Ink and Steel

“Am I?” Her voice was hushed; if he didn’t look at her he could imagine they walked hand in hand like old friends, like brother and sister. When he turned to catch her words more clearly as he half suspected she intended, with the soft risings and dips in her tone, a barbed spiral he recognized as lust and jealousy and covetousness and the bitter dregs of a hundred other mortal sins, caught under his breastbone, and he drew each breath in pain.

Why should she have what I want so badly?

A bitter thought. An unkind thought. And unfair to Will, who was kindness personified.

“Are you my mistress? I come to your whistle.”

“Still you have not forgiven me?”

They came from the cloth-draped passageway into the throne room, and Morgan led him down from the dais with its chair of estate and the massive cloth-draped throne that Kit had never seen, nor seen the Mebd sit in.

“How can I forgive…” He caught the words in his teeth before they quite got away from him. She held his arm, leaning close enough that he could smell not only her own pungency of rosemary and rue, but the traces of another’s scent on her hair and clothes. He breathed in through his mouth, and told himself it was against the pain in his bosom.

“That is to say, Madam, whatever your sins, they must be outweighed by your favors.”

She laughed. “My favors weigh so heavily on thee? If tis jealousy that drives thee, Sir Christofer, then my favors can be thine for the asking. It was not I who ended our arrangement.” He coughed and tugged away. She kept walking while he stood, her gown trailing like the train of a jet-black peacock, and turned back only when her hand touched the door.

“I wish my friend safe,” he said.

Her eyes glittered as she smiled and inclined her head. “You wish more than that.”

“Aye.” A groan. He turned away. “As if something buried, once watered, has sprung into the sun and flowered on a day, and now will not be withered no matter how I scorn and strike it.”

“I could give thee a spell to make him love thee.”

“He loves me well enough,” Kit answered, hating his own honesty. “And that I should be content with.”

Her skirts rustled across the tile as she drifted to him. Her hands encircled his waist, her chin resting on the padded shoulder of his doublet. “Could give thee a spell to do more.”

Kit bit his lip as her breath stroked his ear. Her breasts pressed his back, her fingers demonstrating what he was sure she already knew. She could. The experience that proved it was as painful as the experience that proved it was not just her magic that aroused him, although free of the sorcery he could almost pretend it was the touch alone, nothing more than a whore’s practiced hand. She could give me Will.

“Madam,” he whispered, “What do you take your Marley for?”

She laughed in his ear; he turned in her arms and laid his own around her shoulders, holding her away as much as close. “Anything he’ll offer me,” she said. And then, more kindly: “No, thou wouldst not be my Christofer if thou wert so base as thy Morgan in such matters.”

She smiled and would have stepped back, but his arms restrained her. She turned half a step; they moved as if dancing, her train winding their ankles, binding them together. She ran fingers up the breast of his doublet and touched his lip. He frowned, and she brushed the corner of his eye as if something gleamed there.

“Hard,” she said. “Hard it is to love something, to need something, and to have it taken from thee. There are simples to ease that pain as well.”

“That pain,” he said, “is sheerest poetry.”

“He would not like it if you bedded me today.”

“I do not like that he bedded you last night.”

“There was,” she smiled, her breath against his skin, “no bed.”

“Ah.” And indrawn breath. It cut.

“Come to my room, Christofer.”

He shook his head, but he didn’t step away. “I should go. Go to Murchaud, Morgan. I can smell him on your skin.”

“I know,” she said, brushing her lips across his lips. “I left it for you. Come upstairs.”

As if he had always known he would, he went. Morgan curled against Kit’s side, her sweat drying on his arm. She laid her head on his shoulder, the pearls half worked loose and falling across his throat. Blessedly, she held her peace until his pulse no longer rasped in his ears, and he opened his eye again and turned to look at her.

“Such passion, Kit.” She knotted a fistful of the linen sheet in her hand and dried her face; offered him the same. He rubbed the sweat from her body and untangled the pearls from her hair, laying the strand aside before pulling her down beside him again.

“That was different. Thou wert not ensorceled.” Silly man, her pursed lips said, and he had to agree.

What do I here? Is that all? Enough.

She drew the damp sheet over them, idly toying with his hair.