Back for thee when I need thee.Kit made it to a crouch, steadying himself on the wall. Stood, and staggered to the corner to retrieve his sword. Bending over was a trick; he managed it with one hand braced on the wainscoting, trying not to hear Baines whistling merrily as he washed and rebandaged his wound. Kit staggered for the door.

Baines’ voice arrested him. “Don’t try this trick again, or I’ll see thy friend Shakespeare on the rack. Dost hear me?”

“Aye,” Kit said, and somehow released his own spell on the door and tumbled through it onto the gallery and into the cold. At least,he told himself–trying not to giggle– at least from here thou canst leave by the interior stairs, and out through the front door. Because thouwouldst dash thy brains out if thou hadst to climb down now by the way thou camest.

Past the house‑cleaning landlord, it turned out, who raised a questioning eyebrow as Kit came across the common room to the barred front door. “Master Catesby’s guest,” he said, tugging his cloak tight and hoping the shadows would conceal the ruin of his clothes.

“‘Tis past curfew.” Friendly enough. “Stay the night.”

“My mistress expects me. I’ll mind the watch – ”

“See that you do,” the man said, and came around the bar to lock the door after him.

The cold cleared his head. He staggered into an alleyway and leaned against the wall, under the overhang. Damme. I won’t make that mistake again. Next time, it’s a shadowy alley and a bullet in the back of the head, you son of a whore.

He wants me alive. He’s wanted me alive all along, except when I made it too difficult to keep me that way.Kit pressed his back against the timber and plaster, tasting acid and bitterness, remembering Rheims, remembering the taste of blood and gentle hands holding his hair back while he vomited, again and again.

As if that, as if anything, could clear the poison and the filth from his body. Remembered pleading for his life, and braced his hands on his knees and vomited again, into a rain‑pocked slushpile this time. In Rheims, Baines had argued for his life. Had told the others that if they spared him, they could use the same vessel.

He never meant to kill me.

No.Kit forced himself to stand, to ignore the ragged ache in his chest. He rinsed his mouth with dirty snow, scrubbed more on his face for the chill and abrasion of the icy granules. His brands ached like blisters. His hands stung with the cold. No. He just means to keep me alive for however long it takes and then what? Rape me again? Something else?

God in heaven.

I don’t want to know.

Kit used the frozen surface of a public basin for his mirror – more Promethean witchery, that, that London grew cold enough to freeze her fountains of a winter–and slipped through it and into Faerie with a sigh that was very much relief, even though the court’s fey night shadows twisted around him and small things scurried in the dark. All it would have taken to make my night complete would be to be caught short out of Faerie, and die in some alleyway.

Still staggering, steadying himself with one hand on the wall, Kit moved at first automatically to Morgan’s room and then stopped himself. Not welcome at court.Hell. But Murchaud’s room was closer anyway, and only one flight of stairs away.

The flagstones whirled under Kit’s boots. He pressed his shoulder to the wall, as if the palace needed his assistance to stand as much as he needed its. They leaned together, shoulder to shoulder, flying buttress and cathedral –

A better image than most, for once.He ran his right hand up the banister, cool stone against his ice‑abraded palm, and pulled his torn shirt collar closed at the hollow of his throat, and forbade himself to weep. A command he managed to obey until Murchaud opened his door in a nightshirt Kit had given him, blinking sleepily. “Kit. Thou’rt hurt – ”

“Not so sorely,” Kit answered, and fell through the door.

Murchaud bound his ribs in linen, tight enough to squeeze like a giant’s fist whenever Kit drew a breath, and ignored Kit’s feeble remonstrations over the undressing and the necessary handling. Murchaud warmed water for him–with his own hands, when Kit wouldn’t permit him to call for servants –and combed Kit’s hair, and dressed him in a nightgown twice as large as it needed to be, and carried him–as he had carried Kit that first night in Faerie –to the big chair by the fire. Murchaud settled him there with his feet up and a cup of warmed wine in his hands. It was a blur of action, with Kit trembling like a trapped fox under the Prince’s care and reminding himself not to bite.

Kit drank half the wine without tasting anything but the alcohol’s sting in his lacerated cheek, and then he raised his chin to look Murchaud in the eye. “Thou’rt alone,” he said, wondering.

Murchaud turned away and squatted to poke the fire higher, turning a smoldering log so the bark would catch alight. “I’d be in the Mebd’s rooms if I weren’t, love. She does not come to visit my chambers.”

No, ‘ Kit said. He covered his discomfort with a sip of wine. “I’d have thought – ”

Murchaud shrugged and looked up from his angle‑kneed crouch, shapely limbs protruding from his nightshirt this way and that. “I’ve all the lovers I want,” he said, and stood, limber as a cat, and went to pull the bedcurtains back. The covers were as disordered as Murchaud’s hair; the prince had struggled out of a sound sleep to answer Kit’s knock, and Kit felt a rush of sudden, hopeless gratitude.

And then a moment of wry self‑exasperation. “Damme – ” Kit set his cup down with a click.

“What?”

“I left Cairbre’s viola in Will’s lodging.” He made to stand; his knees failed him, and he slumped back in the chair. “Thou didst drug the wine, ” he accused, as tiredness pressed the center of his chest like a broad, flat palm. His fingers curled on the textured brocade of the chair cushion, but failed to shift his body.

“I’ll save that trick for when I need it,” Murchaud said. “I rather thought the wine would be enough. Come, let me take thee to bed.”

“Murchaud, I – ”

“Hush. I’ll carry thee to thine own rooms if thou likest. Or thou canst sleep in that chair. But I don’t believe thee when thou sayest thou dost wish to be left alone, this night.”

Kit subsided, his eyelids too rough and heavy to hold up. Liar. He did drug the wine.

It didn’t matter. He hadn’t even the strength to protest the discomfort of the Prince’s touch when Murchaud lifted him and laid him in the bed and drew the feather comforter up to his neck. “Puck,” he said, remembering.

“What about him?” A dry kiss on Kit’s forehead. Lights and candles, the dimming of the room. The pressure of a body in bed beside him, and then an arm across his waist. Over the covers. Almost tolerable so, and Kit hadn’t the strength to roll away.

Puck is the villain,Kit meant to say. But then he remembered, he owed Puck a chance to answer the charges to his own face. Before he, Kit, named another friend for treason. As he had named so many before.

He’d seen too many friends hang.

“Nothing,” he said, but he wasn’t sure the word took breath before the darkness folded him deep.

Act IV, scene vii

Thou hast years upon thee; and thou art too full

Of the wars’ surfeits to go rove with one

That’s yet unbruised: bring me but out at gate.

–William Shakespeare, Coriolanus,Act IV, scene i

Will crouched in the chair by Tom Walsingham’s fire, his damp boots draining onto a rush mat, turning Kit’s glorious old Greek Bible in his hands. Will’s Greek had never been good, worse even than his grammar‑school Latin, but he could tell from the handscript, the margins, and the way the sections abutted in the glove‑soft, gold‑embossed red leather of the binding that he held three or four books stitched together. Their pages had been carefully trimmed to match in size; now scallop‑shell flakes roughened the fragile gold edge. He held the book close to his face, open, cupped in the palm of his hands, inhaling the oak‑leaf scent of the pages. “George, have you ever seenanything like this?”