Ink and Steel

He stole a glance at Marley, curled like a child under his spotted cloak, and stifled a yawn against the back of the hand that held the sonnets. He didn’t feel like sleeping, and he propped the letter and the poems upon the mantel and stepped into his boots before he blew the lamps out.

The latch clicked softly, well oiled, when he turned the handle, and he walked into the darkness of the hall. The Mebd’s palace changed in darkness and solitude. The airy corridors closed in, became low and medieval, and Will thought he saw things scuttle in the corners near the floor. He stopped his hand before he could cross himself, wondering where that ancient reflex had arisen from, and picked his way past the roiling shadows of infrequent torches, certain of restlessness, uncertain of his goal.

He found the spiral stair with ease and followed it down, noting landmarks so he would be able to find his way back when his wandering tired him. An unusual sense of well-being buoyed him; he wasn’t sure if Morgan’s medicines deserved the credit, or if it was simply the magic of Faerie. Will paused in the atrium, in the mellow moonlight drifting through high windows and magical skylights, and nodded to the unmoving suits of armor flanking the relief-wrought doors. He wasn’t sure they were inhabited, but in the very least they felt alive. Felt alive, Master Shakespeare? Can you explain what precisely that means, for our academic interest? Well… …no.But he nodded anyway, and continued past, down the winding side corridor that would bring him to the library. A library worthy of a Cambridgeman’s glee, in Will’s admittedly under-experienced opinion.

The light was better, candles that never seemed to drip or smoke ranged every few feet along the wall, and Will found the tall red cherry doors easily enough. They gleamed strangely in the candlelight as he pulled a taper from its sconce and fumbled for the crystal knob, pleased his hand didn’t shake. A dim strand of light crossed the floor as he eased the door; he slipped in and let it latch softly.

“Good night?”

“Master Shakespeare.” A pleased voice, a thrill of velvet that reminded him of the furry backs of fox moth caterpillars inching along a twig. Morgan le Fey looked up from reading, her light gilding one side of her face and casting the other into shadow. A folio whose illuminated leaves were shiny umber under the ink and gilt lay open before her; she held a thin glass rod in her right hand which she used, delicately, to turn the pages.

“Your Highness.” He bowed, balancing his candle, careful to spatter no wax. The scent of paper and leather filled the library. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“I haunt the place,” she said, laying her wand aside. “Sleepless? Too ill? I have herbs for that, too.”

“Rather, I am too well to sleep, Your Highness,” he answered. “And I thank you for it.” As he came forward, he saw that the light gleaming over her shoulder was neither lamp nor candle, but what seemed a swarm of green and golden atomies hovering in midair. He tucked his candle into a wall sconce, well away from the ancient tome, and seated himself across from her in acquiescence to her gesture.

She smiled. “I’m pleased to find I’m not the only one who seeks the dusty comfort of books when I am restless at night.”

She did not behave in the manner he expected of Queens, and truth to be told he was restless; restless with a sort of longing that his own poetry and his sleepless exhaustion had reawakened in his breast. He ached with the need of it, instead of the pain that had haunted him so much of late. He licked his lips and looked down at her text.

“What are you reading?” She wrapped her fingertips in her sleeve and turned the book so he could see, but the thick hand-drawn letters defeated him. The illuminations told him it was an herbal, though, and he thought it one in verse. “It’s beautiful.”

“Not quite so old as I am.” She smiled. Her near-black eyes caught sparks of light from her attendant atomies; they swirled about her hair like a tiara of jewels on invisible threads. Unbidden, Will thought of a line of Kit’s poetry

‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’

And then, unbidden, a response and dark within that light; not so much a star herself. There’s a poem in that no, not a star, not so much a sun …

Her calm voice broke his reverie. “I could grow accustomed to being looked upon so, Master Shakespeare.”

He blushed, and blinked. “My lady is lovely,” he said, and blushed harder when she moved the priceless book aside and reached to take his hand. Her fingers were rough at the tips with callus, the hands shapely and long and the tendons plain against her skin as she turned his over to study the palm.