Ink and Steel

The words came; he could not stop them. They chewed at his heart, another pain among many. They gnawed at his breast, bosom serpents, venomed worms. He had no need to busy himself so; the pantry would fill on its own, the garden would unweed itself. Will himself had no need, it seemed, to eat unless the desire took him, although his hands did tremble with his illness when he had no task to set them to. Idle hands are the Devil’s playground. Idle hands had a tendency to stray to the well-appointed desk, to lift the white pen that was a twin to the one Kit had found under the covers of his bed. Unless my nerves were brass or hammer’d steel. For if you were by my unkindness shaken…

Perfect words. Better than anything, Will knew, anything he had written before. As I by yours, you’ve passed a hell of time; / And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken / To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. Kit was alive. Somewhere. In Faerie. And his crime was ever less than Will’s; Kit had had no vow of marriage to forswear. Kit had made no promise of fidelity at all. Worse, worse. Kit had offered, and Will had refused him. Only to react like a kicked whelp when he discovered that Kit had believed what Will had told him. Kit, who was alive. Kit who would always be alive. As alive as the Fae who had killed Will’s only son. Alive and grieving. O! that our night of woe might have remembered / My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits, / And soon to you, as you to me, then tendered / The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits!

Will added well water to the stewpot, crumbled rosemary, stirred with a long peeled stick. Not pine; he’d learned the flavors of lingering resins in the wood the unpleasant way. Oak. For all he would have liked to burn it. Annie. I hope Kit found you. I hope he told you what became of me. He propped a plate across the lid of the stewpot, left a little gap, banked the coals about the iron bottom. He glanced at his desk, at the fine already-cut leaves of paper, at the elegant pens. At dust that covered all. He glanced at the door, at the notches whittled bright and new in the posts, the oldest ones silvering to match the weathered texture of the beams. He closed his eyes and inhaled the savor of garlic and onions and rosemary bubbling over the fire. He turned in the center of the room, the soft light of evening slipping in through opened shutters, the dark streaks of loam on the thighs of his breeches, the strange incongruity of the clock on the rough-hewn mantel with its scroll-worked hands for seconds, minutes, days, months, years.

A Hell of time.

He dusted his hands again; black dirt made moons under his nail-beds. A bit of grease daubed the left one’s back. He thought of turnips and swore. If I called on Lucifer, would he come to me? Aye, and bid me write, and chide me for childishness.

It had happened before. Will blasphemed a little. It did nothing to ease the bitterness in his throat, the emptiness in his bowels. He picked up his greasy oak stick and his broom and crouched before the fireplace, upsetting the stewpot intentionally, spilling gravy and vegetables on the hearthstone and away from the fire. He burrowed in the embers like a badger, raked them from the fireplace, scorching his shoe, burning his hands. The broom smoked as he swept the heaps of coals against the cottage walls;with the ash shovel he carried a smoking log outside and heaved it up onto the thatch. He caught his cloak from the peg by the door frame and settled under a pine tree, where he remained late into the warm autumn evening, watching the snug little cottage burn. He slept smiling, rough on sponge-soft needles, savoring the pain of his blistered palms when he woke in the darkness before morning. When the sun rose in tawny and auburn, Will crunched across soft-rotted pine boughs and mounds of needles to wash soot from his face and bathe his hands in the well. The cottage sat where it had always been, a thin ribbon of smoke and the smell of cooking bannock rising from the chimney. The door was propped open and had been repainted red; Will could see the unmarked, silvery doorpost from where he stood just under the roof-edge of the pines.

But that your trespass now becomes a fee; / Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

He sighed, and went inside, and somehow, again, managed not to pick up the pen. Will knelt in the sunlight over a bowl full of water, shaving himself as best he could. He kept his hair haggled to the shoulders with his dagger; the palsy made keeping his beard trimmed hard, but he was damned if he’d let himself turn into a wild man. Truth to tell, he was damned even if he wasn’t pretty. He laid the blade aside and dipped hands in the water, washing the trimmed hairs from his face. He sat back on his heels and blinked; a shadow fell over him and he startled, overbalanced, and fell on his ass as he began to rise.