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.