The Great Night Read Online Free Page B

and never was the boy our Boy. I undo it all with a word, no , and pass away.” And then he walked away, from this very spot where she lay every night on her bier, down the hill and out of the park and into the mortal world. In memory she watched him, and instead of turning her face away from his receding back (as she actually had done), she propelled herself after him. Even in her imagination she could not capture him, but this exercise usually sent her into the deeper and more peaceful sadness that she sought. Tonight it eluded her, and seeking it she had a thought, terrible and surprising. Puck was staring at her when she looked up, wearing Oberon’s face, sad but disdainful, looking at her just the way she most feared he might look at her.
    â€œMilady,” said Lyon, “best not to look into his eyes!” He tried to cover her eyes with a fan, but she batted it away.
    â€œMaybe someone should put it out,” she said to Puck. “What does it illuminate for me, except everywhere my love is not? And does it see him and not tell me where he is? Shouldn’t it be punished?”
    â€œI have always hated the sun,“said Puck.
    â€œThe sun is our friend, “said Fell nervously, sensing the direction in which the conversation was turning and not liking it at all. “It makes the green things grow.”
    â€œWhat worth is the world with him not in it?” It wasn’t the first time she had considered destruction as a remedy for her ills. Before she had become confined to the hill, she had made a study of mortal suicides. No faerie had ever done such a thing, or even died at all, though in remote legend some great grief had turned one to stone, or caused a sleep of ages. Mortals’ deaths always only reminded her of how different she was from them. She was ageless and immortal, and the only creature ever to threaten her life or those of her subjects had been
overcome a whole age before, his wild magic contained by a bond that was as frail as it was strong, so that anyone might break it with a single word, though only Titania and Oberon knew the word, which changed from year to year. The magic in the chain prevented any accidental utterance, so that lately Puck, in the city in the service of his Queen or his own constrained appetites, might hear someone forget the breed of their beloved dog when asked, or might hear someone say, “What a lovely dog. What is it? Of course I know … it’s on the tip of my tongue! The lovely fur like hair, the distinctive hairdo. Hypoallergenic!” A person might work themselves into a fit trying to speak the word, but Oberon’s magic would strike them dead before they ever uttered the first syllable.
    â€œDo you think it would draw him out, Adversary, if I set you free?”
    â€œOh, most certainly,” Puck said, visibly trembling.
    â€œMilady!” said Fell.
    â€œYou can’t be thinking of it!” said Lyon.
    â€œHe is my friend,” said Oak, “but you would make him nobody’s friend!”
    â€œYou are not that sad,” said Fell. “No one is that sad!”
    But I am , she thought, standing up and shaking them off. And though she told herself it was a reasoned choice, that freeing this monster would call her husband back more swiftly and certainly than her entreaties of love and remorse ever could, duty to his subjects, and care for all those Puck would threaten being more important to him than her happiness, death was in her heart when she spoke the word. Her courtiers, liegemen first even though they had been her closest companions in the past year, tried to stop her. They leaped upon her with spells and claws and whirling bits of wire-sharp string. Oak came at her bottom first, his rabbit’s tail exuding soporifics strong enough to put an elephant to sleep for a week.
But she was their Queen for a reason. She brushed them aside in a moment. It was over so quickly that the rest of the