Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

stung, as though a cobweb had fallen upon them.
    He blinked, and the homey cottage changed. Light dimmed.
    It seemed to Will that he stood in a rocky cave, the walls rough and moist, covered in green and crawling things and dripping with lichen from which ran foul, stinking liquid.
    The ground underneath his feet, instead of scrubbed oak and clean rushes, turned to bubbling foul mud, from which grayish effluvium climbed to his nose in stinging vapors.
    He felt his feet sink slowly into the mud and the cold slime seep into his shoes.
    Within the mud creatures crawled, their horror only visible now and then, in a claw surfacing, a many-toothed snout emerging above the ooze, dripping venom from sharp fangs, only to vanish again beneath the mud.
    Here a rolling yellow eye with a vertical slit for a pupil peeked in deranged hatred at Will.
    There a forked tongue emerged from the mud and lashed itself around Will’s ankle.
    Teeth fastened on his foot and pulled him down.
    Will screamed, feeling his flesh pierced.
    The witch was evil, after all. This was a demonstration of her true powers.
    As he thought this, the witch in his arms also appeared to change and writhe into a monstrous black serpent coiling madly against him, her forked tongue licking at his cheek.
    This was her mistake.
    Will saw the change and the horrid, coiled serpent in his arms. But those same arms felt, against them, the heave of a human bosom. His hand, splayed beneath her chest, felt the rough weave of her apron.
    He tightened his grip on her.
    “Be still, woman,” he said. “Would you fool me with your childish tricks? I’ve seen better tricks, long ago, in fairyland.”
    The witch whimpered and, in a moment, was matronly and soft and human in his arms again.
    The space around became, again, a cozy kitchen.
    And Will held his knife to the woman’s white throat. “I know you have some potion or some magic which you can give me that will serve my purpose.”
    “Do not do it, for it will serve only his death,” Marlowe said. And, with unmistakable fear. “And Quicksilver’s also.”
    So the ghost sought yet to preserve Marlowe’s erstwhile beloved, Quicksilver.
    With a disdainful smile, Will dismissed all of Marlowe’s prior argument, which he now knew served only to protect Quicksilver.
    Quicksilver be damned. Will would save Hamnet.
    “Let me have the cure for my ill, woman. And I will make it well worth your while.” At the mention of gain, he felt her tremble, and he pushed his knife towards her throat. “Else, tempt you a desperate man.”
    “Such potions have I,” the woman said, her voice fluttering. “But the law, of human and fairy kind both, is death to any that sells them.”
    Will cast an eye at the child in the crib. “You have a child who deserves better than an hovel in Shoreditch. A child, I guess, who knows not his father. Who, but you, should provide for your whelp? Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness and fear to die? Famine is in thy cheeks, need and oppression starve in thy eyes, contempt and beggary hang upon your back. The world is not your friend, nor the world’s law. Then be not poor, but break it, and take this.”
    He put his knife away and, from his sleeve, pulled out the small but heavy leather purse full of golden coin he’d meant to send to Nan when next he found a trusty messenger.
    The woman looked at the purse, her eyes wide, cupidity plainly written in large letters upon her pupils. “But master,” she still protested, though her voice came fainter. “Master, I cannot send you anywhere before your son will be transported. Even now I sense him being taken, not to fairyland but to another place — a place of greater magic and stronger danger.
    “Three days in that land and you’ll forever be captive there. And though there even mortal men can perform magic, yet is the magic there so strong that you will not be able to control it. And having used it will you — even if you return — forever be