Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt Page B

as it touched Will’s arm, and burned with cold through Will’s sleeve. “No, you fool. That is what I came to tell you. You must not go. Not you. You must--”
    He had no time to say more.  
    The woman screamed at Will, her eyes rolling, wide open, terrified, the eyes of a horse about to bolt. “You must not do it, Master Shakespeare. I sense dangers--”
    Will had never, in his life, pulled the dagger in his belt against man or beast. That humble weapon he used to cut bread, to slice his mouton, to pare his nibs and to crumble his inkstone.
    He found his hand on the dagger, the dagger in his hand, pressed against the witch’s neck. “Now, good woman,” he said. “Now. Send me to my son.”

Scene Seven

    The same odd landscape of broken ground, amid which the black castle rises, dark against the sky of fairyland. Past it, in the forest, where each tree seems to reach upwards to touch the indifferent sky, Miranda paces, while Caliban watches her, his canine eyes fixed in abject and mute misery.

    “W hy comes he not?” Miranda asked, and in asking she paced as though, by walking, she could arrive at an answer. “Why tarries my lord so?”
    She held the book to her chest and walked back and forth in a narrow space circumscribed by the rough trunk of a broad, sprawling oak, and the towering height of an ancient pine tree.
    “He comes not. Has he forgotten me? No, I am foolish. How could he forget me? Yet I shall go distracted, for he comes not.” Holding the book precariously with just one hand, she traced, upon the pine tree’s scaly trunk, Proteus’s marks made by his dagger. M and P. Their initials entwined, as their hearts already were, as their lives would be forevermore. “No. My poor lord. What tongue shall smooth his name when I, his intended wife, so abuse him? No. He would come if he could. Therefore, he cannot. But why can he not? Why, Caliban? Has the tyrant stopped him on his way? Has the fiend had my love executed?” Thus speaking, in great anguish, Miranda turned anxious gaze to Caliban and sighed. “Speak, Caliban? Why are thou mute? Think you that he was stopped? Think you my lord is... dead?”
    Caliban only looked, his eyes i mmense.
    Throughout childhood. Miranda had thought that Caliban’s eyes were like her own, her own eyes never glimpsed except hazily in polished bits of tin and the ice upon a pond’s face on a cold winter’s morn. She’d thought Caliban’s eyes were like her own, or at least closer to her own than the cold fire of the Hunter’s eyes.
    But now she knew better. She’d seen her kind and her like in Proteus, and compared to him, Caliban was a nothing, a creature of strange, primeval forests, a creature like a dream unformed, like a nightmare unfinished.
    And his eyes, how dull his eyes
    were. How they made Miranda long all the more for company of her own kind.
    “Speak, Caliban,” she said, her voice full of impatience. Her anxiety for Proteus, her wondering about him, screamed through her lips, unmeant, turning itself into anger and lashing out at the ever-present Caliban. “Speak, Caliban, or I shall go insane. What thinkst thou happened to my lord?”
    Caliban raised his morose gaze to meet hers, and his eyes were full of patient misery, as though he’d made misfortune a friend and lain down companionably beside grief. “How should I know, mistress, what has happened to the elf you wait for? My opinion of him, you do not wish to know, and beyond that I know nothing, nor can I divine how to steady the mad rushing of your heart.”
    Miranda clicked her tongue impatiently. “Such beautiful words to hide such rude meaning. You would not comfort me.”
    “It is to me that such comforting should fall,” Proteus’s voice said.
    Miranda turned to see him approach through the broken landscape behind her. He looked tired, his hair matted and wild, his eyes sunk within dark circles, his face so pale that lips and skin and all seemed to melt in uniform gray-white