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.