Scene 9
Will’s room. Amazed, Will closes the door and turns to Silver, who stands at the farthest corner of the room, leaning on the dingy wall.
“Will?” she asked, and her voice trembled in asking it. Silver bit her lip, but it didn’t help. It would not keep the tremor at bay, and her voice trembled again as she piped uncertainly, “Was that Kit Marlowe? Was it Kit Marlowe at the door?”
Through her mind ran memories she thought long forgotten, memories of Kit Marlowe as a shy, demure divinity student.
At least half the fun of seducing him had come from that shy way of his, his uncertainty about how to act, how to behave, his conviction that he was doing something horribly wicked and out of bounds for a Christian soul.
Which—Silver knowing precious little of mortal souls, Christian or else—he might very well have been.
But she remembered Kit’s eager enthusiasm, once his hesitation had vanished.
Silver remembered Kit’s lips searching, seeking, attempting to drink her very soul, his lust such as only a young man can feel in the early spring of his years.
She remembered their bodies entwined beneath the ancient copse of trees in the abandoned monastery at the outskirts of Canterbury.
Once he’d lost his reserve, how he had loved, and how the love of elvenkind had maddened him, beating upon his heated blood like the smith’s hammer upon red-hot iron.
Kit had loved Silver and Quicksilver both, the elf in both aspects, not caring under which form the elf embraced him, so long as the elf did.
Silver herself hadn’t loved Kit, couldn’t pretend to. As for Quicksilver, as much as Silver could understand that side of her nature, Quicksilver had nurtured for Kit a tender infatuation that yet fell as short of true love as the light cast by a firefly fell short of the shine of a star.
But she remembered that fevered love of Kit’s, that adoration that had perfumed her nights like incense.
Remembering it, her heart beat faster, her heart beat kindly for the man she’d just seen—his face pinched by some unnamed worry, his smiles all cynical pretending and his generosity a strange, imposing one that made no sense and seemed to strike against the normal way of courtesy.
“Was that Kit Marlowe?” she demanded, grabbing Will’s sleeve and holding it until the man, seemingly waking, blinked at her.
“Kit? Yes, it was Kit,” he said. “And look you here, he has given me an introduction to the theater owner and told me if I go early, I’ll surely get a job. Look, and he signed it with his own hand.”
Looking over Will’s shoulder, Silver read the signature and felt a sick turn in her stomach.
Merlin.
Oh, Kit was of that race well enough. It had been the unused elven magic burning in him, the unaware icy power hidden beneath the eager human fire that first had called her to him. But his being of Merlin’s race meant not that he had Merlin’s power. With Sylvanus raging free, Kit’s heritage was a dangerous flag that he should not wave.
She wished Kit would not blazon forth that name as a shield, when it would shield him from precious little.
When it could well call the attention of Sylvanus, Sylvanus who fed on death and suffering, Sylvanus . . . .
Silver felt as though she’d swallowed a lump of ice whole and it had nestled in her stomach, leeching her limbs of strength. She’d thought she cared not for Kit and yet, at the thought of what might happen to the man should Sylvanus find him, both her heart and Quicksilver’s outraged feelings rose in alarm.
She had thought she cared not for Kit, but still something in her did care for him or for that memory of their joint youth so conjoined with the tender memory of his love for her.
Once more, Silver fell short of true elven ice and detachment. Sylvanus would have laughed at her.
But she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d kept track of his movements over the years. Some protective quality remained after the lust had burned out.
And she’d thought Kit away from London. She’d thought him safe. She’d never thought to worry for him as she worried for Will.
Now panic quickened and outraged dormant affection. It was as though her youth itself were threatened and her tender memories under siege.
“Why is he in London? What brought him here?” She felt something like a premonition, though her power didn’t run to prophecy. She felt a cold despondent fear, a thing somewhat like what humans talked about when they said as if someone walked over their grave.
Will waved her away. “It matters not. Look here, it gives me the power, it gives me a chance to get a job in the theater. Look here, it gives me a chance to learn how to write plays by watching them acted and how the audience reacts. And you heard what Kit Marlowe said, about my talent. You heard what he said, he who is the very Muses’ darling.”
“What did he say?” Silver asked, not caring, feeling only that though elves had no graves, their stuff melting into the magic and fire that had first created the universe, something had touched her and foretold . . . death. For her or for whom? For Kit? For Will? For the whole cursed world?
Though Kit was vain and shallow, though Kit had grown older and pinched, yet Silver remembered him in the warm heat of his youth. And though there was to Will that meanness which tightened his eyes and focused him only on his wife and brood, yet Silver had loved him once, loved him truly. Perhaps—she thought, as she looked on those golden falcon eyes, the intensity of the emotions that showed on his face—perhaps she loved him yet with some corner of her being, some particle of her magical might.
As for the world, she would fain save that, too, if for nothing else because human and elven worlds were linked and a blight on one was a blight on the other. And because Quicksilver had loosened this doom upon the world.
She thought of the withering crops, the mist of magical plague spreading as Sylvanus’s dark might swept over the fields toward London. The plague had been birthed by Sylvanus’s monstrous corruption of his state.
What was the equivalent of that withering, in the elven world?
She couldn’t contact Ariel with her mind. Not without Ariel’s finding out more about Silver than Silver wished Ariel to know. She hoped the hill was well.
Will was telling her about what Kit had said, and what he had implied, about Will’s wish to succeed.
“Listen, listen, Will, you must listen to me,” she said, possessed of renewed energy and attempting to make the mortal hear her as he had not before. “You are in danger. That is why I came here. I didn’t know that Kit was in danger also. But he is, and you must listen. My ill-begotten brother has hurt the Hunter and thus made the world rock upon its foundations—the plague, you mentioned it to Kit—the plague is the effect of what my brother did to the Hunter.”
Will looked up from his paper and swept her with an unattending, uncaring gaze. “The Hunter? What am I to the Hunter or the Hunter to me? Why come you to London to tell me that woodland divinities are threatened?”
“The Hunter is not a woodland divinity. The Hunter is . . .” Silver’s words failed her. She put both of her hands on Will, one on each shoulder.
She looked intently into his eyes. “The Hunter is ancient and important and I did not know he could be injured, and he says, he says if—”
She shook her head, stopped. She did not wish to tell Will about the fire in Stratford.
She could well imagine how he would react to such a threat to his family.
Even less did she wish to acknowledge Quicksilver’s guilt in what had transpired.
What Will would think of this, she also knew well. That she was a temptress, a danger, and that he must get well away from her. No. Warn him of the immediate danger and be done.
“My brother has learned to feed on human suffering, on human pain, on human death, as the gods of old did. He has no true body and yet, incorporeal, he can feed and gain power from death. I’m sure he’s come to London to feed on the deaths from this plague. We cannot afford to let him do so.”
Will’s eyes narrowed when she mentioned the plague, but he shook his head stubbornly. “Milady,” he said, and his voice had gone all cold, dripping with icicles and foretelling separation. “Milady, what is your brother to me? What is his power? Why should I be the arbiter and judge of elven disputes?” His eyes narrowed further, but with suspicion. “Do you think to make me your dupe once more? To make me commit your crimes for you?”
Silver gasped at the surprise of this accusation.
Her crimes? What did he think of her?
Her eyes filled with tears, and while she stomped her foot at the humiliation of being thus reduced to tears by a mortal, she heard her voice issue through her lips, shaky and high, “Oh, that you dare. Oh, that you say such things. Will, I would never . . . . That was before I loved you.”
She stretched her hands for him, and he pushed them back, his hands firm and unfeeling.
“Lady, you never loved me.”
And before she could protest, he added, “Lady, I care not.”
“You must care,” she said.
Didn’t the fool man see that his own world depended upon that other shadowy, supernatural world, like a tennis ball tethered to a paddle, which can no more go than the string will let it, and which must burn if the paddle burns? Did he not understand that Sylvanus would grow with his feeding, and need more death to feed him anew?
Did he not know that whatever Sylvanus meant, surely he meant to destroy the world?
All this she flung at him in desperate shrilling.
Will shook his head. He set the paper on his desk, and looked up at her. “No more. I care not for you nor for your world. I care for my family, for my wife and children, for my poems that I might perfect and which might bring me fortune and the ability to make my son Hamnet a fine gentleman, and to buy fine clothes for my daughters and give them a dowry that will make them gentlemen’s wives.” He crossed his arms upon his chest. “I care not for you nor for your kingdom, nor for your shadowy plots that always bring me misfortune and blight what I hold dear. It is my wife I love, Lady Silver, not you.”
The words hurt. Being compared with Anne Shakespeare, with her coarse hands, her coarser figure, nettled the Lady Silver like a well-applied bur will nettle the body of a sleeper.
She heard her voice, shrill, a fishwife demanding accounting for her husband’s misdeeds. “You mean that not. How can you mean it? Your wife more than I? Have you forgotten?” And on an unconsidered, reckless impulse that swept over her as if come out of elsewhere to overwhelm her reason, she advanced toward him, arms extended.
Will put his hands forward, and pushed her away. “No. Be gone. I have no time for your mad games. I must be at the theater early morning.”
Checked in her advance, Silver trembled. She stepped back, trying to recover what of her dignity subsisted. What had she been going to do? Kiss Will? Make love to him?
Hadn’t Quicksilver promised Ariel never more to change to Silver? Never more to let Silver have her way with Will?
Bad enough he’d broken the first promise. Bad enough, though perhaps justified by his need to seek Will’s help. Will was as much more likely to give in to Lady Silver than to Quicksilver.
But that was not working, and besides, what justification could Silver have for seducing Will?
Double adultery it would be. And a breach of promise and honor. No.
She must go. She must control herself and go, as Will wished her to go.
She must go out into the streets of London. She would get no help here, no rational word from Will. And she must find what had brought Sylvanus to London.
Without knowing how or why, Silver knew that Sylvanus meant to dethrone her—him—meant to destroy all that she had ever held dear, even Will and Kit.
But she wasn’t sure how Sylvanus could hope to do that, could hope to prevail against the might of the fairy hill, or the strength of mortal reality.
And not knowing it, she knew not how to battle it.