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Scene 1

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Early morning, in Elizabethan London.   Down the myriad narrow streets, bordered by five-story tall, wooden houses, foot traffic scurries and carriage traffic lumbers. Ox-carts, laden with the produce and goods needed for the daily life of the teeming city, creep at an almost imperceptible pace.   The occasional messenger on horseback, impatient of obstruction in his way, shouts and lays about him with his whip.   From busy workshops, the clang of metal, the knocking of wood, the untiring noise of work reverberates, an unnoticed background to daily life.   Though it be early, taverns are full and from them emerges the clacking of cups, the unruly noise of drinking songs.   The gleeful shrieks of children at play, the admonitions of their vigilant mothers weave joyful notes through this tapestry of sound.   All is busy, all resounds with life in London -- save, it seems, a soberly dressed man who sits upon a narrow stool in a second floor rented room.   The room, itself, looks like a hundred other rooms let to respectable burghers throughout London: its furnishings compass bed and chair, clothes-storing trunk with ceramic basin and hewer atop.   The only added thing is the narrow table at which the man sits, with paper and inkstone and newly-sharpened quill.   He is a middle aged man, but yet good-looking, his hair receding in front but curling over his collar in the back.   His face is oval, his lips small, his nose well-shaped.   He wears a dark wool suit, well cut but no more so than the suits of any middle-class man.   From his sleeves and collar a correct amount of white lace peeks, and the single golden ring in his left ear is no ostentatious jewel.   But it is his eyes -- golden and as intent as the eyes of a falcon intent on the prey -- that give him distinction and make him memorable.   Those eyes, surrounded by the dark circles of a sleepless night, glare at a blank piece of paper.   His name is William Shakespeare and he is the best-loved playwright in London.

    Will glowered at the paper and at his hands resting on either side of it, with something between impatience and dread.
    Never had Will felt such fear of a blank page and the words he should pour upon it.   Nightlong, he’d tried to write, yet the page remained virgin of any ink.
    Taking up the pen, he subdued the treacherous tremor in his right hand.   He dipped the pen into the ink well which he had earlier filled with the grindings of his inkstone and water.
    Vortigern and Rowena, he wrote upon the virgin page.
    He knew what he should write, next.   This was the grave and most piteous story of the king of the Anglos, in northern Britain who, for a woman’s love, sold his kingdom to the Saxons.
     Will put his pen to his mouth and nibbled upon the feather end.
    Words poured into his mind.   He could picture noble Vortigern beholding Rowena’s beauty and struck with awe, speaking, "But what may I, fair virgin, call your name, whose looks set forth no mortal form to view, nor speech betrays aught human in thy birth."
    He closed his eyes and allowed his hand that held the pen to trace the letters of these words upon the willing paper.   "Thou art a goddess that delud’st our eyes and shrouds’t thy beauty in this borrowed shape."
    The movement of his pen stopped.
    The words were familiar, and yet...
    As many times before, in the night, Will was sure that someone stood behind him.   Without turning, Will could feel someone there, a suggestion of laughter, a hint of amusement.
    A soundless voice played in Will’s mind the next line of what he had been writing.   But whether thou the sun’s bright sister be.
    Will stopped, as the hair at the back of his neck prickled up, for the words had the manner, tone and voice of the late Christopher Marlowe, once a greatly admired poet, but dead now for three years.   Dead and buried.
    Yet the feeling of his voice, if not its sound, ran through Will’s mind.   It is Dido, Queen of Carthage, Will.   My Dido, Queen of Carthage.   Those lines are spoken by Aeneas to Venus.
    Can’t you wait till a man turns to dust in his grave before stealing his words?
    The mockery, the feeling of disdain were as much Marlowe’s as the tone of voice.   When alive, Marlowe had been the play fellow of nobility, the best dressed dandy of sparkling London.
    Will could swear that if he turned, dead Marlowe would stand there, behind Will, in all of Marlowe’s marred elegance, his brittle grace.
    He would smile at Will, a mild, ironic smile made horrible by the wound in Marlowe’s right eye, and the blood trickling down Marlowe’s small, neat features to stain the white lawn collar of his well-cut velvet suit.
    Cold sweat dripped down Will’s spine.   He shivered.
    He should turn.   Turn and dispel this irrational fear.
    Turn, he told himself, turn.   The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures; ‘t is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.  
    But his body would not obey and he remained sitting, his hands on his table, his quill pen beside them -- slowly seeping black ink onto the blond oak wood.
    Between his hands, the paper sat, with Marlowe’s words shining upon it.
    This was the first time that, unknowing, Will wrote Marlowe’s words in his own hand.   But he’d long suspected that every word that trickled from his pen was indeed Marlowe’s.
    The words came through him as though originating in some unknown fountain, not within Will’s brain.   And they had the cadence, the effect of Marlowe’s own plays.
    There hung the problem.
    For if the words were Marlowe’s that made Will a success, it was not Will’s success, but rather Marlowe’s.   If Marlowe’s words had earned the gold that, accumulating, would soon allow Will to buy the best house in Stratford-upon-Avon; if Marlowe’s were the words that had created Will’s new found wealth, what right did Will have to use them to buy a coat of arms that his only son, Hamnet, might proudly display.
    Marlowe was dead.   After life’s fitful fever, he slept well.
    But then, whence came his words, like pieces of himself, evading his pauper’s grave, at Trinity church in Deptford, and filling Will’s brain and his plays and his purse?
    What a horrible form of grave-robbing this was, were it true.
    But Will meant to steal from no man.   Yet, each of his words echoed the words of Christopher Marlowe, the greatest playwright the world had ever known.
    Warm air drifted through Will’s open window, stale and smelling of the city’s odd mingle of spices and refuse.  
    Despite it, Will felt cold, with the cold of the grave.
    If Kit Marlowe haunted Shakespeare, why did he do it?
    Will had been but an acquaintance of Kit’s, not close at all.
    Spirits walked for many reasons: for injury done to them -- aye, and Marlowe had been murdered.   Yet, Will was not one of the murderers.   For something left behind -- and who knew what Marlowe might not have left.   Yet, force, Will did not know it, nor did he have the object or the riches.   For the craving of grace and forgiveness -- and Marlowe, who in life had blazed forth atheistic opinions might well need that.   But Will neither judged Marlowe nor condemned him, understanding the man’s brittle genius and the doomed love that had led him astray.
    But maybe this was different.   Maybe the reason Will felt Marlowe so close to him was that Will, and Will alone among mortal men knew the truth of Marlowe’s death.
    Most people believed -- and not a few averred as though they’d been there -- that Marlowe had been killed in a tavern brawl over a bawdy, disreputable love, variously given as male or female, as best suited the speaker’s indignation.
    Moralists and puritans had rushed to see in Marlowe’s death a judgment on Marlowe’s mad, carousing life, on Marlowe’s too free opinions, his too analytical mind.
    Yet, Will would wager that the divine weighed men upon different scales than those of sour-lipped envy.
    If those who spoke could but guess, if they could but know that Christopher Marlowe had died in a brawl over the throne of fairyland, in a fight to preserve the world from the grasp of a dark power!   Oh, if they knew that Kit’s death, his sacrifice, had earned freedom for them and their children, aye, and their great-grandchildren, too, how they would revere Kit Marlowe, how his cynicism and mocking would be forgotten.
    And, remembering Kit Marlowe how they would recognize, in each of Will’s words, the tone, the cadence, the fall of Marlowe’s words.   Will had written the Merchant of Venice.   Aye, and it was like Marlowe’s Jew Of Malta.  
    And in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus there echoed the powder and blood feel of Tamburlaine The Great with which Marlowe had stormed and conquered the London stage.  
    And there, upon his Venus and Adonis, and his Rape of Lucrece, the long poems that had settled his literary fame, how come no one saw the rhyme and word, the very turn of phrase that Kit Marlowe would have used?
    For here was the puzzle, here the coincidence that haunted Will’s mind like a bad dream standing in wait through a sleepless night.  
    Will Shakespeare had never written much worthy of note up to the night of Kit’s Marlowe’s death.   And then, as though through a transference of power, a magical transfusion of the poetical vein, he’d found himself able to write: to write words like Marlowe’s.
    But were these Marlowe’s words, grafted onto Will Shakespeare like an alien strain onto the homely vine?   And if so, did Will deserve one coin of the money he’d earned?   Or should he cease writing and let Marlowe rest in Peace in his unmarked grave in Trinity churchyard in Deptford?
    The need to write, the need not to write, the words trying to emerge, the fear that these were not his words, blazed behind Will’s eyes in pounding headache.   Impulses dwelt within him, locked in close fight like relentless duelers, with his writing as a prize.
    He was late with his writing.   It had been more than a month since he’d promised Ned Alleyn, the chief investor and share holder in Lord Chamberlain’s men, that he’d have a play for him.   More than a month since that play had been set to open up on the boards of the Theater.
    But no more of the play was written than that one sentence upon the page and now, thinking about it, Will knew -- knew -- that he could never write it.   For this play would be about a man betrayed by a woman into giving up his power.
    Even the theme was Marlowe’s and not Will’s.   Marlowe had   written about war and masculine courage and the danger of love and feminine gentleness.   Women were either near onto inanimate objects in Marlowe’s plays -- bargaining chips in the games of male power -- or vile seductresses.
    And here Will was, Will, who’d been married since he was nineteen and who loved his absent Nan as tenderly as man could love woman.   Why should he echo Marlowe’s themes and Marlowe’s philosophy, save that Marlowe’s ghost was in his brain and infected his thought?
    Will put his hands over his eyes, and groaned.   It seemed to him, for just a second, that his groan was echoed, in Marlowe’s tones, from just behind him and to his left.
    If he opened his eyes and turned, would he see Marlowe standing there?   Russet hair pulled back into a pony tail, one large, almond-shaped grey eye watching Will with weary amusement, while his other eye trickled the blood and brains extracted from it at dagger point?
    Instead of turning, Will closed his eyes and called to the still room behind him, to the mundane sounds of the wakening streets outside, "Stay, illusion," he said.   "If you have any sound or use of voice, speak to me.   If there be any good thing to be done, that might do you ease and grace to me, speak to me.   If you are privy to fate which, happily, foreknowing may avoid, oh, speak!   Or if you have uphoarded in your life, extorted treasure in the womb of earth, for which, they say, you spirits oft walk in death, speak of it.   Stay and speak."   And hearing a slithering and a sound like the door opening, he called out.   "Stay, Marlowe."
    "Will?" a voice asked.
    Will jumped, overturning both the stool upon which he’d perched and the inkwell.
    The inkwell bled upon his sleeve and poured its rich black liquid on paper and table, dripping its excess onto the floorboards.
    Will, his heart at his throat, the lace of his sleeve dripping with ink, realized all too late that the voice he’d heard was the uncertain, shy voice of Ned Alleyn, theater entrepreneur, insecure financier of plays and poets.
    "Will, to whom talk you?" he asked again.   "And why did you call Marlowe?   I knocked upon your door, but you answered not, and so I came."
    Feeling like a fool, Will turned and lifted his hand to pull back his hair.
    He felt the moisture on his hand too late, and realized that he’d painted a black streak onto his forehead.
    "Er..." Will said and, once more, nervously, he ran his hand back upon his forehead and hair.   "Er."
    "All you playwrights are mad," Ned said.
    Ned Alleyn was a medium sized man, with medium-colored hair and medium-colored skin.   He wore his suit shabby and much rubbed, the green velvet faded in spots and, in other spots, showing the weave beneath.
    Ned could have walked unremarked into any assembly in this town.   In fact, the only thing at all remarkable about him was his brown eyes.   Not for their color which, like the rest of Ned’s person, showed that eagerness not to be noticed that urge to blend in that made Ned Alleyn so commonplace.   But in those normal, unremarkable eyes something burned, something urgent and immediate, so urgent and immediate that it seemed to hold in itself the flickering flame of madness.
    When Will had first met Alleyn, when Will had first started writing plays for Lord Chamberlain’s men, Will had flattered himself that the keen expression in Alleyn’s face was genius and passion for theater.
    But over the next couple of years, Will had identified the true cause of Alleyn’s expression: it was fear.
    The financier had convinced Ned’s father-in-law, Phillip Henslowe, to allow Ned to finance the start of this new theater company.   Perhaps Ned truly loved theater and what went with it.   But Ned hadn’t realized, perhaps still didn’t realize, what it took to make money in theater.   Phillip Henslowe’s own forays into the theater had been well financed, by brothels and gambling businesses.
    But Ned was an honest man, and he was going at it with clean hands.   Often the funds felt short, and, on occasion, the actors had to storm his office and demand payment before their shares were disbursed.
    The look in Ned’s eyes was sheer, manic fear that his acting company would fail and that he’d be ruined.   And today it seemed to Will it burned with heightened strength.
    He stepped further into Will’s room, on tiptoe, as though he were afraid of waking someone.   His face looked pale enough to be that of a ghostly apparition.
    Will cleared his throat.   "Morrow, Ned," he said. "What brings you to my abode so early?"
    Because it was not normal for Ned to be here, it was not normal for Ned to come into his employee’s rented rooms thus, without a knock, without a by your leave.
    The entrepreneur’s eyes widened, as though he were an intruder caught in an unlawful incursion, and his hand went to his throat, as though feeling the noose with which thieves were hanged.  His voice that issued from his lips small and frighted.
    "Er..." he said.   "Your play.   You said you’d have a play for us in a week.   That was three weeks ago.   Where is your play, Will?   Can I look at it, can we have it, in foul papers if it needs be?   For the rehearsal"   His brown eyes rolled madly about the room as though trying to find, in the spare, carefully made bed, in the neat trunk, in the desk with its piles of clean paper, a hidden play, a stowed-away manuscript.
    Finding none, his gaze returned to Will and bore with mad panic into Will’s own eyes.   "Will, the receipts are down.   Everyone has seen your Merchant of Venice."   Ned wrung his hands together, as though one of them were a wet rag and the other one the washerwoman’s hand.   "An excellent play, Will," he assured, confidentially.   "But all the other companies are presenting it now, and we have nothing new for to bring in the people, and our coffers are empty.   Winter will come soon, Will, and I don’t know how we’ll survive through winter."   His gaze dwelt, amazed, on Will’s lace, peeking at sleeve and collar.   "I know your long poems, Venus and Adonis, and the other, the one about the rape, give you some protection from the miserable conditions of the theater.   And, at any rate, your plays are worth all we pay for them.   Only we need another one, Will.   Is it ready?"
    The panicked cascade of his words having finished tumbling from his lips, Ned stared at Will, the intelligence of his gaze sharpened by galloping fears.   Behind his ordinary brown eyes marched armies of despair, brandishing flags of hunger and privation.
    Will felt color climb to his cheeks, for the play should have been ready, could have been ready, more than a week ago, but for that he’d delayed, because he felt Marlowe’s words trickle through his incapable fingers onto the waiting paper.
    Will felt himself nothing but a vessel for the doomed genius of the late Kit Marlowe and he wanted to be more.   He wanted to write his own plays.   He wanted to be applauded for his own work.
    Yet, how to explain this to Ned, whose very blood ran with ciphers and figures, whose fear was fueled by a tide of red ink upon the company books, whose very life depended on the take of the theater on any given afternoon.
    "The play will be done... er... very soon," he said.   He would have to write it.   He would have to write it no matter whose it turned out to be, he thought, staring at Alleyn’s eyes and feeling Ned’s fear like a palpable thing, like a living creature, sniffing about the room and looking for an escape route.   "The play will be done."
    "Do you have part of it?" Ned asked.   He stood on one leg, an anxious stork.   "Do you have part of it, some papers I can give the men to rehearse?   They are as dispirited as... well, they are dispirited.   They see no end in sight to empty theaters.   You may well imagine.   If you can give me a little, a few words..."
    Will swallowed and shook his head.   "Not yet, but I will.   I promise you I’ll have it ready soon.   It’s called Vortigern and Rowena and I have all the scenes laid here."   He tapped his head.   "I have all the scenes, and I know what to do.   I just have to write it.   A simple matter."
    Ned’s eyes widened again, surprise and confusion in them.   "But you’ve had two extra weeks," he said.   "And you wrote nary a word?   What is wrong?"   Ned’s small, sensitive nose sniffled at the stale air of the room, as though looking for something -- alcohol?   Or vestiges of madness?   He advanced into the room, approached Will, with every step drawing closer and yet giving the impression of cringing away, as if afraid of giving offense or causing harm.   "What is wrong?"
    Will shook his head and shrugged.
    "Oh, it scares me.   Much does it scare me," Ned said, and his hand, again, went to his throat, as though feeling the constriction of a noose.   "Your face just now, your expression.   Oh, it misgave me and made my heart turn on itself, for it was Marlowe’s expression that last month before he was killed -- it was the look of a man with a devil at his heels and burning fire before him.   Are you in trouble, Will?   Trouble like Marlowe’s?"
    Now the frighted rabbit that Ned normally personated became something other, something different -- an eagle, impassive of eye, undeniable of voice -- his gaze narrowing upon Will like the gaze of an angel seeking out sin, his voice the voice of an avenging preacher demanding confession.
    Will drew back.   Did Ned have to mention Marlowe?   Did he have to pronounce Marlowe’s name?   Did he have to compare Will’s expression to Marlowe’s?
    "If you mean I’ve gone all fond of boys and tobacco, as Marlowe claimed to be, then no.   I suffer from no such ill."   But as he said it, it seemed to Will he heard Marlowe’s light laughter, Marlowe’s careless voice declaiming all that don’t like boys and tobacco are fools.
    And Will knew, knew with a deep certainty as never before that Marlowe’s outrageous statement was foolishness, designed to get attention and little else.   Designed to put a soothing balm in Marlowe’s aching soul, Marlowe’s aching heart by shocking other people.
    Because Marlowe had loved neither boys nor tobacco.   Marlowe had loved the king of fairyland.   Or at least the king of fairyland in his female aspect as Lady Silver.   Will had never wished to know how Marlowe felt about Silver’s male aspect, the king proper, king Quicksilver of the Realms Above the Air and Beneath The Hills Of Avalon.
    Just thinking on Silver it seemed to Will that he saw her white skin, her jet-black hair, felt her silk-soft skin upon his weathered cheek, the petal-tender touch of her lips on his lips.
    He jumped, startled.
    Oh, he hated fairyland and all that went with it.  
    Marlowe had died because of his love for the cursed elf.   But Will had other loves -- his wife, his daughters, his only son -- he would not be caught unawares.   He would not die for such a foolish thing as a bit of magic, a twist of glamour, the illusory love of elves, those creatures colder than moonlight, eternal as time, and more insensitive to human suffering than impenetrable granite.
    Did Marlowe follow him, did Marlowe’s words echo through him because Will alone knew that Marlowe had died as a hero, not as   debauch?
    Will touched the tips of his fingers to his lips, where he’d felt as if the shadow of the elf’s touch, and looked guiltily at Ned Alleyn.
    "And there you go," Ned Alleyn said.   "There you go, jumping at shadows and blushing at nothing.   Thus did Marlowe act too, and then, the next thing we heard, he had died of the plague, and then this was not true, and he’d died in a duel in a bawdy house.   And then again, there are rumors, rumors that go afoot in the night and hide themselves in daytime -- rumors that Marlowe worked for the privy council and it was by them that he was killed."   Ned, this new Ned that was more father than cowering entrepreneur, fixed Will with a cold eye, and put his hands on his hips and asked.   "Are you involved in secret work, Will? Do you plot?"
    At this Will laughed.   He laughed before he could contain himself.   Did he plot?
    Oh, what were plots?   He’d been involved in plots and counterplots, in the warp and warf of fairyland politics and murderous intrigues.
    Fourteen years ago -- was it that long? -- when his Susannah was a new born babe and Nan but a new bride, they’d both been stolen by the then king of fairyland.
    To reclaim them, Will had waded into fairyland politics and drank deep the fountain of intrigue.
    Did he plot?
    Three years ago, with Marlowe, he’d rescued the king and queen of fairyland -- and the whole mortal world with them -- from a power darker than any dreamed by cloistered monks in their worst nightmares, or the darkest visions of mystics who saw apocalypse and destruction in the shadowed years ahead.
    Oh, Will plotted, had plotted and now he wanted to plot no more.   He wanted to remain a mortal among mortals and to know no more of fairyland and its dark corners.
    His laugh halted, abruptly, on something like a hiccup, and Will read alarm in Ned Alleyn’s scared face.
    Ned’s eyes looked like they’d drop out of his face, and their panicked look had become something else, a stare of great cunning, an examining glare, like that of a physician with a very ill patient.   "If it’s not plots," he said.   "If it’s not plots, then perhaps it’s witchcraft, friend Will."   Ned’s hands grabbed Will’s sleeves and held tight -- white, thin fingers grasping the black velvet, like spiders clinging to the sides of a gallows.   "Perhaps it’s witchcraft.   Perhaps you’ve been charmed."
    Will felt blood respond to his cheeks, though his lips remained mute.   Had he been charmed?   Who knew?   Once you’d been touched by the fairyworld, would you ever be clean again?   Had not the fairyworld sought Marlowe out, thirteen years after Marlowe’s last involvement with them?
    Will shook his head to Ned Alleyn’s question deferring answer.
    Ned sighed, impatiently.   "You actors and playwrights are all the same -- those of you who keep your wives far away.   Looking for young ladies to still your pain and idle away your solitude, you scant notice if the lady is good or means you evil.   And most such bawds, perforce, mean you evil.   I, myself, always thought that was what brought Marlowe down -- an evil word pronounced by some hag in some black midnight."   Now Ned pushed his face close to Will’s and asked in a confidential whisper, "Did you, perhaps, Will, disappoint some woman, lie to some bawd, and bring on yourself the cooking of bats and dead man’s fingers in a spell that makes your blood boil and your mind race?"
    Will tried to shake his head, but what if his problem were truly enchantment?   For Marlowe had died in a horrible manner, killed by a supernatural being.   Perhaps Marlowe walked the Earth, full of hatred or need for revenge.   Perhaps Marlowe...
    Again, Will felt as though Marlowe stood just behind him, Marlowe’s grave-cold breath brushing his neck and making the hair there stand on end.
    Should Will turn he would see Marlowe standing there, staring at Will with amused pity in his one remaining eye.
    The feeling was so intense that Will did not dare turn and instead stared at Ned’s face and remained still feeling like a hunted animal brought to ground and unable to move.
    "That is the problem, is it not?" Ned said, softly.   And, without waiting for an answer, added, "Get yourself to Shoreditch.   There, beside the sign of the snake, you shall find a small brown door, which, when knocked upon, will reveal a mistress Delilah.   Mistress Delilah will remove the ill that’s been done to you quickly enough and then can you write my play."   Ned smiled, the sweet smile of the completely deranged who, having obsessed on something, care for nothing else.   "And have it ready a week hence."
    Will swallowed and made a sound that might be interpreted as assent.   Was Marlowe’s ghost truly standing behind him?   And if he were, would Ned Alleyn see Marlowe?
    Ned looked only at Will, and spared no look at the shadows behind Will.   "Good.   Get you to Mistress Delilah.   She will not disappoint."   Thus, with a tap on Will’s shoulder, he turned on his heel and left the room, never turning back.
    Will wanted to scream for him to turn back, wanted to yell that Ned should turn back and look -- look behind Will and see if Marlowe’s ghost stood there.
    Mistress Delilah, Will thought.   Beside the sign of the snake in Hog’s lane.
    Well did Will know Hog’s lane, having lived there, hard by Hollywell, in Shoreditch, where the Rose theater had been located in which Marlowe’s plays had found abode and applause.
    It was a hard scrabble district, full of raw, shoddy construction and the people who could afford nothing better: recent migrants to the city, lost souls, vagabonds and those living just outside the law.   A fit place for a witch.
    Going to see a witch was against the law, a minor act of sacrilege and heresy that, depending upon the law’s mood, could warrant either penance and a fine or jail, or even death.
    Will was a good protestant, forever just within the pall of the church of England, its blessings and its munificence.
    He had willed it so, despite his contact with fairyland.   He had willed himself to be a churchman.   He wanted the respectability that came with it for his children and their children.
    Not for them to run from the law that outlawed their beliefs.   No.   They would believe what most believed and be accepted by all.
    If Will went to see mistress Delilah, she could tell him whether Marlowe’s ghost truly followed him or whether it all were but the spinning delusion of an overheated brain.
    Will bit at his moustache that, following the contours of his upper lip, outlined his mouth in a thin, dark line, merging with his beard on the sides.   He chewed the corner of his mouth and his moustache.
    Turn and look, he thought to himself.   Turn and look, you fool!   You don’t need a witch to confirm the lie of what you know is an illusion.   Turn and look.
    Slowly, with infinite caution, he turned his head, to look behind himself.
    But before his head was turned and while only the corner of his eye looked onto that dark space behind himself where he felt sure that Marlowe’s ghost stood, he caught a glimpse of blue, like the blue velvet in which Marlowe had gone to his moldy grave.
    Just that, a glimpse of blue, by the corner of the eye, a hint of movement, a shape that might have been a man and a sound -- so light that it would be drowned by the lightest whisper -- no louder than the fall of a feather, the rustle of paper in a far off room.
    But that sound, Will would swear, was Marlowe’s laughter.
    Marlowe’s cursed laughter, that should long ago have been stilled by the dirt that filled Marlowe’s long-dead mouth.
    Will jumped, stifled a scream.
    He grabbed his cloak from the peg on the wall next to his bedroom’s door and, without turning, without looking, rushed out the door, out of this respectable rooming house, and towards Hog’s lane and Mistress Delilah.
    As he walked the narrow streets, elbowing apprentices and squeezing his way between slow, fat matrons burdened with shopping, Will could hear behind him, the immaterial but ever present steps of Kit Marlowe following him.

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Scene 2

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A clearing in Arden Woods, hard by Stratford-upon-Avon.   To mortal eyes, it is but a sprawl of rank weeds and straggling bushes, in the gloom beneath the overspreading shade of larger trees.   Those with second sight, though, see a castle rising there, a noble palace, the capital of fairyland in the British isles -- the reign of elven Avalon.   The building is a white palace, a thing of beauty, with walls so perfect and smooth, towers so high and thin as to defy the imagination of humans and the reach of mortal artistry.   In front of the palace, a clumsy structure of uneven boards rises, under the ceaseless hammers, the untiring work of many winged fairies.   These winged servants of fairyland, small and dainty, flying either and tither in flashes of light, work at building the platform for an execution block.   The sound of their hammering penetrates the innermost confines of the palace, the royal chamber.   There King Quicksilver stands before his full-length mirror.   He looks like a young man of twenty, with long blond hair combed over his shoulder. Around him, his room lies neatly ordered, with a large bed, curtained in green, a painted trunk, a well-worn golden suit of armor in the corner and -- on the wall -- a portrait of himself which, when viewed from a different angle, shows a dark haired woman -- Quicksilver’s other aspect.   Quicksilver looks only at his mirror, never at his portrait, as he raises his hand to adjust the lace collar that shows over his jacket.

    When the knocking first sounded, Quicksilver wasn’t sure it was more than an echo of the hammering without the walls.
    How much noise the servants made in building the execution block.
    He flinched from the thought of the block and the purpose it would serve, from the execution to come and the inevitable spilling of noble elven blood.
    "Am I butcher?" Quicksilver asked his own image in the mirror.   "A tyrant?"
    His image stared back at him, bland and blond, looking as it had since Quicksilver had reached adult stature at twenty.   It presented a fair prospect, slim and elegant, in the black velvet suit that molded Quicksilver’s long legs, and displayed to advantage his broad shoulders and his svelte body.   Though Quicksilver neared sixty five years of age, yet he looked like a youth of twenty, his moss-green eyes full of sparkle, his perfect features unmarked by wrinkles, his pale blond hair shining like liquid moonlight, combed over his shoulder.
    As his own people reckoned their life spans, Quicksilver had barely grown out of adolescence and was a very young elf indeed.
    But looking at his own reflection, staring at his own dazed, tired eyes, Quicksilver felt old.   The last three years, he had spent commanding armies and putting down rebellion.
    Had those three years of fire and blood, of fear and fighting left no mark?   No mark but the look in his eyes, and this tired, careworn feeling in his soul?
    How strange nature.   How strange that such resounding evil, such suffering, so much blood spilled, left the king of fairyland looking young and untouched.
    Something sounded again -- a knock that seemed different from the clamor of the hammer upon the wood of the block.
    Quicksilver glanced away from the mirror, at the thick oak door of his room and called out, "Come in."
    The door opened to reveal the slim, pale loveliness of Ariel, Queen of Fairyland, Quicksilver’s wife.
    She slid into the room furtively, and cast a worried glance at Quicksilver, like a child afraid of scolding.
    Quicksilver smoothed his lace collar.
    His hands felt rough against the lace and Quicksilver’s knuckles had thickened.
    For three years, those hands had held charmed swords and thrown magic-spelled lances, and taken elven life, with no remorse -- or almost no remorse.
    Could they now return to the smoothing of lace, the holding of game pieces, the signing of documents, the caressing of his wife, the quiet tasks of a king in peace time?
    They must, Quicksilver thought.   After this day, this awful final day of killing, his hands and himself must learn to live in peace.
    The civil war that had rent the fairyland in two was finished.   Rebellious subjects, enemies to peace, profaners of neighbor-stained steel were reformed, and their leaders dead, or soon would be.
    Quicksilver had won and today the main leader of those who had challenged Quicksilver’s rule would meet his swift and merciless end upon the block.
    Quicksilver tried not to think of it, even as hammer blows sounded from outside.   The worst horror of civil war had been visited upon him.  
    His enemy, whom he had defeated, was his near relation, almost the last surviving branch of Quicksilver’s own blood.
    Quicksilver’s own uncle Vargmar, elder brother of that Oberon who had sired Quicksilver, had led the rebel troops in their treasonous blood-shed.
    Ariel’s reflection upon the mirror -- half obscured by Quicksilver’s own -- showed as an intent oval face, staring out at Quicksilver with light blue eyes as though she could read Quicksilver’s grief and worry.   Her expression wavered as Ariel took a deep breath.
    "Milord," the Queen of fairyland said.   She came forward, closing the door behind her.   Her hand, soft and small on Quicksilver’s arm might have been a sparrow that, alighting timidly upon a branch, fears the snare that will snag him should he delay.   "Milord."
    The Queen Ariel’s voice was a mere whisper.   Yet Quicksilver remembered how his Queen, small and slight and seemingly fragile as she was, had stood by him through the years of this awful war -- how she’d nursed the wounded and -- being the seer of fairyland -- had endured troubling dreams of blood and upheaval, as she governed the hill in his absence.
    He turned to her and gave her his attention with a respect he’d have thought impossible when he’d, blithely, unthinkingly, married her fourteen years ago.
    "Milady," he said, and attempted to smile.
    "Milord, I dare speak only because I fear if I do not I shall lose you."   She looked at him, her blue eyes veiled, disturbed, as by a dream that refused to dissipate in the light of waking reality.   She put her hand on Quicksilver’s sleeve, and spoke in a way made more grave for his knowing that she was the seer of this hill, endowed with the power to pierce the future and give warning of it.    "Aye, me," she said.   "I have an ill divining soul."   Her eyes opened wide, unnaturally wide the way she did when she gazed upon her inner visions.   "Methinks I see you, now thou art so low, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Either my eyesight fails, or you look pale."   She looked at him, a look of enquiry.
    He sighed, and touched her face with his fingers, gently.   "And trust me, love, in my eye so do you.   Dry sorrow drinks our blood."
    Her large, blue eyes shone unnaturally, as though washed by tears and her skin looked almost as pale as the white lace upon her black dress.  
    "Forgive my daring," she said.   "I know you’ve won a great war, and that upon you and you alone weighs this decision and this thought.   So forgive your foolish wife for speaking."
    Quicksilver managed a smile, though it seemed to him his lips would crack with it.   "Ariel is not foolish," he said.   "And my Queen may dare what she well wishes."   He put his hand out to cover her own hand.
    The hammering went on, like mad music.
    Quicksilver grit his teeth.   He ran a finger down his wife’s cheek and cursed the rebels who had put fear and horror in Ariel’s gaze and etched Quicksilver’s soul with the acid of war.   Curse them.  
    Today their leader would die.   Was justice not served?
    What else could menace Quicksilver?   What else could put such fear in Ariel’s eyes, such pained discourse in her tongue?
    "Milord," Ariel said, her voice trembling.   "You are not well.   Your spirit like mine fears something that the mouth knows not how to utter nor the sense how to understand.   Yesternight you urgently stole from my bed.   And yesternight at supper, you suddenly arose and walked about, musing and sighing with your arms across and when I asked you what the matter was, you stared upon me with ungentle looks: I urged you further, then you scratched your head and impatiently stamped with your foot.   Yet I insisted.   Yet you answered not, but with an angry wafture of your hand gave sign for me to leave you: so I did.   This humor will not let you eat, nor talk, nor sleep and it could work so much upon your shape as it has much prevailed on your condition.   Quicksilver, is it Vargmar’s execution that so weighs on you?   And if so, is it really needed?"   With her free hand, she waved towards the front of the palace, where the block was being built.   "Might mercy not serve here?"
    Mercy?   Quicksilver frowned, as he felt his features hard and his eyes widen in horror.
    Vargmar, who’d die today, had blighted fairyland for all too many years.
    The revolt that today would end in blood and ordered pomp upon the block, had started with the murder of Quicksilver’s own guards upon a silent midnight.
    These murders had served the greater plan of murdering Quicksilver himself, as he innocently slept by fair Ariel’s side.
    Quicksilver shuddered, remembering his guards’ bloodied corpses, crumpled in a heap outside his door.
    Only the guards valor in that final test had saved Quicksilver.   They’d stayed alive long enough and called for help loud enough to rouse the household -- against the greater numbers of magically powerful foes.
    Their blood had purchased Quicksilver’s own life.
    Only then had Vargmar and his accomplices, caught at their attempt, called to them the malcontents and dregs of fairyland and with them taken to the hinterlands of the fairy realm.
    Those dregs had scourged the hills long enough.
    Quicksilver let Vargmar live?   What for?   That he might call to himself another such coalition and think of new ways to amaze the cowering world?
    Quicksilver stared at his wife’s face, uncomprehending.
    Mercy?
    Quicksilver sighed.   "I’ve won the war, milady, and this much I know.   I cannot have lasting peace if I show mercy.   I showed mercy to my brother once, showed him mercy despite his evil acts and that was only the beginning of a worse strife."
    "But your brother--" Ariel started.
    Quicksilver patted her hand, and let it go.   "Milady, you were not there when, on the fields of Mars, I stood surrounded by enemies and must slash my way out or die.   Nor were you there, on that awful night when I woke to feel a blade at my throat and see an enemy crouched beside my bed.   Malachite saved my life then, by killing my foe.   Think of all the valiant elves, who died as I would have, by stealth and dishonorable attack.   The fine flower of this hill was squandered upon the hills and marshes.   The harsh, wild ground drank up their blood.   Now you would that I show mercy to the man whose ambition murdered them.   Arrest such thought, my Queen.   Mercy would not serve.   It is unworthy."
    Ariel gasped and her face hardened.   Determination erased the normal, gentle cast of her features.   "You wrong me my Lord.   If I went not to war it is that you left me behind to rule your kingdom against your return.   And if I speak now, if I speak, oh, Lord, it is that I fear for you.   For I’ve had dreams such as never before, dreams that stain my nights with blood and make my sleep rank.
    "I dreamed tonight that I saw you as a statue which like a fountain with a hundred spouts did run pure blood; and many lusty elves came smiling and did bathe their hands in it.
    "Do not go on with this, milord.   For I fear for your life if you should."
    Quicksilver narrowed his eyes.
    Ariel’s dreams were normally true, but this one smelt not of truth.   Rather, the dream, like a frighted, wild thing, knocked its teeth and ran wild with terror.   The war that had, for so long, held fear over all of their heads now, being ended, allowed Ariel to give voice to that fear.
    Knowing she was affrighted, he spoke softly, "From whom should I fear?" he asked.   "Who would harm me, once Vargmar is dead?   For his own son has deserted his cause, and those centaurs whom he, with great pride, accounted his closest allies, have sworn fealty to me."   Again he raised his hand, pulling back strands of Ariel’s disarrayed pale blonde hair.   "Be of good cheer, my dear, for once Vargmar is dead you’ll have nothing to fear."
    Ariel held her hand over her heart.   "And yet I misgive me.   Can this not be delayed?"
    "What?   And I shall ask the executioner to stay his ax till Quicksilver’s wife shall meet with better dreams?
    "Your fears are foolish, wife, and if I stay my hand because of them I will all the more encourage that violence you fear against my person."
    Ariel blushed.   Red splashes stained both cheeks and the bridge of her nose.   "Woe is me.   For once were my dreams accounted of service to my lord.
    She drew herself up to her full height, which, yet, came no higher than Quicksilver’s chest.  
    Her face strained and white, she looked like the miniature of a warrior Queen, as endearing as disconcerting.  
    He wanted to hold her and knew he mustn’t.   He must stand firm.
    This time her hand gripped his arm tightly.   "The violence of the last three years has wounded you, milord, maybe more so than it wounded your enemies.   Now you have won and maybe it’s time to exert kind mercy and with it balance the scales of retribution that threaten to crush your joy and peace.   I do not know what my dreams divine, but I do much fear that in killing the traitors, milord, you’ll kill part of yourself also."
    Quicksilver shook his head.   If any part of him there was which harshness could kill, then it was dead already.   "Trouble you not, my lady," he said, offering her his arm.   "Trouble you not.   The villain will die and I shall be none the worse for it."
    Speaking thus, he led her to the door and out of it, to the broad, marble paved corridor outside the bedroom.
    There, courtiers waited their sovereign to lead his court out of the palace, to where the traitor would die.
    Amid the courtiers, Quicksilver marked Proteus, Vargmar’s only son, a pale, golden-haired youth in a dark blue velvet suit that made him appear even paler and more frail.   Looking on him, Quicksilver wished Proteus strength.
    Quicksilver, himself, had been little older than Proteus -- in his twenties and a child in elvenland -- when Oberon had died, leaving Quicksilver orphaned.   And, oh, with what heat had Quicksilver sought vengeance for his father’s spirit.
    Would Proteus?
    Quicksilver took a deep breath and looked away from the youth who bowed to him while attempting to smile with bloodless, ghastly pale lips.  
    It was not the same situation at all.
    Oberon had been cut down stealthily, by an assassin’s knife, while Vargmar would be executed after inciting half of elvenland into a war against its rightful sovereign -- after killing half the youth of elvenland.
    How many elves, fairies, how many trolls and centaurs, even, had died in those three years in which Vargmar had rained blood and destruction on those outposts that had remained loyal to Quicksilver and by stealth and dishonor killed all those whom he dared not face upon the open field?
    And for what?   For what but Vargmar’s ambition and his desire to be king?
    Vargmar’s peasant troops -- servant fairies, changelings, small elf Lords, ignorant trolls, the small band of transplanted Centaurs who’d come with the legions to the south of Avalon and, ever since, been torment and strife to fairyland -- all those had been forgiven.   They’d been allowed to say they’d been Vargmar’s dupes and had believed that Quicksilver meant to destroy fairyland.
    But Vargmar had knowingly betrayed his sovereign.
    Knowingly, he must bleed for it.
    The sound of hammering stopped.
    The block was ready.
    Quicksilver led Ariel across the throne room, to the broad stairway at the entrance of the palace, and down it, towards the crude execution block.
    The palace guards would now be getting the prisoner, while the executioner troll -- a creature three times as large as any elf and covered all over in golden fur -- stood patiently upon the stand that supported the execution block, holding his large, magical ax -- a contraption of black crystal created by dwarves in the bowels of the earth.
    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 cheese cloth, 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 -- kidnaped 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 spritly 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 imperilled 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 horse 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 equine bodies 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 Malachite’s indication, 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 foreswore 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 to play 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 other’s, 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 bloodletting 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 claws and 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 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 leery 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?

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Scene 3

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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.

    "Ush, 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? yes">  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, took 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 forbid her to go alone?
    She tried to still the scared flutter of her heart beat.   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. yes">  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.
    He was the first elf that she ever saw, the first male besides the Hunter or her troll serf, Caliban.   The first that she ever sighed for.   What a piece of work was elf.   In understanding, how like the gods.   In look, how like the angels.
    On seeing him -- his noble features, his light-spun hair, his luminous black eyes, she knew that nothing ill could dwell in such a temple for if the ill spirit had so fair a house, good things would strive to dwell with it.
    She’d come to the window and listened to him.   He’d sung to her beauty.   She’d gone to the door at his behest and for his sake, opened the back gate of the castle, ever kept locked.
    In the wood outside, which had always seemed to her forbidding and shifting, like dreams remembered in the waking morning, she’d talked to Proteus.
    They’d met, they’d wooed, they’d made exchange of vows.
    What Proteus had told her had shattered her heart, then built her a new one.
    To vows of love -- and of those there were plenty -- there had joined other, more substantial information.   Stories of the fairy kingdom, the resplendent court that gathered around a tyrant King: Quicksilver.   And more, he’d told her in that long night.   So much that she feared that her reason and her understanding would sink under it all, like an overburdened bark.
    For how could what he’d told her be true?
    He’d told her she was not the daughter of the Hunter.   She was no kith and kin of the cold immortal creature.   Instead, she was the daughter of the late and virtuous king of Fairyland.   Her father was Sylvanus, whom his brother, Quicksilver, had tricked into deposition and shameful death.
    Here, Proteus had rushed his narration and refused to give her the details of it.  
    Miranda credited it to his kind heart that avoided giving her pain.
    And though his news be strange, like a window opening to an unknown world, she’d looked at his face and read there the volumes of truth and the chapters of love.
    He’d left her before the rosy morn of humans that looked like dim sunset in fairyland.   He’d left her when the horse of her adopted father loomed in the horizon and the barking of his dogs could be heard over the eery, still landscape of frozen waves of rock and millenary trees.
    Proteus had come again the next elf-day and the next and the next.  
    His beauty assured Miranda of his truth when he spoke to Miranda of his love for her and of the just war he and his father, Vargmar, waged against the evil tyrant, Miranda’s uncle.
    For Miranda knew, from legend and tale -- all that had kept her company through her lonely childhood -- that the good were always beautiful, while the evil carried some obvious deformity upon themselves.
    There was nothing deformed in Proteus, and so he was her true and gallant knight.
    When they won the war -- Proteus had told her -- Miranda would be Queen of fairyland, and Proteus her trusty husband.
         At such prospect, Miranda grew giddy, even as, in the Hunter’s library, she waited for the hoofbeat’s of her adopted father’s horse to vanish into the thunderclouds that announced the sunset of mortals, the dawn of fairykind.
    She wished her errand could have waited longer, till she was sure he was gone for the night and would not return.
    But outside the wood, Proteus would already be waiting her, and he’d told her their errand was likely to need all the time in the day of fairy, the night of mortals.
    Proteus had asked Miranda to search for one of the Hunter’s books from these shelves.   He’d shown her the symbols that should be on the cover, and he’d told her it was a book of arcane and powerful spells.
    For Proteus’ side had lost the war and his father would soon be executed by the tyrant, Quicksilver.
    Nothing remained for Proteus but one more desperate spell, one last magical attempt.
    At which Miranda must help, for his magic was tied to the hill and any magic he used would be noticed by the evil king, Quicksilver, or his spies.
    She felt her heart hammer within her chest, part excitement and part fear, for what if Proteus failed, what if he died?
    But no, she would not think on it.   Nay, she would refuse.
    On such decision, she shook her head and drew a deep breath and, hearing Caliban moan a complaint behind her, she snapped, "To it, Caliban.   Here, here’s the symbols that will be on the cover."   She withdrew from her bosom and displayed to him the piece of paper upon which Proteus had traced the figures.   "This is what it will look like and you’ll help me look."
    "But mistress--" Caliban started.
    "Don’t mistress me.   Just search for it."
    Well she understood his reluctance, for Miranda knew in her inner heart that the Hunter would not be pleased if he caught her here.   And he would punish Caliban doubly were he to find the brute here.
    The Hunter had taught her magic -- some magic -- and he’d told her that barring the eternal creatures, creatures like the Hunter himself, she had more power than any man or elf.
    But he’d never told her to look into the arcane books, never taught her to read the strange language they spoke.   He’d forbid it, indeed, professing himself afraid for her safety, her sanity.
    A treacherous thought crossed Miranda’s mind, that perhaps the Hunter had kept her from the books to thus seal her away from discovering her true origin.
    She stamped down the thought.
    The truth was that her adopted father had never been less than kind to her.   The innocent deviltry of her childhood, the temper tantrums of adolescence, all had met with a bemused affection, a gentle joy in her presence.
    She thought, as she looked through the volumes, and climbed a ladder to reach the upper ones, that the Hunter might be hurt.   Just that.   He wouldn’t blame her and he wouldn’t turn on her.   But his eyes might acquire a wounded look and she might know that she’d hurt this immortal creature who’d never done her aught but good.
    She would know she had returned kindness with ill-will.
    Could she bear it?
    She gritted her teeth, thinking of her adopted father’s wounded expression.   Force, her heart would break.   She felt the sting of tears behind her eyes, like the swelling of rain-laden clouds, that must burst in water or else break in storm.
    Then she thought of Proteus, poor Proteus, whose father had been defeated in battle, whose last hope had been dashed.
    She swallowed back the pressure of her tears and told herself that she must hurt the Hunter to save Proteus, and that Proteus, the weaker, needed her more.
    On this resolution, she reached for the shelf, and found her fingers brushing the symbols Proteus had drawn on the spine of a blood-red leather bound book.
    "I’ve found it Caliban," she said, and, holding her green dress up away from her rushing feet, she climbed down the ladder.
    Caliban hadn’t been making much effort to look at books.   He’d been standing by the bookcase, glaring at Miranda with an air of aggrieved dignity.   Now, he followed her out of the library, with dragging step.
    "Mistress, I don’t think you should trust--"
    A look quelled him.   When Proteus had first appeared near the castle, Caliban had made such comments, and indeed, enlarged himself upon the theme that Miranda shouldn’t trust the stranger, that the stranger was just that, and might bring danger and treason to her life and him and even the Hunter.
    Miranda had answered his doubts then, and clearly enough.   By accusing him of jealousy of Proteus’ clean beauty, she’d reduced the beast to sputtering tears.
    Since then, Caliban had been quiet on the subject till now.
    What did he sense now, that pulled such words from him?
    Miranda gave her beastly servant a searching look but saw no more than his normal, surly, red-eyed boorishness.
    He’d been taken from his parents as a cub, by the Hunter who’d wanted him to be a serf to Miranda.
    Did Caliban miss his parents smelly cave in the far norther mountains?
    Did he crave the companionship of his litter mates?
    "What, Mistress, what?" Caliban asked.
    Miranda realized that she’d been staring, thinking odd thoughts indeed.   Trolls were brutes with no feelings nor memories.
    Yet, why did Caliban look ever so mournful?
    Oh, nothing, it is nothing, Miranda told herself. No thoughts, no feelings does he have that are worth my concern.
    She held the magical book to her chest, and tried to think only of Proteus as she climbed the spiral staircase that led to the back door of the tower.
    Outside the tower extended a vast garden, a thing of marvel built by the Hunter for Miranda’s delight.
    On this expanse, flowers grew together that had never, in either geography or season, known each other’s company.   Lilies intertwined with roses and those with tulips, and those yet with the exotic orchid that grew in colors so perfect and absolute that they would have been worth a king’s ransom in the world of men.
    Miranda paid no attention to the flowers, nor to the singing of myriad multicolored birds, nor to the smell of warmth and life that diffused into the crisp morning air.   All of it had amused her when she was a child, but now she was a woman and she must put her childish toys by.
    She walked along the path between the tower door and the gate that opened in the encircling wall, the gate that led to the forest and to Proteus.
    The book in her arms felt very heavy and cold, and she couldn’t help but hear, in Caliban’s shuffle behind her, an ominous question.
    Why did Proteus want this book?
    Thinking about it now, Miranda realized she did not know.   She’d been lulled by Proteus’ talk of love, of proving her love and of righting the great wrongs done to both their families.
    And yet a book of spells was for spelling -- and what spell would change the outcome of the elf civil war?   What spell would restore Miranda to the throne?   What spell could bring back the brave rebels who’d lost their life in the war?   What spell could give Proteus back his father?
    Spells -- Miranda had learned -- rarely could perform even one such miracle, much less all of them.
    Miranda doubted not that Proteus meant well.   It would be going against her very soul to doubt it.   But what if Proteus over-extended his power?   What if he misjudged some spell’s power?
    How did he expect Miranda -- Miranda who had scant training in magic and whom her fath... the immortal Hunter had forbidden from meddling with the higher books and spells in his library -- to perform such a spell?
    The spells in the Hunter’s library were, after all, designed for the Hunter himself, with his immense, cold, immortal power.
    What would they do to a mere elf?
    She tried to push her fears to the back of her mind, and yet they returned, sped thence by her aching heart.
    She couldn’t do this, she thought.   But neither could she bear the thought of losing Proteus.
    Opening the gate and leaving it open, she slipped out of the castle, with Caliban, onto the black waves of rock outside.
    Across an expanse of broken rock, the forest stood, wreathed in misty twilight.
    Miranda tried to see Proteus amid the trees, but she could neither discern his look, nor his golden hair, nor any limb of him, and when she got to the forest, she found their usual meeting place empty.
    Oh, had her evil uncle, the dark king of elves, found out where Proteus was headed?   Had the tyrant stopped him?

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