Ill Met by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF

across the room gather together, hide their faces behind their jeweled, plumaged fans, and whisper.
    Oh, how they would dissect the stranger’s dress and her looks, talk of her too-bulbous nose, the altogether common shape of her round face. Her feet would be judged too large, her hair too coarse, her hands too broad and work-callused.
    Quicksilver wished he had worn his female aspect today, because the males among whom he stood had nothing but slavish approbation and simpering, whispered admiration for the mortal their king had already pronounced fair.
    “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Pyrite said. The shimmering green suit he wore lent brilliance to the brassy yellow hair that fell in curtains on either side of his mobile face. “Beautiful to take your heart away.”
    “Her eyes, like twin moons, have enchanted my soul.”
    “Her hair looks like wheat ready to be gathered at harvest,” another nobleman put in.
    Quicksilver gazed down at his open hands and saw the half-moon shapes his nails had cut into his palms. Dipping the ladle of his need in the river of the hill’s power, he gathered magic to heal the wounds he had given himself. Even in doing it, he was aware that his brother had allowed him the use of that power; aware of Sylvanus’s amused disdain that came with this gift.
    Another young lord, dressed in silk that owed pattern and coloring to the blooming rose in a summer afternoon, laughed musically. “May this woman soon become our king’s wife, and bring our sovereign lord a bountiful harvest indeed.”
    Others giggled.
    The mortal advanced past them, too dazzled or perhaps too scared to look in their direction. At the foot of the throne, she curtseyed.
    This grace, Quicksilver thought, might well have taken her the livelong day to learn.
    She didn’t look like a court lady, but like a broad-hipped farm girl, a peasant accustomed to harsh work. And perhaps the king meant it thus, having required a sturdy maid this time, since his last, highborn bride had proven so frail.
    Quicksilver’s hands tingled with new-healed wounds. His mind still seethed at being humiliated in front of the court. He focused his many-sided discontent on the nursemaid and thought that he couldn’t imagine what possessed everyone to suddenly see this creature as fair. Except, of course, that Sylvanus had declared her so and Sylvanus did not brook dissent.
    The mortal straightened and looked around like a sleeper wakening. It seemed to Quicksilver that she trembled slightly.
    “Ah, my dear,” Sylvanus said. “How are they treating you? Have you all you need?”
    She opened her broad red-lipped mouth, closed it with a snapping sound. A red flush tinged her pale, round cheeks, giving them a passing resemblance to harvest apples, a simile that, all gods be praised, went unremarked by the fawning noblemen who surrounded Quicksilver.
    “Milord,” the woman said. The broad vowels and rolled r ’s of the region tainted her pleasant, low voice. “I do not have all I require. Your servants have seen me well lodged and I lack for no comfort, yet I shouldn’t be here at all. My husband will be coming home and needing me, and missing his daughter that I brought with me.”
    The king’s eyebrows arched. A vertical crease formed on the bridge of his nose. His pout came back, a dissatisfied sulking.
    Quicksilver truly wished he’d come to court as a woman. Though it might have reminded everyone, once more, of his unseemly power, it would also have provided him with a fan behind which to hide the smile that kept trying to curl his lips upwards. He’d not expected the little peasant to be outspoken.
    The storm gathering in the king’s features dispersed as suddenly as it had begun. He leaned back. His powerful body relaxed visibly. His laugh rang out loudly, echoing through the halls and setting the whole, splendid company to fits of sympathetic giggling. “Thus I and all my enchanted kingdom are to be disdained in favor of a farmer, a