Ink and Steel

Somehow he made it to the ground and stood against the timber, shaking more with his realization about Oxford than with the terror of the climb. He knew the length of such reports to the minute, and Poley and Baines would be emerging soon. What’s another betrayal? I already knew what he was. At least I’ve confirmation. Edward II stung him. Although perhaps more than I intended.And then a bright flare of hope, quickly doused. It wasn’t Tom. And so what if it wasn’t? The thought that must concern me is whether Edward is our only traitor.

Kit pulled himself away from the timber and bent to retrieve his cloak. He couldn’t find his eyepatch; the rainwater felt odd trickling over the drooping eyelid and the scar on his blind side. But at least with the cloak too sodden to wear, it was unlikely anyone would look past the whitewash daubing his form, the blood and mess and the long-healed wound to recognize a dead man’s profile. He needed Morgan. He needed to get another message to Francis, that his cousin was innocent and Oxford the man not to be trusted. We, We. Kit, there is no we any more. You serve a different Queen.He would have laughed if he’d dared: first the sinking horror of betrayal and then relief that left him giddy. Edward, not Thomas. Why is it so much better to be betrayed by one former lover than another? Because it is better to have a vile impression of someone once cared for reinforced, than to have one’s heart shown irreparably flawed.

He picked his way out into the steadier traffic of the street, too weary and pained to keep to the shadows though passersby were offering his bloody, whitewashed, rain-streaked visage curious stares and wide berths. There was a rain barrel up on bricks a half block further on, and he thought he might wash his face. Kit kept his eye on his shoes, cautious of the slick cobbles. He wouldn’t have looked up at all if a hurrying figure hadn’t drawn back a startled step and gasped.

“M Marley? God’s blood.”

Kit looked into the eyes of a narrow little man with a narrow little face. He was well dressed and well wrapped against the rain, and he skittered back three steps and bared his teeth like a trapped rat as Kit advanced, reaching across his body for the rapier.

“Nicholas Skeres,” Kit muttered between the draggled locks of his hair. He tasted lime and blood and soot, and spit them out upon the road. “Thou murdering bastard. I’ll see thee hang.”

Skeres eyes widened so the white showed in a ring. He gave a scream like a startled girl and shuffled backward, tripped on a stone, and sat down hard in the slops.

“Kit, stay thy hand.””

“As thou didst stay Ingrim s?” Another step forward, the naked blade in Kit’s hand pointed at Skeres left eye, only a few short steps distant. The damage is done. You’re recognized. You may as well get the pleasure of his blood

Passersby were halting, drawing back, staring and muttering.

“Tis Master Marley’s ghost.” A woman’s shocked voice: one he knew not, but he’d been well enough known. The murdered playmaker. From some window open to the rain, a drift of music followed. Kit turned his head to regard the semicircle ranged on his blind side.

A half-dozen men and women huddled in the rain, frozen with fear or fascination. He ran a cold eye over them and they drew back. He was all over whitewash and blood, and he knew what they must see: a tattered figure smeared with the lime of the grave, the blood of his fatal wound rolling from the socket of his missing eye, leveling a naked blade at a sobbing killer.

It was too much for a player’s imagination. And a few reports of a dramatic revenant wouldn’t risk the sort of intelligent questions that a dead man returning from the grave to slaughter his own murderer might. Skeres claiming a visit from Kit’s ghost could be drunken fancy. Or Hell a ghost, for all that. Kit had been careless and greedy, and he wouldn’t have Will or Francis or a true innocent like Burghley’s changeling cousin Bull caught in the net of that carelessness. Kit smiled through the blood and tilted his head to look his prey in the eye.

You’ll die screaming, Nick Skeres, he whispered. The man flinched down into the gutter, a fresh reek of urine hanging on the rain-wet air, and Kit whirled on the ball of his foot. Silent in his nail-less boots, carrying his naked blade, he ran into the storm and made himself gone.