Ink and Steel (38 page)

“What's Tom brought us, then?”

Ben's thick finger tapped the middle of the paper, shifting it under the weights. It was a plan of a house and garden, well drawn in black lines, with a steady hand Will envied. Ben raised his eyes to Tom, who was still fighting that inscrutable smile. “Richard Baines' house and garden,” Ben guessed. “How did you come by these?”

“Bribery,” Tom said succinctly. “Catch.” He tossed his bundle through the air; Will fumbled it, and it landed on the map with a clunking sound entirely unlike the fairy jingle of silver or the sharp clean sound of gold.

Will struggled with the knot, the fingers of his right hand momentarily failing to answer, and got it untangled. He upended the pouch and dragged it, whistling as it spawned a river of coin. “There must be a hundred pound here.”

“Hundred fifty,” Tom said. “Or a few pounds worth of pewter,” he said, that grin returning. “It seemed appropriate, somehow, given Baines has used the trick himself. I thought it best to attend to Cecil's— pardon, Sir Robert's demands regarding the inestimable Master Baines while he was still occupied with the affairs of his late father.”

“How do you intend to pass it to them?”

“Plant, not pass.” Tom drew his dagger and picked at a cuticle with the point, not quite as idly as Will thought he meant to make it look.

“Interesting,” Will said. “I don't see you clambering in windows—”

“The clambering is Ben's part.”

“Sir Thomas—” Ben looked up from arranging the debased nobles and sovereigns in tidy rows across the face of the map.

“You're youngest, Ben. And”—a circular gesture of the knife— “strongest.”

Ben sighed, his brow wrinkling like that of a bull-baiting dog. “Aye. And once the coins are placed, Sir Thomas, how do we make sure Baines spends them rather than dispensing with them?”

“The property will be searched.” Tom sheathed his knife and picked up a silvery coin, turning it in the light. “Leave that to me. These are better than some I've seen—”

Will wasn't sure what drew his attention to the window; a shadow across the shutters or the faintest of sounds. “Ben,” he said in Jonson's ear, “is there a stair out your window?”

“A drainpipe,” Ben answered in an undertone, following his gaze. “Over the kitchen garden. Sir Thomas, you were followed—”

“—but far from the best. I'm minded of a time in France—” Tom continued, never missing a beat as he drew his sword and moved to the window in silent footsteps.

Ben came around the board, catching his sword from the back of the chair it hung on and easing it from the soft leather sheath. He caught Tom's eye, and Tom nodded as Will hastily scooped the jingling counters of a hanging offense back into their bag.

Ben hurled the shutters open and Tom lunged, reaching, cursing softly and jerking back a moment later. “Missed him,” he said, over a rustling crash and then the sound of running footsteps. “Ben, go after—”

Jonson didn't hesitate. He dropped his rapier inside the window and planted one hand on the sill, vaulting over with a grace that belied his height. Will winced at the thump from ten feet below, but Ben sounded unhurt as he called up
"BLade!”
He must have stepped aside as Tom snatched the sword up and dropped it, point-first so it would stick in the earth. “ 'Tis Gabriel Spencer—”

Tom was already moving for the door. Will grabbed his sleeve as he went by. Tom couldn't: too much chance of being spotted and recognized, even in that nondescript, unfashionably blue doublet that was too broad across the shoulders. “No.”

A moment's startled regard, and then— “Will?” Tom's voice was suddenly his cousin's, his eyes as full of cold necessity as Sir Francis' had ever been. “Make sure Ben understands—”

Oh, Christ on the Cross.
Will nodded and stuffed the coins inside his doublet, hitching his stubborn right leg as he stumbled for the stairs. He wasn't about to catapult out a window like a man eight years younger, but Will was surprised how fast his halting gait, assisted by a grip on the banister, brought him into the courtyard.

Ben must have caught up with Gabriel Spencer by the innyard gate. He had the smaller man lifted off the ground by the collar, Spencer's hand—and a dagger—pinned high against the timbers.
I'm about to order a man to kill.

Will swallowed, as best he could, conscious of the clunk of the coins inside his shirt.
Tyburn hanging,
he thought, and then he thought about Kit in a hearth-warmed kitchen, trying so hard and so falsely to smile. “Ben,” Will said. “Let him down.”

Ben turned over his shoulder, startled. Will nodded, and picked up the blade that Ben must have dropped when he manhandled Spencer against the wall.

Will held the rapier toward Ben, hilt-first, careful of the edge. Ben dropped Spencer—more tossed him to his feet—and stepped back far enough to grasp it, keeping a questioning sideways attention on Will. “He heard everything,” Will said in an undertone, hearing a different voice in the place of Spencer's sudden, comprehending pleading.
This is what a Queen's Man is. This is what a Queen's Man does.

Ben stared for a moment, aghast. And then a soldier's composure settled over the rough features, and he stepped to block Spencer's rabbity bolt for the gate. “Draw, Gabe,” he said tiredly, as his blade came up and he turned to extend the line of his arm.

Spencer glanced from Will to Ben, and back. He slipped his main gauche into the proper hand, and reached across his belt to his rapier hilt. “This is murder, Ben. It's a hanging.”

“Right of clergy,” Ben said, piggy eyes narrowing under the cave of his brow. “I read Latin. It's a branding. Counterfeiting is a hanging. Draw your blade, and you've got a chance—”

He didn't, of course: quick as Spencer was, Ben was half again his size, half again his reach, and almost as fast, with a soldier's nerve. The blades rang silver on silver, with a purity of tone the debased coins burning Will's chest couldn't hope to match. Spencer lunged and shouted—above, at the window, a cry of
murder!
went up—Ben parried, riposted, the passage too fast for Will's eye, trained only to stage combat, to follow. The big man moved in, Spencer's main gauche tearing his sleeve but not the arm beneath, and a moment later blood stained eight inches of steel at the tip of Ben's blade. Shouting and running footsteps rang down the street. Will never saw how it happened.

Ben wiped the blade on his kerchief before he sheathed it, while the witnesses and then the watch crowded close around them. “You tell Tom he'd better stand my bail,” Ben muttered, and Will nodded as Ben was led away.

Act II, scene xix

—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
Hero and Leander

In absolute blackness, Kit paced in the cramped circle afforded him. His right hand trailed on the damp stones of the wall. He had no fear of tripping; his feet knew the path, and the dank earth was where he slept when he grew too tired to walk.
Wasting energy,
he thought, but he could not sit still. “The sink wherein the filth of all the castle falls,” he mumbled, but it wasn't, quite. More an old, almost-dry well, lidded in iron as much to keep light out as the prisoner in, for the sides were twenty foot and steeply angled.

He had paced forever.

He would be pacing forevermore.

A strange sort of irritation, first an itching and then a raw, hot pain, grew in patches on his torso and his thighs. To pass the time he told himself stories. Bits of verse—Nashe's plays, half memorized, Kyd's
Tragedy
, Will's
Titus
. The Greeks and the Romans and his newest acquisition, the Celts.

And none of them could drive the mocking voice of Richard Baines out of his mind.
Good puss. Wait there, I'LL be back for thee when I can.

Kit closed both eyes. It made no difference: he walked, and turned, and walked, and turned. “Christ, Richard. For the love of God, what made you such a monster?”

“Froggy frogs,” someone answered. Kit startled, felt about him. He kicked something that rolled and rattled in darkness, a heavy iron jangle, but nothing that felt like flesh.

“Master Troll?”

“Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs—” faint as an echo up a drain pipe.

Kit felt after whatever had rolled. Maybe a tool, something that could be used to dig, or pry, or climb. He found it after some scrabbling and sat down against the wall to explore it with his fingers. Round, a sort of ball of iron straps. . . . It smelled of rust, the cold savor of iron. He felt inside it, and yelped when something pricked his thumb.

Carefully, almost reverently, Kit laid the scold's bridle aside and scrubbed his hands on his breeches as if he had inadvertently grabbed two fistfuls of meat writhing with worms. His breast burned, his belly, his thighs. In five discrete patches, now, one for each brand, an agony as fresh as the day they had been seared into his skin.
How did I get here?

He didn't know.

“
Hurm.
And
harm.
”

“Master Troll? Is there a way out of this pit? This oubliette?”
A forgetter,
some helpful portion of his mind supplied.
Where you put someone to forget them.

“There must be a way out of this.”

:Ah, Sir Christofer: A voice like brushed silk. :There is always a way. Come with me, my love. I am the way:

There was light, suddenly. Light cast from over his shoulder, and as he found himself standing he turned to it, turned into it. The scent of pipe tobacco surrounded him, a comforting memory of Sir Walter Raleigh's chill parlor and many late nights. He walked through it, heard voices hanging on a glittering arpeggio, felt air stirred by a suggestion of wings.

He walked past, and through. Found himself elsewhere, in a tower room, high in the air: an autumn or early winter evening and the unmistakable reek of the Thames, the cry of ravens in the graying light. Harsh wood scraped Kit's knuckles; something writhed ineffectually against his grip. He looked down, at the skinny, stripped man of middle years he pinned against the rough table, in an all-too-familiar pose.

The man was familiar too: his black hair, high forehead, terrified gray-blue eyes. As familiar as the lazy oval scarred by a set of good young teeth at the base of Kit's left thumb, the saddler's muscle ridging his forearms under thick golden hair. The pain from his brands was a symphony now, bright as holy words written in his flesh.
Will. What is—

A flurry of wings, and the cries of falcons, or perhaps of women in unimaginable grief or unspeakable pleasure. The light shattered like a hurled looking glass—

Kit awakened in the evening dimness behind Morgan's bedcurtains, his head pillowed on her nightgown-covered thigh, and groaned with the simple agony of opening his eye. “Where is he?”

Her voice, lazy and collected and very much awake. “Where is who, Sir Kit?”

He raised his head, wincing, and looked up her body at the woman lowering her book to regard him. “Whosoever it was that beat me in my sleep.”

“All your own doing, I fear.” She laid the cloth-bound volume aside and reached down lazily to smooth his rumpled hair. “You're a sorry drunk, Kit. Do try to avoid it in future.”

“I don't recall,” he answered. Vaguely, a memory of walking ever-so-carefully through her door, the click of the latch, her hands unbuttoning his pearl-embroidered doublet and unbuckling his sword. A brief check informed him that he was half dressed, at least, and Morgan seemed clothed and composed. “What befell?”

“You fell into mine arms,” she said, quite gently, “and wailed like a pup pulled from his mother's teat. And when I thought you'd cried a whole world's tears, you cried a few more in your sleep, and tossed and turned. But slept the morning through and then the afternoon, and whimpered whenever I rose or left your side. Still dreaming?”

Her fingers were gentle. He laid his head down on her thigh again, and sighed in the simple comfort of her touch.
I could have Liked her, if things had been different, for all she is wild and cold.
“Aye,” he said, and then sat upright, the spinning room competing for his attention with remembered horror.
Baines. And Will. Prophetic dreams.

She let her hand fall from his arm. “What of?”

“How did you know of my dreams?”

“Sweet, Murchaud isn't so sound a sleeper as that. They are somewhat—spectacular.” She smiled. He blinked, considering.

“Morgan, thank you.” It fell from his lips unheralded, and he paused a moment to examine the sentiment behind it.
Thank you for— saving my Life? Letting me awaken with some shred of my dignity intact, after Last night's display? Just—being there?
He didn't know. He stood and collected his clothes from the back of her chair, and struggled into them while she laughed.