Free Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

his dark velvet suit vanished amid the trees not so far away, and Quicksilver sighed.
    Maybe Proteus should be followed, and saved from any passing thought any folly, any youthful mistake.
    But if Malachite followed Proteus and caught him at fault, if Malachite knew that Proteus had even weighed treason in the scales of his mind, how could Quicksilver forgive Proteus's straying and consider it normal of a youth so wronged by fate?
    No. If Malachite knew, if anyone in the kingdom knew that Proteus contemplated treason, then Quicksilver must have Proteus executed.
    For, did not, even now, Quicksilver’s enemies say that Quicksilver was too soft and yielding, the female half of his nature making him less than a warrior king should be?
    “I will follow him,” Quicksilver said. “I will.”
    Malachite stepped back, startled. “Milord--”
    “No Malachite. Cease your strife, for you cannot win. The war is over and we must return to family and hearth and the burdens of peace. I will go. He is my relative and my responsibility.”
    And, before loyal Malachite could protest, Quicksilver slipped away, amid the crowd, following the magical trail of Proteus’s presence — away to the depths of Arden forest, where the sounds of celebration and joy echoed only distant and diminished.
    Behind him, Quicksilver thought he heard the slow and steady hoof-beats of centaurs.
    But he turned back once, twice, and he saw no one following him.

Scene Six

    The witch’s homey kitchen, where Will stares, horror-stricken, at Marlowe’s ghost. Marlowe smiles, sits down.

    T here Marlowe stood, there beside Will, to his left — wearing the blue suit in which he had died. The knife that had pierced his left eye had left it bloody and gory. Blood trickled from it like tears, dripping upon Marlowe’s fine clothes.
    Yet, withal, Kit’s remaining gray eye stared mockingly from beneath a perfectly arched russet eyebrow, and his small mouth, with its protruding lower lip that gave Kit the look of a permanent pout, twisted in a wry smile between his thin moustache and his sculpted beard. “Hallo, Will,” he said and stepped, mincingly towards the table. “And hello good mother.” He bowed to the woman.
    How young he looked, Will thought. Dead but three years, and yet how young he already looked to Will’s older eyes.
    Oh, truth be told, Marlowe had always looked younger than Will.  
    Though they’d been born in the same year, and Will was the younger by a few months, they were spun of very different stuff.
    Marlowe’s delicate features and pale coloring had always lent itself better to the displays of beauty and the folly of youth than Will’s ruddy complexion, Will’s receding hair.
    But now Kit looked even younger. Like a flower, when cut and pressed shall forever remain as it was, so had death preserved Marlowe and kept in him the smile of the twenty-nine-year-old and the ready wit of the successful playwright.
    His single eye gazed upon Will, amused. “You have grown old, Will,” he said. “And you have waxed prosperous.”
    Will said nothing. Now, here, facing Marlowe’s ghost, he didn’t know what to say. So long, he’d wanted to be rid of Kit, so long he’d not been sure whether Kit’s specter really existed or it was a figment of his imagination, a burden imagined.
    Looking at Marlowe gave Will the first certainty that the words he’d written, the words that had made him famous and that caused everyone to acclaim him, were in fact Marlowe’s.
    And the first doubt about wanting the ghost exorcized.
    There was not, there had never been a Sweet Swan of the Avon. There was, instead, a doomed shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, dead three years and yet attracting London’s attention and adoration with the words of his dead, immortal pen.
    Will eyed Marlowe’s ghost narrowly and Marlowe smiled back, a strange smile, like that of a child who’s done something he knows he’ll be punished for.
    “Why do you haunt me?” Will