And so he continued, restless and although often in company alone. His thoughts were clearer now that he had a goal, but the passive means of accomplishing it and his lack of success as bait flustered him. More unsettling, it wasn’t any easier to keep track of the days when he was focused on it. He went so far as to carve notches in a candle, and stopped when he began to realize that the number of notches changed. As his head cleared further, though, the craving in his belly grew. He had to talk to Morgan. Jilted lover or no.
Of course, a jilted lover might be expected to wish to speak to her. If not too often. And I am tired of being treated as a pet.
He frowned, thinking that he would not trust himself with matters of import, as mooncalf as he had been.
Hell, I can ask her about love-in-idleness, too. And why Amaranth said she was cruel.
Kit dressed as Will would have it like a cobbler’s son: a shirt of cambric, a leather jerkin, and brown wool breeches. He slipped the iron bootnail from the pocket of the doublet he had been wearing and was about to drop it into a lacquer box on the stand beside his bed when he hesitated. He could almost fancy the sound of a cobbler’s hammer, familiar from childhood, and smiled for a moment at the memory of his father with a mouth full of tacks just like this one. It might have been the scent of leather, or the way the light caught on the worn surface of the nail, but he suddenly couldn’t bear to set it aside. He slipped it into his purse and let it clink against coins he’d had no occasion to spend.
Here is the palace, and the court. But there is no Faerie city. No tradesman, no farmlands, no ports for ships trading the wide and wandering sea …How strange.And then Kit smiled, because there was a lyric in it.
He stomped into his boots, and left his cloak and his sword behind. Should anyone ask, he was only going for a ramble. How far to Morgan’s cottage, he could not estimate. Murchaud had said through the beech wood, but Kit’s explorations had not found a farther edge. They had taught him that the wood changed from day to day; on one the brook might bend beside an enormous gray boulder like a menhir, caked with moss and lichen; on another it would run straight and tossing over rocks through the spraddled roots of a rogue oak, rough-barked and errant among the smooth-boled beeches, vast enough to build an Ark. Then again, there might be no brook at all, and the wood might sweep up the flanks of rolling hills, spacious and silent and lit like a green cathedral.
Kit followed a graveled trail through the palace’s sprawling gardens. It became a sort of bridle path at the verge of the wood. He paused there for a moment to settle the leather bottle of water on his hip and get his bearings. Then Morgan’s house,he thought, and set his foot upon the path.
Today it was late summer under the trees, the day bright and serene, shade and a light breeze welcome in the morning’s heat. He regretted the jerkin, but knew he’d want it if the sun set while he was in the wood. He didn’t object to sleeping rough and hungry for a night, but he wasn’t overfond of shivering in a pile of leaves until morning. The trail tended east, gladdening Kit’s heart, and it passed over the brook; there was a brook today, brown water dappled by sunshine on a well-maintained footbridge. Kit was wise enough to step off the trail and leave prints down the muddy bank, crouching on gravel to cup water to his mouth. He drank deep to spare what he carried, smiling at the hop and splash of infant frogs the same bronze as the silt.
“Hurm,” croaked the troll under the bridge as Kit hopped to the first of four rocks on the way to the far bank. “Harm.”
“Good morning, Master Troll.” Kit’s hand would have dropped to his swordhilt if he had been wearing one.
“Good morning, Sir Poet.”
“You know me. I know your eyepatch,” the troll answered. “I know your errand.” Its eyes blinked like cloud-filtered moons from the gloom under the bridge sarch. Kit saw a knobbed and swollen nose, slimy skin reflecting the yellow glow of those eyes, and the splayed fingers of one weird hand balancing the thing’s crouch. He couldn’t make out enough of its body to get an idea of its size.
The space under the bridge was darker than it ought to be and there was no silhouette cast against the light on the other side, so he saw only splinters of warty hide, the hump of a shoulder illuminated in the thin bands of sunlight that fell between planks.
“Mine errand?”
“Always on the Queen’s business, aye. One Queen or another.”
Kit didn’t like his footing on the stone, which rocked under his boots. He stepped into the stream, calf-deep, a cold gout of water soaking his leg to the thigh.
“How may I assist you, Master Troll?” From the sound, Kit would say that the troll sucked snaggled teeth as it thought that over.
“Well. Tis a troll bridge, in it? So logic says you have to pay the troll.”
“I went around.”
“That you did, that you did.” The troll coughed, an unpleasant fishy sound. “But you drank my water, and you scared my frogs”
Kit sighed. He was in no mood to haggle, and losing light. “A piece of silver?”
“And what does a troll need with silver, Sir Poet?”
“What does a poet need with a bridge?”
“Useful things, bridges.” The troll brightened. “You can pay me with a song.”
“A song. Mine own?”
“What use is a poet, else?”
“Do you intend to keep it, if I give it you?”
“Keep and pass along,” the troll answered, lowering its glowing eyes and curving its hand as if it studied the cracked yellow pegs of its fingernails. “As anyone might a song. If anyone would listen to a troll sing. But if you mean, will I take it from you no, that’s a price worth more than a fording. And everything in Faerie has a price.”
“I’m learning that.” Kit turned in the water to put his blind side to the bank, which was only marginally less discomforting than facing it to the troll. He might not hear the rustle of leaves over the splash of the brook, if anyone snuck close.
“A love song, or a lament? Or something warlike, I know a few of those.
The troll sighed, and Kit saw his shadowed outline settle on its haunches.
“Harm, hurm. A love song,” he said in a dreaming voice. “There’s little enough of love under bridges.”
“But plenty of frogs.” Kit winced as the words left his mouth. Too clever by half, Master Marley. Or Sir Christofer. Whoever you are today.
“Ah, yes,” the troll answered. “A surfeit of frogs. Froggy frogs, froggyfrogs.” He followed it up with a froggy-sounding laugh; Kit glimpsed something like the white swell of a pouched throat. “Sing me a song, toad and prince.”
“I know the song for you.” Kit drew a breath and steadied it, and didn’t sing so much as chant: ‘Come live with me and be my love’
It was a simple song on the surface, an uncomplicated pastoral, but political on the bottom of it. Who was, after all, the famous shepherd who sheared his flock so close as to dine off golden plates? Reciting it made Kit feel he was getting away with heresy.