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Scene Forty



The in-between worlds -- a desolate land with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overpowering cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now seemingly palaces, but nothing is, in solid reality. Amid these shadows Ariel walks.



Where was Quicksilver? Where? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?

She wanted to see him. She needed to see him, and sometimes, through the shadows of trees, the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw him. But it was always nothing.

Yet she must find him. For they were near the end and she must tell her lord that she loved him and loved him true. Oh, let the world end, let faerieland be destroyed and gone, but she would tell Quicksilver what she had discovered, first -- that the fault she saw within him was within her, in the way she saw him; that though he might not be what she’d prefer, he was what she wanted and needed; that she meant to make their marriage a true union, were the it the last thing they ever did. Which, likely, it would be.

She’d walked what seemed like forever, though she knew not where she’d been or where she was going. This land had no more direction than it did sense or smell.

No sensation defined this land, except cold which leeched at her body, at her soul, at her magic.

Even if Sylvanus didn’t kill her, she would not last long in this land.

Her foot caught on something, and she tripped. But what could she trip on in Neverland?

She fell on something soft and cold and, for a moment, blinking, recognized Quicksilver and thought him already dead.

But he opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.

He put his arms out to her, and he sat up. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”

“I thought you dead,” she said.

He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength remains to me.”

Never would Quicksilver appear thus disheveled in his court, never had she seen his face so grave, his moss-green eyes so intent.

He had never looked so much like a king.

Standing on tiptoes Ariel offered him her lips and, after a brief hesitation he covered them with his own. His lips were ice cold, as they would be. Quicksilver had lingered too long in Neverland.

“Oh, milady,” he said, as their lips parted, “I bless your presence, but I wish we could have met beneath the sun of mortals.” He ran his long, soft hand along her face, as if to ascertain by touch the truth of all her features.

He looked so grieved at her presence here, yet so relieved at seeing her that the warring expressions upon his face made him look comical.

Ariel laughed, as she couldn’t remember laughing in days -- nay, in years.

Quicksilver raised one eyebrow and looked bemused. “Do I look, milady, like a jester?” But he spoke softly, and his mouth still pulled in a smile, as if her mirth amused him.

She shook her head. “Not like a jester, no. Never, milord. It’s just that I...I’ve just realized I’ve been a fool.”

Both his golden eyebrows went up, arching in perfect, puzzled demi-rounds. “You mean it not,” he said. “Or else, why do you laugh?”

“Because I’m done being a fool, milord and I only wish.... I only wish the world weren’t coming to an end through my folly.” Tears sprang unbidden to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks to meet her smile.

“Your folly?” Quicksilver asked. His voice was distant, a tolling bell of death over hope. “Your folly, milady. Oh, if you knew my folly and what I’ve done....”

“I know your folly,” Ariel said. “Or at least most of it. The human called Kit Marlowe.” To his astonishment she started telling what she’d seen, what had happened to precipitate her leaving the palace in such haste.

“And you hate me not?” Quicksilver asked.

Ariel shook her head. “It was not you, but Lady Silver. And why should Lady Silver wish me well, when I’ve kept her chained and hidden all these long years? Like a prisoner who evades her jailor, she would wish to do all that her deprival of liberty has prevented.”

Quicksilver tilted his head sideways, as though trying to understand. “Then you mind not....”

“Oh, I mind,” Ariel said. “It is still you. But perhaps Lady Silver and I must get better acquainted.”

At first his eyes looked unbelieving, and his eyebrows descended in a frown over his moss-green eyes.

“She is you,” Ariel said. “And, milord, I do love you.”

The clouds of doubt dissipated. A slow grin crept across Quicksilver’s lips. “I love you also, milady,” he said. “I love you too much, if not too well.”

He put his cold arms around her warm body, and pulled her close.

Sitting on the grey ground of never land, side by side, they told each other all they’d discovered and perceived in the last ten years and in their time apart.

It did not make for happy telling. Quicksilver admitted his remorse, his certainty of having brought Kit Marlowe to his present torment; Ariel spoke of the palace revolution, of how she might have encouraged the rebels without meaning.

But even these sad tales with all their woe, even the nothing land, and the grey landscape that shifted with every moaning sigh, even the chill of Neverland could not impair the happiness they had found.

In her sad captivity, with her husband’s cold arms around her, Ariel felt contented as never before.

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Framed