“And then what happens?”
“Nothing thou hast not already proved thou canst withstand, brave puss,” Baines said. “I imagine it might even be less unpleasant than Rheims, if thou dost cooperate a little.”
“And then the sacrifice.” Every word like speaking broken glass. Kit shivered and dropped his gaze to the floor, wondering if they’d let him die cleanly, at knifepoint, or if it would be something drawn out and ugly.
“Peace, pussycat.” There was– Christ–pride in Baines’ voice; the tone was enough to make Kit wish he had something in his gut to vomit. “I’d rather burn a cathedral than see thee come to any lasting harm. What a waste of eighteen years’ work thatwould be.”
Kit bit down on his lip to stop the whimper, and managed only to convert it to a whine. Mehiel,he thought, like a prayer. Mehiel, Mehiel, Mehiel–
“Rest well,” Baines said. “You’ll need your strength.” And gently closed him in.
The darkness was complete. Kit bit his fist against a rising wave of pain and nausea, his teeth gritting on the iron bands. He tasted his own clotted blood, the rank sickliness of the infected, swollen flesh on either side of the immovable rings. It hurt to bend his fingers; he wondered how long he had before gangrene started to claim them, one by one.
Mehiel
«Sir Poet.» A stirring, as of distant attention drawn close.
Is’t true what Baines said, just now?Kit reached out in the darkness and found the scold’s bridle, lifting it with battered hands. The touch of that iron soothed his pain, just a little. Enough to almost concentrate, even in the unhelpful dark and quiet of the pit. The effect of iron on Faerie magic, perhaps. Art keeping me among the living, angel?
The angel hesitated. «I bear a little of thy hurt,» Mehiel replied. «As much as I am able.»
Ah.Kit stroked the scold’s bridle with the flats of his palms. He wondered if it was the same one, if his own blood seasoned that rusty metal. He did not stop to think what his suffering might have been without the angel’s intervention. Morgan’s words were truth, all those years ago. I would not survive this separation from Faerie.
“And Deptford? Didst aid me there, as well?”
«Did what I might.» Shyly, as if his questions embarrassed the angel. «Not what I might have managed once, by the grace of God.»
Kit’s hands bled again, but at least it smelled of copper and not pus. They knotted tight on the bridle; it fell open on his lap. “Baines will– Baines will hurt us again.”
Silence, long and bleak. «Aye.»
“The Morningstar said it was our own fear that crippled us.”
«The Morningstar,» Mehiel said wryly «wounds with truth.»
And tempts with the thing you long for most.There was regret in that thought. Like not living alone, Kit?
Aye. And isn’t that the thing that frightens thee most, as well?
Kit weighed the instrument of torture in his hands. “How brave are we, Mehiel?”
«We are a very small angel, Sir Christofer.»
He breathed through clenched teeth. “It’s all right, Mehiel. We’re a very small poet, too. And call me Kit, an you will.”
It was dark enough that Kit didn’t bother to close his eyes before he lifted the scold’s bridle and – hands moving as jerkily as if an inexpert puppeteer were at his strings–fitted it to his face. He had to wet his tongue on the flat, warm ale that Baines had left, and began to work the bit into his mouth. Dull blades pressed his tongue and palate, not quite sharp enough to prick blood to the surface if he didn’t fight the thing.
His hands shaking, the hinges rustling rather than creaking, he closed it around his face and sat there in the darkness, holding the edges together for a full ten counted seconds before he permitted himself to fling it away. It rang from stones on the far side of his narrow prison.
He wasn’t sure if the salt and iron he tasted was blood and the bridle, or Mehiel’s tears.
Or his own.
But the pain wassmaller.
* * *
Kit crouched in darkness, stronger for the bread and ale he’d forced over his iron‑numbed tongue, his trembling hands pressed to the iron bands across his cheeks, below his eyes. I can do this.
We can do this.
Mehiel, coiled in a tight, black‑barred ball of misery, shivered and did not answer.
We can endure this. We endure. We live. We cooperate if we must. And then we find our vengeance.
«Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.»
As thou wishest it. We willlive, Mehiel.
“Froggy frogs,” someone whispered. Kit startled, felt about him. He tore the bridle from his head again; it rolled and rattled in darkness, a heavy iron jangle, but his hands brushed nothing that felt like flesh, slick or otherwise. Losing my mind. And who could wonder?
“Master Troll?”
“Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs – ” Faint as an echo up a drain pipe.
“Master Troll ! There’s a way out, sir?”
“Hurm.And harm.”Something that luminesced faintly squeezeditself from a narrow space in the floor, expanding like a rose from a stem, and loomed over Kit.
“Sir Poet,” the troll said, a green‑mottled pattern of dim light against the darkness of the cell. “There’s no way out but through,” he answered, and reached a long hand through the darkness. Spatulate fingers rasped against Kit’s filthy hair, found his earlobe, and tugged.
“What? Ow!”A wincing pain to add to all the greater pains, and suddenly the sensation of a small thing burrowing out of Kit’s intestines ceased.
“A gift,” the troll said, sounding inordinately pleased with himself, and sat down beside Kit with his back to the wall, still glowing faintly.
“And now we escape?” Kit said hopefully, raising his fingers to touch the heavy warm circle throbbing in the lobe of his left ear.
“And now we wait,” the troll answered complacently. “Tell me a story, frog‑and‑prince.”
Act V, scene xiv
I durst, my lord, to wager she is honest,
Lay down my soul at stake: if you think other,
Remove your thought; it doth abuse your bosom.
If any wretch have put this in your head,
Let heaven requite it with the serpent’s curse!
–William Shakespeare, Othello,Act IV, scene ii
Amaranth was easy to find. Her long green‑and‑silver body lay like a jeweled ribbon dropped on the dust‑colored winter grass near that strange white tree; her woman’s torso rose among the ice‑covered branches, her hands upraised like a supplicating sinner’s.
Will glanced over his shoulder at Murchaud as they came up the hill. “Shall we interrupt?”
“Go thou on,” Murchaud answered. “She likes thee better. I’ll stay for thee here.”
Will dug his toes in to climb the slick bank, leaning on a birch limb he’d liberated from the wood –a temporary walking stick – as he climbed. Amaranth heard him coming, of course, or perhaps felt the vibration of his footsteps through the ground. She turned from the waist, the flakes of ice she had been brushing from the tree’s pale branches dusting her arms and shoulders and the complaining mass of her hair. Thread‑fine snakes coiled tight against the warmth of her skull in the Novembery chill.