“What’s one mortal boy, more or less? They die soon enough, and one can always get another. Breed like rabbits, mortals do. And I needed thee, Kit, and needed thee fighting and thinking, not drowning in the dark. I thought if thy Shakespeare stepped back from his Queen, and thou didst go to comfort him, that there was a chance thou wouldst see the Mebd and dark Morgan for what they were, and win thy soul free. And it worked, it worked. How canst condemn me for that, when I had thee at heart, my dear?”

Oh, it was no use. He couldn’t hold the sword up, and he couldn’t have run little Robin through like a game hen on a spit even if he managed to lift the point. “It worked,” Kit said. “Aye. And so Morgan sent me to Hell.”

And thy Shakespeare won thee back, and thou him free. And the tithe paid, and thou what thou art.” Robin grinned. See me? How clever?

“Familiar demon,” Kit said, unbearably weary. He dropped the sword on the leaves and stones, and sat down beside it on a willow root. Puck came closer, sat down beside him, companionate but not touching. “Robin, what hast thou done? Mortal boys are not for slaughtering like cattle. And why dost thou undertake that which harms thy mistress?”

The little Fae turned his head and spat. “That for my mistress, Kit. Slave I am, bound in her hair, and so I may not defy her. We are all her slaves, all but Morgan, who is too strong for binding, and besides, I think me that Morgan knows the Mebd’s name, and the Mebd knows not Morgan’s.”

“So how is it that you do oppose her? If she holds thee in thrall?”

“She never thought to forbid me of the deaths of mortals not taken in her service,” Puck said, and shrugged. “If you tell her what I’ve done, she’ll punish me.”

“And if I kill you myself? ” Kit made no effort to pick up his sword, and Puck made no effort to move away from him on their impromptu bench. Kit buried his head in his hands, fingers knotting in the dirty tangles of his curls.

The Fae leaned back, kicking his toadlike feet. “She might be displeased. Of course, you could prove I conspired against her.” He laid a hand on the crease of Kit’s elbow and squeezed; Kit shied away, twisting from the waist and leaning back. “And yet I imagine you of all people, Kit Marlin, would understand.”

Kit nodded, savagely. “Aye. I know her glamourie. And Morgan’s too, and would not feel the touch again.”

“Imagine thou couldst not fight it,” Puck replied. “What then wouldst do to be free?”

Kit had no answer. He shook his head. He bent down between his knees and picked the hilt of his sword off the earth. “What if I told Will?”

“What of it? Would he ask thee to take his vengeance, in his name?”

“I know not,” Kit answered. He turned the blade over and over in his hands, watching dappled light ripple on the temper marks. “Thou hast done what thou hast done in accordance with thy nature and understanding. And thou hast preserved my life and freedom. Aye. And I do understand the freedom which thou dost seek. What, thee and Geoffrey too? Who else?”

“I cannot disclose to thee–”

“Never matter. I understand. And yet thouwilt understand that I cannot be thy friend, Master Goodfellow.”

“ ‘Twas thee thyself that saidst thou wouldst liefer lose thy life than thy liberty of speech, Sir Poet.”

Aye, ” Kit said, standing. These are not people. Lest you. ever forget. The Fae are not people. And who am I to judge someone who has done what he has done because he did it?“I do recall saying it. And I do recall dying for it too, Master Puck. Good day to you.”

“Wilt speak to thy Shakespeare?”

“Probably…” Kit answered, sheathing his sword and walking away. “Not,” he finished, halting for a moment where the willow’s ring of branches touched his hair. “Nor am I like to tell my Prince of thy machinations. And thus I am a traitor again to every soul I name friend.”

“A traitor? Or a man?”

“Is there a difference?” Kit asked, and turned toward the palace again, and the mirror, and the pain of old injuries. And a conversation and a lie that he did not want to have to tell.

Act IV, scene ix

Edgar: The foul fiend haunts poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale. Hoppdance cries in Tom’s belly for two white herring. Croak not, black angel; I have no food for thee.

–William Shakespeare, King Lear,Act III, scene vi

On the last day of 1599, in a receiving room at Greenwich Palace, Will leaned into the glow of an inconveniently placed lamp and frowned over his own atrocious penmanship, one of several players camped singly or in clumps in the puddles of light around the great dark hall. The windows were shuttered against a March storm, but the Queen was said to be in renewed spirits with the turning of the year, and the show must go on. He bent over his lines again, cursing the tremor in his hand that made the words shiver on the page, and trying not to think of his last, strange conversation with Kit and the long silence since, broken only by hasty letters.

A cultured voice interrupted his concentration. “Hast thought upon our offer, Master Shakespeare?”

Will glanced up from his part‑script and frowned before he remembered to bow. He’d thought the contact would come from Oxford, perhaps in a form as simple as a note. He wasn’t prepared to meet the ferrety countenance of Henry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton. The Earl was clad in snowy velvet, trimmed in white lace at the wrists. Whatever beauty the man had had in youth had dissipated, though he still wore his hair long enough to drape his shoulders and oiled in lovelocks like a girl’s under his hat. His one visible hand was silk‑soft, long, and white; he idly tapped its back with the cuff of the embroidered glove he held in the other. Will frowned to see the ring on Southampton’s smallest finger: black steel, edged in a band of gold.

“You’re wearing iron, my lord.”

“And thou art not.” A tilt of the head and a carefully elevated eyebrow.

Will did not press his fingers to his doublet to feel the iron nail in its soft leather pouch against his breast. Southampton drew his glove between his fingers. He switched it, Will thought, like a cat switching her tail.

“Master Shakespeare. Thy play today, what is it called?”

“Ad You Like It,my lord.” And Will had thought hard about performing that one before the Queen, it was true, and deemed it not unmeet to prick Her Majesty’s conscience a little. And if Essex were offended, or Oxford, so mote it be.

Even Southampton’s smile was greasy. “And if I like it not?”

“Then may it please the Queen.” Bandy word not with me, cockerel. I may be a nodding invalid and a common player, and you an Earl. But I fence with the likes of Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and you limit yourself to sycophants and tyros.

Honesty forced him to, And Queens,but Will couldn’t imagine Southampton had ever won a round with Her Majesty.

An oily ferret, perhaps, but as dogged as a weasel. The Earl stepped back, a little further into the light, so it gleamed on his careful curls. “Dost expect it might?”

“Lies it within my power. ” Will found his shaking hand tightening on the sheaf of playscript; he raised the pages against his breast like a buckler, like a talisman. He glanced over Southampton’s shoulder, across the room to where Burbage and two of the Wills bent Titian curls and dark over their part‑scripts. Burbage posed between the taller, browner players so that they leaned over him like framing trees. He must have felt Will’s gaze, because he glanced up; for a moment their gaze bridged the darkness from one puddle of light to the next.

“I rather hoped thou mightst have missed my patronage, Master Shakespeare.”