She took her child in her arms, and pushed Imp’s face against her shoulder, as if to cover his eyes.
Kit cleared his throat. “I hear you’ve had an unpleasant visit.”
“One? We’ve had them all day and they haven’t ceased yet,” Madeleine said, and compressed her lips as she glared at Kit. “It is time you should be quitting your rooms, Master Marlowe. You pay me not enough to endure the thread of constant feet, the suspicions of countless officers, the danger to my child. If my husband were alive, he’d have thrown you out long ago.”
If her husband were alive, likely Imp would never have existed, and Kit would have no reason to be here.
“Nothing will happen to Imp, madam,” he said. “And as for paying you, tell me how much you want, and like enough, I can find it.”
She glared at him over Imp’s shoulder.
Imp turned to look back at Kit, his pale little face anxious and drawn, visibly resenting the harsh words flying around him.
Kit remembered when he was very young and his parents argued, how it made him hide under the bed, how it made him wish he could stop existing.
Later, when he’d been scarcely older than Imp, he’d stood in front of his mother, protecting her from his father’s rages.
Madeleine opened her mouth and Kit drew breath, ready to counter imputations and insinuations, fearing she’d air, in front of Imp, what she thought she knew of Kit’s interests and amusements.
But instead, her mouth, which had learned her severity too early to be able to soften now, said, “His name is Richard, and I wish you’d stop calling him the name of a kind of demon. His name is Richard, after my sainted husband, his father.”
And as if she could rewrite Imp’s origins with her short words, she turned her back on Kit and vanished, down the long narrow hallway, to where her room and Imp’s lay.
Kit sighed and took his way up the stairs, to his own rented room.
That night, carefully watched, Imp would never dare climb the stairs in the dark and beg Kit for a story, as he did almost nightly.
So, Kit had time to plot the snare that would catch Essex and hold him at bay and thus allow Kit and Imp to go free.
First he must make sure Will voiced treacherous opinions and had contacts beyond his sphere with noblemen in Essex’s field.
Then it remained for Kit to invent a goal for this conspiracy—killing the Queen would always serve. Everyone feared the death of the childless monarch. It had become a national nightmare. And then Kit would denounce Will.
He paused for a moment, staring at the ceiling over his bed, remembering Will’s innocent look, his effusive gratitude.
How could Kit ensnare such a lamb?
He closed his eyes.
It must be.
If the noose thus designed to keep Imp alive and safe must catch in it that poor fool, Will Shakespeare, then so be it.
For one Imp, would Kit sacrifice the world.
Scene 11
The fairy palace. Queen Ariel sleeps on her high, gilded bed, beneath a green silk cover embroidered in gold thread. Suddenly, the darkness above sparkles with pinpoints of light that, like falling stars, burn for only a moment and then are gone. They leave behind a sulphurous stench of waning magic, and objects rain down on Ariel’s bedspread like large hailstones.
Ariel dreamed that Quicksilver was a child again, fourteen or fifteen no more and barely into the prolonged elven adolescence that would last till he was fifty.
They played together under a mighty oak, Quicksilver trying to steal a kiss and Ariel avoiding his advances and laughing.
Rain started pattering on them, heavy rain that quickly turned into gigantic rocks, which cut through leaves and broke the branches, and shred the wood of the wondrous overarching oak.
The air smelled of waning magic, of magic gone wrong.
“Beware, milord,” Ariel screamed. “Someone attacks us.”
But when she turned to look at him, Quicksilver was not beside her. He was away, at the edge of the human town, talking to a young man with dark curls and the golden eyes of a hawk.
Ariel woke with a muffled scream.
In her dark room, flashes of light showed her bed, her bedspread, all of it unreally lit, too white, too bright.
Something fell on her bed, something small and heavy. The smell in the air was real, not dreamed.
The smell of magic gone wrong.
Ariel reached for her bedside table where, at her word, a tall, never-consuming candle lit up, bringing cool, sane lighting to the room.
On her bed lay the countless bodies of many servant fairies, some lifeless, others yet twitching. Dying of some plague, some curse.
Ariel screamed. People ran down the hallway toward her room.
First arrived her maids, Cobweb, Peaseblossom, Cowslip, in their nightly finery of silk lace and embroidered caps. They put their hands over their mouths and joined their screaming to their mistress’s.
After them came Malachite, who threw the door open and ran in, dagger at the ready. He didn’t scream, but sheathed his dagger, made a sound like a man drowning, and went pale, his legs visibly buckling beneath his long, white nightshirt.
He approached the bed and, with horror, poked his finger at a lifeless dragon-fly-fine wing, a small, perfect, humanlike body.
“They’re dead,” he said. He looked at Ariel with horrified green eyes, grown unusually large and scared upon his pale face. He swallowed. “They’re dead.”
He gaped at Ariel as though he expected her to explain the mystery of the servant fairies’ deaths. The dread wonder of death in deathless Fairyland.
His lips trembled.
Other people had come into the room, by twos, by threes, by trembling loneliness.
All of them, including Hyllas, the centaur ambassador, wore their nightclothes, which for Hyllas seemed to be a cap all askew on his dark curls.
And all of them looked horrified.
Ariel recovered her senses first.
“Stop screaming,” Ariel snapped at her maids, while yet servant fairies glowed and—their magic burned out—fell to writhing on the bed. “Stop screaming and fetch me my wrap.”
Peaseblossom, the quickest to recover, handed Ariel her gauzy wrap—though the maid’s gaze remained on the bed, her eyes yet wide and wondering. Ariel wrapped herself and stood up.
“Lords, ladies,” she said. “There’s nothing here to see, nothing. Our servants are suffering and I must minister to them, but for that I must have silence and peace.”
As she spoke, she noticed that several of the servant fairies, seemingly untouched, still flew amid the crowd. She stared at them, wondering what made them different from their stricken fellows, while the ladies and lords, muttering, withdrew to the door of the room.
They walked out but went no farther, collecting in little nervous groups and gossiping crowds in the hallway.
Ariel closed the door in their faces unceremoniously, and left alone with her servants, she walked back to the bed.
It didn’t take Ariel’s gift of second sight, acquired by being born on summer solstice, to allow her to see that what had killed the winged fairies was lack of magic. Their magic had failed somehow. That power that had come to elvenkind from the very first formation of the Universe had now deserted these small beings.
And not all of her gift could show her why the fairies’ magic had failed.
While Ariel watched, several of the dead fairies winked out, returning to the nothing that had birthed them, their bodies disappearing as their magic had.
“Milady, what is wrong?” Peaseblossom asked. The maid held her hands in front of her mouth and spoke through her fingers, as though afraid that her words would give yet more force to dread reality.
Ariel shook her head and, with imperious thought, sent for the leader of the servant fairies, a prim and proper small creature called Marmalade.
Marmalade had tawny hair and a bronze-colored body. Today, her tiny features looked as sic
k, as bleached of color, as Malachite’s had.
Winking her light in the speech of the winged ones, she told Ariel that the servant fairies who were dying were the least powerful of them and that power blight and death seemed to be escalating, climbing the ranks of power.
A mysterious illness, Marmalade said.
Soon, Marmalade said, all servant fairies would be dead. And who after them? As she spoke, tiny Marmalade cast a frightened eye to the bed, where fairies still dropped and writhed and vanished.
See, she winked and blinked her light in fear. See, oh, lady, how they came to you for help in their extremity. Who will be next to feel this blight?
Changelings, Ariel thought, though she didn’t say it. Changelings—though given elven power and elven nature at their adoption—never completely lost their mortal dross, nor did they ever acquire as much power as those elven born.
They were the members of the hill who had the lowest magic, after the servants.
She thought of Malachite’s color, wan and pale, turned from its normal on seeing the dying fairies.
He’d looked like he knew what was wrong and that he’d be next.
Faith, Malachite, Lord Malachite, Quicksilver’s right hand, Quicksilver’s friend, knew more about this blight and its likely course than anyone in the palace.
And Malachite alone had been with Quicksilver when they’d met whatever the menace was at the boundary of Fairyland, near Stratford-upon-Avon.
Thus thinking, Ariel opened her door, and ignoring the many high lords and dazzling ladies of Fairyland who crowded around her and pressed her with questions and comments and condolences, she searched for Malachite.
Not finding him, she grabbed the arm of Igneous, Malachite’s friend and also a changeling.
Igneous was as blond as Malachite was dark, but his features also showed that blurring of perfection, that inexactitude that denoted a human-born elf.
However, unlike Malachite, he looked unconcerned by the fairy blight, or no more concerned than the true-born elves to whom he spoke. Resplendent in a bloodred nightshirt, he talked and gossiped with the crowding lords, venting opinions about foreign attack, or friendly fire, or perhaps a civil war amid servant fairies.
Ariel grabbed his arm and said, “Milord Igneous.”
Sobriety and seriousness came ill to Igneous’s face, with its small nose and broad, mobile mouth, but he strived for it, facing her. “Milady.”
“Have you seen Milord Malachite?”
“Nay, milady. Or rather, even before you asked, er, ordered us out of your room, Malachite walked out and, I thought, as far as I could discern, back to his room.”
“Thank you, milord,” Ariel said, and though knowing that her manner had startled the elf, she knew he would resume his peacock-bright preening as soon as she turned her back.
“Ariel, what’s this? And where is Quicksilver?” An elf of imposing presence pushed in front of Ariel. He looked not like Quicksilver but much like Sylvanus used to look: dark hair and beard, dark eyes, oval face, small pulpy mouth.
This was Vargmar, older brother to the late Oberon, Quicksilver’s uncle.
“I don’t know what this is, milord,” Ariel said, all cold disdain. “But milord the king, I wager, is attempting to remedy it.”
“Bah, king!” Vargmar said. “The impudent brat. A bastard of Puck’s, a low shape changer. Too young to reign. Too unstable to control even himself, less this mighty kingdom.”
Ariel would not argue with Quicksilver’s uncle. She turned her back on him and, aware that—around him—a small group of malcontents had started to gather, she headed for Malachite’s room.
Malachite’s bedroom door was down the hallway from Quicksilver’s, where he could be ever ready to run errands at the whim of his inconstant lord.
She knocked on it once, twice, knowing that she was watched by the entire court of Elvenland and a sleep-befuddled centaur in a night cap.
Twice more, and a faint answer came. “Yes?”
“Lord Malachite, I would fain speak with you,” she yelled.
Malachite opened the door. His pale face looked draggled and tearstained, his eyes swollen, his lips thickened with prolonged crying. His hands trembled, and his lips, too.
Ariel heard questions fly through the crowd, and fictions, too, about Malachite having done magic that caused the servants’ death.
Malachite raised lachrymose eyes to her, “You wish to speak to me here?”
Ariel shook her head. “In your room,” she said. “Milord.”
From his scared looks she imagined that he thought she believed the crowd. She pushed him into his room, where he went reluctantly, like a lamb to the slaughter.
The room was small and Spartanly furnished: a narrow oaken bed, covered in green silk, a narrow desk, a small trunk where Malachite, no doubt, kept his personal effects.
Only a large, whole-body mirror in a corner distinguished Malachite and the room as receivers of the king’s favor.
Yet, the view of green trees through the large, sparkling glass window, the warmth and cleanliness of the room, all these were what Malachite might never have aspired to, had the elves not kidnaped him from his cradle in Stratford so many years ago, leaving in his place a charmed piece of oak that to mortal eyes had looked like a sickly babe who had, presently, died.
“Milord, tell me why this is happening,” Ariel said.
He trembled worse, and gasped. “Lady, what is happening?”
“Do not mock me, milord, you know well. The servants are dying and a plague, a lack of power, clutches at the heart of Fairyland. Why, milord?”
Trembling and pale, Malachite shook his head. “I have done naught,” he said. “Naught with magic.”
Ariel felt her own lips press into a tight, tight line. “I never believed you had.”
And on those words Malachite paled yet more, when he should have been relieved. Ariel noted the change and sighed. “Milord, I cannot protect the hill as my lord ordered me if you do not tell me what’s causing this.”
“I promised not to tell you,” Malachite said.
“Promised? To whom could you have promised such?”
“The king,” Malachite said. “The king,” and his body trembled like a leaf in a storm.
Ariel stared at him, uncomprehending. “Why would the king exact such a promise?”
But he only threw himself on the floor and, pressing his face to the cool tiles, murmured, “Lady, I cannot tell you. Lady, the king made me swear . . . . I’m not to tell you.”
“Swear? Swear silence? What would you keep from me? What would he keep from me?”
But Malachite answered not, and in Ariel’s mind, a monstrous idea bloomed, like a poisonous flower upon an unsuspecting night.
“If your lord were here,” Ariel said, “would then magic be whole?”
Malachite gave her a sideways look, a small, surprised look, as if this thought had only now come to his own mind, as if he’d never thought it else.
“If he were here, then would all be well,” he said in a whisper.
Ariel took in breath. The air smelled still and dusty, as though the servant fairies, in dying, had tainted the very atmosphere with the mustiness of death, the dust of the tomb.
This was all caused by Quicksilver’s absence? But then why had Quicksilver gone to London? Why?
She remembered Malachite, pale and drawn, coming back from the confrontation at the boundary. How nervous he’d looked. How equivocal.
The menace had not been what they’d expected, he’d said. They’d taken care of it, he’d said.
But he looked like he lied, with his face tense and his eyes darting here and there, firefly afraid.
And Ariel had believed the expression and not the words. Fool Ariel.
Malachite, truthful Malachite, a changeling with hardly any power of his own, had told the truth while appearing to lie, and thus had he lied to his queen, while proclaiming verities.
They’d taken care of
the menace indeed, which meant that Quicksilver must have gone to London upon his own pursuit. But what pursuit of his could cause this blight?
Malachite had lied with his hands and his eyes, and his sharp, timorous glances.
Quicksilver, irked at Ariel’s resistence, smarting from her offer to help him, which had insulted his insecure pride, Quicksilver had rushed to London, like a fool to soothe his offended love with . . . what?
Ariel was not such an innocent nor did she live as retired from the gossip of the hill as Quicksilver thought. She knew well enough who was in London. Will Shakespeare. Will. Shakespeare. Will on whom Silver had doted and for whom Quicksilver, himself, had borne quite an unseemly love.
That explained the blight and the crops withering in the fields, and this strange, humid heat that seemed to suffocate even as it warmed.
Ariel remembered well enough, from her childhood, the epic fights that had shaken the palace.
Unlike herself and Quicksilver, Quicksilver’s parents, Queen Titania and the great Oberon, had made no vow of fidelity to each other, nor would they have kept it if they had.
Yet, their jealousy was as furnace-hot as their mutual love was fierce, and their separate affairs and joint raging had shaken the foundations of the palace, the roots of Arden Woods.
And when they argued thus, ever, the disturbed magic had put a chill in the air, brought unseasonable warmth or cold upon the nearby humans, threw the spheres into inharmonious clashing.
Nothing like the blight had happened, but then Oberon and Titania had never separated. He’d never stopped loving her, nor she him till death had overtaken them together one night, in a sacred glade.
Ariel remembered the cold glare of Quicksilver’s moss green eyes, and his quick, impatient step as he left her that night.
Not there, any longer, the soft touch of their honeymoon. Not there, any longer, his eye pliant to love and quick to find favor.
No.
Quicksilver had left her. He cared no more. His love was dead and would not return.
And from the death of that love—from the divided powers of the hill—there came the blight that killed the weaker members of the elven realm.
All Night Awake Page 10
