Frizer and his dagger were mere steps from Will, and Frizer extended his arm in a final plunge to drive the dagger home into the chest of Will, who had nowhere to run. Will had put his own dagger out to parry, but it would never do, not when Frizer was twice his size and twice his strength.
Kit Marlowe plunged sideways to protect Will with his own body. Frizer’s dagger went into Kit’s eye, into his brain.
As death seized his body in convulsion, what remained of Kit plunged forth, freed from his body like a man from wet clothing, and darting forward with that hot brawling spirit that had possessed him in life, plunged towards the wolf form that looked dazed, looming beside him in just as spectral an aspect.
Drawing from his belt the ghost of his own dagger, solid and clear to his ghostly hand, Kit plunged it again and again into the wolf’s dark, looming form.
The wolf was old, an ancient evil. Kit’s evil was nothing to it, Kit’s anger nothing to the dark, devouring malice that dripped from this creature.
But the wolf was off balance, having been pushed unexpectedly from the body that he’d thought haven.
And Kit was strong, for the first time strong, and finding his death a freeing, exhilarating experience, such as life had never been.
Once the worst happened, nothing more could frighten Kit. He’d already died. What was there to fear?
He plunged his ghost dagger -- silver bright -- into the ghost wolf.
The wolf howled and muttered curses that came seemingly out of Kit’s corpse. The darkness disintegrated around the dagger. An awful stench filled the room and the wolf was gone.
Kit’s ghost looked at his own corpse on the floor and for the first time knew true victory.
His laughter echoed so loud it was audible even to the living in the room; he saw it in their faces, in their startled gazes.
Then Quicksilver materialized in the tiny room, a cold –looking, pale Quicksilver, holding the hand of the beautiful, pale woman that Kit had seen last night.
Looking one at the other, the sovereigns of faerieland showed gentle love and hot affection in their whole attachment, and Kit breathed a ghostly sigh of relief. He’d not have stood having been spurned for anything less than true love.
He felt himself vanishing, disintegrating, being blown somewhere by a purposeful wind that none of the living in the room seemed to feel.
The last thing he saw in the mortal world was Quicksilver’s lips forming the words, “Farewell, Kit.”
Scene Forty Six
The same room, still full of centaurs, but now even more full, with Quicksilver and Ariel added and everyone stepping away from Kit’s corpse, knitting themselves with the wall. Malachite tries to hide behind one the centaurs, who isn’t having any of it.
Ariel held onto Quicksilver’s arm, her heart swelling with gratitude, with new-found hope, newly discovered love.
Immediately upon coming back into the world of mortals, she felt the power of faerie land flow into her. She felt warmer, stronger.
The centaur caught in the door backed up, step by step, then in the hallway turned and ran away. Hylas reared, then turned.
Looking at Quicksilver, Ariel realized why. Quicksilver positively glowed with magical power and exuded a bright strength she’d never seen in him before.
“The centaurs,” she said.
Quicksilver shook his head. “Yes, I must assemble an army and discipline Centuria. These few, poor fools aren’t worth much.” Yet he put out his hand, and something like a bright light flowed from his fingers.
A brayed scream of indignation pierced the silence.
Hylas disappeared. The echo of hoof beats died in the hall. A woman cried softly from within the house.
“You....” Ariel said, realizing that Quicksilver had annihilated the centaurs with an energy burst, more energy than any king of faerieland should be able to expend. “You....”
He shook his head. He looked grave. “I killed them, yes. I had to. They’d been tainted by my brother’s evil power. As has this one.” He looked towards Malachite, who’d been slinking towards the door.
Skeres and Poley, obviously confused and shocked, barred his way. Frizer still stood, over Kit Marlowe’s body, morosely examining the blood-sprayed sleeve of his white shirt, as if not sure where the blood had come from.
Quicksilver gestured with his hand, and the mortals in the room -- Skeres, Poley, Frizer, and Will -- all froze in their positions, immobilized, static. Time stopped for them.
“You, Malachite, whom I’ve loved like a brother -- you, foul traitor, what caused your so-vile treason?”
Malachite turned. White as tallow, shaking as the leaf that trembles in the wind, he turned and stared at Quicksilver. “Brother?” he asked, his voice low and trembling. “Brother? When have I been brother to you? I, who’ve been your slave, the attender of your wardrobe, the servant of your whims, the commander of your armies only so far as you would have me go, like a leashed dog, but never allowed to amass glory or honor for myself, lest it should shake the weak foundation of your reign?
“Brother?” He shook his head, his green eyes fixed with fear but also with an almost fanatical outrage. “How can you call me so when from my crib was I stolen, a mewling infant, and led to the strange world of faerie where I could never fit and never live? Where I would ever be inferior and looked down upon, ignored and despised and ordered about? And you, oh might king of elves, didn’t even notice my plight?”
Ariel looked at Quicksilver. In other days, would these words have destroyed him. In other days would he be cringing from the accusations.
Instead he frowned, a strong king seeking to understand a subject’s complaint. “Had my mother not requested you, had you not been stolen from your crib, as you say, would you be dead. As you were stolen, were you dying, your people too poor even to feed you.”
“Yet they were my people, and in stealing me, you stole my true estate,” Malachite yelled, his hands in fists, his eyes blazing.
“Ah, proud creature, treacherous servant. The truth is, you would wear my crown,” Quicksilver said. He put his hand to Ariel and squeezed Ariel’s hands in his own. “And despoiled my people in revenge for an imaginary wrong done to you. Speak like a subject, proud ambitious Malachite. Resign your chair, and where I stand kneel you, whilst I propose the selfsame fate to you, which traitor, you would have had me answer to.” Quicksilver drew himself up, and Ariel felt power gather to him, the power of the hill, of that still-loyal hill, that Malachite had not succeeded in severing from its rightful sovereign. “Let your words condemn you, and thus go you back to the world of men from when you came, and all those who in your heart followed your cause, may they go with you.”
Quicksilver waved his hand. As if forty years had accumulated instantly to Malachite’s youthful figure, he bent, and his hair whitened, and his proud features became lined and pruned.
In a breath, a wizened old man stood before them, a man of sixty, Malachite’s age. Even his green eyes looked faded, with which he gave Quicksilver a look of pure hatred.
But Quicksilver’s eyes showed only grief, as he waved the oldster away, and, putting power behind the order, commanded, “Go you now from here and forget all you’ve ever known about faerieland. Finish your days as you’d have me finish mine, powerless and lost in the world of mortals.”
Unable to resist the compulsion, but still regarding Quicksilver with hatred, Malachite shuffled backwards towards the door and through it.
Once he was out of sight, the sound of his shuffling lost in the corridor outside, Quicksilver waved his hand again. The mortals in the world came to life once more, looking confused.
“Milord?” Ariel said, wishing to comfort her king, but not sure how to do it. “Was it needed?”
Quicksilver swallowed and nodded and sighed. “Yes, it was needed. Malachite was too corrupted by the dark power to save as an elf. And all my fault. I should have seen his resentment. I should have known.... I should have seen. Alas, I
did not. From now on, I’ll be an attentive, awakened king.” He squeezed her arm again and she understood that he could truly do this now, now that he had her love.
Ariel wanted to cry and to beg his forgiveness for her many wrongs to him, in the past. But what she did was take his long, pale hands in hers, and rub them distractedly, to warm them.
She took his hand to her lips and kissed it, and in that moment noticed that Quicksilver was looking towards Kit’s corpse on the stained wooden floor. “And yet,” he said. “I loved him well.” There was no doubt he spoke of Kit, and yet it might have been an epitaph for Malachite as well.
Ariel said, “I know,” amazed to find herself curiously devoid of jealousy.
“And yet,” Quicksilver said. “He was flawed so that....”
He sighed again, and looked around. “All are punished. All. All of you will think you did what you came to do and bear the guilt of this dismal death that you intended for him. Save you, Will, who will hence and to your bed in London, and forget this dismal scene and this dark ending, except maybe as a dream, dimly remembered. And all of you mortals, all, will forget that Will was ever even here. You’ll not remember his look, nor his face, nor that he had anything to do here.”
He waved his hand in the air and Will vanished.
Then, holding Ariel’s hand, Quicksilver looked towards Kit and said, “Thus cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince and flights of angels sing you to thy rest.” He turned to Ariel and blinked tears from his moss-green eyes. “The play is done, milady, let’s resume the golden coil of our unending lives.”
With that, Ariel felt the scene waver around her.
She was in the faerie palace, safe within the immemorial woods of Arden. Around her, the court buzzed like an ant hill disturbed.
And Quicksilver, with powerful voice, was explained to all everything that had happened.
Epilogue
Scene: the primeval forest of Arden, as it once was, with large trees, crowded close. Upon the ground the three spinners sit, working the threads of life. Amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost appears and solidifies.
The three Fates spin beneath the trees of a forest, outside time and space.
“So the king has got his crown,” the youngest one says.
“And the queen’s web is spun,” the middle one says.
“And the traitor’s round is done,” says the oldest one.
She holds in her hand a dark thread, through which a vein of pure gold runs, and holds her scissors poised over it. A sigh makes her tremble. “And yet it is a pity to waste such thread. This stuff is hard to come by. And a magic thread thus bequeathed by an ancestor full of power....”
“It is illusion,” the middle one said. “Merlin never was.”
The younger one fingers the thread. “And yet, here’s the gold, here’s the vein of truth and the power and the word.”
“What would you do with it?” the oldest one asks, lifting her head.
A little ways away, amid the trees, Marlowe’s ghost stands, immaterial, and yet possessed of Marlowe’s charm as we first saw it -- his clothes are impeccably clean and the best cut, and he looks like a man on his way to a fashionable assembly.
A slow smile molds to his lips, and expands, into something like mischievous intent. He walks forward, charming, confident, his mincing step all that could be expected of such a London dandy, a protege of noblemen, the toast of theater goers.
“Give the words to the poet,” he says. “Let my words live on, even if another must write them. I bequeath my poetry and the power in it to William Shakespeare of Stratford. Let anyone find fault with that.”
On those words, the old woman cuts through the thread with her shears, and Marlowe vanishes.
“Humans,” the maiden mutters to herself, and joins the spun gold to a white thread. “The livelong day I’ll never understand them. Treacherous as the serpent and kind as the dove, full of bitter hatred and sudden, mild love.”
“Humans are as they must be,” the matron says. “And everything that was will be again.”
“Humans are all that is, and their heart our reign,” the crone completes. The thread measured out upon her lap is now white, but through it shines a single strand of pure gold.
Curtain Call
Within the too-solid city of London, in a shabby room in Southwark, close to the play houses, Will Shakespeare turned in his bed.
He need never be afraid of Nan again, he thought, in his sleep. He had stood up to the Queen of faerieland, he had dared the wrath of the darkest of evil villains.
As soon as he finished this poem, as it ever was, he’d go visit Stratford, and see Hamnet and Judith, and Susannah. Aye, and his sweet Nan again.
He turned in bed again. He wasn’t quite sure why, but all of a sudden he knew he could finish the poem, too. And it would be admired and great, and live through the ages, long after Will himself had died.
In that space, neither asleep nor awake, where sometimes men know truths otherwise unknowable, Will thought he’d got something from Marlowe, some legacy bequeathed with the poet’s last breath.
It felt right to take that legacy, and Will would make sure those words lived through him and that he made them good.
He, who’d once said he’d have no words but his, now felt beholden to carry on Kit’s words and Kit’s work and make them dazzling-bright as Kit would have -- for when a man's verses could no longer be read nor a man’s good wit heard, it struck a man more dead than a great reckoning in a small room.
Will turned in bed and slept on, certain of the future and of his own ability.
* *
Outside, in the shabby street of Southwark, life ground on, the bawds went to bed, and the artificers woke and manned their workshops.
The threat of pure evil had been lifted from the neck of humanity, where it had rested like a naked sword. The spheres spun on, as they’d been meant to do for eternity.
In his palace the king of faerieland made ardent love to his joyful wife.
And the man who’d known about the threat and done what must be done to diffuse it slept on in his shabby room, and dreamed of poetry.
About the Author
Sarah A Hoyt has published over twenty novels and a hundred short stories. If you enjoyed this book, please look in Baen's webscriptions page for her Shifter's series (Draw One In The Dark, Gentleman Takes a Chance) or her science fiction (Darkship Thieves.) For more of her fantasy, look for Heart of Light, Soul of Fire and Heart and Soul. Those interested in historic mystery might wish to check out Sarah's Musketeer Mysteries, under the pen name Sarah D'Almeida. Her contemporary mysteries, under the name Elise Hyatt are Dipped, Stripped and Dead and A French Polished Murder.
For samples of all of Sarah's work, check out Sarah's website at http://sarahahoyt.com.
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