She stood facing the fire with squared shoulders and softened hands. “A sonnet?”
“About your music.”
“I do not need your poetry. It belongs to the mortal world. I have a poet of mine own.”
Silence. Will rose to his feet. The fire popped, scattering coals on thehearthstones; Morgan’s precisely applied shoe ended their escape. “Morgan.”
“I have a poet of mine own,” she repeated. “If you are wise, you’ll go to him now; you have so little time left before I reclaim him.”
The cruelty in her tone left him gasping. His lips shaped her name again, but that very breathlessness kept it mercifully silent. She stood before the fire and did not look at him. He turned and left her presence. The door of the room he shared with Kit was unlatched. Will pushed it open gently and found Kit bent over papers on their table. Kit’s table, Will thought as the poet looked up.
“Forgotten something?”
Will hoped he imagined the chill in Kit’s voice. He latched the door, breathing deep the aromas of wood smoke and cold tobacco.
“Morgan’s finished with me: she couldn’t make me stay. You said that quill was too beautiful to use.”
Kit glanced at the gorgeous alabaster feather in his hand. “I changed my mind. It writes well. You have a play tomorrow: come to bed.”
“You re working.” But Will unfastened his doublet as he argued, struggling only a little with the golden buttons.
“I can work in November.” Kit dropped the quill into jet-black ink and stood. He came around the table. “Will, I’m frightened.”
“Frightened?”
“I think,” He shook his head. “If you stayed in Faerie, love, you could live.”
“I want to see my son again,” Will said quietly, knowing Kit would not argue the point. “That’s not what scares you.”
Kit tugged the doublet from Will’s shoulder and took it to lay out to air. “Murchaud was here. And very fey.”
“He is.”
“No. Will, I think he’s going to the teind.”
“What do you mean?”
Will laid his hand against Kit’s cheek. The skin was cold and damp. Kit let the doublet drop on the floor and Will pulled him close, feeling Kit’s heart like a terrified sparrow trapped in the cage of his ribs. “I mean,” Kit said, “I think it was farewell. And he’ll be gone, and you’ll be gone.”
I’ll write,” Will said. “You’ll visit.”
Kit turned around and looked at him, unapproachably distant from inches away. “You’ll die. I’ll care for you. Morgan said she would have you back.”
“I have no plans. To return to Morgan.”
So they were lovers, then. Will laid his hand on Kit’s cheek. “I wonder who ended it.”
“I misspoke.”
“Take you back.”
“I’ve worn her collar enough for one lifetime.” Kit shivered and drifted away, running his fingers inside the band of his ruff, disarraying the careful pleats. Abrupt gestures betraying annoyance, he untied it and tossed it on the chest. “Morgan is a fool.”
The thing on Kit’s face approximated a smile, Will decided, but it wasn t, really. “Shakespeare is a bigger one,” he answered, and was glad Kit kissed him before he could compound that foolishness somehow.
Hermia:
Out, dog! out, cur! thou drivest me past the bounds
Of maiden’s patience. Hast thou slain him, then?
Henceforth be never number’d among men!
O, once tell true, tell true, even for my sake!
Durst thou have look’d upon him being awake,
And hast thou kill’d him sleeping? O brave touch!
Could not a worm, an adder, do so much?
An adder did it; for with doubler tongue
Than thine, thou serpent, never adder stung.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Will’s role was small, Asklepios, and he’d written it so intentionally. After his own sad death, struck down by Zeus thunderbolt, the erstwhile physician scrubbed the paint from his face and made his way into the audience, seeking companionship. The revelers were masked and gowned as gorgeously as Will had ever seen; they bowed or curtseyed graciously or, pleasing him more, failed to, rapt in the performance as he walked among them, seeking Kit or Morgan. He found neither, but Puck’s small, twisted form beckoned among the window draperies, and Will went there. The sounds and scents of Faerie surrounded him; he sighed, settling into the window seat.“
“Master Goodfellow, well met.”
“Master Shakespeare, as well.” Spry as a goblin, Puck swung up the draperies and clung to them lightly, at a height from which to hold comfortable converse with a seated man. “They approve of your work.”
“They seem to,” Will answered, over the hollow clatter of hooves as the centaur playing Chiron took the stage, remonstrating with the Gods over Asklepios death. “Kit and I put some magic of our own into the ending.”
“When Prometheus takes Chiron’s immortality, to permit Chiron death I should think our enemies would find that more to their liking than our allies, Master Poet.”
Will grinned and tilted his head to look Robin in the soft, goatlike eye.
“Ah, but Prometheus dooms himself in doing so.”
“Dooms to eternal torment,” Puck answered, nodding. “Clever. But surely outside the scope of the play?”
“There is an epilogue.”
Silence, and then Puck tittered a high fey giggle like a child. “Speaking of eternal torment Aye? What think you of the teind?”
Will swallowed hard and looked away from the Puck, running his eyes once more across the crowd. Neither Kit, nor Morgan, nor Murchaud could be seen. “Kit thinks it will be Murchaud,” he said. “I imagine he is making his farewells.”
“Think how glorious the pain will be. How deep, how lasting. There’s poetry in that.”
“Pain?” Will hauled his legs up onto the window seat and hugged his knees. “Glorious pain? If you think pain is glorious, perhaps you have never known it practically.”
“When you live as the Fey live, any sensation is precious.”
“I see.”
“Not yet.” Puck smiled. But you will”
“I’ve had enough of prophecy,” Will said. He sighed and stretched and stood; Robin swung on the drape and hopped to Will’s shoulder, no more than a featherweight, holding Will’s ear with his long bony fingers.
“Then don’t listen to it.” A jingle of bells, the tangling and untangling of improbable limbs. Puck shifted on the bones of Will’s shoulder and made himself as steady a place as any horseman well accustomed to the saddle. “Tis not Murchaud going to the teind tonight, Will Shakespeare. And a sacrifice gone willing to Hell buys not seven, but seven times seven years.”
On the stage, Chiron was dying, beasts and mortals gathered close about. Will stopped and watched as the noble centaur went to his knees, a majestic fall. “How do you know?”
“It is kept close secret Will,” the Puck said softly, “I’m the Queen’s Fool. I know everything . I am just not often privileged to speak on it.”
“Then who will it be?”
Crowds have a way of moving, of breathing, of falling silent at once as if they were some giant dreaming animal. Will looked up as the animal sighed and stretched and turned in its sleep, as it rolled and broke open along his lineof sight. A tingle ran up his skin; he felt the nail that Kit had given him grow hot in his sleeve. Sorcery? But the thought was lost as a drape blew back from the curtained shadows of a window embrasure like the one he had just left, one toward the back of the hall and away from the crowd gathered before the stage. Will, slowly walking, froze so abruptly that Robin clutched at his head in a most undignified manner.
“Oh, Hell,” Will said, reaching out a hand blindly for balance. For Will recognized the figures intertwined within its moon-touched shelter, caught a kiss that seemed sheerest delight, the smaller all in black except his ragged cloak, his fair hair gleaming; the taller in a gown of palest green, her black hair tumbling over her lover’s hands like a living thing.