Ink and Steel

“We can’t fight a war without one,” Geoffrey answered, holding a branch aside. “A geas as old as the Fae. As for the heartsease. Its other name is love-in-idleness, did you know?”

“I’ve heard.” The branch was whippy and fine: Kit almost lost his grip on it after Geoffrey handed it across.

“Roses for passion and lilies for love and for death. Amaranth,” he smiled, “is undying love, eternity. And crocus is gladness, and pansy is thoughts but I do not think I’m so made mock of for a badge of thinking. So what, for the love of Hell, does a pansy signify?”

“Bondage,” Geoffrey answered without turning. “There’s your mistress house, poet. We will talk again.”

Kit turned to look through the gloom and the red twilight at a rose-twined cottage beyond a garden and a fieldstone wall. He turned back, to bid the stag thanks or something, but Geoffrey had vanished in a silence as utter as that of the dark wood behind him.

“Edakrusen o christos,” Kit muttered, because there was no Fae close enough to hear him. He placed one hand between the curling edges of lichen and vaulted the wall, rough stone gritting his palm and the turf denting under his feet.

A white gravel trail led him between beds of roses, red and white, and under an arch of blossoms damasked both. The beds below the roses were planted with mint, melissa, verbena, rosemary, lavender, and what seemed a thousand other sweet and savory herbs. The scent filled Kit’s head, almost dizzying, and he absently ran his hand across the bulge in his purse. The cottage was as earthed under with brambles as any in a fairy tale, and Kit smiled appreciation of the image. It didn’t look like the abode of a queen: the doorposts were skinned trunks, the door itself painted vermilionin a half-dozen coats that peeled as shaggy as the lichens. Lamplight gleamed through one small window, not yet shuttered against the night, and Kit’s breath ached in his breast as a shadow moved behind it.

I can feel her,he realized. Like a hand twisted in his collar, drawing him forward, and although his strides stayed as crisp as if he knew what he intended, he shivered. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if the stag watched after, but the wood was dark and silent.

Bondage. His shoulder ached in a memory, blow of a silver dagger hard across its ridge, and he tasted an also-remembered trickle of lukewarm mint, and for a moment he wished he had, after all, brought his sword. Oh, he thought. Bondage. Yes, I see. More than her knight, her servant, her lover. More. Or less. Her slave.

“Hello the house!” Until the door swung open. “Good even, my lady.”

“Kit,” she said, gray-green eyes dark as moss in the twilight. Her hair lay unbound upon her shoulders, tumbling to her waist, its darkness shot with silver threads like a moonlit river. She wore only a low-cut smock with blackwork around the neckline and petticoat-bodies over it; a working woman’s home garb, her skirts kilted up to show a length of calf and a bare, clean foot, high-arched and more calloused than a lady’s foot ought be.

She tilted her head, and he looked down, studying her feet. His hand tightened on the nail in his purse; it parted the cloth and pricked his hand, but he didn’t let go.

[What brings you to my door, Sir Kit?” An arch smile, and her hand on his collar her physical hand, twisting the cloth and bringing him inside.

He moved as led, helpless under her touch, and thought of a stud horse rendered passive by the twist of a twitch on his lip. Kit opened his mouth, would have spoken accused her but the taste of bloody iron choked him. A vividly tactile memory of powerlessness: the savage wrench of his dislocated shoulder, gory drool slicking his chin and choking his throat with the effort of screaming and breathing through a mouth full of barbed metal, thinking If I could talk, I could explain my way out of this. There hadn’t been any talking. Not for a long time.

And it was still better than what Essex’s faction did to poor Thomas Kyd.

What greater cruelty to a playmaker than shatter his hand? Stop his tongue, show him his dignity and his sovereignty and his voice as easily rent from him as a girl’s Lavinia in Titus: raped, dismembered, silenced. She could have been a poet too, for all the benefit it got her.