Will sat down too, and cleared his throat. “Couldn’t the end of an old way mean the Prometheans, just as well?”

“It means Elizabeth,” Kit said with quiet conviction, both his fists pressed against his chest as if his heart might burst right between his ribs, and there was no arguing then.

Will had cause to remember those words a fortnight later on October the second, when broad noon turned to darkness over London Town as if a tarnished silver coin had been slid across the disk of the sun. A strange twilight strangled the city’s voice to desperate murmurs as every foot paused, every voice hushed, every eye lifted and then quickly fell again, unable to bear the light of even a half‑occluded sun.

Will shaded his eyes with his hand, pressing his forehead to the rippled glass and lath of Tom Walsingham’s casement window and tilting his face to the side. “It seems a year for ill omens, ” he said softly, and did not look down until Tom came to draw him away from the window.

“What, a cloud across the sun?” Kit came up too–the three of them were alone, Ben and George having been left home from this particular council of war – and glanced through the window. “Ah. I don’t suppose I missed a rain of fire while I was away? ”

“Nay,” Will answered, and pulled Tom toward the door. ‘That’s a terrible sight.”

“Don’t look upon it,” Kit warned. “Wilt burn thine eyes. Tom, have you smoked glass?”

“Nothing so useful,” Tom answered as the three men emerged from the garden door into a world that seemed to Will even stranger and more alien than Faerie. In those places where gold and auburn leaves still clung to the trees and bushes, the dappled shadows moving underneath them formed diminishing crescents, layer on layer of moving images.

Will thrust his hand under the branches of an oak, watching the gleaming crescents shrink upon his skin. The air seemed thicker in its darkness, and hung with sparkles like a summer night. “Camera obscura,” he said, gesturing Kit and Tom to join him. Somewhere beyond the garden wall, he heard someone sob and the sound of a window breaking. “Look at this. The leaves make the pinholes.” He almost fancied he could feel the light brushing his skin as the leaves tossed in time with the breeze.

“Sweet buggered Christ,” Kit said. “I need my books.”

“What books?” asked Tom alertly.

“Oh, I had – ” He paused, as if considering. “A Ptolemy, and Brahe’s Die Stella Nova,an Agrippa, some of Dee’s work – ” Kit stopped and looked around, realizing that Tom and Will were staring. “Research,” he said. “Faustus.In any case, I loaned them all to Sir Walter and he never gave them back. A most notorious thief of books, that one–”

Tom coughed into his hand. “I have some volumes of Ficino.”

“Please?” Kit looked up, exactly as he had admonished Will not too, and closed his left eye. He seemed to pay no notice as Tom returned to the house.

Will cleared his throat, the unease swelling in his belly. “Kit?”

Kit looked down and smiled at Will. “Fear not,” he said. I doubt an eye that won’t be damaged by a knife will be blinded by the light of a half‑dimmed sun.”

“What art thou seeking?”

“The way the moon moves,” Kit said, taking the book from Tom’s hands when Walsingham returned with it. He angled the pages to catch what light he could, but read with ease words that Will would have found incomprehensible in the unnatural twilight. He watched as Kit riffled pages, seeming to know what he was searching for even if he did not know quite where to find it.

“Sidereal,” Kit murmured, and some other words that meant nothing to Will. Tom watched with interest, hands on his hips, head cocked to one side and the wind ruffling his silver‑streaked auburn hair. The strands too made pinholes as they rose and fell; as the eclipse ground toward totality, Will watched the tiny crescents scattering Tom’s face first fade to nothingness and then reemerge as twisting rings of light.

Will risked a glance upward and caught his breath at the image of the sun occluded, a jet‑black round crowned in twisting fire that reminded Will of Lucifer’s writhing, shadowy tiara in reverse. “Sweet Christ,” he swore, but it was more of a prayer, really.

“Ah,” Kit said, and clapped the book shut like a pair of hands. “No,” he said. “Not good at all.”

“It’s an omen, then?”

“Yes, and as ill as you’d like to make it. ‘Tis, again, a marker of the end of things, and an overthrow of balance and harmony. If Elizabeth and her famous temporizing were a force to keep England in symmetry, and in accord with God and nature–”

“Aye?” Will’s feet would not quite hold him steady.

Kit shrugged, and handed the book back to Tom. “You are witnessing the end of her power, gentlemen. And the death of whatever peace our sufferings, and those of the poets and intelligencers who came before us, and the Queen’s cool brilliance at the chess of politics, bought for Mother England.” Kit swallowed and looked down. “The sun will be in Sagittarius at the end of this month and the beginning of the next.”

“And?” Tom and Will, as one voice.

“And,” he said. “The best date for a sacrifice would be November fifth, I think. Fifteen Sagittarius.”

“That’s when Parliament is to meet,” Will said, as the sun began to emerge from its enshadowment. “They were–”

“That late in the year? That’s–”

It was Tom who finished, both hands raised and bound tight in his hair. “They were prorogued,” he said. “The session bound over. On account of plague.”

“Plague,” Kit said, looking at Will for confirmation.

“Aye,” Will said, abruptly sick with exhaustion. “I heard the King discuss it with Robert Cecil, not two months since.”

It was a week later, only, that a sturdy tapping at his door drew Will’s attention and he rose. “Who’s there?”

“Echo the Nymph,” Ben answered deadpan. Will lifted the latch and stood aside to let the big man into the room.

“Thou lookst more like a Narcissus to me,” Will said. “What brings thee to my humble doorway, Ben?”

“Thou’rt invited to a gathering,” Ben answered, shaking rain from his cloak. “A party of sorts.”

“Tonight?” Will gestured to the leaves of paper spread over his table, where they would catch the watery light from the window. “I’ve too much work.”

“Thou’rt only the most‑sought playmaker in London,” Ben answered, careful not to drip on the papers as he bent to inspect them, his massive hands laced behind his back. “Surely thou canst pass a night with friends.”

“I owe Richard a fair copy by Monday.”

“Five days,” Ben said. “Thou dost work too much, Will. And how canst thou refuse an invitation from Robert Catesby, to dine with him and his recusant friends on a cold Wednesday night?”

Will set the latch with a click. “I beg thy pardon?”

Ben turned, his homely face unimproved by his grin. “Call it luck or call it happenstance. I’ve been working on Catesby and Tresham six months now, Will. And been overheard to mention once or twice that thou–and thy brother Edmund – had once or twice missed out loud the more permissive “ways of Warwickshire, with regard to the old religion. If thou takest my meaning. And they did.”

Will pinched his lower lip between his teeth and ran his tongue across it, forcing himself to stop when he remembered it would chap. “Catesby is one of Baines’. He’d never believe I’d welcome any Promethean plot. Not after twelve years fighting them, and all the advances I’ve spurned.”

“Not to hear him talk about it.” Ben shrugged. “Not Promethean, anyway. Catesby’s aims are strictly political, and he’d love the great William Shakespeare to come in under his banner of revolution. I suspect if he knew the sort of black sorcery his friends get up to he “would be even more appalled by them than he is – for all he’s willing to compromise and let politics make what bedfellows they will, he’s a good Catholic, and wouldn’t be damned for sorcery. I think they mean to use him as they used Essex before him, as a sort of stalking horse. Come, get thy cloak.”