Scene Twenty Two
The misty clearing where Will stands before the Lady Silver who, naked and unashamed, looks at him.
“Do this once thing for me, Will,” the Lady asked, her voice soft and gentle. “If ever my love meant aught to you, do this one thing for me and I shall never ask another.”
He felt too sorry for her, in whose voice there still echoed the remnants of tears so recently cried, to tell her no. Yet, knowing the creature, he could not say yes before she told him what the favor was that she requested.
For it might well be his love, or his attention, or his lifelong faithfulness.
Silver smiled on him, an apologetic smile, as though guessing his hesitation and forgiving it. “If you see my Lord Quicksilver -- my brother, my spouse, the other half of my soul born with me in a single birth -- tell him that I crave his company, I crave being whole with him once again.
“But he kept us apart when I would have rejoined him, and now it is he who must accept me, call me back. It is he who must want me to be a part of him once more — want it with every fiber of his body. And he must call to me, and tell me so.
“Then will I come back to him and, reunited, shall our flesh be one once more, shall we be saved....” She looked at Will and sighed, and fresh tears rose to the fountain of her glimmering eyes. “But I fear it is all for nothing, and he won’t wish it intensely enough; he won’t truly want me part of him again. At least not before the division is irreversible, both halves of the soul scarred over where they split, each one lonely and on its own forever.”
Will shook his head, bewildered. “If I see him, I’ll tell him, but why should the king of elves listen to me?”
Silver smiled, revealing a row of small and very sharp teeth that made her look, for a moment, wholly feral and all without mercy. “The king of elves listens to no one,” she said. “It was to stop listening to me that he divided us. He wanted his attention given only to cheerless duty and aching toil and all must be done according to the way of his revered ancestors. Nothing more.” She sighed again. “And yet, if he listens to someone, it will be to Will, whom he loves despite his own wishes.”
“But how will I overtake him, Lady? I know not where he’s gone. And more, yet, I came here to rescue my son that was trapped by an elf – by whom, I neither know nor care. I want to rescue my son and nothing more.
“If I chance upon Quicksilver I will tell him your message, but surely my first duty is to my son.”
Here the lady smiled, a tear-streaked, weak, tremulous smile. “Aye, Will, but so will Quicksilver also view it as his duty to rescue your son. He’ll see it as his duty as a king, his duty as the man who first introduced you to fairyland, to rescue your son and restore him to you. So, in rescuing your son shall your paths meet. Only you try to find your son, and sooner or later you shall find Quicksilver.”
“And how to find my son, Lady?” Will asked. He remembered his lonesome walk out there, in the shifting path, amid the tree roots. “How to find my son in this land where even the trees have thinking life and all shifts and changes beneath my feet at every moment?”
Silver frowned--not a frown of disapproval, but a frown of thinking, the expression of someone remembering long-ago heard lore. “There is a path,” she said. “A true path. There always is one through magical forests.
“Could I but go with you, I would gladly lead you. But you see that I am this ethereal creature, chained to this point of great magic for my only existence, now that Quicksilver has cut me loose from his magic and the magic of the hill.”
She frowned more intensely. Her small, pale fingers drummed upon her white, naked thigh, a gesture that would have looked natural were she drumming upon the silk of a court dress.
“Take you a twig,” she said, pointing at a tree nearby. “Cut one from that tree, and bring it here.”
Will stepped towards the tree and reached his hand up for the thinnest twig.
A scream, like a wounded child’s sounded, growing till it seemed to fill the whole isle. Will froze, quivering, his hand half-raised towards the tree.
“Take it,” the Lady said. She sounded tired, forceful, like an adult controlling a child’s foolishness. “It will no more hurt it than paring your nails hurts you. It is being a coward and quaking only at what it doesn’t know. The trees in the crux have never been broken or put to the ax, and thus they fear what they have never felt.” She sighed. “As I fear eternal separation and all-engrossing death.”
Gingerly Will reached for the twig at the end of the branch nearest him, a twig to which only two leaves and one bud clung.
He took hold of it and, in a single movement, broke it from the tree.
The tree shrieked.
Shimmering sap sprang from it, like water pouring from a living newborn. It felt hot and sticky on Will’s fingers.
The shriek ended in the whimper of an injured child.
Will, feeling cold down his spine, tried to ignore the scream still reverberating in the air and the sap like blood pouring from the stick.
Quicksilver had told Will that everything Will did in the crux -- everything -- would have an effect on the world of magic and that other world of men — beyond the crux.
What had Will done just now? Had he perhaps pruned a family tree, taken a son from his mother? A baby from his cradle?
He thought of the witch’s baby in its humble cradle.
He closed his eyes and took deep breaths and told himself he would not think on it, but he must have looked guilty as he handed the stick to Silver, for she smiled and said, “Think not on it. You have done no wrong. I promise you that much.”
But what was her promise worth? She’d deceived him before.
And if he had done harm, what could he do to remedy it now? It was a necessary evil, was it not? Helping him find his kidnapped son.
Silver now looked at the stick and a mist formed all along it’s brown length. She stared intently at it, and the mist swirled round and round it.
She handed it back to Will. The wood felt cold and trembled in his hand. “Go now,” she said. “The stick will pull your feet onto the path. Only, do not forget to tell Quicksilver of my request.”
Will nodded.
The twig pulled on him, pulled him out of the clearing.
As he walked away, he heard Silver call, “Will, wait.”
He turned to look at her.
“The love I bear you,” she said, "demands that I warn you. Your son might not look as you expect, when you find him.”
Will ignored the pull of the stick and held still, staring back at Silver.
How would Hamnet not look like himself? Was she warning him of those illusions which had been used against him these many years past, when he’d rescued his Nan?
By the power of elves, she’d been seemingly shifted into fire and serpent and other things, but none of them meant much more than the illusions the witch had cast on Will some days ago.
“I understand illusions,” he said, calmly. “I will not be frighted.”
The lady shook her head. Her intent eyes were full of inexpressible sadness. “It won’t be an illusion.” She took a deep breath. “Your son, Will, might be fully grown. A man. For the time in the castle at the heart of the crux, where doubtless your son is, passes a thousand times faster than time here. More than three years does every day count, and most of a day have we already passed.”
Most of a day. Hamnet had been eleven. Will tried to imagine Hamnet at fourteen.
The twig in his hand pulled him impatiently towards a path he couldn’t see but that would lead him, insensibly, towards a magical castle where his son was held captive.
Would his son recognize him? Who had been looking after Hamnet this while? What creature, in this land of dread magic, had served in place of Will in his duty of raising Hamnet? Or had Hamnet, alone in the dread castle, spent his days in solitude?
And how would Hamnet receive his father?