The Great Night Read Online Free Page A

and “I thought tonight would be different”
and “Some Great Night this is going to be!” A few of them wandered off in small companies down the hill, more faithful to their holiday than to the Queen who didn’t have the heart to celebrate it. Most were too timid to spurn her presence, but bold enough to sit without leave and complain to one another loudly and at length. But the three who had been nearest to her husband, and who now were nearest to her, closed on her, taking liberties with her person, stroking her hair and kissing her hands and her feet, uselessly attempting to comfort her. Puck, still smiling, remained where he was.
    â€œWicked thing,” the Queen said to him. “You are failing on purpose to find him.”
    â€œYou know I cannot willingly fail at anything you set me to. Your word is his word, and I am bound to obey.” He shook his silver chain, and the tinkle and rattle and chime stilled a few complaining conversations. It made the host nervous when Puck rattled his chain, and none of them were really comfortable having him around now that the King was gone. “He outmatches me. But perhaps if I were unbound?” He fell to his knees and slid closer to the Queen, offering her the back of his neck, where a thumb-sized block of rough silver bound the ends of the chain. They had this conversation every night, after every report of failure, Puck always bolder in his requests for freedom.
    â€œI would sooner put out the sun,” she said, her usual response, and it sounded to all but the most discerning ears the same as it did on any other night, but Puck and her three closest courtiers heard overtones of resignation in her voice. The three courtiers reacted by stroking and kissing her more frantically, whispering to her that she shouldn’t listen, and calling on Puck to be silent.
    Puck said, “Maybe someone should put it out.” The thought had actually occurred to her, when she was in her deepest
troughs, that there would be a certain satisfaction in putting out the sun or banishing the moon or pulling down the sky, taking away from the world something commensurate with what had been taken from her. But these indulgent fantasies always passed in a moment; she cried them out along with all the resurgent bitter anger she felt toward her husband, and when her nightly tears were done she only ever felt a deep sadness that had a small quality of peace to it. She tried to weep herself down there now, because she was more bitter and angry and hopeless than ever, all because of the bull, prancing outrageously down Twenty-fourth Street, and now through her mind’s eye, wagging its ass, teasing and mocking her for having been stupid enough to drive him away in the first place and for being too weak now to call him back. She took her hands away from her courtiers—two of them were rubbing her palms—and covered her face and wept harder, so the circle of the host widened even more, because it was bad enough for the Queen to be languid and depressive on the festival night, but to indulge in histrionics was frankly poor taste. Even the cats, who had formerly been licking at her arms and breasts and face, slunk off the litter and disappeared over the edge of the hill with another dozen faeries. Titania took no notice of them. She was on her way down to the saddest place in her memory, Oberon’s leave-taking, when she had made her awful mistake. It had seemed like the only thing to say at the time, the only sensible response to the horrible new world she had woken into after the long dreamlike demise of their Boy. Grieving furiously, she had set about destroying everything left to her.
    â€œYou do not love me anymore?” her husband had asked her.
    â€œI do not,” she had said.
    â€œYou do not love me?”
    â€œI do not love you. All my feelings have been false.”

    â€œThen I am undone. Behold, I never was Oberon, nor you Titania,