Ben stared for a moment, aghast. And then a soldier’s composure settled over the rough features, and he stepped to block Spencer’s rabbity bolt for the gate.
“Draw, Gabe,” he said tiredly, as his blade came up and he turned to extend the line of his arm.
Spencer glanced from Will to Ben, and back. He slipped his main gauche into the proper hand, and reached across his belt to his rapier hilt. “This is murder, Ben. It’s a hanging.”
“Right of clergy,” Ben said, piggy eyes narrowing under the cave of his brow. “I read latin. It’s a branding. Counterfeiting is a hanging.” Draw your blade, and you’ve got a chance.
He didn’t, of course: quick as Spencer was, Ben was half again his size, half again his reach, and almost as fast, with a soldier’s nerve. The blades rang silver on silver, with a purity of tone the debased coins burning Will’s chest couldn’t hope to match. Spencer lunged and shouted above, at the window, a cry of ‘murder!’ went up Ben parried, riposted, the passage too fast for Will’s eye, trained only to stage combat, to follow. The big man moved in, Spencer’s main gauche tearing his sleeve but not the arm beneath, and a moment later blood stained eight inches of steel at the tip of Ben’s blade. Shouting and running footsteps rang down the street. Will never saw how it happened. Ben wiped the blade on his kerchief before he sheathed it, while the witnesses and then the watch crowded close around them. You tell Tom he’d better stand my bail, Ben muttered, and Will nodded as Ben was led away.
It lies not in our power to love, or hate,
For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, Hero and Leander
In absolute blackness, Kit paced in the cramped circle afforded him. His right hand trailed on the damp stones of the wall. He had no fear of tripping; his feet knew the path, and the dank earth was where he slept when he grew too tired to walk. Wasting energy, he thought, but he could not sit still. The sink wherein the filth of all the castle falls, he mumbled, but it wasn’t, quite. More an old, almost-dry well, lidded in iron as much to keep light out as the prisoner in, for the sides were twenty foot and steeply angled. He had paced forever. He would be pacing forevermore. A strange sort of irritation, first an itching and then a raw, hot pain, grew in patches on his torso and his thighs. To pass the time he told himself stories. Bits of verse, Nashe’s plays, half memorized, Kyd’s Tragedy, Will’s Titus. The Greeks and the Romans and his newest acquisition, the Celts. And none of them could drive the mocking voice of Richard Baines out of his mind.
“Good puss. Wait there, I’ll be back for thee when I can.”
“Damn you, Baines, don’t leave me alone down here.”
“Oh, thou wilt not be alone. There’s rats and frogs. And they tell me Edward’s ghost still screams. He’ll be company for thee; thou hast so much in common. Dost remember the irons, puss? Thou canst look forward to their acquaintance again.”
Kit closed both eyes. It made no difference: he walked, and turned, and walked, and turned. Christ, Richard. For the love of God, what made you such a monster?
“Froggy frogs,” someone answered. Kit startled, felt about him. He kicked something that rolled and rattled in darkness, a heavy iron jangle, but nothing that felt like flesh.
“Master Troll?”
“Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs. Froggy frogs…” faint as an echo up a drain pipe.
Kit felt after whatever had rolled. Maybe a tool, something that could be used to dig, or pry, or climb. He found it after some scrabbling and sat down against the wall to explore it with his fingers. Round, a sort of ball of iron straps… . It smelled of rust, the cold savor of iron. He felt inside it, and yelped when something pricked his thumb.
Oh. Of course he would have left this here for me to think on.
Carefully, almost reverently, Kit laid the scold’s bridle aside and scrubbed his hands on his breeches as if he had inadvertently grabbed two fistfuls of meat writhing with worms. His breast burned, his belly, his thighs. In five discrete patches, now, one for each brand, an agony as fresh as the day they had been seared into his skin. How did I get here?He didn’t know.
“Hurm. And harm.”
“Master Troll? Is there a way out of this pit? This oubliette?” A forgetter, some helpful portion of his mind supplied. Where you put someone to forget them. But Baines said he’d be back. ‘Listen carefully, Kit. Can you hear Edward screaming?’
There must be a way out of this.
“Ah, Sir Christofer.” A voice like brushed silk. “There is always a way. Come with me, my love. I am the way.”
There was light, suddenly. Light cast from over his shoulder, and as he found himself standing he turned to it, turned into it. The scent of pipe tobacco surrounded him, a comforting memory of Sir Walter Raleigh’s chill parlor and many late nights. He walked through it, heard voices hanging on a glittering arpeggio, felt air stirred by a suggestion of wings.
God.
He walked past, and through. Found himself elsewhere, in a tower room, high in the air: an autumn or early winter evening and the unmistakable reek of the Thames, the cry of ravens in the graying light. Harsh wood scraped Kit’s knuckles; something writhed ineffectually against his grip. He looked down, at the skinny, stripped man of middle years he pinned against the rough table, in an all-too-familiar pose.
God. God, hear me now.
The man was familiar too: his black hair, high forehead, terrified gray-blue eyes. As familiar as the lazy oval scarred by a set of good young teeth at the base of Kit’s left thumb, the saddler’s muscle ridging his forearms under thick golden hair. The pain from his brands was a symphony now, bright as holy words written in his flesh.
Will. What is … Oh, God. That’s Will. I’m Baines.
A flurry of wings, and the cries of falcons, or perhaps of women in unimaginable grief or unspeakable pleasure. The light shattered like a hurled looking glass. Kit awakened in the evening dimness behind Morgan’s bedcurtains, his head pillowed on her nightgown-covered thigh, and groaned with the simple agony of opening his eye.
“Where is he?”
Her voice, lazy and collected and very much awake.
“Where is who, Sir Kit?”
He raised his head, wincing, and looked up her body at the woman lowering her book to regard him.
“Whosoever it was that beat me in my sleep.”
“All your own doing, I fear.” She laid the cloth-bound volume aside and reached down lazily to smooth his rumpled hair. “You re a sorry drunk, Kit. Do try to avoid it in future.”
“I don’t recall,” he answered. Vaguely, a memory of walking ever-so-carefully through her door, the click of the latch, her hands unbuttoning his pearl-embroidered doublet and unbuckling his sword. A brief check informed him that he was half dressed, at least, and Morgan seemed clothed and composed. “What befell?”
“You fell into mine arms,” she said, quite gently, “and wailed like a pup pulled from his mother’s teat. And when I thought you’d cried a whole world’s tears, you cried a few more in your sleep, and tossed and turned. But slept the morning through and then the afternoon, and whimpered whenever I rose or left your side. Still dreaming?” Her fingers were gentle.
He laid his head down on her thigh again, and sighed in the simple comfort of her touch. I could have liked her, if things had been different, for all she is wild and cold.
“Aye,” he said, and then sat upright, the spinning room competing for his attention with remembered horror. “Baines. And Will. Prophetic dreams.”
She let her hand fall from his arm. “What of?”