“It’s a riddle. It depends on when thou dost meet him. Is he climbing to the heavens, or is he hurled back down? Is he chained on a rock, moaning for release? Would he seek immortality, or would he entreat thee take it from him, and make him but a mortal man again?”

Kit shook his head. Oxford was always one to speak in riddles, enjoying teasing others with what he knew and they didn’t, and Kit had no stomach for it now. “What vile task wilt thou bid me to? Why is’t I should not break thy wretched neck?”

“No reason,” Oxford answered. “Do.”

“Do what?”

“Do break my neck. If that is how thou preferest to end this.” Oxford’s hands pleated the blankets across his thighs. “I did serve England–”

“Thou didst serve thyself and thine own furtherance. The Prometheans were meant to seek God and the betterment of Man, thou bastard. Thou–” Kit swallowed the shrillness that wanted to fill his voice. “Thou wert nothing but a spendthrift, a wastrel, a posturing cockerel.”

“Think it as thou wilt.” A sigh, exhaustion. The traceries of light that tangled Oxford were nothing like the dull red of the fever that had so nearly killed Will. “I will not serve MasterRichard Baines, once ordained a priest. Kill me, Kitten.”

A blatant request, and Kit blinked on it. “Killthee.”

“Aye.” Fumbling, Oxford tried to pluck the pillow from behind his neck. Kit helped him with it, careful not to touch the Earl’s fevered skin as Oxford lay back flat. Kit stepped back, the pillow clutched to his chest. Oxford closed his eyes. “Wilt let Baines have the use of me, Kitten? Kill me tonight.”

God,Kit thought. I’d imagined this as somehow satisfying.He looked down at the pillow in his hands and closed his eyes.

Amaranth’s touch did not trouble Kit in the slightest, perhaps because she was more beast than woman. So when he was done with Edward de Vere and had left the Earl of Oxford’s body laid out tidily under the coverlet of his borrowed bed, it was Amaranth that Kit sought.

She lay on her back on the grass under the honey‑scented tree that had been Robin Goodfellow, the creamy white scales of her belly exposed to the dappled sun and her slender, maidenly arms stretched high over her head. She wore a shirt of thin white lawn spotted with embroidered violets, startlingly feminine on a creature that was anything but. Kit dropped into the grass beside her, far enough away that he wouldn’t startle her hair, and crossed his legs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. She twitched her tail, acknowledging him without opening her eyes, and tapped a coil against his hip.

“Thou’rt pensive, Sir Poet.”

“I am more than pensive. I am troubled.”

Her scales were soft and leathery, warmer than the grass when he ran his hands over it. As comforting as a hot‑sided beast in a byre, and she smelled of autumn leaves or curing tobacco, musky as civet; mingled with the sweetness of the flowers, it put Kit in mind of expensive perfume. He lay down on the grass, his head propped on his knuckles, and sighed. She reached down lazily and stroked his hair. “And what troubles thee, Kit?”

“Prometheus,” he said, leaning into the luxury of a touch that did not make him cringe. She shifted to pillow his head on her coils, the gesture more motherly than predatory. “Someone has made an interesting suggestion to me, just now.”

“Interesting?”

Her voice was drowsy in the warmth; it relaxed him as smoothly as if it were a spell. “What if Prometheus–as in, the Prometheus Club–were a person, an individual. A role. As much as he is a symbol of what they intend to accomplish, that is to say, stealing fire from the gods? Or God? And if so, what are we to do about it?”

Sss.” A ripple of muscular constriction passed down her length. Her hand stilled in his hair for a moment, and then resumed smoothing the tangles that always formed at the back of his neck, where his hair snagged on his collar. “Comest thou to a snake for sympathy, Sir Poet?”

“I come to a snake for information. Which may be equally foolish.”

She laughed and levered herself upright without disturbing the section of coils upon which Kit rested. He rolled on his back, her wide belly scales denting under the weight of his head, and looked up her human torso as she rose. Sunlight shone through the cobweb lawn of her shirt; it bellied out on a breeze, offering him a glimpse of her maidenly belly and the underside of her breasts, the embroidered violets casting shadows like spots upon her skin.

“Come along,” she said, and gave a little shudder to shake him to his feet. He rose, dusting bits of grass from his doublet, and fell into step beside her.

She led him down the bluff by the water, holding his hand–her arm extended to keep him well away from any aggressive gestures from her hair–and across the sand. “Wait,” he said, and stripped off his boots and ungartered his stockings so he could feel the sand between his toes. Amaranth didn’t stop, but slithered forward at a stately place, leaving a wavy line through the sand. Kit had only to walk a little faster to catch up. “What is it thou dost not wish the Puck‑tree to overhear, Amaranth?”

“There is a Prometheus,” she said, and turned to look at him through matte steel‑colored eyes. She smiled liplessly. “Ask me another mystery, man.”

He swallowed. The sea broke over her bulk and foamed around his bare feet, drawing the sand from under his soles as if sucked by mouths. “Where do I find this Prometheus?”

The white foam ran down her dappled sides. She bent to trail her fingers through the waves. “In the mirror, Sir Christofer. In the eyes of a lover. Under an angel’s bright wings. All of those places and none. One more question. Come.”

I’ve fallen into a fairy tale.“How did I earn three questions of a serpent, my lady Amaranth?”

“Is that the question thou wishst to waste?” But her voice was kind, a little mocking. “I shall not count the answer, though. The answer. Which is, thou hast earned nothing, but this I give thee as a gift. Ask.”

Another wave, and this one wet him to the knee, spray salting his cheek and lips. The flavor was as musky as the lamia’s scent, salt and depth and thousands of deaths over thousands of years, all washed down into the endless, consuming sea. Kit shivered. And if everything has a spirit, what do you suppose the ocean’s soul is like?His chin lifted, as if of its own accord, and he turned to look out over the sea and its breakers like white tossing manes on dark stallions’ necks.

Amaranth coiled around him, an Archimedean screw with Kit the column at its center, and rested her seashell fingers on his shoulder, her head topping his by two feet or more. “Ask,” and the hiss of her voice was the hiss of the waves.

“What magic is a sacred marriage capable of, Amaranth?”

“Ah.” She settled in a ring about him, a hollow conduit with a poet at its center, sunlight glazing her scales as it did the dimples on the surface of the sea. “A grave risk, such a ritual. To work, it would need to be more than a ritual sacrifice. Thou wouldst die of it, who was Christofer Marley.”

“A grave risk. And? ”

“A potential triumph. It could be salvation: it’s so hard to tell. So much depends on–”

The waves came and went.

“Circumstance? ”

“Mehiel, ” she answered. “Mehiel, and how badly tormented the heart or the soul of an angel might be.”

“Badly,” Kit answered, but he was thinking of Lucifer Morningstar and not the sudden, fearsome heat and pressure in his chest.

Act V, scene iv

To this I witness call the fools of time

Which die for goodness, who have Lived for crime …