Ink and Steel

Kit shook his head. He reached out and gently caught Puck’s wrist, turning it to see the way the spidery fingers joined each other in a palm no bigger than a shilling coin. “Amazing, he said. New? No. But worse of late. And dif… different.”

The Puck’s bells rustled. He twined his other long hand around Kit’s wrist: a gesture of comfort. “They’ll get worse before they get better. Are you stitching your cloak yet?”

Kit shook his head, regretted it when the room kept wobbling after. “Should I be? Tomorrow.”

“The sooner the better. You’ll have to claim this, or it will claim you.”

“What is it?”

Great brown goat eyes examined Kit, their horizontal pupils swelling in interest. “A bardic gift,” Robin said plainly. “The gift of prophecy. If a gift you can call it.”

“Cassandra,” Kit said thickly. “Wonderful. Serve forth Apollo: I’ll fuck him. Cairbre didn’t warn me …”

“Cairbre doesn’t have it.” Robin laid his hand in his lap, and curled cross-legged on the arm of the chair. “Tis rare, even among bards. Taliesin had it, if you know that name.”

“Nay”

“Merlin?” The Puck smiled at Kit’s expression.

“The slip of a clerk’s pen nearly metamorphosed this Marley into a Merlin in younger years,” Kit said, remembering amusement at the name misrendered on his scholarship papers. And his sisters good-natured cruelty over the mistake. ‘Merlin’s going to university, Father.’

“A turn of prophecy, then. Make your cloak, Sir Kit. You re close on becoming a bard: you’ll need it.”

“So hang thee me in thy rags of honor,” Kit said after a considering pause.

“In the tatters of Autumn’s fair fastness clothe me in patches of moss-shag’d boulders that all who attest shall know thy banner, thy brand, thy choice, thy mark in this vastness for all the world, thy witness: my shoulders, bah. It needs internal rhyme. And banner/honor, that’s not so good.”

“Pretty,” Robin commented. “What is it?”

“Slightly less than the back half of a very bad sonnet. The Italian form. The scansion limps outrageously and it doesn’t close properly; I was never very good at them. But that Oxford could do better. I am most foully drunk, Master Goodfellow.”

Puck laughed, and turned on the arm of the chair so he could lean back on Kit’s shoulder, as Kit had leaned on Murchaud. Kit shifted to make the creature more comfortable; his rapier hilt jabbed floating ribs, and he lifted his chin to clear the Puck’s half-floppy ear from his field of view. They settled into companionable silence while the room grew brighter.

“There are many sorts of bindings,” Puck said. “I myself am knotted in the Mebd’s hair, and have no choice but to serve her loyally inasmuch as she commands me. I feel your grief, Kit.”

“There are bindings and bindings,” Kit said, as the sun peeked the horizon and Kit’s wine-soaked dizziness receded like the tide before morning.

“Have you heard from your playmaker in England?”

“No,” Kit sighed. “I thought it best to make a clean break, after all.”

“His son has died.” Kit blinked. He arched his neck and angled his head to get a look at the Puck, who snuggled closer on Kit’s blind side. The words hung in the air, unaltered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“His son. A year past now, of a fall from an oak.”

Kit heard a Queen’s voice, a smiling rhyme. Ellum do grieve; Oak he do hate;Willow do walk if yew travels late

“Hamnet,” Kit said. “Dead.”

“Aye.”

“Oh, God.” Numbly, remembering an undelivered letter a year past, though I am no judge of time in Faerie.And then hugged the Fae close as Robin flinched, covering his ears with his spidery hands. “I beg your pardon, Master Robin Goodfellow.”

“Tis nothing.” Robin hopped up, his moist eyes dark. “I must to mine own tasks, Sir Kit. I hope you find your surcease.”

“Perhaps,” Kit said, a little soberer and sadder. He grasped the arms of his chair and pulled himself to his feet to walk Robin to the door. They exchanged a handclasp, and Kit closed and latched the door behind the Fae. He turned and leaned his back against it, eyeing the smooth-tugged counterpane of his broad, empty bed. A few rays of sunlight lay across it, but the bedcurtains would see to those

“His son. Oh, Will.”

Decisively, he turned again, steady enough if he did not bend or stand, and pulled his door open. Mouse-soft footsteps carried him up the stairs and through the gallery, to a door he had not tapped in quite some little while.

His knock wavered more than he liked; he was about to turn and walk away, almost with a sense of relief, when it swung open and Morgan stood framed against the morning, blinking, in a white nightshirt and a nightgown of apricot silk, barefoot, no nightcap and her hair a wilderness of brambles on her shoulders.

“Madam,” Kit said, shifting from one foot to the other. She stood aside, and let him enter.

   Act II, scene xviii

Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt!

 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Julius Caesar