All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

gives me a chance to get a job in the theater. Look here, it gives me a chance to learn how to write plays by watching them acted and how the audience reacts. And you heard what Kit Marlowe said, about my talent. You heard what he said, he who is the very Muses’ darling.”
    “What did he say?” Silver asked, not caring, feeling only that though elves had no graves, their stuff melting into the magic and fire that had first created the universe, something had touched her and foretold . . .  death. For her or for whom? For Kit? For Will? For the whole cursed world?
    Though Kit was vain and shallow, though Kit had grown older and pinched, yet Silver remembered him in the warm heat of his youth. And though there was to Will that meanness which tightened his eyes and focused him only on his wife and brood, yet Silver had loved him once, loved him truly. Perhaps—she thought, as she looked on those golden falcon eyes, the intensity of the emotions that showed on his face—perhaps she loved him yet with some corner of her being, some particle of her magical might.
    As for the world, she would fain save that, too, if for nothing else because human and elven worlds were linked and a blight on one was a blight on the other. And because Quicksilver had loosened this doom upon the world.
    She thought of the withering crops, the mist of magical plague spreading as Sylvanus’s dark might swept over the fields toward London. The plague had been birthed by Sylvanus’s monstrous corruption of his state.
    What was the equivalent of that withering, in the elven world?
    She couldn’t contact Ariel with her mind. Not without Ariel’s finding out more about Silver than Silver wished Ariel to know. She hoped the hill was well.
    Will was telling her about what Kit had said, and what he had implied, about Will’s wish to succeed.
    “Listen, listen, Will, you must listen to me,” she said, possessed of renewed energy and attempting to make the mortal hear her as he had not before. “You are in danger. That is why I came here. I didn’t know that Kit was in danger also. But he is, and you must listen. My ill-begotten brother has hurt the Hunter and thus made the world rock upon its foundations—the plague, you mentioned it to Kit—the plague is the effect of what my brother did to the Hunter.”
    Will looked up from his paper and swept her with an unattending, uncaring gaze. “The Hunter? What am I to the Hunter or the Hunter to me? Why come you to London to tell me that woodland divinities are threatened?”
    “The Hunter is not a woodland divinity. The Hunter is . . .” Silver’s words failed her. She put both of her hands on Will, one on each shoulder.
    She looked intently into his eyes. “The Hunter is ancient and important and I did not know he could be injured, and he says, he says if—”
    She shook her head, stopped. She did not wish to tell Will about the fire in Stratford.
    She could well imagine how he would react to such a threat to his family.
    Even less did she wish to acknowledge Quicksilver’s guilt in what had transpired.
    What Will would think of this, she also knew well. That she was a temptress, a danger, and that he must get well away from her. No. Warn him of the immediate danger and be done.
    “My brother has learned to feed on human suffering, on human pain, on human death, as the gods of old did. He has no true body and yet, incorporeal, he can feed and gain power from death. I’m sure he’s come to London to feed on the deaths from this plague. We cannot afford to let him do so.”
    Will’s eyes narrowed when she mentioned the plague, but he shook his head stubbornly. “Milady,” he said, and his voice had gone all cold, dripping with icicles and foretelling separation. “Milady, what is your brother to me? What is his power? Why should I be the arbiter and judge of elven disputes?” His eyes narrowed further, but with suspicion. “Do you think to make me your dupe once more? To make me