“That will suffice, dear Water.” She tugged her hand from Raleigh’s grasp, and she passed before Will and came and laid that same white, white hand on Oxford’s cheek. He smiled at the touch, and the Queen smiled back. “What is it, Edward? ”

“I am here to name this playmaker a traitor to Your Highness,” Oxford said, on a breath that didn’t quite manage the sneer he endeavored for. “I have evidence to present–”

Christ,Will thought, but Raleigh came to stand beside him as if about to take his elbow and block his route to the door, using the movement to cover a casual nudge.

“How convenient,” Elizabeth said, turning her back on Oxford while Will marveled at her seamless courage and dignity. “When here we have a tribunal of sorts.”

“A tribunal, Your Highness?”

“Of sorts,” she repeated, withdrawing up the shallow steps. She paused before her chair, made a sweeping turn to accommodate her train, and did not take a seat. “We are here to consider the crimes of Edward de Vere, the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Would he care to make a defense?”

Kit shifted at the left hand of the Mebd, although his face seemed impassive behind the mask. Will saw her lay one black‑gloved hand on the poet’s wrist. Kit glanced down and gave her a smile as edgy as the rapier in his hand. Will stepped away from Oxford, giving Raleigh the room to step between them if he needed, conscious of his blocking as if he moved away from the principals in a scene onstage.

“My Queen.” Oxford swept a low bow and stayed there, his hat in his hand as Will’s had been. “May I hear these – charges?” He glanced sidelong at Will, already arranging his face into a mask of dismissive scorn. “What has this player told you?”

“That playerhas told us nothing,” she said. Her hands looked terribly small against the massive white wall of her skirts; she folded them before the point of her flat‑fronted stomacher and twined the fingers together. “For we have not yet taken his evidence.” Disappointment edged her soft, sweet voice. “Edward. It has reached our ears that thou dost conspire with Catholic spies and agents, along with some others who are not presently welcome in our court – ” She sighed. “Honesty may redeem thee, Edward. How dost thou answer? ”

The look Oxford shot Will this time was nothing short of venomous, and Will had the distinct and elevated pleasure of smiling once and shaking his head with slow finality. Nay. Not me, my dear Earl. I wonder if it was Essex or Southampton threw him to the wolves?

One or the other. Elizabeth would not listen to many men over– Kit’s eye caught Will’s again, and Will nodded so slightly he thought only Kit and perhaps Cairbre might catch it– her own son.

“Your Highness.” Oxford had not yet risen. Will rather enjoyed seeing the back of his neck. “May I know by whose hand these charges have been leveled, then?”

“Mine,” said Kit, and stepped forward with a naked rapier still in his right hand, and it struck Will abruptly that better than half the men in the room had drawn weapons in the presence of not one Queen, but two–and no one seemed to think much of it. Meanwhile, Kit’s gloved left hand rose to strip the sculpted velvet mask from his face; he let it drop from his fingers to the floor behind, and smiled. “Hello, love. Art surprised to find me quick?”

Leaning on his cane, Will hitched himself back from the confrontation evolving in the center of the room.

Elizabeth’s smile was a mask as unyielding of true expression as the one Kit had left lying at her feet, and Oxford’s stiff‑backed bow didn’t survive the revelation. He straightened, reaching for the rapier he wasn’t wearing, and took a slow step away from Kit and from the Queen as Raleigh edged between him and the door.

Oxford hesitated a moment when his hand brushed the richly figured cloth at his hip. Will saw his moment of decision, the squaring of his shoulders and the little grimace as he moved forward, past Kit as if Kit were insignificant, an inconvenience to be shrugged aside. “Your Highness,” Oxford said, pausing at the foot of the steps and addressing himself directly to his Queen. “Surely you will not take the word of this” –his lip twisted, as if on words he would not say in the presence of a woman – “apostate, this perversion–”

Kit came the few steps back up beside Oxford on the left, and Will saw that his motion served to distract Oxford from Raleigh, who flanked the Earl on the right and just out of the periphery of his vision. Kit’s voice stayed level, amused, but there was a honeyed rasp in it that Will knew for sheerest hatred. “Baines told thee not that I was living, Edward? I wonder what else he’s kept from thee. Perhaps he reports directly to Southampton now.”

“Thou shalt not theeme, sirrah.”

Kit stopped close enough for Oxford to feel the heat of his breath, Will imagined, the naked blade angled between them as if laid down the center of a bed. “Or Essex; perhaps ‘tis why Essex saw fit to set thee adrift–”

Oxford looked up at the Queen. “Your Highness would take the word of this common playmaker and, and–”

“–or perhaps ‘tis Essex who wears Baines’ rein. What thinkst thou? Thou hast been cut from their string, hast not?”

The Oueen’s smile was strained white under the carmine of fucus. She held her silence. The Mebd and the four black‑clad men beside her might have been statues.

“–heretic, traitor. Catamite–” Oxford would not turn. Would not look at Kit, as Kit leaned closer. Will’s stomach clenched in sympathy at the tightness that edged Kit’s face, and never was heard in his voice.

“Ah.”

“Your Highness?”

“Ah,” Kit said a second time, and slapped Edward de Vere with the back of his gloved left hand.

It was a blow hard enough to turn the man’s head and leave a welt burning red across the pallor of his skin, and Will flinched at the report. Oxford fell silent, didn’t so much as raise a hand to cover the mark. Will imagined de Vere tasting blood, and the imagining troubled him not at all.

Kit tilted his head to one side like a crow thinking which eye to pluck from a dead man’s skull. He spoke clearly into the silence, and the knot in Will’s stomach wrenched into a wild, braying kind of love. “I cannot fault thine own experienced testament, my lord–”

“Master Marlowe, I am certain–”

“Sir Christopher, ” Elizabeth said.

“Your Highness?”

“Sir Christopher,” she said, as if reminding an idiot child. “Not Master. Sir.”

Oxford’s face went white before it went red. “Sir Christopher. I am certain I do not understand your implication–”

“Implication? My lord Oxford, I will testify.”The poet stripped his gloves off with an elegantly negligent gesture and smiled up at the Queens. Will wondered if anyone else could see what Kit’s smile cost him.

Oxford looked appealingly at his Queen, who ignored him in favor of gracefully resuming her seat, her skirts hissing about her like the foam on a moonlit sea. Oxford must have heard the rumors that the veiled blond beauty was the legendary Anne of Denmark, Queen of Scotland. Will could almost see the false assumptions heaping high in Oxford’s thoughts.

“Sir Christofer,” the Mebd asked in measured and musical tones, “are you suggesting that this my royal sister’s subject has made improper use of thee?”

Elizabeth glanced up from fussing her skirts, but it was Kit she looked to. “Sir Christopher?”

Kit smiled green poison, not at the Queens but at Oxford. “Oh, he made rather a proper job of it, I’d say. May it please Your Majesties.”

“Thou’lt burn with me.” Hissed, and Will rather thought it was meant for Kit’s ears alone, but in the still room it carried. Oxford flinched.

“I’m subject to another Kingdom now,” Kit answered, and gently reached up and kissed Edward de Vere on the cheek still reddened with that blow. Will bit his lip on a cheer, turned aside before it could bubble out of him, and met Raleigh’s amused and savage grin. He approved of our Kit too,Will thought, and gave the Oueen’s “Sir Water” back a flash of a smile as Kit stepped back. Will wonders never cease?