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Scene Twenty Nine




Quicksilver on the ground of the clearing. Caliban enters, running, and starts shaking him.


“Master, awake,” someone said. “Awake, Master.”

His mind overtaken with wine, his body collapsing with tiredness, Quicksilver had been dreaming that he lay in his bed in the palace, with his wife beside him.

He stretched his hand towards Ariel’s side of the bed and touched — leaves? He sat up, struggling to open his eyes against an unforgiving weight on his eyelids.

“Malachite?” he asked, confused at the voice screaming in his ears, at the strong hands shaking him. 

Beneath him there were rude leaves and moss. His fogged brain thought perhaps he was, after all, at the battle front. Perhaps this was Malachite waking him to fight. But Malachite’s voice had never sounded like a growl, and Malachite’s breath didn’t smell like decayed meat and dank moss.

By an effort of will, Quicksilver opened his eyes.

And saw a troll’s dull, unreflective eyes staring at him.

He jumped up, and his hand reached for his dagger.

The troll screamed and tried to escape. “Not me, master, not me...” he screamed. “I’m not the enemy.”

Something about the troll looked familiar. The orange fur, the scared face, the canines, the....

“Caliban?” Quicksilver asked, sheathing the dagger again. “Caliban, what do you do here?”

“It’s them, Master,” Caliban said. “They are coming. I thought I must wake you.”

“Who is coming?” Quicksilver asked. His head spun and a fog obscured his vision. He was still confused by sleep, by too much wine, by this strange land. “Who?”

The monster looked terrified. Even his dark, lipless mouth looked pale. “Centaurs. They would have eaten me, if my mistress hadn’t distracted them.” He shook Quicksilver. “They would have made me into a meal. And my mistress, sir, my mistress, they pursued her, they offered her violence.”

“Your mistress?” Was Miranda in danger? Quicksilver felt a quickening of apprehension and woke fully. Had something happened to Miranda?

Even as he felt it, he wondered at his own concern. How could he love a creature he didn’t even know? How, so quickly, could he feel a protective, fatherly, love for this elf girl?

And yet what he’d glimpsed of her had been pleasing, bespeaking a tenderer heart, a gentler upbringing than he could expect of Sylvanus's daughter, of the adopted daughter of the Hunter.

And Quicksilver wished to love her as his daughter, the daughter he likely would never sire, for his nature seemed to be as sterile as it was mutable.

If he loved not the girl, then he loved his dream of a daughter, the daughter she could be to him.

But... “Centaurs?” Centaurs upon the crux? How? “Centaurs?”

Caliban didn’t answer. He opened his mouth as if to speak but made only a strangled sound, like a man so terrified that he cannot find the strength to scream. He looked at Quicksilver and covered his mouth with his hairy hands.

“What? What is this?”

Something — a cold something — a web, a net, fell over Quicksilver’s head and extended to engulf his whole body, covering him, whole, from head to toe.

With it came a coolness, a cold, cold, icy dankness that was, as it were, death traveling through a mortal body and advancing its army and its pale standard.

His strength gone, his breath a shallow mockery of life, Quicksilver fell to the ground.

Yet his mind remained clear, and he knew, moment by moment what happened to him. 

The troll covered his own mouth, his eyes wide, looking in horror at Quicksilver.

Did the troll’s mouth shape forgive me, or was that an illusion of Quicksilver’s fright and the creature’s odd features?

Meanwhile, the centaurs rode into the clearing, a black one and a dappled one. “The net that your silly niece threw away was easy enough to find, its power calling to us from the undergrowth. It is from our region, and it was for many years kept under centaur guard. It is woven from such material that it will remove all magic from whomsoever it covers. Now are you without power, now are you defanged.” Hylas — Quicksilver remembered the dark centaur’s name -- grinned. “I could kill you with a spell, or with my dagger. But I fear me the protections of the hill are not yet neutralized. Unworthy though you are--” He kicked at Quicksilver’s chest, inflicting a sharp pain. “--you are the king. To stop the hill’s vengeance, we’ll need Proteus's strumpet, or at least her power -- either willingly given upon the bed of love, or else taken by a force-spell. That was the reason he sought her out and courted her and got her involved in this plan. And she’s so infatuated by him that he controls all her thought. Surely her power shall in time also. Meanwhile, your free life is gone. From now on it falls to us to drag your carcass to the meeting point, where you shall die.” 

The centaur looked at Caliban and grinned. “Well-played, troll, keeping him busy while we sneaked into the clearing. For a moment I thought you played me false, for you did wake him, but now I understand it was but a precaution against his waking with the sound of our hooves.” He grinned at Caliban. “For this we’ll forgive all your past insolence, and we’ll forgo feasting on your flesh.”

Quicksilver looked at the troll.

Caliban looked away, his eyes half-closed. Caliban could not be read.

To be truthful, trolls were slow creatures, and Caliban probably had trouble understanding language itself. Maybe he didn’t know what he had done.

Yet Quicksilver didn’t believe it. Despite his extravagant and strange behavior upon meeting Quicksilver -- a behavior perhaps born of panic -- the night before Caliban had proven himself a rational being. As rational as most elves, if not as well mannered. 

No, there was no other explanation but that Caliban had betrayed him. Quicksilver had, for the first time in the history of the kings of the hill, taken a soft, compassionate stand towards one of the lower races, and see how he was repaid!

He shook his head at his own folly. Maybe he should be glad he’d lost Silver. For what was she but that erratic softness, that reckless spirit that led him to such traps?


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