Will didn’t know most of Poley’s associates. But Poley was one of the men who had been in that small room where Kit had died.

Poley never passed more than a glance in his direction in the brief gaps between guests. Will noticed that such patrons as did not seek Poley avoided him; he surmised that this was as much to do with Poley’s own reputation as the company he kept. The visitors seemed to come and go at regulated intervals. As the sun set and the moon rose, Will gathered up his courage and took a single deep breath. He spindled his poems lengthwise preparatory to tucking them back inside his doublet. That accomplished, he was making his way to the landlady to purchase ale for himself and wine for Poley when he saw a face he did recognize, and froze.

Richard Baines. A tall, fair man with a saddler’s forearms, a cleric’s smile, and a poison pen. Blessing his dull brown doublet and the darkness of his hair, Will stepped back into the shadows beside the bar, watching as Poley rose to meet his newest guest which Will had not seen him do before until the two heads leaned together, fair and fair. They embraced, and Will saw the glitter of a band on Baines thumb, a gold circle surrounding an inset of some darker metal, like the one Oxford wore. The flash of it drew Will’s eye to an odd-shaped scar on the base of the thumb, a string of pale knots like pearls.

Baines, Will knew through Kit and Thomas Kyd, and Baines would recognize him. But the men weren’t looking, so Will turned as if watching the landlady go shutter the windows, ducked to swing his hair across his profile, and started for the door.

Why is Robert Poley, who stood by when a knife went in Kit’s eye, talking to Richard Baines, who puts a knife to his reputation now that the man is dead?

For it was Baines who had written a note to the Privy Council that might have seen Kit hanged for heresy.

Salty sourness filled Will’s mouth, and he hesitated a moment and stole one final glance, thinking it safe enough with Baines back to the room.

But he found himself staring directly into Poley’s eyes, as if the man had been tracking his motion across the room. Will froze like a doe at the crack of a twig as Poley’s hand went out to rest on Baines thick forearm. Baines turned, and both men began to stand, and Will took one more hasty step toward the door before Baines mocking baritone arrested his motion like a bullwhip flicked at his nose.

“Well, well.” The big man swung a leg over his bench as he turned and stood. “William Shake-scene. Come sniffing after better company now that yourfancy-boy’s dead?”

Will stepped diagonally toward the door. “I was after supper,” he said, wishing himself better armed than with a handspan beltknife. “And I’ve had it. Good even to you, Master Baines, and I’ll thank you not to idly insult me.” Some impulse made him step forward and add, “Or slander my friends, sirrah.”

Benches scraped on planks as the Sergeant’s custom recognized a brewing fight.

“Friends,” Baines answered with a sneer. “That’s not what they call it that I ever heard. What will you do for a living now, you poor excuse of a playmaker? Without that drunken sodomite Marley to doctor your work and bugger…”

Will opened his mouth to interrupt, but a determined, feminine voice overrode the first rumble of his retort.

“Master Poley.” The landlady stepped between Will and Baines, ample hands on her ample hips, and tilted her head to glare around Baines broad shoulder at Poley. “You will control your friend. I’ll not have any man driving off custom.”

“Mistress Mathews,” Poley said, and he laid a hand on Baines arm. “As you wish it.” But his eyes met Will’s quite plainly, and the glare that followed Will to the door said, ‘And don’t come back.’

Well, Will thought later, barring the door of his own room behind him before tossing his much-battered sheaf of sonnets on the table, that could have ended much worse.

Bernardine:

Thou hast committed…

Barabas :

Fornication. But that was in another

country, And besides, the wench is dead.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, The Jew of Malta

A better awakening than the last, though Kit was surprised to sleep so deeply in a stranger’s bed, with a stranger’s arm around him. His right cheek pressed a pillow that smelled of Morgan’s rosemary, and he remembered before he opened his eye that it should hurt. It didn’t. He remembered as well Morgan snipping and pulling bloody stitches after the Mebd had healed it, and her lips and body drawing out the agony the Faerie Queen’s sorcery had darted in him.

But it wasn’t Morgan’s arm around his waist, her hand splayed possessively across his belly though the dark hair drifting across his face in unbraided waves did not belong to Murchaud. Kit, thou hast outdone thyself. He couldn’t recall Morgan returning, which frightened him: a man with enemies didn’t live long if he slept too heavily to hear an opening door. But Morgan le Fey probably had her own ways of moving quietly. And Kit couldn’t remember when he had last wakened with this silence still in him, the clamor of fear and rage and duty and bitterness and memory stilled.

“Usually,” Kit murmured, when the hand that clipped him slid down to stroke his flank, “men whisper the delights of bedding sisters. Or mother and daughter.”

“Art anyway satisfied?” Murchaud answered, cuddling closer. Kit turned to see him

“Twill serve,” and Morgan chuckled on his blindside.

“Your Highness.”

She rose into his field of view, hair spilled acrossher face. The break in his vision was worse than he’d expected, especially close in. She stopped his lips with a finger, eye corners crinkling, then touched his scar. It felt as if she stroked a bit of leather laid on his skin. “Aren’t we beyond that, my lord? Does this pain you still?”

“Only my heart,” he answered. “But if I may look upon a sight as fair as you with but one eye, I’ll count the other well lost. What, what did she do to me? Your Mebd?”

“Always the flatterer,” Morgan answered. “And my Mebd she isn’t, and what she did on thee was old sorcery, deep glamourie, to turn a man into a mindless, rutting stag.”

Her fingers caressed his throat, and a low moan followed. “I’ve used it myself,” she admitted. “You feel it still.”

“Yes.”

Murchaud’s hands tightened on his hips; Murchaud’s teeth closed on the nape of his neck like a stallion conquering a mare. He cried out, but Morgan’s mouth muffled the sound.

“You re wondering,” she whispered, her cheek pressed by his cheek as her son pulled him close, “when I’ll give thee a mirror to see how the Mebd healed thee. You re wondering how she realized it, and you’re wondering that she englamoured thee of an evening, and at how you strode through sorcery where another would have been lost. And why I have taken an interest in you. Art not?”

Murchaud nibbled the place where Kit’s neck ran into his shoulder, and his hands were adventurers.

“Aye,” Kit whispered against Morgan’s lips. His fingers brushed breasts like heavy’velvet, skin like petals. She pressed close, guiding his hands to her waist and the abutting curves. Her fingertips traced an old scar on his chest, another on his belly, a third along the inside of his thigh. They were puckered and white, old burns that he tried not to think on.

“Time here answers the will of the Queen,” Morgan said. “She took a few months from your wound, is all: their passage dizzied and drained you. If thou hadst not been so brave in the cleaning, it would not have gone so well for thee. Lye soap.”

“I should thank you.”

“There’s one mirror in all the Bless’d Isle,” Murchaud said. “You’ve bought the use of it, although releasing the secret Walsingham’s un-death migh tprove a high price.”