Scene Thirty
The clearing where Miranda has done the scrying. Will stands beside her, gone very pale, shaking.
“Hamnet!” Will said, and, turning to the girl, said, by way of explanation, “That’s my son. My son, who was but a child. How he’s grown. Sixteen? Seventeen? He’s no more my child.”
Will felt a great sense of loss — a grief afraid to own itself. For Hamnet was alive and he should be happy—yet Hamnet was no more Hamnet.
The girl met his startled glance with a panicked one of her own. “That’s my father’s standard,” she said. “That’s my father’s banner that flies beside the youth, my father’s own flag on the ramparts of that white, magical castle. What plot is this? And why would my father plot against me?”
She lifted her hand to her throat.
“Your father?” Will felt as though his blood had turned to ice in his veins. “Sylvanus?”
She shook her head, her disheveled hair though matted and twisted still shining like moonlight in the dark of night. “The Hunter. My true father. My father who raised me.”
She looked cold as she said it, and Will wondered what coldness, what harsh loneliness she might not have learned, living with the Hunter all these years. He remembered his own brief encounter with the creature of shadow and midnight, of dark chases and unforgiving slaughter.
He looked at the small, pale face that was cold and wan like that of a child who has lost her way. “Lady,” he said, softly, in such a tone as he might have said, "Child." “Lady, why would the Hunter conspire against anyone? Is he not a creature of greater power than I, mere mortal, can dream, or even you, immortal though you are, can conceive? Could he not crush all of us with a look, or kill us with a thought?”
She nodded, then shook her head, then shrugged. Her lips, which looked colorless, opened in a round “o” and shaped a sigh. “I’d have thought so, but I, his daughter, was disobedient, and perhaps my disobedience hardened his heart against me. Does not his paternal duty include the duty to discipline me?”
Will sighed. He had some experience with the other side of this. He knew it was his duty to discipline his children. He’d always known it. But ever since Susannah, the eldest, had walked into trouble with her one-year-old feet, and reached for trouble with her little pudgy hands, he’d found himself more inclined to tell her stories and by example show the folly of her ways.
“The good book,” he said, and then, realizing she might not know what that meant, he explained, “the sacred book of humans in my land, says that you should not spare the rod, lest you spoil the child.” He looked around him at the dark turbulent skies, the dark turbulent trees, the agitated landscape. “But truth, sending a child to the crux as a punishment seems well beyond a touch of the rod, a scolding or even a whipping. Why would your father take it upon himself to do something so cruel to his only child?”
And even as he said it, Will thought he couldn’t say such thing. How could he know what the Hunter felt as a father? How did he know how the Hunter felt about this creature he’d adopted, this creature who was no true kin of his?
Did he feel towards Miranda as Will did towards his own children? Or as Will felt towards Nan’s irascible black-and-white cat — beloved, perforce, for he was Nan’s pet -- but not beloved like one of the children. And what would they not do if the cat betrayed them?
The elf princess shook her head. Tears shone in her eyes, and trembled at the edge of falling down her cheeks. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. He was ever gentle and kind, watching over me with a concern more than fatherly — the concern of a mother anxious for her cub. He saw to my needs and my wants, and indulged my tantrums with a smile. But now...”
Strangely, in Will’s mind, a picture formed: the Hunter as doting a father as he knew himself to be during his visits to Stratford. He could see the Hunter bending his immortal heart to accommodate this small, fragile charge, guiding her, step by step, to adulthood.
Knowing what kind of a father the Hunter had been, he knew that such a father, being as he was, could never turn upon his own child in this way.
He shook his head at the girl’s worry and, ever so gently, set his hand upon her shoulder. “Do not cry,” he said. “And do not fear, for I’m sure such a father would not change, suddenly, nor torment his child in this way.”
“But then--” The girl looked at Will, and her lip trembled. “But then who could have lured us here and trapped your son upon the castle, and played with Proteus's mind so that he thought the king of fairyland was evil? Who could have arranged to meet with the centaurs?” she asked. She spoke the last word as though it stung her lips. “Who could have betrayed me thus? And why does the tower fly my father’s standard?”
Will would dearly love to have the answer to that last question himself, but he knew he stood no chance of finding out, till the powerful immortal desired to reveal it.
So he spoke to the other questions. “There are others who might have done it, think. Having been raised by an immortal, always truthful father, perhaps you trust too much. And perhaps you should not assume that beauty always equals virtue, even in elf.”
Miranda sighed and rolled her eyes — a gesture so much like Susannah’s fits of rebellion that Will couldn’t help smiling.
His smile made the girl frown and stomp her foot. “Oh, you know nothing of elves.”
Will sighed in turn. “I know of males, elf and human alike,” he said. “I know beauty is no sign of goodness and that fair elves, like fair humans, can and do lie.”
She stared at him, and her eyes went wide, and again the slightest bit of suspicion entered their blue expanse. But she shook her head. “If you mean Proteus, that cannot be true, for he loves me and, loving me, he’s kind and joyous and smiling.”
“Ah,” Will said. “Ah, but a man may smile and smile and be a villain.”
She shook her head. She sighed. She closed her hands, one upon the other, their grip strong upon each other, as though by one hand holding the other both could be saved of falling into the abyss and Miranda with them.
She set her lips in a straight line. She shook her head. “Nay,” she said. “Nay. Proteus is good. You do not know him as I do. He’s good. Deceived perhaps, but good. And I hold a duty to him, having left him sleeping under a spell. I must go find him, wake him.” And then, raising her eyebrows with sudden memory. “Aye me, there’s Caliban also. I’ve forgotten Caliban. I must go to him, and make sure he’s well and safe. For he’s but a poor creature, none too bright, my servant and my responsibility since we were infants together.”
She started to walk away from Will, then returned and, offering both hands to him, suffered them to be enclosed in his rough, calloused hands.
“Thank you,” she said. “For I was blind to truth, but you have revealed to me that ugliness and evil aren’t always conjoined.”
Will smiled. He’d become used to the idea that this beautiful, dainty elf princess thought him horribly ugly. And well she might, having been raised in the Hunter’s world of perfection where such people as Will could never exist.
Yet he cautioned her, with weary voice, “Neither is beauty always married to goodness.”
She nodded and smiled.
He knew she didn’t listen.
“I wish you good luck in finding your son,” she said. “I wish that you may get out of the crux well, for you belong not here, nor should you have been caught in this net of elven discord.”
Will nodded. He couldn’t agree more with that, and as he parted with Miranda, he felt the stick thump-thump beneath his shirt like a second heart, anxious to find and follow the true path.
He wondered if he’d be the only one walking it, though, the only one walking towards the castle — the prize, the place of reckoning and victory.
For Quicksilver and Silver were divided and -- if Silver spoke true -- both were dying.
Their only hope of meeting was where Quicksilver would go to rescue Hamnet -- at the castle. And Miranda was doubling back upon her own steps to find Proteus, about whom Will’s heart misgave him. Proteus, Will suspected, would be going to the castle, to try once more to entrap Quicksilver.
He wished he could have told Miranda more, warned her of what might happen.
But he suspected anything he said would fall upon deaf ears.
Too well did he remember his first love, a girl his age, named Katherine Hamlet.
Will had been sixteen and mad in love. His mother and father had warned him about her, told him she went with other men and boys, though remaining chaste with Will. But he’d not believed them, never believed them until she drowned herself, pregnant by one of the local gentry.
Like his mother’s and his father’s pleas, would any warning he gave the girl be heard? For it was true that one’s first love was often a disease that must run its course, the poison spreading through the body and ruling it wholly before it subsided and diminished its influence upon the afflicted limbs and presently retreated to a memory that made one smile or cry and nothing more.
So Will leaned his head and spoke, in the voice of a man who knows his own limitations. “And fare you well, kind lady. Flocks of angels watch over your progress and keep you ever free from harm.”
She shot him a curious look, but she smiled and nodded — and she walked away.
Was her gait slower? Was her gracefulness somewhat more controlled? Had the episode to which her impetuous good will had led her put some more thought into her actions? Having learned the evil of centaurs, was she now on guard?
Will couldn’t tell. As with any child, he could only hope that she’d learned a lesson and would not do it again.
And then he realized, with a shock, that he was thinking of Miranda as one of his own children. Remembering his dream, he grinned at the foolishness of it all.
But the rage he had felt in his dream no longer haunted him. Miranda was like one of his own daughters. Elf, perhaps, but no longer fearsome.
He shook his head and, taking the twig out of his shirt,allowed it to tug him onto the right path.
How foolish could a man be who adopted an elf?
He remembered how Nan had told him that she’d once considered doing just that — leaving fairyland with both babes and raising them together as sisters.
He wondered what Miranda would be like if she’d been raised in Henley street, in Stratford upon Avon, as the daughter of a struggling playwright.
Humbler, he thought, as his feet found the true path and his stick pulled him on and on. As graceful, as beautiful as she now was, but humbler and quieter. More modest. Not that the princess of elvenland was boastful, but even while crying on Will’s shoulder, she had been regal.
Regal, he thought, seizing upon the word. That was how Hamnet had looked in that image of him upon the pond.
Thus Will thought of what he didn’t want to think: Hamnet much older, standing on the ramparts of the white castle.
Had it been an illusion? He remembered what Quicksilver had said about the different rates of time in the crux.
Had Hamnet truly grown that fast in a few days? Had years passed for him? And who had raised Hamnet those years?
How could Will take Hamnet back to Stratford and explain how he had grown in just a few days? Who would believe him?
Worse, if they did, would he be tried for witchcraft? Would enough magic remain to Will, from his use of magic in the crux that all would believe him a dark mage?
Oh, let it not be so.
And what about Hamnet? Would Hamnet be magic?
Who was this son that Will was trying to rescue? He recalled the haughty air, the impeccable clothing.
A son of Will’s? By whose fiat?
Who was this prince that, having originated in Will’s humble loins, in a night of passion with Nan in Stratford upon Avon, had now become quite something else?
He didn’t know and he couldn’t think on it, or on how he would explain his son’s sudden growth and superior demeanor to Nan, to the neighbors, to the family in Stratford.
But he did know this land was dangerous. Already once, the sun had set on their stay here. Much longer and they’d be absorbed here forever. And this, also, was no place for Hamnet.
Only let Will get to the castle where Hamnet was captive, and ransom him, and take him safe to the Earth from whence they came.
All the rest would solve itself upon the ripeness of time.
For the sake of the son he could no longer call his, Will held onto his stick and wearily walked the path.