All Night Awake (4 page)

Even the servant fairies—the tiny, winged beings who did all the hard work of Fairyland—seemed to have stopped midflight, the iridescent pattern of light they used for speech stilled.

Malachite shook his head. “I know not, milord. I know not what he wants with us.”

He looked away from Quicksilver as if he suspected his king of some crime so foul that only the supernatural vengeance of the Hunter could expiate it. “Not in fulfillment of his natural fate since that would not demand his breeching our defenses. They gave him entrance easily enough when he had business among us.”

Malachite spoke
business
with a heavy tongue.

Only ten years ago, the
business
of the Hunter in Fairyland had been the collecting of the king, Sylvanus, Quicksilver’s brother. Sylvanus had committed parricide, and thus enslaved himself to the Hunter. In forfeit and payment for his many crimes, he’d been condemned to becoming one of the Hunter’s dogs, enslaved for eternity to the dread lord of justice and slaying.

Quicksilver shivered. He was Sylvanus’s brother. Could the taint extend to him? But he had committed no crime.

“I must see this breach,” Quicksilver said, drawing himself up with regal might he did not feel and drawing a hearty breath.

“Milord, I will go,” Ariel said hastily, nervously. Small, slight, she stood beside her lord like a page boy who showed the meaning of courage to mature royalty. “I’ll go see what the Hunter seeks.”

Quicksilver flinched. Why would she think he needed protection from the Hunter? He spun around, looking at his court, and in every eye he read horrified suspicion which Ariel’s gallantry had only encouraged.

Of what crime did they suspect him? Why feared his lady for him?

Quicksilver said, “You dare too much, milady. You dare too much and you’re too bold. I am the king, and I need no protection. Not from the Hunter.”

And though he shivered, thinking of the dark being and unfathomable power he’d encountered before, he tried to look brave.

In an indecent display of magical power—what he hoped was a reassuring flaunting of his might—Quicksilver frowned down at his clothes, which changed, in that look, from silk to well-cured leather, and from tailored doublet and exquisite hose to crimson leather armor over well-padded tunic and breeches.

Pulling his hair back and knotting it behind his head, he bowed to his alarmed wife, as suede gloves materialized upon his long-fingered hands. “Milady,” he said. “You must do the honors of my court. I, the king, will defend my kingdom.”

But Ariel stepped close to him and laid her hand on his leather-gloved arm. “At least let me go with you, milord. At least let me help—”

Quicksilver drew himself up and away from her. “Milady, indeed, I need no help.” He shook her hand from his sleeve and turned to Malachite, giving his back to his queen. “Igneous and Laurel and Birch?”

“Waiting outside the palace, milord. But should you . . .” Malachite shot a glance at Ariel, who stood behind Quicksilver, and swallowed. “Is it wise to risk your majesty?”

Was it Quicksilver’s fate today to suffer fools? Did every one of his vassals believe Quicksilver a secret criminal?

He exhaled noisily. “My majesty was made for risk and to brave danger that my people might be safe,” he said. With a quick eye he spied the incredulous looks of his courtiers, and this tempted him on. “Come, Malachite. We’ll go and heal the breach that would undo the peace of this kingdom.”

Quicksilver kept one step ahead of Malachite as they jogged out of the broad throne room, and through the arched door of the elven palace to the imposing entrance staircase outside.

On the broad white marble steps, three guards—Igneous, a languid blond, and Birch and Laurel, dark-haired twins—looked awfully young and painfully eager.

They bowed to Quicksilver, their flushed faces and impatient breath like that of a maiden at her first ball. They longed for danger and thought to court her as a fiery and fulfilling mistress.

They knew not the Hunter, Quicksilver thought. They knew nothing of that eternal, immortal darkness nor the danger it engendered.

Scene 3

St. Paul’s Yard, the marketplace of choice for book printers and booksellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll in their finery and velvets, and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Along the center aisle between the tents, Marlowe walks toward the outer gate, at a clipped pace imposed by the two men who flank him.

K
it would not be scared.

Over the gallop of his heart, he ordered his hands not to clench one upon the other, as though in prayer to the God in which Kit no longer believed.

This was the second time in two days that Kit had been seized by envoys of the Queen’s council.

Only the day before, Kit had been dragged from Scagmore—his patron’s home—by one of these men, Henry Mauder, and brought to town in such a great hurry that he’d not been given the chance to change out of his indoor slippers.

Treason Abroad,
a pamphlet pinned to the side of a printer’s tent, slapped in the breeze, catching Kit’s gaze as he was hurried past. The cover displayed a caricature of the King of Spain.

Yesterday Kit, who had worked covertly for the Queen’s council since his days at Cambridge, had invoked names of those he had served as a shield against those who would now arrest him. Blithely, he’d named the late Sir Francis Walsingham and Cecil, the Queen’s present secretary.

Yesterday, Kit had been let go.

But look how he’d been apprehended again today. Had those names, then, so quickly lost their power to protect him?

“What do you wish with me, milords?” Kit asked, casting his voice just so, attempting to keep it from showing shaking anxiety, attempting to keep his fear from the sure knowledge of all the men walking past, all those scholars shopping for pamphlets and books, as Kit had done so many times before.

Henry Mauder, on Kit’s left, cast Kit a brief, triumphant glare. A messenger for the Queen’s chamber, Mauder looked perpetually scared and angry in equal measure. Kit had learned there was none so dangerous as a scared man.

Kit’s mind cast about for the cause of today’s arrest. What had Henry Mauder found out? What did he know? What did he hold over Kit like the sword of Damocles, precariously suspended?

All of Kit’s sins, remembered, danced before his eyes with lewd display. He’d blasphemed and gambled and once, drunk, said a whole lot of nonsense on the subject of boys and tobacco, to see the shocked expressions in the pious faces surrounding him. Could any of these have come home to him? “Pray, pray, he said, his voice thin and dismal. “What think you I’ve done?”

Henry Mauder shrugged. “You are being taken for to answer some questions.”

A trickle of sweat ran from Kit’s forehead, past the ineffective dam of his thin, arched eyebrows, to sting in his eyes.

His captors enforced a fast step. He saw a friend passing by, a friend who was also a secret service man.

This friend who had defended Kit in street brawls and been one of the first critics of Kit’s poems now passed by Kit as though Kit didn’t exist, his gaze not answering Kit’s beckoning recognition.

So word was out among secret service people that Kit was taken, Kit thought, chilled. Word was out that Kit was lost, caught in the net of official displeasure that fished him forth from his natural element to a terrible fate.

“What questions can you have that you did not ask yesterday?” he asked the fat man at his right.

The fat man didn’t even look at Kit. Swollen and wrinkled at once, like a prune too long forgotten in sugar water, he looked unimportant. A mere secretary. A witness.

Or a nobleman in disguise?

In the secret service, one could never tell. Fair was foul and foul was fair, each thing turned from its true nature.

Henry Mauder pursed his mouth into close semblance of a chicken’s ass and tilted his head sideways. “I see, Master Marlowe,” he said, “that heavy deeds weigh upon your conscience.”

Kit’s throat seemed to close upon his breathing, and his brain felt as if it had become a single teeny drum echoing only
What do they know?
Out of his panic, Kit spoke blindly. “I’ll not meddle with a conscience,” he said, in reasonable imitation of his normal teasing tone. He forced his lips into a smile again. “It makes a man a coward and it fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust himself to live without it.”

He took a deep breath and resolved not to show fear. Like rabid dogs, justices and officers of the crown were very like to smell your fear and, smelling it, to react to it like a hungry man to meat and bread.

They were now almost through Paul’s Yard. Almost to the outer iron gate. Almost past any hope of rescue.

Passing the tent that displayed the sign of the white greyhound, where John Harrison, printer, should be indebted to Kit for many weighty purchases and many, even weightier profits, Kit found neither recognition nor interest in his plight. The printer and his apprentices glanced past Kit as if he were suddenly invisible.

It was as though Kit were a dead man already, the lid of his tomb closed upon him, cutting him off from the world and his imagined friends.

“So, you had no conscience, then, when you wrote down that Jesus was not truly God’s son, and twenty other such blasphemies, that you proclaimed while in college?” Henry frowned again, his lips contracting into their narrowest moue, his eyes no more than slits on his suspicious face.

Kit started and drew sharp breath, turning around to stare at Mauder and needing not to fake surprise. He was astonished. While Kit had been in college? Eight years ago?

Beggar the fools, had they all gone mad?

He stared, his mouth hanging open, while in his mind he reviewed the riot of mad living he’d engaged in at Cambridge: the drinking, the gambling, and the carousing.

With those, like a man given weak ale after strong wine, Kit had in vain tried to rinse away his memory of his first love, his
elf
love.

Oh, Kit had not been so bad. He’d not stolen, nor killed, nor any other of those offenses that rightly might have brought a man to justice.

As for what he’d said . . . . What might he not have said? Those had been years of pain. Years without hope.

The memory of the elf lady, Silver, his lost love, had made Kit mad enough for anything. Even now, he shivered at the thought of Silver: dark silken hair, pale silken skin, and a mouth that tasted of new wine.

He stared at Mauder. “Who told you this?” he asked. “That I wrote any such thing?”

“Never mind who told us,” Mauder said. “We have proof enough, in a paper penned by your own hand.”

Mauder smiled wider, showing crooked teeth, yellow and savage. A wolf’s teeth, which would maul and tear. “Master Marlowe, what we have against you is right enough to see you three times hanged or disemboweled or quartered, or indeed all of them.”

Marlowe drew in a quick breath.

Unlike the boy he’d once been, who’d entered Cambridge hoping to be a minister, Kit had lost all hope of paradise beyond. Death meant nothing, save only keeping company with worms. Of his shattered faith no hope at all remained, only the fear of something worse hereafter. Doubting heaven, he kept the suspicious certainty of hell. Therefore death scared him more than it had in his young and pious days.

“Well, then,” he said, his voice sounding hollow and yet striving for a note of bravery. “Well, then, you can kill me but once.” He took off his gloves and put them on again, to give his hands some occupation. “Are we headed, then, to execution?” Even pronouncing the word made his voice tremble and he bit the inside of his cheek hard, willing pain to steady him.

Outside Paul’s Yard, just past the gate to which they hurried, he saw that a dark, boxy carriage with no markings waited. Four dark horses pulled it, driven by a black-attired coachman who might have been the devil himself.

Was this Kit’s final conveyance?

Henry Mauder looked gravely at Kit.

“We would prefer if you would do the Queen a service and reveal where you might have heard those foul heresies you then wrote down,” Henry Mauder said. “For certainly, you realize, the mouth of so dangerous a member of society must be stopped.”

The coachman descended from his perch and opened the door to a spacious but dark interior. Black seats and heavy black curtains seemed all the darker for light of the lantern suspended from the side of the carriage by iron brackets.

Kit took a step back, shying from the carriage like a nervous horse will shy from battle.

“Do you not have friends?” Henry Mauder asked. “Do you not have friends who speak such vile lies, as Christ not being divine?”