Free All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

made him break his vow to Nan, Will had promised it would not happen again.
    He would not break this second vow, not while starving and with death so near.
    Oh, he could ask the elf for money or food, but what would that Fairyland aid not oblige him to do in return?
    Making his face hard, he stopped and spoke from steps away. “What do you want?”
    Silver laughed. Her musical laugh, sweet and soft, rose over the shabby neighborhood, like wine-filled cups tinkling in a golden afternoon pouring mirth over a perfect assembly. “Will, Will,” she said. “Is that the way you greet an old friend?”
    Her laughter moved Will. Again, in his mind there rose a younger man he’d been, full of hopes and dreams never yet tried and with a good opinion of himself never yet tested and therefore never proven futile.
    But the older Will, this Will who had lost his hopes of being a poet and eaten his fill of failure and frustration, shook his head. “We are not friends,” he said.
    Silver looked confused, lonely, like a child who enters a familiar home and finds it changed and a friendly door barred to her access. She blinked. “Not friends?” Her large, silver eyes glimmered with the moisture of tears. “How can you say that, Will? We are friends, aye, if we are nothing else.”
    She walked toward him, and he stepped back. She arched her eyebrows in sharp surprise, and advanced still, holding on to his arm, her hand hot and firm even through the bulk of his doublet and shirt. “Oh, come, Will, be not that way. I must talk to you, must have your help. I came to London sensing your sweet soul, and on your sweet soul did I home as a bee onto freshly distilled honey.”
    His soul?
    Will had never understood elves. Old legends heard when he was young had said elves were ghosts or demons or a long-lost people.
    Did Silver truly want Will’s soul ? Oh, he’d lost much, but he’d not give that up.
    Were elves, then, the demons some legends claimed they were? Or the unquiet dead seeking revenge on life?
    Will pulled his arm away from her, and stepped back. He remembered the lying dream that spoke of elves, but he could not remember the details.
    It had been a mad dream, a dream that promised Will greatness, only to let waking reality disappoint him.
    He remembered the time he’d fallen into the tangled affairs of elves and how Silver’s seduction then had been naught but an attempt to involve him in killing the fairy king, her brother, and stealing the throne from him.
    Had Silver succeeded, indeed, Will would have been dead long ago.
    Would not her plots now be similar to her traps and schemes then? Self-serving plans that bode Will no good.
    And did Will believe this immortal creature would have shed a tear for him, had he died in fulfilling her plans?
    He looked at the reflective, shining silver eyes that, overshadowed by a rich canopy of black lashes, stared so enticingly into his own eyes.
    His body’s weak senses longed to be overwhelmed by all her beauty and to lay complyingly within her enticing arms. But his mind knew better and whispered to him of treason and mistrust.
    He stepped away from her. The movement wrenched at his own heart. He shrank away from the reach of her soft, white hand, though he needed that touch more than he needed the air he breathed.
    He stepped back till he found, behind him, the decaying wooden wall of the house where he lodged. “When has elf been friend to man, milady? When have you been my friend? You would use me for your purposes, nothing more.”
    Silver shook her head, the silken sheaf of her hair rustling in the too hot, too still, too humid night air that was as bad breath, tainted with the odors of London and its wastes.
    “You use me ill,” she said.
    Her face, frantic with some passion, her eyes narrowed and blinking to keep tears away, she looked human and frail and without cunning. “You use me ill and you should not use me thus. For I come in great important business, not just for