“And bedded you? Oh, don’t blush like that. For all tis engaging. We know something of the ways of the Fae. So. Stolen by Faeries, Queen’s Man. And yet you seek an audience with your Sovereign, and we are disposed to grant it. Speak.”

“Your Highness.” Her eyebrow arched under its paint as he sought for words.

“Do women always fluster you so badly, Kit?”

“Only when they’re Queens.” He genuflected again, straightening hastily when she coughed.

“Sir Poet,” she said, not unkindly. “We are pleased that our subtleties have preserved you, and well-pleased are we to see you well. But now our good Walsingham tells us you beg release of your oaths of service. Your Queen would know why, and what adventures befell you. Our intimate Spirit, Burghley, had you buried, and those were of a certainment not our orders.”

“My Queen.” He would have gone to one knee again, but her worn, irritated fingers caught his elbow and held him on his feet. He couldn’t look Gloriana in the eye, though she put her fingers under his chin and tilted his face like a maiden aunt with a wayward boy. “What choice is left me?”

He saw her lips purse under the masque of her paint, smelled the marjoram and ambergris and civet that clothed her. She tilted her head to examine his eyepatch and the scar that ran beneath it. “What befell thee, Queen’s Man?”

“Your Highness knows.”

“Your own words, man, and be quick about it.”

“A dagger in the eye, Your Highness.” He choked. “Thomas Walsingham’s men.”

“Your death was to be an illusion, Christofer Marley,” she said, seeming not to notice when her words rode over his. “A false body put in your place, and you spirited overseas. As was arranged in the letter you should have had under our seal. You have given much, and demanded little. We thought to make recompense.”

“It was not so, Your Highness.”

“We see.” Her hand left a trace of scent on his skin as she stepped away, her gaze steady on his scar. “I’ve witnessed worse, but it is not pretty. And earned in our service. You are a poet, she continued without a breath. Give us a poem.”

That was a challenge. She smiled when he drew himself up.

“And yet before I yield my fainting breath,

I quite the killer, though I blame the kind,”

Kit whispered, amazed at his own audacity.

“You kill unkind, I die, and yet am true,

For at your sight, my wound doth bleed anew”

“Falsely said, but pretty. Like all sentiments of poesy. As a poet myself, I’ll forgive it. Our subterfuge Burghley’s, Thomas Walsingham’s, and mine was to have saved you.”

Kit nodded. A cramp knotted his stomach; he had to brace his knees or they would have failed.

“Dead men are hard-pressed to die again. My Queen. I knew you could not prove false to me, for all you are a Prince, you are a woman as true as any woman, and the mother of a son.”

She stepped back as if stung, and then shook her head in admiration and rue.

“Hist! Kit Marley, you’ve got a tongue in you. Wilt convert me to atheism now?” She leaned close, voice confidential. “You are privileged in your loss this once and once alone. Unmarried Queens do not have children, sir.”

“Your Highness.”

“As I am bid …” She smiled then, gentled. “We are given to understand that we owe you life and reign twice over, Sir Poet. We meant to reward you with your life, but it seems you have that in spite of us. What would complete thee?”

“Do you know, Your Highness, of Thomas Walsingham’s faithlessness?”

“Not unlike his cousin,” she said, “whose trickery painted me to a stand where I must have my royal cousin executed. The men who support me are true to my reign, but they will work at cross-purposes. We believe he is upright in his conviction that your death was warranted for all he was misled to that conclusion. Do not ask yourself revenged on him. I would not.”

“Does Your Highness wish our task ended?”

A tilt of her head under the weight of pearls and hair. A subtle smile. “We are, she said, very fond of plays. You were about to answer my question.”

I should ask for Ingrim’s head roasted and brought in on a platter with an apple in his mouth, and bits of boiled egg to make the eyes.“I was a guest of that same Thomas Walsingham when your summons found me,” Kit said carefully. “There were papers. Manuscripts. Poems, part of a play.”

“I am sorry.”

He believed her. “He has burned them. Better my life lost than my words, Your Highness,” Kit said. “There is nothing else I will be remembered by.”

She stared down her nose. “You will be remembered as a sodomite, a heretic, and a mediocre playmender who died in a cluttered tavern through a tawdry brawl over some free-looking young man’s favors. We pardoned your Ingrim Frazier, and we have buried your name, and we have saved your body and perhaps your immortal soul. Our Spirit’s cousin, the estimable Widow Bull, will be tarred as a feckless tavern wench, and all that will be known of Marley is that he was a shoemaker’s son who came to a sad and ugly end.” And then that smile, and a negligent wave of a jeweled hand. “You may save your thank-yous.” Every word a blow, and yet the logic galled like a spur against his skin.

“Widow Bull is Baron Burghley’s cousin? Your Highness! I did not know that.”

“She is also a distant cousin of the Queen of Faerie’s court musician.” Elizabeth’s smile broadened. “Twas she saved your life, sweet poet.”

Her delight was a schoolgirl’s, and Kit could almost smell stolen flowers when he met her eyes. “Thank you, Your Highness,” he murmured, and she laughed like a very young woman indeed.

“I knew it should come. Now beg your boon. The hour grows late, and old women kept from their beds wax querulous.”

She’d used and discarded him like a street-corner lightskirt, and still he permitted her to charm him. As if permission had anything to do with it.

“Your Highness. If it suits you, would you share what you know of the Mebd, your sister Queen?”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened: her only indication of surprise.

“A fair and clever question, Sir Christofer,” she answered. “And one I cannot answer with the rectitude that it deserves but I will send you as well armed into Faerie as I may, and hope you will remember your old Queen with fondness.” Her smile grew pensive under white lead paint and carmine. Dizziness spun him.

“I have been ever too fond with you greedy, extravagant boys. Our reign reinforces the Mebd’s, and so in subtle ways she supports it. The tricks you wreak with your plays have a greater place there than here, for her land is wove of the stuff of ballads and legendry. A strong Queen in England means a strong Queen of the Bless’d Isle, and she is old enough to know it. Old enough to remember Boudicca and Guenevere. But you have a problem, Sir Christofer.” She paced, pausing at last by the candelabra, and passed her hand through flames as if she caressed a lover sface. “Because it wasn’t the Queen of Faerie who knighted you and bedded you and took you into her service, was it? And when we’release you, it is not to her service you will go. And she is dangerous when thwarted, that one, and ambitious to a fault.”

“Morgan,” he said, understanding, as another spasm wracked him. “Was the soup poisoned? Does she want her sister’s crown?”

Elizabeth shrugged, and her eyes grew dark before she turned away. “Who can say what one Queen wants of another?”

“Who can say, indeed. I will never …” He stopped, and then found his voice again. “Great Queen …”

“Do not flatter me, Christofer. Tis boring.”

“Your Highness. You release me from your service.”

“We do.”

He bowed around the hollowness that filled his throat, though pain grew in his belly like a flame. I must return to Morgan,he thought, realizing the source of the agony suddenly. “Service is what I have borne you, Your Highness, for I have not known you. And now that I bear you no service, I find I do know you. And my Queen, for what a playmaker’s word is worth, I have traded that colder thing for a warmer thing, and with your permission, I will say now that I bear you love.”