Ink and Steel (7 page)

“Waxes vexed, and wanes kind?” Kit pushed against the wall. “Dizziness, Master Fool. You know me?”

“Your plays have a wide circulation.” The little man grimaced: it crinkled his face so oddly that Kit at first did not recognize a smile. “Art Marley, and I'm Goodfellow, but mayst call me Robin if I may call thee Kit. We're fools both, after all, and of an estate.”

“I'll not dispute it.” Kit pressed the heel of his hand to his injured eye, as if the pressure could ease the throbbing that filled his brain. “I've the belly to make a go of it if you'll steady me, Master Fool.”

“One fool hand in hand with another. A Puck for a puck. You've the belly for many things, I hear.”

“I'm notorious.” The banter was tonic to a flagging confidence. A tall man with four horns and the notched ears of a bull swept past, wearing a breastplate of beaten gold and trailing a cloak of burned blue velvet and vair. A circlet crossed the man's fair brow, just under the horns, and Kit returned his stare.
I
am
notorious.

The bull-horned man turned his head, maintaining the eye contact, and almost stumbled over a side table. Kit wished he had a rapier to rest his hand on; a heady rush he liked better than wounded dizziness filling his breast. As if air filled his lungs again after a blow to the gut.
I'm Kit Marl
e
y
.

I'm Kit Marley.
He curled his lips into a grin and stiffened his shoulders, put a cocky sparkle in his eye. Flickering torchlight picked out the river of Fae, limned them like the demons of
Faustus
, and the heat of it stroked Kit's cheek. The bull-horned man turned suddenly to watch his feet.
Marley the poet. Christofer Marley the playmaker. Marley the duelist. Marley the player, the Lover, the intelligencer. I've the honeyed tongue to seduce wives from husbands and husbands from wives, secrets from seditionists and plots from traitors. I'm Christofer Marley, by Christ!

He tasted a breath, and then another one.
For Good Queen Bess. For Elizabeth. I can do this thing and any other.

“Lead on, Merry Robin,” he said without letting the grin slide down his face, though it tugged his stitches and filled his mouth with musky blood. “And show me your merry men.”

“ 'Tis not the men that need concern you. 'Tis the maid stands at their head.” Twiglike fingers encircled Kit's wrist and the elf tugged him forward, creeping on many-jointed toes.

Kit had a brief, swirling impression of heavy paneled doors worked in bas-relief with masterful artistry, designs more Celtic than Roman. The throne room was longer than it was broad, the floor tiled in patterned marble of rose and green, the dark windows hung with rippling silk and open to the night. The Fae moved freely, clumping in knots of whispered conversation, calling witticisms across the table set with glasses and wine. Kit's head throbbed with the scent of rosemary and mint, strewn with flower petals underfoot. Robin Goodfellow tugged his fingers, and Kit turned his head slowly so he would not miss a detail on his blind side.

No hush fell when he entered, but the conversation flagged for half an instant before Robin led him forward. On the far end of the hall, raised on a dais, the Queen lifted her head. Kit would have gasped if he'd had any wonder left in him.

She curled in a beaten gold chair, languid as a lioness. A cloth of estate stretched over her head, and as Kit approached—uncouth nails ringing on the paving stones—she raised eyes that struck him through the heart. It wouldn't have taken much to send him to his knees, true, but Robin was there, and made the stumble look a genuflection. Kit didn't look up, but the image of the Queen's golden hair knotted in braided ropes stayed with him, and the haunting perfection of eyes that caught the light and glimmered one moment green, one moment violet, like orient jade.
That most perfect creature under heaven,
he thought,
the moon full in the arms of restless night
.

She moved an arm, by the sound of it. Stretched in leonine grace. Unfeeling of the hard, cold stone he knelt on, he imagined the purple silk of her mantle drifting from a wrist as white and smooth as a willow branch. He imagined the perfect pale mask of her face marked with a rosebud smile, and shivered deep in his soul. Her voice was furred like catkins, soft as the wind brushing his hair, and he heard a rustle of slick cloth and a jingle of bells, as if she stood, or stretched, or danced a step and stopped.

His breath froze in his belly when she said his name.
She's just a wench,
he thought desperately.
She's ensorcelled me. This is sorcery. Glamourie.

“Gentle Christofer.” Another whisper of bells. Robin got up and shuffled aside. He didn't dare raise his eyes. “You grace our court with your presence. We have seen your work. It pleases us, and we know of your other duties before your Queen, and Gloriana pleases us as well.”

Somewhere, he found a voice, although it didn't sound like his own. “You are gracious, Your Majesty.”

“Look upon us,” she said, and his chin lifted without his conscious will.
I am bewitched,
he thought, and then realized how close she had somehow drifted, silent as a thistledown. She reached out with soft fingertips, laced them through his hair, and traced the outline of his ear as if exploring a flower petal. He whimpered low in his throat, an anxious whine, and gritted his teeth as a low, amused chuckle swept the room.

They knew what she was doing to him. His breath came like a runner's around the fire in his chest, but he managed to answer in pleasant tones. “Yes, Your Highness.”

Like velvet stroked along his spine, like a hand in the hollow of his back, her voice kept on. “I'd grant you a place in my court, Master Poet. Your old life is lost to you. Will you play for my pleasure, sir?” A little ripple of delight colored her tone at her own double meaning.

“I'm sworn to another—” he began.

The hardest words he could imagine speaking then, but the Mebd cut him short with a wave of her lily-white hand. Pearls and diamonds slid about her wrist when she moved, and emeralds and amethysts sparkled on her fingers. “Hath been our royal pleasure to assist our sovereign sister Elizabeth in maintenance of her realm, whether she wits it or not. She'll not grudge us your service, Master Poet—”

“Sir Poet.” A voice like the yowl of a cat after the Mebd's silken perfection. A voice from his blind side.

Kit turned his head. Morgan stood beside him and a few steps back, her hands loose by her sides as she dropped a brief curtsey to the Queen. “I've knighted him, sister dear.”

“Ah.” The Queen let her fingers trail across Kit's neck. “Stand, then, Sir Poet.”

Her voice said she smiled, but her eyes didn't show it, and Kit struggled but didn't have to take Morgan's subtly offered hand. “A man cannot serve two Queens, Your Highness,” Kit said softly, against the pressure within that told him to throw himself down and kiss this woman's slipper, the perfect hem of her perfect gown. “Much as it may pain him.” He shook his head, in pain. “Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air / Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars; / Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter / When he appear'd to hapless Semele: / More lovely than the monarch of the sky / In wanton Arethusa's azured arms . . .”

“Your
Faustus
,” she said, but she seemed well pleased. She stepped back, a silver slipper gliding through the rose petals curling on the tile, and Kit felt something
snap
in the air between them as cleanly as if he'd broken a glass rod between his hands. “We know it.” She settled back on her chair. “Thou canst never go home, Christofer Marley. Art dead unto them.”

Kit swallowed around the dryness in his throat. The dream was broken, the moment of perfection fled like the touch of the Queen's soft hand. His belly ached, his chest, his ballocks, his face; he trembled, and only half with exhaustion. “Your Highness,” he said, and his voice was again his own, if raw as the cawing of crows. “I crave a boon.”

“A boon?” She leaned forward in a tinkle of bells. “We shall consider it. What offer you in return?”

His luck had been running. Let it run a mile longer. He stepped away from Morgan, nearer the throne, dropping his voice. “A bit of information, Your Highness. You have an interest in Elizabeth's court?”

She smiled. Oh yes, he'd guessed right, from the fragments of information gleaned from her speech and Morgan's.

“Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster? He lives, in hiding.”

“As do you,” she answered, with a slight, ironic smile. “It signifies. What wish you in return?”

“Let me speak to him but once. I have information I can give no other, and it is vital to the protection of the realm. If Elizabeth's reign means something to your Royal Highness—and I can see your sister Queen is dear to you—I beg you. On bended knee. Let me make my report.”

“And?”

“And secure my release from service.” For all his practiced manner, he could hear the forlorn edge in his own voice, and imagine the mockery in Elizabeth's.
Am I so easy to set aside then, Master Marley?

The Mebd watched him as he suited action to words, bowing his head, sinking on the stone steps of the dais though they cut his knee like dull knives. The queen sighed; Morgan shifted from foot to foot behind him. At last, he heard the sibilance of her mantle as she nodded, and her voice, stripped now of glamourie. “Let me see your wounds, Sir Christofer,” she answered, not cruelly. “Draw off your bandages.”

His fingers fumbled when he tried. The room spun, and he laid his palm flat on the edge of the steps to keep from tumbling down them. Morgan came up beside him and lifted the coils of linen with gentle fingers, and the Faerie Queen sucked air between her teeth like any woman would at what she saw.

“Hist, let me lay hands on thee,” she said, leaning forward on her throne to probe with cool fingers. “I cannot heal the scar or give you back your vision, poet. But I can seal the cut. Have I consent?”

“Yea,” he answered. Morgan's hand on his shoulder, only, kept him upright. The Queen stroked the wound again, and the pain ebbed, and the floor and the walls blurred and spun. She muttered a word or two he did not hear.
Well,
Kit thought when she leaned back,
I've benefited from sorcery and had dealing with the fair folk. If there's a hell after all, no chance of avoiding it now.
He thought of Faustus and managed a smile as Morgan and someone on his other side—Murchaud—helped him rise.

“Art dismissed.” The Mebd turned her attention away.

To complete Kit's disgrace, Murchaud had to carry him back up the stairs to Morgan's chamber. The knight took his leave, and Morgan stripped Kit over feeble protests and placed him in bed. Sometime before morning, she drew the hangings back and crawled under the coverlet, and he found to his delight that a little rest had restored him more than he'd expected.

There was something to be said for living after all, and for being alive, and the simple joy of a woman who threaded strong hands through his hair and touched the seamed white scar across his face as if it were merely another thing to be caressed—like his nose, his ears, the lower lip she nibbled into silence when he would have whispered fair words in her ear.

She left again by dawn, wriggling from under his arm, and though he lifted his head to see her slip through the door, he did not turn when the door reopened and he thought she returned. A warm body slid beside him as he drowsed. He startled from sleep to wakefulness in a moment, stifling a cry; the hands on his shoulders were dry and calloused with bladeplay, big enough to close a circle around his upper arm, and the lips that touched his throat and the teeth that caught at his skin were framed with a tickling rasp of beard.

A flutter of breath trickled through his teeth. He forced the words to follow it. “I'm unfit for wrestling, Sir Knight—”

Murchaud chuckled, his mouth growing bolder as his long hands tightened on Kit's shoulders, around Kit's chest. “Come, come, Sir Poet,” he answered. “I'm understanding of your plight. Needs do nothing but sigh just like that, and I shall see your sighs well answered on this morn.”

Act I, scene v

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Romeo and Juliet

June stretched through the heat of summer into August, until Will leaned against the wall beyond Oxford's patterned study door, a sheaf of poems clutched in his hand, and fumed. Oxford's words rang in Will's head.
Walsingham has
Titus.
It's good for what you have of it. Pray for an end to the plague, and write me an end to the play.

I didn't give the play to Walsingham,
Will fumed.
I gave it you for comment, good my Lord—

He bit his tongue against a curse and realized his hands were bending the paper his poems were scribbled on. Hastily, he smoothed them against his knee, and eyed Oxford's penmanship on the page—tidier than his own spiraling squiggles when his brain outran his hand.

Will folded the papers once in his hand. “God send me no worse patron than a frustrated poet,” he murmured, and headed out. A housemaid opened the side door for Will. Satisfied that the ink had dried, he tucked the pages into his doublet, rubbing his eyes against brightness as he stepped into the street.

He bought a pasty from a market stall and ate it standing in the lee of a half-timbered house, beside the garden wall. A ribsprung calico peered at him from a roof angle and dared to mew. “The plague chasers will be on thee,” Will observed. “Mind you hide your face, Malken, or your kits will starve without a mother.” He worried a bit of mutton loose from his lunch and tossed it to the tiles beside her paws: she flinched, expecting a stone, then grabbed the morsel and was gone.