Ink and Steel (24 page)

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 loose from his old riding boots, and slipped it into the sleeve pocket of his doublet, and felt just a little better for it.

Act II, scene viii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
As You Like It

Will stepped down from a hired coach weary, bruised to the bone, sorely afflicted with chilblains, and nibbled by fleas. He'd fallen uneasily half asleep with his fingers protruding from under a carriage robe clutched to his chin. He worked them now, trying to bring sensation to cold-chapped skin.

The coachman liberated his luggage and slid it down beside the wheels; the ground was too frozen for the trunk to be damaged by mud. The tired bay snorted. Will skirted the horse nervously, and caught one end handle on the trunk to drag it toward the cottage with its close-thatched roof. He closed his eyes, smelling kindled fire and baking bread, and stopped himself a half gesture before he rapped on his own front door.

Instead he breathed deep, then pulled the latch-cord and shouldered the green-painted portal open, letting his trunk bump over the threshold. “Annie?”

She straightened and turned to him, aproned and dressed in good gray woolen, leather shoes on her stockinged feet against the winter chill of the rush-strewn floor, her befloured hands spread wide. “Will.”

She stepped closer. Will kicked the door shut and bumped it with his heel to make certain of the latch. Leaving his trunk half blocking the threshold, he met her halfway between the door and the table and caught her wrists, holding her whitened hands back when he kissed her mouth. She giggled like a girl. He wiped flour off his cheek when he stepped away.

“I've a rental house for you to look at—”

“Annie, let a man get his boots off,” he protested, and she laughed again. “I'm famous, wife.
Romeo and Juliet
. Dost care?”

“I'll read your plays,” she said stolidly, turning to wash her hands, “when they bring you home again.”

He came and poured the water for her so she would not beflour the ewer, and watched her hands tumble over each other like courting birds. “The bread smells wonderful.”

“Wonderful enough to wake the children, do you suppose?” She glanced at him sideways, drying her hands on her apron.

“Still slugabed?” He smiled, looking up at the loft. “Did you tell them I was coming?”

“I—” She stopped. “I didn't want to disappoint them.”

“Ah.” The sour taste was no more than a night spent in the Davenant's Inn before resuming his coach seat to finish this journey. He nudged his trunk out of the doorway, pushing up a thin ridge of rush stems. Annie's eyes were on him, kinder than he had any right to. “Do you think I can get Hamnet down here over my shoulder before he wakes, the way I used to?”

“He's bigger than you remember—Will! Be careful. . . .”

But he was already halfway up the ladder, and turned to press a silencing finger to his lips. “At least let me try.”

Annie laced her fingers behind her backside, half turned her head, and smiled and sighed as if they were a single gesture. But she held her tongue, and Will resumed his climb.

Soft morning sunlight from a casement under the eave filled the loft, the air cold enough that Will's breath steamed in coils. Will cat-footed to bedsteads ranged side by side along the left-hand wall; the wider held a pair of sweetly snoring lumps and the narrower only one. He paused, a few steps away from the children, and breathed their rich, sleeping scent. It made him lightheaded, as if he were breathing in the pale gold winter sunshine, filled up until he inflated, buoyed, floating forward to unearth his son from quilts and comforters and the featherbed covering the rustling straw-filled tick.

Hamnet slept with his thumb in his mouth, knees drawn up, hips tucked forward, body turned fully at the waist so that his opposite shoulder was in contact with the featherbed. Golden eyelashes fluttered against the boy's rosy cheeks as Will moved to block the square of sunlight dappling his face, dust motes flitting between them like atomies.

Will crouched, dislodging Hamnet's thumb gently, and with both hands picked up his sleeping son. He flopped the boy's slack warm arms around his neck and cradled him close. He squatted on the edge of the girls' bed, then, and leaned Hamnet's still-towheaded curls against his shoulder as he tugged the coverlet down.

Susanna lay with her arms widespread as if embracing the morning, Judith's brown head resting on the soft part of her shoulder. The younger girl coiled around a pillow possessively, her braid snaking across her sister's breast.

Susanna's eyes flicked open when the light brushed her face, but Judith cuddled closer to her pillow and mumbled. And then Susanna's hazel eyes went wide, and as Will saw her draw breath to shriek in delight he put his finger to his lips. She choked on it, clapped her hand over her mouth, and giggled.

Will pointed to the ladder and to Judith, and Susanna nodded and reached to shake her sister awake.

He actually got Hamnet halfway down—to Anne's stifled laughter—before the boy squirmed awake and blinked sleepily through the tangled blond curls. And then Hamnet
did
squeal, and cling, while the girls laughed over the edge of the loft.

Will propped his feet on the bench before the fire while Susanna showed Judith how to sew the braids of ivy into swags to hang over the windows and the door, and Hamnet stole fallen leaves with which to tease Anne's calico cat. The cat, fat with winter mousing, purred and flattened her whiskers smugly, but she couldn't be bothered to extend a claw after the leaves.