No sooner had his boot touched the tiles than he bowed his head, startled, and dropped a knee, his silver scabbard-tip clinking and skipping. The Mebd stood over him: he had almost stepped into her arms. A scent of roses and lilacs like a breeze from a June garden surrounded him; he lifted the embroidered hem of her robe to his lips, heavy cloth draping his fingers.
“Your Majesty.”
“Sweet Sir Kit.” He heard the smile in her voice and clenched his teeth in anticipation of a hammer blow of emotion. Her hand touched his shoulder and he almost fell forward, realizing as he put a hasty hand to the floor that he had been braced against a raw spasm of desire. It never came.
“Mayst rise.” He did as she bid, keeping his eyes on the woven net of wheat-gold braids that lay across her shoulders, pearls knotted at the interstices. She tilted his chin up with flowerlike fingers, forcing him to meet her eyes.
“Needst not fear our games this night, Sir Poet.” She released him and stepped back, her fingers curling in summoning as she walked on. “We’ve been most wicked to thee, my husband, my sister, and me.”
“I’ve known wickeder.”
The pressure of violet eyes in her passionless oval face was almost enough to force him against the wall.
“Thou dost wonder at thy place in our court.”
“I do.”
She smiled, and reached into her sleeve. “When our royal sister Elizabeth dies, things will change.”
“Your Highness?” He stepped back as she drew out a long fluid scarf of transparent silk and twined it between her fingers. It shifted color in the light, shimmers of violet, green, and gold chasing its surface.
“And there will be a war. If not that day, soon after.”
“I am a poet, Your Highness. Not a soldier.”
She smiled at him, and reaching out, wound the scarf around his throat three times, letting the silk brush his face, softer than petals.
“For thy cloak, she said. Give me a song.”
“What sort of a song?”
“An old song.” She started forward again, and he paced her, reciting the oldest song he knew
‘… Young oxen newly yoked are beaten more,
Than oxen which have drawn the plow before.
And rough jades mouths with stubborn bits are torn,
But managed horses heads are lightly borne,
Unwilling lovers, love doth more torment,
Then such as in their bondage feel content.
Lo! I confess, I am thy captive I,
And hold my conquered hands for thee to tie.’
“No,” the Mebd whispered, interrupting him with a hand on his wrist and seeming for a moment a woman given to softness rather than a cold and mocking Queen. “Not that. An English song, for thou art an Englishman.”
“Thomas the Rhymer?” he suggested waggishly, wondering if she would let him press the advantage. A gamble, but they that never gamble have no wit.
“Perhaps not that either. It’s no mere seven years thou wilt serve.” But she smiled, an honest smile, and tilted her head so her braids moved in disarray over her neck.
“I know it.” He nibbled his mustache. “I’ve made my farewells, Your Highness. I’m ready to set it behind me.”
“Thou shalt find it easier. And Morgan has released thee from what bondage she held thee in.”
He blushed. “It influenced my decision.”
“Of course.”
“Free, and myself,” he said. “But never free to leave.”
“No.” Her sorrow was not for him. Never that. They walked on in silence. She led him through tall, many-paned glass doors and into a garden that smelled as she did of lilacs and roses.
“Mortals can be enchanted,” she said, gravel rustling beneath her slippers and turning under the brush of her train, “but they cannot truly be bound the way the Fae can be bound by their names, by iron. Every knot in my hair is a life I possess, Sir Kit, a Faerie entangled to my will forevermore. I could not bind thee so. Nor canst thou be released by the gift of a suit of clothes, or a new pair of shoes. So thy folk require more careful handling. Tis better to let them grieve at their own rate, and leave at their own rate, too.”
She smiled, and recited a scrap of song of her own. “‘Ellum do grieve, Oak he do hate, Willow do walk if yew travels late.’ Dost know that one? No Ah, well. Thou wilt learn it, no doubt. Do you toss like an elm, or break like an oak, Sir Kit?” She stopped and bent to smell a rose.
“This war that you expect, Your Highness.”
“Aye?”
“How will it be fought?”
“Oh,” her smile was lovely. Even through vision unclouded by fey magic and glamourie.
“With song, Sir Poet. With song.”
Jessica:
I am sorry thou wilt leave my father so:
Our house is hell, and thou, a merry devil,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice
Will stood against the painted cloth covering the wall of Sir Francis Walsingham’s bedroom, flanked by Richard Burbage’s fair hair on one side and Thomas Walsingham’s tall frame on the other. They leaned shoulder to shoulder, unspeaking, feet and lower backs aching, listening to the halting rhythm of a dying man’s breath, watching his daughter bathe his brow with cool water and fret his spindled hands. Lopez was dead, and even if another could have been trusted to keep the secret of his identity, Sir Francis would not have accepted the ministrations of strange physicians.
Tom Walsingham shifted, his shoulder brushing Will’s doublet. Will met his glance, but neither spoke, and they turned away again after a moment of consideration. Tom’s guarded eyes reminded Will of the expression in the mirror. They kept their vigil though the clock struck midnight and its hands began their long dark sweep through the downhill hours of the night. Sir Francis whined low on one intaken breath; his next expiration held a damaged clatter that Will knew better than he liked.
“Not long now,” Burbage murmured, and Tom shook his head no but it wasn’t a denial. Thus began the seventh of September, 1595: the sixty-third anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s birth.
One oil lamp guttered. The other had burned out by the time the bell struck three of the clock, leaving a thin white coil of smoke ascending from the wick. Will stepped away from the wall, across the rush matting. He didn’t understand how Sir Francis’ daughter Frances bore it; the stench of putrefaction rising from the dying man’s very pores and on his breath was enough to raise Will’s gorge from across the room.
There was oil in a cupboard. Wordlessly, with exquisite care, he filled the extinguished lamp and trimmed the wick, relighting it before snuffing the second and repeating the process. He set the light left-handed on the stand beside the bed, acknowledging Frances’ grateful glance with a smile.
“We should send a messenger to lord Burghley,” he said to Burbage and Tom as he returned to his post by the wall. “And a messenger to the Queen. He will not last the …”
“The Queen will not come.” A wheeze, a broken gasp followed by Frances’ command to lie back. Will turned in place and looked back to the bed with its coverlet drawn high and its curtains closed on two sides to keep the draft away.
“Sir Francis.” The old man was up on one elbow, waving his nursemaid irritably aside, pain furrowing his face. His voice fragmented.
“Master Shakespeare. Master Burbage, ah, Tom. Waste no time on the Queen. She wouldn’t come. Unless she forgave me.”
“Cousin, lie down,” said Tom, crossing the rush mat heedlessly. Frances moved out of his path in a graceful sweep of skirts and leaned against the window ledge to throw open the shutters, breathing gratefully of the rank Southwark night. Over the reek of the bear gardens, Will imagined he smelled fruiting lemons and apples ripening to the frost that would leave them sweet enough to be plucked. He brushed comforting fingers across Frances arm and moved forward. Burbage hung back beside her, his nostrils flaring in a drinker’s roseate nose. Tom crouched beside the bed, heedless of the reek, and Will stood over his shoulder.