Ill. Edmund was ill, after all.
He felt an odd relief.
Was this the coughing sickness that had claimed Edmund’s Jenny and her illegitimate son by Edmund?
Will shook his head. It mattered not.
If Will’s money could buy them, Edmund would have the best physicians, the most assured medicine.
If it was just this, just physical illness, then Edmund would survive.
And if not…
But all his hopes were dispelled as, after climbing Edmund’s stairs two by two, faster than his own aging legs should carry him, Will entered his brother’s shabby room.
Oh, sure, Edmund looked ilclass="underline" parchment pale and drawn, he smelled of bitter sweat, of wasting illness. His breath left his lips like a howling wind, to be called back with groans of effort. The lustrous curls of youth lay matted and damp upon Edmund’s yellowing pillow.
And yet none of this mattered. None of this.
A maiden stood between Edmund’s small, rickety bed and the unsteady table that was meant to serve as Edmund’s desk—where a ream of paper that Will had bought for Edmund sat, virgin of words, next to the untouched inkstone.
Solid as stone, unreal as ether, the beautiful stranger with the golden hair, stood and smiled at Edmund, and beckoned with wide smile, with enticing gaze.
She wore a white, semi-transparent gown, tight to her tiny waist and stopping short of the swelling roundness of her breasts, which peeked above the fabric with the creaminess of fresh butter and the sheen of fine silk.
“Come, Edmund, come,” she said, her voice the soft whisper of a brook upon parched land. “Come with me to the plain of pleasure, Moy Mell, where Boadag is king for aye and where there’s neither anger nor sorrow, nor pain.”
Will stared. From the creature there came the heady scent of lilac flowering in a Summer night.
Hag ridden. He’d been right there. Edmund was prey of creatures like this, of creatures like onto the ones that Will had known in the far off days of his youth.
Standing at the door to that shabby room in the heart of London, Will ran his hand back over his domed forehead, through his thinning salt-and-pepper curls.
The smell of fairyland enveloped him. The creature’s voice was soft temptation. She glimmered in the scant light coming through the thick lead-paneled window. She shone with her own vitality, her power, her magic.
Her golden hair flowed like molten metal, as she turned to smile at Will.
In his heart, at that moment, as its beats sped like a mad drum played by a drunken reveler at a fair, Will was again twenty and, again, stood in a forest and, artless, was made the dupe of a fairy princess.
It was a moment. A moment only.
The smell of Edmund’s sour, bitter sweat mingled with the scent of lilacs. This smell of all too human mortality, the smell of the condition to which Will was born woke him from his dream.
Will had been right in that, too. Edmund was ill. And his illness might mean death. Or it might not.
Edmund was a healthy child, a happy boy, who had run happy and contented through the garden paths of his parents backyard, amid the vegetables and the roses, with never a sick day.
Edmund’s vitality would count for him. He was young, he was strong, his life would continue.
The fear of death was nothing but a distant danger, Will told himself. For Edmund as for Will. Part and parcel of the fears to which man was heir.
And yet, in that land, Edmund would live on for sure. Will would live on for sure…
Will shook his head.
“My lady, what do you here? What call have you?” His voice caught on the words, as he spoke them, courteous and soft.
The creature, beautiful as moonlight and twice as cold, composed her milk-white features upon her little oval face, and smiled a little demure smile. “I came for to take your brother,” she said. “To take him to the plains of ever-living, where the dance lasts forever and where his words, his fire and his youth shall serve us well.”
Serve them.
Will’s indecision stopped.
Oh, not serve them. Not Edmund who’d been protected from all debt, kept free and safe by his brother Will.
Free and safe.
He must be allowed to remain free. Even if he must risk death for it.
Will rounded on the thing, his hand going up to his forehead and retracing the papist sign of the cross, his lips falling, unawares, upon the words of the paternoster.
He should have known better. Of all people he. He knew these creatures neither angels nor demons—fled not from the holy signs, the holy words.
She laughed, a crystalline laugh. “What have we with your gods, Master Shakespeare? What have you with your crucified one? Leave it be. He has no rule over us.”
Her voice was soft as velvet run over ice. Together with her smell, it made his hair stand on end at the back of his neck.
He thought of Quicksilver, king of elves. Once they’d been friends. Will heard Quicksilver’s name upon his lips like a talisman.
“Aye,” the woman said, and laughed again, the soft, mocking laughter. “Aye, you’re of his well enough. I see his power mark upon you. But that’s naught to us. We are of Erin and not of this island. We care not for his rule. You are of Quicksilver’s company, and you we cannot touch, but him” She smiled at him, silver and crystal, glittering and cold. “The boy will be ours, and fair enough. A bard for a bard and poetry to oppose to Quicksilver’s spells, should it ever come to that.”
The smile was a challenge.
“He’s my blood,” Will said. “He’s my brother. You cannot”
“He is dying,” she said, cold and precise. “Your medicine cannot save him. Here he will die. In our land he’ll live. He’ll live forever.”
“In your land something shall live,” Will said. “Something. One of you. Not my brother.” He swallowed the words he wanted to say but knew not how to form—he, the master and spinner of so many words—that the creature there, in that glittering plain beyond pain and death would not be Edmund, not the child who’d run after chickens and played with dogs. There was no room for such things in fairyland, no room for the untidy mess of human feelings. “He might be ill, but he is young. He’ll live. He’ll live like the rest of us fellows who crawl thus, between heaven and Earth. He’ll survive. He’ll learn to take the bitter with the sweet.”
But she laughed. “You know the rules, son of Adam. You know them well. Tonight is Winter solstice and tonight we ride. You hold on to him and he is yours. But once you let him go, once he joins us, he is of ours, he is none of yours.” Before Will’s eyes, she vanished.
The ride. Will knew the ride well. In Arden it had been a solstice dance. In his youth the elves had taken Will’s wife, Will’s Nan, captive. He’d held onto her through fire and ice while the fairies danced all about.
He could hold on to Edmund while the elves rode on. He could.
He looked at Edmund’s pale face, Edmund’s feverish, shining golden falcon eyes.
“In the tavern,” Edmund was saying, as though he needed explaining. “I danced with her in a tavern. Oh, Will, it was the brightest place in the world, and their music the most wonderful.”
The dance. There had been a dance, then, already, and Edmund had already taken part in it. He was marked by them then. Oh, Will must hold onto him and hold fast, or else was he gone forever.
“Worry not, Edmund,” Will said. “Worry not brother. I’ll hold onto you, and they’ll never get you.”
But Edmund’s eyes were set and feverish, as if looking on landscapes that Will could not see.
“I am… ill…” he whispered. “Ill. The coughing sickness as took Jenny and the baby.”