“Nay, my lord.”
“Kit.”
“Nay, my lord.” He scraped a bootheel across the flags and frowned, turning to look into the flames of the cross-bricked hearth.
“Where has Morgan been?”
“What mean you?”
“I mean,” Kit said, watching ash crumble at the edges of a cave among the embers that glowed cherry red as a dragon’s eye, “she has not summoned me in … How long has it been?” He shrugged, running his tongue across the cleft in his upper lip and then frowning as he nibbled his mustache. “—some time.”
Kit heard the Elf-knight stand, his almost-silent footsteps as he closed the distance on Kit’s blind side.
“She has a cottage where she flees the court. It lies behind yonder beech wood. I will see that she knows of your sorrow. There’s worse to come.”
“What mean you?” The hesitation was long enough for Kit’s gut to clench.
“I’m leaving in five days. The Mebd sends me on diplomacy.”
“Where?”
“I cannot say. But it will be hard for you; Morgan must keep her distance now, and you must seem alone while I am gone. It must seem she has tired of you. You’ve played this game before. She said she warned you.”
Kit looked up. “That I might be needed for skills beyond poetry. Am I naught but a Queen’s toy, Murchaud?”
The Elf-knight smiled. “Is that so terrible a thing to be? You courted Papists for your former Mistress. There are factions in Faerie that are not so fond of your new one, or the Queen. You’ll be attractive to them.”
“The ugliness of the intelligencer’s lot,” Kit said. “Win a man’s trust. Become his friend. Whisper words of love in his ear as you slip in the knife. Catholicism is as excellent a religion as any, I suppose, so I have no reason to prefer Protestants to Catholics. Nor this Fae to that Fae, Murchaud.”
“No,” Murchaud answered, a gentle hand on his elbow. “But thou didst serve a Queen those Papists would have seen murdered, didst not?”
Kit turned back to the fire. “I did.”
Murchaud bent close amid a scent of new-mown grass. “And now you serve another, whose enemies are also manifold. Shall you serve her less well?”
“That other service, for all its blackness, I chose.” Kit sighed and nodded, and Murchaud draped an arm around his shoulders. The Prince’s tone grew intimate.
“You mourn your other life? You miss smoky, brutal London and its pox-riddled stews, its painted Ganymedes, and its starving pickpockets, soon to be hanged?”
“Should I not?”
“Ah, Kit.” Warmth, yes, and pity. “You’ll outlive it. Outlive all your loves and hates. Tis easier to lose it now, all of a piece, than by shreds and tatters.”
“… outlive it?” He turned and looked, despite himself, and caught Murchaud’s expression as the Elf-knight reached to steady him. “Outlive the mortal world?”
“Faerie does not move as the iron world, and you’ll not age here. How long did you think you had lingered here?” Earnest eyes, and dark brows drawn together.
“Hast been a year and more in England, two, three summers here.” Kit swallowed. His voice trailed off at the smile in Murchaud’s eyes. “How long?”
“We mark by the tithe,” Murchaud answered. “The teind we pay to Hell for their protection. Every seven year we draw lots, or a criminal may be chosen to go, or a changeling stolen or, rarely, someone will volunteer. Which last pays the debt not for seven years, but for seven times seven.” He shook his head. “Tribute to our overlords.”
Kit shivered. Murchaud hadn’t answered the question. Kit tried to think back, to count summers and winters, flowerings and fallings. He looked down at his right hand, turned it to examine the tendons strung across the back, the calluses ridging his palm. How long? He had no answer. “When’s the tithe, then?”
“Hallow’s eve. Always.” Murchaud shook his head.
“Hallows eve here or in the mortal world?”
“Time here is an illusion,” Murchaud answered. “In the mortal world: Hallow’s eve, fifteen ninety-eight.”
“Four years hence.”
“Not so very long. Do not pine so for your lost life, Sir Kit. Set it aside, and do what you can to make yourself a stronger place in this court.”
“You suggest I could be sent, if the Mebd does not value me? Although your mother claimed my service? Kit Marley in Hell it has a certain symmetry.”
“The Mebd values you,” Murchaud said. “But she trusts her sister, my mother, not at all. Wert wise to make as many friends in court here as thou couldst, and let thine old friends glide past. The river of time will bear them to their end more quickly than you imagine.”
“I,” Kit swallowed. “Soon enough, then, I shall be beyond that. Had I no loyalty, what would I be worth to you?”
“So be it,” Murchaud said. “Bloody thyself on the bars of thy cage, but know thou canst not straddle the flood between that world and this forever.”
“I did not choose this world.”
“No. This world chose you. Live in it, or it will cut you deep, my love. You cannot go home again.”
“Have I leave to help my friends?”
“I will not forbid it,” Murchaud answered. “But by the love you bear me, pay more mind to courting your Queen.”
Kit nodded, watching the flames. He didn’t tell me how long I’ve been here. How much time could I have lost?The answer brought cold sinking in his belly. In a Faerie Court, Marley? You could lose your whole life in a night.He frowned, and didn’t think of the letter to Walsingham on his desk, with its icy, alien words about Edward de Vere. “As you wish.” He turned his back on the fire and walked to the cupboard, taking his time in selecting his clothes.
“Where are you going?” Kit looked up, fingers stilling on the ruched sleeve of a padded doublet. He turned over his shoulder, enough to see Murchaud clearly. “I must dress if I am to dine with the Queen.”
“Sit at the low table,” Murchaud told him. “We shall pretend at a falling out. I cannot come to you tonight. Or any night until I return from my travel.”
“How long?” But then the Elf-knight kissed him, long hands cradling Kit’s face as if he cupped a rose in his palms, and Kit forgot to pursue the question, after. If after had any meaning here, at all.
Morgan’s rooms, on the third level of the palace, opened onto the gallery over the glass-roofed Great Hall. Murchaud’s were a level lower, in a side hall near the Mebd’s chambers. But Kit’s chamber was in the east wing, and to come to the main level he descended a spiral stair rather than the Great Stair, as he had on his first night. From there, he passed through a corridor to the atrium in all its tapestried magnificence. He drew up before towering ebony doors. Knights in armor, as unmoving as suits on stands, guarded the portal on either side. He ignored them for a moment and studied the dark, coffered carving: intricate spirals and knotworks, fancifully interleaved. And what is it you’ve been seeking these past seasons? A melancholy existence in exile? How … romantic.
Murchaud had threaded the stem of a pansy through the pearl-sewn embroidery on Kit’s doublet; its golden-eyed, plum-colored face nodded against the mallard’s-head green of the velvet, the color Murchaud had insisted he wear.
‘No knight should do battle without a favor from his lover. Green and violet are the Mebd’s colors,’ he had said. ‘If ever you learned to court it in the mortal realm, use that now, and know you walk a line even finer than mine own.’
Kit licked his lips into a smile for the bravado of it and stepped forward. The doors swung open smoothly, and he entered the great, galleried hall with its thousand torches burning with a golden, unholy light.
The room was silent but for the faint, plucked twang of an untuned string: the bard Cairbre straightened over his lute and looked up at the swing of the door. He was alone in the Great Hall. Kit was early. So much for bravado. He laughed at himself and walked between the parallel trestles stretching the length
of the hall. No fires burned at the hearths, and the high table sat on its dais swathed in silk that picked up the damasked colors of the marble tiles under Kit’s boots.
“Good even, Master Harper.”
“And to you, Sir Christofer.” The bard made as if to stand, reaching out to set his instrument aside, and Kit gestured him back onto his stool. “Come out of your self-exile after all?”
“There’s only so long a man can take to his bed.”
Cairbre’s eyes flickered to his breast: the blossom?— and the bard frowned. “As you say. Will you grace us with a poem tonight?”
It wasn’t a question Kit knew how to answer. He folded his right arm over his left and shrugged, silent until Cairbre took pity and tilted his chin to indicate the little stage, its assortment of harpsichord, gitar, lute, and archaic-looking instruments that Kit barely recognized. “Do you play?”
“Viola a little, though I am sadly out of practice.”
“Every gentleman should know an instrument.” Cairbre did stand then, his patch-worked cloak of multicolored tatters falling about him as he bent to pull a cased instrument from a cloth-draped stand. The bells on his epaulets rang sweetly as he laid it on the stool.
“I have a viola here.” He chuckled, and indicated Kit’s boutonniere with a flick of his fingers. “To match the one at your breast.”
Kit laughed. “I’d only embarrass myself.”
“Nonsense.” Cairbre’s calloused thumbs stroked the clasps on the leather case, expertly flicking them open.
“After the masque you gave us for Beltane Masques.”
“Silly things. What’s that to do with music?”
Cairbre shrugged broad shoulders, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear, pointed like a leaf. His merry eyes fixed on Kit’s face, and he smiled through a tidy black beard.
“What has anything to do with music? We fools and poets must hang together, ah, Master Puck! Speak of the Devil.”
Kit turned. Robin Goodfellow ducked under the high table and hopped down from the dais, twirling a bauble in time to the bobbing of his ears.
“Devils for dinner? Not tonight, but mayhap on another. Do you like yours roasted, or baked?”
“My devils, or my soul?”
“Why, Sit Kit,” the Puck said. “Do you have a soul? I’d think you half fey already, and as soul-less as any of us.”
“Soulless?” Kit glanced over his shoulder at Cairbre, who opened the case and slowly folded back the layers of velvet and silk swaddling the viola.
“Soulless, aye,” he answered, unconcerned. “As all Fae are. Tis the source of our power: Heaven has no hold over us, and Hell only the power we grant it. Our immortality is of the flesh. While your sort,” a dismissive gesture,” bloody yourselves over who has the right to interpret the will of that one, and worry at his will, choosing those who govern you.” A curt gesture of his chin upward; Fae, he couldn’t say the Name.
If Heaven has no hold on you, why do you fear God’s name?
Instead, Kit said: “And who governs you?”
“Those that can. Go ahead and pick it up, Sir Christofer.” Cairbre stepped away from the case, swinging his tattered cloak over his arm.
Kit stroked the cherry-dark neck. “I’m really not …” But his fingers slipped around the wood and lifted the beautiful instrument from its crimson bed. The varnish glowed in the torchlight, a rich auburn, a master would have despaired of capturing in oils. “I’ve never touched something like that,” he breathed, as if it were alive in his hands and might spread wings and spiral up into the vast galleried chamber, lost.
“It should be in tune.”
Kit looked from Cairbre to Robin whose ears waggled in amusement and raised an eyebrow, but he took the rosined bow when Cairbre held it out, inhaling the dusty-sweet pine scent until he fought a sneeze. He closed his eye, settled the viola, raised the bow and fluffed the third note.
“I warned you. Lessons,” Cairbre decided, and took the bow away. “Come. You’ll give us a poem tonight, won’t you?”
“Yes, Kit answered. I’ll give you a poem.”
He expected they’d wait for Murchaud’s departure, whoever they might be, but perhaps not too much longer. But that first night, as he sat sharing a trencher with Robin Goodfellow below the cloth of estate, he was bemused by the strangeness that filled him. In another setting he might have called the feeling fey: back to what I was, when I was little more than a boy and full of myself and my secrets.
Puck sat at Kit’s right, on his blind side, and saw he ate, though his appetite forsook him in Murchaud’s absence. Halfway through the meal, Kit realized the little elf had deserted his own place at the high table to stay with him. Kit imagined he looked strange as a swan among magpies beside the lesser Fae.
The Daoine Sidhe the Tuatha de Danaan as they were called claimed descent of the Old Gods of hill and dale, of moor and copse and ocean. A Church scholar might have said the blood in their veins was that of demons, not deities. Kit had long past given up his illusions that God kept his house in a church. Their sea-changing eyes and leaf-tipped ears marked them as something other than human, and their wincing aversion to the Name of the Divine might be evidence. But then, what god would abide the Name of his supplanter?
But they did, in broad, look human. The elder, stranger Fae did not. Though they sometimes dined at the Mebd stable, served delicacies by brownies and sprites, and though many of them served in her palace, they were not Tuatha de Danaan, not Daoine Sidhe. And they were as strange now as ever they had been on Kit’s first lonely walk into the throne room that lurked behind the second closed pair of doors.
Across the table rested a lovely maid-in-waiting whose forked tongue brushed the scent from each morsel she tasted before she lifted it to her mouth. On his left, a creature more wizened than even Robin crouched on the edge of the table and ate between his knees.
Kit stifled a chuckle, thinking what his own mother would have said about boots on the table, and turned to murmur something in Robin’s ear. A polite hiss from the scaly young lady across the table interrupted.
“Sir Christofer?” Thread-fine snakes writhed like windblown curls about her temples. Her eyes were as flat and reflective as steel, the pupils horizontal bars.
“Mistress Amaranth.”
It might have been a smile. Her lips were red and full, a cupid’s bow disturbing behind the glitter of scales like powdered gold rubbed on her skin. Her hand darted with a swiftness that should not have surprised him, brushing the flower on his doublet before he could jerk back.
“Does it not shame you to wear the love-in-idleness?”
“There is more here than I understand.” Remembering Cairbre’s comment, and how Morgan and Murchaud had both adorned him with the blossoms. “Love-in-idleness?”
“Heartsease,” she said, while Puck pretended not to hear. “The pansy or viola.”
He pulled his bread apart in tidbits, setting the balance of it beside the trencher while he buttered a morsel, covering his confusion with concentration on the knife. It seemed dry as paste; he would never have choked it down without wine.
“It pleases my lady, Mistress Amaranth.”
The lamia’s hair hissed again. He thought it was a chuckle.
“Then she is cruel, is she? I am not surprised at that.”
“Not so cruel as that.”
“Cruel enough,” she said, gesturing for a footman to lay a bloody slice of roast upon her plate.
“Kind as any woman,” he answered.
Amaranth’s cold eyes widened; the Puck snorted. Kit toasted Amaranth, wondering what moved him to defend Morgan for all her late absence from the hall, and his bed. But his gaze traveled past the serpent, up to the dais and to Murchaud sitting near Cairbre, at what would have been the Mebd’s right hand if the Mebd were there. Even across that distance, the look Murchaud returned pressed Kit back as physically as a thumb in the notch of his collarbone. He reached for his wine, feeling as if he choked.
And now I truly am alone. Until he returns. Or until Morgan claims me. In deep deception, and in the hands of the enemy.
He held the Elf-knight’s withering glance until it seemed the whole room must have noticed. Until conversation flagged around him and Amaranth herself turned to follow the course of his one-eyed stare, then leaned aside as if she would not break the strung tension. Murchaud looked down first, turning to laugh nastily at some comment whispered by the Mebd’s advisor, stag-horned old Peaseblossom. Kit watched a moment longer, then dropped his eye to his dinner and haggled off a bit of roast as if he could bear to put it in his mouth.
“What’s love-in-idleness?” Kit murmured, bringing his lips close to Puck’s twitching ear.
“What you wear on your bosom,” the Puck answered dryly. “That thing on your sleeve is your heart.”
When Kit stood to give his poem on Cairbre’s signal he chose something that spoke of the pastoral delights of summertime and never a chance of sorrow. But when he returned to his rooms after dinner, he worried an iron nail loosefrom his old riding boots, and slipped it into the sleeve pocket of his doublet, and felt just a little better for it.
‘Sweet Romeo: I apologize for the vagaries of my correspondence. My new masters it seems do not approve entirely that I maintain my friendships from service taken before but in this cause I am defiant. That I am your true friend do not doubt. I thank you for the word of little Mary & her nestling, that they are well. I will watch over you as my ability permits, & your letters (& those of FW) relating the situation in London fall most welcomely into my grateful hands. There is some change in my circumstances, not serious of yet but prone to developments, in which case you might say I am at mine old works again, & there are revelations that may suspend correspondence. These circumstances include the following: that I have been unfair in my judgement of TW, & rather those charges should have been levied at that abominable bastard in the peascod doublet he no doubt imagines conceals his paunch, you will know of whom I refer. Also, it is with sorrow that I must relate that he who I have considered your greatest ally (again you will know) is gravely ill. I have not managed a visit, or more than a word & a note, but I believe that the poison administered these four years since is at work again, & I do not think my dear friend will last through the winter in the lack of Doctor Lopez’s care. This places you in graver danger than I can express. It is imperative that Peascod-doublet not learn we know of his duplicity. Her Majesty, as you know, though it were sedition to speak it, grows in melancholy with the passing of each old friend & each treasured counselor. I cannot imagine that to lose mine old master will lie easy on her, for all their difficulties after the death of Mary Queen of Scots, & you must know it will make her more open to Essex & his machinations: the patron they have sought for you, Southampton, is useful as a link to Essex. There are rumors but I am sure the conclusion lies within your powers. FW s illness means also we must find another path of correspondence. Will you have a looking glass placed in your chambers? Steel-backed is best for these purposes though flawed at reflecting, & less dear than silver. I pine without your company.’
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