Ill Met by Moonlight by Sarah A. Hoyt Read Free Book Online

quickened in the outraged prince’s brain and all his other thoughts stopped, crushed and astonished under the weight of it. The traitor could not be punished by elven hand. But . . . by a mortal? Could Sylvanus’s own scheme be turned upon him?
    Quicksilver looked at Ariel, her drawn features, her big questing eyes, and disciplined himself to a controlled nod of his head. “Milady, I thank you. You have done well to tell me this.”
    “You—” She cleared her throat. Her long white neck stretched gracefully as she looked up at him. “You won’t do anything in haste, will you, milord? It would be madness for you to try to attack . . .” She stopped short of pronouncing the king’s name and, instead, waved her closed fan around helplessly. “To touch him would mean death for you, sweet my Lord.” Her white hand held his arm, pale fingers gleaming on black velvet.
    Sweet, she called him. And inside him, all the while, such vile things rustled and crawled, tainting the unsullied ice of his soul with their dark trails. Thirst for revenge joined his aggrieved pride, and through this all Ariel would walk, like the child leading both lion and lamb.
    Quicksilver shook his head. “Don’t fear for me.” His voice came out raspy and harsh with tears he could never, would never, shed, or not until vengeance was done. “But now you must return to the palace, before my—before he —wonders what you’ve been telling me, before he sends his spies for you.” Quicksilver’s feelings seemed strangely muted, like drums muffled by cloth. He should be raging and screaming, begging the heavens to avenge foul murder, yet he could manage no more than the feeling that he should do so. No accompanying echo arose in his heart.
    Ariel nodded. Bobbing him a graceful curtsey, she said, “Yes, sweet lord.” She grabbed his arm, and raising herself on tiptoe, with desperate suddenness, she set burning lips to his cheek for a feverish kiss.
    Then she was gone, running like a scared being of the night, up the marble steps of the enchanted palace.
    Quicksilver stayed where he was, his gaze following her. His hand rose to touch his cheek, where her timid kiss had heated his skin.
    He let his hand fall and looked down at his gloves, which he’d twisted into a knot between his hands. He smoothed them with slow, unwitting movements.
    With his enchanted vision he watched as, inside the palace, the false king danced with the peasant girl, while the whole noble company followed, round and round, tireless, like painted figures marching along the sides of a battle drum.
    There had been a time that Quicksilver, too, had danced thus, wearing his slippers away in the pleasure of his own movement, in the rapture of the music lifting him. In both his shapes, he’d danced, graceful and gleeful and unashamed. But the couple leading the dance had been his parents.
    His parents.
    He wandered around outside the palace, keeping well in the shadow of the forest, trampling branches and leaves beneath his fine black court slippers, and startling insects and mice to desperate flight.
    Hurry, hurry, hurry. Run, run, run , screamed small, afflicted mind-voices from the brush.
    Oh, if only his parents’ shadows would send him a willing instrument for his vengeance. Someone outside the realm, someone base and crude and mortal. Someone like the mortal his brother had commanded for his foul deed. Someone who would strike at Sylvanus’s rotted-through heart and kill him and not be banned from the power of the hill forever.
    And never mind if mortals who did harm the inhabitants of fairyland bought themselves death in that one action. What did Quicksilver care for the life of mortals, when his heart remained cold at his parents’ plight and he had no more than a sense of what he ought to feel to guide him through his awful duty?
    He stopped. A man stood in front of him.
    Man might not be the right word. This looked scarcely more than a raw boy, with overlong