Ink and Steel (42 page)

“Astoundingly. Is she venomous?”

“She assures me she is. I have never sought an opportunity to discover it first hand.”

“Methinks 'tis probably as well.”

“Aye,” Kit said, taking Will by the elbow. “I do agree. I've spoken with Morgan. Thou wilt share my quarters, an it please thee. The bed's big enough for four, and to be frank I find it strange having so large a room to myself.”
And it will present a barrier to keep thee from Morgan's clutches. And perhaps buy me some peace as well.
The thought of returning to Murchaud's bed made him sick.
Rosalind. Dressed as Ganymede.

Oh, God in Hell.
“Amaranth,” Kit said as they came up to her. “Meet my friend William Shakespeare. Will, Lady Amaranth.”

“Charmed,” Will said, and to his credit bent over her cold, scaled hand and brushed it with his lips.

Amaranth's snakes swelled, pleased, about her elfin face as she mocked a smile. “Master Shakespeare,” she hissed. “Your reputation precedes you.”

Will glanced at Kit. Kit shrugged. “We stay current,” he said. “What poem do you plan to recite?”

Will closed his eyes, as if considering. “Something you haven't read, I think. Are you reciting Hero?”

“They've heard it,” Kit said, lifting his shoulders in a shrug. The ragged hem of his cloak swayed against his calves. “The Mebd hinted she wanted me to play Bard, so I thought I would sing something not of mine own composing.”

“When do we—”

Kit pointed with his chin to the dais. “Go and tell Cairbre there you're sent to claim the stage. He'll advise you when.”

“Come with me?”

Kit smiled. “Aye, I will. Amaranth, will you accompany?”

She tilted her head in gracious refusal as she flicked herself into a tidy tower of coils. “I must seek Master Goodfellow,” she said. “Anon, gentle Poets.”

“Anon, my lady,” Will said.

Kit bowed slightly, but did not speak as she glided away. “She likes thee.”

“How knowst thou?”

Kit flinched as they turned toward the small stage. Cairbre had been joined by Morgan le Fey, who gathered her gown—
thank God she's decently dressed—
in both fists as she seated herself before the virginals. “I can tell.”

“Your Morgan plays?” Will asked in his ear, a tender thrill in his voice that drew another shiver from Kit.

“Very well,” Kit answered, and walked forward.

Kit leaned against the pillar between two silk-shrouded windows, arms folded over his breast, and unsuccessfully fought a smile. Will was correct: he didn't know this poem, and its simple style masked Will's eternal cleverness very well.

Half Kit's mind was elsewhere, hastily revising the words of a whimsically chosen song to remove references to “the Divine.” But with his remaining attention, he watched Will put on a player's confidence and take the stage like a master, broad gestures and subtle expressions as he declaimed.

Applause, and Will soaked it in for a moment before doffing his borrowed hat and taking a long, savoring bow. Kit watched, his stomach still twisting.
No Ned, nor will he ever be, but the man has grown. Even if he is Losing his hair. Congratulations, my Love: an ovation in Faerie, such as most poets only dream.

Will's smile, when he stood, cast his face in the architecture of delight. He turned to Kit, summoning him on an airy gesture.
Sweet
Christ harrowing Hell, how am I supposed to sleep in a bed with that man all night after reading that play?

Kit mounted the steps, acknowledged to a ripple of applause, and leaned down and whispered in Cairbre's ear, enjoying the expression on the Bard's face when he said, “That Tudor song I taught you, Sir—”

“Bold,” Cairbre said, and laced his fingers over the strings of his harp.

“This is not mine,” Kit said, turning to the Fae, “but is said to have been written by a King himself not known for his faith to his ladies.” He drew breath, and found Murchaud in the crowd as Cairbre and Morgan gave him the first plaintive notes.

The Prince's eyes widened in shock at the boldness of the gesture.
And after that kiss, he shouldn't be surprised—
Kit looked away, to find the rest of his audience, aware that his voice hadn't the richness of Cairbre's deep baritone, but finding its notes with confidence. Kit sang a line for Amaranth, and one for Geoffrey, and discovered other eyes in the crowd as well. A sly glance at Morgan, giving her a phrase or two as she ran her fingers over the keys, and she smiled back as if enjoying his bravura.

Goodfellow's glance, there, and a tight little smile as the Puck tugged at his own short motley cape. Kit smiled back, and gave him a verse, for the only friendship Kit had known in Faerie. And then he turned his head and gave Will a verse, one of the changed ones, his throat tight enough that he prayed not to squeak like a mouse.

To Murchaud, the last verse, and to the Mebd's cruel, amused, approving smile and her whisper in her husband's ear—
See, Love? Your pet has teeth—
and then he closed his eyes and back to the beginning again, for the final hanging, dying line.

Shock, not applause, and Kit let the old armored smile slide over his face like a visor at the paleness in Murchaud's cheeks and Kit's own unexpected success.
I've found a way to scandalize Faerie at Last,
he thought, and took himself down from the stage.

Act III, scene iii

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
Romeo and Juliet

Will knew something had happened, that Kit's rendition of "Greensleeves” had somehow been a challenge, the smack of a gauntlet against an unprepared face. Knew it more when the music that resumed after Kit left the small stage was wordless, and Morgan excused herself, smiling, and went to climb the dais beside the Queen and the Prince.

Who shortly thereafter removed themselves from the hall.

Will, rested from the afternoon's nap, mingled joyously with musicians and poets, with the Faerie players that Kit had recruited for his masques and plays, until at last Kit found him and tugged his sleeve toward the stair. “It looks desperate to be the last one at the party,” Kit said. “Unless you were planning on leaving with the brunette—”

Will glanced back at her. She smiled coquettishly behind a fan of painted mauve silk, and he waved and turned away. “The fangs are a bit disconcerting.”

“She's Leannan Sidhe. You'd never be the same.” Kit lit a candle at the base of the spiral stair, and Will climbed in silence beside him.

“Leannan Sidhe?” He tried to mimic Kit's pronunciation.

Kit hesitated, his hand still warm on Will's arm as they made their way up the stairs. “Blood drinkers. A man can't be too careful, in Faerie.”

Will watched Kit open the door. “Black Annie,” he said. “Only men, not children.”

“She's got a special affection for poets.” Kit ushered Will inside, latched the door, and found cups and a bottle in the cupboard, upon which he left the candle. “ 'Tis said her love gives inspiration.”

“And have you availed yourself of this inspiration?” Will took the cup Kit offered him and held it under his nose. The scent made his eyes tear. “Brandywine?”

"Better.'Tis called uisge. Be careful—” As Will sipped, and coughed, and Kit laughed at him. “No, dying young once was enough. But I wanted to talk to you about your play.”

The fire of the liquor sliding down Will's throat did nothing to calm the tension in his shoulders. He told himself any ripples shivering across the tawny fluid in his cup were just the effects of his palsy, and set it down before he could spill it. “You disliked it.”

“I could not adore it more,” Kit said, refilling his cup. He leaned against the great carved post of the bed, curtains rumpling against his cloak. As if irritated, he unfastened the clasp and leaned forward enough to free himself of the tattered finery, tossing it to the bed. The single candle cast gentle shadows across his face; he drank and continued talking into Will's silence. “You've cast me again, haven't you? As you like your Rosalind. Your Ganymede.”

Will laughed. “You caught me out. The first to notice it enough to warrant a mention.”

“How could they miss? Ganymede, Leander, dead shepherds. A crack about ‘a great reckoning in a little room' and another about incompetent historians? You should not take such risks.”

“Not a risk if no one notices.”

Kit laughed, staring down into his cup. “Kit in skirts—I should be offended, I suppose, but she's a delightful girl. Although to call her Ganymede were an ungentle jest—”

“Ungentle? I thought to reference your
Dido
. . . .”

“And not painted boys untrussing in doorways? I suppose that's all right—”

“I beg your pardon—” Will picked up his cup and gulped more liquor, liking the second swallow better. “I intended no offense.”
Naive, Will.

Kit dismissed it with a tilt of his hand. “She's a marvelous character. Any man with the wit to choose a resolute wench would die for such a maid.” And then hastily, as if afeared—“Is that how thou seest me, Will?”

“How I—”
Damn. How does he always manage to weasel me into the honesty I don't want to give?
The liquor gave Will courage, and he wondered if Kit had intended it so. “Perhaps how I would see thee, if I could.”

That beautiful, ruined face turned toward him, and Kit set down his cup on a relief-carved trunk and closed the distance a few hesitant steps. His forehead shone pale, candlelight burnishing a thin gloss of sweat. Will swallowed. Kit's careful, measured voice coiled his limbs like the tendrils of a fog, cat-amused. “And were I a woman, a maid, what wouldst will of me?”

Will grinned and stepped back, far enough that he could breathe again. The closer Kit came, the vaster grew the tightness in Will's throat. He tossed back what was in his glass; it seemed easier to swallow, and a pleasant looseness imbued his muscles. “Wouldst measure thy will 'gainst mine? I'd say a maid at thine age hadn't been striving for another state.”

“I'd be inclined to agree. Dost wish more drink?”

“Wine, an thou hast it.” His throat was dry; wine would comfort it.

“By all means, put me to use.”

Kit busied himself at the sideboard; Will watched how his curls snagged and slid on the velvet across his shoulders.
He would have made a lovely girl.
“To use? Pouring and fetching?”

Kit checked as if Will had flicked his nose for overcuriosity. “Pity mine impertinence. 'Tis queer to see oneself given a woman's body. And, in my situation, a rare pleasure to be remembered.” Bitterness on that last word, and Will flinched from it as Kit returned his cup.

Will drank, and Kit drank too. The silence lasted until they'd drained the wine. Will set his cup on the window ledge with a soft click and twisted his heavy new earring in his ear before he spoke. The words that came were not the words he'd intended. “Kit, why would any man permit . . .” He swallowed, stuffed his traitor right hand into the pocket of the borrowed sunflower doublet. “Isn't it—agonizing?”

Kit cleared his throat, looking away, dispossessing himself of his cup as well. “Rather thou shouldst say, exquisite.”

“I find it difficult to comprehend.”

“I”—Kit paused, still looking down, face suddenly pale around a flush that marked consumptive circles on his cheeks, bright enough to show by candlelight—“could show thee.”

Ah.
Will's mouth that had been so dry was full of juice now. He swallowed it. “Thou—”

Kit was trembling. Like a leaf, like a girl, like a rose petal twisting in the breeze, about to be lifted from the stem. “Do not I possess mine own body, to pray God as I wish, to speak as I wish, to love with as I wish?”

Which was heresy again, and sedition, and half a dozen other things. To which Will had no answer. Kit smelled of sweet wine and herbs, and that fiery taint of uisge. Soft boots silent on red-and-gold carpet, in one endless moment, he came the few short steps to Will diffidently, like a man wooing a maid. Gaze on gaze, as if watching for the instant when Will might startle, he raised spread fingers and slid them up Will's cheeks, brushed his ears, combed his curls with them. Then took Will's face tenderly between his hands and, tugging him down, nibbled Will's lips until they parted.
William, my Love—