Any Man So Daring

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  But none would die by that ax till Quicksilver raised his hand and let it fall, in the signal for the execution.

  Quicksilver took a deep breath. He could stop it all with one gesture.

  The day was bright, but its brightness muffled, like sunlight shining through cheesecloth, as though the sun itself mourned and felt reluctant to watch such spectacle.

  But why reluctant?

  Quicksilver smarted at his own hesitancy, at his cringing heart. For was not what he did honorable? Did he not have law, tradition, and right on his side?

  His lieutenant in the war past, his erstwhile page, his faithful friend Malachite emerged from amid the ranks and knelt at Quicksilver’s foot, signaling need to speak to his master.

  With a wave Quicksilver bid Malachite stand.

  Malachite had ever been Quicksilver’s companion and almost always Quicksilver’s closest friend. A changeling -- kidnapped from nearby Stratford-upon-Avon sixty four years past -- in the course of normal human life, he should have been an old man tottering at the brink of that second childhood from which none grow up.

  Instead, he looked spritely and young, a human youth aged twenty, with dark hair and dark jade-green eyes that nonetheless looked as tired as Quicksilver felt -- and red-rimmed besides -- as from fretting, sleepless nights.

  Standing up, he stood very close to Quicksilver, and leaned closer. “Milord,” he said. “Milord. I would fain not speak, but speak I must, for your own safety is imperiled which is that much dearer to me than my own.”

  He stopped again. When he spoke, his voice echoed as little more than a whisper, barely audible to anyone other than Quicksilver and perhaps Ariel.

  He glanced towards the mourning-clad Proteus, surrounded by centaurs – high-ranking centaurs who, through the war, had been his friends and his own council of war. Like him they’d been pardoned and now Chiron, Hylas, and Eurytion ringed Proteus about with their sturdy equine bodies.

  Hylas had the body of a black stallion, surmounted by a powerful human torso. Chiron was a dappled white and black, and Eurytion a fair brown. All of their human bodies were golden skinned and their features and their dark curls bespoke their ancestors’ origins in far-off Greece, where it was rumored some of their kin still lived in hiding, away from the humans who’d almost destroyed them.

  Today their horse halves were well brushed, their human halves oiled to glistening and ornamented with splendorously barbaric bronze jewelry. They bound their curly black hair back with leather. Their faces...was Quicksilver imagining in their faces the closed-mouthed, downcast look of those who plotted still?

  Yes, he must be. It was hard to forget that ever since they’d come to this island the centaurs had worked treasons and plots against the rightful kings of fairyland. Or else, once having caught a whiff of alcoholic brew, would they run mad through the countryside, a danger to human maid and elf maid alike, a danger to themselves and that separation that must exist between human and elven spheres.

  Twice before, to prevent wars between human and supernatural realms, had Quicksilver needed to make use of all his power to make injured mortals forget the grave outrages of these centaurs. Twice.

  And then the centaurs had joined Vargmar in the war.

  “I misgive myself, Lord, over your cousin, Lord Proteus,” Malachite said. “The son of the traitor. He looks with such ferret and such fiery eyes. Let me have men about me that are fat. Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep of nights. Yond Proteus has a lean and hungry look.” Malachite stopped. He spoke again, clearer. “He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”

  Quicksilver’s eye followed where Malachite indicated, but where Malachite saw thought and maybe treason, he saw only a youth, painfully thin and painfully drawn, his eyes burning with grief and perhaps shame.

  What shame must this not inflict upon the young, already too ready to be shamed by everything?

  Quicksilver shook his head and, with more pity than condemnation, sighed. “Would that he were fatter! But I fear him not. Come, speak softly and tell me, is his leanness your only reason to fear him? Or have you detected in my good kinsman any mark of treason? For truth, he forswore his father’s ambition in front of my throne, publicly, after the last battle in the fields of the Avon.

  “Did he forswear false?”

  Malachite looked up. His odd, dark-green eyes met Quicksilver’s look, unflinching.

  There were depths to Malachite which Quicksilver couldn’t quite fathom. He had taken Malachite for granted, as a changeling and a servant when they were both children, playing together at the feet of great Titania.

  But little by little, in the twenty years since Titania’s death, pain and strife and strange events had shaken the fairy kingdom to the root, and revealed in Malachite that sort of strange intelligence that moves in the depths of the brain like deep-buried water. And, like such water, it seldom found an outlet that allowed it to bubble to the surface. Malachite thought deep and spoke little, not because he was secretive or kept his own council but because the workings of his brain, the machinery of his thought had little commerce with words and found them hard purchase for his tongue.

  Perhaps, Quicksilver thought, it was the peasant, human blood that ran in Malachite’s veins -- little altered by Great Titania’s suckle that had purchased for Malachite the golden life-span of elf — the blood of men and women wedded to their land and knowing little, needing little, of speech or fancy words.

  While Malachite’s wide-open eyes stared at Quicksilver, as though seeking to speak as Malachite’s mouth couldn’t, Quicksilver looked at his subordinate’s hands — those large hands with their broad, flat fingertips, so adept with the sword, so slow in the cleverness of card games, so halting at playing any instrument.

  Malachite’s hands knit together, clutching one upon the other as if in struggle. And his mouth opened and let out a single syllable, a sound of frustration and despair. “Oh,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Oh, I can tell you nothing, point at nothing, that Proteus has done that is treasonous. I can do nothing, nothing, to make you understand the danger you face. I only know I like not his looks and trust not his words, nor his false meekness, nor his scraping bows. There is a quick intelligence in him, something that hides beneath his complaisance and spies through his bright eyes, like an assassin’s dagger seeking a place to strike.” Malachite shook his head. “I think it is not meet that Proteus, so well beloved of his father, Vargmar, should outlive him. We shall find him a shrewd contriver, and you know, his means, if he improve them, may well stretch so far as to annoy us all, which to prevent, let Proteus and Vargmar fall together.”

  Quicksilver looked on Proteus again, then on the brand-new block, which Vargmar was to ascend and stain with the noblest blood in fairyland.

  He marked with unease that Proteus had surrounded himself with centaurs, that is, with others, who’d think they had reason to avenge themselves on the king. Yet Quicksilver could not bring himself to punish treason and potential treason in the same stroke.

  And the centaurs.... Oh, the other kings of fairyland had survived them well enough. Quicksilver would, yet.

  Thoughts were not crimes, and until they became action they must not be punished.

  No. Steeling his voice to gentleness, to soothe Malachite and not inflame him, Quicksilver said, “Our course will seem too bloody, Malachite,” he said. “To cut the head off, and then hack the limbs, like wrath in death and envy afterwards. For Proteus, even if treasonous, is but a limb of Vargmar. Let’s be sacrificers but not butchers, Malachite. We all stand up against the spirit of Vargmar, and in men’s spirit there is no blood. Oh, that we, then, could come by Vargmar’s spirit and not dismember Vargmar. But, alas, Vargmar must bleed for it. As for Proteus, think not of him. For he can do no more than Vargmar’s arm, when Vargmar’s head is off.”

  Malachite looked his misgiving and shook his head, but he could not or did not speak.

  “Come, Malachite, for this our needful blood
letting must be done with, that the hill, that feverish patient, can rest,” Quicksilver said, and, thus speaking, led Malachite and Ariel both out of the door, to watch the dread spectacle.

  The guards of fairyland waited, two enormous giants in diamond armor, standing one on each side of Vargmar, who, shorter than Quicksilver’s father, yet bore some resemblance to Oberon in his lean, spare stature, his aquiline nose, the dark curls now gathered by a strap, to make the axe’s work easier.

  Like Quicksilver, he wore a dark suit, and he gave the king of fairyland a look of such withering disdain that it was Quicksilver who must look away, like a child caught at fault, a sneaking waif.

  Vargmar climbed the steps to his last destination.

  As Vargmar’s head rested on the place where the ax was to strike and the executioner stood over him, waiting only Quicksilver’s order, Ariel said, “Milord, think. Consider. Maybe this need not be done.”

  From Quicksilver’s other side, Malachite whispered, “Milord, what’s another stroke of the ax? A single day could rid you of all traitors.”

  Poised between foolish mercy and wholesale massacre, where ideas were made crimes and suspicions fact, Quicksilver shook his head.

  No.

  He raised his hand and, as his hand fell, so did the ax, suspended above the head of noble Vargmar. The charmed ax fell, cleaving head from body. The head rolled, and the blood poured from the severed neck like water from a fountain, bathing the new boards and filling their pores with the glistening, glimmering, magical blood of fairyland.

  Quicksilver felt as though something — some gigantic hand, all talons, reached within his soul and wrenched.

  “Oh,” he said, and stood. Pale, he stood, trembling, while the gazes of his court converged on him, half appalled, half anxious.

  For a moment, it seemed to him he saw his own female aspect, the Lady Silver, stand in front of him, like in a mirror. But she faded so fast into the hazy air he wasn’t sure he’d seen it.

  He gasped for breath, feeling cleft in twain, feeling blood leave his cheeks. For a moment something like a fog intervened between the king’s eyes and the scene before him, and it seemed to Quicksilver that he had died and that the dead viewed himself among the living.

  “Milord,” Ariel said, standing and wrapping her arm around his, her hand small and restless and anxious like a small, frighted creature that seeks shelter in a storm. “Milord.”

  Quicksilver tried to answer, but only “Oh,” would cross his lips again, for he’d realized his affliction and the cause of his distress.

  He’d been born a dual creature, male and female entwined and able to shift between the two aspects as the mood served, as the time demanded and sometimes — without meaning — as the unseen currents of events moved him.

  Through the war he’d kept his female half — the dark-haired Lady Silver — in tight check. Her mad humor, her emotional nature would have thrown victory to the jaws of defeat. Besides, Malachite and, indeed, all of Quicksilver’s command, felt uncomfortable with and leerie of their leader’s capacity of being two in one.

  But even then, through the war’s dark days, had Quicksilver felt the Lady Silver within him, like a twining beat echoing his own heart.

  Twins they were — joined at the soul and born in one instant, one sundering breath serving both. Like twins and like one single person, who with his soul confides in secrecy, they’d ever been each other’s closest company.

  Flesh of one flesh, blood of one blood, one creature in two and two in one.

  Even when being Quicksilver, Quicksilver had known that he could change and that the Lady Silver lay dormant, not dead, just beneath the stern masculine shell that he must keep.

  Now, on that ax stroke, something had broken. Like fabric tearing, like a tether loosened, something had let go.

  And try as he might, look as he might, Quicksilver knew that the Lady Silver no longer lived within him, twining his heart and soul.

  He’d become Quicksilver — Quicksilver alone and immutable.

  Quicksilver, king and ruler of fairyland, whose heart had much duty and no joy.

  Much as he’d cursed his capacity to change in the past, he now lamented its loss.

  How could half a king rule this war-torn kingdom?

  Scene Three

  A fierce landscape, where ancient forest meets sharp black cliffs, raised high and jagged. From a certain quality of the light -- a filtering, a dimming, an ever-present glow that comes from nowhere in particular, it is plain that we are watching fairyland. From the forbidding, cold quality of the landscape, it is plain that this is the most remote confine of fairyland, where the supernatural world of fairies, of elves, of gnomes and trolls comes up against unyielding reality and there arrests, neither world giving way and nothing prevailing. Even the forest looks dead and still, the immense trees piercing the sky with their tops upon which no creature chatters and which no breeze ever bends. On the topmost cliff, a prominence of jagged black rock that curves like a frozen wave, a castle rises, as black as its surroundings and yet blacker, a broad construction with four towers, a central hold, thick walls, all so dark that they seem to drink up any light that approaches them, so that near them semi-darkness reigns. The castle’s front gate is closed, and nothing at all moves at tower or window. Even the pennant flying above the central hold — a dark blood-red flag embossed with the dark shape of a rider blowing a hunting horn — droops, still in the motionless air. But, deep within the palace, past brocaded rooms and well-furnished salons, creatures move and breathe. In a library twice again as large as many palaces — where the walls are covered in shelves that groan beneath the weight of ancient volumes — two young creatures scurry. One is a debased brute that gives the impression of being half human and half canine except for traits more menacing than those appertaining to either species — long, sharp incisors and a thick, powerful body. The other is a girl, fifteen or so, whose very perfection bespeaks her elven origin. Her long blond hair, her shining green eyes, her graceful countenance lend distinction to her simple green dress.

  “Hush, Caliban,” Miranda said, over her shoulder, directing a stern gaze at her brutish companion. “My father is yet by.”

  “Why must we come here now?” Caliban asked, fixing her with a pleading gaze. He shuffled his great hairy feet, making his uncut toe nails shriek against the mosaic floor. “Why now? Why not wait till the master is gone. Why come at all? When the master finds out...”

  “We must get the book in time for my lord Proteus to--” Miranda stopped, put her finger to her lips and glowered at Caliban.

  From the bowels of the palace came the sound of heavy striding boots as the Hunter’s decisive steps fell upon the polished marble floor of this, his palace.

  The Hunter’s voice rumbled like thunder, calling to the cursed dogs that, nightly, he led on their hunt for lost souls. “On Malice, on Envy, on All Unkindness,” the Hunter called.

  His voice reverberated from the high ceilings, echoing on the walls of the vast building, like the sounds of an approaching storm.

  In response, whines and barks sounded. They might be the answer of any dog when called by his master. Only these were louder and, withal, more cutting, the sound of damned souls baying and whimpering at their captivity and torment.

  The Hunter laughed and more dogs bayed, and the Hunter’s heavy steps sounded overhead, and Miranda’s heart sped up.

  She closed her eyes, and she swallowed hard. What would her father, immortal Lord of Justice, do if he found her here, in his library, where he’d often forbidden her to go alone?

  She tried to still the scared flutter of her heart. Nothing would happen. Nothing. She prayed to the gods of the night to make it so.

  She heard the front gate open and the sound of horse hooves upon the hard rock path outside. The gate closed. Her father was leaving on his nightly rounds.

  What kind of a daughter was she, that so disobeyed her father? That she must hide and fear her discovery
? She shook her head.

  The Hunter was not her father, but her adopted father. A minor difference, but a real one, for the duty she owed him, for her upbringing, was dwarfed by her duty to her real blood and to those over whom she should have ruled as queen.

  And yet, how hard it was to think she was disobeying the Hunter, for he was the only father she had ever known.

  For most of her life, she’d thought herself the daughter of this striding, immortal giant, this creature of primeval cold, this justicer that had existed before mankind and would go on living long after mankind had ceased its vain striving upon their ball of mud.

  For years, while he’d stooped to her small size, and watched with proud smile her hesitant first steps, and taught her to form the words of men, and schooled her to play the music of elves, and held her fiercely to his inhuman heart, she’d thought he was her father and she his daughter and that this solitude of hers, here at the far ends of elvenland, was no more than the result of her immortal, exalted parentage. Oh, sometimes she minded the solitude and sometimes she cried for the company of others like herself, or sat at the window looking down upon the ground frozen in black waves, or at the distant tops of the immutable forest and it seemed to her as though her heart would break.

  But she believed this was her destiny, as the daughter of the dread Hunter.

  But then one day — oh, happy day -- two months ago while the Hunter was gone, she’d heard a song from outside the palace, a heavenly song.

  Nothing, beyond her own voice, her own playing of the virginals, had ever delighted her ear in any way close to those sounds.

  She’d gone to a high window transported, wishing to see more, to hear more of this miracle, this eruption of joy in the dark fabric of her days.

  And there she’d seen him. Proteus. Ah, Proteus.

  On first seeing him, she was overcome. She’d thought him a spirit, a thing divine, for nothing natural had she ever seen that was so noble.