Ink and Steel

The room was silent but for the faint, plucked twang of an untuned string: the bard Cairbre straightened over his lute and looked up at the swing of the door. He was alone in the Great Hall. Kit was early. So much for bravado. He laughed at himself and walked between the parallel trestles stretching the length of the hall. No fires burned at the hearths, and the high table sat on its dais swathed in silk that picked up the damasked colors of the marble tiles under Kit’s boots.

“Good even, Master Harper.”

“And to you, Sir Christofer.” The bard made as if to stand, reaching out to set his instrument aside, and Kit gestured him back onto his stool. “Come out of your self-exile after all?”

“There’s only so long a man can take to his bed.”

Cairbre’s eyes flickered to his breast: the blossom?— and the bard frowned. “As you say. Will you grace us with a poem tonight?”

It wasn’t a question Kit knew how to answer. He folded his right arm over his left and shrugged, silent until Cairbre took pity and tilted his chin to indicate the little stage, its assortment of harpsichord, gitar, lute, and archaic-looking instruments that Kit barely recognized. “Do you play?”

“Viola a little, though I am sadly out of practice.”

“Every gentleman should know an instrument.” Cairbre did stand then, his patch-worked cloak of multicolored tatters falling about him as he bent to pull a cased instrument from a cloth-draped stand. The bells on his epaulets rang sweetly as he laid it on the stool.

“I have a viola here.” He chuckled, and indicated Kit’s boutonniere with a flick of his fingers. “To match the one at your breast.”

Kit laughed. “I’d only embarrass myself.”

“Nonsense.” Cairbre’s calloused thumbs stroked the clasps on the leather case, expertly flicking them open.

“After the masque you gave us for Beltane Masques.”

“Silly things. What’s that to do with music?”

Cairbre shrugged broad shoulders, tucking a strand of hair behind an ear, pointed like a leaf. His merry eyes fixed on Kit’s face, and he smiled through a tidy black beard.

“What has anything to do with music? We fools and poets must hang together, ah, Master Puck! Speak of the Devil.”

Kit turned. Robin Goodfellow ducked under the high table and hopped down from the dais, twirling a bauble in time to the bobbing of his ears.

“Devils for dinner? Not tonight, but mayhap on another. Do you like yours roasted, or baked?”

“My devils, or my soul?”

“Why, Sit Kit,” the Puck said. “Do you have a soul? I’d think you half fey already, and as soul-less as any of us.”

“Soulless?” Kit glanced over his shoulder at Cairbre, who opened the case and slowly folded back the layers of velvet and silk swaddling the viola.

“Soulless, aye,” he answered, unconcerned. “As all Fae are. Tis the source of our power: Heaven has no hold over us, and Hell only the power we grant it. Our immortality is of the flesh. While your sort,” a dismissive gesture,” bloody yourselves over who has the right to interpret the will of that one, and worry at his will, choosing those who govern you.” A curt gesture of his chin upward; Fae, he couldn’t say the Name.

If Heaven has no hold on you, why do you fear God’s name?

Instead, Kit said: “And who governs you?”

“Those that can. Go ahead and pick it up, Sir Christofer.” Cairbre stepped away from the case, swinging his tattered cloak over his arm.

Kit stroked the cherry-dark neck. “I’m really not …” But his fingers slipped around the wood and lifted the beautiful instrument from its crimson bed. The varnish glowed in the torchlight, a rich auburn, a master would have despaired of capturing in oils. “I’ve never touched something like that,” he breathed, as if it were alive in his hands and might spread wings and spiral up into the vast galleried chamber, lost.

“It should be in tune.”

Kit looked from Cairbre to Robin whose ears waggled in amusement and raised an eyebrow, but he took the rosined bow when Cairbre held it out, inhaling the dusty-sweet pine scent until he fought a sneeze. He closed his eye, settled the viola, raised the bow and fluffed the third note.

“I warned you. Lessons,” Cairbre decided, and took the bow away. “Come. You’ll give us a poem tonight, won’t you?”

“Yes, Kit answered. I’ll give you a poem.”

He expected they’d wait for Murchaud’s departure, whoever they might be, but perhaps not too much longer. But that first night, as he sat sharing a trencher with Robin Goodfellow below the cloth of estate, he was bemused by the strangeness that filled him. In another setting he might have called the feeling fey: back to what I was, when I was little more than a boy and full of myself and my secrets.