Ill Met by Moonlight by Sarah A. Hoyt

gate. Not that he would get even that. Common as dirt, with no name and no arms, he’d end by hanging from the gibbet while crows plucked out his eyes.
    Gossamer-like and ethereal, the lady floated toward him as if on air. A waft of perfume came with her—lilacs at full bloom, a floral scent like the one Will had smelled in his deserted room in Stratford, but stronger, more intoxicating. Will inhaled and felt dizzy.
    The vision stopped short of walking through Will, and smiled intently at him. “My kind sir,” it said. “I need your help.”
    “My . . . help?”
    The vision smiled. Her too-solid-feeling hand grasped Will’s arm just above his wrist, where the sleeve of his secondhand suit ended. Her hand felt velvety-soft and very warm. “Your help, if you will give it to me. You are, I assume, the husband and master of that fine lady.” She waved a graceful hand toward the translucent palace, within which Nan still leaped and cavorted. The lady’s gesture made the twin globes of her breasts rise and fall within her low-cut chemise.
    “Ah. Yes. Nan.” So Nan was still there, too? A coherent dream this was, for all its incoherence.
    “Good.” The woman smiled. “My name is . . . um . . . Silver. Lady Silver, and I need your help in righting a great wrong . . . and in . . . um . . . getting your wife back.”
    “Nan?” Getting Nan back? But Nan . . . Had Nan really disappeared? In the world of rational men, Nan could not have disappeared. And if this was all a dream, then Nan would still be home, with Susannah, or else in Shottery, with her kin. And if this was a dream, what did it matter what Will did or how he responded to this splendid lady with her rounded breasts, her tiny waist?
    Will’s mind spun, in confused wonder.
    “Yes, your wife. I understand you love her very much.” The woman’s smile seemed to mock the very idea of love between man and wife.
    Will gave her a shrewd look. She was dressed and behaved like a lady, but was she a bawd, sent to tempt him?
    Right. He smiled at the thought. Oh, certainly this was a bawd. A bawd in white silk walking the forest at night, beside a transparent palace, to tempt Will, petty-schoolmaster of Wincot, son of a ruined Stratford merchant. Perhaps she was a courtier inside that dream palace. Will smiled to himself.
    His smile seemed to startle the dark lady. She cocked her head sideways and examined him, as though he were a strange, wondrous object brought from overseas in the belly of a ship.
    “What—What has happened to my wife, and how may I help Nan? How may I help you—and Nan?” His mouth felt too dry. He licked his lips and gestured expansively toward the palace. If he was dreaming, he might as well find the rules behind the dream, that would allow him to rescue Nan, or at least to change the dream into something more pleasant. He eyed the lady Silver, her tightly corseted waist making an indentation between her ample bosom and her flaring hips. If this were a mad dream, then he’d dream what he best pleased. He longed to lay his face on the two satiny globes at her chest, but something in her eyes warned him against it.
    The lady smiled, as though reading his mind, or maybe just the hungry expression in his eyes. “Your lady wife and your daughter have both been taken by the people below the hill.”
    The people below the hill? Below what hill, in this flat ground of forest and fields? It took him a while to realize what the words meant, to equate this with the good people of which his grandmother had muttered and his mother had spoken, long ago, when Will was a small boy.
    He remembered his aunts and his mother, gathered in a furtive group by the fireplace, discussing mysterious, supernatural beings that inhabited mounds and disused glens, and intercepted travelers on their way through Arden Forest.
    The women had to speak of such things behind the backs of their newly converted men, because the new, Protestant religion