Read Online Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt - Free Book Online Page B

his head and for the first time looked upon Marlowe’s memory as upon that of a young man, too young, too rash, too foolish, who’d really never known anything about the world.  
    “The great fool,” he said. “He loved a creature who was....” And there he misgave, and there he stopped, his mind turning upon this point of much import: the woman to whom he spoke had been so curt, so perfectly possessed in her practical view of the world, so much like his Nan, that Will feared to mention the fairy kingdom and its denizens.
    Would she not throw it back in his face? Would she not laugh, as an adult laughed at a child’s fantasy? Did she know of the elven kingdom’s which twined mortal realms, existing side by side, and yet not touching, like two sides of a single paper?
    “If you mean to speak of the good neighbors,” the woman said, startling him, “I already know you’ve been among them. There’s the mark of their magic in you.” She stared at him, her eyes squinting like the eyes of an old woman who tried to discern some exceedingly small object in a dark midnight. “I would say the mark of their love, if I didn’t know better. For the love-protection upon you is a hot love, a burning flame of passion and selflessness and they do not love so. Their love is a cold thing, meager and small, like their gold that, once spent, changes once more to leaves and dirt, like their food that only makes one hunger for more.”
    “It is love,” Will said, and felt a great anger grow within him, his gorge rising at the thought of this love, unrequited, as insulting, as hurtful as hate unprovoked. Had he truly, still, the fingermarks of the creature upon himself? “It is love and he who loved me--”
    “He?” the woman’s eyebrows rose, startled, above her dark eyes.
    “The Lord Quicksilver, the king of elf land. He is a dual creature, able to assume now the aspect of a man now that of a woman and, man and woman, both truly. The Lady Silver, his female aspect, she once loved me well, and maybe Quicksilver loved — loves me too. I much fear he did, maybe does.”
    “You fear? You have her love? His love? And you come to me? What can I do for you?” The woman looked outraged, vaguely insulted. She set her hand on the table, and made as if to rise. “As the good book would say, whence am I worthy to receive my Lord?”
    And now Will’s anger rose, red-hot, and he trembled as he clenched his fists and stood from the table, facing the woman no longer ashamed, no longer embarrassed, no longer fearing her strange and antic powers. “Oh, curse that love and the one that gave it. Curse his interference in my life. Curse that twisted, strange affection that took Marlowe and, in a fight for the kingdom of fairyland, like a flame consumes a candle thus consumed him.
    “King Quicksilver used Marlowe, nay, used all of us like a puppeteer uses the puppets he holds. When his brother, his deposed brother, the past king of fairyland, tried to recover the throne, Quicksilver used us, his mortal slaves, to defend him. And like slaves, nay, like sticks and stones that children play with in a counting game, he threw us into the fray caring not who wielded the fatal blade and who was cut — dead with the blade through his left eye, the blood tingeing his well-cut doublet and that collar of the finest linen of which he was so proud.” Will pounded his fists together upon the table, a violent slam that made the table shake. “Thus died Marlowe, the Muses’ darling, the best poet ever to bestride a stage and reach for the stars.” He swallowed. “Thus died all the countless poems he would have penned in the remaining years of his natural cycle, the children of his genius — all perfect, all fire and air — so died they, with him, broken, throttled, buried in a paper’s grave in Deptford and forgotten by all. All this -- all -- for the cursed elf’s love.”
    There were tears in his eyes, and through them the cottage looked weird