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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.

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Framed