His right eye showed a smoky power moving within the coarse‑barked trunks. The trees were young, saplings scattered among a few old giants; the wood had been cut in living memory, and Kit wondered if that were the reason for the appalling stench of hate and old blood clotting his senses.
The bit of ribbon had bunched in the palm of his glove. He tugged his digits free and wiggled his hand out, checking over his shoulder to make sure Will’s wife was out of sight behind the barren oaks. Her silhouette had vanished. He stretched the band of scarlet velvet between his fingers – one hand gloved, the other bare –and blew a cloud of steam into the still morning.
His cherry‑varnished viola was in his pack. Kit crouched and slid it out, the ribbon dangling from his fingers as he balanced the case on his knee and opened it reverently. He tied the ribbon around the viola’s waist, under the strings, with a tidy bow at the back, returning the case to his pack to keep it dry before he stood. He would have hung the whole affair on a low branch, but given the wood and his purpose here, he thought perhaps that would be unwise.
That smoky pall of force began to shift as soon as he plucked the strings to tune, mentally apologizing both to the fae bard Cairbre and to the fine old instrument for bringing it out in such chill and unwholesome air. The smoke was not the only vitality in that wood: there was a power in the viola’s pregnant belly and graceful neck as well, a strength as red and resonant as its stain.
Kit felt the oak wood tremble, expectant, bathinghim and his music, and every mortal touch and scent on his soul and on his skin. He shrugged his cloak back from his shoulders and raised the viola and the rosined bow.
The trees screamed when he scraped the first note from the strings. Branches wore on branches like chalk on slate, a sharp grinding that sent Kit’s shoulders up around his ears and all but drowned the hollow lucidity of the viola’s tone. He persevered, found the upswing into a reel, planted his feet wide in the snow, and leaned into the music as best he could.
He would have closed his eyes and found the rhythm, submerged himself in the song, but a witch’s otherwisesight showed him that smoky puissance rising in the trunks of the oaks and the coiled crimson, potent as lifeblood, in the music streaming from his fingertips, and he didn’t dare let his attention waver.
Gauzy tendrils reached out and brushed his hair, his face, his moving hands. Kit felt a slight resistance, a child’s plucking fingers, and fiddled through it. The tendrils struck his cloak, the oaks’ gnarled branches grasping after; both slid back like oiled hands clutching ice and Kit played faster, fingers sailing over the viola’s neck, bow flying back and forth like the shuttle on a loom. He stumbled a note, almost hesitated as the crimson light quailed before an onslaught of dark– smoke and firelight–staggered, found his theme again, twisted his reel around it, and made it his own, gliding the tune over the discord of branch on branch that sought to drown him out.
The music soared. The chafe of wet bark became –not words, but something like enough words that Kit understood them, though the voices raised the hair along his spine. Witch. Witch. Witchery.
Aye,” Kit said, lowering the viola a moment, and holding the red light no other’s eyes would see steady about himself. “Witchery. And I command you in the names of my dread master Lucifer and of the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe to answer my questions, and answer them true.”
Like a saw on bone. Terrible, those voices. Thy master. Witch. Thy queen.
Not ours.
Not ours.
Not ouurzzz.
The black hands grasped as the first golden fingers of dawn filtered through branches. Kit stood fast, telling himself his shiver was cold and the morning mists, nothing else. The black hands touched his cloak and pressed it against his body, but could not push past. “Be that as it may. I am here, and I command you.”
A rattle of branch on branch, a stag knocking velvet from new tines. No. Witch. Witch. Not ours.
A white pain flared over his breastbone, and he flinched. Hell.No, not Hell; what burned was the mark over his heart, the final brand left on his skin when Richard Baines and his Prometheans had raped and tortured him in Rheims, when he had been a mortal man and innocent. Then, like a lightning caress down Kit’s belly and thighs, wherever the irons had touched, the same pain, brighter, so sharp it was almost sweet. He tasted blood but did not scream.
Kit spoke through grinding teeth, forcing his spine straight. I’ve felt worse.“Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
Not ours.
Witchery.
He touched the red ribbon on the red viola with the tip of his bow. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
No answer this time, just the clawing and sawing of the branches, the leaning threat of the sapling trees bent over him, their limbs poised like daggers. Smoky fingers coiled and drifted, wavering thick as banners now, redolent of hate. Somewhere, not too distant, a dead branch crashed to earth. A sort of croaking moan followed, the splintering resonance of splitting wood. Kit turned, following the path of the smoke of power against the wind, and yelped. He dove aside, a deadfall landing close enough to heave snow and splinters on him. He kept his grip on the viola, clutched it close when he rolled, guarded it with his body when he rose with a swordsman’s grace.
“Dammit,” he swore, and took a deep breath. Snowmelt trickled from his hair, down his neck. “Third time I command you then –as I am a man and the master and shepherd of trees since the wild God of the World gave Adam their naming – answer me not, and I shall return with fire.”
Silence, shivering silence. Kit spoke into it, each word measured and plain. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
A breath held. A silence like the silence of any mortal wood in the golden sunrise, in the January snow. The smell of rotten wood, of loam under snow. No whispers. No mutters. No ghosts.
But a name.
Robin Goodfellow,the wood said.
Puck.
Act IV, scene v
Salisbury: God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.
God be wi’ you, princes all; I’ll to my charge:
If we no more meet till we meet in heaven,…
–William Shakespeare, Henry V,Act IV, scene iii
Will glanced around the candlelit confines of a smoky little room in the chapel of Westminster Palace–almost more of a hallway with a narrow table and six tall chairs in the center–and sat himself down with a sigh. At the head of the table, near the flickering candelabra. He plucked a beeswax taper from one arm of the fixture and toyed with it while he waited, letting the wax drip along its sides in layered arabesques, making the shadows dance.
No matter how he tilted the taper between his fingers, the flame rose upright through the biting chill, shivering slightly in response to his palsy. He shook free beads of liquid wax and rising bubbles of smoke, amused by their transformation from transparency to a milky crystallized splash when they struck the cold wood of the table.
Beyond the windowless walls, a clock struck seven. And Sir Robert did not come. Am I forgotten? Or is this meant to teach me humility?He tilted the taper further, and this time the wax that fell dripped down the wick and flamed as it scattered through the air. A good effect,Will thought. ‘Tis pity there’s not a safe way to adapt it for the stage. ‘Twould be too fine a detail to read well, anyway.