Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

had learned — rarely could perform even one such miracle, much less all of them.
    Miranda doubted not that Proteus meant well. It would be going against her very soul to doubt it. But what if Proteus over-extended his power? What if he misjudged some spell’s power?
    How did he expect Miranda — Miranda who had scant training in magic, and whom her fath... the immortal Hunter had forbidden from meddling with the higher books and spells in his library — to perform such a spell?
    The spells in the Hunter’s library were, after all, designed for the Hunter himself, with his immense, cold, immortal power.
    What would they do to a mere elf?
    She tried to push her fears to the back of her mind, and yet they returned, sped thence by her aching heart.
    She couldn’t do this, she thought. But neither could she bear the thought of losing Proteus.
    Opening the gate and leaving it open, she slipped out of the castle, with Caliban, onto the black waves of rock outside.
    Across an expanse of broken rock, the forest stood, wreathed in misty twilight.
    Miranda tried to see Proteus amid the trees, but she could discern neither his look, nor his golden hair, nor any limb of him, and when she got to the forest, she found their usual meeting place empty.
    Oh, had her evil uncle, the dark king of elves, found out where Proteus was headed? Had the tyrant stopped him?

Scene Four

    The inside of a peasant’s kitchen in Elizabethan England. A broad fireplace, overhung by an even broader chimney, holds a brightly burning fire. Over the fire a pot of something bubbles with a merry sound. By the fireplace itself cooking implements sit — pots and pans of iron and of clay. In a corner, not too far from the fire, a cradle hangs upon a stand and moves slightly, now and then, giving the impression of a child or babe turning within it.

    To the left, at a bench pushed near a scrubbed pine table, a woman sits. She wears plain peasant clothes, kirtle and shirt, with neither lace nor embroidery. Over them, a plain apron. She scowls at Will, who sits across from her.  

    “S peak,” the woman said. “Or go. I have no time for this.”
    She was young, with a rounded face. A white cap covered her brown hair. Her dark eyes, surrounded by bruised circles, gazed with the intent wisdom of a much older woman.
    Will, sitting across the table from her, felt the power of that glare. He shouldn’t have come here. He shouldn’t be here.
    What did he, Will Shakespeare, master playwright, the toast of the London stage, have to do with witches, with fortune tellers, with those who had commerce with dark forces and other worlds?
    Oh, playwrights of the past had been involved in such things. Kit Marlowe had been a rumored member of the School of the Night-- that group of dark seekers -- the disciple of magic, involved with things beyond the ken or interest of mortal men.
    Marlowe. Will felt as though Marlowe stood behind him, fixing him with an intent gaze. Will shivered. In this homey kitchen, redolent of herbs and cooling, Will felt cold. Yet sweat beaded on his upper lip. He found words. Innocuous ones.... “I came, good woman, in search of help in my trouble.”
    The woman’s dark eyebrows rose, above her young-old eyes.
    She flung herself up from the bench suddenly, with an impatient quickness that reminded Will of his own wife, his Nan, back in Stratford-upon-Avon.
    Approaching the fire, she stirred her pot with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” she said, and turned and grinned at him, displaying white, even teeth. “Indeed. Much you tell me. Do you think people come to see me when they’re not in trouble? Nay, I tell you. When the thread of their life runs smooth, they stay in their homes, by their snug hearths away from the likes of me. Which trouble brings you to me, Master Shakespeare?”
    Will’s heart skipped a beat.
    She’d called him by name. And he’d not given her his name. It was the first sign, the first