Ink and Steel

The great hall bustled. Kit moved through Fae both less and more familiar, already missing the click of bootnails on marble floors and the protection of forged iron. He paused at the doorway, but the herald saw and announced him, and as he moved forward, looking for a place below the salt, his eye was drawn by a jaunty wave from the high table.

Robin Goodfellow, the Puck, who sat beside what must by its chair and cushions be the Mebd’s chair of estate, held open a position on his left. Kit strode toward him, conscious of how recently he’d made a spectacle of himself in this very hall, more conscious of the ripple of hushed conversation that followed. Murchaud sat at the Queen’s right hand, his mother further right, and Kit’s stomach clenched and twisted with unkind recollection. But Morgan looked up at him and smiled as he walked before her. He returned the nod, and knew he blushed crimson when she stood to reach across the table and caress the velvet of his sleeve. “A lovely color on you, she said. Is the fit well?”

“My lady,” he answered, with a nod that mayhap concealed his desire to catch her black hair in both hands and scour his face with it. “Your gift?”

“You can’t go about clad in castoffs,” she said. We’ll see about a wardrobe tomorrow. And outfitting your chambers.”

“My lady is too kind.” He searched for the marks of violence on her skin, near the deep narrow neckline of her gown. There might have been a bruise, powdered over, but he wasn’t absolute. The looking left him sick, and he could not look away. “Your lady is not kind enough. Go, take your place.”

“Will I See you tonight?”

Her smile was the flex of a mayfly’s wings. “Perhaps, she said,” and froze him with her dismissal. Murchaud said nothing, but acknowledged him with a wink. He went to take his place between the fool and another Fae whose name he did not know.

“Sir Kit.”

“Master Robin.”

“Ah.”

“You remember my name better, then I apologize,” Kit said, and stood beside his chair rather than trouble himself to sit only to rise and sit again. “I was overwrought.”

“It is understandable. How fared you in the mortal lands?”

“Miserably,” Kit said, which was an answer. One cut short by the flare of trumpets. The Mebd entered, and was made courtesy to, and took her chair. She did not seem to notice Kit, though her long sleeves and her mantle of pure white silk brushed his leg as she passed. Kit seated himself as Robin did, and invisible footmen attended their chairs.

“I’m bid to tell you,” Puck said, “you’ll be called upon when the meal is done. There’s poetry in your future.”

“Something new?”

“Impress us, is the word.”

Kit bit his knuckle, thinking. I could manage a stanza or two of blank verse between then and now.There was an oiled cloth on the table, and he sketched a few letters in it with the hilt of his blade. He’d had a thought before. ‘That most perfect creature under heaven, The moon full in the arms of restless night’— but the second line limped, and he wasn’t sure this was a time for pretty flattery and praising one lady over another. He smiled. Proserpine and Hades. Oh, can I get away with it?

Kit stole a glance at the Mebd and past her to his master and his mistress. Morgan saw him; he raised his brows in question. Her eyes sparkled as she tilted her head. Yes. They delight in being shocked. The question is, can I manage more than a half-dozen lines by the time the subtlety’s presented?

He leaned toward the Puck as the meats were passed, and the Mebd made her selections.

“Why am I seated at the high table, Master Robin?”

Robin’s bells jangled, a scent of peppermint arising. “Because it amuses someone to see you here.” Twig-fingers tapped the back of Kit’s hand as the poet broke his bread into tidbits. “Your manners are dainty for someone who is not accustomed to eating with nobility.”

“Not unaccustomed to it,” Kit answered. “I’ve done my share of dining above my station.”

“And what is your station, Sir Poet?”

Kit stopped, a buttered morsel of bread to his lips. There was more to the question than the obvious: the glitter in the Puck’s huge soft eyes, wide and wicked as a goat’s, made that plain.

“It varies with the weather,” he said at last, picking up a cup he had no taste for just to feel the wine swirl within it. “Cobbler, preacher, poet, spy. Which would you have me?” The Puck chewed noisily, dipping greasy fingers in a bowl of rose-water after setting a leg of swan aside. He swallowed, enough of a mouthful that his throat distended. “Lover, killer, playmaker, thief…”