Scene 39
Never Land, the in-between worlds—a desolate place with no taste, no smell, and no feeling save overweening cold. Shadows appear and disappear, like windblown clouds, now prefiguring trees, now palaces. None of the shapes remains in solid reality but it all changes like shadows of wind-whipped branches. Amid these shadows Ariel walks, her eyes now dry but looking as if they have dried from crying every tear that could be summoned to their bruised, reddened orbs.
Where was Quicksilver? Why couldn’t she find him in the mutable landscape of this lost land?
Ariel stumbled on a grey root that momentarily sprawled across her path. Before she’d regained her feet, the root vanished.
Oh, what a terrible land, worse than anything that she could have imagined. How lost she was. How much she wanted to see her lord. Oh, that Ariel could cry, that her tears might warm this frozen place and bring a living ocean to this world of shifting nothingness.
How cold the shifting shapes made her feel. And her lord had been here almost three days. Lived he yet?
She must find him. She must see his sweet face again and drink the words of his sweet address.
Tattered rags of trees with things like moss or mourning grey cloth hanging from them brushed across Ariel’s face, moved by an unfelt wind.
Sometimes, through the shadows of trees and the glimmering of buildings never built, she almost thought she saw Quicksilver. But running forward, through the shadows and the shades, she found him not.
Like a rainbow, forever receding from the reaching hand, so her lord to her straining heart.
Where was he now, for whom her heart longed?
She wanted to apologize for all her misdeeds—for her distrust of him, her assumption that he had left her to disport himself in London.
He’d left to defend Fairyland. He’d done what any noble king would have done. That he’d kept it from her and would not let her help him was no more than the excess of his love and the trembling insufficiency of his self-confidence. Quicksilver had, by virtue of his division, an over sensitivity to what others might think and a tender, overgrown conscience that would not allow him to have others risk themselves in his steed, or take any part of his responsibility, though his shoulders should crack from it.
His infidelity, if it had been such, was probably no more than a symptom of the disturbance in the cosmos, the swaying winds of feminine alarm.
And if not, then it was Ariel’s fault, for so wishing Silver out of sight until Silver’s desires burst from their bounds and became uncontrollable in their swollen need.
Ariel walked here and there. She wished to call for Quicksilver, but the cold seemed to steal her voice. The cold was everywhere, came from everywhere at once and leached not only heat but life itself from her body.
Thus would death come, she understood, a sad death—a nothing, a final whimper in a frozen landscape.
The air smelled musty like the grave, like a never-inhabited womb, like all that might have been but never was.
She sighed as she thought that she might have been Quicksilver’s loving queen, but had not been such, and in her barren unlove, her love and her royalty belonged, rightly, in this land.
Her foot caught on something. She fell forward and the hands she put forth to save herself from hurt gripped solid shoulders and silky hair, which did not shift upon her holding them.
Quicksilver.
She knelt beside him. He wore white velvet, or perhaps the magical cold of this place had leeched color from his garments. All in white, he lay on his side, curled upon himself, his eyes closed, his blond hair spread out behind him.
For a moment, blinking, Ariel thought him dead and her heart shrank upon itself, clutching upon grief and mourning over the love she’d betrayed and could never right again.
Then Quicksilver stirred. He opened his eyes, and then his mouth, in astonishment at seeing her here.
He stood up. He put his arms out to her. “Milady.” He said. “Oh, how I longed to see you. But not here.”
“I thought you dead,” she said and put a hand out, to assure herself of his living reality. She touched his cold chest that yet moved, in search of breath.
He shook his head, tangling his already tangled silver-blond hair. “No. Sleeping. Trying to preserve what little strength yet remains to me. It is not much and it might not last long.” He unfolded himself and looked down on her, his face set and grave and regal.
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.
Quicksilver had lingered too long in Never Land.
“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 of 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. “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. As though her mirth warmed him, in his cold state in this desolate land.
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 demirounds. “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. I know somehow you freed Sylvanus. And I know you made love to 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. His face looked even paler than when she’d first seen it, his eyes wide with horror. “Half my people are dead, and you hate me not?”
Ariel shook her head and embraced him. How cold he was, how cold, how icy, how impervious to touch. Like snow, new-fallen, or like old ice on a cliff face.
“How can I hate him who is another half of me?” she asked. “Whose folly is, ever, but a reflection of my own?”
She wished she could share with him the heat of her love, the pulse of her life.
But she could not.
“And now we’ll die here,” Quicksilver said, his voice as cold as his body. “And Sylvanus shall have sway over the world and all in it.”
But Ariel touched the marble-cold cheek, the icy hands, the cold, cold lips.
“No. No. We have hope. We have hope still. There’s Will Shakespeare free. He’ll find a way to set things aright.”
But she knew her own voice echoed with doubt, and she saw doubt in Quicksilver’s disbelieving look.