Ink and Steel

Puck sat at Kit’s right, on his blind side, and saw he ate, though his appetite forsook him in Murchaud’s absence. Halfway through the meal, Kit realized the little elf had deserted his own place at the high table to stay with him. Kit imagined he looked strange as a swan among magpies beside the lesser Fae.

The Daoine Sidhe the Tuatha de Danaan as they were called claimed descent of the Old Gods of hill and dale, of moor and copse and ocean. A Church scholar might have said the blood in their veins was that of demons, not deities. Kit had long past given up his illusions that God kept his house in a church. Their sea-changing eyes and leaf-tipped ears marked them as something other than human, and their wincing aversion to the Name of the Divine might be evidence. But then, what god would abide the Name of his supplanter?

But they did, in broad, look human. The elder, stranger Fae did not. Though they sometimes dined at the Mebd stable, served delicacies by brownies and sprites, and though many of them served in her palace, they were not Tuatha de Danaan, not Daoine Sidhe. And they were as strange now as ever they had been on Kit’s first lonely walk into the throne room that lurked behind the second closed pair of doors.

Across the table rested a lovely maid-in-waiting whose forked tongue brushed the scent from each morsel she tasted before she lifted it to her mouth. On his left, a creature more wizened than even Robin crouched on the edge of the table and ate between his knees.

Kit stifled a chuckle, thinking what his own mother would have said about boots on the table, and turned to murmur something in Robin’s ear. A polite hiss from the scaly young lady across the table interrupted.

“Sir Christofer?” Thread-fine snakes writhed like windblown curls about her temples. Her eyes were as flat and reflective as steel, the pupils horizontal bars.

“Mistress Amaranth.”

It might have been a smile. Her lips were red and full, a cupid’s bow disturbing behind the glitter of scales like powdered gold rubbed on her skin. Her hand darted with a swiftness that should not have surprised him, brushing the flower on his doublet before he could jerk back.

“Does it not shame you to wear the love-in-idleness?”

“There is more here than I understand.” Remembering Cairbre’s comment, and how Morgan and Murchaud had both adorned him with the blossoms. “Love-in-idleness?”

“Heartsease,” she said, while Puck pretended not to hear. “The pansy or viola.”

He pulled his bread apart in tidbits, setting the balance of it beside the trencher while he buttered a morsel, covering his confusion with concentration on the knife. It seemed dry as paste; he would never have choked it down without wine.

“It pleases my lady, Mistress Amaranth.”

The lamia’s hair hissed again. He thought it was a chuckle.

“Then she is cruel, is she? I am not surprised at that.”

“Not so cruel as that.”

“Cruel enough,” she said, gesturing for a footman to lay a bloody slice of roast upon her plate.

“Kind as any woman,” he answered.

Amaranth’s cold eyes widened; the Puck snorted. Kit toasted Amaranth, wondering what moved him to defend Morgan for all her late absence from the hall, and his bed. But his gaze traveled past the serpent, up to the dais and to Murchaud sitting near Cairbre, at what would have been the Mebd’s right hand if the Mebd were there. Even across that distance, the look Murchaud returned pressed Kit back as physically as a thumb in the notch of his collarbone. He reached for his wine, feeling as if he choked.

And now I truly am alone. Until he returns. Or until Morgan claims me. In deep deception, and in the hands of the enemy.

He held the Elf-knight’s withering glance until it seemed the whole room must have noticed. Until conversation flagged around him and Amaranth herself turned to follow the course of his one-eyed stare, then leaned aside as if she would not break the strung tension. Murchaud looked down first, turning to laugh nastily at some comment whispered by the Mebd’s advisor, stag-horned old Peaseblossom. Kit watched a moment longer, then dropped his eye to his dinner and haggled off a bit of roast as if he could bear to put it in his mouth.

“What’s love-in-idleness?” Kit murmured, bringing his lips close to Puck’s twitching ear.

“What you wear on your bosom,” the Puck answered dryly. “That thing on your sleeve is your heart.”

When Kit stood to give his poem on Cairbre’s signal he chose something that spoke of the pastoral delights of summertime and never a chance of sorrow. But when he returned to his rooms after dinner, he worried an iron nail loosefrom his old riding boots, and slipped it into the sleeve pocket of his doublet, and felt just a little better for it.