Hell and Earth pa-4

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Did he say so?”

  “That he underreported your sweetness? Nay–

  “Nay, that you could be assured of your welcome here.” She cocked her head back, her black hair spilling over her shoulders, and stared up at him. Kit bit his lip: her eyes were the same dark blue as her father’s, and made him shiver.

  “Judith? Judith, if thou wishest to warm the out‑doors, build a fire behind the stable – ” Annie Shakespeare paused in the doorway, her faded eyes narrowing at the corners when she caught sight of Kit standing on the path. He waited while she examined him from boots to hair. A thoughtful moment, until she nodded and tugged Judith out of the doorway. The braided ribbon around Mistress Shakespeare’s neck caught Kit’s eye; he smiled in spite of himself, bitter and sweet. And joy you in it, Will.

  “Welcome, Master Marlin.” After the country fashion, she kissed him in greeting when he came through the door.

  Kit forced himself to stillness, to returning the quick peck she offered, but he knew from the lift of her brow that she noticed his discomfort. She reached out, deft as a bird, and brushed his hair behind his ear, her fingers quick on the rounded tip. He shied like a startled horse, and she nodded satisfaction as he shifted from foot to foot.

  “Some Elf‑knight,” she said, when Judith was out of earshot, scampering into the house to let Cook and the maid know the company had come. “You look like an overdressed university lad, if you ask me, which you haven’t. Will you eat beef and bread and apples like a mortal man?”

  “Madam,” Kit said, stamping the snow from his boots. “And glad of it. Mistress Shakespeare, you keep a fine house.”

  “I do when I can,” she answered, and hung his cloak on a peg once he handed it to her. “Will wrote to say you were here on his business – ”

  A note of suspicion in her voice, and not unwarranted. Kit let his gaze wander as she led him to the hearthside, concealing a swelling blister of sorrow. Will’s an idiot not to come home more often. Had I a family such as this– “And he told you I was an Elf‑knight?”

  “Nay, he told me my rival was an Elf‑knight under a curse, who could not endure a mortal touch. ‘Twas not too difficult a study to know of whom he spoke, once presented yourself at my door in your hobgoblin cloak and your boots of green chamois.”

  “Ah.” Kit kept the little bubble of–not homesickness, exactly–behind his smile as she led him to a chair by the fire and pressed a mug of warmed wine into his hands. “Your rival, madam?”

  “Not his words,” she admitted. “But you’re no elf, Master Marlin, or I am very much mistaken.”

  “Changeling,” Kit said with a shrug he meant to be casual. He closed his eyes, afraid of what Mistress Shakespeare might glimpse in them, and then opened them again, uneasy when he could not see. “It makes little difference in the end; I was born mortal, but it seems I am mortal no more.”

  Mistress Shakespeare glanced over her shoulder, assuring their privacy, before she sat across the hearth from Kit. She lowered her voice so it would not ring through the house. “What is my husband to you?”

  Kit’s breath stopped half in and half out of his chest. “My” – he swallowed wine to cover his hesitation, and managed only poorly, by the look in her eyes – “oh, there is no one easy word, madam. What did he say to you of me, to put that savagery in your gaze?”

  Silence, and the dent of her teeth in her lip. Her skirts, twisted between her fingers, showed him a flash of red flannel petticoats. “He said he loved you.”

  “Ah.” There is no answer that can make that better.“Mistress, and I him.”

  She shrugged. Her skirts fell smooth. Her small foot twisted on the hearthstone, clad in a shoe of good blue leather, the stitching stretched over the rise of her great toe.

  “I could mend that for you,” Kit said, pointing with his chin.

  She started, expression darkening as if he indicted her housewifery, and then saw the angle of his gaze and looked down, extending a hearty ankle to inspect her shoe in the firelight. “A seamstress, are you?”

  “I can darn a stocking, too,” Kit said. “Such it is with students.” The wine was sugared, sweet and thick. It heated his cold feet at least as much as the fire did. “Especially the overdressed ones.”

  A laugh, but not a warm one. Aye, and she’s a reason to love thee, Kit?She tucked her shoe away under her skirts and dusted her hands together, as if about to rise. “Your supper will be a little while longer – ”

  “‘Tis no matter,” he said, sipping his wine, trying to puzzle out what the even tone of her comment meant. Is she inviting some sort of a battlefield alliance, I wonder? Or running her banner up over Will’s castle?“The company is good.”

  She blushed dark; Kit rather enjoyed imagining Will’s reaction to his flattery. He smiled wider when she absently brushed fingers across the pouch resting against her bosom. “I wanted to hate you,” she said.

  “You would not be the first. Or likely the last.”

  “He came home – Master Marlin, why did you send him home again? And healed. Half healed, at least. …”

  “Aye, and I wish I could claim his health my doing,” Kit said. They matched gazes a little while, and Kit finished the wine. “Madam, I thank you. That was very pleasant.”

  “And unpoisoned, ” she said, with a little shrug and half a chuckle. She leaned to lift the cup from his fingers, turning it with her own. “This time, at least. You did not tell me why.”

  Her answer was so dry he had to laugh before he hoisted himself to his feet and swept a bow. “Mistress Shakespeare. I beg your sympathy, madam, and I pray you understand that there is nothing in me so base as would take a man from his wife and children. Even could I.”

  Mistress Shakespeare lowered her voice. The firelight fell across her face; Kit liked the way it outlined the high, arrogant arch of her brow. “If he knew them better, that might be more of a promise, Master Marlin.”

  Ah. Touch й . And the heart of the matter.“Madam,” Kit said, as kindly as he could through an ache and a coldness that ran from his throat all the way down to his fingertips, “Will’s heart is yours. No matter what else transpires – ”

  “Words are easy,” she answered, but she didn’t rise.

  “They are. And they are yet all I have, and all I have ever had.” Kit sighed, and stared down at his boots. Hanged for the lamb is hanged for the ewe.“Did Will tell you why he sent me?”

  She swallowed, a little bobble behind the worn silk of her throat, and whispered, “Hamnet.”

  With his witch’s sight, Kit wouldn’t have had any problems walking through the woods after sunset, as long as there was some little starlight. But he was not eager to go among Faerie oaks in the darkness and the dark of the moon, and less eager even to drag Annie Shakespeare out into the snow and the night. “Tomorrow. When it’s light. Can you show me where he died? That is all I need of you; I can stay the night at the inn.” Aye,” Mistress Shakespeare answered, and gathered her skirts to rise, his cup still dangling from her fingers. “Your supper will be ready. Come join us at board, Master Marlin. And then Peter, our lad in service, will show you up to bed. There is no need for any lover of my Will’s to share a buggy inn bed.”

  She turned then, and Kit stopped her with the quick brush of fingers across her sleeve. “Madam …”

  “Master Marlin?”

  He coughed, a prickling throat. It was all inadequate, anything he could say, any flowery line he could quote, in the face of her grace and her strength and her composure. “If I had someone such as you at home, I would not leave her a moment.”

  She regarded him evenly, only the corners of her eyes giving a trace of a smile. “As well‑favored as you are,” she said. “How can it be that you do not?”

  * * *

  Snow creaked over crunching leaves as Kit left Mistress Shakespeare at the edge of the Arden wood and tromped forward, feeling her gaze on his back. His rucksack swayed against his shoulder. There was no path under t
he trees. Their black branches shone wet and rough against a dawning sky of pale porcelain blue; the white powder underneath was trellised with fallen laceworks of snow, but only Kit’s footprints marred it.

  Not even a crow or a fox. And canst blame them?He glanced around, tugging the velvet collar of his cloak higher as if to ward the gaze of chilly eyes from his neck. The trees leaned over, their wind‑stirred fingers interlaced like bones. Kit found himself ducking as if through low doorways whenever he looked up, and drawing shallow breaths that tasted of moss and musk and mildew.

  His right eye showed a smoky power moving within the coarse‑barked trunks. The trees were young, saplings scattered among a few old giants; the wood had been cut in living memory, and Kit wondered if that were the reason for the appalling stench of hate and old blood clotting his senses.

  The bit of ribbon had bunched in the palm of his glove. He tugged his digits free and wiggled his hand out, checking over his shoulder to make sure Will’s wife was out of sight behind the barren oaks. Her silhouette had vanished. He stretched the band of scarlet velvet between his fingers – one hand gloved, the other bare –and blew a cloud of steam into the still morning.

  His cherry‑varnished viola was in his pack. Kit crouched and slid it out, the ribbon dangling from his fingers as he balanced the case on his knee and opened it reverently. He tied the ribbon around the viola’s waist, under the strings, with a tidy bow at the back, returning the case to his pack to keep it dry before he stood. He would have hung the whole affair on a low branch, but given the wood and his purpose here, he thought perhaps that would be unwise.

  That smoky pall of force began to shift as soon as he plucked the strings to tune, mentally apologizing both to the fae bard Cairbre and to the fine old instrument for bringing it out in such chill and unwholesome air. The smoke was not the only vitality in that wood: there was a power in the viola’s pregnant belly and graceful neck as well, a strength as red and resonant as its stain.

  Kit felt the oak wood tremble, expectant, bathinghim and his music, and every mortal touch and scent on his soul and on his skin. He shrugged his cloak back from his shoulders and raised the viola and the rosined bow.

  The trees screamed when he scraped the first note from the strings. Branches wore on branches like chalk on slate, a sharp grinding that sent Kit’s shoulders up around his ears and all but drowned the hollow lucidity of the viola’s tone. He persevered, found the upswing into a reel, planted his feet wide in the snow, and leaned into the music as best he could.

  He would have closed his eyes and found the rhythm, submerged himself in the song, but a witch’s otherwisesight showed him that smoky puissance rising in the trunks of the oaks and the coiled crimson, potent as lifeblood, in the music streaming from his fingertips, and he didn’t dare let his attention waver.

  Gauzy tendrils reached out and brushed his hair, his face, his moving hands. Kit felt a slight resistance, a child’s plucking fingers, and fiddled through it. The tendrils struck his cloak, the oaks’ gnarled branches grasping after; both slid back like oiled hands clutching ice and Kit played faster, fingers sailing over the viola’s neck, bow flying back and forth like the shuttle on a loom. He stumbled a note, almost hesitated as the crimson light quailed before an onslaught of dark– smoke and firelight–staggered, found his theme again, twisted his reel around it, and made it his own, gliding the tune over the discord of branch on branch that sought to drown him out.

  The music soared. The chafe of wet bark became –not words, but something like enough words that Kit understood them, though the voices raised the hair along his spine. Witch. Witch. Witchery.

  Aye,” Kit said, lowering the viola a moment, and holding the red light no other’s eyes would see steady about himself. “Witchery. And I command you in the names of my dread master Lucifer and of the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe to answer my questions, and answer them true.”

  Like a saw on bone. Terrible, those voices. Thy master. Witch. Thy queen.

  Not ours.

  Not ours.

  Not ouurzzz.

  The black hands grasped as the first golden fingers of dawn filtered through branches. Kit stood fast, telling himself his shiver was cold and the morning mists, nothing else. The black hands touched his cloak and pressed it against his body, but could not push past. “Be that as it may. I am here, and I command you.”

  A rattle of branch on branch, a stag knocking velvet from new tines. No. Witch. Witch. Not ours.

  A white pain flared over his breastbone, and he flinched. Hell.No, not Hell; what burned was the mark over his heart, the final brand left on his skin when Richard Baines and his Prometheans had raped and tortured him in Rheims, when he had been a mortal man and innocent. Then, like a lightning caress down Kit’s belly and thighs, wherever the irons had touched, the same pain, brighter, so sharp it was almost sweet. He tasted blood but did not scream.

  Kit spoke through grinding teeth, forcing his spine straight. I’ve felt worse.“Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”

  Not ours.

  Witchery.

  He touched the red ribbon on the red viola with the tip of his bow. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”

  No answer this time, just the clawing and sawing of the branches, the leaning threat of the sapling trees bent over him, their limbs poised like daggers. Smoky fingers coiled and drifted, wavering thick as banners now, redolent of hate. Somewhere, not too distant, a dead branch crashed to earth. A sort of croaking moan followed, the splintering resonance of splitting wood. Kit turned, following the path of the smoke of power against the wind, and yelped. He dove aside, a deadfall landing close enough to heave snow and splinters on him. He kept his grip on the viola, clutched it close when he rolled, guarded it with his body when he rose with a swordsman’s grace.

  “Dammit,” he swore, and took a deep breath. Snowmelt trickled from his hair, down his neck. “Third time I command you then –as I am a man and the master and shepherd of trees since the wild God of the World gave Adam their naming – answer me not, and I shall return with fire.”

  Silence, shivering silence. Kit spoke into it, each word measured and plain. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”

  A breath held. A silence like the silence of any mortal wood in the golden sunrise, in the January snow. The smell of rotten wood, of loam under snow. No whispers. No mutters. No ghosts.

  But a name.

  Robin Goodfellow,the wood said.

  Puck.

  Act IV, scene v

  Salisbury: God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.

  God be wi’ you, princes all; I’ll to my charge:

  If we no more meet till we meet in heaven,…

  –William Shakespeare, Henry V,Act IV, scene iii

  Will glanced around the candlelit confines of a smoky little room in the chapel of Westminster Palace–almost more of a hallway with a narrow table and six tall chairs in the center–and sat himself down with a sigh. At the head of the table, near the flickering candelabra. He plucked a beeswax taper from one arm of the fixture and toyed with it while he waited, letting the wax drip along its sides in layered arabesques, making the shadows dance.

  No matter how he tilted the taper between his fingers, the flame rose upright through the biting chill, shivering slightly in response to his palsy. He shook free beads of liquid wax and rising bubbles of smoke, amused by their transformation from transparency to a milky crystallized splash when they struck the cold wood of the table.

  Beyond the windowless walls, a clock struck seven. And Sir Robert did not come. Am I forgotten? Or is this meant to teach me humility?He tilted the taper further, and this time the wax that fell dripped down the wick and flamed as it scattered through the air. A good effect,Will thought. ‘Tis pity there’s not a safe way to adapt it for the stage. ‘Twould be too fine a detail to read well, anyway.

  The door opened, admitting the spare black‑robed shape of Robert Cecil; Will twisted th
e candle upright and stood, hot wax splattering his fingers as his trembling knocked it loose. He bowed, careful not to set himself on fire, and tucked the candle back into the candelabra. “Mr. Secretary.”

  “Master Shakespeare, ” Sir Robert said, and shut the door firmly. “Sir Thomas passed along your note regarding the disposition of your … investigation … of Masters Baines and Poley. I would have preferred a personal report.”

  “I am afraid that was impossible,” Will said, coming forward. “If I had been in London, I believe I would be dead.”

  Cecil limped to the end of the table. “We’ve had the house under observation.” He pulled a chair out but did not sit. “The Inquisitor’s body has not turned up.”

  “Then it’s still in the house, ” Will said, as if the situation could not be more plain. He picked wax from the crease of his thumb with his left hand, steadying his right when it would have trembled. It didn’t help, and he dug in his purse for a shilling, hoping the gesture looked absent. “He’s most certainly dead, Mr. Secretary.”

  “I did notreceive a satisfactory explanation from Sir Thomas of how you yourself managed to escape, although I’ll not complain of any man who brings me the demise of a Papist pawn.

  Will looked down, watching the silver coin cartwheel across his knuckles in the candlelight. “You’ve not had Baines arrested yet?”

  Threadlike lips writhed as Sir Robert tried and failed to repress a smile. “We are arranging a suitable frame for your painting of Baines as counterfeiter. And an excuse to search the house. If he’s buried a body in his cellar, so much the better; at the very least, we can force Essex to act to protect him, and perhaps the Earl will show a soft underbelly.” Cecil sighed. “You know he supports James as the heir.”

  “I know the Queen thinks it treason to speak of it, Sir Robert,” Will said.

  Cecil coughed into his hand. “And yet speak of it we must.”

  “Nay, Mr. Secretary.” Will shook his head. “Baines, Oxford, and Essex, and their Prometheans, are my concern, and the safety of the Queen we have. When that changes, I’ll address it, but I leave finer matters of politics to those who are equipped to understand the implications.”