Now

The Queen of Elfland’s chamberlain struck three times on the polished black-and-white chess-squares of the great dancing-hall and cried out in the sudden hush, “Sir Thomas Lene! Sir John-a-Dale!”

John followed Sir Thomas through the door into a close press of people. It seemed darker here, despite the moonlight throwing pale pools of light through the mullioned windows. More light fell from candle-sconces in the intricately coffered ceiling, but that seemed lost in shadow long before it reached the crowd thronging beneath.

And what a crowd it was! Reflected multitudinously in the tall mirrors lining the wall opposite the windows, they parted to right and left of him as he pressed down to the other end of the hall, whispering and laughing under the sound of music. Many of them were masked; those who wore no mask often had some oddity about their faces—hair silvery-blue or beechen-green, red skin, beastly snouts, branching horns, many eyes… And was it his imagination, or did their features shift, so that no two glances ever showed him the same face? One lady passed him by wearing rose-coloured silk and a French hood over thick dark ropes of hair which glistened and writhed like the bodies of snakes, but when he turned with his heart in his mouth to look again he saw only the demure face of a pale girl who dropped him a curtsey and whisked away.

John turned again and looked for Sir Thomas, but he had melted away somehow into the crowd, and if he was nearby, it was too dark to see him. John pushed on through the tide of Lordly Folk to the head of the room. Here the crowd thickened until suddenly he burst through the edge into a spaaaaaace that had been cleared for dancing. He had hardly time to draw breath before someone gave a laughing shout and caught his hand and dragged him sideways, nearly off his feet. It was a masked man wearing a cap crowned with peacock-feathers. John staggered four steps to his right, and then the peacock-cap panted “Way!” and he reeled back four steps in the way he had come, and then the hands in the line dropped and a fay-woman came out of the crowd and turned him by his right hand.

He had not come to dance. John dropped the lady’s hand with a hasty tug of the forelock, and turned and shouldered his way through the swinging and circling dancers, through the wild skirling music, to the dais under the tapestry at the head of the hall. Gigantic figures blazed across the massive hanging: against a field of leaves and flowers, a unicorn laid its head in the lap of a lady seated in a chair. She tangled the fingers of one hand in its mane; the other beckoned to hunters hiding in the bushes with spears and hounds.

Under the tapestry was a cloth-of-gold canopy with attendants set about it. The throne. When the dancers parted before him he saw that it was empty, and puffed out a soundless breath. He had come all this way, and he must now run the woman to ground in her own palace? He forced his way through the dancers and asked of an attendant, “Sir, where is the Queen of Faerie?”

“She went down to dance, master,” the man told him. “When I last saw her she was speaking to Sir Calidore.” He pointed toward the diamond-paned windows.

John looked across the hall and sighed again. He had been in this place no longer than would serve him at home to file a horse’s hoof, but already it seemed as if hours had passed. To his surprise, he found himself weary, as if bearing up under an oppressive weight. Perhaps it was the constant jarring grotesquery of everything he saw around him. There was no pure beauty on which to rest his eyes and heart; there was no definite ugliness from which to recoil. Perhaps it was the constant effort of untangling them that wearied him so.

“How should I know her?” he asked.

“She is crowned,” said the attendant.

That seemed all the help he was going to get. John stepped off the dais again and pushed his way through the crowd toward the window. The Lordly Folk stared at him; stared without speaking, so that wherever he turned he saw eyes shining bright and inquisitive. Nearer the windows he looked up and saw a flutter of blue velvet, dark as the summer night outside, sprinkled with pearls like stars, and under the peaked hood a gleam of pale hair which in that half-light shone like silver.

Only the flash of a glimpse, and she was gone, melting into the shifting crowd. But in that glimpse, John was sure he had seen Janet. He called out her name and elbowed after her. There was the blue velvet ahead of him, her back turned, a dark veil clouding her hair. He cried “Janet” again and turned her by the shoulder.

Someone gave a cry of protest. There was a mutter of leather on steel, and light gleamed off a long slim blade as the point flickered to his breast. John spared no glance for it; he stared into the woman’s face and his heart sank. She was a beauty—one of the few in that room unmarred, save for the fay-woman harshness in her eyes. But she was not Janet. Her hair was red, not ash-blonde, and with sudden terror he saw long thin jewel-points crowning the border of her hood.

He had found the Queen of Faerie.