Scene 4
The place where Arden Woods and the town of Stratford-upon-Avon meet. It is a warm summer night, and the few noises of the town—the distant singing of a drunkard, the voice of a man calling an errant dog—mingle with the sounds of the woods—the hooting of an owl, the shriek of a scared mouse. To the human eye, it all looks calm, but the elven eyes can see a blight like a blot of darkness spreading at the very edge of the woodland. There, no howl hoots and no creature moves, as though everything alive knows the presence of a predator.
“Ill met by moonlight, my proud brother.”
At the voice in front of them, Quicksilver and his guards stopped.
A chill ran down Quicksilver’s back like a cold finger dragged along his spine. The voice he heard was the voice of his brother. Changed and disembodied, but his brother’s voice, nonetheless.
The voice issued from the tendrils of light that, to elven eyes, marked the boundary between the human village and the sacred forest.
There, a blot of darkness marred the pure light, the shimmering strands of Fairyland’s protective enchantments.
The words themselves seemed to pulse through with the very essence of distilled darkness.
The younger elves shied back from it.
Only Quicksilver advanced, with Malachite close by.
“Sylvanus?” Quicksilver said. The word dropped from between his lips, unmeant, as a coin will drop through the tear in a rent purse.
“Quicksilver, wait,” Malachite said, and, a step behind Quicksilver, he laid a hand on the king’s shoulder.
“Aye, wait, Quicksilver, wait.”
The darkness throbbed with laughter that bespoke no mirth, but only a cold amusement, a distant mocking.
Then the dark node parted, like an eggshell cracking, and birthed a creature: an elf, goodly built, with dark hair and beard and features that resembled Quicksilver’s, from oval face to pulpy lips.
Though this elf looked half-transparent, like a painting on glass, like a cloud passing in front of the moon, his cold blue eyes appraised Quicksilver with amusement.
“Fares it then so badly with my brother?” the elf asked. “That he must thus consort with changelings?” He spared a cold, calculating eye to Malachite. “Is this your leeman, Quicksilver, that he thus calls you by your given name and lays hands on you?”
Quicksilver felt hot blood ascend his cheeks in shameful heat, and wrenched his shoulder away from Malachite’s clasping hand.
Yet Malachite reached, yet he persisted, yet he said, in a strangled voice, “Milord!”
Quicksilver gave Malachite a withering glance, over his shoulder. “Go, Malachite, I order you. I’m man enough to handle this villain alone.”
As Malachite stepped back, the transparent elf grinned, showing teeth larger and sharper than elf’s teeth. “Aye, brother, man enough and woman enough, too, I grant you. How fares my sister, Silver?”
The blood on Quicksilver’s cheeks flared and burned, the color of a red rose, hot as a poker fresh from the fire.
Now had Sylvanus’s ghost, Sylvanus’s emanation, touched the secret shame that had dogged Quicksilver ever from his birth.
Quicksilver had been born a shape changer, with the capacity—the need—to become a dark lady, with midnight black hair, the Lady Silver.
On Ariel’s request he’d forsaken the aspect, and forbore to change if he could control it. Yet, the Lady Silver was still within him, and he would change, sooner or later, meant or not.
This ability, more suitable to a lowly woodland spirit than to a royal elf, had almost cost Quicksilver the throne. He often feared his vassals still mocked him for it.
Quicksilver glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see his young guards fleering at him.
Instead, he saw them staring at Sylvanus, their faces stripped of all their cocky self-confidence, and infused with the pale strained look of fear.
Their fear lit a rage within Quicksilver. Looking back at the flickering elf amid the dark core that floated near the houses of Stratford, Quicksilver squared his shoulders, and made his face stern. “What want you, Sylvanus? Speak fast, for I’ll be done with you.”
The grin died upon the transparent face, like a candle blown out.
Sylvanus’s eyebrows gathered, his mouth pulled in a rictus of pain. “You were done with me, brother. Or so you thought. Done with me when you turned me out of Fairyland and stole my throne.”
A hunting horn sounded in the distance.
Sylvanus’s transparent shape wavered and trembled with each note, as though the sound injured him.
Quicksilver looked up at the sound, because he knew that horn well. Louder and clearer than any human instrument, it was the call of the Hunter, a being who had existed before the elves, a being whom the elves themselves believed embodied a fundamental thread in the fabric of the Universe. God or demon he might be. But powerful he was. Years ago Sylvanus had been made the Hunter’s dog, the Hunter’s slave.
Up on the horizon, in the purpled sky where thunderclouds began massing, a dark shape showed, looking like a hunter on horseback, his silver horn at his lips, calling to his dogs that clustered, growling and threatening, around his horse’s legs.
Twice before had Quicksilver met the Hunter, twice before, once in sorrow and once in joy.
But neither time had he escaped unscathed. The terror of the Hunter, the knowledge of something that, beyond elf and man, judged both and cared for neither, had chilled some core of Quicksilver’s innocence and forever ended his prolonged elven childhood.
Now, feeling the hair rise at the back of his neck, Quicksilver looked over his shoulder at Malachite and the three younger elves, all them terrified looking, all pale, all trembling.
“Go,” Quicksilver said. “Go, all of you. Stand back. Take refuge.”
The three younger elves ran madly toward the trees, but Malachite stayed, stubbornly, rooted to the spot, staring at his king.
“You, too, Malachite. Go.”
Malachite shook his head slowly. “No, milord. There’s something you must know—”
Sylvanus, in the center of the darkness, screamed, his voice changing from elven speech to a wide baying.
Quicksilver turned. Sylvanus transformed.
He transformed as if he were being burned, as though his substance had ignited in the hottest breath of a blazing furnace.
Twisting and writhing like a bit of hair that, caught in a candle flame, curls and twirls and is finally consumed by heat, Sylvanus dropped to all fours and trembled, and changed, and transformed, until in his place there was only a squat, square-headed, heavy-jawed dog.
One of the Hunter’s own dogs, which Sylvanus had become, in punishment of his many crimes.
In that shape, a form neither wolf nor dog but something predating both—a creature that had rounded and nipped at man in his cave and howled around the mountain holds of the elves when the world was young—Sylvanus turned baleful eyes to the Hunter.
The Hunter had stopped, amid the thunderclouds, and with outstretched arm, incited his dogs forth.
The dogs ran down from the sky, seemingly descending a staircase woven of darkness and steps made of roiling purple clouds.
As they neared, Quicksilver trembled. Panic closed his throat and ice gripped his stomach. What dread creatures, these, square and squat, broad of head and shoulder, low of legs, creatures made to hunt in ice eternal and eternal night.
How would it be to be hounded by them?
Sylvanus trembled and looked as piteous, as forlorn as a deer faced with the baying dogs that would tear it apart.
Whining, he backed away from the other dogs, his belly close to the ground, his tail tucked between his legs.
His squat body trembled, his hirsute fur ruffled at the neck, and his piteous eyes, Sylvanus’s incongruously blue eyes, turned to gaze at Quicksilver as the dog slid and shied away from the Hunter’s mastiffs.
“Brother,” Sylvanus said, his voice composed of growls and low baying, which yet formed intelligible words. “Brother, they’ve come and they’ll rent me limb from limb, or yet worse, they’ll take me with them. They’ll take me with them forever, to be one of them.”
He had time for the words—no more—as the dogs closed around him, screaming, nipping, baying, a pile of fur and open maws, of claws and blood-lapping tongues.
Quicksilver gaped at the mayhem of fur, the melee of furious canine bodies. His heart contracted in horror as fur covered fur and jaws snapped, and teeth met teeth in ferocious clash.
This was his brother there, he thought. His brother, turned to such a low, demeaning form. Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother, born of the same noble Titania, sired by the same majestic Oberon, once Queen and King of Fairyland. Sylvanus’s birth had been welcomed, celebrated through the hilltops of many lands. Sylvanus had been a pampered prince, once.
And now this—this pile of fur, this bestial strife.
Quicksilver heard Malachite draw breath behind him.
With scant breath, Quicksilver asked, “How does he not come to us? How not run this way?”
“I’ve tried to tell you, lord,” Malachite said. “The barrier hasn’t really been breached. Your brother has projected the illusion of it being so. But it remains whole. Whole enough that he can’t crawl onto our side.”
“An illusion?” Quicksilver asked, and yet dared not look away from the giant figure of shadow, with glimmering red eyes and a shining silver horn, who climbed down from his horse and strode down the same stairway his dogs had used, toward them, toward cowering, pitiable Sylvanus.
“How an illusion?”
“How I don’t know, Quicksilver.” Malachite spoke in a whisper. “But that is all. It is all delusion. He has no power such as would breech our defenses. Yet he fooled us, and me first of all. What a trick to master! I think it was that he knew the defenses so well, having once been . . . . our king.”
Once the King of Fairyland and now a cur.
Quicksilver shivered.
Why had his brother wished him to see this? Had he meant Quicksilver to have nightmares over it, all his life long?
“Come,” the Hunter said, and his speaking rustled the leaves of the trees like an icy wind, freezing Quicksilver’s mind and heart. “Come.”
At this word, the dogs parted and heeled to him, gamboling and frisking like happy puppies on seeing their master.
On the ground lay a pile of fur, wet with blood, stained with the iridescent saliva of the creatures. Nothing more.
The Hunter took the horn to his lips and blew upon it. The cold, silvery sound wove itself into the surrounding trees like a mist of ice, bringing a reminder of winter to the summer night.
“Come,” the Hunter said.
At that one word, the pathetic remains quivered.
At that one word, the bloodied piece of fur moved.
Legs grew on it, and a muzzle. A cowed, shivering dog stood on uncertain paws, bleeding from myriad wounds.
You see how it is, Quicksilver heard in his mind. Neither death nor eternity will free me. I was greedy, brother, but I meant no harm. I thought you not able to rule the land, and so I tried to rule in your stead. Does this deserve punishment eternal?
The voice was not a voice, but a thought, whispered close into the ventricle of Quicksilver’s brain. But that thought was Sylvanus’s. The voice of a scared elf.
It echoed a voice Quicksilver remembered from when Sylvanus had been but a young prince and faced with the monumental sky-cracking rages of their father, Oberon.
And though Quicksilver knew that his brother had done more than enough to deserve this fate, though he knew Sylvanus’s crimes mounted to the sky and raised bloody hands to the heavens, craving the gods’ revenge, yet in his heart Quicksilver pitied the vile thing.
Sylvanus had once reigned in Fairyland.
Now Quicksilver was the king of elves.
In vain he told himself that a king must be impervious to the hurts and lacerations of his subjects.
Yet if Sylvanus was his subject, then couldn’t Quicksilver decide to stop Sylvanus’s punishment?
Ten years, Sylvanus had endured near the heart and center of a vengeful force, his elven body consumed away, his elven nature distorted. Was that not enough?
Behind Quicksilver, Malachite withdrew his hand and whispered, “I’m sorry, milord. I—”
Raising his hand, Quicksilver spoke, his voice small against the gathering thunder, the baying of the dogs that clustered around their master, Sylvanus’s whimpers of desolate pain.
“Stop, Great One,” Quicksilver said. “Stop, I beg you.”
The Hunter turned to Quicksilver a face that looked almost human or elven, save that no human, no elf, could even envision the perfection of the Hunter’s noble look, from curly dark hair to chiseled features. As he turned, the Hunter exposed his chest where—in the place a human heart would lodge—an empty darkness, an absence of all, reigned.
“You beg?” the Hunter asked. Laughter poured out, as cold as ice, as chilled as winter fog. “You beg me to stop? Who are you to beg and to demand how I should punish this cur, and when I should stay?”
“But justice—” Quicksilver said.
Again the Hunter laughed. “Justice is a word you don’t understand, oh king, who judge everyone according to your changeable measure. This is true evil, and this I will punish.”
The Hunter’s arm rose. Upon it something crackled, a whip of light, a cord of lightning.
He raised it and let it fall upon Sylvanus’s canine form.
Sylvanus howled and fell, bleeding again, yet rose again as the Hunter called, “Come.”
Quicksilver could not endure it.
He could neither watch it nor turn away. His heart pounding, his blood raging through his head like a fever, he raised his hand.
“No,” the Hunter yelled. “No. Give way. I’ll take what’s mine.”
Sylvanus, the dog, whimpered, belly to the dirt.
Before Quicksilver knew it, he lifted his hand. He summoned to him his magic and the gathered strength of his hill, that gathering of elven souls and bodies and magic over which Quicksilver reigned, his to command. He aimed a bolt of destruction at the Hunter’s feet and threw it and felt the burn of power leave his hand.
The power of the hill, in a form like the thunderbolt, flew from his open palm.
Quicksilver meant only to let the ball of fire land between Sylvanus and the Hunter, and thus call the Hunter’s attention and give his brother respite.
But as the fire crackled, bright, from his hand, it flew past the dog and the dog, somehow, reached out a hand that looked like Sylvanus’s and caught the fire and spun it off again—toward the thatched roofs of Stratford.
Fairy lights burned in the mortal night, a trail of power splitting the mundane peace of mortal repose.
Fire hit the roofs of the nearby houses.
The thatch blazed.
Dogs howled, men screamed, babies cried.
“Milord,” Malachite whispered.
“Stop,” the Hunter yelled. “Stop.”
Quicksilver took a deep breath, tainted with the smoke from the burning houses. One breath to realize he was alive.
Another breath as the smoke grew worse.
Another breath and Quicksilver saw Sylvanus writhe to human shape and grow and smile, a smile of satisfaction such as babes show after milk and men after love.
“He’s feeding on the deaths,” the Hunter yelled. “He’s feeding on the life force of dead mortals. From me he learned that, but I refrain unless the life comes from evildoers.”
Sylvanus’s almond-shaped eyes narrowed in satisfaction, his small, pulpy lips widened in a broader smile, and he waved a hand that looked more solid than before, in the direction of the fire that spread, from roof to roof and from thatch to thatch, like vermin that jump from one body to the other and consume all.
“Thank you, brother. Thank you. I would have lived my whole life as the Hunter’s dog, but for you. By setting this fire have you given me lives that, in the manner of the Hunter, I can collect to grow my own, and increase my force.”
As Sylvanus twisted and writhed in his obscene pleasure, he grew. The dark mist around him overspread, darker and darker, like a killing frost, its tendrils reaching out to the burning houses and by them growing in strength and force, like a dark octopus that grows and spreads over the floor of a blighted sea.
There was plague in that wicked mist, Quicksilver thought, the pestilent touch and evil humor of illness.
And other things, other dark things that would bring death to most and feed Sylvanus’s swollen appetite.
What was this creature Sylvanus was becoming? What powers would it have?
Never in the collective memory of Fairyland had something like this happened.
Never had an elf been king and slave to the Hunter and then . . . what?
Quicksilver broke into a sweat of shame and fear.
Never had a king been so weak as to help free his mortal enemy.
Quicksilver wished he could hide, wished he could crawl away in shame.
Screams echoed from everywhere in Stratford. Women and children and men woke to find themselves engulfed in flame.
Some ran out of the houses, flaming like living torches, to burn and die on the street. Others ran here and there, with buckets of water, throwing these at the flames, which mockingly grew despite all.
Quicksilver, unable to breathe, unable to think, looking at his brother grow in power, looking at Stratford being consumed, sank to his knees and screamed, “What have I done?”
“No time for that, no time,” Malachite said. “No time for that, milord. These your vassals await orders. Should we not fight the fire?” He gestured to the elven youths who stood behind Quicksilver and waited.
“Listen to him, listen, brother,” Sylvanus said before Malachite was even fully done. His words echoed of amusement and mockery. “Listen to him, for he’s a man, his wit greater than your womanly wiles.”
Quicksilver wanted to scream, he wanted to rage. He wished he could throw fire again, this time the fire that consumed his heart and burned his soul. But instead he nodded to Malachite and said, “Aye. Go. Help them.”
Aware of what he must look like to the young people he commanded, he stood up and, trembling, tried to brush the knees of his breeches.
Sylvanus’s power still grew and Quicksilver must do something.
Steeling himself, knowing he gazed on his own death, knowing nothing would come of this but his own destruction, he stepped forward.
The Hunter stepped forward also, in giant steps, approaching Sylvanus. “There will be an end to this, cur,” the Hunter said. “You cannot thus break your bond.”
Once more, Sylvanus changed, as if the sound compelled him, his well-formed humanlike form compacting and shrinking into the shape of a square-headed, squat dog.
Only the dog was bigger than he’d ever been, almost as big as a dog as he’d been as a man.
The Hunter looked puzzled for a moment, then his voice sounded so loud that it seemed to make both earth and sky tremble, and almost obscured the screams of the dying humans. “Come to heel, you creature.”
He advanced on Sylvanus, like a displeased master calling his puppy. “What? You dare defy me?”
Sylvanus hunkered down and showed his glowing teeth as the Hunter approached.
Suddenly, Sylvanus leapt. His glowing teeth pierced the darkness of the Hunter’s arm.
The Hunter screamed, a sound such as had never been heard before. Reality wavered and turned and reeled, like a windblown paper dancing in the whirlwind that announces a storm. What light there was, amid the smoke of the fires and the darkness of the Hunter and his dogs, seemed to waver also, the very moon growing pale as if in distress.
Drops of glowing blood fell to the earth, withering and blighting the very weeds it touched.
Around them, as if this were a contagion-infested breath, Quicksilver could feel crops withering and dying in the fields.
Time was out of joint and the mechanisms of the world jangled off-key.
The dog charged again, this time sinking its teeth into the Hunter’s leg. He pulled, seeking to bring the Hunter down.
The Hunter wrenched away and turned, his misty shape looking sickly green where it had been pitch black and alive before. “This is your fault, oh Quicksilver, king of elves. And I will come for you in judgment,” the Hunter screamed.
With his scream he vanished, like a fog upon the air. With him vanished his waiting horse, and the pack of his cowering dogs.
“My first victory is won,” Sylvanus crowed, his voice changing from a low growl to a smooth human voice as he shifted and unfolded into his elven form once more. “Now for the others.”
Quicksilver realized he was covered in a sweat of fear, as he hadn’t been in many a year, not since acquiring the rule of Fairyland and all the power that came with it.
Trembling, he watched as Sylvanus grew and seemingly called to him every tendril of darkness that touched on every one of the burned houses. He changed and shifted to a dark miasma and transported himself somewhere.
To London. Quicksilver felt it both as a word and an image impressed upon his fevered brain. Sylvanus had gone to London, the largest city in the land. It wasn’t so much knowledge but a deeper certainty, born of blood, of sinew, of Elvenland magic.
Sylvanus had transported to London, capital of this human realm whose boundaries overlapped sacred, elven Avalon—like two pages in a book will share a leaf, each taking up a different face, the two touching but never mingling.
What would Sylvanus want with London? What would he do there?
Quicksilver looked at the charred ruin around him, heard the lamentations of those who’d lost loved ones, and trembled.
What would Sylvanus not do there, in that London of packed multitudes?
More than half of Stratford had burned. Only a few houses stood amid the destruction caused by magical fire. Quicksilver’s magical fire.
Where the town had been silent, now it echoed the screams of widows and the inconsolable cries of orphans.
And all because of Quicksilver.
The Hunter said he would come for him. Come for Quicksilver he would, doubtless, as soon as the Hunter had recovered.
If the Hunter recovered. Quicksilver shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling small and young and foolish. Oh, curse the day he’d become king, he who was so naive, so dumb, so frail, so divided.
What if the Hunter didn’t recover? Quicksilver would willingly suffer any punishment to be assured of the Hunter’s recovery.
For what would happen if the Hunter did not recover? What would become of the workings of the world?
Quicksilver hadn’t even known that such creatures as the Hunter could be hurt. He’d never suspected it. And now the Hunter was injured. With the Hunter’s scream of pain something seemed to have changed about the very nature of reality, the truths that held everything in its place.
He watched through the smoke his elves, like unseen angels, smothering the last magical fires.
What did it matter, this belated charity? The damage was done.
Done through Quicksilver’s hand.
Quicksilver had set the fire, and Sylvanus had fed upon it.
Distracted, Quicksilver stared at the house closest to the forest, the double wattle-and-daub house of the Shakespeares. It still stood, undamaged.
Will’s wife, Nan, had organized her in-laws and her own three children—the older girl, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to carry buckets of water from the river and thus soak all before flame ever touched it.
Quicksilver thought of Will, who was in London. Once upon a time, the Lady Silver, Quicksilver’s female aspect, had loved Will with all-consuming passion.
Even now, thinking of that young man with the golden falconlike eyes made Quicksilver’s heart quiver.
Will was in London. Quicksilver remembered hearing elven gossip from one of Ariel’s maids, Peaseblossom, who’d seduced a mortal youth.
Will was in London and Sylvanus had gone there.
Quicksilver realized he was trembling again.
He must go to London and stop Sylvanus. He must keep the evil creature from wreaking havoc upon the unprepared humans.
Quicksilver must, if nothing else, keep Sylvanus from hurting Will.
And Quicksilver should stop Sylvanus, rein him in, atone for his crime against Stratford by keeping Sylvanus from destroying London.
He, Quicksilver, was the king of elves, and responsible for all other elves, even those who had ceased to be of elvenkind.
It fell to him to protect London from Sylvanus.
“Malachite,” he called, and his friend approached. “Go to your mistress. Tell her I’ve gone to London, and whatever you do, do not disclose this sad fray here. No reason she should fear.”
No reason fair Ariel, who loved Quicksilver enough to imagine him a good king, should know that he had brought doom on innocent humans and loosed plague and danger upon both fairy and mortal.