Hell and Earth pa-4

by Elizabeth Bear

  Act V, scene xxiv

  Why did it suffer thee to touch her breast,

  And shrunk not back, knowing my love was there?

  –Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage,Act IV, scene i

  Kit rose with the sunset and went to the window, leaving his bed rumpled and unmade behind him. The casement stood open; it might be winter in England, but at the castle of the Mebd it was high spring, and the wood was in leaf as gold as primrose blossoms. He leaned a hand on either side of the window frame and stared out, watching darkness unfurl along the horizon.

  «Sir Poet.»

  Mehiel?Feeling eyes on him, almost, Kit turned back to the room. The way his shadow fell behind him was warning enough. A glimpse of arched eyebrow, of swan‑white wing followed.

  «Surely thou knowest my name by now, my love,» Lucifer said, and opened his wings in welcome.

  “What makes you think I would greet you, Morningstar?” Kit folded his arms, trembling in the warm spring breeze. The wall he put his back to was smooth as glass. He would have preferred the purchase of rough‑hewn stone.

  Lucifer tilted his head and smiled, and Kit felt his knees turn to water where he stood. The fallen angel wore a white‑worked shirt of ivory silk with sleeves that flowed like water, as full as a second set of wings. The crown of shadows that capped his golden hair seemed to draw a rich dark tint from the crimson velvet of his breeches, and his eyes caught more light than the sunset sky had to offer.

  Kit held his breath as Lucifer came to him, tilted his chin up with a wing‑tip touch, wordlessly eased open his tight‑folded arms with the brush of gentle feathers. The Devil’s lips hovered over Kit’s, satin as rose petals, the warm brush of breath on Kit’s skin and the warmth of a presence close enough to stir the fine hairs on his cheek.

  Kit drew breath in an agony of anticipation, felt Mehiel’s surrender in the coldness in his brands. The wall stood firm behind him; his hands flattened on the stones, but they gave him no purchase and less strength. The fire in his belly was chill.

  “I could give thee wings,” Lucifer murmured. His true voice rang Kit like a bell, with a sensation of flying. Of falling. Kit closed his dark, dark eyes.

  Mehiel turned his mouth upward for the kiss.

  And Kit’s fingernails found a crack.

  A finer and a smaller chink than he had picked away at during his confinement in the pit. But a crack nonetheless, and he drove nails into it, clutching, clawing. Drawing his own bright blood, feeling the pain of the nail bed tearing as the nail folded.

  He turned his head away and pressed his fingertips to Lucifer’s mouth, crimson staining palest dog‑rose pink. “I love thee, ” Kit whispered, and Lucifer smiled against his fingers.

  “And I thee, poet and angel.”

  Kit shook his head, dropped his hand to Lucifer’s chest, and pushed. The Devil stepped back smoothly, offering no resistance, and all Kit could see was the red of his own blood on the whiteness of Lucifer’s breast. “I love thee,” Kit said again. “And thou wilt destroy me. Be gone. And take thy witchery with thee.”

  Lucifer’s wings cupped air, a sound like a backhanded slap. Kit flinched, but the Devil flinched moreso. And looked Kit in the eye. And nodded once, slowly, and closed his eyes that were bluer than the twilight.

  And ceased to be where he had been.

  Kit stood a moment in darkness, the sunset wind riffling the fine hairs on his neck, and slid down the wall until he could bury his face in his arms.

  A tap on his door roused him. It seemed as if moments had passed, but as he stood the dawn air felt cold through his linen nightshirt. He limped across the chamber. The knotted red wool of the carpet pricked his bare soles and the tender flesh of his bandaged foot. He lifted the latch without asking a name, knowing from the sound whom he would see.

  “My Prince.”

  The Elf‑knight stepped past him and pulled the door from his grasp. “Kit, what hast done to thy fingers?”

  Kit looked down, startled. “Split a nail or two,” he said. “‘Tis nothing.”

  “‘Tis not nothing,” Murchaud answered, relatching the door. “Let me clean it.”

  Kit followed in obedience, gasping at cold water spilled across his palms and wrists. And then marveling at the Prince‑consort of Faerie, bent over his–Kit’s–sad, calloused hands with a rag. “My Prince,” he said again.

  Murchaud dabbed at a bit of blood, and looked up. He’d dressed, but his hair was still tousled from the night and his eyes were so bruised with exhaustion as to seem kohled. “Is that all I am to thee?”

  “No….” Kit protested, Mehiel silent within him. Murchaud took one step away.

  “I came to bring thee something. I’ll be quick. I did not mean to presume.” Murchaud cast his eyes down, and Kit’s breath snagged as he understood.

  “Murchaud,” he began, and couldn’t find the next word.

  The Elf‑knight dug into his sleeve, unmindful of the water pink with Kit’s blood that spotted it, and came out with a scrap of silk. He held the cloth out, and Kit numbly took it. It was like quicksilver, the highlights blue as shadows on snow and the shadows the color of twilight. Kit stared uncomprehending.

  “For your cloak,” the Elf‑knight said, and turned away.

  Kit’s mouth worked, his tongue dry and dumb as un‑inked paper. Murchaud crossed the room in five long strides, lifted the latch, turned the handle on the door, and opened it, unhesitating, back straight, lean and dark in the half‑light so far from the window.

  He stepped into the hall.

  “Wait,” Kit whispered, but the door was closing. “Wait!”he shouted, and froze, listening for the click of the latch.

  Silence.

  And then the door opening again, and Murchaud framed against the gold stone of the hallway. “Kit?” he asked, lifting his chin.

  “Do–” Kit took up a breath, and his courage with it. “Dost love me?”

  Murchaud considered the question, turning his answer over on his tongue. He dropped his eyes to his hand on the door handle, stepped back into the room, shut the door behind himself. Latched it, and leaned against the boards. “Can an elf be said to love?”

  Kit nodded, his sore fingers knotted white on the bit of silk in his palm.

  Murchaud did not leave the door. The air between them grew golden with the rising, indirect light. “Then as elves love, aye.”

  Kit closed his eyes on the fear, closed his heart on Mehiel’s startled protest. “Wilt prove it?”

  Mute, Murchaud nodded. Drew a breath and another, came one step toward Kit. “Anything.”

  Kit gasped, and laughed. “Thou swearest.”

  “Anything.I vow.”

  And Kit felt his own heart break.

  “It is not fair or just, what I will ask of thee,” he began, calm now that the die was cast. “I need thee to undo what was done.”

  It was the kiss that broke Kit. Not the kisses on his mouth; he lay still, hands clenched into fists on the coverlet, through those. Murchaud lingered over them, a hand on either side of his head, all that black hair freed from its tail and tumbling down around Kit’s face, no contact between them except lips and tongue.

  No, it was when Murchaud kissed his eyes closed that Kit knew he had made a mistake. “God,” Kit said, and Murchaud flinched but did not draw away. Instead, he caught Kit’s lip between his teeth, but Kit continued to speak anyway, his fingernails bloodying his palms as he struggled not to shove the Prince to the floor. “Murchaud, just finish it.”

  Murchaud gnawed at his own lower lip. “I said I will unbind thy angel, though it mean thy life. Wouldst have me misuse thee, also?”

  It wouldmean Kit’s life. But if the bonds that trapped the angel in his body were severed first, then Mehiel need not die with him, but–when his cage was shattered–might go free.

  Kit drew breath and said, “I would it were done.”

  Murchaud leaned down on an elbow, close enough that Kit could feel the heat
of his body. He raised his right hand and outlined the scar over Kit’s heart. Kit gasped as that scar and its brothers flared on his skin as if freshly seared. “Is there no means to make this gentle?”

  Kit swallowed and closed his eyes. “It is mine to endure.”

  “If enduring is what thou chooseth.”

  I cannot do this. I cannot lie still for this. I cannot bear it.

  «And thou wouldst have had no choice, were it Baines.» The voice startled Kit, coming as it did with a sense of unfurling and a gazing awareness within. Eyes like a falcon’s, gold as the sun, and wings whose stunning plumage was banded in black and gold, not swan‑white at all. Mehiel.

  A rape I could have endured,Kit answered. And yet my lover will be kind.“Murchaud,” he whispered.

  “Kit.”

  “Bind my hands.” Love?” Honest dismay. “I will not–”

  “Thou must.” Kit drew a ragged breath. “I will refuse thee otherwise. I have not the strength of will for this. And I must not be permitted to refuse.”

  “I would not force thee–”

  “It is not force,” Kit said. “For I am begging thee.”

  “Dost thou?”

  “So we do,” Kit answered, and realized only after the words had left his mouth that he had spoken for himself, and for Mehiel too. “Bind my hands. And my legs. It will reinforce the sorcery in any case; cut the bonds when thou’rt done with me. If we steal those other Prometheans’ symbols to undo their black work, ‘tis no more than they deserve.”

  Murchaud regarded him thoughtfully, and then nodded. “As thou wishest.”

  Kit closed his eyes as Murchaud left the curtained confines of the bed. The straw tick dimpled under Murchaud when the Elf‑knight returned. Kit turned to watch him fasten a yard‑long length of silk scavenged from a drapery about Kit’s wrist and draw it outward, to one of the massive bedposts. Kit’s heart beat faster as Murchaud repeated the process on the opposite side, exquisitely gentle and completely without pity.

  Every inch the Elf‑knight again.

  “Do you have the knife?”

  “Aye.” Murchaud covered Kit’s eyes with a blindfold and carefully tugged it down over his cheeks. “I’ll not stop thy mouth,” he said. “‘Tis thy poetry I need of thee, and all thy power. ”

  Safer in the darkness, Kit nodded, and Murchaud bound his feet apart as well.

  The room was warm, and yet Kit shivered at every brush of the air on his sweat‑drenched skin. If he were a horse, he thought, he would be lathered white with fear. Terror, which crystallized into something else entirely when Murchaud, without otherwise touching him, laid the ice‑cold blade of the dagger against the brand on the inside of his thigh and – cut. And moved the blade to the other thigh and cut again. And once more. And again, defacing each sigil in reverse of how they had been layered on Kit’s skin.

  Kit strangled the whimper that rose in his throat, not out of pride–he was beyond pride–but out of fear for how it would sound to Murchaud. Instead he pulled against the twisted cloth that bound him, grunting like a birthing woman dragging at a knotted rope. The pain of the knife was still better than the touch of Murchaud’s hand.

  Murchaud kissed his mouth again, quickly, guiltily, before Kit could jerk away. And then, the Elf‑knight straddled Kit’s belly, with the heat of flesh on flesh, his weight like stones. Peine forte et dure.This time, Kit could not silence the sound that rose in his throat. Murchaud swallowed it, kissed it away. He settled over Kit’s hips, toes dug under Kit’s thighs, and must have laid the knife aside, because the next touch was the flat of both hands upon Kit’s breast. The brands on Kit’s sides burned so hot Kit thought they must blister, knife slashes trickling blood across Kit’s ribs to soak into the coverlet.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Kit snarled, “get it overwith.”

  He felt a small, cruel joy when Murchaud flinched hard enough to shake the bed, but then the Elf‑knight drew himself back and said “As you wish it,” and that was a small kind of victory. Until Murchaud wrapped a rough, calloused hand around Kit’s prick and began, with abrupt motions, to manipulate it.

  Every touch was irritation, and the longer it continued the more Kit’s rage grew. It started in his belly, a small uncomfortable coal, and grew swiftly to a venom that would not be contained; he cursed and whimpered and heaped abuse. He used the name of God like a whip, and felt the Fae Prince shudder under it and continue, while Mehiel struggled in Kit’s breast like a fox in a snare’s sharp jaws.

  Kit visualized the tumble of crimson fur rolling, tail flagging like a banner against the snow. Not much Longer, sweet Mehiel. Soon we part company. Soon you go home.

  And as for Kit? He supposed he had a destination, too.

  Kit thought they would tear him apart between them, the angel and the Faerie Prince. He was grateful for the bindings, which let him thrash however he would and yet held him secure. He was grateful for Murchaud’s hands that held him likewise, and with a strength and negligence that carried no remembrance of Baines’ sick mock‑gentleness. And he was grateful for his unstopped mouth, for the freedom to blaspheme and beg even when he knew the efforts would be ignored.

  He thought it would grow easier to bear, the Prince’s touch, that in the darkness it would be all he had to focus on and he would learn to withstand it, as he had Baines’ damned iron bridle. But he grew instead angrier and fiercer, an unstoppered wrath that would not be silenced again. Murchaud, meanwhile, was thorough and remorseless, and Kit wept when his body at last surrendered, arching himself to the touch, scrabbling against the bonds.

  Murchaud tarried for a moment, ducked to kiss the bloody scar on Kit’s thigh with a mouth that was wet and hot, and then kissed each of the other three ruined brands in turn. It was a farewell, and that was all it was. And Kit, to his shame, fought and wailed like an orphaned child. It was well he was bound, or he should have used his fists against Murchaud.

  When the Prince at last placed pillows beneath Kit and knelt between his thighs, placing the dagger upon his breast, Kit’s gratefulness swelled. The straw tick crunched under the Elf‑knight’s knees; his flanks were warm against the insides of Kit’s thighs as Kit bent his legs, taking the slack from the bonds. “I have thy freedom in my hand.”

  Kit “wasn’t sure how he found his voice, but find it he did and made it firm to support his lover’s hand. “Finish it.”

  “So mote it be,” Murchaud said, and pressed the dagger to the center of the brand upon Kit’s breast. “The Fae should know better than to love mortal men.”

  He leaned into the dagger as he rose into Kit.

  The dagger slid through Kit’s heart like a serpent’s tongue, slick and easy. He feltthe force of it, felt the gallant muscle striving to beat, shredding itself on the ice‑cold blade. He might have screamed, but all he could manage was a breathless whine that he meant for a sorry sort of joke: Consummatum est.And then the darkness was no longer merely the darkness behind the blindfold, but encompassing and deep and edged with penetrating cold.

  And thou’lt go to Lucifer after all, but shed of the thing he wished of thee.

  Kit’s last thought through the pain was that he was glad–so glad–that he could not see Murchaud’s face as he died.

  Murchaud, who pulled the dagger free and gathered Kit close to his breast, while the sharp heat of blood spread between them and Kit felt warm arms and stickiness and the wetness that might be an elf‑Prince weeping all recede on a river of dark, as he remembered something long forgotten–that he had come this way before, not once but twice, in Deptford and at Rheims.

  Pure white light enfolded him and he smiled at the lie. It would not be Heaven awaiting beyond that gate, but there was something to be said for the refinement of that deception. Some must come this way, Kit imagined, who did not honestly know what to expect.

  Imagine their disillusionment.

  And then Mehiel’s falcon‑cry of a voice that was not a voice, and his eyes like living suns as he b
owed down in the space that was not a space and spread his wings before a Kit who was not Kit. Kit who was whole, and who was not in pain. «God is good. I shall not be able to save thee again, poet.»

  Farewell, Mehiel,Kit answered. I expected no salvation. I expect we shall not meet in Heaven, Angel of the Lord.

  «Thy life thrice,» the angel answered. «Rheims, Deptford, Hy Brйаsil. Be healed one last time, child, and may our paths cross nevermore.» Barred black and gold, the bright wings blurred, and Kit stepped back, or dreamed he did.

  «Consummatum est!»Mehiel shouted. And rose. And was gone.

  “Consummatum est,” Kit whispered. He opened his eyes, lashes sticky with his own red blood, and cursed because his hands were bound and he could not bury them in Murchaud’s hair.

  There was a scar in the center of the scar in the center of his breast and another on his back between the shoulder blades and to the left of his spine, where Murchaud’s weight had driven the blade through his body and into the featherbed. Beside the witch’s mark, in fact, and just opposite it.

  And there was blood: so very much blood, indeed. Blood through the ticking and onto the floor.

  Blood, and blood only. That was all.

  Epilogue

  “I hate” she altered with an end,

  That followed it as gentle day

  Doth follow night, who like a fiend

  From heav’n to hell is flown away

  “I hate “from hate away she threw

  And saved my life saying, “not you.”

  –William Shakespeare, Sonnet 45

  April 22, 1616

  Annie helped Will lean back in the pillow‑upholstered chair as he finished coughing. He was weak, too weak. He couldn’t get air into his lungs and the fever that burned him wasn’t even strong enough to grant the surcease of delirium, just the misery of aches and sweat.

  He thought it was a natural sickness, at least. We’ve seen an end to the Promethean plagues. That’d something. And something I’ve lived this long, with Kit’s help and Morgan’s.

  And who would have thought ‘twould not be the damned palsy after all?