“I happened to chance upon your mistress in the Great Hall,” the bard said abruptly. “As I was on my way to my rooms, she asked me to bid you come to hers.” Kit straightened the lacings on his doublet, pulled his swordbelt from the rack, and stepped into the corridor. “Thank you, Master Harper.”

“Think nothing of it.” The bard’s cheek crinkled beside his eye, his lopsided smile disappearing into his beard. “When are you going to show me your poetry?”

Kit’s fingers slipped on slick black leather and he looked up from adjusting the rapier carriage at his left hip. “A year ago, had I known your interest.”

“I had thought—” A raised eyebrow to go with that angled grin. —“A poet likes a poet’s company, Sir Kit. And it seems to me that you have lovers aplenty, but perhaps could use a friend or two. In any case, your lady awaits.” The bard stepped back, melt water marking his footsteps on the rose and gold flagstones. “Stood I in your boots, I should hurry.”

When Kit looked back, Cairbre was still staring after, a bemused expression shadowing his face. A few minutes later, Kit stopped in the open doorway of Morgan’s room and raised a hand as if to knock on the doorjamb, then paused when he saw her settled on a bench, her skirts hiked above the knee in heavy folds as she struggled with fur-lined boots. Her bedroom window stood open, and a cool, moist breeze blew through it, carrying up a scent at odds with the midsummer colors of her window box of violet-gold heartsease. “My lady.”

“Kit. Your assistance, sir?” She extended a leg, and he knelt before her, taking the soft leather heel cap into the palm of his right hand and sliding the fingers of his left between the furred edge and the silk of her hose. The boot slipped into his hand, dripping melting snow between his fingers, and he turned her leg to kiss above the ankle bone, nubs of knit silk catching softly on dry lips. She cleared her throat, and he smiled and removed her other boot. There was a practiced trick to standing with a sword at one’s belt; he managed it neatly enough. She drew a fistful of skirt into the light to examine the water stains along the hem. She showed him a little more leg than she had to when she swung the skirts into place and stood.

“You summoned me,” he said, following her to the window. The vista was not so different from his, although overlooking the lawn and not the beech wood, and from a higher vantage. But the breeze that flowed through the open panes was a spring breeze, not a winter one, and her window box riotous in bloom.

“I’ve a letter for you,” she said, stroking a pansy with one fingertip as if oblivious to his consternation. “I intercepted it before your friend the Puck could get his hands on it. You and your friend have things yet to learn about keeping your confidences from the notice of the Queen.”

She wouldn’t look up. He caught the damp wool of her sleeve and turned her toward him. “My lady. A letter? Have you read it?” It was more emotion than he’d managed in months.

“Don’t flutter so.” She lifted her fingers to the collar of his shirt and let them trail up his cheek. Her eyes shifted again gray to green, this time, and drifting into hazel as she closed his left eye with a touch of her fingertip sand kissed him softly. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

Despite his effort to stay stern, a smile moved under her kiss. She drew her fingers down his face, and when he opened his eye his breath knotted in his chest, a ragged silken scarf. He let his hand slide down her sleeve, grasped her wrist, raised her fingers to his mouth, lowered them quickly when the gesture brought a memory of tearing cloth. “Don’t tease me.”

“No,” she said, studying his expression as she stepped away, their hands for a moment making a falling bridge between them. “It would be unkind to tease, would it not? Like taunting a tame falcon in a mews.” A little prick with the dagger of her tongue, and a twist to make the blood flow. It stopped him, when he might have heeled her across the room again. He’d had a sharp tongue of his own once, he recalled, but he couldn’t seem to find it after her kisses. “Lady, but give me a purpose, and I will be a falcon on the wing, answering only to your glove. A man is not a toy.”

“No?” But she smiled, and came back with a folded letter in her hand. The seal looked untouched, but he knew well the ways around that. It told him more that the creases were crisp and sharp, a splintered edge still showing where the sheet had cracked. The hand was Will’s untidy abomination, the scrawl of a man who wrote frequently, and hastily and it bore no name or address beyond C. M.

“Thank you,” he said, and tucked it into the pocket in his sleeve, ignoring Morgan’s arch expression. She tapped a knuckle against her lips and turned back to her window garden, pinching dead pansies away. Mint and melissa grew between the blossoms; her fingernails met like snips, filling the room with lemony aromas.

“You wish a purpose, Sir Kit? Poetry and pleasing your lady suffice not?”

“A man gets used to living by his wits. I was never merely a poet, madam.” She pinched another pansy a just-opening bud, this time and brushed it against his cheek. “There are roles for you to play,” she said, tucking the stem into a pink on the breast of the doublet. “But best perhaps if you play them innocent, Queen’s Man. I have your love?”

“Oh, a little,” he lied. “Love is ever increasing or ever decreasing, they say. So better a little love grow great than a great love grow little.”

“Or be lost.” He startled at the softness in her voice as she knotted her hands in her skirts and lifted them to step back. “For what mortal flesh can bear the true heat of an immortal love?”

There’s pain there.With the thought came the urge to go to her. He pressed his palms against his thighs instead. “You expect me to be courted by your enemies.”

“Ah,” she said. “The boy is clever. And that green looks well on thee: we’ll make an Elf-knight of thee yet.”

“When mine ears come to a point, or horns sprout on my forehead. Then, perhaps.”

“Horns, sweet Kit? Or antlers?” But she smiled and blew a kiss. “A task. Very well. When thou dost write thy William in return, see thou if canst encourage him to weave a few tales of his country youth into his plays.”

“Arthur and Guenevere?” Kit asked, letting a little of the irony filling his mouth soak the words.

“By the white hart, never!” Morgan laughed and shook her hair over her shoulder. “We’ll have enough of that from Spenser, I warrant. Although chance and legend alter us: I was as fair as Anne and Arthur, once upon a time.” She raised a fistful of hair black as sorcery and shook it in the light.

“Gloriana does like to play on the Faeries, and it strengthens us to be spoken of so I think it should please Master Shakespeare’s Queen and thine as well.”

“Madam. A little task. But something. Your wish is …”

“Oh,” she interrupted, giving him an airy wave at odds with her earthy grin. “And a play for Beltane, I think. Something we can see performed for Her Majesty the Mebd.”

Beltane. He tasted it. Short notice, but he’d had shorter. Ten weeks.“Have you a subject?”

“Intrigue.” She straightened the blossom on his breast. “And passion. Mayhap one of those great lost loves of which we spoke. Drystan and Yseult. Something ill-starred would suit us both, and Her Majesty. But mind that thou lookst wistful and sigh and fret while thou’rt composing, and see who chooses to speak with thee. And on what matters.”

“My lady. Drystan and Yseult. No, Orpheus, I think.” But he was smiling as she took his elbow and led him to her door, her stockinged feet whisking against the flagstones like a cat’s white paws. A stalking horse. I’ve played that role before.

‘Dearest & most-esteemed leander:

Your letter does indeed find me very well, if exceeding busy. I fear I have not had occasion to converse with my wife since our last encounter but I shall pass your felicitations when I may. The subject is complex, but suffice to say I have hopes for rapprochement. I am attending your request for books & broadsides: they will follow under separate cover. You will be amused to read that, following hard on the discovery of a poisoning plot against the Queen of which you will no doubt have heard, plays about Jews are once again popular in London, & we are becoming reacquainted with some names that languished in danger of loss. I hope these humble words find you well. In any case, thinking of you I am moved to remember Sir Francis & a certain incident with a lemon bush. I wonder if my predecessor had such a sour experience of his own.