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.