Shakespeare for Squirrels: A Novel (Fool #3)(27)

“I left breakfast for you. There was frolicking to be done. You look better. Didn’t find your giant friend, then?”

“Oh, I found him. He’s locked in the dungeon under Theseus’s castle, and if I don’t return within three days with the answers Hippolyta and Theseus want, they’ll kill him.”

“Fuck’s sake, Pocket, trouble follows you like a fluffy tail. What kind of answers do the mortal royals think you can give them?”

“Like who killed the Puck and what he was doing up until the time he died.”

Cobweb snorted. “Killed the Puck! Haw-haw. What fools these mortals be. Robin Goodfellow is forever, he can’t be killed.”

“No, Robin Goodfellow was slain this morning, in this forest. I found him myself, his heart’s blood spilling out a hole in his ribs made by this.” I drew the black bolt from the sheath at my back and held it before Cobweb, whose wide eyes were filling with tears. She took the bolt from me and sniffed it, touched her tongue to the iron tip, then dropped it to the forest floor.

Her eyes rolled back and she began to fall. I caught her around the waist and held her up, pressing her head against my chest until I could feel her will return.

“Rather I would kiss a dog’s arse than Hermia’s bubbling lips,” said Lysander.

“You had no trouble with these bubbly lips last evening,” said Hermia.

“I was a fool. The scales have fallen from my eyes and I see now Helena’s radiance.”

“I, too, was a fool, a bigger fool,” said Demetrius. “When I wooed you for fortune and position I saw not how truly hideous you were in comparison to glorious Helena.”

“Mock me, cruel rogues,” said Helena. “I am deserved of it, for I am as ugly as a bear.”

“You are not,” said Hermia. “But these two, enchanted or not, are as stupid as chickens.”

Cobweb pushed away from me and looked up, blinking the tears out of her eyes. “Circe’s balls, they’re annoying.” She looked over her shoulder at the lovers. “With their tallness and their painted faces and their—their shoes.”

“Agreed, but they saw the Puck last night. The duke tasked me with finding the Puck’s killer and I am yet to ask them about the encounter.”

“I’ll do it.” She snatched up the crossbow bolt and charged the lovers. “Shut up, you shiny-haired fuckwits!”

Everyone grieves in his own way. Evidently the fairy way was violent and armed.

The lovers hadn’t even noticed the fairy’s arrival, but they noticed now, as she marched up to them, her jaw jutting hard and sharp like the ramming prow of a tiny warship.

“Look,” said Helena. “An elf! She’s even tinier than you, Hermia.”

“Not an elf,” I said to no one, as that is who was listening. The lovers, forgetting their own self-made calamity, had lined up in a semicircle around Cobweb and were examining her as if she’d been presented to them for purchase.

“Look at her little ears,” said Helena. “They’re pointed.”

“There are sticks in her hair,” said Hermia. “We should keep her. Have her groomed and show her off at the duke’s wedding.”

“I’ve never seen an elf before,” said Lysander. “Is this why no one will go into the forest at night? Seems silly now, when you see this wisp of a girl.”

“You’ve seen the Puck,” said Hermia. “And you might have seen him again last night if you hadn’t been so knackered from trying to shag me all night.”

“So you say,” said Lysander. “That seems but a dream to me now.”

“Well if I saw him fiddling with people’s feelings,” said Demetrius, “I’d make him sorry indeed.”

“By sticking him with this!” said Cobweb, and as she spoke she swung the crossbow bolt up from behind her back. I think she may have intended to present it before Demetrius’s face—confront him with the instrument of his dread-dickery—but whether she was moved by anger or her vision was obscured by her tears, she misjudged somewhat and stabbed the Athenian quite smartly in the tip of his chin.

Demetrius screamed and went over backward, clutching his chin, which spurted blood no little. Cobweb leapt on him and knelt on his chest, the bolt raised over her head. “Did you kill him, you great yellow-haired twat? Tell me or I’ll make a Cyclops of you with the next plunge.”

“No, no, no, I didn’t even see him.”

Cobweb jumped off Demetrius and landed before Lysander, who cowered against the mossy rocks. “How about you? Did you kill the Puck?”

“No, no, madam, I did not see him.”

Cobweb leapt to a spot between Helena and Hermia. “You? Did you kill him?” She raised the arrow over Helena’s breast. “I will pop your black, broken heart from your chest and eat it while you watch, shoe whore!”

“I don’t even know what that means,” said Helena, shaking.

“Did you kill him?”

“No.” Helena turned and hid her face in her hands, preferring to take the fairy’s killing blow in the bum, evidently.

“You!” Cobweb said to Hermia, who was small enough that the fairy could menace her eye to eye. “Tell me, did you kill the Puck or do I pin your tits together like bloody apples on a spit?”