Ill Met by Moonlight Read Online Free PDF Page B

butcher’s apprentice or perhaps a lowly clerk in some law firm.” He laughed on. “I’m offering you, milady, all the riches of both elves and fairies, the tall inhabitants of the hills and the small magical lights of the evening, all their riches, all their magic and”—he smiled seductively—“since you’re so fair, even my hand in marriage, and a throne by my side. Yet, you stand there and tell me you require a husband. Well, and I grant you I’d be husband enough for you.”
    The company tittered again. The winged fairies flashed around the room, flaring into pale lights.
    The woman recoiled, taking two steps back. Her fair but abundant eyebrows descended over her eyes, and she licked her lips, her expression one of shrewish calculation, like a goodwife at the market faced with a higher price than she wishes to pay. Her hand went to the front of her pearl-embroidered pale green gown, as though searching for the pocket of her accustomed apron. “I do not disdain anyone. My husband is alive and well. I should be with him. I seek no other.” She raised her head a little, defiantly, and one of the many tiny braids affixed beneath the tiara on her head, fell and dangled beside her ear, making her look yet more mortal and more common, and somehow, perhaps because of that, more alluring—like freshly baked bread and homely meals, next to which the dainties of kings paled.
    A hushed silence fell over the assembly. In the five years of Sylvanus’s reign, since King Oberon and Queen Titania had disappeared one winter night and their power vanished from amid their people, there hadn’t been such frank talk heard in this court.
    Quicksilver could swear that even the sounds of breathing stopped in the salon and the wings of the serf fairies were arrested midbeat, as though each fairy, each highborn elf held his or her breath, waiting for the king’s fury to be unleashed.
    Instead, the king laughed again, his merriment echoed by a string of relieved titters, an echo of flashing lights and dancing winged sprites.
    “So.” The king grinned at the mortal. “So. But you can’t leave and return to your husband. It’s my decree that you shall remain here and nurse my daughter and raise your own daughter as her sister. Soon, soon, we’ll see if you do not perceive the advantages of my kingdom, the joy of my near-immortal people. We’ll see if you might not long to join us.” The king rose to his full height, taller than any mortal man. His limber figure made him look like a mortal of twenty though among his own people he neared middle age at three thousand years. “And now, we shall dance.”
    The woman’s eyes clouded with tears, and her hands clenched into fists, the twin of Quicksilver’s own. But she was even more powerless than Quicksilver, against the might of the hill embodied in the king.
    That she had resisted him so far was miracle enough. That she denied him in front of his courtiers was astonishing. Most humans bent and swayed in the power of the hill, like limber pines tilting in the wind’s fury.
    The musician elves in the farthest corner, who’d been playing soft, subtle music, rose and struck up their instruments louder and faster, in a dancing tune.
    “You, my dear, will dance with me.” The king extended his hand to the mortal.
    For a moment it all hung in the balance, and it looked as if she’d refuse the proffered royal fingers.
    But a farm girl couldn’t resist the elven king’s glamoury. Her work-roughened hand, reddened by a hundred wash days, rested in his.
    Before other couples joined in, Quicksilver had time to wonder at her grace, the skipping step with which she led the dance by the king’s side. Then he noticed a young lady in white cutting through the crowd, toward him.
    Ariel.
    Her blond hair shone like a halo of light around her small, intent face which was set in unbearable longing, and her graceful figure seemed to lean forward, striving to reach Quicksilver. Her pale