Prologue

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    Scene: A vague place, the stage fogged over with thick white clouds that veil the backdrop, turning it into mere shadows and shapes, half perceived as though in a dream.

    Enter: An elegant young man, flawlessly attired according to Elizabethan fashion, in black velvet hose and doublet. The disarray of his auburn hair, his hand covering his left eye, the blood that trickles from beneath his fingers to drip onto his broad, fine white lawn collar, all give witness to recent calamity.
    Yet he speaks in the composed tones of an impersonal narrator.
    "Between what happened and what didn't happen, what could have happened exists like a dream, suspended halfway between the safe, dark night of illusion and the harsh dawn of wakening reality.
    "To peaceful Stratford, where we lay our scene, let us then go, and, within Arden Forest's ancient confines watch the drama about to unfold, the drama of treason, and love, and star-crossed passion.
    "There, two households exist, nay, two kingdoms, which side by side have endured these many centuries, with no strife. Now, mutinity breaks between them.
    "Two households, alike in dignity. Two young men chafe, each under his destiny, and curse the stars that have brought each to his subservient position.
    "Will their travails change either? Can ill-will bring good? Does treason ever turn good to ill? Is there a price to pay for elven love? Does deceit leave its mark upon the mind? Or can power be won at no cost?
    "Watch, kind ladies and fair gentlemen, the fearful clash of these two realms which is now the two hours' traffic of our stage, the which, if you with patient ears attend, what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

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Scene 1

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An Elizabethan town of white-washed wattle-and-daub buildings, nestled in the curve of the gentle-flowing Avon. Ducklings waddle in the current and pigs walk the streets. Tall elms grow amid the houses, giving the very streets the feel of woodland glens. In an alley at the edge of town a poorly dressed young man stoops to open a garden gate.

    Will stopped at the entrance to the garden, his hand on the rickety wooden gate. A feeling of doom came over him, like a presage of some evil thing.
    A young man of nineteen, with overlong dark locks that curled on the collar of his cheap russet wool suit, Will felt as if he were about to walk into a trap. He looked around, anxiously for what the trap might be, but saw nothing amiss.
    The green garden ahead of him lay undisturbed. A few bees, from the hives next door, buzzed amid the flowers. The reddish rays of the setting sun burnished the flowers and made the vegetables a deep green. A fat brown chicken walked along the garden path, pecking at the ground.
    Will shook his head at his fear, yet his fear remained. With his feet, in their worn ankle boots, solidly planted on the mud of the alley behind his parents' property, he looked into the sprawling garden for a hint of the great unnamed calamity that he knew awaited him just around the corner.
    Half of him wanted to run in through the garden and the other half wished to hide, with animal cunning, behind the wall and spy... spy, he knew not on whom nor for what.
    His mother's stories must be getting to him, her dark muttering about the velvet-clad gentlemen who visited Nan in Will's absence.
    Will shook his head again and half chuckled at himself, but his chuckle echoed back strangely, visiting his ears like the cackle of a gloating demon.
    He raised his white gloved hand to his face and stroked the nest of soft hairs that only a young man's pride could mistake for a beard.
    Nonsense. Sick fancies born of tiredness. It was all because of his job in Wincot, wearing him low enough that fancies preyed on his mind. His work, supervising the smallest children at their learning of the letters and numerals, would be dreary and arduous enough, but the two hour walk each way to Wincot and back made it crushing.
    This very day, Will had left Stratford at the crack of rosy dawn, when the pink tints of morn were no more than a promise in the east. Now, he came back home with the sun turned to bleeding glory in the west and night closing in on all sides, like creditors surrounding a penniless debtor.
    Little wonder, then, that Will's mind should be filled with presages and wonders, with fears and unexplained dread. Little wonder.
    He needed to rest and he longed for his bench by the scrubbed pine table; for the soft bustle his wife, Nan, made by the kitchen fire -- her skirt kilted up on the left, displaying the length of her straight limbs and allowing her to move freely. Even now, she'd be clacking clay pans and stirring enticing smells from the poor vegetables and meager eggs, those homely, cheap ingredients, the best Will could provide for her. He longed for his new-born daughter, Susannah, for her mewling cries, for her wriggling in his tired arms.
    He opened the gate and trotted onto the beaten dirt of the garden path with new decision. "Nan," he called.
    This sound, too, returned oddly to his ears, like a long forgotten name, never more pronounced among the living. But Nan wasn't dead, nor gone, nor forgotten. Will had left her sleeping in their marriage bed -- the broad oak bed given to him by his Arden aunt -- when he'd dressed in the half-dark before dawn.
    Still, his trotting slowed to a reluctant walk and he dared not call her name again.
    Around him, the garden bloomed in green abundance. The neatly arranged patches of flax and herbs that Nan had planted in February, when she was already big with child, thrived. The roses Nan had brought with her from Hewland, the Hathaways' farm in Shottery, bloomed big and round, casting their perfumes into the summer air.
    Their scent mingled with the heavy odor of boiled cabbage, wafting from the house of Will's parents, next door. The two houses, built side by side, and both owned by Will's family, shared a garden and, until recently, had been used by the one family. But, on Will's marriage, his parents had made the house to the west private for him and Nan.
    Will and Nan could only use the back and the top floor, since the front hall housed John Shakespeare's glover shop. But at the back Will and Nan had their own kitchen, and, above that, their own chamber, and Will was as relieved not to have to share sleeping quarters with his siblings as his mother was glad not to have to share her kitchen with the woman she disdainfully called the Shottery girl.
    Will's relief at this separation increased, as the unsavory smell of cabbage washed over him, mingled with high-pitched screams from his three-year-old brother Edmund and the voice of his fourteen-year-old sister, Joan, raised in anger.
    His home would never be that way, he promised himself, as he walked the narrow cobbled path between the rose bushes. Rather it would be like the home he remembered from his own childhood: well ordained, with a few serving girls, and his Nan kept calm and rested enough to look after the children, who would be well fed and better dressed.
    He had no idea how to manage this on his petty-schoolmaster allowance, but he was determined to manage it, somehow.
    He rounded the corner of the garden path, beside the roses, and came into full view of his side of the house.
    If only he didn't have to use his earnings to prop his parents' failing fortunes. If only-- He stopped, his feelings of doom stronger than ever. Everything about this side of the house looked wrong.
    The shutter on the window was closed, as was the door. Will frowned.
    Nan never closed the door or the window, while the last remnants of light could be gotten from the day.
    Will's heart speed up like an unruly horse, and his feet raced upon the cobbled path.
    The feeling of wrongness, of foreboding, overpowered him. Once, when he was very small, he had seen a dog swept away by the raging Avon at the flood. He remembered the small brown and white animal paddling futilely against the current even as it dragged him on and on to his certain doom. So, now, did Will's reason paddle against the current of dread that overtook it and pulled it on and on, unrelenting.
    His running feet sped him to the door. Swinging it open, he peered into the dark, cool kitchen.
    "Nan," he called. His voice broke, as it hadn't for years. No sound answered his call.
    Blinded by the transition from daylight to dark, Will could see only vague shapes and dark shadows. He listened. No sound came from the kitchen or from upstairs. Nothing stirred. The close air reeked of wood smoke and the old mutton grease used for making tapers. But no tapers burned, no fire blazed in the hearth.
    No blazing fire meant no supper. The young man's stomach twisted in a hungry knot. For a heartbeat, he forgot his anxiety and thought disparagingly of his wife who didn't even know enough to have her husband's food ready when he came home from his weary toil.
    These thoughts so resounded of his mother's bitter voice, that Will frowned at them, reproaching the bitterness into silence. Nan was nowhere in sight. Perhaps she had fallen ill in another room, perhaps she was hurt, and yet Will, her wretched husband, could think only of his stomach. "Nan?"
    He wished to hear Nan call back and name him a fool for his alarm. He wished it so hard that he almost fancied he heard it, very far away and faint. But he knew this for an illusion.
    No matter how many times Will told himself that his fears were nonsense, that Nan must be nearby, that she must be well, dread leaped and danced in him like an obscene, mottled clown at a country fair, mocking his self assurance.
    As his eyes became acquainted with the dark, he saw that the coals in the hearth remained banked, the ashes raked around them to protect the embers in the middle and reduce the danger of fire in the night. He'd done that the night before, and left all thus in the morning, when he'd walked out eating a slice of cold mutton and some day-old bread for his breakfast. But Nan would have needed to undo this and feed the fire to prepare her dinner, and bake bread. Had Nan not had a midday meal? Had she been gone or ill for that long?
    The dread grew in Will, stronger than ever, and his hair rose at the back of his neck. "Nan?" Still half blind in the darkness, he pulled his gloves off, threw them on the table, and hurried down the narrow, shadowy corridor that separated the kitchen from the front hall.
    The front hall-shop was darker even than the kitchen, but he saw, without remarking, the hanging pelts and the wide, scarred work bench of his father's glover trade. His nose filled with the acrid smells of tanning -- old meat, spoiled eggs and stale flour -- familiar to him from childhood.
    Though wooden shutters were fitted over both windows, and the door firmly closed, this was no cause for alarm. These days this was the normal condition of John Shakespeare's glover shop. No doubt, Will's father would be hiding in his room, muttering about those who wished to catch him and make him pay his debts, though -- that anyone knew -- despite his ruined business, his slackening enthusiasm for work, he had no outstanding debts and no one pursued him.
    Will took a sharp turn left, to the almost vertical stairway at the corner of the room, and hurried up it, his feet accommodating themselves to the narrow steps by long habit.
    The entrance to the top floor was a mere square hole on the planks at the top of the staircase and, through this hole, Will pushed his upper body into the top floor. The word "Nan" started but died on his lips.
    Unlike the upper floor of the house next door, which had been partitioned into rooms to accommodate a large family, this one lacked any dividing walls to obstruct the view. Will could see the entire space at a glance, bathed in hazy light coming in through cracks in the wooden shutters that covered the three windows. Once those windows had been covered by shutters made of lead and tiny panels of glass, but such luxuries had long deserted the Shakespeare household.
    The cheap woolen covers had been pulled neat and tight over the mattress of the good oak bed against the wall. On the bed, the fat black and white tom cat that Nan had brought with her from Hewland, woke and stretched his paws in front of him, digging his claws into the bed covers. He looked at Will with an inquisitive eye and gave a little questioning murr. Beside him lay something, and, for a moment, Will thought he saw Nan, reclining there. He started to smile, when he noticed it was not Nan, not even anything close to Nan's size, but a small twig, broken from a bush, with green leaves still on it. What it was doing on his bed, he couldn't understand.
    Will took a deep breath. The dread he'd felt in the garden returned, like a horse to an accustomed stable.
    Slower, he climbed the rest of the way into the upper floor. On a peg on the wall hung Nan's good shirt and bodice and her embroidered kirtle, the clothing she wore to church on Sunday. His own good, black breeches and doublet hung on the other peg. Everything looked reassuring and accustomed, and yet the air felt heavy, impregnated with an odd floral scent.
    Will nodded to the cat as to a respected acquaintance, while he went around to look in Susannah's cradle, beside the bed.
    No sound came from the ancient rocking cradle, that had belonged to Will and each of his siblings in turn. Not the soft mewling of Susannah's cry, not even the sound of her breathing.
    For a moment, in the darkness, he thought that Susannah was indeed in there, though so immobile that his heart skipped a beat while a noose of panic tightened around it.
    But as he reached into the cradle, he touched, not the soft velvet of his daughter's skin, but something rough and harsh. Throwing the cradle blankets back, he pulled the object out: a piece of a tree branch of sizeable girth on which some wit had carved a rounded top and painted eyes and a nose and mouth, all of it so crude it might well have been executed by one of Will's five-year-old pupils. It did not look like Susannah at all and, even in the dim light, Will could not imagine how he'd ever come to mistake it for her.
    Puzzled, he turned the wood over in his hands, blinking in wonder. Who had done this? And what was this thing? It wasn't even a doll. What was it doing in Susannah's cradle? If a joke, it was a poor one. Had Nan played it? Why would Nan do such a thing?
    Sometimes, in their scant six months together, Nan had hid herself in a far corner of the house when he got home, and made him hunt for her like a madman, until he brought her to ground in her hideout, desire and laughter interlacing in their embrace. But she'd never done it since Susannah had been born. And she'd never taken her joke to the point of leaving the fire unlit and a mannequin in his daughter's bed.
    Worry rounded on Will like a hunting mastiff, nipping at his heels, trying to make him take flight. But his sluggish brain lagged, turning round and round, like a blindfolded beggar within a circle of mocking villagers. Hemmed in by worry, it spun over the puzzle of Nan's absence, and knew not what answer to fetch.
    Will's hands, working of their own accord, laid the mannequin back in Susannah's cradle and adjusted the small blanket over it, tenderly, as though it were Susannah herself. Why was Nan gone? And for how long? Could she have left Will for good?
    She couldn't. She wouldn't. Oh, true, he'd not offered her a prosperous abode, nor did his teaching earnings -- halved as they must be with his parents' household -- support Nan as he would like to support her. But then, Nan had known of his penury when she married him, had even known of it almost a year ago, when, sweet and laughing, she'd lain in the river-side fields with him, waiting no sanction of parents, or law, or church.
    Yet, Nan was gone and Susannah with her. How to explain it?
    Had Will's mother been right, when she'd talked of Nan's receiving visitors? Of velvet-suited dandies skulking around the garden paths?
    Will couldn't credit it.
    He thought of Nan just the night before, Nan by the fire, Nan cooking supper, Nan warm and gentle in his bed. Nan couldn't have left. Not Nan. Not unless those gentlemen had taken her with them by force, and who would do that? Who would kidnap a poor man's wife and his new daughter? The shadowy persecutors of his father's fancy?
    Will grinned despite his misery. These fears of his, these fantasies of doom, were like a plot hatched from his father's nightmares, his mother's fancy.
    No, no. The world was a reasonable place, not populated by old wives' fears, old men's fancies, nor by the dreams of poets or the nightmares of philosophers. In this rational place, there had to be some good reason for Nan's absence.
    Will's feet sought out the steps by feel as he made his way downstairs. Perforce, Nan's absence must have a cause as solid as the wood under his feet.
    Before he reached the bottom floor, his frantic, searching brain had found one. Nan's sister-in-law, her brother Bartholomew's wife, was due to deliver any day. How foolish of him not to have thought of this before. Nan's kin would have come from Shottery to request her help.
    Someone, probably Bartholomew himself, would have come from Hewland farm to fetch Nan, and he'd have brought his children, Nan's older nieces, to get them out from underfoot in the house. This thing in Susannah's cradle would be one of the children's toys, probably made by the child's own hand, which explained its crude imitation of human features.
    Will smiled in the dark, musty workshop and sighed in relief. His mystery was solved, to his mind's content. Now he must go to Shottery and fetch his Nan. At Shottery, his kin by marriage would give him food and ale, and he could stay the night with Nan, or walk Nan home.
    True, his legs were tired, and this walk would take away from his well-merited rest. But he'd rather put himself to the trouble of walking to Shottery and there spend the night with Nan than spend the night here, alone, in his cold bed.
    Will closed the front hall door behind himself, and squared his shoulders. After all, though only nineteen, he was a married man and married men had responsibilities. His wife would depend on him to come to her.
    When Will stepped outside his kitchen door, the sun had fully set, its panoply of color hidden beyond the edge of the Earth. The sky spread over Stratford like a blanket: a deep, cloudless, blue dome with pinpoints of stars. Will blinked up at it. It looked like the velvet gown the Queen had worn when she'd come for the pageant the Earl of Leicester had put on for her at Kennilworth, when Will was less than eleven years old. Will had gone to see the pageant with his parents.
    In his mind, Will saw again the shows for the Queen: the dancers, the plays, and, best of all, the dolphin, surmounted by the merman, navigating slowly down the river. That dolphin and merman, that had fallen on young Will's credulous eyes like supernatural manifestations, remained in his mind as a promise of a magical world that had never come true. The true world meant debts and hard work and short-lived pleasure purchased by long-lasting toil. He would never see the like of such wonders again.
    An owl hooted from the barns at the other end of the Shakespeare backyard and Will jumped, startled. His foreboding returned, called by the ill-omened bird.
    Along the garden path, a dark shape approached, an ominous shape, like a man with two heads.
    Will swallowed and his breath halted, suspended, before the shape moved closer and a soft giggle revealed the imagined monster for a woman carrying a child.
    "Nan, thank God," he said, before he realized that the woman was too short to be Nan.
    The shape giggled again, the childish giggle of Will's sister, Joan, and, as it approached, the shadow revealed Joan's still round features, obscured by her unkempt curly hair.
    "Goose," she said. "Your Nan is gone. Neither hide nor tail of her have we seen all day."
    "She's gone to Shottery," he said, speaking his wish as reality. "To help her sister at her labor."
    Joan stopped, on the path, a little to the side, allowing Will to walk by her. As he went past, his brother, Edmund, on Joan's hip, three years old and weighing down fourteen-year-old Joan, stretched out his hand to Will's arm. Will caressed Edmund's chubby face, glancingly, as he walked past.
    "Mother says Nan is gone with the gentlemen as call on her while you're at work."
    Will turned back. "Mother is like a witch poring over her cauldron, brewing lies and plots around Nan."
    With it said, he wished it unsaid, and bit his tongue in belated reproach. What manner of son called his mother a liar and a witch? Truly, the Bible warned of ungrateful children, their tongues sharper than serpent's teeth. But on the subject of Nan, Will's mother didn't speak as a dutiful wife and mother, but as a raving hag, a lunatic spouting infamy. She claimed that Nan had entrapped Will into a marriage that was as ruinous to him as disgraceful to Nan herself, and more, that Nan cavorted with others while Will was away.
    "Mother says she saw Nan go early morning, before the sun came up, amid a large company, with twinkling lights all around," Joan said, behind him. "No Shottery people, for certain."
    "Mother knows not what she says," Will yelled over his shoulder, and ran across the garden towards the gate, taking a short-cut through the rose bushes. The bushes prickled his skin and snagged his clothes, but he did not care.
    At the gate, a last, fugitive look over his shoulder showed Will his sister, still in the middle of the garden. Though the distance didn't allow it, he fancied he saw her amazed expression, wide open mouth, eyes round in shock. She'd be wondering why he ran. As though husbands should stand quietly and listen to slander heaped on their wives' names.
    And where had Joan come from, with Edmund, after nightfall? At any other time, Will would have gone back and scolded the girl, but now his Nan waited him. The thought of her enveloping arms and warm body beckoned him on. The thought of her warm voice, calming his fears, called to him like water to a parched traveler.
    Will found his way through the alley to the path that crossed the forest of Arden, the path he knew much too well from his courting days when he had taken it every evening for a year, as much to bask in Nan's sweet presence as to escape the closed-in, vile atmosphere of home: his father with his fears, his mother with her fancies.
    If only Will's father had stayed the course he'd first set. When Will had been very young, and John Shakespeare's business had thrived, John, himself, had been an alderman, an important man in the community.
    Will walked the narrow path that countless generations of feet had beaten amid towering elms and sprawling oaks, and thought of his life and his family and the obligations that bound him. At nineteen, he was a married man, with a daughter. He'd married a woman with no dowry to speak of, and he had wed himself to an arduous, ill-paying career. He reproached his father's mistakes, yet how could he hope to give Susannah a better start in life?
    From behind him he heard the distant sounds of Stratford: the occasional cry of a baby, a woman calling for her son. From her voice, the woman would be Mistress Whateley. And, knowing the Whateley brat, Will suspected the boy was as likely as not to be out of the reach of even that shrill a call.
    From farther away came the voice of a man, worse for drink, singing a mournful church song of papist times. Will caught the words Dies Irae--in fulsome, rounded Latin. That would be the owner of the Bear, the tavern where Catholics gathered to mourn the past.
    Stratford was the only town Will had ever known, and he knew it well. Its embrace could be comforting and safe like a mother's arms, but, like Will's mother, perhaps it held on too tightly and crushed that which it would preserve.
    Perhaps Will should take Nan and Susannah to London and there attempt to find a trade that would bring him better chance of fortune. But what trade? He had a good, logical mind, but a meager education and what could a mind alone do for a man of no fortune?
    When John had been prosperous, there had been talk of Will's attending University or one of the inns of the court. With his precise mind Will could have made short work of University learning. Had he but done that, he could have become a real schoolmaster, teaching older children their Latin, not the little ones their letters. He could have made enough money, then, to support a large family. Or perhaps he would have become a honey-tongued barrister, swift at unraveling legal knots. He could have supported his Nan, his sweet Nan, in style.
    And even his mother would have been unable to spin stories about Nan's consorting with mysterious gentlemen in velvet and jewels.
    Little by little, the city sounds receded, as the forest surrounded Will. Human voices became fainter, replaced by the hoots and scrapings of things scurrying and flying amid the old oaks that remained of a forest that, in the distant times of Arthur, had covered all of Britain.
    Every rough spot on the path, every stone, every twig, made itself felt through Will's worn out soles. His legs ached with a dull fatigue. He should have had his supper and he should be going to bed. He should be lying beside his Nan. But Nan was gone.
    What if she hadn't gone to the Hathaways? What if she'd run away? She used to escape from her father's strict household, he remembered. She'd dressed in her brother Bartholomew's old clothes and gone tramping about the forest of Arden for whole afternoons. Will wondered if she missed that freedom.
    After Susannah's birth Nan had turned so silent. She no longer laughed at his jests. Waking up in the night to tend the baby made her look perpetually tired. And there wasn't ever enough food, either, only the meager white meat of egg and cheese, with the occasional bit of mutton. With her feeding the babe besides, Nan had grown thin and wraithlike. She didn't seek Will's pleasure as before, nor did her sight inflame him as it once had.
    The trees whispered ominously around him, disturbed by wind.
    Will sighed.
    Things scurried and chattered in the undergrowth on either side of the path.
    Ahead, some creature cried like a wounded child.
    Could a gentleman really have been courting Nan? One of the richer merchants who came for the Stratford market, perhaps?
    Will thought that Nan -- Nan who labored nonstop, cooking and washing, mending and weaving and tending the garden -- might well have taken the promise of a better life, had a gentleman offered it to her. What fool wouldn't?
    Yet Nan was a fool in love. Nan loved him. Will was sure of this. He remembered the soft look that veiled Nan's deep blue eyes when she gazed on him. Yes, she loved him, too much and too well.
    In the distance, a dog, or perhaps a wolf, howled to the moon.
    Moonlight scarcely penetrated the deep darkness of the timeless forest, where each tree cast a whispering shadow, each bush resembled a skittering, squirming monster.
    Sweet music sounded out of nowhere, rising like a river current, surrounding and enveloping Will.
    He stopped, startled, at the sounds that were soothing, cool and harmonious and rousing all at once, gripping him in the tide of their smooth, sweet emotion.
    Ahead of him, on his right hand side, a great flash of light surged, like a flame that suddenly catches.
    Fire. He flinched in panic, and put up his hand to cover his face. Fire, now. Fire come out of nothing. The forest, dry with midsummer heat, would catch easily. Will was too close to run from it.
    But, as his dazzled eyes adapted to the light, he realized the blaze shone too pale, too mild, to be a conflagration. He lowered the hand that had shielded his eyes.
    The flash of light solidified into a tall, white castle. Because its walls had an uneven transparency like clotted milk, Will saw rooms within it and glittering servants and courtiers in velvet and jewels walking up and down white marble staircases. At the center of the castle, a vast salon sprawled, furnished only with a red carpet and a massive gilded throne.
    Courtiers and fine ladies, dressed in silk and velvet, their jewels sparkling like rival stars, stood in groups on either side of the throne. Brightly garbed minstrels played sweet music on strange instruments.
    In front of the throne, on the red carpet, stood Nan, her fair hair arranged in heavy coils braided through with pearls, her slim body garbed in fine cloth that gave off a sheen of silk.
    Around her, lights sparkled and twinkled, like the blinking beacon of the firefly.

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Scene 2

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A palace in the air, sparkling with white walls and spacious marble floors. Columns as those in ancient Greek buildings, support the far-distant ceiling, but these columns rise lighter and thinner than ever the gravity-bound laws of human architecture could permit. The ceiling itself shimmers in deep tones of pure gold, as does the throne. On the throne sits a creature who looks like a bearded man in his middle years. But his dark hair is smoother, his features more perfect than man ever possessed. He wears a crown and looks complacently around at an assembly of extraordinarily handsome courtiers. Around the walls and up near the ceiling, fly little fairies, their human shapes aloft on dragonfly wings. In a corner, a gathering of young courtiers play instruments with talent beyond mortal reach.

    "Why, now, my brother. I'm glad you've graced this assembly." King Sylvanus, Lord of Elven Realms Above The Air And Beneath The Hills Of Avalon, leaned forward on his gilded throne to look at his younger brother, Quicksilver.
    The king's oval-shaped face composed itself to show eager interest. His dark blue eyes, his small, pink lips, all of his well-proportioned features, arranged themselves in an expression of solicitude. Yet beneath all that goodwill, lurked something very much like disapproval.
    Quicksilver sighed. He'd been hoping to go unnoticed, amid the group of youths, more or less his own age, who huddled to the left side of the throne and traded gossip and news about the birth of the king's daughter, the death of his mortal spouse, and the human who had been kidnaped to nurse the royal baby.
    What other gossip had they traded, and what news had leaked from their easy prattle to the vigilant ears of the elven king?
    Fearful but determined not to show it, Quicksilver stepped forward, onto the red carpet in front of the throne.
    He should have known that he could not have remained hidden for very long. Quicksilver saw himself clearly, in his mind's mirror, and knew himself for the most lovely elven lord of his age. Besides, unlike the other courtiers, he recoiled from gaudy clothes, tinted in colors borrowed from butterfly wings and grafted from summer gardens. His grief at his humiliating submission, drove him to wearing dark clothes. His court slippers were black, as were the gloves on his long-fingered hands, and the hose and breeches that molded his long, well-shaped legs. His velvet doublet, dark as the mid-winter night sky, outlined his broad shoulders and narrow waist in gloom.
    Quicksilver even disdained the white collar fashionable among mortals and aped by most of his elven companions. He wore nothing contrasting, save only a large diamond clasp that closed his doublet at the throat, and his own long, glimmering, moonlight-colored hair, combed over his left shoulder to his waist.
    The jewel had come from his mother, sweet Titania, late Queen of the fairy realms. It was all Quicksilver had inherited from his parents. Quicksilver's heart ached within him, mingling resentment and mourning. He should have inherited the kingdom. By elven law, the youngest child should have inherited, and that was Quicksilver. The youngest child, aye, and cosseted and coddled as the heir by fair Titania and her husband Oberon before their deaths. But all that, all law, all justice, was as nothing to the tyrant, Sylvanus.
    The anger that coursed through Quicksilver tinged red the deep dark river of grief that drowned his soul. Yet, anger and humiliation, a bitter brew, hid themselves well in his sweet features, lurked unnoticed in his round, dark green eyes, as he danced forward, with mincing steps, to pay his respects to the usurper on the throne.
    What else could he do? The fairy hill had accepted Sylvanus, goaded by Sylvanus's smooth words, his depiction of Quicksilver as a lowly shapechanger. That done, Quicksilver had been defeated. He could no more live without the hill, and its power that supported his elven soul, than a mortal could have lived without air or food.
    Quicksilver tightened his hands into fists, until his well-kept nails bit into the tender flesh of his palms.
    At fifty, Quicksilver had scarcely shed his elven childhood. He was barely old enough to speak for himself.
    Five years ago, at his parents' death, he'd been a child in mind and law, more interested in his play pleasures than in the throne. By the time he'd realized he'd been robbed, the game had been played and the victor had claimed his place for good and ill.
    Rightful king or no, Sylvanus was now the lord of fairies and elves, possessor of their vows of submission and, through those, of their glamoury, their supernatural strength, their very souls.
    The might of all those conjoined powers surged through and from Sylvanus, like the discharge of heavenly power erupting from the thunder cloud to char the Earth.
    Quicksilver breathed deeply and stood before his brother, bowing his fair head slightly to the dark haired, bearded, majesty on the throne. "My lord."
    His brother smiled. "I am amazed, my brother, that you come to us thus and grace the court with your presence. I heard you wished to leave our realm, entire, for another kingdom and its fair monarch."
    Quicksilver barely stopped himself from gasping. His breath froze in his chest. The king had found him out. He knew of Quicksilver's plans, those ideas carefully spun in the dark recesses of the night, in the confidence of Quicksilver's intimates.
    Who could -- who would -- have revealed to the king Quicksilver's plans of escape? Lady Ariel? He looked at the slim blonde on the other side of the room. No, she loved him too well to want him thwarted. Pyrite? Quicksilver forbore to search out his childhood friend in the group of male courtiers. He couldn't be the traitor, anyway. Bright, fair, prattling Pyrite didn't wish to keep Quicksilver near. The comparison between their looks bode ill for Pyrite. He'd much rather be friends with Quicksilver at a distance.
    Quicksilver heard his own voice shape well-formed, facile words. "I have no wish of leaving the realm of my birth, my brother, the realm of my parents." He meant it, as far as that went. He had no wish to leave, but leave he must, to avoid the usurper, his long reach touching Quicksilver's own soul. He must, to avoid the corruption of having to draw force from the tyrant who had stolen Quicksilver's own inheritance.
    Sylvanus smiled. He extended his right hand to the thin air beside him. One of the flying fairies landed on it, dropping a rounded pearl of dew onto the monarch's palm. "I have here, my brother, copy of a message from you to the lady Amaris, Queen of the fairy realms of Tyr-Nan-Og -- asking her for the sanctuary of her kingdom, maybe the grace of her hand." The king held the dew between thumb and forefinger and, in that magic globe, Quicksilver's minuscule image pranced, begged for refuge, and preened to entice that stranger, the maiden Queen of Tyr-Nan-Og. "Will you explain my brother, then, what you meant by this message and--." The king gestured towards a troop of little flying fairies each holding a pearl-drop of dew. "By the ones that followed them, and the ones that you received in return, in which the Queen Amaris doesn't spurn you and even makes arrangements for your travel -- all without consulting me?"
    Quicksilver felt color burn in his cheeks, then vanish as he went cold with fear at the possible consequences of his failed plans. To contract marriage, or even to seek it out, without his king's consent would be treason, of course. To leave the kingdom without consent would be treason, also, for a member of the royal family. "I meant not to displease you. Nor did I wish to. In faith, I had no great design in mind. But you know, my brother, that since our parents' death, these five years ago, my heart is yet full of mourning." On a wild, crazed chance, like a deer brought to bay by a pack of hounds that will yet try to spear them on his antlers, and fight even as he bleeds into death, Quicksilver added, "If you'd give me chance to go to another kingdom, and there pursue my studies and heal my pain... I've scarce completed the training in magic use that a noble in my position must endure. And the Queen of Tyr-Nan-Og will, I'm sure, vouchsafe me a stay in her court. That's all I wished of her."
    And this was true, though the lady no doubt also wanted Quicksilver in her bed. But Quicksilver would rather not. He had been born with the capacity to change shapes between male and female at will -- an ability more befitting lowly forest shapechangers than a member of the royal family -- and in his duality he'd never found true love or even lasting desire with either gender.
    Oh, Quicksilver would have married the Queen for the power and the safety such a marriage promised. If that was the price for peace, then he would pay it. If he couldn't avoid matrimony, then he would marry rather than die. But matrimony had never been his intent. He'd just resigned himself to its inevitability. "I wanted a respite in different surroundings. Nothing more."
    The king's eyes opened, in startled surprise, as though he'd never expected to hear a defense. For a moment he frowned, then he pouted. His small, pink lips, so much like Quicksilver's own, drew into an unsatisfied expression, a pinch of disappointment, like the mouth of a child denied a sweet.
    "No," he said. "No, my brother. You're needed here, not in Tyr-Nan-Og. You'll stay where it can be seen that we two live in harmony and that there is no dissension between us. Abroad, who knows what fools might start intrigues or deceits around your fair head. Young, innocent and trusting as you are... and with your dual, changing, capricious nature, your uncontrollable mutability...."
    His brother always spoke thus, in veiled terms, of Quicksilver's power of changing between the male and female form, that gift -- that curse -- come to Quicksilver from some unknown ancestor. At least that's how the king alluded to it in Quicksilver's presence. Quicksilver knew too well that behind his back Sylvanus referred to Quicksilver as the spawn of some dark thing that had crept, unbeknownst, into their parents' bed. Quicksilver knew this had been one of the arguments used to steal the crown from his too-young head.
    Quicksilver's anger spiked, sharpened, like the new pain received when an old wound reopens.
    Just at the mention of his strange power, Quicksilver fancied he heard tittering here and there in the assembly. Even the small fairies, the servants and helpers of Elvenland, skittered about on golden wings, casting wild patterns of light. Their own version of laughter.
    Heat flared and waned on Quicksilver's cheeks in waves. His shame coursed through him like pain.
    From across the room, he saw the Lady Ariel, Duchess of the Air Kingdoms, beautiful, blonde and soft-hearted, stare at him with a pitying look. Her pitying gaze was yet another insult heaped on his suffering head. Even when the pity arose from love, Quicksilver would not suffer pity.
    And yet, what else could he do, but suffer it in good stead? The power of the hill, his need for it, bound him hand and foot to both pity and scorn. He was a prince with neither honor nor power.
    If he left here, then he could only go to another elven kingdom. And that pathway had just been barred. His careful plans of escape to Tyr-Nan-Og, the nearest and friendliest of the elven lands, had been discovered, betrayed, destroyed with a flick of the royal hand. Betrayed by whom? Quicksilver returned to the question with burning interest. Did his brother, then, have spies everywhere?
    Quicksilver bit his lower lip, trying to call forth salty blood from flesh, trying to give himself pain that would remind him of his vulnerable nature, his undeniable need for the hill.
    "Stay." The king leaned forward and watched Quicksilver as though reading his thoughts. Condescension mingled with a sharp, cunning look on the royal features. "Turn your thoughts, my brother, to the bright new day, and your joy to me, your rightful sovereign."
    Quicksilver's blood thundered in his ears, a noise like a storm at sea. "I thought, milord," he said. "That we were supposed to be mourning for your own dear wife, that mortal maiden of surpassing beauty, who died just this week, giving life to your daughter."
    Silence fell over the palace. It seemed to Quicksilver that even the servants in the distant rooms had stopped moving, stopped speaking. He knew he'd made a fatal blunder. He knew well that his brother -- with his cold nature - had forgotten his wife before she lay deep in the dark ground.
    Quicksilver had heard rumors of the new royal nursemaid arrived this day, who was expected to replace the Queen on the throne and the king's bed as well. But to know it was one thing, to speak it aloud another.
    Sylvanus, knowing well that Quicksilver had no love for the late, mortal queen, would guess that, by speaking of mourning the dead queen, Quicksilver meant only to taunt Sylvanus himself.
    Holding his breath, Quicksilver waited for the ax to fall, for the royal displeasure to cut him off from hill and power, and send him into the world as a wraith, a powerless, hollow being, neither elf nor mortal, neither ghost nor living. None in the hill would oppose that punishment, either, for such a provocation. One does not taunt sovereigns.
    Quicksilver waited, knowing himself doomed. What could have called his brother's renewed attention to him, now? What could have sparked this need to render Quicksilver harmless, defanged; this wish to torment Quicksilver until, like a pup attacked by an old wolf, he rolled on the floor and exposed that which made him vulnerable?
    Quicksilver's heart thudded erratically within his chest, like a trapped bird flinging itself at the walls of its cage and getting no more for it than torn wings.
    Sylvanus laughed, a singing metallic sound, like the hiss of a blade sharpened on good stone. "Yes, my dear wife is dead." He composed his face to sadness for a moment, then laughed again. "But, dear brother, your rightful sovereign is blessed with a daughter to lighten his days, a daughter who will have a nursemaid most fair...."
    At the words rightful sovereign, Quicksilver's nails dug with renewed vigor at his palms, exacting blood to punish a lie, though not his own. He must leave the hill. Oh, he must leave. And yet, he couldn't. He couldn't leave. Like a chained bear, baited by merciless, raging mutts, he must stay, helplessly straining at his bonds, while pain tore and rent his living flesh, his quick brain.
    Quicksilver had so long clenched his fists that the pain of his nails biting his skin had dulled, had become an old, accustomed torment, like the pain of his having been passed over, like the aching torture of being who he was and not able to fix his nature to one, proper thing.
    "Ah," The king's watchful attention, which had been intent on Quicksilver like the gaze of a cat on the mouse he tortures, softened and wandered behind Quicksilver's left shoulder and up, towards the open door of the royal salon. "The nursemaid that the raiding party has found to nurse my daughter, the princess, has arrived. Tonight, she's introduced to the court. Isn't she surpassing fair?"
    Forgotten, Quicksilver edged away from the throne, and melted again into the crowd of colorfully attired noblemen. With them, he looked towards the door of the salon.
    The mortal had been arrayed in elven finery, decked out as the most worthy of the elven ladies, in a pale green gown studded with pearls. Through the deep slashes in her sleeves, a silvery fabric shone. A tiara of crystal and pearls had been set on her hair, and she wore pearl earrings on her too-large, too red ear lobes.
    She advanced in the small, hesitant steps of one bewildered. All around her danced the small, chattering sprite fairies, skittering and flying, looking now like small humans with wings, and now like no more than glowing, pale lights.
    As humans, they grabbed at the woman's arms and her skirts, and pulled her from the front and pushed her from behind. As lights, they danced ahead of her, enticing her forth.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Quicksilver could see bevies of the fairy ladies across the room gather together, hide their faces behind their jeweled, plumaged fans, and whisper.
    Oh, how they would dissect the stranger's dress and her looks, talk of her too-bulbous nose, the altogether common shape of her round face. Her feet would be judged too large, her hair too coarse, her hands too broad and work-calloused.
    Quicksilver wished he had worn his female aspect today, because the males among whom he stood had nothing but slavish approbation and whimpering, whispering admiration for the mortal their king had already pronounced fair.
    "Beautiful, isn't she?" Pyrite said. The shimmering green suit he wore lent brilliance to his brassy yellow hair that fell in curtains on either side of his mobile face. "Beautiful to take your heart away."
    "Her eyes, like twin moons, have enchanted my soul."
    "Her hair looks like wheat ready to be gathered at harvest," another nobleman put in.
    Quicksilver gazed down at his hands, saw the half-moon shapes his nails had cut into his palms. Dipping the ladle of his need in the river of the hill's power, he gathered power to heal the wounds he had given himself. Even in doing it, he was aware that his brother had allowed him the use of that power; aware of Sylvanus's amused disdain that came with this gift.
    Another young lord, dressed in silk that owed pattern and coloring to the blooming rose in a summer afternoon, laughed musically, "May this woman soon become our king's wife, and bring our sovereign lord a bountiful harvest indeed."
    Others giggled.
    The mortal advanced past them, too dazzled or perhaps too scared to look in their direction. At the foot of the throne, she curtseyed.
    This grace, Quicksilver thought, might well have taken her the whole day to learn.
    She didn't look like a court lady, but like a broad-hipped farm girl, a peasant accustomed to harsh work. And perhaps the king meant it thus, having required a sturdy maid this time, since his last, high-born bride had proven so frail.
    Quicksilver's hands tingled with new-healed wounds. His mind still seethed at being humiliated in front of the court. He focused his many-sided discontent on the nursemaid and thought that he couldn't imagine what possessed everyone to suddenly see this creature as fair. Except, of course, that Sylvanus had declared her so and Sylvanus did not brook dissent.
    The mortal straightened and looked around like a sleeper wakening. It seemed to Quicksilver that she trembled slightly.
    "Ah, my dear," Sylvanus said. "How are they treating you? Have you all you need?"
    She opened her broad, red-lipped mouth; closed it with a snapping sound. A red flush tinged her pale, round cheeks, giving them a passing resemblance to harvest apples, a simile that, all gods be praised, went unremarked by the fawning noblemen who surrounded Quicksilver.
    "Milord," the woman said. The broad vowels and rolled r's of the region tainted her pleasant, low voice. "I do not have all I require. Your servants have seen me well lodged and I lack for no comfort, yet I shouldn't be here at all. My husband will be coming home and needing me, and missing his daughter that I brought with me."
    The king's eyebrows arched. A vertical crease formed on the bridge of his nose. His pout came back, a dissatisfied sulking.
    Quicksilver truly wished he'd come to court as a girl. Though it might have reminded everyone, once more, of his unseemly power, it would also have provided him with a fan behind which to hide the smile that kept trying to curl his lips upwards. He'd not expected the little peasant to be outspoken.
    The storm gathering in the king's features dispersed as suddenly as it had begun. He leaned back. His powerful body relaxed visibly. His laugh rang out loudly, echoing through the halls and setting the whole, splendid company to fits of sympathetic giggling. "Thus I and all my enchanted kingdom are to be disdained in favor of a farmer, a butcher's apprentice or perhaps a lowly clerk in some law firm." He laughed on. "I'm offering you, milady, all the riches of both elves and fairies, the tall inhabitants of the hills and the small magical lights of the evening, all their riches, all their magic and-." He smiled seductively. "...since you're so fair, even my hand in marriage, and a throne by my side. Yet, you stand there and tell me you require a husband. Well, and I grant you I'd be husband enough for you."
    The company tittered again. The winged fairies flashed around the room, flaring into pale lights.
    The woman recoiled, taking two steps back. Her fair but abundant eyebrows descended over her eyes, and she licked her lips, her expression one of shrewish calculation, like a goodwife at the market, faced with a higher price than she wishes to pay. Her hand went to the front of her pearl-embroidered pale green gown, as though searching for the pocket of her accustomed apron. "I do not disdain anyone. My husband is alive and well. I should be with him. I seek no other." She raised her head a little, defiantly, and one of the many tiny braids affixed upwards, beneath the tiara on her head, fell and dangled beside her ear, making her look yet more mortal and more common and somehow, perhaps because of that, more alluring - like freshly baked bread and homely meals, next to which the dainties of kings paled.
    A hushed silence fell over the assembly. In the five years of Sylvanus's reign, since King Oberon and Queen Titania had disappeared one winter night and their power vanished from amid their people, there hadn't been such frank talk heard in this court.
    Quicksilver could swear that even the sounds of breathing stopped in the salon and the wings of the serf fairies arrested, mid-beat, as though each fairy, each high-born elf held his or her breath, waiting for the king's fury to unleash.
    Instead, the king laughed again, his merriment echoed by a string of relieved titters, an echo of flashing lights and dancing winged sprites.
    "So." The king grinned at the mortal. "So. But you can't leave and return to your husband. It's my decree that you shall remain here and nurse my daughter and raise your own daughter as her sister. Soon, soon, we'll see if you do not perceive the advantages of my kingdom, the joy of my near immortal people. We'll see if you might not long to join us." The king rose to his full height, taller than any mortal man. His limber figure made him look like a mortal of twenty though among his own people, he neared middle age at three thousand years. "And now, we shall dance."
    The woman's eyes clouded with tears, and her hands clutched into fists, the twin of Quicksilver's own. But she was even more powerless than Quicksilver, against the might of the hill embodied in the king.
    That she had resisted him so far was miracle enough. That she denied him in front of his courtiers was astonishing. Most humans bent and swayed in the power of the hill, like limber pines tilting in the wind's fury.
    The musician elves in the farthest corner, who'd been playing soft, subtle music, rose and struck up their instruments louder and faster, in a dancing tune.
    "You, my dear, will dance with me." The king extended his hand to the mortal.
    For a moment it all hung in balance, and it looked like she'd refuse the proffered royal fingers.
    But a farm girl couldn't resist the elven king's glamoury. Her work-roughened hand, reddened by a hundred wash days, rested in his.
    Before other couples joined in, Quicksilver had time to wonder at her grace, the skipping step with which she led the dance, by the king's side. Then he noticed a young lady in white cutting through the crowd, towards him.
    Ariel.
    Her blonde hair shone like a halo of light around her small, intent face that had set in unbearable longing, and her whole graceful figure seemed to lean forward, intent on reaching Quicksilver. Her pale clothing lent her white skin a creamy pallor, like that of the finest silk.
    She would come to Quicksilver, she would ask him to dance and loudly repeat it, making it unseemly for him to refuse.
    Prince Quicksilver had no time and scant patience for lovesick kings, and even less for lovesick elven maids of high birth and little mind.
    Turning abruptly, before Ariel could reach him, he made for the wide, arched opening to the outside world, beyond the palace, beyond the enchanted realms of fairyland. He escaped towards the world of mortals, that place of crude and simple beings, which seemed to him, suddenly, to beckon like a promised land.
    He rushed outside - past the black-diamond armored guards who bowed their heads to him - down the broad marble steps, to the cool dark night beyond.
    He ran through the night, heedless, until he got far away enough from the bubble of light thrown by the fairy palace. In the semi-dark, he leaned against the bark of a rough tree and took greedy breaths of air perfumed with the deep, earthy scents of trees and grass.
    The voices of the small, scurrying creatures of the night surrounded him. Hurry, hurry, hurry, cried the mind of the mouse skittering through the undergrowth, while above him the sharper mind of the owl screamed of hunger and blood.
    Quicksilver's anger sang in harmony with the owl, and his fear of his brother and his brother's power screamed in unison with the mouse.
    With peevish annoyance, he pulled off his gloves and, holding them both in his right hand, smacked them on his left leg as he resumed walking. His movement was intended to disperse his impotent anger, rather than to carry him anywhere. While he strode, unminding, through the forest around the charmed palace, his errors, his many-splendored mistakes, taunted him like mocking demons.
    He should have said something in his own defense. He should somehow have salvaged his plans to leave the kingdom. He should have answered his brother's mocking tones, his implication that Quicksilver wasn't a proper elf, his intimation that Quicksilver might conspire against the kingdom. And he should, he should, have answered the barbed arrows aimed at his youth and inexperience and his mutable nature.
    With such flimsy excuses, such vile murmuring, his brother had managed to snatch the throne for himself. And no one had protested the usurpation. No one. With such flimsy excuses had Quicksilver been robbed of his inheritance.
    Flogging his thigh, as one would flog a sluggish horse, he welcomed the stings of his blows, the pain that came through the black velvet of his breeches to remind him always that he had no power. No power to rebel. No power to do anything.
    Maybe he was a child, maybe he was ineffective and foolish. Why else would he have allowed his brother to thus despoil him? Even there, in the salon, he had found no answer to his brother's public mocking, his veiled challenge.
    How could Quicksilver hope to prevail over his brother's perfidy if he couldn't even reply to the king's taunting?
    "Quicksilver, my lord, wait," a woman's voice called from behind him.
    This high, harmonious voice almost set Quicksilver to flight. Yet, he checked his feet in their attempt at running, kept them immobile on the woodland ground.
    Ariel had found him and pursued him here. Why? Even she was not usually that importune, no matter how besotted.
    Besotted. Thinking of her devotion, Quicksilver felt as though something dark and deep uncoiled within him, something serpentine and cunning, that wished to vent his anger on anything, anyone.
    This elven girl, an orphan, Pyrite's sister, even more powerless and even younger than Quicksilver, would be vulnerable to his wrath, his pent-up fury. And even if she was one of his few allies - and spies - in the court, Quicksilver knew he could safely hurt her. She would forgive him. She always forgave him.
    Quicksilver breathed deeply, more furious than ever at Ariel's folly, her soft, yielding nature. His own folly was such that he might have liked her better were she harsher.
    He rounded on her, with a cat's swift movements. "milady Ariel."
    She'd been running, full tilt, after him, and stopped, ten steps away, suddenly wary, as though something in his movement or his voice had given away his mood.
    "Milord," she said, and struggled to catch breath, and most becomingly raised her pretty, dainty hand to her pretty, dainty chest. "All evening long I've been wishing to speak with you."
    Quicksilver closed his lips tightly.
    Dressed in creamy velvet and lace, Ariel looked fair in this light, her lack of proper womanly charms masked by the shadows, her face small and peaked and anxiously turned up to him.
    Words pushed past his lips, his fury biting through them, "I do not wish for your company. Someone betrayed me to my brother and it might well have been you, Lady Ariel." These words sounded so unlikely that Quicksilver himself almost laughed at them. Ariel could no more betray than plot, no more scheme than rebel. But it served to startle her. "It might well have been you."
    She took a step back. Her hand clasped the lace at her chest. Her other hand - still holding the closed, white, feathered fan she'd used inside the salon - came up. But she never opened the fan, just held it closed near her face.
    Her pink lips shaped a round, afflicted "oh." She cleared her throat. "I've...." She shook her head. "As you know I have my modest gift, my seeress gift, and last night I dreamed of your parents, the great Oberon, our Queen Titania that was. And in my dream, they-" She stopped abruptly. Her lips went pale and her eyes opened wide, as if something in Quicksilver's face scared her.
    Quicksilver's heart beat faster, the very blood in his veins racing in frenzy, though he remained still. Ariel might be a twit, but she had a gift of dreams. And if she'd dreamed of Oberon and Titania, what had she dreamed? Was there hope his parents would return and re-establish the proper order of the world?
    He clasped her arm in his hand, crushing her creamy silk sleeve to a crumple beneath his merciless fingers. "What dreamed you, fool girl, answer me?"
    She opened her mouth, closed it. For a moment it looked like she could not command her voice to her wishes. "They came," she finally said. "As those shades of mortals that depart this world not in peace. Our king looked wan and ragged, and our Queen-" Here, Ariel, who'd been one of the Queen's own maids, managed to squeeze from her eyes two crystalline tears, and stopped long enough to wipe them to a kerchief pulled from her sleeve. "Milady was also pale and wan, and devoid of substance so that through her, as though through great rents in her being, I could glimpse another world. It was a desolate world, as pale and devoid of life as she was. Naked trees stood out against a merciless sky and the earth, the soil beneath her feet boiled like a cauldron of evil. She wore only a white thing, like the shroud in which mortals are confined at their death. And she said that by foul means were they slain, she and her royal husband, by foul means turned from this world to the place of shadows and nothingness - a place where no other elf has ever gone - where they expiate their former joys, their enchanted days. There...." She paused.
    "There where? There what?" Quicksilver's fury had been replaced with shock and impatience. His parents had been murdered? By whom? And how? It wasn't easy to kill an elf. It was even harder to kill those who held the power of the whole hill in themselves. Quicksilver thought of his own, impotent fury at his brother, his repeated, empty fantasies of killing Sylvanus.
    "There, in the land of shadows, your parents will remain imprisoned, powerless, waning, until you...." She blushed and looked away. "... until you, who are the legitimate heir of their power, should release them. By your avenging them, they will be freed to be born again into this world and the kingdom of fairy."
    "Avenging them! How did they meet their death, then?"
    "They said that they were slain when they rode north across the bridge of air, to sup with the Queen of the Northern Lights. They were stabbed through with a charmed dagger, by a mortal they met at the crossroads."
    "A mortal?" Unbelievable. Mortals could attack fairies and elves, even the sovereigns of fairies - supposing they could resist the glamoury of elven magic and the raw power of the hill that such monarchs embodied. But mortals could not hope to succeed in such attacks. Even their iron was powerless to kill magical beings. They could do no harm. Not in vain were elves considered immortals. "To murder a king, or a queen, it would take charms, powerful charms woven onto the weapon. Charms that only our kind-"
    He stopped.
    Ariel nodded, setting her baby-fine pale hair in motion, its waves shining like beacons in the dark night. "Yes. They said that the one who benefitted the most from their death had thus prepared the weapon for the wretched mortal."
    The one who benefitted most. Sylvanus. Sylvanus, the treasonous cur. Quicksilver had never suspected that much evil. Greed, yes, it lived in Sylvanus's chest, and pride, and ambition, revenge and more offenses at Sylvanus' beck than he had thoughts to give them shape or time to act them in. But treason, that was sin of a higher order, a hand raised against the gods above and the spirits below. Quicksilver had never suspected greatness in his brother, not even greatness in evil.
    In this new understanding, he looked all around with painfully clear vision. His parents' disappearance was no longer a mystery, nor did he wonder at his brother's usurping the throne.
    He wondered, instead, why the moon still shone, on hearing of such horrors. It should be thundering, raining. Clouds should crowd and do battle in the sky. The earthquake should tear asunder Earth's fragile crust, crushing trees and animals in its unfeeling hand.
    How could everything look so calm?
    Love, love, love, thought the calling frog down by the river.
    Life, life, life, twinkled the firefly close at hand.
    Quicksilver breathed air that felt by turns too cold and burning, that scalded and froze him, mind and heart.
    For Quicksilver, neither love nor life mattered any longer. Nor could he expect them to matter, even in the distant future. Gone was his dream of escaping to Tyr-Nan-Og to live a quiet life in an unclouded court, as the prince consort of a powerful queen.
    His parents had died, not just changed forms as elves would, but truly died, as no elf should die. They'd been cut off from the wheel of creation that compensated elves for their exclusion from the heaven of mortals.
    Without that wheel, Oberon's and Titania's souls would hang outside the world, struggling against the currents of time, buffeted by the hopelessness of those who would never leave the land of shadows.
    From this remote, improbable land, his parents had sent a plea for his help through Ariel's dream. They had asked the help of Quicksilver, their son, their darling, spoiled younger son, who was powerless to even prevent his brother's humiliating him before the court.
    If Quicksilver ignored their plea, if he didn't aid them, they would fade away to nothing; to less than nothing, to that nothingness that haunted those who had never existed.
    From what Ariel had said, they were close to nothingness even now.
    He must avenge them.
    But the one who'd profited most from their demise was Sylvanus and Sylvanus could not be killed. Not while he held all the power of the hill, the force of all the magic of every lord who'd sworn fealty to him - even, perforce, Quicksilver's magic and power.
    He could not be killed by an elf, an inhabitant of the hill he ruled. And yet, an idea quickened in the outraged prince's brain and all his other thoughts stopped, crushed and astonished under the weight of it. The traitor could not be punished by elven hand. But... by a mortal? Could Sylvanus's own scheme be turned upon him?
    Quicksilver looked at Ariel, her drawn features, her big questing eyes, and disciplined himself to a controlled nod of his head. "Milady, I thank you. You have done well to tell me this."
    "You--" She cleared her throat. Her long white neck stretched gracefully as she looked up at him. "You won't do anything in haste, will you, milord? It would be madness for you to try to attack...." She stopped short of pronouncing the king's name and, instead, waved her closed fan around peevishly. "To touch him would mean death for you, sweet my lord." Her white hand held his arm, pale fingers gleaming on black velvet.
    Sweet, she called him. And inside him, all the while, such vile things rustled and crawled, tainting the unsullied ice of his soul with their dark trails. Thirst for revenge joined his aggrieved pride, and through this all Ariel would walk, like the child leading both lion and lamb.
    Quicksilver shook his head. "Don't fear for me." His voice came out raspy and harsh with tears he could never, would never shed, or not until vengeance was done. "But now you must return inside, before my--before he--wonders what you've been telling me, before he sends his spies for you." Quicksilver's feelings seemed strangely muted, like drums muffled by cloth. He should be raging and screaming, begging the heavens to avenge foul murder, yet he could manage no more than the feeling that he should do so. No accompanying echo arose in his heart.
    Ariel nodded. Bobbing him a graceful curtsy, she said, "Yes, sweet lord." She grabbed his arm, and raising herself on tiptoes, with desperate suddenness, she set burning lips to his cheek for a feverish kiss.
    Then she was gone, running like a scared thing of the night, up the marble steps of the enchanted palace.
    Quicksilver stayed where he was, his gaze following her. His hand rose to touch his cheek, where her timid kiss had heated his skin.
    He let his hand fall and looked down at his gloves, that he'd twisted to a knot, between his hands. He smoothed them with slow, unwitting movements.
    With his enchanted vision he watched as, inside the palace, the false king danced with the peasant girl, while the whole noble company followed, round and round, tireless, like painted figures marching along the sides of a battle drum.
    There had been a time that Quicksilver, too, had danced thus, wearing his court slippers away in the pleasure of his own movement, in the rapture of the music lifting him. In both his shapes, he'd danced, graceful and gleeful and unashamed. But the couple leading the dance had been his parents.
    His parents.
    He wandered around the palace, keeping well in the shadow of the forest, trampling branches and leaves beneath his fine, black court slippers, and startling insects and mice to desperate flight.
    Hurry, hurry, hurry. Run, run, run, screamed small, afflicted mind-voices from the brush.
    Oh, if only his parents' shadows would send him a willing instrument for his vengeance. Someone outside the realm, someone base and crude and mortal. Someone like the mortal his brother had commanded for his foul deed. Someone who would strike at Sylvanus's rotted-through heart and kill him and not be banned from the power of the hill forever.
    And never mind if mortals who did harm the inhabitants of fairyland bought themselves death in that one action. What could Quicksilver care for the life of mortals, when his heart remained cold at his parents' plight and he had no more than a sense of what he ought to feel to guide him through his awful duty?
    He stopped. A man stood in front of him.
    Man might not be the right word. This looked like scarcely more than a boy, with overlong bones beneath supple skin, his angles and jagged ends showing only a hint of future manly power. The hair on his chin was no more than a dispirited feathery growth.
    Yet, his skin glowed as pale and even and smooth as Lady Ariel's, and his forehead rose noble and broad. His small, pink lips held an unexpected hint of stubborn strength. His dark hair fell in soft curls to his shoulders. His yellow-brown eyes were the eyes of a falcon intent on the chase.
    Not unpleasant to the eye, the young man might have been mistaken for one of the elven king's own guards, except for his clothes, which were all mortal, and cheap. Russet wool, such as the poorest peasants wore, made up his garb, though it had been cut into respectable enough doublet and breeches.
    The garments showed the boy for a mortal. A mortal aspiring to middle-class and falling short.
    Yet he looked at the enchanted palace and saw it, where mortal eyes should perceive nothing but darkness and rustling trees.
    Quicksilver sighed. This must be another Sunday child, blessed with enchanted sight. He wished the creatures wouldn't whelp on Sundays. It only caused trouble, for elf and human alike.
    And yet... if the boy could see Sylvanus, maybe he could kill him, too. Maybe Quicksilver had found his henchman. Addling the mortal's wits, persuading him to cooperate could not be hard.
    Quicksilver reached for the boy's thoughts and heard the tumult of them: Nan, my Nan.
    The youth's eyes, fixed in a mournful gaze, turned to where the peasant girl danced with the elven king.
    Ah, so this would be the butcher's apprentice, or the law clerk, or whatever he was, who'd married the woman that the elven king coveted.
    And he would be - Quicksilver smiled - the willing instrument of Quicksilver's vengeance.
    Silently, Quicksilver thanked his parents' shades for sending him such a one.
    Then, by an effort of his elven will, he bent his body to his pliant mind, and, taking advantage of the gift his brother so disdained, wished upon himself his female aspect and changed his clothes to match his form. Thus armed, he went out to begin his vengeance.

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