Ink and Steel

His fingers fumbled when he tried. The room spun, and he laid his palm flat on the edge of the steps to keep from tumbling down them. Morgan came up beside him and lifted the coils of linen with gentle fingers, and the Faerie Queen sucked air between her teeth like any woman would at what she saw.

“Hist, let me lay hands on thee,” she said, leaning forward on her throne to probe with cool fingers. “I cannot heal the scar or give you back your vision, poet. But I can seal the cut. Have I consent?”

“Yea,” he answered. Morgan’s hand on his shoulder, only, kept him upright. The Queen stroked the wound again, and the pain ebbed, and the floor and the walls blurred and spun. She muttered a word or two he did not hear.

Well,Kit thought when she leaned back, I’ve benefited from sorcery and had dealing with the fair folk. If there’s a hell after all, no chance of avoiding it now.He thought of Faustus and managed a smile as Morgan and someone on his other side—Murchaud—helped him rise.

“Art dismissed.” The Mebd turned her attention away.

To complete Kit’s disgrace, Murchaud had to carry him back up the stairs to Morgan’s chamber. The knight took his leave, and Morgan stripped Kit over feeble protests and placed him in bed. Sometime before morning, she drew the hangings back and crawled under the coverlet, and he found to his delight that a little rest had restored him more than he’d expected. There was something to be said for living after all, and for being alive, and the simple joy of a woman who threaded strong hands through his hair and touched the seamed white scar across his face as if it were merely another thing to be caressed like his nose, his ears, the lower lip she nibbled into silence when he would have whispered fair words in her ear.

She left again by dawn, wriggling from under his arm, and though he lifted his head to see her slip through the door, he did not turn when the door reopened and he thought she returned. A warm body slid beside him as he drowsed. He startled from sleep to wakefulness in a moment, stifling a cry;the hands on his shoulders were dry and calloused with bladeplay, big enough to close a circle around his upper arm, and the lips that touched his throat and the teeth that caught at his skin were framed with a tickling rasp of beard. A flutter of breath trickled through his teeth. He forced the words to follow it.

“I’m unfit for wrestling, Sir Knight.”

Murchaud chuckled, his mouth growing bolder as his long hands tightened on Kit’s shoulders, around Kit’s chest. “Come, come, Sir Poet, he answered. “I’m understanding of your plight. Needs do nothing but sigh just like that, and I shall see your sighs well answered on this morn.”

   Act I, scene v

Mercutio:

Thou art like one of those fellows that when he

enters the confines of a tavern claps me his sword

upon the table and says God send me no need of thee!

and by the operation of the second cup draws it on the drawer,

when indeed there is no need.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet

June stretched through the heat of summer into August, until Will leaned against the wall beyond Oxford’s patterned study door, a sheaf of poems clutched in his hand, and fumed. Oxford’s words rang in Will’s head.

“Walsingham has Titus. It’s good for what you have of it. Pray for an end to the plague, and write me an end to the play.”

“I didn’t give the play to Walsingham,” Will fumed. “I gave it you for comment, good my lord”

He bit his tongue against a curse and realized his hands were bending the paper his poems were scribbled on. Hastily, he smoothed them against his knee, and eyed Oxford’s penmanship on the page, tidier than his own spiraling squiggles when his brain outran his hand. Will folded the papers once in his hand. God send me no worse patron than a frustrated poet, he murmured, and headed out. A housemaid opened the side door for Will. Satisfied that the ink had dried, he tucked the pages into his doublet, rubbing his eyes against brightness as he stepped into the street. He bought a pasty from a market stall and ate it standing in the lee of a half-timbered house, beside the garden wall. A ribsprung calico peered at him from a roof angle and dared to mew. The plague chasers will be on thee, Will observed. Mind you hide your face, Malken, or your kits will starve without a mother. He worried a bit of mutton loose from his lunch and tossed it to the tiles beside her paws: she flinched, expecting a stone, then grabbed the morsel and was gone.