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.