither and both -- and not a mortal chained by the thrall of time?

Why love here, not elsewhere?

Why one especially does the heart affect, of two gold ingots, like in each respect?

No more was there an answer to this riddle than to Kit’s heart-pounding, driving need.

The reason for it all, no man knows. Let it suffice that what we behold is censured by our eyes. Where both deliberate, love is slight.

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

Scene Twelve

Will disembarks from the ferry on the river shore in front of a grand house -- the townhouse of the earl of Southampton. Two iron gates stand open to a small quay, and past them, broad marble stairs disappear into the green shade of a large garden. At the quay someone in rich livery -- presumably a footman -- waits. He steps forward as Will is delivered to the quay.

Will stepped out of the river-crossing barge, glad to be on solid ground once more. Keeping his balance on the flat-bottomed boat had made him feel nauseous and he could well tell that the ferryman, a small, rodent-faced creature, wondered what business such a man as Shakespeare could have in this place.

And yet, Will had put on his best suit -- dark velvet, hardly mended at all -- although mended by the hand of his Nan who’d never been fully conversant with needle and thread.

Beneath the suit, his best shirt, with a broad collar, neither as fine nor surely as expensive as Kit Marlowe’s, and yet the best Will had ever owned.

But the ferryman looked at him oddly and even when Will handed over his money -- and a shocking price it was to ferry someone across the river -- the man no more than doffed his hat and grumbled something.

No bowing at the legs, no whisper of thanks. No. Well, he must know that Will was no gentleman, much less a nobleman such as most who visited here.

Will turned his back on him, and, climbing the stairs all in a rush, started towards the house that could barely be seen through the trees: a giant structure of stone, not like the humble wattle and daub Shakespeare house. And yet, beholding the house, thus, through the trees, Will remembered his dream and his house, seen from the bottom of his parents’ garden.

In that dream as in this moment, some windows of the distant building sparkled with the reflected light of distant candles. In that dream as in this, Will was alone at the bottom of the peaceful garden, while storm clouds gathered above.

Well, at least here he was not wholly alone.

The footman in sparkling blue and silver velvet livery spared him a look and a raised eyebrow.

“I’m Master William Shakespeare,” Will said, feeling his voice break and crack, and feeling heartily ashamed of himself. If he could not face the footman, how could he face the lord? “Master Richard Field, the printer, has recommended me to your master and he -- ”

“Ah, one of the players,” The footman said, disdain dripping from every syllable. “You may go.”

As Shakespeare went he saw, drawn up on either side of the long walk, carriages ready and equipped with horses, to welcome other guests more refined and less likely to be sent wandering down this dusty drive.

Thinking this, Will wished to laugh at himself, at his pretensions. Would he be received by nobility as if of equal birth?

Ah, fool Will, the grammar school graduate, the country boy of Stratford, the foolish poet.

Was Will even a poet? Or just a fool who thought that he could rhyme?

He thought of Marlowe, and Marlowe’s easy jest on the subject of dreams. Oh, to have a way with words, to use language like that. Oh, it would almost be worth one’s mortal soul.

Walking the dusty drive, beneath the whispering trees, he heard dogs bark in the distance and stayed, for a moment, every sense alert, every gesture stopped, listening with straying ear and fearful sense for the sound of a hunting horn. But the horn didn’t sound and Will laughed an uneasy laugh that echoed hollowly back to him in the still air.

The bark came from many dogs, each with a different sound but none had the primal, blood-chilling bark of the Hunter’s dogs. This was a noble house, after all, and the dogs would be the lord’s kennels.

He wondered what this Southampton would be like. Richard Field had said he inclined to the theater. Will remembered hearing Lord Strange say that Henry Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton was both very rich and very young and no more foolish than those two circumstances warrant, whatever that meant in Lord Strange’s sometimes cryptic parlance.

Will looked at those lit squares in the night, those lights shining where the house windows were and tried to imagine going into that house. He’d go into that house, and be snubbed by countless footmen, and perhaps handed on and on to see the lord.

And then, what would he say to this young, rich and only vaguely foolish gentleman?

Will remembered his audience with Lord Strange, much too well.

How Marlowe had laughed at Will’s laboriously worked poem. Will’s face warmed up at the memory.

Since then Will had written his three plays that no one, save him remembered. Henry VI, Richard III, and the blood-soaked Titus Andronicus, his attempt at stealing the spotlight from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine.

But the truth was, the truth was, the theater company had only wanted Will’s plays when there was no new one of Marlowe’s.

Will trudged along the walk, in the dark, his feet weighing much too much, his mind heavy with self-doubt.

The sound of hooves behind him made him turn, in time to behold a carriage heading towards him. He jumped, deeper into the shade of the giant oaks on either side of the walk. Just in time to avoid the wheels of the carriage, that nonetheless splattered him with dirt clods. Sighing, Will dusted his good velvet suit, as he walked forward.

Why didn’t he turn and go back now? Why didn’t he leave?

Will knew his poetry to be bad, or, if not bad, so lackluster that no nobleman would want to give him money to pursue it.

What was the use and why not return to Stratford, to the glover trade, to Nan’s arms?

Something in him rebelled and stood up and said that only had he Marlowe’s mastery of the language and of the forms and fashions of the ancients as understood by today’s scholars, Will would fare better than even Marlowe himself. Had Will not more of an understanding of the human heart?

He thought of Marlowe’s smirk and sighed, impatient. Well, Will had, at least, a human heart, while Marlowe was nothing more than words, words fashioned into man, expensively suited, walking abroad in the light of the day. He was one such, nothing more.

If you boiled Marlowe down to his words, what would you find behind, but more words?

And if Will could indeed boil Marlowe down, and reduce him to words, perhaps that potion would give Will the nimble-footed meter he needed to woo Lords and impress them with his agile tongue.

He was thinking so, resentment towards Marlowe flaring, when -- ahead -- a form appeared, made of air and woven of moonlight, a form clear and yet ethereal, immaterial and yet dark like lost dreams. Sylvanus. Once the king of faerie land.

“One more chance, Will, one more chance,” the voice that was no voice spoke in Will’s mind. “One more chance to grasp at your desire. But take me to your heart, good Will, and I will give you those winged words you long for.”

The smell and taste of graveyard clay came with the voice, and the rank odor of this, the worm’s final banquet, penetrated Will’s skin and mouth, stopped his nostrils, put a dampening effect on the other sounds his ears perceived: the rustling of the trees overhead, the clinking of glasses and soft laughter from within the house.

Will took a deep, shuddering breath.

He’d been wrong, after all, and how many times need he prove himself wrong? He’d not give all for a gift of words. Even he didn’t crave poetry all that much. No. Will would succeed himself, of himself, or not at all.

“No,” he spoke, sure that what he saw was no more than hallucination. “No. Not were you as fair as the angels and as good. I’ll do it on my own or not at all.”

“Oh, but it would be on your own. You and I would be one, linked forever. A touch of magic, a wish of faerieland upon your mortal bones, making you more than you will ever be,” the shape spoke out of a darker shadow within woods.

But the odor and feel of the thing were rank and gross and the thought of being one with this corruption brought bitter bile to Will’s throat. He shook his head, and in shaking it he ran, down the drive, all the way to where the carriage was letting out a passel of guests. Forgetting himself, Will ran past the guests, and all the way up the staircase, only to meet with a handsome valet in blue livery, who bowed slightly to him and said, “Sir?”

“I am no Sir,” he said, out of breath. “I am no Sir. Just Will. Will Shakespeare. A player. I would wish to be a play maker, and my friend Richard Fielding has spoken for me to his Lordship the earl and -- ”

“Ah, Shakespeare,” a voice spoke from the dazzle of light that was the interior of the vast salon into which the door opened. A figure walked from that dazzle of light that so confused Will’s dark-adapted eyes that he could not tell details nor size of the salon, nor even how many people attended -- nothing, really, save that it was brightly lit.

For a moment, still half-blinded, Will thought it was Quicksilver.

As his eyes adjusted, he realized that what he saw was actually a human, younger and, perforce, less perfect than the lord of faerieland. And yet, in his features, and in the blond hair carefully combed over his left shoulder, he resembled Quicksilver entire.

It was this resemblance, disquieting but familiar and soothing at once, that reminded Will he had, once before, faced royalty without trembling.

That certainty steadied his voice when, moments later, the earl said, “Recite us some of your poetry, good Shakespeare.”

Unable to think of anything, unable to remember any of his carefully polished poems he had labored over and crafted for months on end, Will was for a moment mute.

Then he thought of what Marlowe had said about a tragic fate and mythical lovers, and thought of people loved by the gods. Out of all this, lines appeared, plucked entire from his frantic, panicked mind.

He heard himself say with unwonted assurance, “I have but a few lines of a poem I’ve been working on, your Lordship.... Thinking of making it a gift to you, if you should like it.” He cleared his throat and his voice swelled and for a moment he wondered if the words he used were truly his or if somehow he had accepted the foul bargain of the creature outside, without meaning to. It was so strange for him to speak like this, poetry pouring from his lips, unthought. “Even as the sun, with purple-colored face, had taken his last leave of the weeping morn, rose cheeked Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved but love he laughed to scorn; Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him, and like a bold-faced suitor ‘gins to woo him.”

Then the words swept even him along, and he could do no more than follow with his mind, as his lips spoke on, and the entire audience listened in silence that, for once, betrayed no amusement and no scorn, “Stain to all the nymphs, more lovely than a man; more white and red than doves or roses are....”

Nothing mattered, except the words.

Scene Thirteen

The throne room, in the faerie palace. Ariel sits on the throne. With the other, vacant throne by her side, she looks scared and small, like a child wearing adult clothes, or sitting in furniture too large for her frame. She faces the centaurs. On either side of the throne, the fine Lords, the delicate ladies of faerieland stand, dressed in their finery.

There was something rotten in faerieland.

Ariel could feel it, palpable, harsh, within the throne room. A tension of expectancy or dread knit the elven gentlemen in groups and made the fans of the elven ladies move as fast as dragon fly wings, while the ladies’ mouths, no doubt, moved the same way behind those agitated plumes and painted cloth.

Yet, Ariel had no idea what was causing the tension, and felt her back stiffen against the unknown. Her shoulders ached, as if her fine mantle and her crown weighed of a sudden much more than they’d ever done.

She glanced at the empty throne beside her. Odd how she missed Quicksilver; his presence, his support.

She’d always thought she could take on his job, unaided. But now she missed having him to lean upon. And, thinking that, she almost smiled, for who was Quicksilver that she should lean upon him? She might as well lean upon flowing water, rest her hope on the inconstant stream.

Hylas, the head of the centaur delegation, advanced to the center of the room, and stood on the red carpet that led to the throne, awaiting Ariel’s notice.

Today he displayed hammered gold bracelets and a heavy sort of pectoral. As always, Malachite stood beside the centaur, his hand upon his sword handle, as if fearing the centaur would try to overpower Malachite’s sovereign.

Ariel wanted to give her attention to what the centaur said, but she felt her head swim.

Even from here, she could swear she smelled Hylas’ heavy, animal stench.

For a moment her sight dimmed and she glimpsed the dark wolf creature darting amid the silk skirts of the elven ladies and the well-trimmed velvet breeches of the elven lords.

“Milady, are you well?” Malachite, stepped up the throne steps, extending a hand towards Ariel’s harm. “Lady?”

Ariel nodded, though even Malachite swam on and off focus, and her vision dimmed and put spots where it shouldn’t. For the barest of moments Malachite seemed to have a wolf’s head, like that Egyptian god it was, long ago, who’d devoured the souls of the unrighteous dead.

“I am well,” she said. “Passing well. My majesty would hear the delegate Hylas again.”

“What I said is simple,” said the centaur. “And what I told your husband I will say to you.” He smiled at her, an animal smile, all glimmering teeth and harsh stare. “It is simple as a simple, which, as you know is the name for a remedy brewed of herbs and such, which can cure illness. To cure the illness of the land, milady, you must give Centuria to the centaurs.”

“But the land you speak of is not Centuria,” Ariel said, expounding in the same way she wished her husband had, the night before. But where Quicksilver could make anything sound plausible, Ariel’s voice came out small, tiny, appearing to turn on and off, like her sight. “Before ever the centaurs came there, there were the pixies, and the dwarves, and others who lived on that land.”

The centaur grinned. “Why should your strong majesty care for such weak races?” His smile tried to draw a parallel between himself and Ariel -- both strong, capable beings.

It made Ariel’s nausea worse to think about it. Had she, then, been such an arrogant creature that this thing should think them alike?

Hylas went on, mercilessly. “Those races were nothing and they’ve folded before our onslaught like grass bending before a strong wind.”

Her strong majesty. Ariel clasped both hands on the harms of her throne. She’d thought herself strong, and Quicksilver a weak and foolish man, but sitting in her throne, next to his empty one, the power and decision resting with her, she wasn’t so sure.

Her impulse was to stop Hylas’ insolence, to send him flying hence, to send the faerie armies after the centaurs.

But would the faerie armies go if she sent them?

She looked at Malachite out of the corner of her eye. She could now see his face clearly, but she couldn’t see any warlike intent in his features, except sort of a peaked excitement, a narrow-eyed intentness.

Did Quicksilver do this? Did he thus observe Malachite and thus weigh, the eagerness of his commander for the battle field? Did Quicksilver likewise decide even Malachite, for all his words, wasn’t eager enough? And if the commander wasn’t eager, then who would be?

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.

“Come 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.

There Silver had sat, and there reclined, offering her tender, white body to his mercies. Where that wrinkle, there, folded the sheet over, she had pulled away and laughed at his too-rough attentions. And there, there, where the imprint of her body still marked the mattress, he’d cupped her breasts in his hands, and straddled her soft body.

And all for naught.

“Is all my hope turned to this hell of grief?” he asked aloud, in bitter, querulous tones born of his pain on behalf of that poor Kit who still seemed to Kit’s confused emotions to be someone else, some poor, deluded fool he hardly knew. “On seeing you after all these years, I thought, fool that I am, that you remembered me, that you had cared, cared enough to know where I lived and what I did after that cursed day when you pushed me, ice cold, from your sight.”

He fastened his shirt, whichever way, then pulled his doublet on and started buttoning it, noticing halfway through that the button was in the wrong hole, and that the doublet pulled askew on his body, rising at a tilted angle at his neck and protruding oddly below his waist.

It didn’t matter. His hair -- he forbore to even run his fingers through it, matted and tangled as it must be -- and instead, concentrated on keeping the snivel from his voice, the catch from his breath, the tears from his eyes. He was a man, and damn it, no longer the boy of seventeen who’d cried shamelessly at first losing his elven love. Men must forego the consolation of tears.

It was the only pride he had left, and a sore-tested pride it was. The unthinkable thought had come and installed itself in Kit’s brain, and he would speak it though he died in uttering the words.

“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 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, the glory that could be made something of on stage.

“He’s 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 the words, Kit had realized how he envied those young men who, indeed, had something to go back to in the country.

What should Kit do, and where be if he attempted such? His father’s cobbler shop was closed to him. From the age of ten or eleven when he should have been learning leathers and cuts and how to fit a shoe to an unwieldy foot, he’d spent his time with Latin and poetry and abstruse theological argument.

As for his spying work....

Well, and a fine thing that was. An avocation born in blood, to which he’d come like Judas by turning in his friends and those who’d thought to do him good.

It had continued in blood, too. Step by step, by insensible step, like a man that stumbles in the dark down an unknown alley, Kit had grown numb to the thought of all those people -- one minute alive and breathing and happy in their estate, and burning with their faith or with their beliefs -- the next minute bleeding under the torturer’s tools, or hanged high up on the gallows -- in Tyburn, and Westminster and, aye, even in Paul’s yard.

All so that Kit could live and have fine garments and play the gentleman.

Now, himself betrayed, feeling low and empty of purpose, Kit fancied that each of his victims’ long-dead eyes were turned to him in an accusing glare.

There was Peter Watson, ascetic Peter, who’d gone to Rheims and come back as a preaching Jesuit, only to be caught because Marlowe had denounced him as going to Rheims.

His dark eyes seemed to glare at Marlowe out of his faith-consumed countenance.

And there was John Whateley, still lost somewhere, still evading the law that would have his life for being a papist.

And William Cox, a puritan of extremist leanings, hanged and disemboweled because Kit had accused him of partiality for the king of Scotland. Had Cox actually said aught to justify being turned in?

Kit couldn’t even remember it, anymore.

Oh, curse the day Kit had come to London. Curse the day he’d earned a scholarship to Cambridge. Curse the petty schoolmaster who had singled him out for his intelligence and quick wit and told Kit’s father that here was a son who could be more than a cobbler or an honest burgher.

But most of all curse the day, that damned day, when Kit had first seen Silver in the closed, abandoned garden of that manor house in Canterbury. That garden that Quicksilver had told him was a remnant of the primeval forest and, as such, had an equivalent, a parallel in faerieland, where Quicksilver lived.

Bitter with dejection he stood, looking at Quicksilver’s taut back, wanting to touch his shoulder and ask fully why, or yet to cry and snivel and go down on his knees and beg -- plead -- for one more hour, one more minute, one more pretense of affection.

What else had Kit to live for? For the theater? The theater, indeed. For poetry? Sometimes theater and poetry both seemed to him a vain pastime, something he did to recapture in the weak magic of words the voice of Silver, her smile, the smell of her magic body, the movement of their love, so long ago. And that too was vain.

“Is it Will you love?” he asked, this time plainly, his voice even to his own ears cold and emotionless, like the voice of one long dead who comes back to ask the cause of his murder.

And Quicksilver, his back turned, spoke as if from a long distance off, in words dried and cold-cut, like a long cooked and cooled piece of mutton, with all its grease congealed upon it, unappetizing and solid and gagging to the taste. “I am no longer a Prince, Kit, nor a youth. I’ve come of age within my own sphere, and 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 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 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 making sure a child’s attire answered to the rules of proper appearance.

Looking up at Kit’s face, he started a smile that turned to an intent frown. “Go, you fool, go, before you force me to commit I don’t know what madness. 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 wouldn’t let him stay because he wished him safe. 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, quietly. “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.”

Like that, the elf marched to the door, in easy strides of his long legs, and opened it wide, and displayed a swath of night outside, a dark night lit only by the blood-tinged brilliance of the full moon.

Kit, feeling as though he floated above his body -- above this poor Kit who had been sent away like a starving child dismissed from a banquet -- walked through the threshold and out the door, all the while not knowing how his legs supported him, or how his heart didn’t break.

All too soon he found himself outside, on the narrow, unprotected landing at the top of the rickety wooden stairs.

From beneath came laughter and song; the sound of voices, male and female and all ages laughing and shouting and enjoining each other to greater madness, snatching heartily at a second’s pleasure, no matter what it might cost in pain and sorrow later.

Kit looked at the sturdy oak door closed behind him and at the little window, near it. But the window was closed and not a shadow hinted that the elf looked through it.

Kit thought if only he could have made himself as pleasant to Quicksilver -- in his male form -- as he was to Silver, maybe he’d not have got dismissed. He’d thought he accepted Quicksilver well enough, yet maybe this dual creature noticed a chill, a coolness towards him. Maybe that was why --

And for a moment, Marlowe hesitated, his hand poised to knock at the door and a thousand different apologies running through his mind.

Shaking his head, he lowered his hand, turned away. No. No. Kit loved Quicksilver much as he could, with his mortal nature. And Quicksilver perforce knew that. So, while Kit could not believe the talk of dark forces, something other must keep him away from the elf he loved well.

“And yet,” he told himself. “I love in vain, he’ll never love me.”

Starting down the stairs, he looked down at the unprotected left side, down which, if he were to throw himself, he might find swift death upon landing on the hard ground below.

From where he stood, death seemed like a wonderful rest. No more to fear the rack and the torments of the torturer. No more to think of the family in which he no longer fit, of his lost honor and the myriad betrayals that had kept him alive in the dangerous world of politics where two religions warred for supremacy. No more thinking of love.

He stared at that abyss there, at his left side, and yet lacked the strength, the power to jump. “Death ends all, and I can die but once,” he told himself.

Yet that once seemed so final. No more a chance of crossing paths with Silver, no more a chance to enjoy wine and silk and pleasant accommodation. No more, at Scagmore, Sir Thomas Walsingham’s estate, to enjoy the company of nobility, the praise they bestowed on Kit, his pleasure in it.

It would not happen. Kit could no more kill himself now than had he been able to when Quicksilver had first turned him away in hasty sorrow.

No. He must find Will and know from Will’s mouth exactly what Quicksilver meant by dark forces, and what kept Quicksilver from staying with Kit. Was it true that Quicksilver was married and a king?

Would Will know? Well, it stood to reason Will knew something.

With a pang, Kit remembered the way Silver had leaned upon Will’s shoulder.

Oh, Will knew enough and Kit would soon find out what that was. And if he found that Will stood as the sole obstacle to Kit’s possessing of Quicksilver and Silver, the elf’s heart and soul, then may Will be protected by those gods who turned a deaf ear to Kit’s pleas.

At the bottom of the stairs, Kit hesitated. Shakestaff had dined with the earl of Southampton. He would soon be coming home. Kit would to the strand, and there wait for the barge to dock that brought Will to his reckoning.

With light step, he started, plastering a smile upon his face. But beneath his smile and the careless walk, his heart was an anvil for sorrow, which beat upon it like Cyclops hammers, and with the noise turned his giddy brain and made him frantic.

In such a mood, he went to search for Wagglance.

Scene Fifteen

Will disembarks from the ferry. It’s late at night and the strand is deserted. If furtive figures move in the darkness, by the row of warehouses at the edges of the quay, they’re the sort of figures no one would wish to go near: there’s a suggestion of the furtiveness of thieves, the light stepping of assassins about them. Will pays the ferry man and gets out.

From the moon, suspended at the very top of its nightly arc, it must be midnight or nearing it.

Even in Southwark, it would be getting quiet, as the fine gentlemen went back to their homes, their beds and their wives, and the bawds back to their houses.

Will felt tired, pleasantly tired with just the slightest edge of wine-befuddled satisfaction.

Those words. Those golden words that had flowed, irrepressible from his lips, in front of all the fine gentleman, the earl himself.

Will had never been that eloquent. Never had he found his voice like that. It was as though his voice were a newborn lamb, unsteady and insecure in its footing, that all of a sudden, on a patch of sun and sweet meadow grass finds his footing and runs with the freedom of a wild thing, amid the sweet spring grass, the heavenly flowers.

He grinned to himself. How his poetry had changed his standing too. How the fine lords had suddenly vied to be the ones to talk to him, to ask his opinions.

And the Earl had asked him to the banquet table, and sat beside him. The earl -- that noble creature who looked so much like the king of faerieland.

Will shook his head.

Yet now, as he walked amid the warehouse shadows, setting his feet on the alley that would take him home, to his room and well-deserved rest, the glow of warmth and triumph ebbed away from Will.

Little by little, amid the rank smells of urine and cheap ale, surrounded by dark warehouses, Will started feeling cold.

Like a breeze blown out of an icy place, the thought came: where did the words come from?

Will shook his head and smiled, and tried to quiet the thought down with easy assurances, such as would quiet Hamnet down when he woke up from a nightmare. The words had come from Will’s own mind, from his poetic dreams, his lofty aspirations, ever before confined by Stratford and his own lack of confidence, but which now were allowed, at long last, to fly in company that would understand them.

And yet he couldn’t quite believe it. It had been too easy. The words had flowed too easily, like sweet wine from a breached cask.

What if they’d come from the wolf -- Sylvanus -- from whatever evil power the dark creature commanded, that same power that had promised fame and fortune and sweet poetry to Will?

He shook his head. Around him, the shadows seemed to deepen, the dank smells to grow grosser in their overpowering assault upon his nostrils. They flowed to his throat, choking him.

Will shook his head. No and no and no. There was no ill gift in these words. No gift but his own, the one he’d been born with, and woven in strings of words and poetry ever since he’d been a tike tall enough to crawl after his mother through the Stratford garden.

Will remembered, when still learning to talk, how the sound of a string of words would transfix him, how the rhythm of words, pronounced and strung and played over and over in his head, would enchant him as much as shiny baubles dangled before his eyes.

And what was poetry but that enchantment, grown up and dressed in some learning, and taken out to be displayed in the world of noblemen and scholars?

Yes, but why had Will never been able to do it before, to create golden poetry, without a thought to either rhythm or rhyme? Where had that sudden confidence come from, that sudden knowledge? Had his sheer terror at finding himself among lofty nobles made him forget all but poetry?

Or could the words have come from a power Will feared? And what would the price be, that Will was sure he did not want to pay?

And yet he swore to himself it couldn’t be, he told himself he was a fool, a pathetic fool, a foolish fool, such as Nan used to call him. If Nan were here she would tell him, she would tell him he was frightening himself silly, of the nothing and the shadows and his own incompetence.

But when he tried this newfound power, when he tried to find new words to clothe new thoughts, they edged away from him, they melted into that very darkness, those very shadows. Like children frightened of a stern power, they slid sideways, away from Will’s searching mind, and went to play elsewhere.

He grasped for them with desperate thoughts, and called for them with a relentless mind, and they were there no more. No more. Which meant only that they could have come from elsewhere, been someone else’s servants, not his own.

A drop of sweat slid down the center of his spine like a gelid finger, and he trembled as he walked down the middle of the alley, where it was lighter. The alley was so narrow that were Will to hold his hands out, his arms fully extended, he could have touched the walls on either side.

And not a light anywhere, not a light, not a solitary candle in the upper floors, lighting the vigil of the workmen, the secrets of the magician, the work of the bawd. Not a single lantern swinging in the wind.

Dark dismal‑dreaming night.

Will felt as if he were the only man in the world, walking through the dark chaos before the first divine word was ever uttered that put the sun in the sky and the light in the day.

When the shadow detached itself from the greater darkness near the wall on his left, Will jumped. He jumped back and knit his back with the wall on the right.

His heart pounded and his ears whistled, and he thought, if he thought at all, that this was Sylvanus come to collect Will’s life in exchange for his gift to Will -- come to demand payment for Will’s words, so roundly displayed before noble company.

But the shadow was man shaped and too short, too slight, to be Sylvanus’ dark majesty. Instead of graveyard clay and the smell of long-buried flesh, the smell that came from this creature was a perfume mingled with an indefinable smell of lilacs -- almost like Silver’s smell -- but layered over with good human sweat, the sweat of exertion, the reek of a closed bedroom.

The creature was breathed heavy, as no elf had ever breathed. It breathed heavily but with a catch, as if breath were caught upon grief and on it hung like a tattered sigh, almost becoming a sob but stopping short of it. Before the corner of grief was turned, the sob stopped and turned to that heavy, labored breathing once more.

Realizing that the thing he faced was mortal so relieved Will that he almost laughed. It was a man, nothing but a man. A common cut purse, an assassin.

Will smiled thinking that two months -- nay, two nights -- ago would he have frozen with terror and quaked at the thought of facing a cut-throat from London’s underworld.

But, compared with a supernatural being, what could a cut throat be? Weighed on the same scale, the cutthroat and Sylvanus with all his supernatural evil, the cutthroat would perforce appear almost gentle, and somewhat pleasing to the eye and mood.

He could kill Will’s body, but not his soul. Nor could his killing Will set the spheres on their way to colliding destruction, nor cloud the future of those who were still children -- in faraway Stratford. Their mother would look after them, and their uncles and their aunt. Will’s loss would go unremarked, except for Nan’s memories of him.

Will thought like that and it seemed as if he stood there a long time waiting for the other man to spring, standing with his back against a dank, dark door, that must have been painted once but was now only paint chips and splintered wood. Will let his arms hang by his side, set his palms back against the door and minimally moved his feet apart, braced to spring whichever way was needed.

Will’s would-be-attacker didn’t move. He stood across the alley from Will and made a sound that might have been a hastily suppressed sob.

He crouched, just slightly, bending his knees in the easy pose of the experienced fighter, and his shoulders stooped forward, just the slightest bit. Something metallic glinted in his hands.

A knife or a dagger, Will thought, and yet couldn’t command himself to fear.

The knife wielder would spring; the knife would be thrust at Will. This Will knew, and yet didn’t worry. In the space of mind to which he had retreated, these were banal, trivial threats, and he was certain of having the speed, the presence of mind to evade them.

Time seemed to slow, or hence his mind to speed up, so that everything happened very slowly, like a snail crawling on a green leaf in the sunlight.

Will saw the cutthroat shift his weight, so that it rested on the ball of his more advanced foot, and then he saw the man lunge. All of it took place, as it were, remotely, and so slowly, that Will had time not only to side-step the blow but slowly, seemingly so slowly, to extend his hand, to grab the advanced wrist that held the knife and -- in a maneuver he didn’t have the time to think out, but that his body seemed to know by itself -- twist that wrist with quick, vicious force.

The man yelped and dropped his knife.

The knife fell, with seeming slowness, and hit the hard packed dirt of the alley with a sharp metallic sound.

Only then did Will’s mind catch up with his body. Only then did he realize that the sleeve he had held was fine linen, soft and delicate to the touch -- not the normal attire of ruffians.

Only then did Will catch, from the glimpses afforded by scant light in this dark place, enough of his attacker’s features to find them familiar.

Good God, it looked....

Will took a deep breath, unable to accept what his brain told him about this man. And yet, the oval face, the small nose, the fine linen beneath his fingers, the tone in which the man had yelped his pain, all of it put Will in mind of Marlowe.

But what would Marlowe be doing here, in this dark place upon such a misguided mission as attacking Will? Why here and why Will?

Oh, Will didn’t think Marlowe was sound. He’d heard from many men before that Marlowe was an habitue of the street brawl, a frequenter of taverns where bawdy love was purchased cheaply and men got killed; a dealer in dark death and sudden betrayal, a man well adept at giving men private injuries.

But why Will? Surely Will was small enough, unimportant enough, far away enough from Marlowe’s ambitious reach not to be the bout of such an attack? And what could he ever have done to provoke such a formidable foe? Did Marlowe envy Will his poetry? Will almost laughed.

“Marlowe?” he asked.

The shadow man didn’t answer, except to try to force his body forward, pressing Will away from the fallen dagger, all the while attempting to stoop, to retrieve the weapon.

And there, Kit Marlowe might be the more experienced fighter, but Will was heavier, and stronger, and, despite the wine he’d drunk, seemingly the more emotionally unencumbered.

This close up, holding Marlowe’s wrist, Will realized that the other man cried. He cried quietly, like a child scolded once too often, and his tears were invisible in this darkness. And yet his grief was unmistakable from the rhythm of his breathing, from his sudden intakes of breath just as suddenly stifled, from his gasps and the slight tremble that shook the whole, long, limber body.

Like that, thus impaired, he could no more resist Will than could a child. Wrapped in his own grief, he was too slow to react, when Will grabbed both his shoulders, and, in a movement Will had not used since his schoolboy brawls, a long time ago in Stratford, pushed at Marlowe, with all the force of Will’s body behind it.

Will slammed him against the wall with sudden violence.

Marlowe lost balance, and fell back under the impact, and hit the wall full force, and gasped harder, and, for a moment, appeared to loose whatever strength had held him up.

Just a moment, and his body sagged, and he seemed, like a puppet whose strings are cut, to have no will and no power.

In that moment, Will advanced again, and grabbed Marlowe’s wrists, and, lifting his knee, slammed it full force into Marlowe’s private parts.

Marlowe bellowed and went down on his knees, and Will stepped back, and picked up the dagger from the mud, and held it uncertainly. He’d brawled with his fists and his feet, but he’d never before used a dagger on a man.

Yet, this time, Will had defended himself without thought. Or at least with no more thought than it takes to reach for a spot that itches. He had some idea, somewhere, that he must injure Marlowe to stop him from attacking him.

Now thought returned and Will realized what he had done, and part of him doubted that Marlowe would ever have meant violence towards him, and that part demanded that Will help his fellow playwright whom he admired.

Marlowe still knelt on the dirt, and held the offended part of his anatomy, and made a sound something like a low keening.

“Kit Marlowe?” Will asked. His voice sounded uncertain to his own ears. “Have I injured you?” he asked, and thought in asking it how stupid it sounded, for surely, surely, he’d injured Marlowe. He could tell that easily enough from Marlowe’s position and his high complaining.

At the sound of Will’s voice, Marlowe attempted to stand up, and tried to lunge at Will, in a half-crouch.

This man had no idea when he had enough.

Will stuck Marlowe’s dagger into the sheath with his own dagger and stepped back, balled his hand into a solid fist, and threw the fist forward, to catch Marlowe full on the jaw.

No time to think, once more, till the moment was past, and Marlowe had stopped, stock still, shaking his head.

Then did Will realize that Marlowe must mean it, really mean it. For some reason, Kit Marlowe wished to kill Will Shakespeare.

“What have I done, that you come at me so?” Will asked. “When have I ever injured you?”

This time, though he braced himself for the attack, his words didn’t incite Marlowe to violence.

Instead the playwright stepped back and lifted his face so that it caught fully in a beam of reddish moonlight coming between two tall buildings.

Will saw, as he had suspected, the traces of tears, moon-bright, down Marlowe’s face, and the swollen lips, the ravaged look of one who’s cried long, unguardedly.

He also saw surprise, or confusion, or something like a slow puzzlement dawning on Marlowe’s face.

Marlowe swallowed, then swallowed again, and when he spoke his voice sounded high and reedy and unguarded. “You ask what you have done?”

Will nodded. “Aye, I ask, for I do not know.”

Marlowe arched his eyebrows in disbelief. “My love,” he said, and stopped.

Will felt his eyes widening in shock. He’d heard rumors about Marlowe, but surely, surely the words didn’t mean what Marlowe seemed to say. Even Marlowe couldn’t be that insane.

And there Marlowe caught breath again, and took it in, seemingly expanding his chest to accept that much air, and swallowed again, and half sighed, and cleared his throat and spoke, closer to his normal voice, “Oh, you, foul thief, what have you done with my love? Damned as you are, you have enchanted her, for I’ll refer me to all things of sense, if she is in chains of magic not bound, whether a maid so tender, fair and happy, would ever have, to incur a general mock, run into the provincial arms of such a man as you.” Marlowe took a deep breath, again, and seemed to explode in words as fresh tears erupted from his unguarded eyes. “Judge me the world if ‘tis not gross in sense, that you have practiced on her with foul charms, that weaken notion.”

Genuinely baffled, Will stepped back and braced for further attack. “You’ve drunk too much ale,” he said. “Or else are your senses addled with moon madness. Of what do you speak?”

“Of my love,” Marlowe said, and though he spoke in a low voice, yet it seemed to Will that he wailed. “Whom you have stolen from me.”

“Friend Marlowe,” Will said. “I know not by what false report you understood this, nor what manner of creature has thought to send you against me by these means, but I have stolen no love, yours or anyone’s. I love no one, save only my own lady, Nan, at home in Stratford....”

A brief thought of Silver, in the room, of his lust for her, made Will flinch from so bold a statement, and yet he spoke true and knew it in speaking it. For Nan’s sake had Will resisted Silver’s blandishments. “And unless you aspire to her favor -- in which case I hope to stand firm as her lord should, I -- ”

He could go no further. Marlowe’s face, ravaged by grief and marked by shock, changed aspect. His eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open, then his eyes half-shut, his mouth smiled, and a dry cackle rose out his throat, like the sound of a creature surprised at itself. “The good wife?” he asked. “Oh, but that’s rich.”

“Rich or poor, she’s the only one I got, and tell me not I’ve trifled with some fine lady, or with the wife of some nobleman, or whatever women move in those circles to which you aspire, Kit Marlowe, for I’ve none of it, and well you know.”

Marlowe stopped laughing as abruptly as he’d begun, and opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it on the words unuttered. After a while he took in breath, and said, “Maybe you’re right, and maybe I was ill informed. Who am I to doubt what you so earnestly say?” Standing in the street, he composed himself, though his shirt still protruded below his doublet, and his hair still looked like a tangled mess. He brushed ineffectually at the slime and mud on his jacket. “I’ve done you injury, good Will.”

“Nay, no injury, but let me walk you home.” To be honest, with Marlowe in this state, Will didn’t trust him to go more than a few steps without getting in another brawl. And the next ruffian might bring Marlowe down.

Will realized, with a shock that almost made him laugh that, envious though he was of Marlowe’s gift of words, he didn’t wish Marlowe ill. No, let the wretched creature go on living, if it meant he’d go on producing poetry.

Kit tilted his head sideways. “I live not very far off. There’s a tavern beneath my lodgings. I pray you let me, repay it in some measure by taking you to the tavern, where you shall drink my health and I yours, and we shall be friends again.”

Will opened his mouth to say they’d never been friends, but closed it again. Neither seemed it a good time to remind Marlowe that if anyone had suffered injury in this fray, it had been Marlowe himself.

London contained taverns aplenty and Will thought that in many of them he could be killed and disposed of and no man the wiser. Yet, he looked at Marlowe and at Marlowe’s seemingly open countenance and honest proposing of a drink.

Will sighed. After all, much to his own surprise, Will had managed to stop Marlowe in private brawl. Surely in a tavern he’d only be safer. “I’ll go with you, Marlowe,” he said. “But I’ll keep your dagger, yet a while.”

And Marlowe bowed, but it seemed to Will that something weary spied out of the corner of the playwright’s eye.

Scene Sixteen

The palace of faerieland. Upon the throne, Ariel looks more than ever like a doll -- a waxen-pale doll. The court has fallen silent, the deep silence of the profoundly shocked.

It was the silence that woke Ariel from her horrified contemplation of the image in the drop of water.

Quicksilver used to say, joking, that the court became quiet only for regicide or treason.

Quicksilver. She remembered his smiling at her, as he said that. She saw him as Silver, within the drop of water, smiling on another, a mortal, a young man. And not Will.

It had come to this, then, that her lord -- her lord’s other aspect -- would be a bawd unto human kind.

He had promised Ariel -- promised -- upon their wedding day that he would never change again, not voluntarily. She’d seen him break that yesterday.

And then he’d promised her, promised her, she’d be his only love, lifelong -- a promise most uncommon for a marriage between near-immortal beings.

She looked at the image in the water and felt heartsick. Fool she was, she had believed in him.

Opening her hand, she let the drop roll out of it, roll onto the floor.

Shaking, she stood up, she said, “You will forgive me. I do not feel well. I will....” Her voice failed.

“Milady is ill,” Malachite said, hurrying forth. “Milady is ill. Give her space.”

But she stood and shook her head and said, against the pressure in her heart. “Not ill, not ill. Only I must.... Deliberate.” She rose from her throne, and fought free of Malachite’s hands. “No, leave me be. I’ll be well enough.”

She almost ran out of the throne room, ignoring the bobbing waves of courtiers who ran out of her way and bowed and curtsied in her wake.

Her feet picking up speed, her eyes filling with tears, she ran down a long, echoing hallway, ignoring the disturbed flights of servant fairies, and the courtiers who cleared her way just in time. She thought she heard running steps behind her, but she didn’t turn back to see who it was. She didn’t care.

She ran all the way to her room, threw herself at the oaken door, opening it with the impact of her weight, and rushing into her own room, surprised her maids, Pease Blossom and Cobweb.

Pease Blossom, holding one of Ariel’s silken dresses, half-turned, looking shocked. “Milady.”

“Out,” Ariel said. “Out.” Her voice came out raspy. She leaned against the wall taking deep breaths. “Out, both of you, please.”

“Milady,” Cobweb said, and bobbed a curtsey, but hazarded, “Is aught wrong?”

Yes, it was all wrong. Ariel was acting like Quicksilver upon one of his flights of fancy, when he interrupted councils and ordered servants about to suit his caprice.

And Quicksilver was wrong also. She’d thought that Quicksilver, weak as he was, was hers. She’d just realized that such possession, such dream of possession had been just that. A dream, and vain like all dreaming.

But Ariel could not say that, dared not say that, so she shook her head and said, “My head aches, what a head have I.” And, putting a hand to her forehead in languid gesture, she leaned further against the wall and implored, “Please, fair maids, if you love me go, and leave me to rest in peace a while.

The maids retreated, walking backwards, bobbing courtesy, and left Ariel alone, in the splendors of her solitary room.

The door opened. “Milady, I must apologize. I did not know what he meant to do. Had I known what he knew, what....”

She opened her eyes, to see Malachite standing by the door.

“Oh, cease,” she said. “Cease. I care not who knew. Now everyone knows.” She felt tears falling, scalding hot, down her cheeks. Everyone, the whole court knew of her vow with Quicksilver, a vow considered lunacy by all the old elves. And now, now they all knew that she alone kept that vow.

“Milady,” Malachite advanced, and held both of her hands, and knelt in front of her. “Milady, I would not hurt you for the world. My lord is what he is. He is inconstant, but I have worshiped you only, with a constant.... loyalty from the time we were children. Milady, I beg you to believe I wouldn’t hurt you. I’ve often and often kept what I knew to myself, to save you pain.”

Through her tears, Ariel saw Malachite’s face intent and eager turned up to her, his eyes burning with a fanaticism humans reserved for their religion. What he knew? What had he known? So this wasn’t the first time that Quicksilver....?

She shook her head. “I believe you didn’t mean to give me pain, kind Malachite. Now, go, please go and leave me with my grief yet a while. Presently, when I have nursed my grief well, mayhap it will, like a well-fed baby, go to sleep.”

He rose from his knees, he took her hand. Bowing deeply over it, he touched warm lips to the back of her hand. He left.

Alone in the room, Ariel wanted to cry. But her tears had, unaccountably, dried. Like fields under the merciless sun, her eyes had no water in them. Water might have brought life, and without water all was dead: her emotions, her fears, Ariel herself.

This grief she felt, this sense of loss at no longer possessing -- maybe never having possessed -- Quicksilver’s affection loomed too large to be squeezed into mere salt water wrung from the eyes.

Through grief her thoughts marched, asking questions, like a clear-eyed general upon a conquered city.

Who had thought to get that image? And how so quick? For Quicksilver had left only the night before, and Ariel thought what she’d seen must have happened tonight, maybe minutes ago.

No servant faerie was strong enough to fly into London and take those images there, and no elf could have traveled there so quickly.

Indeed, the presence of the big city made it necessary that travel there be made on foot, or horse, or even enchanted flying horse conjured out of any stick or twig -- which was probably what Quicksilver himself had used. And no elf could have traveled there that quickly.

Unless one would have followed Quicksilver. No. That was no sense at all. Quicksilver would have felt his being followed.

No. Something else was here, something, which gave rise to all of Ariel’s fears. There was something wrong. The drop of water.... It went beyond what it showed her. The drop of water itself was wrong.

There had been magic used there, she was sure, to capture the image at a distance.

But how could that be? No one but Quicksilver had enough power, in this hill, to do something like that. And how could such spying be done upon the king of faerieland, to the being that held all of his subject’s power -- their very souls -- in his grasp, and him not feel it?

Her head hurt, truly. The false headache she had claimed pounded upon her, in reality, like a booming thunder that obscured her thoughts.

She wished she could go out to the terrace and take the air. But it was the night of mortals, daytime in faerieland, and the terrace would be crowded with promenading courtiers discussing the newest piece of gossip.

And then there would be Hylas. And, Ariel suspected, Malachite waited outside her door, wishing only to pounce upon her, to press upon her all his unwanted affection, all of his overwhelming loyalty.

Ariel found herself staring at the broad window of her bedroom, a fine sheet of magically created glass, enclosed within a wooden frame that unlatched to allow one to get fresh air. Or to walk out.

She remembered when Will’s wife, Nan, had been prisoner in faerieland, she’d tried to escape that way.

That was nonsense, of course, at least for a captive mortal, for the woods upon which the window looked were the woods of faerieland. And mortals could not step between the worlds at will, but only at specified points and even then only with an elf’s consent.

But Ariel could avail herself of the window, and take a walk outside, amid the woods.

She opened the window and vaulted over the frame.

Woods in faerieland looked tidier -- were tidier -- than woods in the mortal world. Here, no creature ran, unheeded, through the undergrowth, no bird dropped feathers upon the ground. The ground was a soft, spongy grassland, and the trees grew straight and unhampered to the very blue sky.

Ariel took deep breaths of the air scented with flowering plants and green grass.

Yes, she felt better already. She’d needed this: a little time to recover from her shock and find her feet.

“It will be no time at all,” a voice said.

Ariel jumped. She thought the voice addressed her, but, looking around, she saw that she remained alone in these woods. And the voice went on, conversationally, “No time, at all, dear Hylas, till you see me crowned sovereign of faerieland.”

Now Ariel’s eyes widened, because she recognized the voice as Malachite’s.

She looked with renewed frenzy at the windows of the palace. One was open. Quicksilver’s room.

From it, Hylas’ voice came, grave and impertinent, tainted with a horse-like snorting. “If this were in Centauria, we’d have killed him. Made short work of him. Creature like that, with no strength to defend himself.”

“Ah, dear Hylas, you do not understand,” Malachite said.

“Oh, I understand plain enough,” Hylas said. “The weak have no right to live.”

Malachite laughed. “Centaurs have it easy,” he said.

Ariel took a deep breath. Her head was reeling again. If they should look out and see her....

She crept close to the wall of the palace and, knitting herself with it, crept nearer the window.

If they looked out they wouldn’t see her, then. It would take suspicion and looking just this way to find her. She damped her aura of power, she made herself as inconspicuous as she might, as she crept to the window.

She wanted to hear more. And she wanted to see. Because, despite her ears, she did not believe Malachite could be saying these things. Was he, perhaps, playing a game to entrap the centaur?

“Centaurs can kill their kings if they wish,” Malachite said. “But our kings are different. Elven kings have in them all their subjects’ power, and we cannot draw power but from them. It’s hard enough, Hylas, just to have treasonous thoughts without Quicksilver finding me out.”

Hylas snorted and stamped his hooves. “You seem to manage.”

Ariel had reached the point where she could look into Quicksilver’s room, and see the two of them -- Hylas standing by the canopied bed and Malachite beside the gilded armor.

She saw Malachite narrow his eyes, she heard him say, “I’ve hated Quicksilver all my life. Always. Ever since I became conscious of what they’d done to me, of how they’d taken me from my mother and father, and brought me here, to faerieland, to be this creature’s servant.” He pronounced the last word like a crack of the whip.

Ariel shook. That voice. The hatred in it. It was no game.

“If you’d not been taken by elves, you’d probably be dead,” Hylas said.

Malachite exhaled, heavily, and pushed his lips together. “Well, then, I’d be dead in my own time, my own place, and not be a servant, not be looked down upon by creatures who have no right to think themselves better than I.” He stood in front of Quicksilver’s portrait. “It’s always 'Malachite, my other coat,' 'Malachite, my pearl-embroidered shirt,' 'Malachite, my cloak.' And him, not even a proper elf, not even a proper man.” Malachite grinned and in that grin looked more carnivorous, more ferocious than the centaur. “But now he’s done it. Now he’s torn it. Now he’s thrown himself into my power.

“She’s never loved him, not half, though she thinks she does. He distresses her, he vexes her. Now, he’s gone to disport himself -- or rather Silver -- upon London. It won’t take much till I woo her away from the delusion of being in love with him. And once I have her, I’ll have access to him. He gives her full reach to all the power of the hill. With me to guide her, she can take it, and she can cut him off. And then we can kill him.”

Hylas looked at Malachite, with a broad smile, but his eyes were anxious. “And then you’ll give Centauria to the centaurs?”

Malachite glanced at Hylas and nodded. “Of course,” he said. He turned to the mirror. “When I’m king, I shall get rid of all this foppery. I’ll have armor and swords only, in my room.”

“Should we be meeting here at all?” Hylas asked, stomping his front hoof nervously.

Malachite laughed. “And why not? In Quicksilver’s absence, only I come into this room. What think you? That his betrayed queen will come here to pine her loss?” He laughed.

Outside, trembling, Ariel felt tears prickle at her eyes.

She had to get away. She had to find someone she could trust.

Her head was such a whirlwind of confusion, that she knew not truth from lies, anymore.

She loved Quicksilver, or did she not? And Malachite was loyal, was he not? This had to be a game that he was playing upon the centaur.

But Ariel had heard the hatred in Malachite’s voice.

Shaking, she closed her eyes. Malachite would only have other changelings in his service. Only changelings in his confidence.

Did he indeed resent the kidnapping that had given him near immortality?

Oh, Ariel must get away from here. She must have true counsel, somewhere. Someone had to take pity on her.

Had her husband betrayed her? Or was he, himself betrayed? Or was she the one who was a toy of fortune?

Why did she yield to that suggestion whose horrid image did unfix her hair and make her seated heart knock at her ribs, against the use of nature?

Present fears were less than horrible imaginings: her thought that there was a plot in faerieland was yet but fantastical.

Shook so her confidence as queen that function was smothered in surmise, and nothing was but what was not?

Scene Seventeen

The inside of the tavern. It is a large room, whitewashed, filled with long, rough wooden tables, and long, rough wooden benches beside them. Tables and benches, and the none-too-fresh rushes on the floor, are stained with wine and greasy spots of food and candle drops. Amid the rushes, too, peek the white ends of bones of meat consumed there, where the bones have been carelessly disposed of upon the rushes. Closer inspection would show vermin crawling amid all this, their black, many-legged bodies fat and busy. But none would look at this, save the one or two drunkards who have fallen, face down on the floor, unable to go further. Candles burn in metal holders on the walls, and a fire roars in the large fireplace. There are few drinkers, and those poorly attired. A few dispirited, tired-looking bawds circulate, showing their withered dugs, trying to interest those few patrons. In an ill-lit corner, a few men play the dice.

At the door to the tavern, Will had tried to back out, but Kit had pulled him and cajoled him along, and told him that since they were here, anyway, they might as well have a drink together, to seal over Kit’s lamentable mistake.

Unwillingly, Will had let Kit drag him to a table at the back, away from the other drinkers.

The wench who knew Kit well enough, since he normally took his food at this tavern, living right next door to it, hastened to them, and filled their mugs with good ale.

She knew Kit for a heavy drinker and a good tipper who yet kept his hands to himself, and this, Kit thought, had much to do with her promptitude in attending to them.

“We could get something to eat,” Kit said. “I would pay. Some mutton, or quail, perhaps.” He hadn’t eaten since midday and felt lightheaded. Even the smell of old mutton grease in the air made Kit salivate. But Will shook his head, and Kit didn’t wish to press his point, nor did he want to eat while Will watched.

He wanted to ask Will, just ask, plain out, if Will had met the elves before and what Will knew of the affairs of faerieland.

But he dared not.

There was, of course, the possibility that Will’s hospitality to the elf was a chance thing, that Silver had used the human as her puppet, mesmerizing him into helping her, without Will’s knowing what he was doing or having any recollection of it.

Was it so?

Kit wanted to believe it was so. He'd believed Will when he’d said he loved only his Nan. There had been truth in his voice, truth in his words.

Kit wanted to believe him.

He looked at Will, as Will lifted his mug to his lips and drank. Such a tidy provincial burgher. No good as a poet, of course, and all lacking in the fire that would make him a dramatist. But not a bad sort.

How could such an uncomplicated creature ever have come by faerieland enchantment, faerieland love, faerieland deception?

He found Will’s gaze trained on him, and thought how like a falcon Will’s eyes were. A falcon intent upon the kill.

Of a sudden, he felt quite uncomfortable, as though those golden eyes could scry into Kit’s very soul.

“How now?” Will asked. “How now? What woe is here?” He looked sympathetic, worried. “Will you tell me, master Marlowe, why you thought me guilty of trespass against you? Surely a reasonable man would not seek my life thus without reason.”

Marlowe looked up. Reasonable? “And why think you that I’d be reasonable?” He asked and felt a chuckle scrape up his throat that felt raw from crying. “Ask the length and breadth of London, from the secretary Sir Cecil, to the privy chamber, to those arms of it that run the night and ensnare the guilty.” He grinned into the discomfiting green eyes, hoping, hoping that Will didn’t notice the sweat upon Kit’s forehead, the tremor in his hand that raised the mug. He felt like one who had been bereaved, with a secret mourning that no one could share. “Aye, the guilty and the innocent too -- and you might find yourself very lonely in your opinion of my reasonableness, good Tremblestick.” Did Will know of Kit’s bereavement? Was Will’s heart, likewise, dangling from the same high, unattainable point? Why, that would make them almost brothers.

Yet, Kit looked at those clear eyes with their straightforward glance and could not credit deception from this quarter. He sighed and shrugged. “My attacking you was but one of my mistakes. Of my own muddled head, I thought you’d done me injury. Of my own muddled head and my confused brain, on insufficient grounds and thoughts built thereon.” He frowned. He wanted to know, he needed to know. “Be kind with me, Will, if you would tell me -- ” He opened his mouth to speak, but found his tongue stopped. What if Will said that yes, he knew Silver? What if Will said that Silver had come to London to enjoy Will’s favors in his little, low-rent room?

Silence lengthened.

Will looked as if he weighed something in his mind, then shrugged in his turn. As the wench came around to refill their mugs, Will said, “I meant to thank you, Marlowe. Before our...misunderstanding.”

Kit raised his brows. Will meant to thank Kit, did he? Oh, he hoped, he very much hoped Will wouldn’t say that he meant to thank Kit for the loan of Silver, for Kit would lose what temperance he’d acquired, and go for Will again, be it with bare hands and in front of witnesses.

“I meant to thank you for your advice,” Will said. He smiled, though his smile looked somewhat like a grimace with bared teeth. Yet, the intention to smile remained, like a shadow behind the real expression. “On how to entice a young nobleman to extend his patronage.”

“Oh?” Kit asked, and raised his brows further, unable to recollect giving such advice, unable to guess what nobleman would have consorted with someone in Will’s sphere. If he’d heard it, he couldn’t remember.

He didn’t even know, himself, whether he meant harm to Will or not. He didn’t even know, himself, what he thought or felt, or where he was.

Once having walked into faerieland, he’d stepped into a land where shadows were things and things were shadows. He couldn’t flat out ask Will if he’d had Silver, because if he did, and Will said yes, then all of Kit’s world would crumble. Coward words that feared the unthinkable, the question would not cross his lips.

“At first I thought I couldn’t do it,” Will said. “But then the words came, and I recited -- improvised -- a poem on Venus and Adonis. And the Earl gave me coin to go on with, so I can survive to finish the poem, here in London, and I need not hie back to Stratford. I have even a little to send my wife.”

Venus and Adonis. How provincial. Nothing different or rare in the discourse, and yet apparently the earl had liked it. Marlowe half-closed his eyes at an inner, intellectual pang. How easy it was, sometimes, to satisfy the wealthy and would-be sophisticated. He didn’t sigh, though. He didn’t wish to offend the good burgher. It still meant nothing, even if Will wrote his meager verses for the earl. It meant nothing and it was no shadow on Marlowe’s own glory.

Hero and Leander, once he finished it, would eclipse the faked glory of the verses of this provincial. Why not let Will Shakespeare of Stratford have his one literary triumph, before returning to the good wife and the little Waggstaffs, all?

Yet thinking of Hero and Leander turned Marlowe’s mind, with a sick turn, like a winged bird that attempts to fly home but falls short, to Scagmore and to Thomas Walsingham, in whose home Kit had stayed and under whose patronage Kit had been working on the long poem.

He couldn’t return there now. He couldn’t return until his case were cleared by the Privy Council, on whose good mercy he depended for the very air of fake freedom he breathed at the moment. Perhaps he could never return there.

So far poor Thomas Kyd, under torture, no doubt, had accused Marlowe of heresy and homosexuality--and who knew what else besides? Several charges, certainly. Each of them enough, no doubt, to get him hanged seven times over.

Perhaps it was that the council hesitated only on the mode of dispatch -- hanging, beheading or disemboweling.

Or perhaps Sir Cecil’s word stayed the council, but at what price? Cecil wouldn’t have the sword of Kit’s possible babbling hanging over his head long.

And what would Thomas Walsingham think of all this? He too had worked in the secret service, with Kit, under his uncle, Francis Walsingham, the head of secret service that was. What would Thomas think of the chance of Kit’s being put to the torture and singing, as he might very well sing, like a fine-tuned instrument under the hands of those skilled in breaking the spirit of men?

Oh, Kit could imagine what Thomas Walsingham thought, and he didn’t like it. Sir Thomas would no more wish Kit to babble of the covert operations Kit had undertaken for his uncle, than Kit had liked Thomas Kyd’s accusations.

The difference was that Kit Marlowe, corrupt and dissembling though he knew himself to be, and tainted with the blood of more innocent lambs than would fill a paddock any Easter day, would never dream of killing his friend and erstwhile roommate for the meager security this would afford him.

But Sir Thomas Walsingham .... Ah, there was a different matter. Kit had seen more men sent to torture, more men sent to the gallows, more men broken at the wheel on a mere suspicion of a suspicion, of a suspicion, than he cared to attempt to count, and under the word of Thomas’s uncle.

Would Thomas prove that different?

Kit’s collar felt too tight around his neck, and he rubbed his finger inside it, imagining what the executioner’s rope would feel like there, imagining that plunge from which there was no return.

He drew breath, and trembled in drawing it. If he were not the coward he knew himself to be, he would die now and save the good gentlemen of the Privy Council the expense of persecuting him; save his parents the shame of his trial; save himself his endless heartache.

What had life to offer to him?

Base fortune, now Kit saw, that in its wheel there was a point, to which when men aspired, they tumbled headlong down: that point he’d touched, briefly, today, in Silver’s arms, when he’d been the most admired playwright of London and had his lady love, besides.

In her arms, he’d forgotten his fears of the Privy Council, and his heartache and sorrow of many years standing. But now, now cast from her arms, he’d been cast out of fortune’s darling hands. And fear and death ran fast at his heels, hot wolves with foul breath.

Seeing that after that perfect, crowning moment, there had been no place to mount up higher, why should he grieve at his fall?

Let sweet death come and rid him of his grief.

Closing his eyes, clenching his white ceramic ale mug hard within his hand, Kit asked, “Will, only tell me one thing. Is your wife, indeed, your only love?”

No answer came for a little while, but when Kit opened his eyes, he saw that Will was smiling, with the smile of a man recalling pleasant memories. “Aye,” he said. “Nan and my children. Nan has a rough tongue, now. And she’s not always comfortable to be about. But she loves me, and I do love her.”

Kit stared. His heart hammered very fast still, from the answer he had feared. Yet, he shouldn’t have feared it. This man loved a woman with a rough tongue. And no doubt peasant features, work-ruined hands. How did other men do that, and settle for less than perfection? Kit had never understood it.

This time he kept his eyes open, as he asked, “And only she, Will? In your full compass from boy to man?”

This was as close as he could get to asking Will about Silver.

Will blushed, a coarse red blush beneath his coarse tanned skin. He looked away from Kit.

But, before Kit’s suspicions could quicken, Will shrugged. “In truth, you could say I loved a girl once. Her name was Catherine Hamlet, and we were both sixteen, but she liked not of me; her sights were set higher. A local wealthy yeoman got her with child and then reneged on his promise of marriage and she drowned herself in fast flowing Avon.”

Will’s golden eyes filled with tears.

This was Will’s sin? Will’s great shame?

Oh, sin indeed for which Kit would trade all of his virtues. He grimaced. “A sin indeed, but not for it, making you my enemy. And that one death not even of your doing. If I could count the deaths -- ” He managed to stop. What had he been about to say? Surely he wasn’t going to tell Will about the deaths he’d caused.

What an odd father confessor to choose, and what an odd confessional, even for a man who’d once associated with Catholics.

He drowned his too-easy-flowing tongue in his ale.

Will stared at him with wide, amazed eyes, then shook his head, as if to clear it. His voice was hesitant, as he said,

“You spoke of love? Who do you love? Am I right in supposing that you love?”

Kit sighed. This is what his need to confess earned him.

He plastered his best ironical smile upon his face and said, “In truth, Will, I love a woman.” He felt his cheeks color even at having said so much, and grinned a mirthless grin, displaying his teeth in such a fashion as a dog might bare them at an enemy. “Or maybe a youth, you see, I’m never sure. It is one of the puzzles of my life, that I must always second-guess my own heart, like a blind man walking through pitch black midnight.”

He saw Will’s eyes widen further, and winked at the provincial poet, which made Will frown and look away, quick as a flinch.

Kit Marlowe chuckled. “He who doesn’t like boys or tobacco is a fool,” he said. The one time he’d used this line before, to Tom Kyd, Tom had gone white as a sheet at such a bold statement.

Will only looked puzzled, staring across the table at Kit, as though Kit lived in a different sphere, a different world altogether. And maybe Kit did.

“I thought it was illegal,” Will said, in plain simplicity, and turned away and gestured for the wench to refill his mug. “I thought they would hang you for it.... Having commerce with boys or men.”

Kit heard himself laugh like a fool. Several of the drinkers looked their way, and Kit shrugged, and said, in a reasonable voice, “Oh, no, good Will, you have it wrong. Though it be, mayhap, a sin, if one believes in a God above who keeps track of such things, and though, mayhap, it is death-worthy, and the law so deals, the law is hardly ever enforced, unless it suits others to have you die thus, instead of for other crimes, in which they might have had a part,” Marlowe spoke wildly, quickly, words salving the wound that nothing could cure, and stopping, for a moment the thought of his own very real pain.

He leaned forward to look at Will’s too-wide open eyes. “No, indeed. Such vices, if you call them that, serve as good cover for darker deeds, deeds that indeed are vice and crime but where you will never be persecuted, lest you should bring down with you the high heads of state, the princes of the land, those who do such deeds every day.”

He took a drink, and wiped the froth from his upper lip to the back of his glove, as he leaned back on his narrow bench and smiled.

“The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love‑cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club; yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good Will, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

Will stared, his eyes intent, as though actually trying to understand, not so much the speech but what the speech hid. “And yet you love,” Will said when Kit stopped.

“And yet I love, but love is such a coil, that in its coil I pine like man insane. I’m beaten and captive, kept in chains and going without my food.” Kit drained his cup, and gestured for the woman to refill it.

Will finished his also. “And what presume you to do about this.... About your love?”

“What can I do about love?” Marlowe asked. He laughed, though he felt like crying, and his eyes hurt with the pressure of unshed tears.

Oh, for another minute with Silver, another chance to touch that silken skin.

Oh, to hear her fair lips whisper love, even if he knew it a lie.

“Fair is my love, but not so fair as fickle, mild as a dove, but neither true nor trusty, brighter than glass, and yet, as glass is, brittle, softer than wax, and yet, as iron, rusty: A lily pale, with damask dye to grace her, none fairer, nor none falser to deface her.”

He leaned forward, having got Will’s attention, and grinned into Will’s intent scrutiny. “Her lips to mine how often hath she joined, between each kiss her oaths of true love swearing! How many tales to please me hath she coined, dreading my love, the loss thereof still fearing! Yet in the midst of all her pure protestings, her faith, her oaths, her tears, and all were jestings. She burned with love, as straw with fire flamed, she burned out love, as soon as straw outburned, she framed the love, and yet she foiled the framing, she bade love last, and yet she fell a‑turning. Was this a lover, or a lecher whether? Bad in the best, though excellent in neither.”

Will put forth a hand, palm outward. “Stop, kind Kit. You make me dizzy. That love is childish which consists in words. Be your love a woman or a man?” And, before Kit could take that opening for another word-glimmering rant, Will went on, “You call her she, so let’s say it’s a woman. If she woman be, aye, wed her and bed her, and sire upon her those children that will give delight to both your ages. If it be a man, then forget him, and turn your love to woman, where the law is lenient and the result life to enrich your life.”

Oh, life was so simple for those men who had never crossed the fine dividing line of sanity, the stark dividing line of honor.

Kit sought for words, but they came not. He gestured for more beer, and drunk it, and gestured for more anew.

He looked at Will, and felt like a puppy scolded, a creature berated who knows not why and whose mute gestures cannot broach the abyss between him and his tormentor. “Well, you have comforted me marvelous much,” he finally said. Oh, how he longed to be Will. To be Will, with his fat wife back at home, and his little provincial brats. But the fork in the road Kit had taken led not to cottage love and contented family. “Marvelous much, and yet, you see, I thought you as fickle as I. Yes, for a moment, I thought us rivals in my love. That was why, good Wagglance, I came for you with dagger and hot anger.”

“Too dear a witness for such love, Marlowe,” Will said. “When you do not even know who you love and when I’ve been a rival for no woman’s love, save loving my Nan, which I do prize.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right and your words bear witness to an excellent mind,” Marlowe said, and heard irony march through his own words, giving them better cadence and strength. “You’ll do well in London, mark my words.” He smiled at his own lie.

“And you’ll never gather enemies, such as I have, that have collected all around, and eye my death as a very treat, a feast to be savored in advance. Treason dogs my heels more than even love, and why should I worry on love, when likely I’ll be dead before the week is out?

“All comfort go with you! For none abides with me: my joy is death, death, at whose name I oft have been afraid, because I wished this world's eternity. But I can’t have it and I’m done with it. You have nothing to fear from me. Only, I’d know, that woman with whom I saw you.... In Paul’s yard.... How long have you known her and in what capacity?”

Will’s blank, blank look turned on him.

“Woman?” he asked. “A woman, Marlowe? You do but mistake me. It was another you saw and not myself. I have not with woman consorted, with woman met, since I left my Nan in Stratford these many months hence.”

Kit exhaled. So, Will had been foolishly manipulated by the magic of faerieland and himself unknowing.

Well, at least Kit was not such a fool. “Maybe I did,” he said, “Maybe I did indeed mistake you. Let’s have more ale.”

And more ale they had, and Will started asking Kit about plays and their construction and how one went about making a play that captured the audience as Kit’s did.

Half laughing, half flattered, Kit told him more than he ever before had, of his learning, his studies, and the bitter brew of intrigue and fame that had been his whole life these many years.

Late into the night, while the only other occupant remaining in the tavern -- a man -- snored over his spilled ale, and when Kit’s head was fair dizzy with ale, Will leaned across the table, and started, in slow cadence, one of those songs men sing over ale, “When that I was and a little tiny boy, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” he sang, his voice picking up strength. “A foolish thing was but a toy, for the rain it raineth every day.” The snorer beside him twitched not.

Will lifted his eyebrows and his mug, daring Kit to pick up his challenge and improvise the next verse.

Kit smiled, bemused. As a little boy, he’d watched his father and his friends play this game. But he’d been a quiet child, apart from the euphoria, the socializing of such convivial evenings. And later, he’d been a learned child, who intimidated his father and his father’s friends.

Now, at long last, in the maturity of his years, he was being included in a game men played with their tavern friends. He grinned broadly. Only Will Shakespeare would dare do this with someone of Kit Marlowe’s jaded reputation.

Grinning, Kit picked up the tune in the voice that had made him the star of Canterbury choir -- a clear, resounding voice, if made lower by age and manhood -- “But when I came to man's estate, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, 'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Will raised an eyebrow and smiled, as though asking if that was the best Kit could do, and Kit chuckled.

Will’s turn to wink -- and not many people had winked at Kit in recent years -- and pick up with “ But when I came, alas! to wive, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain, by swaggering could I never thrive, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Kit picked it before the last line had died in the still, ale-smelling air. “But when I came unto my beds, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain.” He grinned at Will, and lifted his ale mug in silent salutation. “With toss‑pots still had drunken heads, for the rain, it rained every day.”

Will laughed at that, and Kit laughed in return. For a moment, in the glow of the ale, Kit relaxed and thought this was what having friends felt like and how he would like to be friends with Will.

Kit could picture many meetings like this. They’d dine and drink, walk together, and talk. Kit could improve Will’s mind and Will’s writing. They could discuss poetry, and Kit could learn the easy joys of undemanding friendship that required neither secret nor betrayal.

It was only a moment, in the afterglow of ale.

Will gave Kit his dagger back, and they clasped hands and clapped each other on the shoulders.

But when they left the ale house, the cold wind sobered Kit and, watching Will retreat, in unsteady steps, down the street, Kit asked himself whether Will would be going to Silver’s embrace.

The thought hurt more than he could bear and suddenly, suddenly, Kit needed to know. He’d never sleep if he didn’t know.

Silently, stealthily, in the way of one used to betrayal and skulking down dark alleys, Kit Marlowe followed Will Shakespeare.

Scene Eighteen

The outskirts of the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, just past the river, where the lane ends that comes from Arden forest, and the gate stands to the Shakespeare garden. At the gate stands the faerie queen. Beyond her, the twin houses inhabited by the Shakespeare kin. No light shines in any of the windows.

What was she doing here?

Opening the rickety wooden gate and treading the garden path towards the left one of the twin houses, she wondered if she’d taken leave of her senses.

Oh, she knew well enough that she needed someone to talk to, someone whom she could be sure would understand her.

Someone whom she could be sure of not being involved in the conspiracy with the centaurs. She thought of Malachite and shuddered.

Malachite, Malachite, for whose loyalty both she and Quicksilver would have set their hands on hot coals.

Walking up the garden path, between neatly tended rows of vegetables stunted by the unseasonable, humid heat, Ariel thought it was no wonder Quicksilver had proved a weak king. His right hand was a traitor, perjured to his bosom.

And his wife. Ah, his wife.

What had Ariel done, then, that Malachite had thought she’d be such easy prey? What had she done that everyone -- everyone -- knew she despised Quicksilver and thought she loved him not.

Great reason that her noble lord be rated for weakness, when he’d no one to lean on, no one to trust.

Good king, to be so mightily abused!

And yet, he’d been unfaithful to her, had he not? The recording in the drop of water could not be doubted. It wasn’t in elven kind to counterfeit such, and not all magic could obtain so believable a likeness.

She thought of what the drop of water displayed and flinched. How could she love Quicksilver, when he would turn into Silver and go running -- a heedless bawd in search of fun?

Ariel lifted her white gown, embroidered all with seed pearls, to walk up the whitewashed steps to the back door, and there she stood, on the back stoop, wondering whether to knock or not.

For what did she want from Nan, that Nan could tell her?

What could this human housewife do that would resolve the problems of the Queen of faerieland?

Nan knew not magic. Nor did Nan know the problems of living with an elf that could change between the two genders at will. Nor even did Nan, like women of old, know the medicines of herbs, the secrets of the moon and which sacred stones held virtue against infertility.

So, what could Nan teach her?

And yet, unguided, confused, Ariel knew she must talk to someone. Someone. She must tell someone about the events of faerieland.

Let that someone be Nan, if Nan would allow it.

Ariel knocked, strongly, once, twice, upon the sturdy oak door.

Would Nan even remember her?

At first nothing happened, and Ariel knocked again.

She heard steps inside the house. The door opened, suddenly, revealing a small child -- were she in faerieland Ariel would have thought him a pixie -- with dark curls and bright, golden-brown eyes.

He wore a voluminous nightgown that covered him to his ankles and held a candle in his small hand, and looked at her, amazement and curiosity mingling in his features that still retained the rounded shape of a babe’s face. “Who are you?” he asked. And, “What do you wish?”

He couldn’t be much more than five or six, Ariel judged, though not sure how fast mortals grew, and his voice was a faerie piping, full of music and liveliness.

Ariel bowed slightly, and smiled, trying her all to look as any mortal would who’d call upon a friend. But what did she know of how mortals looked? “I wish,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly as she could to one so small in sense and body. “To see your mother. And I am her friend.”

He looked at her, puzzled and slow, and tilted his head sideways, just a little, in the way Ariel had seen Will do in their brief acquaintance, long ago.

His hawk-like eyes stared, examining her from head to toe, taking measure of her essence and the portent of her being here. Then he nodded and closed the door softly, leaving Ariel standing on the stoop.

Ariel smiled, despite herself, at hearing the bolt shot home, inside the door.

Did this mean the little boy had gone to fetch his mother? Or was this his way of blocking the intruder?

And yet, she smiled, at his precaution, his cautious behavior.

Not that the bolt would hold her, if she wished. Much too easy to use magic to slide that bolt away, even though it was metal, and even through the door.

But Ariel didn’t want to enter this house by force, and so she waited.

Deep within the rose garden, a cricket thrilled his love song. In the distance, a dog wailed at some unknown ill. Standing outside the door, Ariel wondered if anyone would have noticed her missing from the faerie palace.

They’d come for her, as soon as they noticed. They couldn’t allow their hope to escape.

But would they think she had escaped?

Not likely. They didn’t know what she had overheard. They’d think her absent on some walk to clear her mind.

At length she heard steps at behind the door and Nan’s voice said something. Through the door, it all sounded too indistinct for the words to be understood, but Ariel recognized Nan’s sharp tones.

The bolt slid, the door opened with new decision, and the little boy was telling his mother, “I couldn’t sleep and I thought it might be grandad, next door, who was taken ill and needed you.”

Nan had her lips compressed tight, if at the argument or at her son having opened the door on his own, in the middle of the night, Ariel could never tell.

On seeing Ariel, Nan’s pursed lips relaxed, and her mouth opened, as Nan’s jaw sagged in surprise.

“Milady,” she said, then cleared her throat and closed her mouth, and narrowed her eyes and managed a very creditable impression of her normal sharp tones. “What do you want, Lady Ariel?” As she spoke, Nan took the candle from her son’s hand, and put her hand on his shoulder, grasping so firmly that the child squirmed and looked up, shocked at his mother’s use of force.

Ariel bobbed a courtesy, as if these had been the old days in the faerie palace, when Nan had been kidnapped to nurse the faerie princess, and the old king, Sylvanus, had taken a fancy to the human, and Ariel had been appointed as her maid. Then had she bent her knee to Nan. Then had she expected Nan to be the future queen of faerieland.

But Nan had done that odd thing, resisted faerie glamoury, and held out for her husband, who’d rescued her and to whose arms she’d happily returned.

Her choice had cost her aging, Ariel decided, as she looked up at Nan’s weather-beaten face.

Had Nan stayed in the faerie hill, she’d have looked still as she had ten years ago: a twenty-eight-year-old farmer girl, not beautiful, maybe even not pretty, but possessed of her own wholesome charm, her round face tanned but supple, her round, pale blue eyes full of spirit, her broad, generous mouth still soft and promising many gentle summers to come.

The ten years in the mortal world had changed all that. Around Nan’s blue eyes, a fine nest of lines had collected, each one no doubt marking one sleepless night, one worry over the children. Around the mouth, too, lines gathered, making it look like Nan too often pursed her lips in disapproval. And her once tanned-but-fresh face had grown coarse and dark. Silver threads had twined themselves in her hair, which was loose down her back, since she wore no bonnet with the loose white shirt that was, no doubt, her night attire and covered her well enough from neck to ankle, but didn’t manage to hide how much her figure had broadened.

Ariel gazed at her and said, “Nan, milady, I must talk to you. I need your help.”

Nan, without replying, had turned, and shoved the little boy in the small of the back. “Go, Hamnet. Go upstairs. And to sleep, mind you, and no listening. You have petty school tomorrow and I want to see how you’ll remember your letters with no sleep.”

The boy frowned, and looked disappointed at once, the look of a schoolboy reminded of his obligation to his books.

He turned to Ariel, yet, and looked at Nan again, his preternaturally knowing eyes alert. “Who is this, Mother? How come she's your friend? She looks like a fine lady from the court, as father shows us in those engravings -- ”

“To bed, I said.” Nan raised her voice, as if to make herself heard over Hamnet’s internal dreams. “To bed and plague me no more. A fine lady indeed. Do I look like the kind who has fine ladies for friends? This is your cousin, five times removed, who has been away in Ireland, with her husband who is in the army. And no doubt, she’s picked up too fine an attire these years.” She gave Ariel a stern look. “But is not for that a fine lady.” As she spoke, she pushed Hamnet all the way to the darkened door that led to some interior space. “To bed sirrah, and let me not find you awake when I check, and I will check in a few breaths.” She pushed him to the inner door, and through the doorway into the hallway beyond, and closed the interior door softly.

She turned to Ariel, her arms crossed. “And now you, milady? What will you? Why plague me like this, in the middle of the night? Think you not of changelings. The two children I have, the younger ones, are too old for you to steal for your dissolute ways, your hill living.”

Ariel heard the sharp tones, but sensed behind them, behind the lie Nan had told her son, something--if not willingness to help, at least interest, or maybe curiosity, like to what Hamnet had displayed.

That curiosity Ariel smiled to, that curiosity she answered, and not Nan’s rebukes. “May I come in?” she asked.

“May you come in?” Nan mimicked, making her voice unnaturally soft, to sound like Ariel’s own voice. She grimaced and sighed, and threw the door wide open. “You may, of course, as though I could stop you. Ten years ago, it was, enough of you entered, and none of you asked my permission.”

Ariel nodded to that, and smiled still, a polite smile, and entered the kitchen.

In this kitchen, ten years ago, the lady Silver had seduced that peasant boy and petty schoolmaster, Will Shakespeare.

“Will you sit?” Nan asked, and gestured towards the table.

Ariel pushed the image out of her mind, and lowered herself to the rough-hewn long bench next to the equally rough-hewn pine table. The kitchen was small, and maybe it was typical of mortal kitchens, though Ariel wouldn’t know it. She had little enough experience of her own kitchens in the palace, leaving the tending of roasts, the serving of food, to lesser elves and the small, winged servant fairies who did all the tedious work of faerieland.

This one was equipped with a tall keeping cupboard, made of dark wood and fitted with a net on the doors, presumably to keep the flies off the food within; with a tall box-table, whose use Ariel couldn’t even guess, save that it might be for the preparation of some food, or perhaps of most foods; with a bewildering multitude of baskets and ceramic implements, and carved wooden bowls, all neatly stacked in a corner. That and the wide hearth, wide enough that, were it not for the fire burning in it, the entire table and bench might have been placed within it, and two large iron pots that even at this distance made Ariel uncomfortable, seemed to be the full stock and store of Nan’s cooking implements and domestic wealth.

No, maybe not all. A large cat, with black and white spots, lay in one of the larger baskets, near the fire.

“Is that -- ” Ariel started, looking at the cat and remembering a cat very like it who had accompanied Will and Nan out of faerieland.

Nan shook her head matter-of-factly. She stood by the table, and did not sit. “No. Old Tom died, these five years ago. Nay, longer, because it was the Michaelmas before Hamnet and Judith were born. This is his daughter, Bess. She will have a litter of kittens in another septnight.” She crossed her arms on her chest. “Came you to ask me for a kitten?”

Ariel looked at Nan and shook her head, though she thought she wouldn’t mind a kitten, if it came to that, if her life were back to normal by then.

Back to normal.

Ariel thought of what that would entail: Quicksilver by her side, the hill obedient to them both. Oh, what a dream, what a mad vain hope. And how she hoped it would come to pass.

“What then?” Nan asked, and this time sat down, at the bench across from Ariel’s, on the other side of the table. She used her candle to light one on a candlestick on the table between them, then blew the one in her hand out. “What troubles you, milady? How may I help? Why come to me, since I know that your own science exceeds all that my advice can give you?”

On those words, Ariel felt tears sting her eyes. On those words, she felt herself tremble.

The fear and ire that had held her up all the way here from the hill, that fear and ire she told herself were self control and courage and lack of weak feelings, now collapsed. Nan knew not how to help her? She spoke of Ariel’s science.

Ariel’s science.

Oh, the Queen of fairies was a miserable being, who should know so much, but knew nothing. What was her science? What her wisdom? What had she to show for her more than half century of life, except this blamable, damnable disdain for her own husband, this broken marriage, this treacherous vassal who thought he could overpower her and make her love him?

The words poured from her mouth, before she could think how she would say them, and she wiped her tears on the back of her pearl-embroidered sleeve, having quite forgotten a handkerchief.

She told Nan everything, everything, from the day she had married Quicksilver, and Quicksilver had agreed to vows of fidelity and -- in the sweet embraces of that night when their nuptial day was done, and tapers burned to bedward -- had promised never to change into Silver again.

And how those promises had got broken, and how sullied, and how she’d come to despise where she had loved, and yet loved still, and how and what dread threatened faerieland, if she couldn’t resolve her differences with Quicksilver. Quicksilver who was absent and away, pursuing a threat that might be no threat.

At first Nan heard attentively, her head supported on her hand, her elbow resting upon the table. Halfway through, though, she stood up and, stirring the embers in the fireplace to a blaze, got something from a jar, and something else from a basket, and yet something from a small box, put all of it into the smaller iron pot, and set it on the fire.

Ariel stopped, staring at Nan

Nan turned back, “I’m listening, milady. I’m listening.”

“Oh,” Ariel said. And then, “I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know what else to do. I think I love Quicksilver ever -- haven’t I ever loved him? But then how can all these people think I love him not? Is to see a man’s defects not to love him? Is to wish him different to deny him? I do not wish my lord dethroned and sent from the hill to die in exile. I do not wish him any ill. I only....”

“You only wish he weren’t himself,” Nan said, and, dipping a long-handled spoon into her brew poured it into two cups and brought them to the table, setting one in front of Ariel.

Ariel looked up. “I didn’t say that,” she said, surprised, shocked at Nan’s conclusion. “Who should he be, if not himself?”

“Ah,” Nan said. She blew upon the contents of her mug, and took a sip. “Let me tell you, milady, how I married Will when he was yet the sketch of a man, the barest sketch, drawn with God’s own hand upon a boy’s body and a witty but unwise mind.”

Ariel blinked. What did this have to do with her? She surveyed the red clay cup in front of her, that was filled with a foamy mixture that smelled sweet and pungent with herbs. She smelled it, but dared not taste it.

“It’s not a potion, milady,” Nan said, noticing her confusion. “Just ale with spices and honey.” She smiled. “It makes it more companionable, and if you’re going to come in and announce yourself as my friend, you’ll get the treatment my friends get. Drink it; it will not harm you.”

Ariel took the mixture to her lips and tasted it. It was not unpleasant, and warmed her. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d felt. The night was warm and yet Malachite’s treason had set her trembling, made her colder than she dared admit.

Had she liked the fool changeling? Were his hopes founded on that much fact?

“I said,” Nan resumed. “That when I married Will he was little more than a boy and, as he grew, I became aware Stratford wouldn’t hold his ambition. He wanted to write poetry and be recognized for his wit and mind. He wanted to go on the stage and be applauded. When the itinerant companies came by, Will would follow the actors around, and drink in their talk, like a child begging for a sweet.” Nan looked up, her blue eyes staring, unflinching. “I’m not an easy woman to live with, either, and I know we often had words when we need not and we.... Ah, but that’s not what called Will forth. It was this thing that he must be, this thing that he needed and I could not give him.

“I could have kept him. I could have kept him here, made him aware of his duty to his children. But what good is a husband kept at home, when he wishes to extend his wings elsewhere? It’s like clipping the hawk’s wings and keeping him blinded and cowed by the hearth. It might keep its owner fed, and serve his purpose, but it makes for a miserable hawk, who cannot soar to the skies. And the hawk I loved in Will must be allowed his chance.

“So, to keep him, I let him go. And he’s mine still, though he be in London.” She smiled at Ariel. “And I wish the Lady Silver much luck, if she thinks to turn his love from me, because even in London, he’s left his heart behind here, with me and Hamnet, and Susannah and Judith.”

Ariel gulped sweet ale and tried to think how to explain to Nan how different her cases were. “My husband does not wish to be a poet. He wishes to be a lady. At least half the time he does. This is not an ambition I can brook. Were kisses all the joys in bed, one woman would another wed. But they’re not, and I do not wish to.”

Nan laughed. “You’re not married to Lady Silver, milady, and yet she is the component and part of the man you wed, the man you say you love.” She shook her head, and put her hand out to touch Ariel’s wrist. “No, hear me out. I feared this would happen even as I saw you attain your heart’s desire in marrying your husband. For it was not Quicksilver you loved, flawed Quicksilver, bright and flashing like Silver and mutable like mercury, who can change from male to female and from bright to dark, from morning to night and night to morning again. No. You loved the Quicksilver you imagined. And that, milady, is your mistake. You love not the man you married; you do not even know him.”

“Ten years we’ve slept in adjoining rooms,” Ariel protested.

“With the door closed against what you did not wish to know.”

Ariel drank her ale. She didn’t wish to think about it. She’d come to Nan for comfort. She’d come to Nan to be told that she didn’t deserve this calamity of dissension in her hill, a revolution brewing, Quicksilver’s servant turned upon them, and Quicksilver himself unfaithful to her. And Nan would make out that it was all Ariel’s fault.

“He betrayed me,” Ariel said. “Silver did. With a stranger.”

Nan sighed. “And yet, had he been allowed to be Silver, now and then, would not Silver have been kept under control? And would he not come to you, Quicksilver again, at day’s end? Isn’t Silver part of who he is? Shouldn’t you at least befriend her, if you love him? Think of her as a sister of your husband? Would you not wish to know her, had she shared his childhood and his growing up secrets? Yet she shares more than that, the mind and heart of your lord. And you know her not, but treat her as his Mistress that must be kept hidden and away from you. Who betrayed whom first, milady? And who is the worse abused?”

Ariel opened her mouth to reply, but found no words. Tears fell from her eyes.

She wasn’t sure she agreed with Nan, yet Nan seemed to speak the truth. And Nan said Will still loved Nan, though he live as far away as London.

Ariel couldn’t trust her husband outside the palace.

“Now, it’s late,” Nan said, collecting the empty cups and setting them atop the cooking table. “And I’ll to my bed. If you believe what I tell you, or even if you don’t, but you wish to remain married, you’ll to your husband and beg his forgiveness, and learn to know him.”

“But the rebels,” Ariel said. “And the wolf.... If there is a wolf....”

Nan shrugged. “Alone you cannot face them. And without your love I think neither can your husband. I think you’re right and his weakness is that lack of support from those who should give it. So hie to him and with him make peace. You cannot save the world while you live in a marriage that is no marriage with a man you know not.” She banked the ashes around the glowing coals, and turned to Ariel, and waited till Ariel got up, and escorted her to the door.

At the door, she smiled, and pulled Ariel into an unexpected, friendly embrace and, brushing her dry lips against Ariel’s cheek, in the reassuring gesture of an older friend or relative, she said, “Oh, and when you see Will, tell him I’d like him to visit before Michaelmas, or his son will forget his name.”

With that, she pushed Ariel gently out the door, much as she’d pushed Hamnet towards the hallway, and closed the door behind her.

Ariel heard the bolt shoot home.

"When she saw Will.” The nerve of the woman! What made her think that Ariel would be going to London and seeing Will?

Standing outside, in the cold of night, Ariel thought of going back to the hill and facing the duplicitous Malachite, the threatening centaurs, all on her own. Or going to harsh, iron-cluttered London, and from there fetching Quicksilver.

The thought of Quicksilver made her feel warm, like a gentle fire in a stormy night.

Oh, curse it all. She’d go to London. And there, following her lord’s magic, track him down and try to salvage the unsalvageable.

Scene Nineteen

The street outside Will’s rented lodgings. Though it’s still night, a sliver of pink shows in the east, and the taverns are all closed and the whole street silent, save only for those stirrings of the people who tidy up after the amusement of others: tavern wenches, bear keepers, horse dealers. It is, in fact, one of the very few times when all is silent in Southwark, that short moment between the time when revelers retire and the time the day’s workers rise to do their working. Once more, Marlowe loiters beneath the sign across the street.

If Will had thought to fool Kit Marlowe, more the fool he.

Kit Marlowe thought this, but he did not feel gloating, nor victorious over Will’s low cunning or attempt at deception. Instead, facing Will’s lodgings, Will’s lodgings, where the fair Lady Silver had just opened the door to allow Will into the room, Kit felt tired, and old, and used and abused by those circumstances of time and of affection that had made the provincial of Stratford preferred above him.

He’d seen the lady clearly, as she’d opened the door and stepped out, for a brief moment, to let Will in. And he’d seen Will, too. Though too far away to see his expression, he guessed at Will’s eagerness by the way he clutched the lady’s shoulder and pulled her in.

Standing there, Kit felt as though his whole world had shattered, this time irremediably.

Will’s actions were not those of a puppet mesmerized by faerieland magic.

Kit should have killed Waggstaff while he had a chance. But he’d believed the truth of his words. He’d thought, foolishly, that Silver must have used her magic on this creature and that Will, poor clod that he was, had failed to see her, or, having seen her, to remember her.

Kit had been fooled.

Not for the first time.

Kit clenched his fist around the handle of his dagger. A thin streak of light dawned in the east, but as yet the night was dark and secret, and a cold, cold breeze picked up as if out of nowhere, bringing with it a loathsome reek, like the smell of an opened tomb.

Two houses down from where Kit stood, a door was firmly closed and, across it, a nailed board proclaimed that the tavern was a haunt of the plague and that any entering it would not only be risking contagion but breaking the law as well.

The sign over the door swung forlornly in the wind, showing a man in a blue cloak, holding an harp. The Words beneath read: The Minstrel.

The brightly painted sign coupled with the plague notice mirrored Kit’s state of mind.

He too went about well dressed and with a smile fit to attract, and yet what corruption lurked inside, and how much danger did he not pose to the unwary entering into his sphere?

The thought came again that he should have killed Will, and he knew -- in the end -- that part of what had stayed his hand had been the memory of all those he’d betrayed, all the men he’d sent to their deaths on the block and gallows: the Catholics he’d turned in over the Babington conspiracy -- which had probably been as much an invention of Walsingham’s as anything else, and his protestant, nay, his fanatic puritan friends whom he’d likewise betrayed to the inhuman arm of state religion.

A voice in him, a meek, small voice, the voice of the child who had grown up as a cobbler’s son, in the shade of the great cathedral at Canterbury, piped up to say that he’d had no choice, that had he not betrayed he would have been betrayed, his motives and reasons as certainly questioned as his companions’. And they would have found more to condemn in him than in any other, as they were about to find more now.

Because Kit Marlowe, with his mind that had ever been his one pride, and his pride in the workings of what he prided himself in thinking his excellent reason -- Kit Marlowe had always strayed too near the dangerous edge of atheism, always stepped too close to the abyss of the dangerous thought, the lonely doubt of the man who walks alone, away from the protective walls of faith.

And now Kit had taken it too far. He’d die for it.

But Silver would go on living.

Looking up at the window where the candle light winked, obscured by bodies that crossed between it and the windowpane, Kit wondered if Silver and Will were making love -- her perfect body entwined in his too-homely one, his great balding head leaning over her black silk hair, her white silk thighs.

Soon Kit would be arrested, and tried, and probably executed.

If things were allowed to go that far, he thought, if his sometime friend and patron, Thomas Walsingham didn’t kill him first, in some street corner, in some carefully faked brawl, to avoid Kit’s revealing under torture all the dealings of the Walsinghams. Dead, Kit could reveal nothing about all the times that the service of the Queen’s majesty had been more excuse than purpose, and the true purpose had lay in the lining of the Walsingham purse, the enriching of the Walsingham family.

So Kit would die. Soon. No use deceiving himself any longer.

Again, as before, when Quicksilver had dismissed him, Kit Marlowe felt sorry for this Kit, this urchin of the lower middle class who’d climbed under his own impulse and by his own power to be a scholar, and mingle with the great ones of the land. To save his own life, he had betrayed others. To save his own life, he had tainted his own soul.

But which man, being human, wouldn’t do likewise, and hold onto sweet life, while others lost theirs? Surely no one could expect more of Kit than this loyalty to his own person.

For he who doesn’t hold himself dear, who does he hold dear, and what loyalty swerves his path?

And yet now Kit would die, for this sin he had in common with all humanity, and, after his dying, Silver would go on living, and Quicksilver too, one person in two bodies, and both bodies immortal and uncorrupted, like finely wrought gold, and sweet-polished silver.

Silver would go on living, and so would Will, and through the sweet, perfumed springs, the hot, invigorating summers, they would go on loving, their bodies entwined, their souls rejoicing, while Kit moldered beneath a slab in some forgotten church, or in the dirt of a pauper’s grave, somewhere.

Silver and Will would love and live.

The thought pounded upon his mind like madness proper, and rolled along his veins with screaming fever.

It must not happen.

Kit would kill Will.

He must kill Tremblestick. If nothing else, if Kit couldn’t save his own life, then he must, he must prevent Will from living on. If Kit couldn’t have Silver, then he must prevent Will from enjoying Silver and life, and all that Kit had lost.

Clenching his teeth so hard that they ground, one upon the other like millstones, Kit imagined himself climbing the stairs, taking step by step the steps to the top, and there knocking at the door, there demanding to see Silver, there putting an end to Will’s life, in that one fell instant.

But if he climbed the steps, would Silver not intervene, and cast a veil of magic over Kit and, perhaps, make her lover invisible or all powerful?

No, Kit thought, as the wind whistled through the quiet desolate street. No. He would wait till the morrow and near the door surprise Will and kill him, making a fast measure of it.

Yet Kit remembered the way Will had fought, and he hesitated. He wasn’t so sure he could take the provincial married man from Stratford, hand to hand, in combat.

This night, at least, he’d proven himself able to defend his life, and not averse to using force to do it.

Kit remembered the blows he’d endured.

And he remembered Will in the tavern. If that hadn’t been friendly companionship, it had been a close counterfeit. Whatever Will thought, he hadn’t meant ill to Kit.

Yet Kit must kill Will. He had to kill Will Shakelance, or never have rest, in grave or meadow, in life or death. Will must stop breathing and be prevented from enjoying Silver’s favors, from which Kit was barred.

The light went out within Will’s lodgings, and Kit held breath while his hatred, like a living thing, spilled out of its tight confines, and seized hold of his soul.

Oh, for a stronger soul, a stronger body, a dark, winged, evil intensity that could seize Will and drag him down with Kit into Kit’s own pit of torment.

The smell of the graveyard became heavier around him, as the chill wind picked up. A foul taste rose in Kit’s mouth.

He felt as though a cold, furry body rubbed against his ankles.

Scene Twenty

Will’s room, with everything clean and tidy and a few additions. On the bed, there’s a multicolored blanket, woven through with gold threads. The candlestick is gold. The glass in the windows sparkles. Lady Silver, in a filmy white dress sits on the bed. Will, standing, paces the room.

“You had no right,” Will said. He’d been received at the door by the Lady Silver, who’d pulled him into the room with every evidence of delight. But he’d pulled away from her encompassing arms, her soft rounded breast, the warmth of her body, and he’d rounded on her with his indignation. “It is my lodging, and you had no right.”

She laughed, a musical sound, woven through with delighted seduction, a sound that suggested fields in full flower and the red-blooded rites of May when country boys took their girls out to pick flowers and in so doing picked their flower as well.

“But my dear, it was squalor such as rats would disdain.”

“I am not your dear,” Will said. Seeing his room thus transformed had sobered him. The soft haziness of his drunken camaraderie with Marlowe was replaced by indignation, and the gentle glow of ale in his stomach with a burning, acid coldness. Not even Nan, with her blunt ways, would think to change Will’s living space like this, without asking him. Why, Nan didn’t even mend her suits without telling him she intended on doing it.

And this elf, with her laughing ways, her soft voice, would think to manipulate him, to control him, to make him into that which he was not.

That Silver had taken his room and changed it to be her own reminded Will of the high-handed nature of these creatures, who’d take your very life and redo it, ten times over, with hardly a thought, taking and twisting your words, your purpose and your intent to their own ends.

They were, he thought, like the child playing with insects, directing them hither and thither with a stick. The child might mean no harm and think not of killing the insect. Yet, neither does he think of the insect or of where the insect was headed before the stick came in his way.

It’s all a game for the child, a way of whiling away a boring afternoon, and in that game, played gamely, he might accidentally crush his victim without noticing. All in sport, and the child runs off laughing, but the insect, crushed beneath the careless boot, or the playfully tossed stick, has lost the only one of his brief lives, and is as dead as if death had been meant.

“It is my room. My room. My place, paid for with my money and maintained by me.”

Again the laughter. Though Silver sat still on the bed, her legs composedly drawn together, her hands resting side by side on them, yet her laughter contrived to color all of it with wanton abandon and put a spark in her shimmering silken hair, a glimmer of enticement in her silver eyes. “But you can’t maintain that you liked the way it looked. Surely, you must have meant to change it, had you had the money.”

“Had I had the money, yes, I would have changed it. Or maybe not, for it suited me well, and the money must be saved for Nan and for the children. It is still my room, not yours. You must not do things to my room, while I’m away. You must not do things to me for your amusement. You must not seduce me because you’re bored. You must not beguile me because you’re scared. I am my own man and have my own life, and my own wife, and my own true love.”

Silver sighed, and waved a dainty white hand around the room. The golden candlestick became again a chipped, much used clay one. The table that had been polished, gleaming rich wood, became the broken-down pine wreck it really was. And the window clouded once more with foggy grime.

Silver yawned, the lazy yawn of a cat, and covered her mouth with her pale hand, then stretched, also like a cat, in theatric manner. “Your boring room is back, Will. Do not fuss.” She lowered her arms, and smiled at him. “There, are you happy?”

But Will could not feel happy. His heart clenched with fear or something very like fear.

He cleared his throat. “No, I’m not happy.” How did he even know she’d told him the truth about anything? Had Silver truly come to town to rescue the world from Sylvanus’s ill intent? Or was all this a crazed game, a play devised by the elves’ eternal high spirits, seeking to call him once more into a mad round? Was this all a game designed to seduce Will to Silver’s soft eyes and softer body, her love that was no love, but a cold thing, and yet, as a cold thing, burned in multicolored splendor.

“Not happy?” The dark arched eyebrows rose up the pale forehead, and the silver eyes opened in round amazement, as if to say that surely everyone would be happy, whom she dared touch with her magic glamour.

Her lilac smell filled the room, overpoweringly strong, making Will’s head more confused than any amount of ale could do.

She leaned backward, and threw her shoulders back, displaying her womanly figure in full bloom, and smiled. “And what can I do, Master Shakespeare, to make you happy?”

Will took in her cleavage, the top half of it soft, and white, and bare, the bottom half cradled by flimsy wanton lace, the top creamier even than the white bottom, and promising heat and shelter. In his younger days, this would have been irresistible. But now his indignation, even at this one gesture, was stronger than his errant attraction.

He looked away, and stared at the window, and walked that way, and looked down at the street.

Few people ventured out on the street, this late at night, before the early morning rush of working people. And yet, the man standing in front of the tavern across the street looked like Marlowe, and might well be him.

Yet, what would Marlowe be doing there? Surely Marlowe had been in no state to go stand about. And Will had seen him home.

He must be in his room and well asleep in his bed, as Will would be if his bed were his own. At this distance, one man looked much like another.

“You said you’d be gone at night,” Will said, turning around to face Silver. “You said at night my room would be my own. Yet, here you are, and night fully underway.”

Silver smiled. “Well, tonight you were absent most of the night.” Her smile curled around an indefinable insinuation, even as her sweet voice dripped honey over him. “So I thought it no harm being here. And, surely, there is no harm in talking to you this way. We are friends, are we not, Will?”

Will, in whose bosom a vat of emotional poison boiled, threatening to spill over everything, looked at the fair elf with suspicion, and took her measure with weariness. He tore his gaze away the better to think, and frowned, and said, “If you wished to be friends, you would be Quicksilver.”

The soft laughter echoed in the room and Silver’s voice sounded like Quicksilver’s as she spoke next. “Why, Will. I thought you liked women better.”

Will spread his hands wide, as if to mean that he knew what he liked and he didn’t see any reason to account for it to this creature. He sighed. “Listen, lady, it’s not going to work. You’ve got me scared enough that tonight, on my way to see the Lord Southampton, I thought I saw the wolf. And yet, it was all a game, was it not? A game of elven kind. There is no wolf, and it’s all your deception. So, do you wish to tell me what really happened?” He stared at the fair creature on his bed, and managed to keep his expression composed to sourness and disdain. “Your marriage grew too boring, your life too steady, and you thought to snare the fool, Will Shakespeare to your bed, to amuse you with his bumbling folly?”

This arrow struck home, its barbs penetrating deep into the flesh.

The Lady opened her mouth, then closed it. The color fled her cheeks that, during his speech, had collected in bright crimson pools upon her pale skin. “Is that what you think?” she asked slowly. “Think you that of me? Think you I’m no better than a bawd who’d come all this way to seduce you?”

Will nodded. Indeed, he thought it, and the way she’d reacted only proved it further. For what, save truth, will make a creature blanch so? What, save ill-will, would make an elf look as if discovered by a mortal, and sore humiliated at that?

Silver rose.

By the soft candlelight coming from Will’s table, she flickered. It was an effect like the sun seen through winking eyelids. She flickered, and shone, and flickered again, and a soft heat permeated the room.

In her place, stood Lord Quicksilver, king of faerieland, fully attired in male fashion.

Only once before had Will seen that change, and that had been in his poor kitchen in Henley Street, and the change induced by the fearful heat, the glaring burn of forged iron applied to this creature’s flesh.

Now the change was voluntary, and, unlike then, when Quicksilver changed so did his clothes. The lord who took the lady’s place still wore white, but his clothing consisted of a creamy doublet, and shiny velvet hose, both of them embroidered with gold and silver threads.

White, translucent stockings molded the shapely, muscular calf, and a black dagger depended from Quicksilver’s belt.

Will knew, from having seen elven weapons ten years before, that this dagger would be crystal. Black crystal, honed to a point, beautiful and strange to behold, but for that no less lethal than the forged steel of men.

Quicksilver was taller than Silver, tall enough to dwarf Will, upon whom he looked, like a child judging a rebellious worm.

“I see the friendship I imagined is all to naught.” Walking over to stand beside Will, he reached with thumb and forefinger and pinched the candle’s wick between his fingers and out of the darkness he spoke, like a waning sprite, “I’ll be gone, now, Will. I see the battle for your friendship, nay, your regard, is lost, and I was foolish to think it possible. You shall see me no more.”

Like that, he winked out, in a dazzle of fireflies that left the room dark. The scent of lilac still weighed heavy in this confined space, reminding Will of this abrupt departure.

Confused, wondering where Quicksilver might have gone and why, if the king of Elves could use such means, he’d not devised to do it before, when Will had dragged him -- or Lady Silver -- quivering and fainting across half of London, Will thought it had indeed been all a trap, all sport at his expense.

It had all been a sham.

Still angry, Will burned with resentment that the creature had even presumed to think that he could control Will so, and so have command of Will’s emotions, even though once before it had been rebuffed, and saw its worth set back when compared to Nan’s real love.

Turning to the window, he saw that the man who looked like Marlowe still stood outside, but now had been joined by his dog.

Or at least a dog, likely one of the many that roamed London streets in ravenous packs.

The dog was enormous and very dark, and, as Will watched, it rubbed against the man’s legs, and the man lowered his hand to pet the massive head.

Well, at least some people weren’t alone, Will thought, as he retraced his steps into his dark room, and undressed, and lay on his slim mattress, beneath his blanket.

One thing was left of Silver’s magic, one thing she’d not changed back. The blanket his fingers encountered was soft, and thick, probably the multicolored blanket Silver had conjured.

Though he still thought he had been right about Quicksilver’s intentions, Will wondered if he’d done the right thing.

The creatures could be as spiteful as pagan gods, and like them vengeful. What wrath had he not incurred?

He stared at the ceiling a long time, thinking of the gains of the day -- that fat purse he’d slid beneath the mattress before lying down, and which would not only pay his lodging and his food for many months, but provide a parcel to take to his Nan as soon as he could spare a few days to visit Stratford.

Then he thought of the losses -- of Marlowe’s strange behavior, of the dog or what he’d thought was the dog, of the creature who was Silver and Quicksilver and as either or both an inscrutable mystery.

Will turned the events over in his head, but nothing resolved itself, nothing made sense. At long last, he turned on his side, and, as the sounds came from outside, of waking apprentices and workers hurrying to their workshops, he fell asleep.

Just as he closed his eyes, in that space between awakening and sleeping, he thought he heard a dog howl.

Scene Twenty One

Kit Marlowe, standing on the street, outside Shakespeare’s lodging. The night is dark, and around his ankles a darker shadow twines.

The thought Kit had.... What was it?

He’d thought of Will and how good it would be if Will lay dead, if he died before Marlowe might die, if that bed in which Will enjoyed Silver might forever cursed be with loneliness.

“All that I will do, and yet more,” said a voice, gentle as the light of day that rose, whisper-soft, over the buildings across the street. “All that I will do, and yet I’ll grant that Kit Marlowe will not squander his life, that he shall not give up breath and heart for the heartless elf, the foolish peasant.”

The smell of graveyard intruded, heavy and gagging, and something cold rubbed against his leg, but Kit listened to the voice.

Looking down, where he thought there would be a dog, he saw only a darker patch of night, as if a concentration of darkness.

What voice was it, what disordered thought, that to Kit’s ears seemed to promise life and love and all the good things that men dreamed of? Yet Kit knew himself so near to his death that he walked as if by the very crumbling edge of his own grave. He knew he could not live, for his continued life threatened the Walsinghams, and Cecil, and Essex, and for smaller threats had greater men died.

And yet that sense that knew death inevitable, that same sense would reach for any promise of life, however vain.

Kit did not want to die. He did not want eternal quietus in the dark, with worms.

Like a swimmer amid overpowering waves, crossing the broad arm of a perilous sea, Kit, wave on wave, saw his death near, and felt the abyss rob him of his very breath and life and joy, and every heartbeat that he would yet take. Kit plunged head long towards the promise of air and life, even should that air prove stale, that life fickle.

“Who are you?” he asked the still air tainted with the heavy smell of moist earth and rotting flesh.

An apprentice clad all in black, walking by on the other side of the street, gave Kit an odd look as if he talked to himself, then, with an obvious glance at the tavern sign above Kit’s head, shrugged his shoulders.

And perhaps I’m drunk, Kit thought. Or perhaps dreaming without sleeping.

Maybe from his terror and his jealousy, from his pity for that poor Kit, so deceived, so abused, something else had sprung to make Kit Marlowe hallucinate salvation out of the still air.

But what dream of his had ever smelled so foul?

Laughter, unmistakably male in its low accents, and yet laden with soft, flowing promise, echoed all around Kit, seemingly wrapping him in coils of the mind.

“Who are you?” he asked again.

“I am that which can grant you your heart’s desire,” a male voice said, soft and slow. “Your desire of revenge and love and life, and everything you ever wanted.

“Only take me in, give me asylum, and shall your brow be crowned with a poet’s crown, and future generations will compare their meager efforts to your greater worthiness.”

Kit cleared his throat against the foul stench that surrounded him. He did not know why his heart beat such a disordered dance within his chest.

This was all a dream. It had to be a dream.

Did he not stand in a Southwark street, looking on mundane facades of wooden buildings, and watching apprentices walk by? Was the morning breeze not cold upon his skin, did his clothes not feel clammy with his own sweat? Was he not in the world of real things, the world of the living?

“Did you not stand in an ancient grove of trees, in a garden in your own home town, when you beheld Lady Silver? Aye, and when you rushed to her embraces, and submitted to those of Quicksilver, too?”

Kit’s throat closed. This dream knew too much and was too mocking. This dream knew about Quicksilver? If a dream of his own, it was a foul dream that lifted the scab off the not-yet healed injury and exposed Kit’s own heart to the cold and bitter bite of memory. And if it came from elsewhere, real being or false, human or elf, this creature knew too much.

Feeling his head pound, his heart clench, causing a faintness to tremble upon his limbs, Kit said in a voice that he hoped would be strong, “I have no need of you, to have my genius crowned. My poetry is enough that I produce, nor do I doubt that it will be remembered and, centuries after my death, serve as a monument more durable than ever was sculpted in marble.”

A sound like a soft sigh echoed all around Marlowe. The darkness no longer tangled around his ankles and knees, but swirled all around him, wrapping him, like a dark blanket, so fine, that you could see the surrounding houses and street through it, and even the dark sky with the faint reddish taint up in the east. Yet the darkness, blanket like, felt warm and soft upon Kit’s head and hands, and shielded him from the wanton breeze.

Darker flecks floated in this black haze, as though they were black diamond dust tossed in the wind. And a voice came from it, very softly, so real and exact that it seemed to tickle Kit’s ear with breath as each word was spoken. “Ah, you have confidence in your own worth.” A light chuckle followed upon the words. “And yet, if you die now, what will be your reward? You might, indeed, have in you greatness such as would astound the ages to come. But you know yourself that your plays, your meager poetry, are as of yet no more than a child’s doodles, a youth’s abstractions. To be remembered you must live, and you must know that without me you’re speeding at unstoppable gallop to your death.”

Like that, the blanket was gone, the faint darkness around Marlowe all dissipated, leaving him with a clear view of the street, the facing building, the too-sharp-edged bite of reality upon his senses.

The breeze blew with renewed vigor, bringing with it a scent of graveyard.

That graveyard to which Kit was hastening, step by step, with his every step and his every breath.

Kit turned his eyes to the window that had gone dark so long ago, in the tall building across the street.

How Silver must be sighing, her joyous sighs, and how Will must be glorying in his conquest, while the broken-down bed creaked beneath their conjoined bodies.

And they’d go on laughing and loving long after Kit was gone. Gone and forgotten, his poems derided as worthless juvenilia, his rhymes dismissed as minor works of a minor poet that had nothing in him, except this meager toil.

“No, stay,” he heard himself say, though surely all darkness was now absent, and he called in vain to the empty air. “Stay. I will hear you. What can you do to grant me what you say?”

For a moment nothing happened. The waking street was too real, all too mundane in its everyday noises: houses awakening, family members calling to each other. A few doors down a householder opened his lower door, where his shop no doubt was, and gave Kit an odd look, but not too odd, for, after all, what can you expect in Southwark but drunks?

Then the blanket of darkness was back, suddenly, enveloping Kit like an embrace. “You must share my life and I yours, and in that life will you gain immortality, so that not only will your poems be remembered through the centuries, but you’ll be there to hear the praise and reap the accolades.”

The blanket tightened around him, keeping the cold breeze out. A different scent than the rank smell of rotting flesh surrounded Kit, a smell not unlike that smell of lilac that he associated with Quicksilver, but grown overpowering, so as to smell like flowers arrayed around a funereal urn. “This I’ll do for you and more, if you take me in and give asylum to my high and lofty purpose. Rulers of the world, we’ll conjoined be, if only you keep me within your company. You rule in humankind, and I in faerieland.”

“Faerieland?” Marlowe asked, the one word costing him all the accumulated breath he’d gathered, while the blanket coiled and coalesced around him. “Faerieland?”

“From faerieland I hail,” the thing said. “And there I ruled, before that imp, that low shape changer, Quicksilver, took my place, and with cold, unloving hand, thrust me from my race, to die.”

“Quicksilver? Quicksilver banished you?” Kit asked. In his own mind was the image of Quicksilver, the fair youth in all his noble splendor turning Kit away from his only love, from his true lady’s bed.

“Banished?” A bitter laugh echoed on the heels of the word, and the darkness coalesced, so that over Kit’s shoulder, a man appeared, taller than Kit, and better formed for war, with broad shoulders and powerful arms so that beside him, Kit felt like a child, less than half-grown. The man’s -- elf’s? -- features looked noble, his face well proportioned, his hair dark ringlets, his beard carefully groomed, his heart-shaped mouth poised in a half smile.

Kit made as if to move away, but a hand grabbed him around his middle, a powerful arm held him immobile. “The vermin had no right to banish me, nor to punish me, nor did he have power to do so. I was his king and he a foolish boy, playing with his mortals and his maidens. Yet, like the snake, well nurtured to the bosom, did he despoil me of kingdom and of country, and send me wandering in the desolate darkness, with no one and nothing to sustain me. But give me asylum, and together, we’ll recover my land, my kingdom entire, and lay the worm in the darkest dungeon that the imagination of man has ever built.”

Kit felt he should say that he did not wish to see Silver harmed -- nay, nor Quicksilver either, harsher though he was -- nor did he wish their enchantment brought low.

Yet she should be punished, and Quicksilver too, for the wanton disregard of Kit’s love. But no more than a rebuke, a soft rejoinder.

Just as he thought this, another thought intervened, that Quicksilver had cast him from his bosom and from Silver’s warm favors and that, even as Marlowe in agony stood outside this house in the dark of night, inside the wanton elf enjoyed the pleasures and company of another.

Into that thought wrapped the memory of disordered sheets and warm bed, of the soft, silken body beneath his own. He sighed and bit his lips, and didn’t say anything, did not defend his erstwhile love, nor attempt to turn away condemnation from that fair head.

In that moment this other elf was upon him, seemingly still blanket and yet human, his hands everywhere, and prying upon Kit’s breast, his thighs and every limb, and up again, and close beside him pressed, and talked of love.

Gasping for breath, scared and giddy and confused, Kit made reply, “You are deceived, I am no woman, I.”

The elf smiled at that and said, “It is no love such as human love I crave, but the fair use of your fair body that we will become one and the other and both interchangeable.”

Too late, Kit thought to run. Too late he thought that if it were so, if this creature were to have use of his body -- whatever that use meant -- Kit, the weaker, would lose his body, aye, and his soul too and all that went with life.

What good was life, if just a semblance, if Kit seemingly would walk and talk, but another creature use his mind and limbs?

He sought to run, pushing his feet hard against the dusty ground.

The elf ran with him, the darkness clinging on, laughter, immortal laughter stopping Kit’s ears.

He ran and ran, in disordered running, till each breath made bid to burst his lungs, and, upon each breath he thought it would be his last.

Then in a dark place, far away from the awakening street where he had started, he fell down. His knees gave out, and his legs with them, bringing him to his knees upon a muddy street, wet with slops and smelly discards.

Kit’s eyes stung from sweat that had dripped into them. He blinked and looked around, and saw that all the houses here, once taverns and bawdy houses, were blocked, the board nailed across their doors, the seal of the Queen upon the board and a warning that here reigned the plague.

Kit Marlowe made as if to rise again, but his knees wouldn’t support him.

Kneeling like a penitent on the muddy street, he heard the elf laugh and felt a touch, upon his whole body at once, like a million wanton hands seeking to feel his skin, his very pores, and trying to possess him and know him and win him as never human lover could have done.

He tried to shrug away from such a touch, too intimate and knowing to be pleasurable, but found nowhere to turn since it was everywhere, and his legs felt too tired to allow him to rise, to allow him to run.

Trembling, he knelt and wished that he would die, or else that he would, instantly, be consigned to the raw attentions of the torturers which, not feeling this soft, would yet be kinder.

The hands, the myriad hands that it felt were touching him everywhere that hand could touch, seemed to sink deeper and, through his clothes, touch his very skin.

Then the touch turned burning, hot, intemperate, and sank lower and deeper into Kit’s being, so it seemed to have captured not inconsequential flesh, but his very soul.

Like a bird trembling between the hands that would wring it, Marlowe sought to escape, but couldn’t. What’s inside cannot be escaped.

With a fearful burning upon his every limb, he collapsed to the muddy street and thought that he’d sealed an hellish bargain.

But something in him laughed, something pushed, like a rider will set spurs to a sluggish horse, something whispered within his brain, “You will rise and do my work now. Morning is nigh, and from now must you spend all night awake and doing my will, if we are to achieve our revenge over our mutual enemy.”

Scene Twenty Two

Marlowe’s lodgings -- a room larger than Will’s and better furnished, with a large bed, covered with a good coverlet. Though the room’s furnishings are minimal, and obviously designed for a room that’s no more than a pied-a-terre within London confines, yet the small writing table is polished oak, the chair before it is an armchair, carved and polished, and the trunk for clothing storage is overhung with a fine brocade cloth. On the bed, on his stomach, lies Marlowe. His clothes are tattered, and blood-stained, as are his hair, his hands and his face.

Even before Marlowe woke, a feeling of heaviness was upon him, a heaviness such as one feels when coming down with an illness or when, having slept after a great grief, one wakes to find that grief undiminished.

Awakening, opening his eyes to the bright light of day coming in through his sparkling-clean windows, changed nothing. A heavy scent of rotted flesh and spoiled meat overhung the room; Kit’s head pounded with the worst of hangover headaches, his mouth tasted like an unswept midden, and every movement of his limbs cost him an agony as though a fiend armed with a sharp dagger worked him over, pushing the tip into his skin and piercing his muscle.

No. Not a fiend with a sharp dagger, but many fiends, with myriad arms and countless daggers, all dancing around Kit and tormenting him.

Aching, Kit lay still for a while, but nothing improved. A heaviness rested upon his stomach as though hot lead had been poured, unsuspecting, down his throat in the night.

He moved not, and he hurt, and hurting he thought he might well move. Pulling himself up on his arms, enduring hellish pain along them, he rolled on his side and lifted himself on his elbow. As he rolled the cover of his bed came with him, glued by a black substance.

His head pounded and he looked as if through a dark veil.

Memories of the night before came in fits and starts, each of them hurting as much as physical movement.

Kit remembered Silver, beautiful Silver in St. Paul’s yard, and he remembered their lovemaking, though both mind and heart flinched from the memory as a man will from touching a bruised spot.

His other memories were darker, more confused. He remembered the drunk -- the monumental drunk -- he’d got with Will but from then on he wondered how much of it was real and how much the effects of wine.

He’d thought he’d seen Will go home to Silver, but had he really, or had his wine-addled brain created it, like he’d heard sailors tell that the sun will create a mirage upon the vast, unmoving ocean?

He tried to shake his head at the thought, but his head pounded so badly that he stopped.

Groaning with the effort of it, he managed to sit up. As for the other memories, the memories of the dark being who’d waged -- as far as Kit could think -- a war for Kit’s own soul, or his life or his mortal body -- Kit couldn’t think which and, indeed, couldn’t remember any of it -- those memories were confused and vague, like a dream had a long time ago and never again visited by reason during waking hours.

He essayed a smile, though his lips hurt with stretching, and told himself perforce he had believed his own plays and his judging mind beneath the waking one had brought upon him that same ill judgment of being punished for trifling with demons.

His anger now.... Kit sat on the bed, and again tried to shake his head, but stopped, as a sharp pain made it feel as if a dagger were worked into his left temple. He cradled his head in black, sticky hands, and wondered how and with what he’d got himself so befouled. He remembered the mud of the alley, the stickiness of it, but this stickiness was greater than any clay, and it had the heavy smell of the slaughter house.

The thought gagged him, his throat working against his mind and body to close, and stop all thought, all breathing, with overpowering nausea.

He must wash. Whatever it was, he would wash, and it would be gone.

Carefully, cautiously, he extended his feet over the side of the bed, and scooted slowly downward, trying to find the floor and feeling as if he should have already touched it, as if nothing, nothing were under his feet but the mouth of a deep-yawning abyss.

His anger, how quickly it had flared the night before, puzzled Kit himself still. His anger always puzzled him. Hot as hell’s own breath upon descending on Kit, it would cloud his mind and every thought. And afterwards, Kit would stand amazed at what he’d said and done within that whirlwind of fury.

Had he really meant to kill Will Waggstick, the much-married burgher of Stratford? He couldn’t have meant it. It couldn’t be. Will was amusing, in an innocent way.

Even if he had -- and Kit’s head throbbed with ache at the very thought -- even if he had somehow contrived to seduce Silver, how would that make him Kit’s enemy?

Surely Kit could not be so foolish that he thought that an elf who’d leave him for Will wouldn’t leave him for just about any other undistinguished man out on the streets?

No. Will was not the problem. Nor was Silver. The problem was Kit and Kit’s anger, much worsened by wine.

He stood up on unsteady legs.

He’d been angry for so long that he no longer remembered at what. Maybe at the childhood companions who’d turned their back on him, when the teacher had favored him and started grooming him for the scholarship at Cambridge.

Maybe at his parents who, once it became obvious their son would attend university, treated him well enough but not the way they treated their daughters. They handled him with cold near-deference, like sparrows catering to the cuckoo in their nest.

He walked unsteadily towards his washbasin that stood on a metal stand across the room.

He’d felt anger too, he thought, at his father, too quick to consign his oldest son to the ranks of scholars and never taking the time or the interest to show Kit about his father’s own craft, that had been passed down from his grandfather and from his great-grandfather before.

Not that Kit had ever felt a great hankering towards making shoes and fitting them to the feet of the demanding gentry. Even now, thinking about such a thing as his ambition brought a low, croaking chuckle to his throat, a chuckle that resolved itself in a fit of coughing.

No, it wasn’t the mean little workshop, the unpleasant work of tanning hides, the back always bent over some piece of leather that Kit envied. Rather, it was that thing he’d never experienced -- his father’s attentive teaching of him, his father’s paying attention to him and looking upon him as a worthy successor to the name.

His father taught apprentices aplenty and, thinking of that, Kit still clenched his hands in anger.

This anger, he thought now, all this anger, that he’d carried with him almost from the cradle, he’d directed at Quicksilver, too, for so hastily dismissing Kit from his bliss, so blithely turning him away from paradise.

And yet, that was not the source of the anger that exploded whenever Kit was pressured and often when he drank.

Twice, he’d been involved in street brawls, where men had been killed, and once had he served time in jail for it. Yesterday, he might well have slain Will and, even if Kit could contrive to escape the many other deaths that threatened him -- the enclosing snares of his espionage work and the danger of Cecil, or Essex, or Walsingham silencing of him; even if he could escape the privy council’s enquiry and death by torture or hanging or disemboweling -- killing Will would have got Kit executed more certainly, yet, than all of them.

Kit could no longer afford to be a fool and let his anger buffet him here and there like a rudderless ship on a stormy sea.

And besides, had he ever really wanted to kill master Will?

By the clear light of the new day, Kit couldn’t find it in his heart to feel anything towards Will but calm benevolence.

Kit swallowed the sticky, evil taste in his throat.

He’d get up and clean himself and go to Will and attempt to make peace with him.

Unsteadily, he reeled to his washbasin. His landlady, ever attentive when Kit was in town, and mindful of her manners around learned scholars such as him, had set a large pitcher full of water on the dresser, beside the stand that supported the ceramic wash basin.

Kit poured water into the basin, dipped his hands in it, preparing to splash at his face.

He stopped. The water in the basin, into which he’d dipped his hands, had turned a deep, dark red, like freshly spilled blood.

Kit looked, with wide open eyes at his sleeve, caked with black the same black that had been on his hands.

Blood. How had he got himself all over blood? Had he killed Will, indeed?

No. He had not. He knew he had not.

Yet, breaking down the flimsy barrier of his mind, came a knocking of images too horrible to contemplate. Images of killing and tearing of -- with bare hands and cruel teeth taking human life, and gorging, like an animal, on the still-warm flesh.

Kit looked down at the basin, with his hands in it, and blood swirling over them, around them, all about.

His stomach wrenched within him and, before thought stayed his aching body, he ran to the window and fumbled with the latches that held the glass panels in place and pulling the panel off and setting it, any which way, on the floor, he leaned out of the window and spewed the contents of his stomach onto the street below.

An indignant shout answered the first volley, but then people beneath moved out of the way, and Kit threw up, out the open window, onto the street below, his stomach wrenched and his mouth tasting foul as never before.

At long last, the need to throw up abated, the pushing in his stomach, the gagging at his throat stopped.

Kit felt dizzy and tired and a fine dewing of sweat covered his forehead.

He looked down the brown front of the building, marked with darker, faintly red tracks where the contents of his stomach had fallen. Red wine or blood?

Kit could not tell, nor could he remember for sure what he had done.

With a sob, he retreated back inside his room, and leaned against his wall, trembling in weakness and humiliation, in fear and tiredness.

His heart beat so fast and so hard that it seemed to him to deafen him and, against the disorder of his thoughts, he could no more than interpose words, carefully pronounced, so that upon hearing them he would know what he was thinking and steady the racing horses which, like furious team dragged the unsteady chariot of his thought towards a deep abyss.

So, he spoke softly, to himself, like a neighbor to a brain-addled fool. “Have mercy, Jesu!‑‑Soft! I did but dream.”

And yet, was his dream so unlikely? He remembered the dark power that had taken him, its strength dragging him to commit murder and prey like a dog upon dead bodies. Was it so unlikely a power would do that? When Kit Marlowe’s hands were full tainted already, with the blood of innocents?

How many people had Kit turned in? How many had died under torture. How many hanged? “Oh coward conscience, how do you afflict me! Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.”

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then shuddered thinking of the red trail his sleeve had left behind. Fresh sweat sprang from his forehead, and red-tinged beads trembled before his eyes.

His heart beat so fast it might break and he wanted to run, run, run, away from himself, his tainted soul, his crimes, old and new. “What do I fear--myself? There's none else by: Kit loves Kit; that is, I am I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.”

He shook, and trembling walked to the basin, and, trembling, dabbed the bloody water at hands and cuffs, at face and arms, and, like a maniac possessed of fire and driven by his madness, like a horse inflamed by spurs or like a fanatic by religious mania that makes him dance upon the street he grabbed the basin in both hands, threw the blood-red water out the window, to further screaming from the passerby. Then back again, and he filled the basin anew from the tall jar. “Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why: Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?”

He rubbed his hands in this new water, which anew was made red by his touch, while his mouth spoke on, and on, in fearful rant. “Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? For any good that I myself have done unto myself? O, no! alas, I rather hate myself for hateful deeds committed by myself! I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.” He poured the now red water out, filled the basin anew.

“Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter. My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, and every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain. Perjury, perjury in the highest degree.”

The water ran out and, running to the door, he opened it. Upon first touching the iron doorknob, Kit flinched, because the thing felt red-hot, burning his palm. Why and how had this knob got hot?

He shook his head. No matter. Grabbing his blanket from the bed, he dragged it to the door, and used a tip of it to protect his hand as he opened the door.

With the door open, Kit hollered to the cool, dark interior of the house, for more water to be brought and, while waiting, paced back and forth the narrow confines of his room.

“Murder, stem murder, in the direst degree; all several sins, all used in each degree, throng to the bar, crying all, 'Guilty! guilty!' I shall despair. There is no creature loves me; and if I die, no soul shall pity me: Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself find in myself no pity to myself?”

He heard steps upon the stairs and, pacing still, tried to still his tongue that would not be stilled. Clenching his teeth upon his own, fearful words, yet he could hear his muffled rant, the words echoing inside his head like accusations.

“Methought the souls of all that I had murdered came to my room; and every one did threat tomorrow's vengeance on the head of Marlowe.”

The buxom goodwife appeared on the door, attired in white kirtle, white cap, and shrank fearfully, staring at Kit, but still came within, with both hands carrying her bucket of fresh water.

And Kit bowed, wondering how fearful his countenance might be, and said, “I thank you, I thank you. I got fearfully spattered. A dog run over by a cart and I was near and suffered the blemish. A dog. A dog. Thanks good Mistress, thank you for the water.”

But the woman, as if warned by presentiment that all was darker than Kit would have it be, hastened from the room, walking backwards and never once turning her back on him.

Kit followed her and closed the door. He must go to Will, right away, and assure himself Will was still alive. As for these dark coils he’d fallen into: madness or possession, guilt or anger, he’d uncoil them yet, and he would run from death, to Scotland or France or some far distant land and there live, in fearful isolation like cloistered nun, till his sins were expiated and his guilt stilled.

But first he must get clean. He removed his clothes, and, scooping clear water with his hands, threw it at his face, only to see it fall, again, as red as crimson blood.

Looking at his bespattered hands still filled him with nausea.

Deep from within the house, he heard steps and noises, and stopped, imagining it the constables, come for to arrest him of capital murder that yet he didn’t fully know if he’d committed.

He thought he heard a knock upon the door, but listening heard not more. “Whence is that knocking?” he said, and startled upon saying it, and, chuckling in his throat, he trembled at the sound. “How is it with me?” he said. “When every noise appalls me? What hands are here?” He lifted his hands from the basin and stared at the red stains in amazement. “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red.”

Talking to himself, he knew himself already mad. And yet he must hence and make madness sane or else die, and thus end all reeling thought.

Scene Twenty Three

Will’s room. Will is asleep on the bed on his stomach, with Silver’s glimmering blanket sideways over him. Through the window come the pale light of morning and the sounds of a wakening street: metal banging on metal, from the forges and workshops, peddlers and merchants calling clientele and extolling the virtues of their services, carts rumbling slowly along the rutted street.

Will dreamed and knew he dreamed, but a disturbing, bottomless dream, a falling into darkness, a sleeping oppression like a scream never uttered, like the breath that, fugitive, leaves the sleeper’s mouth, and makes him gasp and beg for air and life.

In this bottomless darkness, he saw Silver, and Silver smiled at him, red, soft lips poised for grace and life and joy, white skin flushed with just a hint of pink, arms held open, in welcoming gesture.

Around Will’s shoulders her arms she wrapped, and in his ears, what sweet whisperings -- her breath against his neck, her lilac smell making him dizzy.

Silver was sweet, and Will would fain listen to her. Her body felt gentle and warm in his arms, and it had been so long since Will had held anyone like this. Even Nan.... It had been too long.

That Will hesitated, and, chaste in seduction’s arms, would hold back his love and his yielding, that had to do with Will’s true love.

What he had with Nan, now there was love. Though Nan’s skin be coarser than this silk, though Nan’s whispers never be as soft, Will knew Nan’s goodness, the soft caring of her heart.

He and Nan, like a tree well planted, had grown branches that, over their head, extended a canopy of love. If the trunk be slender or thick, what matter it, when the tree has born fruit, and the fruit is sweet?

He felt Silver’s temptation and his body rushed with the sap of spring and the desire to give in to this lady’s wooing.

And it was all a dream. Will knew he dreamed. Why not let his dream give him what his waking hours so denied him?

Yet, what would he win if he gained this thing his body sought? A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.

And wherewithal would his true love with Nan be marred. Even if she never knew of his transgression. For Will had promised there would never be another.

Will turned in bed, his mind preoccupied, his dreaming arms hanging beside his body, while Silver hugged him tight and spoke of joy.

Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week? Or sells eternity to get a toy? For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy? Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown, would with the scepter straight be stricken down?

Will shook his head and, in his dream, pushed Silver away with his sleeping arms, and said, “Lady, no.”

She was taken from him. A dark whirlwind sprang out of nowhere, and sucked her away into grey blankness, into nothing.

Her face from pale turned waxen white, her body stiffened with unyielding death. Her lips opened and through them she screamed, “It was loving Will that has undone me.”

A scream echoed from outside Will’s room, a cry like the fresh discovery of life’s short span.

A woman’s scream, sharp, inconsolable.

The scream on the heels of Silver’s wail intertwined into Will’s nightmare, making him start. He woke up. Trembling he sat, shaking in his bed, sweat springing, fearful, from every pore.

What a dream he’d had. What a guilty dream. And following up close behind, this wailing, brought the fresh spring of his fear.

Was Silver gone? Had she died for Will’s ill-considered refusal of her?

And yet, how could Will not refuse her? And who was she, how far did she presume, that she presumed so far on Will’s love?

This creature that was neither male nor female, neither human nor mortal, neither breathing nor ethereal?

How could Will love such a thing, even had he not Nan -- real, true Nan -- to keep with him the span of his days? How could Will love light, immaterial light and cold magic?

He could not. She was a dream he’d dreamed when young enough not to know the true from the false.

But now the dream was gone and he, awakened, knew the real worth of wakening love.

And yet he wished Silver not dead. And he’d not have the guilt of her death on his conscience.

Outside the screams went on, pouring onto Will’s mind like blood fresh-sprung from a wound.

This was no dream. This broad daylight should have dispelled the nightly terrors. And though Southwark was known for brawls and bawds, screaming like this meant a fresh death, and that was rare, least of all in daytime.

Half-dazed and trembling, Will grabbed his clothes which he had thrown over the back of the chair. He pulled them on with clumsy hands.

He opened his door to the warm morning air and ran perilously fast down his unguarded stairs.

Outside on the streets, people ran like ants whose anthill the careless boot has ripped open. Men abandoned their forges, women abandoned thei r homes, ill-awakened bawds ran out in their nightclothes with tattered shawls ill-wrapped around their shoulders.

They all ran in the direction of the screams and Will ran with them.

As he ran, his mind whispered a disordered prayer.

Only but let this mean a cutthroat had attacked a victim. Only but let this be a woman outraged in a dark alley. Let it be any crime, any crime at all, but not Will’s, and nothing to do with a wolf. Will remembered Silver’s talk of Sylvanus. He remembered his own dream of Sylvanus as a wolf.

At the end of the street, pushing through the disordered crowd that milled there, Will beheld a corpse: a corpse torn, and mauled into shapelessness.

He backed away through the crowd, gagging, feeling nauseous and dizzy.

A woman sat by the bloodied corpse, a young woman that, doubtless, in other circumstances would have been comely. She cradled the shattered head upon her dark skirt, and cried freely.

From the crowd Will heard comments, words that with some thinking assembled into meaning.

“It’s a bear,” one of them said. “Some bear escaped from a baiting ring.”

“Or one of the dogs,” said another.

“Looks like a wolf’s ravaging of a sheep,” said an old man. “I was once a shepherd. I should know.”

Will backed and backed, and backed, till he could hear no more.

Something must be done about it.

And Will knew not what to do. Silver had spoken of a wolf, and behold a wolf’s fresh kill.

Will had turned Silver from his room, from the safe haven of his protection, such as it had been.

Oh, the fool Will, the criminal fool.

Cringing and sick at heart, he backed clear away from the press of people and leaned against a wall, his heart beating fast.

He closed his eyes. Only let this be a dream, a mad dream.

But opening his eyes he saw the same, the crowd gathering, the pungent smell of fresh death augmenting the normal reek of the street.

“Ay me, for pity!” he whispered to himself. “What a dream was here! I do quake with fear: Silver said the wolf prowled the streets of London and behold, the fresh kill. Methought I was damned and behold, already, demons torment my heart.”

Screams came from two other directions. More deaths?

He thought of Silver who had come to town and warned him of just such dangers. He’d thought her to be lying for her own interests, and now, for his mistrust, was he undone, was she undone.

Was Silver dead, who just yesterday had been alive and hopeful and confident in Will’s room?

Or was Will’s dream one of those premonitory dreams he’d had sometimes, that warned him of impending danger?

If so, then he must find Silver. Silver would know how to curtail the wolf. Silver would know how to make the world clean.

Gathering himself with an effort, Will set off down the street. He must find Silver and tell her what was here.

Despite the heat of the sun he felt cold, as he meditated on the fresh terror of his dream. For Sylvanus, the villainous traitor, was inclined as was the ravenous wolf. And like the wolf he’d prowl till he’d mauled human world and faerieland both to death.

Scene Twenty Four

The fields outside the closed playhouses. These are rutted, muddy fields, crisscrossed and tamped down by countless feet. Will, hastily dressed, his hair in a tangle, walks past the empty, plague-closed theater. Marlowe walking the other way, sees Will and stops, startled.

And there the man was. Alive.

Kit had searched Will’s street and heard of the killings. But neither had he that facility that some had of mingling with common people, nor had his disordered appearance, his great, anxious rush encouraged confidences from Will’s neighbors.

Kit hadn’t found the little Frenchman he’d talked to before, and he couldn’t find if one of the dead might or might not be Will Shakespeare.

The description of the wounds of the dead men echoed with him like an evil dream.

Seeing Will now, in this mundane street, walking, preoccupied, hardly noticing Kit, Kit breathed a sigh of relief and his legs that had held him steady through his long search for Shakespeare, now buckled under him, relief undermining them as fear hadn’t. Will was alive, the very man whose blood Kit feared he had just washed from his stained skin.

Will was alive. Alive and, as far as Kit could tell, none the worse for the wear.

“I didn’t kill.” The morning turned seemingly brighter, the air of Southwark, though heavy with garbage and decay, smelled cleaner, and Kit took deep breaths of the reviving, warm air. “I am no murderer.”

And though his conscience shied he had often killed with words, with denouncing, with baseborn treason, the alarmed part of his mind demanded to know where the blood had come from, then, that had bathed him head to toe upon wakening.

“Will, friend Will,” Kit called, his voice shaking, thinking only that if he talked to another it would quiet the voices of dissent in his own mind, for he was like a country broken to vicious fighting among angry factions, where none could emerge victorious.

Will turned, amazed, and looked at Kit, and half opened his mouth.

Will looked as bad as Kit felt, his face paler even than a shroud, his lips as grey as though death’s pale flag advanced there, fighting life away.

Will’s lips worked for a while, before he managed to say, “Marlowe?” and that came in a choking, rasping voice. “Marlowe?” The repetition implied incredulity, the questioning of what Marlowe might want there, the test of the unsteady truth of naming.

Kit crossed the distance between them, squelching mud whichever way under his boots, and not caring if they got splattered or not.

His shaky legs supported him ill, as he extended his hands, both of them, to Will. Words he hadn’t meant to say dropped from his lips. “I thought you dead. I feared you dead. But you’re alive.” He took a deep breath and attempted to explain. “I meant I came from your street and they said three men were found dead there.”

Will’s color faded another shade, going from pale to a sickly translucent grey like congealed lard. He straightened himself and looked at Kit with suspicious eye.

Kit had just managed to get his mouth under control of his panicked mind, and contrived to say, “I thought I might have injured you.... yesterday.” And upon saying it, he felt his cheeks color, because he knew well that he hadn’t injured Will.

He remembered too well, with sudden, vivid force, who the injured party had been and in which manner.

But Will didn’t laugh at Kit’s pretensions, though he relaxed and unbent slightly from his square-shouldered, defensive posture. “No, no, I’m well,” he said. He didn’t extend his hands to meet Kit’s, but, instead, raised his right hand and ran it back through his own thinning hair. “I’m well, I’m well. And how fare you?”

“Well enough,” Kit answered, though the question was asked for the sake of form. He let his hands fall, since his intended gesture of friendship had been ignored. Indeed, why had Kit made it? He and Will were not friends. Not friends like that.

Kit had no friends. All his friends were dead, and the brand of their death upon his conscience like a stain.

Will nodded. Once, twice, quickly, he nodded, then straightened. “Well, and I must be gone. Pressing matters of business call me hence. I must—”

He started to turn away from Kit, but Kit grabbed at his sleeve, held him. “No, wait,” he said. He must tell Will of his foul awakening...he must tell him of the wolf, the horror, the blood that had covered him on waking. He must know if Will knew of Silver and what Silver’s remedy could be for such an irremediable ill.

Will turned, vague and wondering.

“We have....” Kit searched for words, but couldn’t somehow find them. It was as if his mind had become a quick stream, in which fish flashed by, silver and gold, but couldn’t be caught. So did the words for what he wished to say evade him, and when his mouth thought to capture them, his tongue faltered and turned his speaking to incoherent sounds.

Will stared at him, eyes widening.

“We love -- ” Kit started, meaning to say that they both loved Silver and that this must concern Silver being, like Silver, a thing of another realm, alien to human. But his mouth stopped upon the words. He took in breath and tried again, in an exasperated exhalation, “We love -- ”

Will’s eyebrows rose, his expression something between sheer alarm and confusion. “Well, and may we talk about it another time? I am pressed for time, and I -- ”

“No. I must...talk.” As Kit said that, he realized he couldn’t. Between himself and his words interposed the dark shade of the wolf, squatting upon Kit’s reason like a dragon upon his hoard and determined, by these simple means, to keep Kit mute. He couldn’t speak. And Will was turning away, walking away.

Kit could get no help. He’d gone to Will’s lodgings, and knocked, and either Silver wasn’t there or she didn’t answer his knock. It came to the same. He must tell Will what was happening. He must. It was his last hope.

He must ask Will to beg Quicksilver to save Kit. Or he would die alone.

Maybe if Kit approached his meaning sideways, like a thing to be hunted. Maybe if he leapt on it like a cat upon a well-watched mouse, the thing would work. Thinking thus, Kit ran after Will, and stood in front of him, barring his way.

“Listen, listen: There are more things in heaven and earth, Will, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Will stared at him, uncomprehending, and made as if to walk around Kit.

Kit extended his arm, to bar his way. “But come; here, as before, never, so help you mercy, however strange or odd I bear myself.” Kit’s mind was barely ahead of his words, seeking to excuse his odd behavior to this man who stared at him as if he thought Kit should be in bedlam hospital for the insane, locked in chains, and fed on water and dry bread. “That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, with arms encumbered thus, or this head shake, or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, as 'Well, well, we know,' or 'We could, an if we would,' Or 'If we list to speak,' or 'There be, an if they might,' or such ambiguous giving out, ignore me, for what I have to say is hid in such foppery, and I must talk to you, I must say, we love both the same, both entwined in one heart, the same woman, the same-” He stopped short, unable to pronounce the word elf.

Kit let out an exasperated exhalation. Perhaps another way.

Perhaps Will, who dwelt with Silver, knew something of the wolf himself. “You may as well use question with the wolf,” Kit said, and amazed himself that he had managed to pronounce that word.

Upon the word, Will’s eyes widened, his face acquired an intensity of concentration as if here, at last, was something that interested him. “Wolf? What mean you of wolves, man?” he asked.

Kit opened his mouth to explain and, instead, horrified himself at the words pouring from his mouth, senseless words with no reason. “Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb; To wake a wolf is as bad as to smell a fox.”

Will took a deep breath. He detached Kit’s hand from the sleeve of his doublet, physically unfolding Kit’s fingers that clenched upon the cheap russet fabric.

“Ha! art you bedlam?” Will asked. “A roguish inconstant humor has installed itself in your wits. Or else have you drunk too much. Hence to bed, kind Kit, and leave us be, upon our fatal search.”

Like that, with no appeal, Will turned his back on Kit and walked away.

His fatal search? How fatal could it be? Could it compare to Kit’s anxious, hopeless quest?

Standing near the closed theater, tears stinging his eyes, Kit thought it was all to naught, and why had he thought it would be different?

Kit couldn’t speak, couldn’t betray the thief of Kit’s wits who’d installed himself in Kit’s heart and Kit’s mind as surely as if he were Kit himself.

And perhaps it was Kit. Always Kit. Oh, dread thought, and yet how likely. It would be no supernatural thing, and only Kit. The same Kit who’d turned in his friends and who, with fiendish humor and fiendish greed, had watched them go to their deaths, with very little regret and a justification that it was best for Kit’s own sake.

Now Kit was the wolf, and prowled the night. It was Kit, whose schemes were revealed, whose plots tolled his end as surely as an unsound bell. Kit whom the council suspected, who’d made himself suspicious to Cecil, who cowered in the shadows of his own mind, and who woke up covered in blood. Kit who now fed on human flesh more openly than he had before, and yet was this feeding so different from taking payment for the lives of friends?

And if this were all Kit, how could he be stopped, unless his immortal, fugitive Mistress knew of some simple that evaded the might of men.

And if it were not Kit, then, again, Silver must hold the cure.

“Can you not minister to a mind diseased?” Kit heard his own voice moan, and startled himself with its piteous tone. He yelled after Will’s now far-away, walking-away back, “Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow. Raze out the written troubles of the brain and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart. Good, sweet Will, for friendship’s sake. For the sake of humanity and kindness.”

But humanity and kindness didn’t so much as make Will turn back at Kit’s pleading.

Taking hold of his stray emotions, Kit swallowed hard. He ran his fingers through his entangled hair. What a fright he must look. What a sight. If anyone who knew him, who respected him should see him now.... How foolish they’d think him, how week.

If his enemies in the secret service should see him now, what easy prey, what a mark they’d not deem him.

He took a deep, deep breath.

“Soft, I dreamed. It was all a dream.”

But within him, the wolf howled triumph.

Scene Twenty Five

A tavern, in a narrow street, the ground muddy with accumulated refuse. Large, fearsome pigs run amid the people. Through the street Ariel walks, bewildered, confused, evading men who would hire her for a bawd, and shrinking from women’s envious gaze.

Ariel had walked too far. Her magic, and her magic horse, conjured by it, had both waned as she neared town. Her horse had vanished.

She’d never entered the city. London, with its dark walls, its gates upon which heads and limbs of traitors were displayed, rotting and festering, kite-pecked and fly infested, put out such a dark emanation, such pestilent reach, that Ariel could not convince herself to go there.

She’d followed the trail of Quicksilver’s power to Will’s lodgings. There, a little man, speaking in a funny accent, had told her that no one was within and that Will had gone to eat at a tavern down the road a piece.

Down the road a piece was a long while down a rutted, muddy lane, filled with people and animals.

It rained, a dispirited drizzle, and though Ariel’s magic prevented her getting soaked, the rain turned the ground underfoot to silty mud.

Ariel’s legs hurt. She’d already walked so much -- miles and miles, in the hot, humid weather.

Her feet hurt too, within their thin slippers. And though she tried to keep herself magically veiled, so that common people wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t look at her, would take no notice of her white pearl-embroidered dress, her complexion, her hair, her all-too regular features, people still saw her, still noticed her.

Her magic was too weak, too frail, here, near the big city. It hunkered like a frozen beast within Ariel’s heart, and quivered with fear at the looming darkness of the city.

Shivering, her arms around herself, Ariel avoided the hands of men and the stares of women, as she made for the tavern -- The Devil’s Ape -- its sign painted with an ape with horns and a forked tail.

The door to the tavern proper stood wide open. Inside it was dark, shady and cool, though outside the summer sun raged.

Looking around, Ariel found Will, though it took her two hard stares to convince herself this was indeed the proud youth that Silver had loved and Quicksilver doted upon ten years ago.

The ten years had dealt roughly with Will, and, indeed, he looked as old as Nan, though she was his elder by seven years or so. His hair had receded so that his forehead loomed, monstrous, and his body no longer looked as trim and lean as it had all those years ago when he’d daily walked the forest paths of Arden.

She approached the table, slowly. Would he remember her? Did he know where Quicksilver was? And would he tell her?

Approaching, she noticed that he had a plate of boiled mutton in front of him, and cut bits from it and ate them with his knife, in measured bites.

The mutton gave off the faint reek of meat kept too long in summer, and Will looked not like he enjoyed it.

When her shade -- faint as it was in this dark space -- fell across his plate, he looked up.

He had just put some meat in his mouth. Looking up at her, he dropped the knife, and choked on the meat, and started to get up, all at once, his eyes wide, round, disbelieving. Despite the many time-wrought changes in him, his eyes remained the same -- golden brown, falcon-bright, attentive.

“Master Shakespeare?” She asked. “You recognize me?”

He swallowed hastily and coughed into his hand, and swallowed again. “Oh, milady,” he said, his voice harsh, with his hurried dispatch of his morsel. “Oh, milady. Yes, I recognize you. But at first smelling your scent, I thought you the lady.... Your lord.... The Lady Silver.”

The Lady Silver. “Have you seen the Lady Silver?” Ariel asked. Her heart beat impatiently for the answer.

She had to wait.

First Will shook his head, then he nodded. Then, taking a deep breath, he managed to say, “Not since yesternight.”

“Oh,” Ariel felt as though all the strength that had animated her coming here had faltered. Her legs turned weak, her head confused with tiredness. This was the middle of the faerie night and here she was, sleepless, trying to ask Quicksilver’s whereabouts of this mortal.

She was aware of Will’s grabbing her arm, and easing her gently onto the long bench beside the table. She was also aware of other men talking, making comments. Three bawds, assembled near the door, made crude remarks about her faintness and what it denoted.

Ariel sat with her head in her hands. She’d come here, straight, without either eating or resting. The centaurs must know by now that she’d escaped. Malachite must know. What madness would both of them undertake to drag her back to the hill and use her in their foul intrigue?

But every heartbeat that passed without her finding Quicksilver, without her apprising him of the conspiracy, she felt as though disaster closed in on her, with red claws and hot breath.

Where was Quicksilver? Where was her lord? Was Quicksilver still hers? Or had Nan been right? Had Ariel, in denying Silver lost Quicksilver?

Ariel didn’t want to believe it. What was so wrong with wanting a husband as other women had? A man, a fixed creature with a true north, a true horizon?

She looked through her fingers, saw Will staring at her, lowered her hands. “I’m well,” she said, answering the mute question in his gaze. “I’m well. Perhaps faint. Perhaps I need eat more. Perhaps....” She floundered.

Will, mutely, pushed the plate of mutton at her.

The pungent smell of it caught in her throat. She shook her head. “A little bread, perhaps. And some ale? If you’d be so kind?”

Will gestured at the serving wench. “Milady, how come you here?” he asked. “What disturbance brings you from your dales?” Something to his eyes, some mute horror, showed to Ariel that he feared some certain cause that he didn’t wish to name.

Was it Quicksilver? What had happened to Quicksilver?

“Disturbance in the hill,” Ariel said. Her words were faint, falling so softly upon the background noise of the tavern that Will leaned forward to perceive them better. “I came to find my lord. Know you where I might find him? My Lord Quicksilver?”

“I know not where he is,” Will said. He sighed, deeply, a chest-straining sigh. “I wish I did.”

“You know not?” She stared at him, not sure whether to believe it. “The thread of his magic I followed to your room, and there.... He didn’t answer my knocks, and your landlord sent me here. I thought Quicksilver was in there, but veiled to me, because he....” Tears came to her eyes. “Because he resented me. Speak truth, Master Shakespeare. Is he there? Are you hiding him?”

Will sighed “I wish I were hiding him, milady. I wish.” He shook his head, pushed his plate away from him, then held his mouth closed, while he watched the ale wife put a cup of ale and three slices of thick bread in front of Ariel.

“I’ve seen your lord... or the Lady Silver. But we.... argued and he left,” Will said.

Ariel had picked up the bread, but she could neither break it nor eat. She felt her color flee her, leaving her cheeks marmoreally cold. “Ah, a lovers’ quarrel.”

“Milady!” Will looked genuinely shocked.

She looked at him, meeting his falcon eyes with questioning intensity. “What, mean you you’re no lover of my lord?”

Will shook his head. “I tried to be a friend to him.”

“Ah,” Ariel tilted her head, took a deep breath. A friend. What did Will mean by that? She took a sip of her ale, for she felt faint, and she said, “It is cursed to be friends with Quicksilver. He betrays as well as he seduces.”

Will shook his head, while his face grew hot. “Milady, Ariel? Why.... What happened to Quicksilver?”

Ariel shrugged. Her heart caught, her hands that held the breath trembled. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She heard her voice, small and miserable, and felt all the smaller and more miserable for it.

“I am the Queen of faerieland and I don’t know anything.” She felt tears run down her cheeks and wiped them, peevishly, on the back of her left hand, then tore a piece of bread, stuffed it in her mouth and bit into it. Salty tears mingled with its slightly stale taste, and Ariel tried to ignore both.

Will looked distressed at her tears.

Ariel could swear an echo of them -- a faint shimmer of unshed water -- shone in his eyes.

How would it be, she wondered for a moment, to have a man like this for a husband? A man who could not endure your tears without crying? A man who noticed when you cried?

Quicksilver was more likely to notice a limp in his favorite hunting mastiff, a mar on the uniform of his favorite attendant. His favorite attendant. Malachite.

This brought fresh tears to Ariel’s eyes, and she tried to drown their salt in her ale, that she might not make a passing fool of herself.

“Milady?” Will asked. He spoke very softly. “Milady, I don’t know of your husband, nor where he is. I am telling the truth when I say I only saw him -- in Silver form -- for the space of his asking me my help -- it seems fantastic -- in preventing his brother Sylvanus from -- ” He stopped and stared amazed.

Because Ariel, almost without meaning, had taken her finger to her lips in a commanding gesture. “Don’t say his name. The evil king’s name. Don’t pronounce it. With magical creatures the name is the thing, and the name can conjure it. We do not wish him to eavesdrop.” She drank her ale and sniffed back her tears and asked, “You were saying, Master Shakespeare?”

Quicksilver had told Will about the wolf and asked for help. That meant Quicksilver really had come to London to try to rescue the hill and both worlds. That meant.... And yet, Ariel knew Silver had disported with a mortal. But which mortal? And why?

“I was saying your lord told me a fantastical tale.” Will said. “And I thought.... I thought it was a trick played on me, and I dismissed him. I told him to plague me no more.”

Ariel sniffed and sighed. No use reproaching Will. Hadn’t she, by other means, and over many years, told the same to Quicksilver? And yet, where was Quicksilver now? What had happened to him? Ariel folded her hands, one upon the other and, together, set them on the dark greasy wood of the table. “And then, Master Shakespeare?”

“How would you know there would be more?” he asked, surprised.

Ariel sighed. How to explain to a mortal that her greater age and that racial memory that was inherited in elf and not in man, allowed her to read his expressions better than he could know his own thoughts? Oh, let him think it was his thoughts she read. Maybe it would discourage lies. “There is more,” she said.

“Yes,” Will said and, in a tumbling he told her a tale of dreaming Silver dead, and of three corpses, found on his street, wolf-mauled, animal-ravaged.

At the words, Ariel went cold, her heart turned to ice within her living chest.

The wolf had started rampaging. And Quicksilver was missing? Oh, would she ever see her lord again? And if not, how would she survive?

For a moment, out of sheer fright, she thought she must return to the hill and marry Malachite, and deviate the power of the hill to him. He would at least stand up to the threat to come. He would help her defeat it.

In the next breath, she felt ashamed, ashamed unto death. Oh, weak, weak Ariel who’d cut off the power of the hill from her sworn lord, her loved husband. Traitor Ariel who would thus sell her lord to sure death, consign him to the wolf’s harsh mercies all to save herself the solitude, the cold solitude of decision.

Ariel, who’d conjoin herself with a known traitor, a secret schemer, all not to be alone.

And she called Quicksilver weak.

She felt color ebb and flow upon her cheeks, her shame making her tremble, as her voice wavered, when she said, “Master Shakespeare, you must help me. For I’m weak and dumb. If the wolf is in London, he’s found shelter with someone in London who has been touched by faerie or elf.

“Someone has given my lord’s dark brother refuge. And his power grows, and I can feel it, in the breeze that comes from the Thames, in the pestilence that spreads all about, in the wrongness of this heat in so early a season and yet coupled with the rains of a much colder month. Think, Master Shakespeare, think. Who else could it be? Likely it’s someone that Quicksilver knows, someone he has gone to when you disappointed his expectations. And if that’s true, Quicksilver is in great danger, and all of faerieland.... nay, all of the worlds are endangered through him.” She looked at Shakespeare and felt fresh tears spring to her eyes, distorting his look, so that he appeared like one long drowned.

Only his golden eyes remained clear.

To those eyes she talked; to those eyes she appealed, “Master Shakespeare, help me save my foolish lord.”

Scene Twenty Six

Kit Marlowe walks beside the river. It is a poor neighborhood, at the edge of the slums. Across the river, the palaces of great lords can be glimpsed. But here there’s nothing but solitude, the stench of the river, the desolate strand. In the red light of sunset, things float on the current that might well be plague corpses, thrown in the river by businesses desirous to avoid closing, by relatives anxious not to be closed up in a plague house.

Kit hadn’t tidied his clothes, nor had he eaten all day. Every time he thought of eating or drinking, he remembered the taste of blood in his mouth, and he felt a sickness, overpowering, climbing from his empty belly to his parched mouth.

He must look like a ghost, walking this way by the shore, pale and scruffy and haunted, looking for help or relief where he could find neither.

But he knew better than to go towards the city, the teeming slums of Southwark. There was life there. He could feel it, sense it, crave it, like other men craved bread or wine, or love.

Kit could smell life, as he’d once smelled food. It was a scent in the breeze wafting by, making his stomach tighten with need, making his chest compress his beating heart and making him crave.... crave.... crave, the craving nothing clear or defined, just a nameless, driving, aching need.

Yet, with sweat on his brow, with tears in his eyes, his legs weak, his arms aching, his whole body feeling like a corpse that, animated, walks the scene of its former misdeeds, with all that remained to him, Kit willed himself to stay away from that life that called all his senses with passionate need.

Fool that he was, and a traitor, his hands already tainted with the blood of those who had trusted him, he would not, he could not go on taking innocent life -- this time the life of strangers, of children, of women, of defenseless elders and young lovers.

Yet he knew his bravado would be short-lasting, his resistance a perilous, hard-won momentary triumph -- like unto that of a child wrestling with a giant.

The wolf, dormant within him, stirred more and more with each inch that the sun sank deep into the horizon. The night was coming, and Kit Marlowe, poor Kit Marlowe, as he’d taken to thinking of himself, would soon be nothing but the mindless vehicle to another’s crimes.

With the sinking rays of the red sun, Kit could sense the strength of the wolf increasing, and he remembered the dark blanket that had covered Kit, taken him, possessed him, body and mind, aye, and soul, if Kit had one. Kit’s rotted-through soul.

Drunken with his own misery, he looked out at the floating corpses and wished he could catch the plague from walking here, catch it from the stench and nearness of those rotting bodies.

Was Kit, himself, not unlike a plague, walking the world withering life? Let one plague, then, battle out the other and thus cancel the evil loosened on the world.

“Kit.”

He turned, half expecting to see Skeres or another emissary of the grey eminence, Cecil.

Instead, he saw a face he’d never thought to see again. Not in this world. It took him a long time of looking at that perfect face, that pale blond hair, the moss-green eyes, before he formed the name with his lips. “Quicksilver.”

There was no sound.

Kit didn’t have the strength for so much, nor would his parched throat allow sound through.

Kit felt the wolf squirm within his mind and seek a hold within him. He felt the flood of hate emanating from the wolf. Hate for Quicksilver. Hate, horrible and black and flowing, stronger even than the craving for life. Hate for those sweet features of that beloved creature, for whom Kit would have died... died a thousand deaths.

Quicksilver looked at Kit with a timid apology that Kit had never expected to see. His cheeks tinted with a faint pink. “Kit, forgive me. I was hasty, maybe cruel. I need your help.” And foolish Quicksilver approached, laying his hand upon Kit’s arm.

Kit recoiled and attempted, from the mad river of his mind, to fish the words to warn his one true love of the danger incurred in thus accosting the ally of the deadly wolf.

He formed a prayer in his mind, to a God in which he no longer believed. Oh, take all the world and Kit with it, all, take every loveliness, and all joy and grace from the sorry Earth and bury it all in a common grave. But leave this elf untouched, his bright mind uncorrupted, his magical body whole. Protect every golden hair of Quicksilver’s head; every black silk strand of Lady Silvers. And let Kit be damned then.

Let Kit spend eternity in his own damnation, with no hope of redemption, no appeal. But save Quicksilver.

No words came to Kit’s mouth.

He could do nothing but look on Quicksilver with mute, moist eyes, filled with dread and love and hate in equal parts, and open his mouth and wait for words that did not come.

“Forgive me, Kit,” Quicksilver said. He squeezed Kit’s arm, hard. “What I told you is true. I’m married. Married these ten years, and to my lady did I vow true love and faithfulness. In neither have I been perhaps perfect, and in both yet, must I strive.”

Strive, sneered the wolf. Strive. He who always followed his pleasure like the child follows the sweetmeat, like the gaudy bird follows the shining bauble.

Kit shook his head.

“You’ll not forgive me?” Quicksilver’s smile faded, pale and sickened, like a lost child’s. “Come, Kit. You are my only hope, as so far I’ve found hate, where I hoped to find love. Since then, have I searched for you, who always loved me so well. In this battle for the heart of men, I’m losing the fights, one by one, and my brother.... I suppose I should tell you.” Standing there, Quicksilver, grave and solemn, like a child saying his lessons to a stern master, told Kit of his brother, his older brother, Sylvanus, eldest son of the Queen Titania, the king Oberon who, disinherited by Quicksilver’s birth -- since the youngest inherited in faerieland -- had sought power from the dark Hunter, and with his help killed the king and queen and usurped the throne while Quicksilver was yet underage. And how Quicksilver had got his throne and Sylvanus had been collected by the dark Hunter to be one of his dogs through eternity.

“But my brother, with great cunning and power, has broken the bonds of his state,” Quicksilver said. “And, if he does find a foolish human who’ll take him in -- he can gain power by killing humans and absorbing their suffering and life, until Sylvanus is more powerful than the Hunter himself, more powerful than any bonds upon him. Then will he destroy me and faerieland, and aye, both the worlds of elf and of mortal.” Quicksilver sighed. “So you see, I need help. Help to find my brother. Help to find who might be harboring him. Oh, look not at me that way. I only thought to keep you out of this, Kit. I only thought to protect you.”

Kit dug his nails into his own palms, willing the pain to distract the wolf, and, with desperate tenderness, managed to speak. “Run from me,” Kit said. “Do not come near me.” Overpowering the wolf’s hate with all the force of his love, he pulled his arm away from Quicksilver’s grasping hand, from the warm of that elven life, that much warmer, that much more fragrant than pale mortal life.

Kit went two steps, no more. The wolf grabbed him. With a shudder that ran down Kit’s whole body, the wolf turned him about face, made him take two steps back to where he’d been and turned his eyes, his battle-broken eyes upon Quicksilver.

“Idiot,” Quicksilver said and smiled. “Idiot. Come with me. “I’ll buy you a drink at a tavern, and we’ll decide how to go on from here.”

The sun had all but sunk beneath the horizon.

The stench coming off the river was the smell of death and the graveyard.

Kit had no more control over his aching, tired body, than he had over his beating heart, over his fearful love.

Quicksilver put his hand around Kit’s arm and pulled him, and Kit followed, while within Kit the wolf laughed at easy victory.

Scene Twenty Seven

Will’s room. Ariel sits on the bed, and Will stands by the window.

“Master Shakespeare, we’d better go about it,” Ariel said.

Will turned towards her, and started. In front of him stood a young fair haired boy, attired in a sky blue doublet, fashionable breeches, impeccable white stockings and dark shoes. “How now...?” Will started. He’d thought Quicksilver was unique in his ability to change. Was this a common thing with all elves, and had he been so deceived?

But Ariel laughed, easy musical laughter. “No, Master Shakespeare, I did not change my aspect, only my clothes.” And, removing the hat from her head, she showed her hair coiled beneath it, in braids and loops, fantastically arranged as some rich boys coiffed their long hair.

Will bowed to her. For some reason she looked all the more charming now, in this boyish aspect, her blandness masked by masculine decision, her small face revealed by her hair being pulled back. He realized he was looking into her eyes, when she blinked, and looked away, blushing.

She blushed a becoming shade of apricot. Her grey-blue eyes looked very blue. A calm sea.

I thought it would be better this way,” she said, very low. “I thought I would attract less attention as a boy.”

Her voice was ever soft. An excellent thing in a woman, or so Will thought, who’d never known that kind of woman. “You’ll attract attention whichever way you’re attired, milady.”

For a moment he put a hand out to her, but then pulled it a way. He hadn’t been alone with a woman, who was not Nan, in too long. It seemed to him that this whole situation was improper.

She nodded, her blush intensifying.

He turned away, looked out his window. “One thing I don’t understand, milady? How mean you to find the wolf out there? Your husband couldn’t. Does he not have more power than you? All the power of faerieland? I thought that was how it worked.”

He heard Ariel sigh behind him, and looked over his shoulder at her.

“I can see it,” she said. “I can see the trail of the dark power of the wolf. I can even see the traces of my lord’s bright power. Which is how I followed him here.

“You can see it? Can Quicksilver? Can the other elves?”

Ariel shook her head. She didn’t look at him, but she spied on him, just out of the corner of her eye, like a shy maiden. But she wasn’t a maiden, was she now? A grown elf, probably many years older than Will. And Quicksilver’s wife.

Again, Will felt the slipperiness of faerieland, how things were never what they seemed. Ariel seemed young and innocent, and harmless enough.

He turned away towards the window. Anything, anything, to break the eye contact, and the thoughts forming in his mind. Ariel was maybe all the more dangerous for not seeming as glamourous as Silver. Yet, Will knew that she must have her share of tawdry elf glamoury, that she must be manipulating him even now. And yet it didn’t feel tawdry. Not on Ariel. Quicksilver and Silver, oh, surely -- tawdry as yellow metal, cloying like cheap perfume.

But Ariel was something altogether different. She looked young and soft, and in need of protection and tugged at the same place in Will’s heart that harbored tender, protective feelings for injured animals, for whipped dogs, for small children.

He could resist seduction well enough. He was old enough to know what he wanted and that was Nan. But this soft appeal for protection, what man with a kind heart could resist it?

“I can see it,” Ariel said. “Not every elf can, though. Quicksilver can’t. Which is why.... Which is why it was passing foolish for my husband to come to London without me. I am the seer of faerieland and my eyes penetrate distances no other elf can see.”

“Like being a Sunday child,” Will said, thinking of his own capacity to see things of magic, all because he’d been born on a Sunday. Looking out the window, he could see apprentices leaving work, and the taverns starting to open. Over it all, a steady drizzle fell. An ordinary late afternoon in Southwark. Ordinary. And he was here, in his room, with the faerie queen. How odd, how odd that of all people Will knew about faerieland. All because he’d been born on a Sunday.

“Exactly like that,” Ariel said. “I was born on Summer solstice. Only a rare thing because there are so few elven births.”

He heard her get up, heard her soft steps approaching him, felt her hand on his arm and, looking down, saw the long, thin fingers clasped around his sleeve, shining almost ivory white against the dark russet fabric. A hand as small and delicate as his children’s hands.

He heard his voice, softer than usual, “Then why would your husband come to London without you? He is neither crazy nor a fool, Quicksilver.”

Ariel let go of Will’s sleeve, her lips trembled, her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know...,” she said. “I don’t know. Only your good lady....” she stopped.

His good lady? “Nan? You saw Nan?” Suddenly, Ariel didn’t matter, but Nan mattered. “You saw my Nan. And what says my Nan?”

Ariel took in a deep sobbing breath. “She says by asking Quicksilver to be Quicksilver only, by denying Silver, I killed Quicksilver’s love for me. She says.... your Lady says I never could have loved him or I’d not have done that.”

Fat tears ran down the little oval face and the delicate pink lips trembled. “And maybe she’s right, Master Shakespeare. Maybe she’s right, and maybe there won’t be another chance.”

Will smiled, because he could see Nan counseling the faerie queen as though she were a young housewife from Stratford. It was so like his Nan, this utter disregard of rank and even of species, that he couldn’t help but smiling, as his mind filled with Nan’s dear image.

Seen through this light, Ariel no longer felt like an irresistible creature of glamoury, no longer supernatural, no longer dangerous. She was a young woman, pale and distressed. A woman to whom Nan had extended a hand. A newlywed in trouble. And Will would do no more than carry out what Nan would wish and protect this young lady and see her safely to her lord’s arms and the firm compass of her marriage.

“My Nan is probably right,” Will said. “She has an uncomfortable habit of being so. But she’d not give you that advice if it were hopeless.” He fished within his sleeve for his handkerchief -- good, sturdy cotton, monogrammed with W.S. by Nan in her huge, clumsy stitches.

Ariel wiped her eyes on it.

“Let’s go milady,” Will said. “We’ll use your good talent to search out your errant lord and the dark creature. We’ll find them both, I daresay, and you’ll be restored to your lord, who can’t but forgive you. He makes his mistakes too.” Will thought that Silver had tried to seduce him. He knew enough to know that had been no delusion. And if that wasn’t a mistake, what was it, when such a thing would visibly have broken the heart of Quicksilver’s queen?

Gently, he walked Ariel down the steps.

Together, they went into the darkened streets of Southwark, and night long they searched, amid bawds and gamers, drunkards and cutpurses.

It wasn’t till dawn tinged the horizon pink that they came upon Sylvanus’s handiwork, in an alley, away from human traffic. It had been a young girl, barely a woman. Now it was nothing but a bundle of blood-soaked rags and a few bones, glimmering white where the flesh had been devoured.

No crowd gathered around her yet, Will and Ariel having been first on the scene.

Will backed away, in horror, at the sight.

But Ariel stood still, staring, eyes wide open, “It is the wolf’s work,” she said. “But it has my lord’s power prints upon it, also.” She fainted dead away, and only Will’s quick dive and ready arms prevented her dirtying her dainty page costume with the bloodied mud of the foul alley.

With the faerie queen unconscious in his harms, Will first thought that this was becoming an habit, elves losing their senses around him.

But irreverence was soon driven out by shock. What could Ariel mean that this had her lord’s traces? Had Quicksilver himself been taken by the wolf?

And all because Will had turned him out. Looking at Ariel’s eyes, as they fluttered open, Will felt more heartily sorry of that than he’d ever been of anything.

Scene Twenty Eight

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Again, he lies on his bed, on his stomach, and he and the bed are covered in blood.

Kit Marlowe didn’t startle at the way he stuck to the covers, nor at the reek of blood on his nostrils, nor at the dull ache behind his eyes, nor at the feeling that something horrible had happened the night before, something that made the world a black place and his earth a hell.

He woke with a curse upon his lips, and opened his eyes to the dull throb of headache and the grey light of an overcast day coming in through the diamond-shaped panes of his window.

Damn the world and the light and the blood, and his headache too.

He rolled over slowly, bringing the blanket with him, stuck to him by a dark substance that smelled pungently of blood and that Kit didn’t even attempt to tell himself wasn’t just that.

He pulled the blanket away from his body -- he appeared to have lain a-bed naked -- and amazed himself only with how calm he felt, how collected.

Horror experienced once is horror indeed: marvelous, strange and terrifying. Horror experienced twice is dim and dull, an occurrence expected if not welcomed, a nuisance where there should be screaming awe.

Thus, step by step, he thought, do humans become used to their own sins.

Thus had be become used to the idea of betraying friends and strangers to the secret service -- first out of fear, then out of monetary need and finally, finally, out of convenience, of expediency, almost out of boredom, ignoring the lives consumed to his casualness, the very real deaths he caused on the gallows, on the rack, or out of sheer despair, at the victim’s own hand.

Would he, thus, get used to the foul taste of raw flesh in his mouth, to the dried blood covering him?

He dragged himself up, out of the bed, and set his feet firmly on the floor. His clothes were by the door, in a blood-soaked heap. Another suit ruined.

Walking like a drunkard, or one only half awakened, Kit tripped to his basin, and poured in the cool clear water, from the jar, dipped his hands in it, and watched it turn red. He realized, with a sob caught in the throat and suffocating his emotions, that the desperate revulsion of the day before was not gone. It had turned, instead, to an aching despair.

Standing there, Kit felt for the wolf in his mind, and found a wall -- a diamond-strong wall, black and unyielding. Pushing at that wall, behind which Kit felt that the wolf’s thoughts hid, Kit knew his battle was lost before he drew his weapon.

There might be, true, some way to circumvent the curse, some way to pierce the wall, or look beneath it, but what mattered it? Kit was not likely to find it. Not on his own.

Some knowledge, some thought of Silver tickled at his mind, but he could no more hold it than a child’s hands can hold the fluttering butterfly.

He might kill himself. But he didn’t wish to kill himself. All the things he’d done, to avoid death, and now he’d play the roman fool and fall upon his own dagger? Not likely. No. It was useless. Kit was damned, and he might as well learn to live with his damnation.

“I am in blood stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as going over,” he told himself, reasonably, while staring at his hands submerged in the red liquid in the white porcelain basin. “Strange things I have in head, that will to hand; which must be acted ere they may be scanned.”

He rinsed his hands with prosaic calm, and, opening his window, poured the bloodied water out.

A man, passing underneath the window, jumped away and shook his fist at Kit.

What land was this London that a man may pour blood from his window, early morning, and draw from it no more censure than if he poured the nightly wastes from his chamberpot?

Bemused, Kit returned the basin atop its stand, and poured fresh water into it, then cupped his washed hands with fresh water to wash his face.

It was when his hands touched his face that he remembered.

As if out of a dream, he saw Quicksilver smile, and touch Kit’s face, and tell him not to worry, that all would be well and that, between them, they could conquer the foul fiend who threatened Quicksilver’s reign and the world of men.

He heard Quicksilver’s sweet, confiding voice, smelled the lilac perfume of the elf lord, felt that white hand -- just like Silver’s -- caress his cheek.

Kit straightened. The red from his face dripped from his beard onto the basin, like drops of fresh blood.

Quicksilver. Was this a dream? A horrible illusion? Or had Quicksilver come to him, in this his dream? Or was it true?

All of his senses told him it was true, mind and heart and speeding breath. All of them. All.

Quicksilver had come to Kit and, all unsuspecting, had sought Kit’s help.

Oh, cursed fate, that thus would deliver Kit’s love to his hate.

And what had happened? What had Kit done? Had he done aught? Or was this deception? Vain delusion of a mind too strained?

But he remembered walking by the river and he remembered Quicksilver taking him to a tavern, and sharing a drink with him and telling him—

He couldn’t remember what Quicksilver had told him, or what might have happened to Quicksilver after.

Kit leaned forward, so his fevered forehead touched his cool plastered wall.

He prodded at his memory but still found it divided by that black, impenetrable partition. So were the two parts of Kit divided, like a child that, once separated from the mother, becomes lost in the multitudinous world, never to be found again.

He stared at the basin, with mute horror, contemplating anew this red horror that stained the white porcelain.

Was some of that blood, fresh again upon the touch of water, Quicksilver’s immortal blood?

The thought froze the blood in Kit’s own veins. Had he then committed that ultimate betrayal, and tore his love to pieces?

Had he -- had the wolf in Kit, using Kit’s body -- feasted upon the flesh of the king of elves?

Sickness, horrible sickness overpowered Kit’s reasoning, and he swallowed hard, and leaned against the wall, too weak to move, while tears gathered in his eyes and his breath came in sobs.

Kit remembered Quicksilver with painful clarity. He remembered Quicksilver standing beside him, asking his help. Quicksilver’s moss-green eyes filled with sweet appeal he’d never before shown Kit.

And all the while, deaf-mute, unable to express his fear and his warning, Kit had felt himself pushed down and down into the black room of his mind and out of the way.

Oh, curse Kit’s intemperate heart, his quick jealousy and boiling blood that had led him into the clutches of the wolf.

His mind in turmoil, Kit sank to his knees on the floor, holding his wet hands to his bloodied face.

Had he killed Quicksilver? And Silver also, withal? Had his hand, his mouth, his own body put an end to that dear body that should have lasted all eternity and the world beyond?

Kit heard a sob as from a long way off, and realized he cried. What had been a calm acceptance of his murder of innocents, turned now in his mind and heart to raging storm, the waves of blood turned against himself. If that blood was Quicksilver’s also, then Kit did not wish to live. If Quicksilver was dead, then let the world dissolve, for what was the gross substance of the Earth, compared to Silver’s body, to Quicksilver’s wit, to the substance and light of Kit’s elven love?

He trembled as if with a cold wind. If Quicksilver was dead, the world would dissolve. For how much more fodder would the rebellious dark elf need than that magical life?

If Quicksilver was dead, the world was dead withal and, amid the shard and ruin of this Earth would Kit ramp and the wolf reign in blood and terror.

In despair, Kit let his hands fall. They fell upon the cold iron of the stand that held up his porcelain basin.

A flare of light, blue and white, and Kit felt a burn upon the flesh of his palms, and smelled the scorch upon the air.

Yet he scant noticed the pain that smarted along his hands. Unminding, he took his right hand to his mouth, touched it to his lips.

What had happened in his mind interested him more, for there, for a moment, the black wall had parted like a curtain. It had closed again, almost immediately. But it had parted long enough for Kit to glimpse....

A memory crossed the black wall within Kit’s mind, a memory of stalking life, smelling it bright, hot, appetizing. He remembered bringing humans down and tearing them, and feeding, not so much on the flesh and blood, but on the suffering and agony of the victim.

The memory froze him as though ice, creeping in at his finger tips, at his toe tips, climbed his limbs through accustomed route, bringing numbness and insensitivity with it.

Shaking with cold, Kit heard himself still sobbing, and could no more stop it than he could stop shivering, or stop mourning for his elven love whom he had killed.

Or had he killed Quicksilver? Did the wolf have that much power? Kit would imagine that if the wolf still needed, with craving hunger and necessary cruelty, to slay humans for his sustenance, so that he might grow strong enough for his aim, he, perforce, did not have enough power to dethrone the very king of elves.

Or did he now? Were the murders just cruelty in action? Were they no more than an exercise of that active want of heart that Kit himself had known in himself now and then?

Oh, no denying it, nor would Kit try it, that the wolf had come to Kit because of their likeness. Something of Kit’s unsoundness resonated with the wolf’s evil, both like a bell tuned to the same note, and in that note, they’d recognized each other, and the wolf had found entrance into Kit’s mind.

But yet, the stalking and the craving felt like hunger.

Kit must know. He must know what had become of his love.

Taking a deep breath, he set his injured hands again to the cold iron, and, writhing in silent agony, half-mad with the pain, looked within, to see the curtain part once more.

Behind that wall turned curtain the wolf cowered, cringing from the pain, more than even Kit did.

What came at Kit from the wolf’s own mind was a sense that Sylvanus, the wolf, needed that life, needed that power that he so craved, so he could -- dethrone another dark monarch, his superior, and thus become ruler, sole ruler of human and elfland. But he didn’t have that power yet.

The knowledge spread like a balm from Kit’s heart to soothe his lips contorted in spasm. Little by little, sobs quit emerging, of their own, from his tortured chest.

Holding his hands onto the iron, not caring if he lost his hands wherewithal, if his capacity to write plays was gone when this was done, Kit felt a mad rush of energy tremble through his limbs, a mad need to do something, anything, to match the inner frenzy of his search for what he had lost.

In a rush, he let go of the stand. In a rush, he stood, and threw cold water over his face, his hair, wringing bloody stain from them, and pouring the water out, and then again, pouring more water on the basin, and washing as much as he could from himself, before -- inevitably -- calling for the landlady to bring him more water.

While his hands washed at the blood, he approached the black wall in his mind. A stealthy agent was what was needed, and Kit had been stealthy enough in the past, and often spied on others, so why shouldn’t he -- now -- spy upon the invader in his soul.

His heart pounding, from the frenetic activity of his hands, as much as from his inner search, his inner fear, Kit approached the wall in his mind.

He poured fresh water into the basin and washed himself, the attenuated red color in the basin, still showing blood but less of it.

Again he set his hands to the iron, their pain somewhat eased by the cold water. Again he set a mental ear to his mind, and reached mental fingers to the needed knowledge.

But he didn’t know what he was doing, and for a while nothing happened. Then just as Kit had given up and opened his door and, standing as much as he could behind it, had yelled for the landlady to bring more water, the wall gave. Or maybe the wolf, suspicious, frightened -- or perhaps amused -- reached for Kit’s mind.

The wall became porous, or else broke. Kit didn’t know, couldn’t care. Because that moment was as bad as that first night in the alley.

The wolf roared in, in all his glory, chasing Kit forth from the very haven of his mind, driving Kit to all the dark, forgotten pathways where, panting and screaming, he hid, and attempted to claw back. And then even from those, till Kit was the wolf, a dark, striding creature of the night, full of power and amused cruelty, a creature that could eat human life and laugh at it, a creature that enjoyed torture and suffering, a creature that longed for power with a thirst such as Kit Marlowe, no matter how parched, had never felt for ale or wine, or water, or even love.

And yet, through this all he remained Kit, a Kit who felt much like a hunted rabbit under a falcon’s claws -- a Kit who trembled, all his limbs weak, and begged, in a voice that sounded, even to his ears, abject and pleading and weak, “Please, oh, please, no.”

Yet the onslaught continued, wave upon wave of the wolf, of the wolf’s ancient knowledge, overpowering Kit.

Kit wanted to reach for his washstand but lacked the control to move that far.

The creature was two thousand years, at least, if not more, and the cold knowledge of all that age, lived without love, and in envy and calculation and hunger for power, overpowered Kit and frightened him.

Standing behind his door, Kit remembered his doorknob was forged iron, and reached for it, eagerly, while with the other hand he reached back, to the cool plaster of the wall, to hold himself standing.

At the same time, dimly attenuated, he heard his landlady shriek, and told himself he’d done it now, and he’d be killed.

And wasn’t that what he wished? To be killed and freed from this torment?

But Kit couldn’t truly desire death. He feared it too much. And besides, his landlady would not have him killed. She’d think him zany and send him to bedlam, where they’d beat him, and have him kept in chains, chains that the wolf would break nightly to prowl along the corridors. Kit would be in torment and the wolf free.

He heard the wolf laugh at the idea -- a magical, cold, distant, elven laugh -- and then, in a flash Kit’s slow creeping fingers reached the doorknob and, in the flash of burn and pain, the part of Kit that remained Kit -- a small portion, cowering in the darker recesses of his mind -- knew that if such happened, if the wolf were allowed to continue his nightly magic-enlarging prowls, soon he’d be powerful enough to kill Quicksilver.

In the wake of that, the knowledge poured into Kit that Quicksilver wasn’t dead, only imprisoned, in a magical dimension where neither man nor elf could reach him. Not while the wolf lived, and the wolf held sway because it was the wolf’s power that held Quicksilver there.

In his mind, Kit saw Quicksilver, sitting alone and shivering -- his arms wrapped around himself for comfort -- in a comfortless land of grey nothing and tattered shades.

Quicksilver flickered to Silver, and saw her hands extended to him, saw her mouth form the words, “Kit, I loved you well.”

Above it, overpowering, the laughter of the wolf, made Kit shake.

Oh, fie on that love that hatched death and hate. There Silver was, who was also Quicksilver, sovereign king of faerieland, reduced to nothing, or very little, surrounded on all sides, brought to heel, betrayed by fortune and suspicious love.

And all for Kit.

With the force of his new indignation, his new guilt and outrage at what he’d helped do, Kit pushed at the wolf, pushing back, using the cold iron that seemed to frighten the creature, the burn and the pain in Kit’s own hands, until Kit himself regained control of his limbs, managed to steady his wavering sight.

And yet, his landlady screamed, two buckets of water resting at her feet, her hands to her head, her mouth wide open.

From outside the door, Kit could hear rushing feet. How long had all this taken? From the woman’s pose, less than a heartbeat.

Kit mustered his mouth to say, “Kind lady, please. It was just a turn. I am well, you see. I thank you for the water.”

But within he labored mightily, with the force of hope, new hope that had come to him from knowing Quicksilver alive, to rebuild the wall that had torn down.

If Quicksilver was alive, then Kit could ransom him. Only, he must find what the ransom would be, and, meanwhile, Kit must keep the wolf from rampaging still.

One more life and the wolf would have the power, the strength he craved to end Quicksilver. And, once Quicksilver was gone, all would be lost, and the worlds clashing to their end.

The end of all, save Kit alone, forever alone with the wolf and his own guilt.

The Christian hell he wasn’t sure of believing in seemed like a comfortable and cheerful place by comparison.

“A turn?” the landlady asked, spying Kit sidewise.

Somehow the door had got closed, leaving Kit exposed, standing against the wall. The landlady no doubt could see all the blood on him, but that was not what he noted. He noted the quickening in her eye, the eager look.

Kit almost sighed, but didn’t. He’d thought so for a long time, but he didn’t say it, that his landlady showed an interest. Interest or not, nothing was interesting to Kit. Kit had long been promised to his grave and to it would he be espoused soon enough, soon as he found one to perform the ceremony. Meanwhile, he could use the landlady’s partiality to his ends.

The thought, new but not strange, came upon him like cooling, reviving water.

From it he drew the strength to smile, from it the strength to return the landlady’s look with more interest than he meant to, from it the facile words to say, “I found a job in a slaughterhouse. I feared it might diminish me in your eyes, so I would not tell you. But coin has been scarce and I haven’t eaten. I had a turn of faintness just now, from an empty stomach. Nothing more.”

She believed him. He could see that in her earnest brown eyes, of a sudden changing from lust to pity, though lust yet remained, like a flame that burned lower but was not for that extinct.

Hands pounded on the door outside, and asked if she was all right. “I am fine,” she answered, with a steady voice. “It was a mouse I saw, and that frightened me. But Master Marlowe has taken care of it.” She smiled at him. “I’ll now downstairs, and fetch you some soup.”

She opened the door and slid out, managing to hold the door half closed and not to afford the -- from the sound of them -- husband and sons outside a sight of the naked, blood-covered Kit.

Kit locked the door, as she left, and, pouring the water onto the basin, continued to wash.

Quicksilver was alive, and Kit would rescue him. How, Kit didn’t know, when Kit couldn’t speak of his predicament. But he would find a way. He must find the nearest emissaries of the hill, and to them he must send a message.

There must be a way to speak other than with his own mouth, or his own hand, holding the pen. He was a playwright, after all, who often spoke through the mouths of actors.

He must find a way to do that, a way to speak through others' mouths.

The thought came to him of just how to do that, how to marshal his guilt to his use. But, he’d need magic.

And what of it?

He realized that in the time the wall in his mind had opened -- even if it was again closed tight -- he’d got enough knowledge of magic to do what he needed and more. Knowledge to raise the dead and predict the future a little while, and know what was happening a ways away. Knowledge to send his poor charms in search of the emissaries of faerieland.

Knowledge to give them his message.

Kit was also a descendent of Merlin -- this having been known and confirmed by the wolf -- and, as such, must have some power from the old sorcerer.

As for whom he’d call....

Marlowe got his one clean suit from inside the trunk, and thought he would have to ask the landlady to wash the others.

He chuckled to himself, in his throat, and opened the door to the landlady, who came in, bearing a bowl of soup.

She set it upon his writing table, no doubt smearing his papers.

He bowed in recognition of her kindness.

“Master Marlowe,” she said, hesitantly. “There is a man who would speak to you on a matter of urgent business.”

He raised his brows. A man? If his fortune held it would be Will, and Will would have guessed that Kit had given shelter to the wolf and Will would know how to call upon the hill, and whom to call. “Send him up,” Kit said, with less caution than he’d ever exercised in his life in London.

The landlady smiled, and patted Kit’s shoulder affectionately, and was gone.

Moments later, he heard steps behind him and turned from the bowl of soup -- an indifferent pottage of lentil and mutton that he’d forced himself to choke down over the nausea of the wolf’s recent gorging -- and saw, not Will but a man he knew well from Scagmore. It was a servant of Sir Thomas Walsingham, Kit’s patron. He’d come, perhaps, to enquire how long Kit would be away.

Kit stood, smiling and extended his hands, and said, “Ingram Frizer. What brings you to London, and what business have you to impart to me?”

Frizer looked embarrassed, and didn’t respond to Marlowe’s friendly gesture.

He was a big man, with a shock of dark blond hair, and slow-moving eyes of a dull grey. The eyes now goggled as he stared at Kit, and Frizer’s large, shapeless mouth struggled to form words that finally exited, “My master, Sir Walsingham sent me to say that he would like you meet with some people in Deptford, at Mistress Bull’s house, tomorrow, early morning as ever was.”

Marlowe stopped. This he didn’t expect. This was surprising. Frizer and Skeres, both with the same message.

Oh, true, before succeeding to the title on his older brother’s death, Tom Walsingham had worked in the secret service with Kit, under supervision of Francis Walsingham.

But both of them had left all that behind.

Or had they? Perhaps Tom was part of whatever operation was planned.

“What for?” Kit asked. “Why should I?”

Frizer frowned, a slow frown, that like the movement of his eyes appeared to require permission of a sluggish brain to move. “Business of import to you.”

His life imported to him, too. But then, Kit had used Cecil’s name, when questioned, and Kit stood in danger of torture, under which he might well spill Walsingham’s secrets, the fortunes acquired by conning and usury and simple deviation of royal funds, all under cover of secret operations in her majesty’s service.

So, they wanted to kill him, and little did they know, how welcome an assassin’s knife would be just now.

Kit bit his lip, to avoid laughing. His hands pained him, like fresh-burned flesh. A token of the torments that waited the damned in hell? And yet that pain, and Frizer’s summons and all, all of it, were no more than silly jests, infant jokes.

Kit bit his lip and fought back chuckles. He must show gravity yet a while. But he permitted himself a smirk as he said, “Tell your master that I’ll be there. Early morning as ever was.”

Of a sudden, what had been frightening and vital -- these plots and counterplots of Kit’s once allies and sometime enemies -- now seemed petty, small, inconsequential, as the scuffles of children in a playground compared to the bloody battles that consumed countries.

Adroitly, Kit made to get rid of Frizer, showing him down the stairs and to the door. He had no time to waste with these minions of the mortal powers. What was there to fear from them?

Kit had a more vital game to play. One that, lost, could lose all of the world.

Scene Twenty Nine

Will’s bedroom. Will and Ariel come in from the street outside, both looking tired and pale.

Ariel sank down on Will’s bed, and sat there, her hands over her face, trying to breathe, trying to think.

What had Quicksilver done? What had the foolish elf wrought? How could Quicksilver’s power traces end there, where that gory, bloody kill was, destroyed by the wolf’s own fangs?

Oh, Quicksilver, has your weakness led you to such evil? Are you, now, like Sylvanus, lost to goodness and the clean power of the hill? Am I to go back and acquiesce in Malachite’s schemes, just for the sake of giving the hill a king? Am I the only power left in faerieland?

She rocked back and forth in her distress, and in her grief, she knew not where to turn. She did not want to reign alone in faerieland. Nor did she want to link herself to an elf who’d betrayed his master. She wanted.... She wanted.... She surprised herself by finding that she wanted Quicksilver.

Oh, she’d wanted him before, abstractly, wanted him back, wished for him back, but just because he’d been used to be there, and because she refused to admit she had lost him.

This want for Quicksilver that now appeared, fully formed, within herself, was something other.

Not a need, not a fear-driven need for her lord. And not a desire to have him near so that she wouldn’t lose him.

No, this need was other -- a plain necessity, a simple requirement, that Quicksilver be by, that Quicksilver be with her.

She saw him, in her mind, as he was wont to be -- his all-too-facile smile, his all-too-easy mind, the weakness in his heart as he weighed decisions of state and always hesitated. She saw him in her mind turning to Silver, and from Silver again into Ariel’s lord, and both forms, both of them were yet Quicksilver, both twined in his inconstant heart.

This weather-vane unsteadiness that should have repelled, yet didn’t. Those qualities in him that had always before brought despair to Ariel’s heart, now that Quicksilver might be lost, felt desirable, needed, precise and exactly the way Quicksilver should be.

Oh, let him be restored to her; let him return to her arms and to his throne; and she’d never more with weakness reproach him. She’d shore up his weakness without seeming to do so. She would allow him to be Silver, if Silver he must be.

Perhaps Nan Shakespeare was right -- Will said it was her habit -- and perhaps Ariel herself had made Silver stronger, irresistible, by making Quicksilver keep her back, by making Quicksilver be only half of what he was meant to be.

And perhaps that very halving of Quicksilver brought about the weakness of her lord which, in revolt against the splitting of his self, split everything he did and thought in half.

When he was young, Quicksilver had lightly changed, from one to the other aspect and back again. Yet his courage had not lacked, nor had his demeanor ever been maidenly.

“Oh me,” Ariel said. “Oh me, I am a fool. Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband? Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name, when I, thy ten years' wife, have mangled it? Oh me, who’ve encouraged rebellion and treason with my ill demeanor. Oh, me, who will be widowed through my own unmeaning hand.” She rocked back and forth, and tears escaped beneath her hands, which covered her eyes, to fall upon the blue velvet of her page’s attire. She cared not.

“Milady!” Will said, from near by.

Startled because she’d forgotten him, Ariel looked up.

“Milady,” Will said again. He looked disturbed, sympathetic, full of grief at her grief, sorrow at her sorrow. “Milady, I’m sure you do yourself injustice. I’m sure it’s not your fault.”

The mortal’s simple confidence, his well-meaning words, only encouraged Ariel’s anger at her own folly. What did the mortal know, what could he know? He a simple man, with simple ambitions, circumscribed within the world of a man? He with a wife and children in a little town, so far away? What could he know of the sins of kings, the awful, crushing weight of the indifferent crown?

Subjects had no such doubts, nor could subjects sin so awfully as their sovereigns, for it was enough if they knew they were the king’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, their obedience to the king wiped the crime of it out of them.

But Kings and Queens, they must think about their cause and advance into the dark, unguided, with no meek quality of humble obedience to excuse their egregious mistakes.

Ariel had been acting like a subject. And a subject she was, to her imperiled king. But, in her king’s absence, must she be a queen and tread her own path unafraid.

The tears dried in her eyes, decision chasing them out. No time to lament past mistakes. Time now, to act and to tread along a path that might be wrong but then again might be right.

Time to show that decision she would wish her lord had shown oh, so many times.

Getting up, she smoothed her velvet suit, and glanced at Will, who stood two steps away from her, looking solicitous and more than a little frightened at what must be fearful changes in her countenance.

“Get me a bowl of water,” she said, commanding lightly, as though this were faerieland and he her rightful subject. “A clean bowl, and water that has not touched metal.

“Milady?”

“You heard me,” she said. Going to his desk, she moved aside the pile of papers there, and cleared a space for the bowl. She fancied she saw him flinch at her handling of his scribbled over papers, but it didn’t matter. He was but a mortal, and his words, if mangled, could be written again. A hundred years from now he would be long dead, and no one would care what words he’d written or why.

But she, she was an immortal sovereign and if she could not rescue her husband she would have to face evil alone and win life for herself and her hill, and reward good and punish treason.

But first she must know where her lord was and if there were hope of ransoming him.

She no longer needed Quicksilver, but she would fain have him by her side, her lord love, and Silver, and all of Quicksilver’s multifaceted splendor.

Thinking of Quicksilver, dreaming on him, she hardly noticed Will saying, “I’ll be back in a breath,” and leaving the room.

In her mind, she could almost see Quicksilver. He looked pale, cold, distraught, and sat in a dark, grey, gloomy landscape where nothing existed expect shadows.

It looked like the land of the dead and, with a shiver, Ariel hoped her vision was not true.

Scene Thirty

Marlowe’s room. He stands by his writing table. He has -- obviously uncaring -- pushed all his papers to the floor, in scattered confusion. In the space thus cleared, he has set an infinity of bowls, cups, spoons, and three candles. These he moves around, while muttering to himself.

The landlady had kindly let Kit have a mess of crockery for his mad scheme, without even asking what he meant to use it for. Such the foolishness of women when they craved love.

Such the foolishness of men, also. For it was craving Silver’s love that had got Kit into this mess.

And the same craving must somehow give him force to see it through.

Standing in front of his work table, Marlowe looked at the crockery, and smiled to himself. What to put in these bowls, and what to do with them?

A mad idea had formed in his brain, while the bowls and cups were fetched, that he might put his guilt to good use, and conjure the spirits of the guiltless dead, killed by him and by the wolf proper, who might well, oh, too well, serve his turn and speak where his enemy forced him to stand silent. For would the spirits not wish to denounce their murderer.

Did they not say that murder cried out of the Earth for revenge?

Kit removed his gloves, the gloves that had cost him the torments of hell to slip on, and yet that he had to slip on to avoid notice of his burned hands.

He poured water into one of the bowls, and, picking up his most stained garment, dipped it into the water, making it pinkish with the blood of the wolf’s victims.

Frowning at it, it came to Kit that though he’d shared the mind of the wolf, he remembered no spells, as such. No grand gestures, no great work involving herbs or glory hands or the noose from a hanged man’s neck, nor other repugnant ingredients. No eye of newt, no toe of bat, none of it figured in the magic of elves.

Of course, if elves were of magic made, which Kit knew elves to be, then it would be easy enough, would it not, for an elf to move magic. It stood to reason since Kit, made of flesh, found it easy enough to move his body by command of his mind.

At least, and he smiled ruefully at this thought, he’d found it easy until the recent past.

He felt the wolf sniffing at the thought, from the other side of the partition that divided them. Afraid the wolf should surprise Kit and stop Kit’s scheme before ever he started it, Kit pushed all thought of the wolf, and all thought of what he must do, out of his mind, and concentrated on the crockery, the bowls, the cups, his hands moving them, clustering bowls full of clear water around the all important one.

Not that he knew what to do with any of them, but that he thought if he had enough of a confusing profusion of them, the wolf, if he peeked out through Kit’s eyes, would find it all innocent nonsense, desperate play, the foolish attempt of an ensnared rabbit at escaping the piercing claws of the hunting falcon.

Kit pulled his sleeves up and looked at the bowl of bloodied water, sitting against the dark table.

How could Kit, mortal Kit, poor Kit who could never control his own life, control magic?

All Kit was good at was words.

And yet, magic was ever words, was it not? And if so, who better to perform magic than Kit Marlowe? Was not his work a kind of magic, making the theater goers for a moment believe in Tamburlaine, or Faustus?

Still, he wished he had something more solid, a more eminent kind of knowledge.

“Yet fain would I have a book wherein I might behold all spells and incantations, that I might raise up spirits when I please,” he whispered, and sighed. Faustus, at least, had a guide, but Kit, himself, must go traipsing, unshod and blind, into this dark, perilous country.

But.... well, if he must he must, and might as well steel his spirit to the task at hand. Because if he didn’t get help, the wolf would consume him, and soon there would be nothing, nothing at all to prevent the wolf’s victory. Except maybe Kit’s death. And Kit wasn’t ready to die. Neither in mind nor in body.

Stroking his chin with his left hand, he smelled the sweet-sickly taint of fresh blood and sighed. “Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this hand again.”

Scene Thirty One

Will’s room. Outside, the sun is setting in a splendor of red. Ariel looks up from her bowl of water, and looks at the entranced Will.

Many years later, Will would try to remember those moments, when the Queen of faerieland had gazed into a bowl of water and seen what was happening in the world of spirits, the play of ghosts, the battle of good and evil beyond the ken of men.

He could not.

In those moments, all he could say is that he’d seen figures, each fast succeeding the other upon the clear unruffled surface of the water in the bowl.

He’d seen elves and princes, women and men and children, each one after the other, each eclipsing the other, all of them followed, all of them pursued by the darkness that was the wolf. As night succeeded day, so the wolf succeeded all of human light, like eternal damnation closing in on the works of man, like an eclipse shutting up the bright inconstant moon.

He’s seen them all and understood little -- not even the image of worlds, spinning in the dark, distant void.

But Ariel had understood it. That much he knew, when she looked up at him.

This woman, for whom Will felt already too much paternal tenderness, this elf, towards whom, against his best judgment he’d been feeling a father’s love, looked up from her bowl, and the sapience of the ancient, all-knowing sea was in her eyes.

Those elven-blue orbs might not be all that much older than his -- he knew that in elf terms Ariel and Quicksilver were little more than children -- and yet in them was the instinctive knowledge of the succeeding ages, the intuition of world everlasting, the knowledge of mountains ground down to the grain of sand and of terra firma and ocean exchanging places over and over again.

“He’s near his goal,” she said. Her voice sounded distant and cold, like wind blowing over far eastern mountains, where men sat and meditated on eternal truth, far from the hurrying crowds of the rushing west. “My... my husband’s unworthy brother. One more life. One more human life, and if he gets it, it will be the undoing of us all. Human and elf alike.”

The calm with which she spoke shocked Will more than the words. He took a deep breath, gathered into timorous lungs and slowly expelled. “Did you find out? Who gave your brother-in-law shelter?”

Ariel shook her head. She looked not at Will but at the window in front of her, like a child lost in a nightmare all her own. “No. No. Whatever it is, whoever it is, whatever vile abode my vile relative sought, he has hidden it well, protected it. I got no more than a feeling that my husband had found it. Stumbled onto it, to be honest. To his undoing.” Ariel’s eyes filled with tears, one of which slid, unknown, down her oval cheek.

“Your husband?” Will asked, more alarm and concern in his voice than he meant to put in it. But he felt responsible for this one victim of the darkness that might soon overtake all. “Quicksilver? Is he.... He isn’t dead? Is he?”

Ariel looked sharply at him, and sighed. “Quicksilver is neither dead nor alive. The life that sustains him is like the dying flame of a guttering candle, that any sharp breeze can put out. My.... His brother has imprisoned him in .... we call it between-worlds, a place that’s neither dead nor alive, here nor there. It’s the world that never existed, the potential never fulfilled. It’s where our dead go that can’t find rest -- the untimely murdered, the lost souls, those who die with unfinished business and unaccounted-for sins.” She tilted her head up.

The red of the setting sun, coming through the window, tinted her cheeks coral and made her look unbearably beautiful, unmistakably human, exquisitely fragile.

Had Will dared, he would have consoled her, as he comforted Susannah when she broke a toy. But Ariel’s troubles were more than all the broken toys, and Will dared not patronize this being of fire and magic.

“Fortunately, the evil thing didn’t have the power to kill my husband,” Ariel said. “Not while Quicksilver yet has the power of the hill. But the wolf’s power is growing by the moment and my husband.... Well, the hill is in turmoil. I came here because my husband’s enemies, within the hill, were trying to seize power through me. And even as I viewed the occult world in this simple water I felt our enemies at the hill tracking me down.” She dipped her dainty finger in the liquid. “If they sever my husband from the hill before evil is destroyed.... We will be lost, Quicksilver and I. Even with the power of the hill behind him, if Quicksilver’s brother should take one more life and acquire that much more power, Quicksilver will be utterly lost.”

Will walked to the window, turning his back on Ariel, on that beautiful face that reflected all the desolate bleakness of an empty, fearful Earth -- the death awaiting all this riotous panoply outside Will’s bedroom, the whores and the merchants, the ale houses, the gentlemen and the horse thieves, the hounds and the baited bear.

Looking out, at what he had always thought a dirty, noisy street full of beggared poor and crooked rich men, Will felt a sudden wave of tenderness for London, this London so harsh and so different from his sweet Stratford, this town that would allow Will to be what he would and claim as high a name as he dared for himself, provided only he had the courage to claim it.

Fearing his eyes too would fill with tears like Ariel’s, he blinked, and stared harder, searching for a face he knew.

He hadn’t seen Marlowe in a long time, and the last time he’d seen him, the playwright had appeared to be drunk, or else insane.

How could such a high mind come to such a low pass? Was the closing of the theaters working upon Marlowe more than upon Will? Or had Marlowe gone without food too long? Will remembered Marlowe telling him about the lack of food, the lack of money, the general poverty in the land these days.

Was Marlowe suffering? It was hard to reconcile with the playwright’s expensive velvets and smooth silks. And yet, who knew?

Something else, something that Will felt was vital, tickled at his memory -- a remembrance, a feeling that he had seen or heard something important, something he couldn’t lay his finger upon, something he couldn’t name, something that related to Marlowe.

He tried to pin it down. It was something Quicksilver had said -- an expression, a look, something .... But how could that relate to Marlowe, Marlowe who was so far from the faerie realm, a coarse and cold big-city hustler, even if dressed in the refined veneer of poetry?

Shaking his head with impatience, Will noticed something odd.

One of the men downstairs looked familiar, but as though Will had seen him many, many years ago. Someone from Stratford?

The man, standing outside, beneath the wind-rattled sign of the tavern across the street, was tall and dark, with very pale skin, and pronounced features that looked more beautiful than they should be. His green velvet suit displayed the latest fashion and looked so freshly washed and set as to make even Marlowe’s normal dressing standards appear sloppy and careless.

Not the type of person that Will associated with small Stratford upon Avon, where all the neighbors knew each other and took care not to dress too far above their stations.

Will frowned, trying to remember where he might have seen such singular features, such long, shiny black hair. Other than on Lady Silver, but then even Will, looking at the incisive nose, the beautiful but sharp features of that man couldn’t associate him with Silver’s soft, rounded loveliness.

As he watched the man looked up, and Will had the impression the whole creature flickered, in and out of the street, like the fading of an image reflected upon glass, like the images that had formed upon Ariel’s water bowl.

Then Will remembered he’d seen the man -- no, the creature. It had been many years ago, in the faerie clearing, on the night he’d reclaimed his Nan from faerieland. This had been one of the elves in Quicksilver’s retinue.

“What?” Ariel asked. “What is it, Will?”

He must have made some small noise, some shocked exclamation.

“There’s a man across the street,” Will said, feeling the man’s gaze on him and wondering how that could be. “That I think is an elf, and not there at all but somehow only an image of him.” Who could this be? Could it be one of the rebellious elves that Ariel feared had come for her? Or was it a friend, come to her help?

She’d called him Will. Not Master Shakespeare. Will.

He smiled at that. The queen of faerieland needed a keeper, a watchful protector. She trusted too much, made herself too vulnerable.

She stepped up near him, and looked out the window.

“Oh,” Ariel said, and her body stiffened in surprise and shock. “Oh,” she said. “He’s Malachite, and he has found me.”

“Malachite?” Will asked.

“The leader of the palace rebellion,” Ariel said. “He.... He would dethrone my lord and have me, and by having me have the faerie hill.” She turned a waxen-white face towards Will. “It’s like your game of chess, you see. Quicksilver and I both have the souls and power and loyalty of our kind. If he’s out of action, the one who captures the Queen wins the game.” Her tiny, needle-sharp elf teeth glimmered in a little feral smile, full of woeful irony.

Will trembled. He felt a sudden raging anger at Quicksilver. How could Quicksilver take a creature like this to wife, a soft, helpless creature, and then leave her to fend for herself this way?

How dare he? Quicksilver showed as much carelessness in his own love as in interfering in other’s lives.

And yet, Ariel loved Quicksilver. Quicksilver, who was trapped in nothing-land, in the land between existing and not existing, in the land that had never happened.

Remembering Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s quick wit, his moonlight-pale hair, his perfect features, Will felt something very much like regret at the elf’s loss tinge his anger at Quicksilver. His anger paled to this feeling of regret and loss.

The fool, Quicksilver, had allowed himself to be trapped, allowed everything to be destroyed, and Will could do no more than regret it, with an impotent regret that seemed to paint everything a pale, sickly yellow, like the sun in winter, falling slantwise upon the face of a babe who will not live out the season.

“Need you escape, milady?” he asked, with quick fierce intent, with protective despair. He would not let this one be lost also. “Must you hide? I will defend you. I will protect your escape.”

“No.” Ariel turned to look at Will, her little face grave, her eyes sympathetic. But she shook her head, loosening the multitude of braids that held her hair confined beneath the page’s cap. “No. It is not Malachite really, just an image of him. And even if he’s found me, he can’t come here that quickly. That he found me, alone, is a miracle. Unlike Quicksilver, we, the other elves, can’t transport between two places with the speed of thought. Malachite will have to come overland, as I did. We have a day before he gets here. A night and a day, or thereabouts.”

“A night and a day,” Will said. A night and a day to save both worlds in. And save what he might, how could he ensure that Quicksilver would take better care of reign and wife in the future?

Because, so that he could save Nan and Judith, and Hamnet, and Susannah, who held his love and all his hope for the future, in far-distant Stratford, he must relinquish his protection on this elf, and let her risk herself, as she might. The protection of Ariel didn’t rightfully belong to a man.

Scene Thirty Two

Kit Marlowe’s lodgings. Marlowe stands in front of his array of crockery, his arms raised. The setting sun, coming through the window, paints his hair an odd red, and makes him look as though he’s surrounded by flames, like a magician of old practicing fearful magic. Around him, wisps of something like fog form, within the tight confines of his room, seeming to crowd him.

Kit raised his arms. The evening sun was red, that red of spilled blood that Kit had seen all too often of late.

His heart beat fast, so fast that his breath caught in rushing after it, and his raised hands trembled. His palms hurt, and his fingers looked bloodied again by the touch of that accursed, red light.

He could feel as if a pressure, as those he wished near gathered around.

And yet, he wished them not.

Not so long ago, he would have paid and paid dearly not to have these things near that now just so dearly he tried to summon.

“Ye are mine,” he said, to the shadows, the patches of fog, the dark that gathered around him and that he hoped were spirits. The spirits of men who had once walked the fair green of God’s Earth, men that Kit had dispatched, knowing or unknowing, through the tricks and arts of the denouncer, the spy, the informer, through the cruel claws and thirsty fangs of the guilty beast he’d lately become, through omission and commission, through what he’d done and what he’d failed to do.

His hands thus raised, he seemed to feel the spirits pressing against them, hands holding his that were once pressed upon his in friendship, in the far, distant days of his youth at Cambridge. The men who’d trusted him, and with him discussed their crisis of faith, the weighty matters that held their souls down and drew them to Rheims, to the Catholic seminar.

Those same men that, once known to the secret service, setting foot in their native England again, had been dragged to death in intricate torture by the servants of a Queen too fearful of Catholic conspiracies.

Their hands had pressed Kit’s in friendship, once. Those same hands of Kit’s, that had been filled with the coin for which he’d betrayed them, and clad in the fine gloves such coin had bought.

Now their clammy touch reached from the grave, cold and dank, and frigid and claiming him as much as he claimed them.

Such was the price of the necromancer, Kit knew then. Not to be taken away by shrieking demons, though that might look better upon the stage, but to be claimed as much as those he claimed, and suffer a little of their death as he did it.

And yet this, having the dead speak for him, was the last thing Kit could do to save his own life. For he could communicate to no living being what he thought or felt. Only to these creatures if they should read his true fear from his tortured brain.

He must set them on their course, and then flee the environs of London, where too many people gathered, and too many people might provide fresh fodder to the ravening beast.

Oh, only let him do this, his poor magic, and let the magic spring forth in healing for these souls, and in deliverance for him. Let his magic save Quicksilver.

He thought of Quicksilver, forlorn Quicksilver in the land of shadows, Quicksilver whose lips had parted to say “I loved you well.”

The strange thing was that Kit believed him. He remembered his distant, haughty behavior, and yet believed that Quicksilver loved him. Love was indeed too full of faith, too credulous, with folly and false hope perhaps deluding him. However, for once, Kit couldn’t help believing, couldn’t help reaching for captive Quicksilver and seeking to free him.

“Ye are mine,” he repeated to the dark shadows that encircled him. “As I am yours, my crime having birthed you to death as it birthed me a murderer. By my tainted hands and my stained heart I conjure you. So far forth as by art and power of my spirit I am able to perform, I command you to take the shape of men as you once were.”

All at once, he was surrounded, the small room almost too full, too crowded close.

Terror and triumph warred within Kit, as he recognized that one’s faith-burned countenance, and this one’s trusting eyes, and, upon that one, the fresh features he’d noticed just the night before, seconds before the wolf tore her features asunder and rent the skin and crushed the bone beneath.

Kit’s impulse was to cover his eyes, and he heartily wished to look away from those faces, each of which, shrouded in the pale garment of livid death, accused him.

But another part of him gloried and grew.

Kit could do magic. He could, indeed.

Like his ancestor, Merlin, he could conjure. He marveled at it, as if from a distance off, and joyed in it like a child with a new toy. Never until now had he fully believed that the spirit lived after the flesh died.

And now, believing it, he knew not whether to be happy or scared, for if the Christians were right then what waited him after death would be naught but endless torment.

And if the Christians weren’t right and the afterlife more the domain of such creatures as elves....

He grimaced. Oh, curse it all. Eternity with the wolf.

Yet, for the moment, his joy in power overtook him, and he thought of Faustus and in his heart repeated Faustus’ words: I see there's virtue in my heavenly words; Who would not be proficient in this art? Full of obedience and humility, such is the force of magic and my spells.

Aloud he said, “Gather around me, spirits, for tonight we must perform a deed that will redeem me and earn you rest. The theater awaits, and the play must be braved that will free the elven king, and set both worlds aright.”

Scene Thirty Three

Ariel and Will, outside a closed theater. The bulk of the building looms large above them, and a painted sign swings in the wind, proclaiming it The Rose.

“This is the place?” Will asked. “This?”

Ariel nodded. He looked more than surprised--disappointed. A human he was, an ephemeral creature and, by the standards of her race, a child or little more.

What was she doing here, what with him? She who had so bitterly censured Quicksilver, she who had thought her husband a fool for running after humans.

Yet, Will was so grave, so eager, so ever ready to cast heart and soul into this quest he couldn’t possibly understand. He was a man as a man should be.

The thought came, then disappeared.

What did Ariel know of what a man should be? She who had so often, so bitterly censured her husband, and who, after all, could do naught but follow the same mistakes he made?

Perhaps Quicksilver was right in hesitating, in suffering folly, in doing anything rather than rush forward, into the hot furnace of war, into the crazed frenzy of love.

Ariel had thought she knew what she was doing.

Yet, here she was, in London, facing a wolf that she knew not how to defeat. And all the while, all the while, the hill was undefended.

She took her hand to her mouth, and covered it, while the thought came to her, for the first time, of what might be going on in the hill.

The power of it still flowed to her. That meant the insurgents were not victorious. But that would have meant that Ariel could have stood and fought them, fought them, face to face. Wouldn’t that have been better than what she was doing now?

“But....” Will put his large hand against the double door of the theater. He’d put on gloves before leaving the house, insisting that a gentleman didn’t go out with bare hands.

His gloves were white, and somewhat the worse for wear, but they looked glaringly bright against the aged wood of the door. “This is the theater. The Rose. My plays.... my plays were put on here, by Lord Strange’s men.” A high color suffused his cheeks and, Ariel thought, something like shame darted around his hawk-eyes. “Not many people came. I am no Marlowe. And then the theater closed for the plague, and the actors went on tour but I thought if I stayed behind....” His voice ebbed. “I do not know who keeps the key to this, nor how we can enter it. And how would the one who has given.... the wolf asylum be in there? Surely, it is not one of the actors? Or Ned Alleyn?”

Ariel sighed. All she knew was that her dream-vision, the feeling that had come over her, overpowering suffocating like a heavy blanket, had drawn her here, to the door of the theater -- if this immense, closed facade.

She could still see the power -- the line of a power tainted with Sylvanus’s darkness, tinged with Quicksilver’s pulsing strength, but a different power altogether, leading to the door of the theater, like human footprints led to a place recently visited. Here she must come to find how to save Quicksilver, because the same power that surrounded the corpse they’d found had been here. And Quicksilver must be saved.

She thought of her lord not so much with need as with fresh shock that he was not with her.

For her sake, for her hill’s sake, for the sake of both worlds, human and elven, Quicksilver must be saved.

“It is here,” she said, looking at Will. “We must go here.”

Will sighed. “If we must, we must. And yet, this will be closed.”

Ariel sighed. “Allow me.” Pushing the mortal aside, the put her hands on the door, one on either side of the joining partition. The lock was metal and larger than any Ariel had ever handled. Her mind flinched from the touch of iron, yet Ariel forced it on.

Pushing and pulling with all her magic strength, she made the lock tilt and turn, and finally unlock.

The door flew open, as though pushed by invisible hands.

Ariel stared at the opening, at the vast space revealed, the vast space empty and desolate and yet, seemingly, still resounding with the echoes of past performances, with the cries of those who pretended to die, with the oaths of lovers, with the glory of imagined history.

Looking in, Ariel hesitated.

Maybe it had been a mistake coming here, to London. A mistake for Quicksilver, surely, and maybe one for her too. Maybe she should have stood and fought for her hill and for her throne, and maybe from there she would have been in a position to render her husband a better service. And maybe she still, now, made further mistakes. Would the dark power leave such clear steps, but that it meant for her to find it. To find it and be caught, and join her husband.

Her captive, dying husband.

She thought of Quicksilver as her sight had revealed him: A huddled, miserable Quicksilver, scorched by cold and frozen by the lack of life in the desolate in-between worlds, severed from all that was and consigned only to the fearful half-life of might-have-been.

Quicksilver, didn’t deserve that.

Weak he might have been, criminally weak, maybe. But how else could he be when everyone around him, from his treasonous servant, to herself, his ten-year wife, from the massed courtiers to the mincing servant fairies, to the plotting centaurs, had been wishing him to be something he was not, and could not be.

They’d been wishing for Sylvanus’s force, his dark ruthlessness.

A shiver went over Ariel at the thought of what they had wished and what their collective wishing had done.

Impatient, she reached for Will’s hand, and, turning her face away that he could not see her tears, tugged him into the empty building.

Scene Thirty Four

The theater, as Ariel and Will close the door behind themselves. It is a huge fenced space, mostly open to the sky. Only the balconies and the stage area have partial roofs. The vast wooden balconies and a large, empty central area face a wide curtain. The moment the door closes, the whole building animates. Twinkles of light, and odd flashes of color run along the very tall wooden fencing, paint the aged wood of the balconies an eerie green, a glowing orange, a bitter yellow. Breezes, now cold, now hot, play with Will’s hair, with Ariel’s elaborate braids.

“This is the theater, then,” Ariel said. She spoke in hushed tones and pronounced theater like a foreigner saying a word of whose meaning she wasn’t quite sure.

“The theater, yes,” Will said. He looked around, remembering the last performance he’d seen there. Doctor Faustus. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, full of sound and fury, and the echo of great and dreadful happenings translated into awful words. Every part of the theater had then been crammed, the pit with apprentices and bawds cheering and heckling; the balconies with well to do burghers, a few lords, a sprinkling of ladies, peeling oranges and cracking nuts while watching the show.

Now it was empty, but full of lights and flashes. Magic? Or some weird effect of nature upon long-dried wood?

“What are we meant to do?” Will asked Ariel, as they stood by the door, in the walkway that led and up toward the stairs to the balconies, or downward, into the main, cheaper area of the theater.

Ariel shook her head, distracted. Her face was sharpened, becoming intent, her whole mouth and eyes, and features set in an expression like one who listens for distant sound. She looked like an angel waiting for the final trumpet of judgment.

The flashes of light ran madly around and around the balconies, like dervishes inebriated with life, and rolled in colored displays off the dry wood, and dazzled upon the very ground where Ariel and Will stood.

Little by little, as if by playing they had found a place to stand, the lights collected upon the stage curtains, running up and down on them with strange effect, tingeing the deep black, cheap wool, all the colors of the rainbow.

“I don’t know,” Ariel spoke, still very low, still as if out of a dream. “I think.... I think we’re supposed to watch and listen. But I do not know to what or why.”

“Well,” Will said. “Then let’s search seats, there, in yonder balcony.” Speaking thus, he led her to the rickety stairs that climbed to the even more rickety nearest balcony.

When he’d last been here, he’d stood downstairs, unable to afford the seating comfort of the balconies. Hazelnut shells, orange peels and the stray slop of beer from the balconies had landed on his head throughout the play, but he’d not cared.

What a play that had been -- what a thing -- to make men forget it was but a play. When the actors had pretended true damnation, aye, Will had seen it and tasted its effect upon his dazzled mind and his eager lips.

That was what he wanted, thus to dazzle.

He sighed, his sighing too loud, in this theater where no one laughed, no one applauded, no bawd displayed her wares, no patrons conversed.

The theater could get just this hushed, just this quiet when Kit Marlowe’s villain declaimed his villainy, or when his hero prepared for great death.

It had never silenced so absolutely for one of Will’s plays.

He followed Ariel’s nimble feet climbing the stairs, followed Ariel to the balcony that shook beneath their steps.

So absorbed was he in his professional fear, his professional jealousy, that he noticed nothing amiss, until Ariel shouted, “Look, look.”

He looked, following her extended, trembling arm and the long, thin finger pointed towards the stage.

In a blaze of noxious green light and flashes of darkness -- only explainable as such an absence of light that it absorbed what little light was present in the surroundings -- the curtain moved, opened stealthily.

Will felt a shiver run down his spine. Were they not alone here, then? Was this all, the weird lights, the open door and now the curtain opening, part of some trap? Was someone -- human or elven, created or immortal creature -- trying to entrap him and Ariel? Was someone trying to scare him? Intimidate him?

He half rose from his seat, determined to go backstage and see who operated the rope-and-pulley mechanism that opened the broad curtains.

But the sight of what filled the stage stopped him. The sight of what strutted upon the boards held him silent and robbed the strength from his knees, so that he dropped, half dazed, back onto his creaking seat.

The stage shone, as if backlit by a thousand candles. Not bright candles, such as might light a wedding or a family revel, but small, mournful, veiled candles, such as might veil a wake or a service for the dead.

This yellow, diffuse light highlighted patches of dark fog that formed shapes and clustered, center stage, slowly coalescing into something other, something human, like a group of people, sitting around.

Little by little a concentration of fog moved up and center stage, and little by little, like a piece of clay gaining shape under the hands of a master sculptor, it developed the features of a man: a very young man, dressed all in black. His pale blue eyes protruded just slightly from the thin angular face, and wisps of pale blond hair clung to the high forehead.

He looked around himself, as if not sure where he was, found Will and Ariel in the balcony, and stared up at them, with an intent gaze. “If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, but with good will, that is the true beginning of our end. Consider then we come but in despite.” Its voice was slow and halting, as if coming from a mouth not used to words. “We do not come as minding to contest you, our true intent is all for your delight. We are not here that you should here repent you. The actors are at hand and by their show you shall know all that you are like to know.”

Near him, another wisp of fog had taken the shape and the look of a man not so young, wearing a monk’s robe, his features likewise narrow and ascetic, his black eyes peering intensely from within his brown hood. “You come here to know where to find the wolf, and in which man he does repose. It should not be hard, for he’s inclined, as is the ravenous wolf, to bite when cornered, and fight without much prompting. Think you, you know him, if only you should think.”

By his side, another specter had formed, a very young man, almost a child, with russet hair that Will remembered. Will would swear this was the shade of hair of the little apprentice whose corpse he’d seen. A frisson ran down his back, as he listened to that dead mouth speak.

“He came upon me early morning, as I walked to my master’s, and stilled the heart that had yet years to live.”

“The man who let the wolf make this spoil,” another fog creature said -- this one a fresh-faced maiden, "is as evil as the wolf who harbors him.”

“That can I witness,” said the monk. “While yet we were both at Cambridge did he befriend me, and all the while he got from me my intent of going to Rheims and returning a missionary. I returned only to find that he had sold me to the gallows, and a fouler fact did never traitor in the land commit. For we were friends, and I trusted him well.”

Cambridge. Will frowned. Had Kit Marlowe not attended Cambridge? He thought of the play maker’s odd behavior. But where would Kit have come across the elven kingdom before?

“You?” Another fog shape said. “I, he did betray in the maturity of his years, when he made me talk of whom I wished would succeed our sovereign. And for those words, rash and quick, against his subtle mind I lost contest, and was hung in Tyburn square.”

Others crowded in, with accusations.

Will’s head swam in the confusion, like a traveler that has lost sight of shore and does not expect to regain it.

He wished the shades would speak plainly, plainly accuse their slayer.

Standing, his voice quavering, he put an end to the babel of accusations on the stage. “Stay, good spirits, tell me only: who is this man you so accuse?”

The monk detached himself from the rest, and pushed forward, in rash movement. “He is a traitor and a miscreant, too good to be so and too bad to live, since the more fair and crystal is the sky, the uglier seem the clouds that in it fly.”

The first ghost now pushed him out of the way, and said, “He is the muse’s darling, the poets envy, the actor’s patron saint.”

The apprentice pushed them both away and said, “He is descended from Merlin’s own race.”

And the maiden, last, shrilled, loud and clear, like a woman outraged. “His name is Christopher Marlowe.”

Scene Thirty Five

Will and Ariel in the theater. Ariel is determined to go out, and Will demurs.

“But, my lady, you know not his poetry. He is the greatest poet of our age. How can we strike him down just because,” Will gestured towards the stage in exasperation, "ghosts and goblins have denounced him? It could all be a trap of the wolf.”

Ariel felt her gorge rise. She wanted to yell, but she dared not. Were all men, then, these hesitant creatures, always ready to wait and ponder, and look both ways before deciding which way they wished to go?

Oh, call them not men. Call them maids, and dress them in petticoats, and sit them to their embroidery all day.

“I know,” she said, "that years before Quicksilver.... Years before you met him, he had this creature, this.... toy, for his one summer of sporting. A young man, it was, and later on, I remember Quicksilver said he had gone mad, tainted by faerie love, as all are who’ve experienced, and sought their livelihood from the stage.” She gave Will a malicious eye. “Obviously an all-too-common reaction to contact with faerieland,” she said, and had the satisfaction of seeing Will flinch.

Yet, Will did a good imitation of Quicksilver’s overarching stubbornness that wasn’t force and yet wouldn’t be bent. “But Marlowe...,” he said. “His plays. If you’d see his plays....” Will’s eyes filled with something like starry-eyed awe.

Ariel stamped her foot and blew out breath. He’d call her Milady, too. She wished, she very much wished that, like her husband, she could do more than borrow the appearance and clothing of the other sex. Then she would show them what a man should be, and how behave, and with what ready hand wield the sword. “If he is the wolf, and I argue he is, for I know a true seeing when I see one, then he is the undoing of both worlds. And you worry about killing him because he is a good playwright?”

Why must men be stubborn only when arguing for inaction?

Will looked at her with an expression somewhere between surprise and the look of a bird confronted by a rampaging cat. “And then the other thing is, Milady, one can’t go about murdering whoever one wants in the world of men, you know? I could end up arrested, or worse.”

“And yet I am a queen,” Ariel said she opened her hands wide, to express the despair that welled up in her heart. “And yet powerless. My husband leaves me to defer to mortals, and my only ally, the man I’d have called a friend but a few minutes ago, has turned cowardly, his liver like water.” Even as she said it, and saw the sudden hurt fly across Will’s face, to be replaced with a closed, inscrutable expression, she knew that what she said wasn’t right.

Will lived in the world of men, and in the world of men there were laws to obey, that no elf could understand, much less presume to ignore.

But she’d been imagining him an equal who understood her and her dilemma.

She heard Nan’s words in her mind, Nan’s fair words accusing her of having loved not Quicksilver, but only an image of him.

Had she been doing the same here; had she been feeling friendship for an image of Will?

Oh, if this were true, and she was only capable of being attracted to images, what did it say about her?

How many times had she shied from Quicksilver’s caresses, how many times had she judged him inadequate because he fell short of her image of him?

What did that make her, who’d so often accused Quicksilver of being cold?

What did that make her, but the coldest of elves, the most wretched of wives?

Like that, revealed to her own inner sight, unable to hide from her own mind, Ariel saw herself in that flash: small, inoffensive looking, and yet poisonous.

How much hatred seethed within her, how much desire for power. And she, unable to love, unable to care for anything except these perfect images that she carried, within the secret of her bile-filled heart.

The realization made her eyes widen in shock.

It was as though someone had held a mirror in front of her, fully displaying Ariel in her full ugliness to her own eyes had, until now, been scaled over. “Oh,” she said.

“Milady?” Will looked confused.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, what a fool I’ve been.” But she didn’t wish to explain to him, as his eyes widened in further surprise, the full cause, the full extent of her revelation. A poor thing she was as an elf and a wife, but she’d keep her shame to herself. Aloud she said, “You need not suffer for killing the ally of the wolf. There are things, things elves can do, to...to prevent you falling to your human law.”

This was the wrong thing to say. Will stiffened, if offended or shocked, Ariel couldn’t tell.

Oh, for the ability to understand these strange, ephemeral creatures. What in this man made it so impossible for him to kill another, even another that so many ghosts had accused of treason, even another that perforce must die?

And yet he was offended at the thought that he might. That she could tell, from the way he drew his spine up, from the way he glared.

“Milady, Marlowe is a friend, a colleague.” He shook his head. “We have.... We have drunk together. We have.... He has given me advice. I couldn’t kill him. Not like that.”

“And yet, you heard what he’s done to his other friends,” Ariel said, earnestly confused, seeking to learn. “And yet, you know he’s not reliable. This is a true seeing. I assure you of as much.”

Will squeezed his lips together, making them appear small and tight, and straight. “A true seeing it might be, aye, and a true reason. But, milady, I don’t know why he did these things. You cannot believe only one side of the story. No man is so vile that he’s a villain in his own eyes. And Marlowe’s words are.... Marlowe’s poetry is winged fire and vibrant air.” Looking at Ariel, he looked earnest, pleading, his golden falcon eyes shimmering, filled with tears.

“I don’t expect you to understand, milady. You’re not a creature like us, bound to a short span of mortal years. You’re not a creature who must seek immortality and hope in words that will transcend death. Marlowe’s words will transcend death, milady. Kit’s words. I don’t know about others'. That the mouth of such an able poet should be stopped. It would cry to the very heavens for vengeance.”

“He is the wolf,” Ariel said. She wished she could make Will understand what she meant by that, how tainted the soul must be that could harbor such a creature as Sylvanus, and yet how, even to one such, Sylvanus would be torture and vexation, an eternity of torment to live with and excruciating suffering to endure. How the very fiend who’d given the fiend shelter must be suffering more than he deserved from the horror of it.

“That may be as it might be,” Will said, stubborn, the facile words falling from his lips. “Now, if there were another away, an elven way, that you could separate him from the creature -- that you could detach the poet and the wolf, and let the poet go on living, while the wolf dies....”

He wanted her to lie to him, Ariel thought. He wanted her to do the impossible.

And yet, Ariel’s bitter voice reproached, hadn’t she, so often, demanded of Quicksilver that he do the impossible, that he make himself into something he was not -- into her mental image of him, her idealization of this prince Quicksilver that lived in her mind only? A Quicksilver without Silver, a creature without duality and ever ready to impose his will upon the world of faerie and men alike?

If she could demand the impossible of others, why shouldn’t others demand it of her?

She swallowed. It was impossible. She had forced Quicksilver to live an impossible lie for ten years. And yet, he’d tried.

This was undoable, too, and, by the Fates, she would try. “I will try,” she said and meant it. “Good Shakespeare, I will try. Only take me to his lodging. There’s not a minute to lose. The centaurs are rebelling and even now, even this minute, I could lose my kingdom, have it severed from me like the cord from a babe.

“And Quicksilver will die if he loses that contact. He will die, too,” she said, and was surprised to find her eyes overflowing with tears. “He will die, too, if the wolf claims one more victim, and see, watch, good Shakespeare, the night is advancing, dark prevailing. Even if this Marlowe tried, even if he’s not as corrupt as he seems to be, even if his conscience made him fight the wolf, he couldn’t keep away this evil. For Marlowe is of human kind and night finds him longing for his pillow--while this evil is of elven kind and used to spending the entire human night awake.”

Will took a deep breath. He looked pale and as though he were debating with himself, neither side winning. “All right,” he said at last. His features set in stony determination, his shoulders unnaturally square, his hand resting on his dagger, at his waist, as though it were the hardest thing to do, to make this decision. “All right. I will take you to his lodgings.”

Knowing she was a fool for braving the wolf in his den, knowing that if Quicksilver hadn’t been able to prevail, neither could she, knowing that the death of the creature was the only thing that would free them all -- but determined to try the impossible as Quicksilver had tried it for ten long years, Ariel walked beside Will out of the theater, and along the fields of Southwark, towards the place where Will told her Marlowe lodged.

Scene Thirty Six

Kit Marlowe’s room. Marlowe has removed the doorknob from his door and hung it around his neck, from a leather strap. He paces his room, back and forth, now and then touching the knob. Always, when he does that, it flashes forth in blue light. The smell of scorched flesh hangs heavy and bitter in the confined air of the room, mingling with the reek of the blood-soaked clothes piled in the corner, and with the stench of fearful sweat.

Had it worked?

Kit could not tell. He thought it had worked. He had seen the specters leave his room and fly through the dark, clear air towards the theater.

Kit’s hands hurt and the wolf paced, just as impatient behind Kit’s mental barrier, as Kit paced within his narrow, dark room.

Did both of them wait but for doom?

The ghosts had flown at Kit’s command, but had Kit’s other command brought someone forth to hear the spirits? And had they delivered his message? Exactly what message had they delivered? And to whom?

He couldn’t tell. He could only hope. He could only pray, pray with desperate fervor he’d not experienced since he’d been a choir boy in Canterbury. He could only pray for Quicksilver and himself, for his own damned soul.

Oh, let someone have got his message who understood it and who knew what to do to separate Kit from his doom.

Only let someone help him with this supernatural doom and Kit himself would deal with the mortal harm that threatened him -- and not the way he usually did.

He’d not talk to the council. He’d not denounce Raleigh for things Raleigh had never done. He’d not kill anyone. Let Kit survive this and Kit would leave the country all together. Go to Scotland or France and there live, in fearful, quiet humility, forsaking his art and his silks; his velvets and his drink; his late nights and later mornings. Kit would live like a monk sworn to poverty and humble affliction.

Only let Quicksilver be well, and remove the dark wolf from Kit’s mind, that even now paced back and forth and struck at the wall that divided them, the wolf’s impatient, eager hunger for blood and life striking at Kit’s mind, at Kit’s hold on his own body.

Kit touched the iron knob around his neck, and whimpered at the pain it brought him.

Oh, curse it all. Even wearing this knob over his clothes hurt and made him cringe inwardly. But touching it with his bare hands brought sheer torment.

And yet, he’d lived well enough with iron his whole life. This reaction to iron was a measure of how much the wolf had already taken Kit. But the iron acted on the wolf even more than on Kit, and, pray, it was all that Kit had to keep the wolf at bay until more effective, more permanent, remedy could be sought.

A sound of fast hooves outside brought Kit running to his window. His pursuers were here, at last.

But outside, in the dark shadows of the night, what moved, amid the bawds and their customers, the gamblers and their victims, the drunken men and their next drink, was not human.

These strange creatures looked half-horse, half-man, with dark hair unbound down muscular, bare torsos, and glimmers of golden chains and barbaric jewelry.

Ten of them, but only the nearest three were clearly visible -- their broad flat faces, dark curls, yellow eyes. One of the horse bodies was a stocky roan, another a sleek velvet black, the other pure white. But all of them, all of them looked alien and strange, and barbaric and just larger-than-human.

His mouth dropping open, Kit wondered how damaged the world was, already, and by what means, that centaurs would walk the world of men.

The men and the women on the street below walked around the centaurs without seeming to see them, even when they detoured to avoid them.

Did they not see them? Was it Kit, who alone could see them? Was it because he was so close to the realm of faerie, so touched by the coils of invisible magic?

Cold sweat dropped down Kit’s back.

Or was this just a manifestation of the madness seizing Kit? Did he see what was not there?

He touched the knob. It brought nothing but searing pain, and a further cowering of the cowered wolf. And yet, in the momentary parting of the barrier in his mind, Kit realized that the centaurs were something of the wolf, of the wolf’s own, dark vassalage.

Were they the expected avengers for Kit’s crimes, also?

They wouldn’t be, would they? Not if they’d come to serve the wolf.

But then, Kit’s saviors who would come, would, inevitably, run into these centaurs and....

And what? Would Kit’s deliverance flounder upon this shoal of hoofed humans and human-seeming beasts?

Looking down from his window, Kit sighed. The centaurs looked fierce, muscular, strong. Each held a war mace and wore, strapped around his middle, both sword and dagger.

If Kit went down, surely he would die.

But no, he wouldn’t. For the centaurs would not kill the body which harbored their master.

And besides, afraid of death though he was, how often had Kit brawled and been involved in quick, violent frays? And he’d not died, skillful as he was at defending himself.

He told his beating heart, his racing mind that he would not die of this. But he must go down stairs, and defend his rescuers from this supernatural menace.

Scene Thirty Seven

The street outside Marlowe’s lodgings. Centaurs, invisible to humans -- except those who have been touched by faerieland -- roam the streets amid bawds and pickpockets, gentlemen and cony catchers.

Will saw the centaurs as he turned into Kit’s street. Strange beings, not at all like the elves.

Where the elves’ glamoury was all delicate, like sugar spun confects, pretty and enticing, these creatures’ power rolled off their steaming horse bodies, their gleaming, golden human torsos in dark waves.

Instinctively, without thinking, Will thrust his body in front of Ariel, as she exclaimed in surprise and fright.

He’d have done the same were she Nan, or one of his daughters, frightened of gross, rank creatures.

He did not think of the wooden maces in the creatures' hands, or what they’d to his skull. Only that he must protect Ariel.

Breathing deeply, breathing slowly, he tried to control his heart, his breath, tried to look like he couldn’t even see them, tried to prevent them seeing Ariel.

But first the powerful, sleek black leader noticed them, and grinned at them, his broad grin displaying what looked like teeth of the purest gold.

The yellow eyes, a shade lighter than Will’s, turned towards them, the broad mouth pulled in sly amusement.

He advanced at a canter.

Bawds and gentlemen didn’t see him, yet moved out of his way, as he advanced, grinning.

Ariel dug her little hand into Will’s shoulder.

“What have we here?” Will asked, in a whisper, to her, as the centaur cantered towards them. “Who is this? What is this?”

“A ... a centaur,” Ariel whispered.

“That much I’d realized milady,” Will said. “But why?”

“They are .... enemies. They wish to dethrone my lord. The traitors I told you about. These are they.”

Then the centaur stood before them, no farther away than it would take a single horse step to close. That close, he bowed. “Ah, milady. We’ve come to escort you back to your hill. As we love you well, we’d not be unruled.”

Ariel squeaked and made as if to hide between Will and the nearest wall.

“Milady,” the centaur said. He bowed at his human waist again. “I am Laius, a noble of Centauria, and I mean you no harm, only to take you back to your hill, your proper abode. You’ve been wandering, lost in your wits, and you’ve wondered into danger. We’ve tracked you here and here we found you, and from here we’d take you to your safe home.”

In Will’s mind, the centaur’s words resounded, slowly assembling into meaning. The centaur had come for Ariel, to take her to her hill. What kind of treason was that? How did Will know that Ariel had not escaped her rightful lord, and, wondering in her wits come to London? Because Quicksilver had been in London? But what if Quicksilver had gone back to the hill by now? Whose word had Will that the centaur had not?

Hesitating, he stood, helpless.

The centaur leaned over him, and reached for Ariel with a rough arm, with a hand twice the normal human size. He grabbed at Ariel’s shoulder and pulled her from behind Will, while his booming, barbaric laughter echoed. “Come, milady. Come. Your nuptials wait you.”

Ariel shrieked and batted at the hand.

Nuptials. Nuptials, not with Quicksilver. Captive, despoiled Quicksilver. Lost through Will’s own fault.

Will’s dagger was out that he’d never yet removed from his belt in anger since coming to London. Out and flourished, before Will could think, and cutting a broad gash into the golden arm, sending blood spraying over Will’s face, over Ariel’s shoulder.

The creature screamed, a scream like a bray, and for a moment his huge fingers unclenched from Ariel’s shoulder.

In that moment, Will recovered her, pulled her behind him, interposed his body between her and this beast man.

“How can you see me?” the centaur asked. He wrinkled his nose with distaste as though Will smelled badly.

That close, Will himself smelled the centaur, a heavy scent of animal hide and cloves.

He eyed the heavy hooves on the ground.

“You meddlesome mortal, think you that you’ll be allowed to interfere in the affairs of elven kind?”

The heavy hooves rose, the creature backed, a step, two. He backed and he reared and he came at them, using his hooves as a weapon, meaning to crush Will.

Will grabbed Ariel around the waist and rolled with her to the mud of the alley, tripping over a gentleman who, unmindful of the centaur that reared an arm span away from him, cursed them soundly.

His curses still rang in Will’s ears, when the centaur, rounding, came at Will again, his war mace out, and swinging, his human body half-bent, to dash Will’s brains.

On all fours, Will crawled away from certain doom, leaving Ariel momentarily unprotected.

Will would be killed. Killed and he knew it well. Killed and gone forever. And then they’d take Ariel, and what might these men-beasts not do to her, frail Ariel, queen of faerieland?

He heard the hooves clop near his head. He almost felt the blow that would dash his brains.

Then he heard a scream. This scream had no words. It needed no words to adorn the sheer battle-mad, blood-thirsting anger that molded it and curled it around the human mind, making all humans recoil and instinctively hold onto that which they held most dear.

Thus had Cain screamed when Abel’s blood was spilled. Thus had every man who in anger had drawn sword screamed his rage at the unfair world and wanton fate.

The hooves moved away.

Centaurs screamed orders in some foreign tongue.

Will sat up, panting.

Every man and woman, every one of Adam’s children on that street had stopped walking, forgotten his or her round, the normal, appointed occupations of this night. Instead they stood, staring at what to them must look like an even madder man than he looked to Will.

And to Will he looked bedlam.

Oh, Will knew him well enough. This was Kit Marlowe, but a Kit Marlowe such as Will would not have dreamed, not two days before. His clothes looked neither dirty nor ragged, but slept on, or rather, worn the whole livelong night unsleeping, having accumulated creases and stains where the body had sat that would fain lie, where the man had stood who’d rather sleep.

His hair, a matted fright and his beard untrimmed, Marlowe glared at the world with red-rimmed eyes, and threw a formless scream from his throat, like a threat held at man’s necks.

But what he actually held in his hand, in fighting stance, was a small, rounded iron object. More interesting, from this object blue flashes flew, that made the air smell of scorch. And with this object Kit Marlowe attacked and feigned at the heavily armed centaurs.

The iron touched the nearest one on the chest, and he screamed, as blue light blazed, and he lifted his mace and made as if to dash Marlowe’s brains out.

Then a voice spoke through Marlowe’s mouth, a voice smooth and soft and purring-threatening. Sylvanus. Erstwhile king of faerieland. Will would have known the honeyed threat anywhere.

His hair rose, as his scalp tightened in fear.

“Stop,” the voice cried. “Kill not this body, for him I’ve claimed. I’ve but lost control for a breath. I shall regain it. Kill him and you kill me, the patron and abettor of your rebellion. Then shall Centauria be lost to centaurs.” The voice lost force as it went, till it disappeared, submerged, seemingly under Kit’s wild cry.

But in that wild cry, in that maddened voice, Will now discerned as though a whimper of pain, an edge of suffering.

“He’s burning himself, you know,” Ariel said, in a whisper. She’d come up behind Will and, still sheltered by his body, knelt behind him. “Burning himself for the sake of keeping the wolf at bay. But the wolf is already him and in that embrace, he suffers for the pain he can’t but take, for the freedom but hardily purchased and so short of duration. Is this the coward we heard about? The fearful traitor? What odd behavior for one such. Brave, gallant, deranged behavior. If I knew not better I’d think him an upright man.”

Around the street, people applauded and laughed, and pointed at the madman who fought nothing, and howled at emptiness with vain fury.

“This is better than an afternoon in bedlam hospital,” a man standing near Will said.

“And we need not pay the entry fee to see the zanies,” his companion, equally well dressed, equally well perfumed, said and smiled. “Yet, is he not Kit Marlowe, the playwright?”

His friend who had first spoken smirked. “This is Kit Marlowe, you do not mistake. To Bedlam with him! is the man grown mad?”

Not knowing of their comments, not caring, wild-haired, wild eyed Marlowe tried to keep away all the centaurs that they could not see. With his iron piece, his only weapon, he thrust and he parried.

But even as he kept those in front of him away, those behind him grabbed him, and, with a smooth, effortless embrace, stopped both of Kit’s arms with his own.

Marlowe thus surrounded and helpless, another centaur approached and struck a gentle blow with his war mace upon the playwright’s wrist. He dropped the iron.

Gentle though the blow was for this creature, yet it made Kit scream, in ghastly pain as his already white face went whiter, and, released from the centaur’s hold, the playwright fell to his knees, holding his hand that dangled, seemingly boneless from his wrist.

It lasted a moment, no more.

The next moment, Marlowe’s face changed.

In a way it was like seeing the Marlowe of yore return. The face that had looked sallow and tired smoothed out, the skin looking brighter, the eyes, of a sudden, focused. The hair remained uncombed, the beard wild, but with the new posture, the new straightening of the shoulders, those didn’t seem to matter.

It went beyond that, though. Kit’s very bones seemed to change, the shape of his face sharpening, elongating, to look wolfish-cunning, wolf-hungry.

That face like a hungry animal’s looked down at the shattered hand, still cradled in Marlowe’s other hand.

Just a look and the hand seemingly regained shape and form. The wolf lifted it, flexed it, then smiled at the centaurs who, of a sudden, gave him space and bobbed him bows of great respect. “Thank you,” he said. “You have done well. Now, fetch her hence.” He pointed at Ariel.

Before Will could react, a centaur galloped over, and grabbing Ariel, threw her over his own horse body, holding her there with an impossibly back-bent arm.

The Marlowe who was no longer Marlowe smiled, his wolfish face distorted in a grin of murderous joy. “Now have I the king and queen both. One more life, and faerieland is mine.” Jumping, with unnatural grace, onto the horse-back of the nearest centaur, the wolf said, “Hence, quickly. We have work to do with this faerie queen.”

As he galloped past Will, on his odd mount, he called out, “And then I’ll go find your family.”

The people on the street stirred and talked and walked and resumed their normal occupations.

“Did you ever see that?” one of the gentlemen who’d spoken before asked his companion. “Marlowe has galloped hence, on a horse I couldn’t see. How did he do that?”

His companion looked puzzled for a moment, then shrugged and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “He must have been drunk. You know how he drinks.”

Scene Thirty Eight

Morning in a desolate place, on the edge of town. The dirt all around, little more than mud with desolate bits of grass clinging desperately to the clay-colored soil. A single tree, a bent tree, broken and pitiful, stands amid this ruin. Around the tree, a trampling of hooves. On the mud, beneath the tree, Kit Marlowe lies.

Kit woke with a headache. The sun that shone on him seemed too bright. He tasted mud in his mouth, and wondered how he’d got here.

Sitting up was sheer torture, as if every fiber in his being were mortal tired, unendurably drained.

Looking around, he saw things through a red film, and his eyes felt gritty as though someone had flung sand into them. What he saw was the city gate, the nearby road.

He’d been asleep under this single tree.

How’d come he here?

He remembered.... though he scarcely wanted to believe what he remembered. What a mad dream this had been, an insane dream.

He thought he remembered centaurs and a fight and the wolf....

The memory of the wolf made him reach for where his doorknob should have hung from his neck. But the knob was gone.

So must he have....

Kit must have collected the life the wolf longed for. All must be lost. All gone. The worlds would clash into annihilation, and Kit’s one true love was dead and gone.

Oh, why was Kit still alive? Why did the offended conscience still remain, sparkling clear and aware to see the routing of all his dreams. Oh cursed Kit, cursed creature, that would go on living for all eternity having lost that which made him human.

He raised himself to his feet by holding onto the tree.

And yet, it seemed scant worth it.

If he’d killed just one more human -- one more drop of blood added to the oceans accrued to his count -- if he’d killed just one more man -- and how could he not have, wolf-ridden? -- then he’d been the seal and unmaking of his fate.

One moment he thought this and the next something quite different.

Oh, why would the elves not save him, that had got him in this trouble?

Thinking this, of a sudden he got a shady memory of the night before. There had been an elf. An elf woman, beautiful and delicate like the rising sun -- hair even lighter than Quicksilver’s, and a little, oval face with no harm in her.

He remembered ordering -- no Sylvanus had ordered -- that she be taken, and they’d brought her here, to this gate at the edge of town and they had....

Little by little, through his splitting headache, memory came. Perhaps the wolf was sick too or perhaps -- as he took over more and more of Marlowe’s mind and body with each passing day, so that even by day some of the wolf remained within Marlowe -- perhaps the wolf permeated Marlowe, his unhallowed knowledge reaching into Marlowe’s brain.

Ariel. That was the elf’s name, and she was Quicksilver’s wife. With a start, Kit realized Quicksilver hadn’t lied. He was married, a king of elfland, and this was his queen come for him.

She’d fought and bit, and finally collapsed, crying, beneath this very tree.

There had been an argument. An argument between the wolf and the centaurs -- the centaurs who were beholden to him and yet not his.

The centaurs wanted to take the fair elf to someone they called Malachite, but Marlowe -- no, the wolf -- had not allowed it.

The centaurs debated, and many old wrongs were brought up where, seemingly, they reminded the wolf of past battles between the centaurs and the elves, in which the wolf had commanded the elves.

While they were thus engaged, had the wolf reached for...the wolf had reached for Ariel and sent her to that same land of grey twilight where Quicksilver pined.

But the wolf, contented with his sly magic, hadn’t counted on the centaurs’ brute force -- the war mace that had crashed on Marlowe’s head from behind.

And then.... Darkness till this morning.

Holding onto the tree with one hand, Kit cradled his aching head in the other. The blow should have killed him but it had not.

The immortal malevolence in him would go on living forever.

As through a mirror darkly, Kit remembered the words the wolf had spoken through Kit’s mouth the night before. He’d said, had he not, that if Kit died the wolf would die with him? Here was salvation. If Kit died, he would save all.

But that meant...perforce that meant....

And yet, Kit didn’t want to die. Or did he?

The death he’d feared so long, that fearful death, whose scythe to stay he’d given so much, now looked like a soft, wonderful rest.

Kit was this thing that must be stopped. Or at least must the wolf be stopped. And the wolf was Kit, was he not? Or was Kit the wolf?

It mattered not, to make an end to Kit and to the wolf, it sufficed the dagger at Kit’s belt.

Reaching for the dagger, he pulled it out, and sank it unresisting into his chest.

No blood spurted. No faintness issued. Kit stared down at his chest and saw the dagger’s handle protruding from his doublet, then saw the dagger disappear like a ghost into thin air.

Again he reached for the dagger, again he drew it. Holding it in his hand, he marveled at it. Was this the thing? Or the ghost of the thing? “Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch you.” Clutching the dagger, he looked down and saw another dagger at his belt. Which the real, which the false?

A woman -- probably a bawd -- walking along the other side of the street stared at him with amazed eyes, but Kit cared not.

He spoke to himself, as did the very old, the very young and those not sure of their wits. “I have you not, and yet I see you still.” He looked at both daggers. “Art you not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling as to sight? Or art you but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat‑oppressed brain? I see you yet, in form as palpable as this which now I draw. You marshallest me the way that I was going; and such an instrument I was to use. And yet I cannot. I cannot. My mind will yet play tricks to my heart and the wolf control me.”

His voice broke down in a half-sob, while the woman across the street started to run. “Mine eyes are made the fools of the other senses, or else worth all the rest; I see you still. There's no such thing: it is the bloody business which informs thus to mine eyes. Now over the one half world nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep.”

He took a deep breath, controlled his sobbing. “Soft, I dreamed. It was all a dream. Or else witchcraft celebrates pale Hecate's offerings, and withered murder, alarmed by his sentinel, the wolf, whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace towards his design moves like a ghost. you sure and firm‑set earth, hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear thy very stones prate of my whereabout, and take the present horror from the time, which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives: words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.”

And yet he felt relieved, oddly relieved that he hadn’t managed to kill himself.

The same death he wished yet loomed before his eyes as the horrendous threat it had ever been.

A fear is not conquered in a minute, nor does the babe who cowers from the crackling thunder turn to playing in the baying wind with no remorse.

Shame choking him and a fear that he’d lack the courage to die, even now, he tried to think his way out of his predicament. Was it his own self love that deluded him, and stayed the hand that would have slain him? Could he not even, like the Roman fool, fall upon his own dagger?

Kit wrung his hands, one upon the other, digging his nails into the flesh of his palms, attempting to wake himself from this unending nightmare.

To die: to sleep. No more -- and by a sleep to say Kit ended the heart‑ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh was heir to.

Oh, it was a consummation devoutly to be wished, no matter by what means attained.

To die, to sleep....

And yet, to sleep: perchance to dream.

Aye, and there was the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams might come when he had shuffled off this mortal coil?

Would all his sins revisit in his sleep, making his eternity as fearful as his living eternity here, with the wolf?Could Kit even kill himself, if he wished to, if he wished to with his whole heart?

Or would the wolf, some control over Kit remaining even in this full daylight, manage to stay the hand that would have severed Kit’s life and his own?

Could Kit not convince his cowardice of the sure need to kill himself? Could he not see the unending torment that waited immortal Kit upon an Earth where the wolf reigned?

Oh, cowardice got more complicated by the moment, till, to be the coward that he was Kit needed more courage and twice the force of a brave man.

And, desirable though his death might be, yet Kit feared it. His conscience for eternity might make better company than the foul wolf. But not by much.

Thus his conscience, newly discovered, rendered him as much of a coward as his self-love had made him before.

Thus conscience made him run from death, and thus the native hue of resolution was sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turned awry, and lost the name of action.

He wanted to save the multiple worlds, and aye, Kit would die for it, if he knew he could die all together, die without leaving behind any tendrils of feeling that hurt still.

Oh, if Kit could be assured of having no immortal soul.

But he remembered the ghosts he’d summoned to do his bidding. Were they the spinning of his own heart and memory?

Or the remains of those he’d betrayed, the spirit that, naked, wailed the death of the self?

He’d started walking around outside the gate, walking in circles, talking to himself.

“Holla, Kit, holla, ar’t though bedlam?”

He looked up. Everyone asked him this question lately. Everyone. Looking up, he saw three men.

Two he had seen recently: Nicholas Skeres, he of the impeccable blond hair, stood by and wrinkled his very clean nose at Kit’s state. Beside him, to his right, stood Frizer, his bovine expression even more bovine as with oxen patience he seemed to ruminate upon the scene before his eyes. And to the side of those, a man Kit had not seen in many a year. Robert Poley, sweet Robin Poley, who’d been Sir Francis Walsingham’s right hand man and was now Robert Cecil’s.

A darker traitor than Kit had ever been, because untroubled by the slightest glimmer of conscience, Robin Poley had turned in friends and lived to dance, unremorseful, upon their graves.

Now he smiled at Kit and said, “Oh, we just wished to make sure, Kit, that you’d not forgotten our hour for meeting in Deptford. Come with us, we’ve secured a carriage.”

And speaking thus they led Kit through the gate to the other side, where the carriage -- a looming dark thing -- waited on the rutted muddy street.

Heavy curtains veiled the windows of the carriage.

So that was how it was to be: one man from Essex’s camp, and one from Tom Walsingham, and one from Cecil.

Between them they’d take Kit to the docks, from whence he’d never come again.

Perhaps that was the best. Perhaps.

But, as Kit climbed the carriage steps into the dark interior of the carriage, a fear of death -- his old fear of death -- struck at his heart like a well aimed arrow.

Like a man who’s suffered all his life from blindness and from whose eyes, with sudden healing, the scales do fall, Kit saw himself and his own cold and empty center.

He was a coward who feared death.

Long had he known that, and yet he’d thought the undoing of his life had been loving Silver.

Now he saw he’d loved Silver because Silver was immortal or nearly so. He’d never found a woman to compare only because he could not love something that would die.

It was immortality Kit had longed for in Silver’s arms.

Kit, cold and miserable, had never loved at all.

With a push from Poley, Kit was sent sprawling onto one of the slick seats of the carriage.

“I must confess I am amazed, Kit, at your state, and the reports of your doings that we followed here. Either you’re bedlam or so cunning you’d fake yourself bedlam to evade reckoning. Either case, it is either worse or better than I’d expect from you.”

Kit felt the wolf stir within him, at his own fears, felt the wolf reach for control of his limbs.

Kit didn’t fight the fatal influence. Awestruck at seeing himself clearly, like a man who, lifelong, has thought himself lissome and suddenly discovers gross deformity upon his own limb, he wondered at his coldness, his wrongness.

All these years he’d thought himself expeditious and smart and capable, and congratulated himself on his cunning escapes, and he’d thought himself a lover who had once wooed a great one from faerieland and been unfairly dismissed from her sight.

Now he saw himself for what he was, the true, empty shell of a being with neither heart nor feelings, neither shame nor courage.

Kit could blame it on his elven blood, Merlin’s inheritance, but it didn’t seem right. His father was good enough, as was his mother, the best person Kit knew, always disposed and ready to help friend and neighbor, acquaintance and stranger, with her hands, her purse, her words.

How of two such had Kit been born? Except that, like the humble field mouse, he’d tried to reach beyond his own burrow and become something other.

What? A fox? A lion?

He didn’t know, but he knew he’d never changed. He’d just gnawed on the flesh of greater ones than him.

Latterly literally.

Wrapped in misery, he heard Poley ask, “Are those tears? Does Kit Marlowe cry?”

He heard the wolf answer, but he did not know what. He saw the quickened interest in Poley’s look.

The carriage rocked beneath them and in the penumbrous dark, Kit Marlowe wondered if he headed towards death and damnation or damnation in life.

Scene Thirty Nine

The same gate but more animated, in the rush of midday entrance into and departure from the city. Will comes walking through it.

Will wished he could see the power tracks that Ariel had seen, the indications that beings of power had been there.

He could not. Instead, at first light of day, after a sleepless night of wondering where the queen of faerieland had been taken and how long until evil conquered the world, Will had returned to Marlowe’s street and followed the marks of heavy hooves upon the mud of the alley.

Strange that invisible centaurs could leave such visible marks: hoof prints, larger and deeper than would be left by a normal animal.

Will followed the tracks, down muddy streets and past awakening markets. He followed all the way to the city gate, where the creatures seemed to have trampled round and round a solitary tree -- nightlong to judge by the profusion of stepped-over tracks and horse dung, all in this one small space. Amid the hoof prints, prints of a man’s boot showed.

Marlowe’s fine boots, Will would wager, though, of course, one boot was much like the other. But Marlowe had been with the centaurs.

Will shuddered at recalling the transformation of Marlowe’s face, the wolfish, sharp quality of his look.

Again, Will asked himself why he was doing this. Why follow the evil creatures who’d almost killed him the night before?

Will who was afraid of meeting Lords and of exposing his creations to theater goers and of standing up and declaiming his own poetry, could Will truly think he might take on creatures like this in single combat and defeat them? Did Will think he had what it took to save the world?

He walked back towards the gate, following the footsteps of the boots, which had got joined by other human footsteps.

Into his mind unbidden came an image of Marlowe, wielding that round object -- a doorknob? a handle? -- patently it had been iron and burned Marlowe’s own changed nature. And yet Marlowe, the madman, had taken on the centaurs armed only with it.

Will shook his head. Marlowe had ever had more confidence than Will could muster.

It took self-confidence to strut your creations on stage and hope for reward and adoration from the crowds.

The footprints ended in rutted carriage tracks, and Will stood there, staring at them. The tracks led out the gate again. Will could not follow -- could not hope to follow -- carriage tracks.

Raising his eyes from them, with a despairing sigh, Will thought that it was here that his search ended and that he might as well go back to his lodging and pack and go back home to Nan.

He didn’t know how the end of the world would happen, or if the end of the world would be such indeed, come all of a sudden, in a blaze of horror or evil. He rather suspected it would come quietly, day by day, until in the end all that existed would be Sylvanus’s harsh world of granite and impiety, of cruelty and instant death.

But be that as it may, Will would be with Nan and Hamnet and Judith and Susannah. This was no time to try to make it in London, where any disturbances would be first felt.

A part of him felt a great relief at this thought, but something like disappointment yet nagged at him. Venus and Adonis had been going well, despite all this, and Will had almost believed he might be a true poet after all.

He sighed, and in mid-sigh saw a young woman on the other side of the street. She wore a dirty low-cut chemise and a skirt too tight on her ample hips. The shawl thrown over her shoulders was that flaming orange that people called harlot’s leg -- and the woman was probably a bawd.

Yet she looked at Will with meaning, attentive eyes, as though she wished to tell him something.

Probably wishing for a customer, Will thought, and sighed again. She looked so young. Scarcely older than ten-year-old Susannah, though, to be honest, she probably would be fourteen or fifteen, only stunted by ill-treatment.

Since coming to London Will had found himself often giving alms to prostitutes who tried to solicit him as a client, and he suspected this would be one of those times.

And yet, she looked so meaningfully at him. And a bawd this early in the morning was strange enough.

He walked towards her, careful not to smile or give any indication that he might be a potential customer. “Tell me,” he said, without preamble. “Have you seen a red-headed gentleman? He would be about my height but slenderer, and he wore a dark velvet suit, very rumpled and worse for the wear?”

The bawd looked relieved. She essayed a clumsy curtsy, and blushed a deep red, and looking away from him, said, all in a rush, “I thought as you might be looking for him. He looked.... well, he looked bedlam and that’s the truth, and I thought that his keepers might be coming for him.” She made a face. “But the men who took him didn’t look like his keepers, nor at all kindly inclined towards him.”

The men who’d taken him? Had Marlowe become Marlowe again, then? Will was not sure how the mechanism actuated, but he thought that in the beginning of the fight he’d witnessed, Marlowe had been himself, not Sylvanus. And, looking at it from what he knew now, Will suspected that when Marlowe had met him by the river, there he’d been Marlowe too and trying to tell Will the truth, though something had stopped him.

He wondered if Marlowe himself had sent the ghosts to denounce him, and felt a chill down his spine.

He might well have, for who else would do it?

“Did it look like the men took him with them against his will?” Will asked. In truth, if it were so, it must be Marlowe, for he couldn’t imagine any mortal forcing Sylvanus to do anything.

The girl nodded. “They were rough with him, and not like keepers who might be rough for his own protection. I thought...I thought that he might be wealthy and they mean to rob him, so I lingered hoping his friends would come for him. You are his friend?”

“Aye,” Will said. He was Marlowe’s friend, was he not? The playwright whose plays had thrilled Will’s heart, whose untamed heart fought even against the wolf within? How could Will deny him? “And know you where they took him?”

“I heard one of the men speaking to the coachman,” she said. “And he said Mistress Bull’s house, in Deptford.”

Will sighed. Deptford. A half day’s ride away, by the docks, where sea and river met. Not somewhere where Will could hope to go on foot.

He fished in his sleeve and got a few pennies, which he thrust at the girl. “For your pains. You’ve done me great service.”

“Thank you, master.” She smiled, displaying very bad teeth, then ran down the street, her conscience no doubt relieved.

But Will’s own conscience was not relieved. Deptford. If they’d taken Marlowe there, they might have killed him by now. At least if these were the same people about whom Marlowe had talked, the arms the Privy Council, the agents that moved, unnoticed through the darker shadows of London.

If they’d killed Marlowe, what would happen to Quicksilver and Ariel? Would they be restored or lost forever?

Will could not tell.

He moaned his indecision to the street, as a cart rumbled past. What could Will do if he followed Marlowe? What would he do?

Then he remembered the dark king’s command to the centaurs to leave the body alone, for they would kill him with it.

Would Sylvanus, able to summon enough strength to say this even when Marlowe’s body was no longer controlled by him, stand by while humans murdered Marlowe? Not likely.

And if they did not, what would happen when night fell? Ariel had said that creatures of faerieland gained strength at night. Would the wolf not take Marlowe’s body fully again for his use then? And if so, would those mortal assassins not be killed immediately?

Though the assassins might deserve their death, Will thought of the power that would give Sylvanus. Armed with such power, Sylvanus could and would kill Ariel and Quicksilver, if he hadn’t already.

Then would the world go down the unalterable path to evil regnant.

Will felt sweat spring from all his pores, instantly gluing his shirt to his body.

He was the only person who even knew of this threat that hung over the heads of all the inhabitants of this vast earth.

He walked along the street, watching vendors set up fruit and bread stalls. Chimney sweeps called loudly for clients. Urchins ran errands. Schoolboys with shiny, fresh-scrubbed faces crept their unwilling way to school.

On a street corner, a young boy kissed a girl about his age.

And come tomorrow all these people, all, might be Sylvanus’s vassals and his unwilling slaves. His corrupting breath might taint them all though they knew it not.

To save them from doom, Will must act, since he was the only one who knew that acting was needed.

But what could Will do? What say? How could he stop a menace that was destroying Marlowe? How could he stop a supernatural force that had imprisoned the king and queen of faerieland?

Will was only a provincial boy who wanted to be a poet.

And if he did not try, how live with it?

He saw himself an old man, in an evil-ravaged world, justifying to Hamnet why he had not fought for good and life and right.

No. No. It would be the same as explaining to Hamnet why Will had never tried his hand at making it as a poet. To both of those Will would find no answer. Were Hamnet in Will’s position, Will would expect his son to at least try.

Will stopped and sighed again, so loudly that several passersby looked at him.

Will reached for his sleeve, to which, that morning, he had transferred the purse that had been beneath his mattress.

To go to Deptford, he must buy a horse, and that would take all the money he had.

And Will still didn’t know what he’d do once he got there.

Scene Forty

The in-between worlds -- a desolate land with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overpowering cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now seemingly palaces, but nothing is, in solid reality. Amid these shadows Ariel walks.

Where was Quicksilver? Where? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?

She wanted to see him. She needed to see him, and sometimes, through the shadows of trees, the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw him. But it was always nothing.

Yet she must find him. For they were near the end and she must tell her lord that she loved him and loved him true. Oh, let the world end, let faerieland be destroyed and gone, but she would tell Quicksilver what she had discovered, first -- that the fault she saw within him was within her, in the way she saw him; that though he might not be what she’d prefer, he was what she wanted and needed; that she meant to make their marriage a true union, were the it the last thing they ever did. Which, likely, it would be.

She’d walked what seemed like forever, though she knew not where she’d been or where she was going. This land had no more direction than it did sense or smell.

No sensation defined this land, except cold which leeched at her body, at her soul, at her magic.

Even if Sylvanus didn’t kill her, she would not last long in this land.

Her foot caught on something, and she tripped. But what could she trip on in Neverland?

She fell on something soft and cold and, for a moment, blinking, recognized Quicksilver and thought him already dead.

But he opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

He put his arms out to her, and he sat up. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

“I thought you dead,” she said.

He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength remains to me.”

Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss-green eyes so intent.

He had never looked so much like a king.

Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips and, after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold, as they would be. Quicksilver had lingered too long in Neverland.

“Oh, milady,” he said, as their lips parted, “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch the truth of all her features.

He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days -- nay, in years.

Quicksilver raised one eyebrow and looked bemused. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him.

She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I...I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demi-rounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

“Because I’m done being a fool, milord and I only wish.... I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

“Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done....”

“I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. The human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

“And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked.

Ariel shook her head. “It was not you, but Lady Silver. And why should Lady Silver wish me well, when I’ve kept her chained and hidden all these long years? Like a prisoner who evades her jailor, she would wish to do all that her deprival of liberty has prevented.”

Quicksilver tilted his head sideways, as though trying to understand. “Then you mind not....”

“Oh, I mind,” Ariel said. “It is still you. But perhaps Lady Silver and I must get better acquainted.”

At first his eyes looked unbelieving, and his eyebrows descended in a frown over his moss-green eyes.

“She is you,” Ariel said. “And, milord, I do love you.”

The clouds of doubt dissipated. A slow grin crept across Quicksilver’s lips. “I love you also, milady,” he said. “I love you too much, if not too well.”

He put his cold arms around her warm body, and pulled her close.

Sitting on the grey ground of never land, side by side, they told each other all they’d discovered and perceived in the last ten years and in their time apart.

It did not make for happy telling. Quicksilver admitted his remorse, his certainty of having brought Kit Marlowe to his present torment; Ariel spoke of the palace revolution, of how she might have encouraged the rebels without meaning.

But even these sad tales with all their woe, even the nothing land, and the grey landscape that shifted with every moaning sigh, even the chill of Neverland could not impair the happiness they had found.

In her sad captivity, with her husband’s cold arms around her, Ariel felt contented as never before.

Scene Forty One

Deptford, a busy dockside town. There are some nicer streets and houses obviously built by the nobility. Mistress Bull’s house sits near the river, the garden bordering on it, and it is a good house, with shabby-genteel charm. It rains; the rain rather increasing the suffocating heat than relieving it. In a room at the back, four men sit. It’s a narrow, clean, white-walled room, furnished with a bed and a table. At the table three men sit playing at tables. One of the men is Frizer, the other Skeres, the third sweet Robin Poley. All three have pipes. Skeres’ and Frizer’s sit beside them at the table. Poley lights his. On the bed, Kit Marlowe reclines, looking spent and vacant, like a man who’s run a long race and is no longer sure towards what.

“Marlowe,” Nicholas Skeres said, turning from the small table, where he played at tables with the other two men. “Tell us that you told me in the garden, that thing about ruling the whole world and our ambition never again going lacking, once we knit our fate with yours.”

Kit groaned.

He couldn’t remember telling Skeres anything in the shaded garden of Mistress Bull’s house. Or yet, if he remembered it, it was but dimly, through a fog as if from too much ale, or too little sleep.

What was he doing here?

What was he doing here and still alive?

He should be dead.

Yet he did not want to die.

He was dead, dead within the wolf’s grip, and yet walking still. And this dying life, this living death, made Kit feel that almost anything, almost, would be preferable. Maybe even dusty death, his mouth forever stopped, his body consigned to a common grave in a forgotten churchyard, or floating downriver, bloated and gross, anonymous and horror-inspiring.

These men wanted to kill him. So why allow the wolf to persuade them otherwise? Why did Kit cling to this half life? Why struggle so hard to remain here, in this torment?

But that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, puzzled the will and made him rather bear those ills he had than fly to others that he knew not of?

And in that fear, undone, Kit gave the wolf, the wolf’s persuasive tongue, the power to argue his case.

As for these men, wolf-tainted themselves, wolf-like, living on living flesh and beating hearts and enjoying it, these men bent and swayed to the wolf’s oratory and had all but already sworn fealty to the wolf’s dark designs.

If men like this would reign after the wolf’s victory, oh, let Kit be dead.

And yet, no.

For how was Kit better than these men? And what torments waited Kit hereafter?

Upon meeting these three men who should have been his doom, these three men he could identify from his days in the secret service and name as to their nefarious thoughts and expectations, Kit should have been dead. He should have been dead within minutes of his arrival at Deptford, his body buried in the pestilent river out back, or else thrown in some forgotten hole, sequestered in a common grave as a pretended plague victim.

On seeing them together Kit had known that indeed it was his life they sought. No doubt about it. No room for doubt.

There was Nicholas Skeres, to make sure that he was dead and couldn’t somehow turn the plot of the duke of Essex back on the duke himself, as they all feared Kit could do, by power and virtue of his magical words, his silver tongue.

And there was Frizer, come to ensure that Kit was dead on behalf of Kit’s own patron and good friend Sir Thomas Walsingham, who no more wished the Privy Council to know how he’d lined his pockets than did any other secret agent.

Finally, the third man was Poley. Robert Poley, sweet Robin Poley, the main betrayer of the Babington conspirators, if indeed not the instigator of those poor fools who, lured in a moment of bravado, had signed statements swearing to kill the queen, but who’d in fact tried nothing against her, and who nonetheless had ended in their graves for Poley’s sake.

He was a smooth, middle-aged man, with a wealth of blond and white hair, carefully coiffed, and a dark, circumspect suit.

He’d been the right hand of Francis Walsingham, and he was, no doubt, in an equally important position with Cecil.

He -- he had come to make sure Kit was dead and Robert Cecil and all the high Lords at court could sleep in peace, the mouth of such a dangerous member having been stopped.

Even looking at these men now, Kit felt himself sweat with the fear, the cold, clammy fear of death.

Aye, and that was the rub, for when he’d first seen them, thus, together, he’d feared death as much as he had in that dim chamber where he’d first been interrogated, ten years ago.

And from that fear, through that fear, he’d heard the wolf’s voice again, the wolf promising him life everlasting, if he let the wolf handle this, if he let the wolf deal with this potentially lethal situation.

Looking at the three men, Kit closed his eyes and wanted to groan again, but the wolf’s voice poured from his lips, in well-modulated words that possessed the magic of faerieland, the dark enchantment of inevitable death.

The wolf was promising these men power and wealth, and mastery over everyone who’d ever done them a wrong.

Men like this would not deny it. Nor could they resist an evil that spoke to their evil.

As yet, Kit kept the wolf from fully possessing his body, from tearing men to pieces and taking their life force. But the sun would be setting soon and, tired and spent, Kit would not have the strength to resist the wolf for another night.

Sitting back, in the sweltering heat of the afternoon, leaning on Mistress Bull’s dubiously clean cushions, Kit wondered whether Sylvanus would kill these men and take their lives, or use them for his acolytes.

It seemed to him that the wolf would value these men as his allies, these men who’d committed plots and murders, vile assassinations and character destruction, treason and most foul entrapment.

Men like Kit himself.

Feeling sick to his stomach, Kit could see a world where such men ruled. And there was no room for poets, or for well-intentioned affectionate fools like Will.

Looking at those three men, it seemed to him they all had wolves' heads, like the Egyptian god who devoured the entrails of the dead.

Closing his eyes, while yet from his mouth the wolf’s words poured, Kit thought that all he’d done these last few days had been in vain.

He remained a coward, too afraid to die, and he’d managed no more than to bring the wolf to his natural allies.

No one would kill Kit, and, this time, the betrayal he’d commit was the betrayal of the whole world.

For the world, Kit would be saved. At the price of the world, Kit would never die.

Tomorrow and tomorrow, and tomorrow would creep in this petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of recorded time, and all his yesterdays had lighted fools the way to dusty death.

Scene Forty Two

Outside Mistress Bull’s, Will ties the reins of a tired-looking horse to a stone ring attached to the side of the house, beside the door. The smell of fish and rotting raises as if from the depths of the river where drowned mariners and dead warriors decompose.

Will should have bought a better horse. But his money ran to no more than a nag, a bag of bones, a creature of meager canter and tired steps.

Yet it had got him to Deptford. Saddle-sore, tired, wet through from the pouring rain, sweaty from the stifling heat, Will pounded on the door of Mistress Bull’s house.

He still did not know what he would do, but whatever it was, he must do it fast, for the sun was setting and soon the wolf would be stronger than anything Will might undertake.

What to undertake remained a round puzzle, a mystery he knew not how to solve.

Will feared Marlowe might have to be killed; Will very much wished that Marlowe could be saved.

At least... he thought of mad Marlowe, Marlowe attacking him in the dark of night in a Southwark alley. At least he would like to save the Marlowe who made the immortal poetry that lifted and lilted within Will’s own heart.

At least that. If only they could save the poet, and set aside whatever other darkness had come through and polluted this creature of the muses.

Let the wolf take the rest, let him have it and destroy it and die with it. But allow Marlowe’s yet-unwritten poetry to come to fruition, allow Marlowe’s golden words to live on.

Will dismounted in front of the narrow wooden door and knocked.

No one answered the door, and the house didn’t look like a rooming house, or the sort of purlieu that Kit Marlowe would haunt. It was too big, too imposing, too grand.

He knocked again, and his knock echoed as if upon an empty palace. Will felt too common, too gross, too indecisive.

What was he doing here? He should go back.

But he could not go back. He stood, rooted to the spot. The image of Ariel and Quicksilver came to him. Cold and fleeting, magical creatures though they were, they were creatures of a fair magic that made the cold world worth living in.

And then there was Will’s family, whose fate, he guessed, was tied to keeping the balance of the worlds -- faerie and human in their proper place. And in seeing that the foul wolf did not win.

Will raised his hand and knocked.

Scene Forty Three

The same small shabby rental room, now made even more crowded by the addition of Will. Mistress Bull -- perceived as no more than a shadow in the darkened hallway -- closes the door behind Will.

Kit half stood, as Will came into the room. He half stood in panic fear, and wished he could yell at Will to run, run and not come back.

Silly, provincial Shakespeare, in his russet suit, with his receding hairline and his face creased and puffy like faces get when people haven’t slept for too long.

God alone knew how Will had got past Mistress Bull, or what he’d told her. Not that he needed to say much. If, in any way, he’d revealed that he knew her to be harboring intelligencers, she’d have brought him here, to let them deal with him.

For any man that discovered that Eleanor Bull’s often served as a safe house for members of the secret service, a place where they could do whatever dirty deeds were called for, aye, any common man possessed of that knowledge was a threat and must be killed.

So Kit stood, and tried to scream at Will to run. Even were this a normal gathering, and the wolf not present, Will would be dead, dead in his entering the room.

But Kit’s mouth, opened, uttered only silence.

He made a keen noise of frustration that called all eyes to him.

“I’ve come to help you,” Will said. He spoke plainly, and looked Kit Marlowe in the eye with a frankness that Kit hadn’t seen, hadn’t hoped to see in oh, so long. “I’ve come to help you, if you but tell me how.”

Poley, and Skeres exchanged looks, and Frizer made a barking laughter deep in his throat.

Kit felt laughter bubble out of his throat, too, the wolf’s howled, bitter laughter. “Oh, you can help me well enough, you sorry puppet. Only lend your throat to my dagger, allow me to drink your life.”

Kit shuddered at the words, and at the thought, at the thought of Will dead.

Provincial and inadequate, Will was, but something good and strong burned in him, something Kit could see all the brighter for it lacking wholly in himself.

And with Will, Quicksilver would die, and Lady Silver who was Kit’s one love -- or if not his true love, the closest thing such a poor show as Kit had ever come to love.

Kit’s heart beat disordered in his chest, as he tried to command his strength to obey him. Him, and not the wolf.

Oh, for some iron to touch, for some iron to plunge into Kit’s own traitorous chest, while yet the wolf remained dazed by his contact with the metal.

With a tremor that shook his whole body, like an ague, an unexpected fever, Kit bit his lower lip, willing pain to allow him self-control.

Though his own lips felt like unwieldy cork, his tongue like wood, he bent them to his wishes. Through the pain and the taste of his own blood, he said, “Go,” to Will, who stood amazed. And then again, “Flee. All is lost.”

But his last words were drowned out by the wolf’s laughter, by the wolf’s power and the wolf’s strength that traveled through Kit’s muscles, reclaiming Kit’s body as his own.

Fully in control, the wolf took Kit’s hand to Kit’s belt, pulling out Kit’s dagger.

Kit fought for control of the arm. Sweat sprang from his forehead stinging into his eyes, as Kit struggled with all his force against his own muscles that moved when he willed them not to.

Yet his arm moved, slowly, slowly, holding the dagger.

With all his force, Kit willed his arm to stay.

Curse it all. He would not do this.

Will Shakespeare, who’d taken a step back at Kit’s warning to flee, stood with his eyes as wide as those of a frightened horse, his face waxy pale. Will put his hand to his dagger. His hand trembled visibly. His gaze riveted itself to Kit’s own hand that fought with the wolf, not to pull Kit’s dagger fully out of its sheath.

Skeres and Poley stepped slyly towards the door, certain that Shakespeare would, of course, try to flee -- something they couldn’t allow, since he knew about this house and had seen them with Kit, whom they had meant to kill.

Shakespeare ignored their sliding steps to the door, and, in fact, seemed not to notice them. His golden falcon eyes remained trained upon Kit, his gaze slowly lifting from the dagger at Kit’s waist to Kit’s own eyes.

“How can I help you, Marlowe?” he asked. “I’m not fleeing. Only tell me how I can help you.” Though his voice shook, his words were resolute, and his gaze met Kit’s with such intensity that Kit felt as though Shakespeare were lending him strength for the fight against the wolf.

Oh, the fool, Kit thought. The sheer provincial fool. Had he then come here to help Kit? Who cared for Kit’s damned soul? Who cared if Kit got killed?

Kit wanted to believe no one did, and yet there was Will, staring at him with unwavering support, with quiet friendship.

Kit had never known anyone to support him who didn’t want something from him in return.

He shook his head, or started to shake it, but the wolf pulled the dagger out farther, and Kit had to concentrate wholly on his arm, on keeping his arm from moving.

He felt a great raging anger against Shakespeare, and, oddly enough, felt his eyes mist with tears.

What was this fool about and why? Why would he try to save Kit? What would that get him, if he did accomplish it?

He’d never had anything from Kit but mocking words and vague, patronizing advice. Did he think he’d get more?

“What do you want?” he managed to ask, though his voice sounded strangled, the wolf attempting to silence him. “What do you want from me?”

Will started. His eyes opened wider, in surprise. It was obvious he’d never thought of wanting anything from Kit. “To help you,” he said. “You... you’re the best poet I know. And we are friends. The tavern....”

Oh, hell. Buy a man a drink and he’ll follow you for the rest of his days? Never had Kit found such easy friendship. And yet, he found tears rolling down his cheeks.

He wanted to shout at Will that he should leave. He wished that he could make Will leave.

Didn’t Will realize that the only way out of this was for Kit to die, taking the wolf with him?

This thought, like a scream, fell upon a dreadful quiet in Kit’s own mind.

It was as if Kit’s divided mind, his tumultuous thoughts, had been a fashionable party, a well-heeled group of convivial lords and ladies, upon which a mad jester had walked, shouting unwelcome truths.

Like the silence that would fall on such a jester’s words, was the silence in Kit’s mind, half outraged affront, half disbelief.

The great resounding hall of his reason stayed mute, while the import of his thought sank in.

The only way to free the world of this wolf was to rid the world of Kit Marlowe.

Only that way could Shakespeare be saved. Only that way could Quicksilver be ransomed. Only that way could the world be set aright. Only that way. No other.

The thought, not new, this time loomed inescapable.

Only Kit’s death could set everything right. Yet, was Kit ready to die? Even to save the world?

Scene Forty Four

The small room in Deptford. Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley stand by the door, looking as if they would block Shakespeare’s escape, but they dart confused glances at Marlowe, whose behavior visibly worries them. Ingram Frizer is still at the table, watching all with his slow, puzzled glance. Will looks at Marlowe, then the other men, then just at Marlowe.

Will waited for Marlowe’s answer, feeling more foolish each moment.

His heart beat erratically. His throat hurt with his effort to avoid screaming.

Marlowe stared at him with such an odd expression. No, a warring of expressions: now the wolf’s sharp gaze, now Marlowe’s puzzled little-boy-lost look, pouting lip drawn in as though in pain, grey eyes a-swim in indecision.

Will marked Marlowe’s hand reaching for the dagger; he watched the two men who, by the door, seemed to bar any attempt Will might make at escaping.

Should Will try to escape?

He didn’t want to. He’d come so far to save Marlowe.

A cold sweat sprang from his pores, chilling him.

What was here? What had he got himself into? Would he die at the wolf’s mercy? Or would his end come at Marlowe’s own hand?

Which was his friend, and which his sworn foe, of these two souls trapped within a body?

Marlowe’s lip curled upward, even as his whole face seemingly lengthened in a wolf-look. “Kill the fool,” Sylvanus’s voice snarled. “Kill the fool and be done. Kill the fool and drink his life.”

Before Will could do more than take a step towards the door, before Skeres and Poley could do more than take steps forward, to prevent his escape, Marlowe’s face smoothed and rounded, looking like Marlowe’s once more, but a Marlowe on the verge of despair. His grey eyes filled with water. Tears flowed unbidden down his cheeks. His pulpy lips trembled. “No,” he said. “No. He called me friend. I’ve never had friends. Not friends I don’t turn in.”

“You were right, Poley,” Skeres said. “He’s right bedlam. And he almost fooled me into believing that story about ruling the world.”

Marlowe trembled, his eyes immense and round, and he looked at Poley and Skeres with sudden fright. “But he meant it,” he said. “I mean, I did. Ruling the world, I mean. If you spare me. Only please don’t kill me.” Before he finished speaking, the wolf laughter echoed, followed by Sylvanus’s sneering words. “That’s a good Kit. Now kill the fool, and let’s be done with this.”

And Kit took a step towards Will.

But at that moment, a frightful knocking echoed from the hallway outside, a knocking as if horses had come within and galloped, pitilessly, through the house.

A woman screamed. Eleanor Bull?

Then the door was thrown open, and a centaur strode in.

The centaur had not been one of those that Will had seen the night before, but a larger, more powerful creature, with black hair and a grey and white body.

For a moment, upon seeing it stride into the room, Will thought that it had a double body, but as soon as it stopped in the middle of the room, making it even more crowded than it already was, an elf dismounted from its back.

Will recognized the elf that Ariel had told him was the leader of the rebellion, and took a step towards the door.

Unfortunately, another centaur had started to come in and, unable to push himself into the already packed room, stood half in, half out the door, blocking Will’s path.

At least Marlowe was not attempting to kill Will.

Marlowe’s face sharpened, his eyes wholly wolfish, and he stared at the elf.

“Malachite?” he asked, disdain dripping from his voice. “How come so far from your hill, little elf?”

“Our deal,” the elf said, drawing himself up tautly. He didn’t look as perfect as the other elves Will had seen and, when he drew himself up like that, fear was visible in every line of his long face. “Our deal was that you should hand me the faerie Queen so that through her I might rule the hill. But the centaurs say you took her for yourself.”

Sylvanus laughed, a silky, chilly laugh. “Yes, but that was if I needed you. I thought that my brother would stay in the hill and that you must sever him from it, before I could capture it. But the fool came to London, as did the Queen. So I captured them both without your help. I owe you nothing. I’ll rule both worlds. I’m quite able.”

Malachite turned pale. He stared at Sylvanus. “But...” he said. “But... you promised.”

Scene Forty Five

The same small room, now much too full of men and centaurs. From within the house come the sounds of more hooves, and the alarmed scream of Eleanor Bull, “No, not my ale. Help! Invisible sprites and goblins are at the ale.” Within the room, Marlowe’s face shifts, momentarily becoming Marlowe again.

Kit had been ready to kill Will to avoid being killed. Then the next second he couldn’t believe it, and shame at his own cowardice overwhelmed him.

While the centaurs came into the room and Sylvanus overpowered Kit’s body in order to speak to the creatures, Kit stood as if back within his own mind, looking at the scene.

It was all very far away and yet very clear, and Kit analyzed it all with that detachment of mind and heart that are possible only to the very old, to the very ill, to those near death.

He’d run enough. He’d committed villainies enough. Now he’d run no more. He’d betray no more.

To cure the world, he must die.

Upon his consciousness fell the words of that poor elf, Malachite, whom Kit knew -- through his contact with the wolf -- that the wolf had enticed to treason. Just as Poley had enticed Babington and his co-conspirators. Sylvanus, in wolf form, had approached Malachite in the wild marches of the south and represented him such benefits from their alliance, and made Malachite feel so ill for being just a changeling, that Malachite had fallen to Sylvanus’s coils.

And now Sylvanus had betrayed Malachite, made all of Malachite’s treason for naught.

Curse Sylvanus and his dark ways. He made Kit’s gorge rise; he resembled Kit and Poley and the like of them so much.

Kit thought all this, but couldn’t say it, his mind but a small, afflicted thing within the totality of the wolf.

He heard the wolf laugh at some threat of the centaurs. “You’ll have no time,” the wolf said, through Kit’s mouth. “You’ll have no time to hurt me, Hylas. See that mortal there.”

He nodded towards Will. “Watch as I slit his throat and drink his life, and become monarch regnant of both spheres.”

Kit felt himself take a step towards Will, and forced himself to stop.

He felt his hand half-drawing the dagger from the sheath, and made it arrest in its movement.

Yet the wolf was too strong. He felt the wolf slowly reaching for control of his muscles.

With a last, desperate strength, Kit managed to scream, “Kill me, Will. Kill me now. Only that will save you. Only that will save the world. Only that will save Quicksilver.”

Will had his hand on his dagger. He looked down at the hand on the dagger as though it were not his, but he did not move it.

“Now, you fool. Now.” Kit could feel the wolf overpower him. “Kill me now,” he begged, and hoped that the blow would be swift and he’d not feel it.

Will shook his head. “I’m not going to kill you. I want to save you.”

For a moment everything stopped. The wolf that had been on the point of overpowering Kit, of taking control of Kit’s body, started at the words. And Kit himself felt as if an infusion of fresh strength coursed along his veins.

Stupid idiot that Will was. He wanted to save Kit. Curse Will, and yet -- despite himself Kit had made a friend.

His arm stopped, before the dagger was fully out of its sheath.

This had been all so quick that the centaurs only now awakened from their confusion. The lead one, who was in the room, took a sword from somewhere, and started swinging it towards Kit, but midway hit Frizer a glancing blow with the flat of the blade.

In the cramped quarters, Frizer jumped, and stood right close to Kit, trembling. “Invisible spirits are attacking me,” he said.

Skeres and Poley, pressed against the opposite wall by the push of the centaurs, looked confused, too, by this crowding of bodies they could not see.

Kit, once more in control of his body, wanted to laugh, but didn’t. Instead, he concentrated all his strength on keeping Sylvanus from killing Will, as he desperately wanted to.

He hoped the centaur would behead him, killing Sylvanus, but Malachite, gone even paler, had grabbed onto the centaur’s huge wrist with both hands, and held his hand and his sword down as he screamed, “Don’t kill him, you fool. If you do, you’ll be freeing Quicksilver.”

The centaur started sneering something back.

Kit felt a revolt within him, an impatience, as Sylvanus despaired of making him draw his dagger.

“Oh, curse you, Kit Marlowe, and your late repentance,” the wolf said, through Kit’s impotent mouth. “Slave that you are, yet you think to resist me? First I’ll slay this mortal fool, and then I’ll destroy you and burn your coward soul from within this body, to which I’ll do more justice than ever you have.”

Kit trembled at the words he knew true.

What an end. What a piteous end. His soul would be devoured, disappear, be part of the wolf for eternity.

If only he could still appease the wolf....

Yet, despite his wavering, he didn’t let go. Something long dormant in Kit Marlowe had awakened. He knew that retreating here would be death, as sure and as final as any death the wolf might inflict upon his spirit.

Holding on to his dagger, Kit would not let his hand move, not let it withdraw the dagger further.

The wolf had turned Kit around to see Will, and in looking out through the wolf’s eyes, Kit could see Will looking scared, paralyzed.

Like a lamb come to the slaughter.

And this, this fool thought to save me, he thought. This fool to whom I’ve done so much injury, from mocking his poetry to attacking him. He’d save me. He.

But he knew, he knew in his heart that the reason Will hadn’t killed the evil and saved the world was out of misguided friendship towards Kit. Because I’ve drunk with him one evening.

An invincible tenderness, a gratitude, a warm human sympathy crept into Kit Marlowe’s heart, that heart that before had known only love and hate -- stark fire and invincible ice -- but no friendship, no companionship, no sympathy, none of the grown up emotions.

With this sudden growth came strength, and with his strength, Kit shoved at the wolf, seeking to expel him for good from within him.

Given time, he knew, with his new strength, his -- for the first time whole -- human soul, as immortal and fiery as the wolf’s evil, Kit would win.

The wolf struggled to control Kit’s body, his ravaging fangs rending at Kit’s very soul. And, within himself, Kit stood still, his awareness of his own soul shocking him, he stood still and strong, and defended his body as a householder will defend his home, by standing and not allowing the foe control.

It is no use, Kit, the wolf said. No use. You are nothing, you are less than nothing. No matter what you think, you can never win. This sudden human kindness you think you found within yourself is only an illusion, a dream spun of your very fear. You delude yourself. You’ll never throw me off. I’m the only one you can trust. We are two of a kind, Kit. You never belonged with my weak brother. You are mine.

But Kit shook his head. He could feel the wolf’s strength pushing along his arm, willing him to kill Will.

And Kit could feel himself, suddenly strong, suddenly grown up, no longer afraid of death or of life.

With that force, he held fast, grinding his teeth. The black wall in his mind was broken, and the wolf had taken over his inner thought. And yet, Kit lived still, within that great chamber of his mind, and managed to control his body, aye, and push the wolf back, step by step.

Kit would kill no more. He was done with blood.

The wolf wanted him to step forward, to lift a dagger, to kill Will -- Will Shakestaff of Stratford, with who knew how many little children to feed.

Will, fool Will, who’d come all this way to save Kit to whom he owed nothing, not even common courtesy.

This time, this one time, Kit would not take innocent life to save his own.

Like that, upon that decisive thought, he felt the wolf let go.

I don’t need you, the wolf said within Kit’s own mind. I don’t need you. There are other villains who’ll do my bidding.

The wolf, who knew himself threatened, made one last effort, gambling his all, and, turning Kit Marlowe’s body around, faced Frizer and said, in a voice of command that oafs such as Frizer couldn’t help but obey, “Kill him.” He pointed at Shakespeare.

Ingram Frizer plunged forward, dagger drawn, obeying orders, as he always had.

Kit saw Will, frozen in place, staring still. Even if Will wanted to escape, he could not. There was a centaur blocking his path, living, supernatural horse flesh barring his way.

Will made as if to crouch, but that would not get him far.

Kit wanted to live. Oh, he wanted to live with this soul he’d found, and find love yet in the bosom of some mortal, now that Kit no longer feared death.

And yet death was such, looming before him, dark and dank and full of silence.

The silence of the tomb where there were not silks and velvets and those who’d admire Kit’s pretty words.

And yet, it mattered not. What were all of Kit’s skill, all of his words, compared to Will’s steady mind, his gentle, loving heart, Will’s forgiving soul that forced him to come to the succor of even such as Kit Marlowe, himself? Will’s soul who would not kill whom he thought his friend, even to save the world.

Oh, let the better man live.

In Kit’s mind it took forever -- those few moments between the time the assassin plunged forward, dagger and unsheathed, and the final, freeing decision that Kit would not let Will die.

Too many had been sacrificed already for Kit’s life.

Now would Kit die. Now would Kit die and upon dying, would he throw what remained of his soul at the foul wolf, and drag him into death with him.

In his eternity, tormented by demons though he might be, Kit, like the warriors of old, buried with their enemies, would have as his escort the evil king of darkness.

And Will would live to see his little Shakestaffs grow. And Quicksilver, fair Quicksilver be released from the dark land of what never was.

And Quicksilver would live and be blessed from Kit’s long and well deserved death.

Frizer and his dagger were mere steps from Will, and Frizer extended his arm in a final plunge to drive the dagger home into the chest of Will, who had nowhere to run. Will had put his own dagger out to parry, but it would never do, not when Frizer was twice his size and twice his strength.

Kit Marlowe plunged sideways to protect Will with his own body. Frizer’s dagger went into Kit’s eye, into his brain.

As death seized his body in convulsion, what remained of Kit plunged forth, freed from his body like a man from wet clothing, and darting forward with that hot brawling spirit that had possessed him in life, plunged towards the wolf form that looked dazed, looming beside him in just as spectral an aspect.

Drawing from his belt the ghost of his own dagger, solid and clear to his ghostly hand, Kit plunged it again and again into the wolf’s dark, looming form.

The wolf was old, an ancient evil. Kit’s evil was nothing to it, Kit’s anger nothing to the dark, devouring malice that dripped from this creature.

But the wolf was off balance, having been pushed unexpectedly from the body that he’d thought haven.

And Kit was strong, for the first time strong, and finding his death a freeing, exhilarating experience, such as life had never been.

Once the worst happened, nothing more could frighten Kit. He’d already died. What was there to fear?

He plunged his ghost dagger -- silver bright -- into the ghost wolf.

The wolf howled and muttered curses that came seemingly out of Kit’s corpse. The darkness disintegrated around the dagger. An awful stench filled the room and the wolf was gone.

Kit’s ghost looked at his own corpse on the floor and for the first time knew true victory.

His laughter echoed so loud it was audible even to the living in the room; he saw it in their faces, in their startled gazes.

Then Quicksilver materialized in the tiny room, a cold –looking, pale Quicksilver, holding the hand of the beautiful, pale woman that Kit had seen last night.

Looking one at the other, the sovereigns of faerieland showed gentle love and hot affection in their whole attachment, and Kit breathed a ghostly sigh of relief. He’d not have stood having been spurned for anything less than true love.

He felt himself vanishing, disintegrating, being blown somewhere by a purposeful wind that none of the living in the room seemed to feel.

The last thing he saw in the mortal world was Quicksilver’s lips forming the words, “Farewell, Kit.”

Scene Forty Six

The same room, still full of centaurs, but now even more full, with Quicksilver and Ariel added and everyone stepping away from Kit’s corpse, knitting themselves with the wall. Malachite tries to hide behind one the centaurs, who isn’t having any of it.

Ariel held onto Quicksilver’s arm, her heart swelling with gratitude, with new-found hope, newly discovered love.

Immediately upon coming back into the world of mortals, she felt the power of faerie land flow into her. She felt warmer, stronger.

The centaur caught in the door backed up, step by step, then in the hallway turned and ran away. Hylas reared, then turned.

Looking at Quicksilver, Ariel realized why. Quicksilver positively glowed with magical power and exuded a bright strength she’d never seen in him before.

“The centaurs,” she said.

Quicksilver shook his head. “Yes, I must assemble an army and discipline Centuria. These few, poor fools aren’t worth much.” Yet he put out his hand, and something like a bright light flowed from his fingers.

A brayed scream of indignation pierced the silence.

Hylas disappeared. The echo of hoof beats died in the hall. A woman cried softly from within the house.

“You....” Ariel said, realizing that Quicksilver had annihilated the centaurs with an energy burst, more energy than any king of faerieland should be able to expend. “You....”

He shook his head. He looked grave. “I killed them, yes. I had to. They’d been tainted by my brother’s evil power. As has this one.” He looked towards Malachite, who’d been slinking towards the door.

Skeres and Poley, obviously confused and shocked, barred his way. Frizer still stood, over Kit Marlowe’s body, morosely examining the blood-sprayed sleeve of his white shirt, as if not sure where the blood had come from.

Quicksilver gestured with his hand, and the mortals in the room -- Skeres, Poley, Frizer, and Will -- all froze in their positions, immobilized, static. Time stopped for them.

“You, Malachite, whom I’ve loved like a brother -- you, foul traitor, what caused your so-vile treason?”

Malachite turned. White as tallow, shaking as the leaf that trembles in the wind, he turned and stared at Quicksilver. “Brother?” he asked, his voice low and trembling. “Brother? When have I been brother to you? I, who’ve been your slave, the attender of your wardrobe, the servant of your whims, the commander of your armies only so far as you would have me go, like a leashed dog, but never allowed to amass glory or honor for myself, lest it should shake the weak foundation of your reign?

“Brother?” He shook his head, his green eyes fixed with fear but also with an almost fanatical outrage. “How can you call me so when from my crib was I stolen, a mewling infant, and led to the strange world of faerie where I could never fit and never live? Where I would ever be inferior and looked down upon, ignored and despised and ordered about? And you, oh might king of elves, didn’t even notice my plight?”

Ariel looked at Quicksilver. In other days, would these words have destroyed him. In other days would he be cringing from the accusations.

Instead he frowned, a strong king seeking to understand a subject’s complaint. “Had my mother not requested you, had you not been stolen from your crib, as you say, would you be dead. As you were stolen, were you dying, your people too poor even to feed you.”

“Yet they were my people, and in stealing me, you stole my true estate,” Malachite yelled, his hands in fists, his eyes blazing.

“Ah, proud creature, treacherous servant. The truth is, you would wear my crown,” Quicksilver said. He put his hand to Ariel and squeezed Ariel’s hands in his own. “And despoiled my people in revenge for an imaginary wrong done to you. Speak like a subject, proud ambitious Malachite. Resign your chair, and where I stand kneel you, whilst I propose the selfsame fate to you, which traitor, you would have had me answer to.” Quicksilver drew himself up, and Ariel felt power gather to him, the power of the hill, of that still-loyal hill, that Malachite had not succeeded in severing from its rightful sovereign. “Let your words condemn you, and thus go you back to the world of men from when you came, and all those who in your heart followed your cause, may they go with you.”

Quicksilver waved his hand. As if forty years had accumulated instantly to Malachite’s youthful figure, he bent, and his hair whitened, and his proud features became lined and pruned.

In a breath, a wizened old man stood before them, a man of sixty, Malachite’s age. Even his green eyes looked faded, with which he gave Quicksilver a look of pure hatred.

But Quicksilver’s eyes showed only grief, as he waved the oldster away, and, putting power behind the order, commanded, “Go you now from here and forget all you’ve ever known about faerieland. Finish your days as you’d have me finish mine, powerless and lost in the world of mortals.”

Unable to resist the compulsion, but still regarding Quicksilver with hatred, Malachite shuffled backwards towards the door and through it.

Once he was out of sight, the sound of his shuffling lost in the corridor outside, Quicksilver waved his hand again. The mortals in the world came to life once more, looking confused.

“Milord?” Ariel said, wishing to comfort her king, but not sure how to do it. “Was it needed?”

Quicksilver swallowed and nodded and sighed. “Yes, it was needed. Malachite was too corrupted by the dark power to save as an elf. And all my fault. I should have seen his resentment. I should have known.... I should have seen. Alas, I did not. From now on, I’ll be an attentive, awakened king.” He squeezed her arm again and she understood that he could truly do this now, now that he had her love.

Ariel wanted to cry and to beg his forgiveness for her many wrongs to him, in the past. But what she did was take his long, pale hands in hers, and rub them distractedly, to warm them.

She took his hand to her lips and kissed it, and in that moment noticed that Quicksilver was looking towards Kit’s corpse on the stained wooden floor. “And yet,” he said. “I loved him well.” There was no doubt he spoke of Kit, and yet it might have been an epitaph for Malachite as well.

Ariel said, “I know,” amazed to find herself curiously devoid of jealousy.

“And yet,” Quicksilver said. “He was flawed so that....”

He sighed again, and looked around. “All are punished. All. All of you will think you did what you came to do and bear the guilt of this dismal death that you intended for him. Save you, Will, who will hence and to your bed in London, and forget this dismal scene and this dark ending, except maybe as a dream, dimly remembered. And all of you mortals, all, will forget that Will was ever even here. You’ll not remember his look, nor his face, nor that he had anything to do here.”

He waved his hand in the air and Will vanished.

Then, holding Ariel’s hand, Quicksilver looked towards Kit and said, “Thus cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince and flights of angels sing you to thy rest.” He turned to Ariel and blinked tears from his moss-green eyes. “The play is done, milady, let’s resume the golden coil of our unending lives.”

With that, Ariel felt the scene waver around her.

She was in the faerie palace, safe within the immemorial woods of Arden. Around her, the court buzzed like an ant hill disturbed.

And Quicksilver, with powerful voice, was explained to all everything that had happened.

Epilogue

Scene: the primeval forest of Arden, as it once was, with large trees, crowded close. Upon the ground the three spinners sit, working the threads of life. Amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost appears and solidifies.

The three Fates spin beneath the trees of a forest, outside time and space.

“So the king has got his crown,” the youngest one says.

“And the queen’s web is spun,” the middle one says.

“And the traitor’s round is done,” says the oldest one.

She holds in her hand a dark thread, through which a vein of pure gold runs, and holds her scissors poised over it. A sigh makes her tremble. “And yet it is a pity to waste such thread. This stuff is hard to come by. And a magic thread thus bequeathed by an ancestor full of power....”

“It is illusion,” the middle one said. “Merlin never was.”

The younger one fingers the thread. “And yet, here’s the gold, here’s the vein of truth and the power and the word.”

“What would you do with it?” the oldest one asks, lifting her head.

A little ways away, amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost stands, immaterial, and yet possessed of Marlowe’s charm as we first saw it -- his clothes are impeccably clean and the best cut, and he looks like a man on his way to a fashionable assembly.

A slow smile molds to his lips, and expands, into something like mischievous intent. He walks forward, charming, confident, his mincing step all that could be expected of such a London dandy, a protege of noblemen, the toast of theater goers.

“Give the words to the poet,” he says. “Let my words live on, even if another must write them. I bequeath my poetry and the power in it to William Shakespeare of Stratford. Let anyone find fault with that.”

On those words, the old woman cuts through the thread with her shears, and Marlowe vanishes.

“Humans,” the maiden mutters to herself, and joins the spun gold to a white thread. “The livelong day I’ll never understand them. Treacherous as the serpent and kind as the dove, full of bitter hatred and sudden, mild love.”

“Humans are as they must be,” the matron says. “And everything that was will be again.”

“Humans are all that is, and their heart our reign,” the crone completes. The thread measured out upon her lap is now white, but through it shines a single strand of pure gold.

Curtain Call

Within the too-solid city of London, in a shabby room in Southwark, close to the play houses, Will Shakespeare turned in his bed.

He need never be afraid of Nan again, he thought, in his sleep. He had stood up to the Queen of faerieland, he had dared the wrath of the darkest of evil villains.

As soon as he finished this poem, as it ever was, he’d go visit Stratford, and see Hamnet and Judith, and Susannah. Aye, and his sweet Nan again.

He turned in bed again. He wasn’t quite sure why, but all of a sudden he knew he could finish the poem, too. And it would be admired and great, and live through the ages, long after Will himself had died.

In that space, neither asleep nor awake, where sometimes men know truths otherwise unknowable, Will thought he’d got something from Marlowe, some legacy bequeathed with the poet’s last breath.

It felt right to take that legacy, and Will would make sure those words lived through him and that he made them good.

He, who’d once said he’d have no words but his, now felt beholden to carry on Kit’s words and Kit’s work and make them dazzling-bright as Kit would have -- for when a man's verses could no longer be read nor a man’s good wit heard, it struck a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room.

Will turned in bed and slept on, certain of the future and of his own ability.

* *

Outside, in the shabby street of Southwark, life ground on, the bawds went to bed, and the artificers woke and manned their workshops.

The threat of pure evil had been lifted from the neck of humanity, where it had rested like a naked sword. The spheres spun on, as they’d been meant to do for eternity.

In his palace the king of faerieland made ardent love to his joyful wife.

And the man who’d known about the threat and done what must be done to diffuse it slept on in his shabby room, and dreamed of poetry.

About the Author

Sarah A Hoyt has published over twenty novels and a hundred short stories. If you enjoyed this book, please look in Baen's webscriptions page for her Shifter's series (Draw One In The Dark, Gentleman Takes a Chance) or her science fiction (Darkship Thieves.)  For more of her fantasy, look for Heart of Light, Soul of Fire and Heart and Soul. Those interested in historic mystery might wish to check out Sarah's Musketeer Mysteries, under the pen name Sarah D'Almeida. Her contemporary mysteries, under the name Elise Hyatt are Dipped, Stripped and Dead and A French Polished Murder.

For samples of all of Sarah's work, check out Sarah's website at http://sarahahoyt.com.

Table of Contents

All Night Awake

Prologue

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Scene 7

Scene 8

Scene 9

Scene 10

Scene 11

Scene 12

Scene 13

Scene 14

Scene 15

Scene 16

Scene 17

Scene 18

Scene 19

Scene 20

Scene 21

Scene 22

Scene 23

Scene 24

Scene 25

Scene 26

Scene 27

Scene 28

Scene 29

Scene 30

Scene 31

Scene 32

Scene 33

Scene 34

Scene 35

Scene 36

Scene 37

Scene 38

Scene 39

Scene 40

Scene 41

Scene 42

Scene 43

Scene 44

Scene 45

Scene 46

Scene 47

Scene 48

Scene 49

Epilogue

Curtain Call

Author’s Note

Bibliography

All Night Awake (Original Version)

Prologue

Scene One

Scene Two

Scene Three

Scene Four

Scene Five

Scene Six

Scene Seven

Scene Eight

Scene Nine

Scene Ten

Scene Eleven

Scene Twelve

Scene Thirteen

Scene Fourteen

Scene Fifteen

Scene Sixteen

Scene Seventeen

Scene Eighteen

Scene Nineteen

Scene Twenty

Scene Twenty One

Scene Twenty Two

Scene Twenty Three

Scene Twenty Four

Scene Twenty Five

Scene Twenty Six

Scene Twenty Seven

Scene Twenty Eight

Scene Twenty Nine

Scene Thirty

Scene Thirty One

Scene Thirty Two

Scene Thirty Three

Scene Thirty Four

Scene Thirty Five

Scene Thirty Six

Scene Thirty Seven

Scene Thirty Eight

Scene Thirty Nine

Scene Forty

Scene Forty One

Scene Forty Two

Scene Forty Three

Scene Forty Four

Scene Forty Five

Scene Forty Six

Epilogue

Curtain Call

About the Author