Ink and Steel (23 page)

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 sevenyear 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 says. “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's table, 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?”