It’s time wert about thy duties, Kit,he thought, half hearing the rattle of antlers on wood. Thou hast charged from the Queen and thy Prince that thou hast much neglected, in pursuit of love and poetry.
He would to the library, and see what he could find there. And perhaps start researching Will’s crackpot scheme to retranslate the Bible.
For once, Amaranth was not in the library. Kit sought through old texts until near the dinner hour, and found nothing on the names and ranks of angels, and little after the fashion of Bibles. Which should not have surprised him, he knew: there was little of Christian myth in the Queen of Faery’s archive. Hast never heard to know thine enemy, and keep him close?And then Kit laughed. Why, no. Of course not. I wonder if the Book itself ‘could do them injury.
He wiped dusty hands on his doublet and then cursed the mouse‑brown streaks across its front. A wave of his hand spelled them away again. It seemed frivolous to use hard‑won power for such petty purposes, but there was no reason not to. No one told me witchcraft was so useful. If word gets out, ‘twill be all the rage indeed.
He cast one more lingering glance around the room before he left, but lunch–truthfully–held a greater allure. And mayhap I can find Puck or Geoffrey there.It suddenly occurred to him to find it odd that a being with a stag’s head would eat beef and bread like a man, but he shrugged as he stepped through the open double doors of the hall and walked silently across the fresh‑strewn rushes.
The Mebd, Queen of the Daoine Sidhe, sat at the high table, although she did not usually take her dinner in public, and the Prince, her husband, sat beside her. Kit might have slipped aside and taken a seat just above the salt–there was one near Amaranth, on the bench she had pushed aside to make room for the bulk of her coils–except Prince Murchaud raised his head and smiled, and beckoned with one refined oval hand.
Kit turned his head to get a glimpse of Amaranth through the otherwisevision Lucifer had awakened in his right eye. She seemed to him a long spill of dark water, a black surface shattered with ephemeral reflections of light. Murchaud and the Mebd – all the Fae – shimmered like dust motes in dawnlight as Kit walked down the center aisle of the hall between the long trestles. He didn’t need the second sight to show him every eye guardedly upon him. It was there again, the way they had stared in the morning, before the applause. Climbing the steps to the dais, Kit realized belatedly what it was. You’re among the legends now, Marley.
Or not‑Marley, as it were.
The Fae were in awe of him, mortal man in a journeyman bard’s cloak who had gone to Hell in pursuit of his mortal lover–and brought them both back out again, alive and to all appearances whole, no matter how much a lie that might be. “Your Highness.” Kit bowed low before the Mebd, scraping his boot on the floor. The only sound it made was the rustle of rushes: damned elf‑boots.
The Queen of Faeries smiled and inclined her head. She seemed drawn, her rose‑petal skin pinched beside her eyes, and as if she–always willow‑slender–grew thin.
“Prince Murchaud,” Kit said, with a bow almost as low. Murchaud favored him with a sideways glance, and nodded to the empty chair at his left hand. Kit circled the table with some trepidation to take it, not allayed when Murchaud laid a buttered roll on his trencher and served Kit with his own hands.
Kit picked idly at the roast laid before him, trying to find his appetite again. “Thank you, my Prince.”
Murchaud laid a hand half over Kit’s. A carefully casual gesture, and Kit would not shame him in public by flinching away as if struck. “Kit,” he said, tilting his head to hide his lips against Kit’s hair. “I am not sorry I tried to prevent thee going, love. But nor am I sorry thou art home and safe; I did not lie when I said I cared for thee. Can we not be friends at least, if thou canst abide not my closer company? ”
“Aye,” Kit found himself answering, and then halted. “Tis not thee,” he said, as something in Murchaud’s tone ripped him to honesty. “I would fain – ”
“Aye?” Murchaud’s voice, and close and tight.
Kit bowed his head over his hands, and stifled a chuckle at the image of saying grace over fey victuals. He stole a sideways glance at Murchaud’s pale, intense blue eyes, the midnight coils of his hair, the elegant line of his nose, the faint sequined glitter of magic behind it. “Thou didst seek to protect me,” Kit said.
“I did wonder when thou wouldst notice.”
“And,” Kit continued, unperturbed, “I might… call thee friend. An thou wouldst permit it.”
Murchaud drew a breath. “Is’t so bad, Kit?”
“‘Tis worse,” Kit said, and busied himself with his bread and beef. A little later he looked up, and waited for the quiet conversation between the Mebd and Murchaud to flag. He spoke when it did, knowing the Mebd could hear him as well as the Prince. “I have not been about my duties – ”
“Thou’rt absolved,” the Prince answered, absently.
“Nay,” Kit said, still wondering at the words that seemed so inevitable as they passed his lips. “‘Tis time I accepted my place, here in Faerie. ‘Tis time I chose a side.”
Kit missed Amaranth leaving the hall by a few moments, and hurried his step as he followed the flicker of her tail through cool, sunlit corridors. Her progression was stately enough; he caught her up by the doors to a balcony overlooking the rose garden. “Lady Amaranth.”
“Sir Poet? How may I be of service?” She turned from the waist, her long body twisting like a ribbon, and extended a cold hand in welcome.
He bowed over it and mimed a kiss. Her chuckle sounded as if it rose the length of her in bubbles. “I had hoped you might assist me in finding a book. Some information on an angel–I think an angel, by his name. And perhaps a very old Bible.”
“In Faerie?” She drew her hand back as he straightened, and gestured him to accompany her. Not to the gardens after all, but down the corridor and back toward the library where he had spent the morning. “A Bible? New Testament and Old? Apocrypha? I might have one of those. How old?”
“Whatever you have. And as old as possible,” Kit answered.
Amaranth laughed. “Read you Aramaic?”
“A little Hebrew,” he admitted. “Greek would be better.”
She shrugged fluidly, dropping her body to a merely human height to grasp the handle of the library door and twist it open. “I can teach you a spell ‘twill render tongues –human and otherwise – comprehensible to thee. It can be done with music also, now thou art both bard and warlock, but the bardic spell lasts only as long as the song.”
“Rumors fly, I see,” Kit said. He followed Amaranth’s train into the room and turned to shut the door behind them. She draped a coil of herself over a massive dark wood table with legs as thick as Kit’s thigh; Kit hopped up on the table opposite, hugging a knee.
“Some of us see more than others,” Amaranth said. “And you came back from Hell and an interview with Satan with mismatched eyes. Tell me, Christofer –how look I to thee, now?”
“A bottomless sea in moonlight. Are mine eyes mismatched?” She smiled, her hair writhing about her head. “You have not looked in a mirror since you came back from Hell, I see – ” How could I? There are no mirrors in Faerie.”
“That is a difficulty.” She slid from the table edge like a fall of silk and crawled off among the rows of bookshelves. “I shall return,” she said. “Take your ease.”