“Tis not the men that need concern you. Tis the maid stands at their head.” Twiglike fingers encircled Kit’s wrist and the elf tugged him forward, creeping on many-jointed toes.
Kit had a brief, swirling impression of heavy paneled doors worked in bas-relief with masterful artistry, designs more Celtic than Roman. The throne room was longer than it was broad, the floor tiled in patterned marble of rose and green, the dark windows hung with rippling silk and open to the night. The Fae moved freely, clumping in knots of whispered conversation, calling witticisms across the table set with glasses and wine.
Kit’s head throbbed with the scent of rosemary and mint, strewn with flower petals underfoot. Robin Goodfellow tugged his fingers, and Kit turned his head slowly so he would not miss a detail on his blind side. No hush fell when he entered, but the conversation flagged for half an instant before Robin led him forward. On the far end of the hall, raised on a dais, the Queen lifted her head. Kit would have gasped if he’d had any wonder left in him.
She curled in a beaten gold chair, languid as a lioness. A cloth of estate stretched over her head, and as Kit approached uncouth nails ringing on the paving stones she raised eyes that struck him through the heart. It wouldn’t have taken much to send him to his knees, true, but Robin was there, and made the stumble look a genuflection. Kit didn’t look up, but the image of the Queen’s golden hair knotted in braided ropes stayed with him, and the haunting perfection of eyes that caught the light and glimmered one moment green, one moment violet, like orient jade.
That most perfect creature under heaven,he thought, the moon full in the arms of restless night.
She moved an arm, by the sound of it. Stretched in leonine grace. Unfeeling of the hard, cold stone he knelt on, he imagined the purple silk of her mantle drifting from a wrist as white and smooth as a willow branch. He imagined the perfect pale mask of her face marked with a rosebud smile, and shivered deep in his soul. Her voice was furred like catkins, soft as the wind brushing his hair, and he heard a rustle of slick cloth and a jingle of bells, as if she stood, or stretched, or danced a step and stopped. His breath froze in his belly when she said his name. She’s just a wench,he thought desperately. She’s ensorcelled me. This is sorcery. Glamourie.
“Gentle Christofer.” Another whisper of bells. Robin got up and shuffled aside. He didn’t dare raise his eyes. “You grace our court with your presence. We have seen your work. It pleases us, and we know of your other duties before your Queen, and Gloriana pleases us as well.”
Somewhere, he found a voice, although it didn’t sound like his own. “You are gracious, Your Majesty.”
“Look upon us, she said,” and his chin lifted without his conscious will. I am bewitched,he thought, and then realized how close she had somehow drifted, silent as a thistledown. She reached out with soft fingertips, laced them through his hair, and traced the outline of his ear as if exploring a flower petal. He whimpered low in his throat, an anxious whine, and gritted his teeth as a low, amused chuckle swept the room.
They knew what she was doing to him. His breath came like a runner’s around the fire in his chest, but he managed to answer in pleasant tones. “Yes, Your Highness.”
Like velvet stroked along his spine, like a hand in the hollow of his back, her voice kept on.
“I’d grant you a place in my court, Master Poet. Your old life is lost to you. Will you play for my pleasure, sir?” A little ripple of delight colored her tone at her own double meaning.
“I’m sworn to another,” he began. The hardest words he could imagine speaking then, but the Mebd cut him short with a wave of her lily-white hand. Pearls and diamonds slid about her wrist when she moved, and emeralds and amethysts sparkled on her fingers.
“Hath been our royal pleasure to assist our sovereign sister Elizabeth in maintenance of her realm, whether she wits it or not. She’ll not grudge us your service, Master Poet”
“Sir Poet.” A voice like the yowl of a cat after the Mebd’s silken perfection. A voice from his blind side. Kit turned his head. Morgan stood beside him and a few steps back, her hands loose by her sides as she dropped a brief curtsey to the Queen. “I’ve knighted him, sister dear.”
“Ah.” The Queen let her fingers trail across Kit’s neck. “Stand, then, Sir Poet.” Her voice said she smiled, but her eyes didn’t show it, and Kit struggled but didn’t have to take Morgan’s subtly offered hand.
“A man cannot serve two Queens, Your Highness,” Kit said softly, against the pressure within that told him to throw himself down and kiss this woman’s slipper, the perfect hem of her perfect gown. Much as it may pain him. He shook his head, in pain.
“Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousandstars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele:
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms …”
“Your Faustus,” she said, but she seemed well pleased. She stepped back, a silver slipper gliding through the rose petals curling on the tile, and Kit felt something snap in the air between them as cleanly as if he’d broken a glass rod between his hands.
“We know it.” She settled back on her chair. “Thou canst never go home, Christofer Marley. Art dead unto them.”
Kit swallowed around the dryness in his throat. The dream was broken, the moment of perfection fled like the touch of the Queen’s soft hand. His belly ached, his chest, his ballocks, his face; he trembled, and only half with exhaustion.
“Your Highness,” he said, and his voice was again his own, if raw as the cawing of crows. “I crave a boon.”
“A boon?” She leaned forward in a tinkle of bells. “We shall consider it. What offer you in return?”
His luck had been running. Let it run a mile longer. He stepped away from Morgan, nearer the throne, dropping his voice.
“A bit of information, Your Highness. You have an interest in Elizabeth’s court?”
She smiled. Oh yes, he’d guessed right, from the fragments of information gleaned from her speech and Morgan’s.
“Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster? He lives, in hiding.”
“As do you,” she answered, with a slight, ironic smile. “It signifies. What wish you in return?”
“Let me speak to him but once. I have information I can give no other, and it is vital to the protection of the realm. If Elizabeth’s reign means something to your Royal Highness and I can see your sister Queen is dear to you, I beg you. On bended knee. Let me make my report.”
“And?”
“And secure my release from service.” For all his practiced manner, he could hear the forlorn edge in his own voice, and imagine the mockery in Elizabeth’s. ‘Am I so easy to set aside then, Master Marley?’
The Mebd watched him as he suited action to words, bowing his head, sinking on the stone steps of the dais though they cut his knee like dull knives. The queen sighed; Morgan shifted from foot to foot behind him. At last, he heard the sibilance of her mantle as she nodded, and her voice, stripped now of glamourie.
“Let me see your wounds, Sir Christofer,” she answered, not cruelly. “Draw off your bandages.”
His fingers fumbled when he tried. The room spun, and he laid his palm flat on the edge of the steps to keep from tumbling down them. Morgan came up beside him and lifted the coils of linen with gentle fingers, and the Faerie Queen sucked air between her teeth like any woman would at what she saw.