Ink and Steel

Kit emerged from the doorway, tipping his rapier straight again so the outline wouldn’t show, and staggered around the corner to the alley. It didn’t take as much effort to move drunkenly as he would have preferred: two nights propped in a doorway left his neck and back complaining, the muscles of his thighs stiff as if they’d been nights in the saddle.

Thunder crackled; Kit skulked behind empty barrels under a second-story overhang. He kicked a dead starling aside and settled himself to wait, but a few moments later the sky pissed rain like a drunken Jove. He tugged the hood of his cloak higher, wet wool slicing his limited vision in half. Inside the cookshop, pots clattered, onions browned. Christ wept.

Never trust to luck.In a quarter hour, Baines cloakless, ears hunched into his collar left the Sergeant. Poley walked alongside, better equipped for the rain in a gray oiled cloak and high boots. Kit swung in behind them, fifty feet or more.

Baines’ shoulders, clad in a brown leather jerkin that grew slowly darker with the rain, bobbed through a crowd, and Kit for once was glad of the other man’s height. The men wended north. The grit between his soles and the cobbles turned to mud, but Kit’s feet stayed snug in Faerie boots and he never slipped. Poley and Baines led him down alleys and through mires more wallow than highway. A bloated rat corpse swept down the gutter. Pedestrians ducked into taverns and doorways, but Baines and Poley continued. And Kit followed. Baines never looked back. Poley did, but Kit was careful to vary his distance and his walk, and one shrouded, sodden figure looked much like another.

He got lucky: they took the Bridge rather than a wherry south across the Thames. The two men stepped down another side street and into an intersection. Kit recognized their destination: a well-favored establishment known as the Elephant, a Southwark tavern whose sign peeled artistically rather than from simple neglect.

Kit checked his step as they continued around the building to where, he knew, a ramshackle stairway led to a warm and comfortably appointed room. He stepped under an overhang and leaned into the corner by the garden wall, gasping like a hooked fish. His stomach clenched on emptiness, but he forced himself to straighten and walk silently through the rain.

His hand itched on his sword hilt. Not his left hand, to keep the blade tuckedunder his cloak, but his right, ready to draw the blade whickering into the air and cast that cloak aside, to run Baines and Poley down, shouting. To run them through before they could climb those stairs.

Where’s Nick Skeres?he thought, picking his way over litter and startling a feral pig nosing through garbage. It fled in a clatter of trotters, and Kit held his breath lest the sound should bring investigators. But the rain probably covered it. Where’s Frazier?The name brought a twist of coldness into his belly, and kept him from thinking about who might be already waiting in that room.

He released the rapier’s hilt and thrust the lank strands of hair out of his eye. They stuck to his cheeks and forehead; he stifled a sneeze and swore. Morgan will put me in a hot bath again.It was her cure for everything, insane as it sounded, but it hadn’t killed him yet.

Baines and Poley had just reached the landing as Kit glided around the corner and slipped beneath the whitewashed frame of the stair. They did not shut the door. Kit looked up at the timbers and sighed, knowing from experience that the landing and much of the stair were visible through that entryway.

Perhaps I can’t make the climb in a cloak. The sword would be enough trouble, but he wasn’t leaving that behind. He circled through puddles, using a few wan flickers of lightning to get an idea of the strength of the crossbracing holding the stairs, wishing he had a bit of leather to bind his hair. It drifted again into his eye and mouth as he lifted his face. He drank in the unclean savor of London rain, blinked a particle of soot away. A pang of hunger left him dizzy for a moment; he sighed and took hold of the thickest timber. Quickly, Kit, or you’ll miss what you’ve come to hear. You don’t know who’s in that room. ALL you have is a very nasty suspicion indeed.

And one that could mean a great deal of danger to Will, especially if his friend’s secret plan to undermine the ill-feeling between Protestants and Papists came to light.