All Night Awake Read Online Free PDF Page A

this breach,” Quicksilver said, drawing himself up with regal might he did not feel and drawing a hearty breath.
    “Milord, I will go,” Ariel said hastily, nervously. Small, slight, she stood beside her lord like a page boy who showed the meaning of courage to mature royalty. “I’ll go see what the Hunter seeks.”
    Quicksilver flinched. Why would she think he needed protection from the Hunter? He spun around, looking at his court, and in every eye he read horrified suspicion which Ariel’s gallantry had only encouraged.
    Of what crime did they suspect him? Why feared his lady for him?
    Quicksilver said, “You dare too much, milady. You dare too much and you’re too bold. I am the king, and I need no protection. Not from the Hunter.”
    And though he shivered, thinking of the dark being and unfathomable power he’d encountered before, he tried to look brave.
    In an indecent display of magical power—what he hoped was a reassuring flaunting of his might—Quicksilver frowned down at his clothes, which changed, in that look, from silk to well-cured leather, and from tailored doublet and exquisite hose to crimson leather armor over well-padded tunic and breeches.
    Pulling his hair back and knotting it behind his head, he bowed to his alarmed wife, as suede gloves materialized upon his long-fingered hands. “Milady,” he said. “You must do the honors of my court. I, the king, will defend my kingdom.”
    But Ariel stepped close to him and laid her hand on his leather-gloved arm. “At least let me go with you, milord. At least let me help—”
    Quicksilver drew himself up and away from her. “Milady, indeed, I need no help.” He shook her hand from his sleeve and turned to Malachite, giving his back to his queen. “Igneous and Laurel and Birch?”
    “Waiting outside the palace, milord. But should you . . .” Malachite shot a glance at Ariel, who stood behind Quicksilver, and swallowed. “Is it wise to risk your majesty?”
    Was it Quicksilver’s fate today to suffer fools? Did every one of his vassals believe Quicksilver a secret criminal?
    He exhaled noisily. “My majesty was made for risk and to brave danger that my people might be safe,” he said. With a quick eye he spied the incredulous looks of his courtiers, and this tempted him on. “Come, Malachite. We’ll go and heal the breach that would undo the peace of this kingdom.”
    Quicksilver kept one step ahead of Malachite as they jogged out of the broad throne room, and through the arched door of the elven palace to the imposing entrance staircase outside.
    On the broad white marble steps, three guards—Igneous, a languid blond, and Birch and Laurel, dark-haired twins—looked awfully young and painfully eager.
    They bowed to Quicksilver, their flushed faces and impatient breath like that of a maiden at her first ball. They longed for danger and thought to court her as a fiery and fulfilling mistress.
    They knew not the Hunter, Quicksilver thought. They knew nothing of that eternal, immortal darkness nor the danger it engendered.

Scene 3

    St. Paul’s Yard, the marketplace of choice for book printers and booksellers in Elizabethan England. Around the corners of the yard, houses encroach, shadowing the space and making it look like the inside of a building, lacking only the roof to be a cathedral as imposing as the one beside it. Colorful tents dot the yard proper, streaming booklets and papers like festive ornaments. Amid the tents, the well-to-do stroll in their finery and velvets, and older scholars in dull wool cloaks skulk. Along the center aisle between the tents, Marlowe walks toward the outer gate, at a clipped pace imposed by the two men who flank him.

    K it would not be scared.
    Over the gallop of his heart, he ordered his hands not to clench one upon the other, as though in prayer to the God in which Kit no longer believed.
    This was the second time in two days that Kit had been seized by envoys of the Queen’s council.
    Only the