Ink and Steel

“We mark by the tithe,” Murchaud answered. “The teind we pay to Hell for their protection. Every seven year we draw lots, or a criminal may be chosen to go, or a changeling stolen or, rarely, someone will volunteer. Which last pays the debt not for seven years, but for seven times seven.” He shook his head. “Tribute to our overlords.”

Kit shivered. Murchaud hadn’t answered the question. Kit tried to think back, to count summers and winters, flowerings and fallings. He looked down at his right hand, turned it to examine the tendons strung across the back, the calluses ridging his palm. How long? He had no answer. “When’s the tithe, then?”

“Hallow’s eve. Always.” Murchaud shook his head.

“Hallows eve here or in the mortal world?”

“Time here is an illusion,” Murchaud answered. “In the mortal world: Hallow’s eve, fifteen ninety-eight.”

“Four years hence.”

“Not so very long. Do not pine so for your lost life, Sir Kit. Set it aside, and do what you can to make yourself a stronger place in this court.”

“You suggest I could be sent, if the Mebd does not value me? Although your mother claimed my service? Kit Marley in Hell it has a certain symmetry.”

“The Mebd values you,” Murchaud said. “But she trusts her sister, my mother, not at all. Wert wise to make as many friends in court here as thou couldst, and let thine old friends glide past. The river of time will bear them to their end more quickly than you imagine.”

“I,” Kit swallowed. “Soon enough, then, I shall be beyond that. Had I no loyalty, what would I be worth to you?”

“So be it,” Murchaud said. “Bloody thyself on the bars of thy cage, but know thou canst not straddle the flood between that world and this forever.”

“I did not choose this world.”

“No. This world chose you. Live in it, or it will cut you deep, my love. You cannot go home again.”

“Have I leave to help my friends?”

“I will not forbid it,” Murchaud answered. “But by the love you bear me, pay more mind to courting your Queen.”

Kit nodded, watching the flames. He didn’t tell me how long I’ve been here. How much time could I have lost?The answer brought cold sinking in his belly. In a Faerie Court, Marley? You could lose your whole life in a night.He frowned, and didn’t think of the letter to Walsingham on his desk, with its icy, alien words about Edward de Vere. “As you wish.” He turned his back on the fire and walked to the cupboard, taking his time in selecting his clothes.

“Where are you going?” Kit looked up, fingers stilling on the ruched sleeve of a padded doublet. He turned over his shoulder, enough to see Murchaud clearly. “I must dress if I am to dine with the Queen.”

“Sit at the low table,” Murchaud told him. “We shall pretend at a falling out. I cannot come to you tonight. Or any night until I return from my travel.”

“How long?” But then the Elf-knight kissed him, long hands cradling Kit’s face as if he cupped a rose in his palms, and Kit forgot to pursue the question, after. If after had any meaning here, at all.

Morgan’s rooms, on the third level of the palace, opened onto the gallery over the glass-roofed Great Hall. Murchaud’s were a level lower, in a side hall near the Mebd’s chambers. But Kit’s chamber was in the east wing, and to come to the main level he descended a spiral stair rather than the Great Stair, as he had on his first night. From there, he passed through a corridor to the atrium in all its tapestried magnificence. He drew up before towering ebony doors. Knights in armor, as unmoving as suits on stands, guarded the portal on either side. He ignored them for a moment and studied the dark, coffered carving: intricate spirals and knotworks, fancifully interleaved. And what is it you’ve been seeking these past seasons? A melancholy existence in exile? How … romantic.

Murchaud had threaded the stem of a pansy through the pearl-sewn embroidery on Kit’s doublet; its golden-eyed, plum-colored face nodded against the mallard’s-head green of the velvet, the color Murchaud had insisted he wear.

‘No knight should do battle without a favor from his lover. Green and violet are the Mebd’s colors,’ he had said. ‘If ever you learned to court it in the mortal realm, use that now, and know you walk a line even finer than mine own.’

Kit licked his lips into a smile for the bravado of it and stepped forward. The doors swung open smoothly, and he entered the great, galleried hall with its thousand torches burning with a golden, unholy light.