All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

also, in giant steps, approaching Sylvanus. “There will be an end to this, cur,” the Hunter said. “You cannot thus break your bond.”
    Once more, Sylvanus changed, as if the sound compelled him, his well-formed humanlike form compacting and shrinking into the shape of a square-headed, squat dog.
    Only the dog was bigger than he’d ever been, almost as big as a dog as he’d been as a man.
    The Hunter looked puzzled for a moment, then his voice sounded so loud that it seemed to make both earth and sky tremble, and almost obscured the screams of the dying humans. “Come to heel, you creature .”
    He advanced on Sylvanus, like a displeased master calling his puppy. “What? You dare defy me?”
    Sylvanus hunkered down and showed his glowing teeth as the Hunter approached.
    Suddenly, Sylvanus leapt. His glowing teeth pierced the darkness of the Hunter’s arm.
    The Hunter screamed, a sound such as had never been heard before. Reality wavered and turned and reeled, like a windblown paper dancing in the whirlwind that announces a storm. What light there was, amid the smoke of the fires and the darkness of the Hunter and his dogs, seemed to waver also, the very moon growing pale as if in distress.
    Drops of glowing blood fell to the earth, withering and blighting the very weeds it touched.
    Around them, as if this were a contagion-infested breath, Quicksilver could feel crops withering and dying in the fields.
    Time was out of joint and the mechanisms of the world jangled off-key.
    The dog charged again, this time sinking its teeth into the Hunter’s leg. He pulled, seeking to bring the Hunter down.
    The Hunter wrenched away and turned, his misty shape looking sickly green where it had been pitch black and alive before. “This is your fault, oh Quicksilver, king of elves. And I will come for you in judgment,” the Hunter screamed.
    With his scream he vanished, like a fog upon the air. With him vanished his waiting horse, and the pack of his cowering dogs.
    “My first victory is won,” Sylvanus crowed, his voice changing from a low growl to a smooth human voice as he shifted and unfolded into his elven form once more. “Now for the others.”
    Quicksilver realized he was covered in a sweat of fear, as he hadn’t been in many a year, not since acquiring the rule of Fairyland and all the power that came with it.
    Trembling, he watched as Sylvanus grew and seemingly called to him every tendril of darkness that touched on every one of the burned houses. He changed and shifted to a dark miasma and transported himself somewhere.
    To London. Quicksilver felt it both as a word and an image impressed upon his fevered brain. Sylvanus had gone to London, the largest city in the land. It wasn’t so much knowledge but a deeper certainty, born of blood, of sinew, of Elvenland magic.
    Sylvanus had transported to London, capital of this human realm whose boundaries overlapped sacred, elven Avalon—like two pages in a book will share a leaf, each taking up a different face, the two touching but never mingling.
    What would Sylvanus want with London? What would he do there?
    Quicksilver looked at the charred ruin around him, heard the lamentations of those who’d lost loved ones, and trembled.
    What would Sylvanus not do there, in that London of packed multitudes?
    More than half of Stratford had burned. Only a few houses stood amid the destruction caused by magical fire. Quicksilver’s magical fire.
    Where the town had been silent, now it echoed the screams of widows and the inconsolable cries of orphans.
    And all because of Quicksilver.
    The Hunter said he would come for him. Come for Quicksilver he would, doubtless, as soon as the Hunter had recovered.
    If the Hunter recovered. Quicksilver shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, feeling small and young and foolish. Oh, curse the day he’d become king, he who was so naive, so dumb, so frail, so divided.
    What if the Hunter didn’t recover? Quicksilver would willingly