“At least you brought Harvey down with you.”

“A minor victory. It’s not hard to be funnier than Gabriel Harvey. Hullo, George.”

“Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Chapman patted Will on the shoulder and settled his bulk onto the plank bench beside Nashe. And then looked up, exasperated, and started to heave his stout graybearded self up again. “Damme, I forgot I wanted sack.”

“I’ll get it,” Nashe said, pushing himself to his feet with a hand on either side of the board. “I wanted another ale. Mind you keep Will from ‘repairing’ the board while I’m up – oh, look. The Catholics are here again.”

He jerked his chin, and Will followed the motion. Robert Catesby caught Will’s eye and smiled; Will didn’t know the big, well‑favored redhead beside him, but the ridges of muscle on his arms and the scars on his hands said soldier,and he carried himself in the same manner that Ben did.

“At least we’re unlikely to see Puritans in a poet’s bar,” Chapman answered, stretching his feet toward the fire. “And Catesby’s a good sort.”

Nashe snorted and went to find the landlord. Chapman turned and offered Will a considering look. “Does your offer still stand, Master Shakespeare?”

Will blinked, trying to remember what offer he might have made, and shrugged. He pulled a tiny bottle from his purse and shook Morgan’s poisoned medicine into his wine cup, counting the droplets that fell from the splinter imbedded in the cork. “Which offer is that?”

Chapman glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve thought better of your idea. The Bible.”

Will swirled the wine to mix in the bitter herbs, aware of Chapman’s interest. “It’s a tincture for my palsy, George.”

“Oh.” Silence, as Will drank and felt the tightness in his muscles easing. “The Bible,” he reminded.

“Ben’s not speaking to me,”

“Ben thinks highly of himself,” Chapman commented dryly. We were young once too. It passes.”

Will laughed, tidying counters on the board. “I’m uncertain I was ever so young as that. The Bible’s been slow going. What changed your mind?”

Chapman shrugged as Nashe came back, juggling two wine cups and a mug of ale. He placed the cups before Will and Chapman, and settled in again, leaning forward to look at the board. “I bid you not to let him move my counters, George – ”

“I was only straightening,” Will protested. “Thank you for the wine, Tom.”

“I was up.” Tom brushed it aside as unworthy. “I interrupted.”

“Not at all,” Chapman said. “We were discussing the foibles of Master Jonson.”

Will sighed and nodded, glad that Chapman had failed to answer his question once Nashe returned. Jonson owes too much to Tom Walsingham to give away what he knows of our tasks. But I cannot help but wonder, sulky boy that he is, if I made a mistake recruiting him. Still, it wouldn’t do to have Tom Nashe wondering why I’ve cut him out of Bible study.

Nashe rolled his eyes. “Ben’s all wind and no rain,” he opined, toying with his ale.

“Easy to say, when you’re not somebody he’s brawled with or cudgeled with his own pistol. Ask John Marston what he thinks of Ben’s fists.”

Nashe grinned at Chapman. “He’ll wind up stabbed in unsavory circumstances. Mark my words.”

Will marked them, all right. And, sitting at the table between two other friends and collaborators of Kit Marlowe’s, found them less than comforting. Well, if I can trust anyone with the news of Kit’s survival, it would have been smarter Tom Nashe or George than Ben, now that I think on it. Oh, hell.He caught Chapman’s eye and nodded while Nashe was fussing with the dice, and Chapman returned the smile and sipped his wine complacently.

Act IV, scene xvi

She whom thy eye shall like, thy heart shall have,

Be she as chaste as was Penelope,

As wise as Saba, or as beautiful

As was bright Lucifer before his fall.

–Christopher Marlowe, Faustus,Act II, scene i

Kit walked down the sweeping greens‑ward below the Mebd’s gold‑turreted palace and stopped on the bluff above the sea. A strange white tree grew there, where the lawn gave way to coarse and knotty salt grass. Kit let his viola swing from his hand, kicked the tree’s trunk with the side of his foot, and arched his head back to look up into the branches.

Murchaud told him it was a New World tree, or perhaps one native to Cathay. It flowered heavily, hung with white petals thick as paper and soft as the skin of a peach. A thick honeyed scent the sea breeze couldn’t leaven floated under the branches, cloying Kit’s throat.

It wasn’t what the tree was that interested Kit. It was who the tree had been. “Well, I hope thou’rt enjoying thy penance, Robin,” he said. “Can think of worse prisons…”

The branches whispered one on the other. Kit freed the bow and lifted the viola. “I came to play thee a tune. I thought it might lighten the weary hours….”

There was no answer, of course. But still he settled his instrument and played for an hour or two, there at the border between the sea and the land, with the tree reaching up to scrape the sky. He would have played longer, and perhaps stayed to watch the sunset under the white tree’s branches, but the heavy slip and sway of a caller’s approach across the grass distracted him.

He lowered the instrument and turned. “Good evening, Lady Amaranth.”

“A beautiful evening, Sir Poet,” she answered. “Play on, and lull me to sleep in this forgiving evening air.”

“Do snakes sleep?”

She smiled, that strange flat rearrangement of her face. “Snakes sleep with their eyes open, who was Christofer Marley.”

“Please,” he said, laying the viola down in a flat, dry patch of grass. He leaned back against the bark of the tree, wondering how long the Mebd would leave Robin stranded so before she deemed her lesson taught. “Call me Kit. ’

“Kit.” Her snakes moved like a lovely woman’s hair, tossed by the sea breeze. For a moment, he could almost imagine curls caught on her collar, limned like sculpture in the low angled light. “How likest thou the answers to thy questions?”

“The answers you’re guiding me to? ” He laughed. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Mehiel. The oaks. Puck. Other things …”

She inclined her head, smile broadening, the picture of womanly waiting except for the flicker of her tail tip.

He pushed a hand into his hair, as much to hide his shaking as to hold the wind‑tossed strands out of his face. “How do you know what you know, Amaranth?” He’d meant to ask the question more subtly, to dance up to it.

She coiled aside and smiled, rising up to pluck a palm‑broad blossom from the branches overhead. She buried her face in the flower, inhaling deeply, and then tucked the twig behind her ear. Threadlike serpents coiled over the petals as Kit watched in fascination. She leaned back, as if considering.

Kit straightened against the tree and folded his arms across his breast. “You are more patient than I, my friend. Older and more knowing.”

“But thou’rt more stubborn, and I should take it into account?” She showed him a bit of fang when she smiled this time, and fussed the lace on the cuff of her flowing white shirt. “I know because I know, Kit. Because serpents are for knowing things.”

“And sharing them with mortals to their detriment?”

Oh, that was fang indeed, and the flicker of a long forked tongue in silent laughter. It brushed his cheek as she swayed forward, and all her hair hissed in sympathy. “If thou knowest thy scripture. Or all the myths of all the world.”

“Is there a difference?”

She settled back on her tail, watching him with an arch assessment that left him quite unsettled. “No. Now that thou dost mention it, there’s not.”