All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

suffer any punishment to be assured of the Hunter’s recovery.
    For what would happen if the Hunter did not recover? What would become of the workings of the world?
    Quicksilver hadn’t even known that such creatures as the Hunter could be hurt. He’d never suspected it. And now the Hunter was injured. With the Hunter’s scream of pain something seemed to have changed about the very nature of reality, the truths that held everything in its place.
    He watched through the smoke his elves, like unseen angels, smothering the last magical fires.
    What did it matter, this belated charity? The damage was done.
    Done through Quicksilver’s hand.
    Quicksilver had set the fire, and Sylvanus had fed upon it.
    Distracted, Quicksilver stared at the house closest to the forest, the double wattle-and-daub house of the Shakespeares. It still stood, undamaged.
    Will’s wife, Nan, had organized her in-laws and her own three children—the older girl, Susannah, and the twins, Judith and Hamnet—to carry buckets of water from the river and thus soak all before flame ever touched it.
    Quicksilver thought of Will, who was in London. Once upon a time, the Lady Silver, Quicksilver’s female aspect, had loved Will with all-consuming passion.
    Even now, thinking of that young man with the golden falconlike eyes made Quicksilver’s heart quiver.
    Will was in London. Quicksilver remembered hearing elven gossip from one of Ariel’s maids, Peaseblossom, who’d seduced a mortal youth.
    Will was in London and Sylvanus had gone there.
    Quicksilver realized he was trembling again.
    He must go to London and stop Sylvanus. He must keep the evil creature from wreaking havoc upon the unprepared humans.
    Quicksilver must, if nothing else, keep Sylvanus from hurting Will.
    And Quicksilver should stop Sylvanus, rein him in, atone for his crime against Stratford by keeping Sylvanus from destroying London.
    He, Quicksilver, was the king of elves, and responsible for all other elves, even those who had ceased to be of elvenkind.
    It fell to him to protect London from Sylvanus.
    “Malachite,” he called, and his friend approached. “Go to your mistress. Tell her I’ve gone to London, and whatever you do, do not disclose this sad fray here. No reason she should fear.”
    No reason fair Ariel, who loved Quicksilver enough to imagine him a good king, should know that he had brought doom on innocent humans and loosed plague and danger upon both fairy and mortal.

Scene 5

    A road running along the Thames River. On the other side of the river, the impressive mansions of the nobility line up in impressive display, their stone facades vying to outdo each other in grandeur and architectural ornament. On the nearer side, only a few houses, hovels, and decaying warehouses cluster. Amid them, a small shop remains open, a lantern burning over the sign that advertises used clothes for resale. Will Shakespeare enters the shop, where clothes hang from the ceiling and lie in neat piles upon the two tables that take up most of the scant interior space. An old man sits at the back, by a small table at which a wavering oil lamp burns. Two other, younger men argue with him.

    “ N ot worth three pennies.” The old man turned a dark red velvet doublet over and over in his dried-up clawlike hands. He squinted at the fabric and squeezed his lips together, multiplying the wrinkles on his already wrinkled face.
    “I need five pennies, please, master,” a tall man in his twenties, obviously the owner of the doublet, said. “I must have five pennies to pay my gaming debt.”
    “Three pennies,” the man said. “And I’m being too generous. I’ll ruin myself this way.”
    He waved the tall man aside, saying, “Think it over.”
    The blond youth, no more than sixteen or so, pushed a folded dark suit at the man.
    The boy looked scared and his anxiety mounted as the old man picked at seams, and turned sleeves, and made smacking sounds with his mouth.
    Will Shakespeare held on