Ink and Steel

“And bedded you? Oh, don’t blush like that. For all tis engaging. We know something of the ways of the Fae. So. Stolen by Faeries, Queen’s Man. And yet you seek an audience with your Sovereign, and we are disposed to grant it. Speak.”

“Your Highness.” Her eyebrow arched under its paint as he sought for words.

“Do women always fluster you so badly, Kit?”

“Only when they’re Queens.” He genuflected again, straightening hastily when she coughed.

“Sir Poet,” she said, not unkindly. “We are pleased that our subtleties have preserved you, and well-pleased are we to see you well. But now our good Walsingham tells us you beg release of your oaths of service. Your Queen would know why, and what adventures befell you. Our intimate Spirit, Burghley, had you buried, and those were of a certainment not our orders.”

“My Queen.” He would have gone to one knee again, but her worn, irritated fingers caught his elbow and held him on his feet. He couldn’t look Gloriana in the eye, though she put her fingers under his chin and tilted his face like a maiden aunt with a wayward boy. “What choice is left me?”

He saw her lips purse under the masque of her paint, smelled the marjoram and ambergris and civet that clothed her. She tilted her head to examine his eyepatch and the scar that ran beneath it. “What befell thee, Queen’s Man?”

“Your Highness knows.”

“Your own words, man, and be quick about it.”

“A dagger in the eye, Your Highness.” He choked. “Thomas Walsingham’s men.”

“Your death was to be an illusion, Christofer Marley,” she said, seeming not to notice when her words rode over his. “A false body put in your place, and you spirited overseas. As was arranged in the letter you should have had under our seal. You have given much, and demanded little. We thought to make recompense.”

“It was not so, Your Highness.”

“We see.” Her hand left a trace of scent on his skin as she stepped away, her gaze steady on his scar. “I’ve witnessed worse, but it is not pretty. And earned in our service. You are a poet, she continued without a breath. Give us a poem.”

That was a challenge. She smiled when he drew himself up.

“And yet before I yield my fainting breath,

I quite the killer, though I blame the kind,”

Kit whispered, amazed at his own audacity.

“You kill unkind, I die, and yet am true,

For at your sight, my wound doth bleed anew”

“Falsely said, but pretty. Like all sentiments of poesy. As a poet myself, I’ll forgive it. Our subterfuge Burghley’s, Thomas Walsingham’s, and mine was to have saved you.”

Kit nodded. A cramp knotted his stomach; he had to brace his knees or they would have failed.

“Dead men are hard-pressed to die again. My Queen. I knew you could not prove false to me, for all you are a Prince, you are a woman as true as any woman, and the mother of a son.”

She stepped back as if stung, and then shook her head in admiration and rue.

“Hist! Kit Marley, you’ve got a tongue in you. Wilt convert me to atheism now?” She leaned close, voice confidential. “You are privileged in your loss this once and once alone. Unmarried Queens do not have children, sir.”

“Your Highness.”

“As I am bid …” She smiled then, gentled. “We are given to understand that we owe you life and reign twice over, Sir Poet. We meant to reward you with your life, but it seems you have that in spite of us. What would complete thee?”

“Do you know, Your Highness, of Thomas Walsingham’s faithlessness?”

“Not unlike his cousin,” she said, “whose trickery painted me to a stand where I must have my royal cousin executed. The men who support me are true to my reign, but they will work at cross-purposes. We believe he is upright in his conviction that your death was warranted for all he was misled to that conclusion. Do not ask yourself revenged on him. I would not.”

“Does Your Highness wish our task ended?”

A tilt of her head under the weight of pearls and hair. A subtle smile. “We are, she said, very fond of plays. You were about to answer my question.”

I should ask for Ingrim’s head roasted and brought in on a platter with an apple in his mouth, and bits of boiled egg to make the eyes.“I was a guest of that same Thomas Walsingham when your summons found me,” Kit said carefully. “There were papers. Manuscripts. Poems, part of a play.”

“I am sorry.”

He believed her. “He has burned them. Better my life lost than my words, Your Highness,” Kit said. “There is nothing else I will be remembered by.”