Ink and Steel

“You should make a start on your cloak, she said. I would help you sew the patches.” He wondered how she spoke so clearly, when her forked tongue flickered with every breath. Magic and more magic.

“Cairbre says I must stitch them myself. Tis part ofthe protection.”

“Then I will teach you to sew.” Lightly scaled fingers demonstrated a minnowlike dart. Kit frowned, not looking up. “I am,” he said with asperity, “a cobbler’s son. I can handle a needle very well indeed.”

“So I’ve heard rumored.” She laughed when he shook his head. “Tell me of this protection. I haven’t heard the tale.”

“The Queen’s Bard wants me for an apprentice, I think. A true one, and not a hanger-on. It seems to involve rather a lot of memorizing antique ballads. They were great memorizers of all things, the Druids. They would have gotten along well with my latin tutor. I wonder if the Druids also believed in the recollective power of birchings.” He slid the flute into its case on his hip opposite the rapier, and stretched his fingers one against the other. “I am restless, lady Amaranth.”

“You have seemed less anguished of late, Sir Poet.”

“I have. I am busy playing the student again, and making poems to please the Mebd. Morgan leaves me alone, more or less. Is pleasant when I report to her, and gives me no hint to what use she puts mine information, or if it is of use at all. Will not answer my questions about Murchaud, and neither will the Queen. And there is no news from England.”

“leave it, Christofer. England is done with thee, and thee with she. How is it that writing for royals is not so rewarding as the bloody rush of the common stage?”

“I should be writing,” he said, aware as he spoke that Amaranth’s last few comments had fallen into silence unanswered, and he could not recall them.

“Ah,” she said. Something in her cool, melodious voice caught him; he turned to study her eyes.

“Such a lovely man,” she said, stroking his cheek. Her fingers felt like cool leather, the scales catching his rough-shaven cheek. “Pity about your scars.”

“There’s nothing to be done for it,” he said. “Many a man’s survived worse than half a blinding, and to more sorrow.”

“What would you do for your sight returned?” she asked, as if idly.

“Can you do such a thing?” She shook her head. “There might be those that could. It’s in the songs: If I had known, Tamlin, that for a lady you would leave, I would have taken your eyes and put in dew from a tree.”

“I do not know that song. Cairbre has not taught it me.”

“We do not sing it here.” She smiled, a curve of bloodless lips.

His footsteps padded beside the rustle of her belly sliding on stone. “It has not been written yet. And what would you write, if you were writing?”

“A play. Something of Greek descent, perhaps. Has ever a playmaker had such a cast as here, that could play satyrs and centaurs convincing?”

“A tragedy?”

“Tis what I’m good for. Tragedy and black farce.” He ran the fingertips of his right hand along the wall, feeling slight dimples between the cool stones. “You know much of my history, lady Amaranth. And I know little of yours.”

“I have no history.”

As they turned the corner, the way opened wide. Cushioned benches lined the windows on the west wall; on the east were glass doors made of a thousand diamond-shaped panes as small as Kit’s palm. Beyond them, sunlight lay on autumn gardens, begging comparisons to Elysium.

“Shall we wander?”

“I know why you are overset, Sir Christofer.”

“I never said I was unhappy.” But he held the door for her, waiting until the last slender inches of her massive tail whipped past, and stepped out onto the balcony behind. Amaranth rose like a charmed cobra, the power of her lower body lifting her human torso fifteen feet into the air. She draped her coils over the thick stone banister and stretched down it, scorning the steps Kit descended. He enjoyed watching her move; she didn’t slither side to side, like a garden snake. Rather, her scaled belly pulsed in ripples like waves rebounding in a fountain, pushing her forward, leaving not so much as a depression in the gravel path to mark where she had gone.

“Neither did you say you were not,” she replied, stretching her arms to the sun. The snakes of her hair yawned wider than cats and twisted sleepily in the warmth of a St.-Martin’s-summer day, tiny fangs glittering white.

“Clever Amaranth. Snakes are a symbol of wisdom.”

She turned to him, winked one of her expressionless eyes.

“If you’re so wise, then what is it troubles my well-known, imperturbable calm?”

Her laughter was a hiss. “The Prince-consort, of course.”

“I have not seen him” … Kit paused. “Time in Faerie, ah. I cannot say how long it’s been. Years.”

“Then you have not been informed. Curious.”

Without inflection, as she sank her face into the enormous, late-blooming starburst of a peony. Kit turned so fast that he tripped, his throat closing in fear. Some detached, intelligencer’s fragment of his mind observed his sudden panic wryly.

“So. It was not all enchantment, was it, Sir Christofer?”