Ill Met by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page A

daughter.”
    Silence fell over the palace. It seemed to Quicksilver that even the servants in the distant rooms had stopped moving, stopped speaking. He knew he’d made a fatal blunder. He knew well that his brother—with his cold nature—had forgotten his wife before she lay deep in the dark ground.
    Quicksilver had heard rumors of the new royal nursemaid, arrived this day, who was expected to replace the queen on the throne and the king’s bed as well. But to know it was one thing, to speak it aloud another.
    Sylvanus, knowing that Quicksilver had no love for the late, mortal-born queen, would guess that by speaking of mourning the dead queen, Quicksilver meant only to taunt Sylvanus himself.
    Holding his breath, Quicksilver waited for the ax to fall, for the royal displeasure to cut him off from hill and power, and send him into the world as a wraith, a powerless, hollow being, neither elf nor mortal, neither ghost nor living. None in the hill would oppose that punishment, either, for such provocation. One does not taunt sovereigns.
    Quicksilver waited, knowing himself doomed. What could have called his brother’s renewed attention to him now? What could have sparked this need to render Quicksilver harmless, defanged; this wish to torment Quicksilver until, like a pup attacked by an old wolf, he rolled on the floor and exposed that which made him vulnerable?
    Quicksilver’s heart thudded erratically within his chest, like a trapped bird flinging itself at the walls of its cage and getting no more for it than torn wings.
    Sylvanus laughed, a singing metallic sound, like the hiss of a blade sharpened on good stone. “Yes, my dear wife is dead.” He composed his face to sadness for a moment, then laughed again. “But, dear brother, your rightful sovereign is blessed with a daughter to lighten his days, a daughter who will have a nursemaid most fair. . . .”
    At the words rightful sovereign , Quicksilver’s nails dug with renewed vigor into his palms, exacting blood to punish his meek acceptance of his brother’s foul lie. He must leave the hill. Oh, he must leave. And yet, he couldn’t. He couldn’t leave. Like a chained bear, baited by merciless, raging mutts, he must stay, helplessly straining at his bonds, while pain tore and rent his living flesh, his quick brain.
    Quicksilver had so long clenched his fists that the pain of his nails biting his skin had dulled, had become an old, accustomed torment, like the pain of his having been passed over, like the aching torture of being who he was and not able to fix his nature to one, proper thing.
    “Ah.” The king’s watchful attention, which had been intent on Quicksilver like the gaze of a cat on the mouse he tortures, softened and wandered behind Quicksilver’s left shoulder and up, toward the open door of the royal salon. “The nursemaid that the raiding party has found to nurse my daughter, the princess, has arrived. Tonight, she is introduced to the court. Is she not passing fair?”
    Forgotten, Quicksilver edged away from the throne, and melted again into the crowd of colorfully attired noblemen. With them, he looked toward the door of the salon.
    The mortal had been arrayed in elven finery, decked out as the most worthy of the elven ladies, in a pale green gown studded with pearls. Through the deep slashes in her sleeves, a silvery fabric shone. A tiara of crystal and pearls had been set on her hair, and she wore pearl earrings on her too-large, too-red earlobes.
    She advanced in the small, hesitant steps of one bewildered. All around her danced the small, chattering sprite fairies, skittering and flying, looking now like small humans with wings, and now like no more than pale, glowing lights.
    As humans, they grabbed at the woman’s arms and her skirts, and pulled her from the front and pushed her from behind. As lights, they danced ahead of her, enticing her forth.
    Out of the corner of his eye, Quicksilver could see bevies of the fairy ladies