Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt

asked. “What do you want of me?”
    “I never meant to haunt you, Marlowe said. “I was foolish. I gave you my words,” he said. “But no one told me the price to pay and the penalty of my good deed. In the final judgment, because of that one good deed, when the judge weighed my follies in the scale against my worth, the two plates of the scale came dead even and did not move.
    “Thus was my fate weighed, thus was I judged too good for hell, too ill for heaven, and then did my words like a golden filament, an unforgiving tether, call to me and hold me here.” His one eye filled with tears, while his mouth yet twisted in a smile. “It wouldn’t matter to me, nor would I care, but for Imp, that son I fathered without meaning and killed without intent. He waits for me heavenward. I disappointed the boy too much living to disappoint him again now.”
    Will raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know what Kit meant. Oh, he knew well enough — or at least suspected — that Kit had fathered a son by his erstwhile landlady and that the boy --nicknamed Imp -- aged six or seven, had died in the awful struggle for the elf throne that had claimed his own father’s life. But what Kit meant otherwise, Will could not tell.
    Will’s imagination had never run to matters of final judgment or of glory ever after, and what Kit spoke of seemed too legalistic, too exacting, to be real.
    Yet what did Will know of reality, he who had meddled with the fairy realms? Other people thought that an illusion, and yet Will knew it was real. How dared he doubt the reality Marlowe averred? For Marlowe was dead and, therefore, should know of judgment and heaven and hell. More than Will, who had not yet shuffled off his mortal coil.  
    “I know you do not understand, yet hear this — one good deed would put me over the threshold of heaven, one good deed alone catapult me to glory with angel wings and harp song.” Kit tried to look innocent, but his small, expressive mouth twisted in wry amusement at such an image. Then his features sobered and softened and his gaze seemed to look on something inexpressively dear. “And Imp’s company forevermore. So you must hear, for this is my good deed, and I wish it accounted to me as it should be. I came to pay you warning.
    “In the fairy realm, anew, does trouble boil like pus out of an ill-healed wound. There’s conspiracy afoot and disaster beyond it. A trap for Quicksilver is being laid, with your undistinguished self as the cheese that shall lure the royal mouse.”
    “Myself? As bait for Quicksilver?” Will asked. It passed his understanding. He’d not seen Quicksilver for three years, nor did he know what Quicksilver thought of him now. They’d not parted so amicably three years ago. Could Quicksilver still love him? Could the Lady Silver still love him?
    At the thought of Lady Silver he grew dizzy and shook his head to clear it. “But what will they use to draw me into their quarrels who am so well schooled in their effects? How will they tempt me into their death-dealing duels, their magical arguments?”
    Kit’s ghost appeared to hesitate. His gaze wavered, and his hand moved, midair, as though attempting to clutch aught that wasn’t there. His whole form seemed to wink out of sight for a moment, only to solidify again.
    “This is my warning. Pay heed, Will; do not go rushing where your heart leads, for it will only lead you tripping into nothingness.”
    “Speak plainly,” Will said. “I tire of riddles.” What a nimble tongue this ghost had, that defied Will’s understanding.
    “You too have a son, an eleven year old boy.”
    “Hamnet?” Will heard his own voice, raspy and menacing, erupt from his throat as though it would scratch it on emerging. “What of Hamnet?” In speaking, he half rose from his bench and stood, trembling.
    He had that one son, aye, that one light and hope for this days. His two daughters — fourteen-year-old Susannah, and Judith, Hamnet’s twin -- he