“Soulless, aye,” he answered, unconcerned. “As all Fae are. Tis the source of our power: Heaven has no hold over us, and Hell only the power we grant it. Our immortality is of the flesh. While your sort,” a dismissive gesture,” bloody yourselves over who has the right to interpret the will of that one, and worry at his will, choosing those who govern you.” A curt gesture of his chin upward; Fae, he couldn’t say the Name.

If Heaven has no hold on you, why do you fear God’s name?

Instead, Kit said: “And who governs you?”

“Those that can. Go ahead and pick it up, Sir Christofer.” Cairbre stepped away from the case, swinging his tattered cloak over his arm.

Kit stroked the cherry-dark neck. “I’m really not …” But his fingers slipped around the wood and lifted the beautiful instrument from its crimson bed. The varnish glowed in the torchlight, a rich auburn, a master would have despaired of capturing in oils. “I’ve never touched something like that,” he breathed, as if it were alive in his hands and might spread wings and spiral up into the vast galleried chamber, lost.

“It should be in tune.”

Kit looked from Cairbre to Robin whose ears waggled in amusement and raised an eyebrow, but he took the rosined bow when Cairbre held it out, inhaling the dusty-sweet pine scent until he fought a sneeze. He closed his eye, settled the viola, raised the bow and fluffed the third note.

“I warned you. Lessons,” Cairbre decided, and took the bow away. “Come. You’ll give us a poem tonight, won’t you?”

“Yes, Kit answered. I’ll give you a poem.”

He expected they’d wait for Murchaud’s departure, whoever they might be, but perhaps not too much longer. But that first night, as he sat sharing a trencher with Robin Goodfellow below the cloth of estate, he was bemused by the strangeness that filled him. In another setting he might have called the feeling fey: back to what I was, when I was little more than a boy and full of myself and my secrets.

Puck sat at Kit’s right, on his blind side, and saw he ate, though his appetite forsook him in Murchaud’s absence. Halfway through the meal, Kit realized the little elf had deserted his own place at the high table to stay with him. Kit imagined he looked strange as a swan among magpies beside the lesser Fae.

The Daoine Sidhe the Tuatha de Danaan as they were called claimed descent of the Old Gods of hill and dale, of moor and copse and ocean. A Church scholar might have said the blood in their veins was that of demons, not deities. Kit had long past given up his illusions that God kept his house in a church. Their sea-changing eyes and leaf-tipped ears marked them as something other than human, and their wincing aversion to the Name of the Divine might be evidence. But then, what god would abide the Name of his supplanter?

But they did, in broad, look human. The elder, stranger Fae did not. Though they sometimes dined at the Mebd stable, served delicacies by brownies and sprites, and though many of them served in her palace, they were not Tuatha de Danaan, not Daoine Sidhe. And they were as strange now as ever they had been on Kit’s first lonely walk into the throne room that lurked behind the second closed pair of doors.

Across the table rested a lovely maid-in-waiting whose forked tongue brushed the scent from each morsel she tasted before she lifted it to her mouth. On his left, a creature more wizened than even Robin crouched on the edge of the table and ate between his knees.

Kit stifled a chuckle, thinking what his own mother would have said about boots on the table, and turned to murmur something in Robin’s ear. A polite hiss from the scaly young lady across the table interrupted.

“Sir Christofer?” Thread-fine snakes writhed like windblown curls about her temples. Her eyes were as flat and reflective as steel, the pupils horizontal bars.

“Mistress Amaranth.”

It might have been a smile. Her lips were red and full, a cupid’s bow disturbing behind the glitter of scales like powdered gold rubbed on her skin. Her hand darted with a swiftness that should not have surprised him, brushing the flower on his doublet before he could jerk back.

“Does it not shame you to wear the love-in-idleness?”

“There is more here than I understand.” Remembering Cairbre’s comment, and how Morgan and Murchaud had both adorned him with the blossoms. “Love-in-idleness?”

“Heartsease,” she said, while Puck pretended not to hear. “The pansy or viola.”

He pulled his bread apart in tidbits, setting the balance of it beside the trencher while he buttered a morsel, covering his confusion with concentration on the knife. It seemed dry as paste; he would never have choked it down without wine.

“It pleases my lady, Mistress Amaranth.”

The lamia’s hair hissed again. He thought it was a chuckle.

“Then she is cruel, is she? I am not surprised at that.”

“Not so cruel as that.”

“Cruel enough,” she said, gesturing for a footman to lay a bloody slice of roast upon her plate.

“Kind as any woman,” he answered.

Amaranth’s cold eyes widened; the Puck snorted. Kit toasted Amaranth, wondering what moved him to defend Morgan for all her late absence from the hall, and his bed. But his gaze traveled past the serpent, up to the dais and to Murchaud sitting near Cairbre, at what would have been the Mebd’s right hand if the Mebd were there. Even across that distance, the look Murchaud returned pressed Kit back as physically as a thumb in the notch of his collarbone. He reached for his wine, feeling as if he choked.

And now I truly am alone. Until he returns. Or until Morgan claims me. In deep deception, and in the hands of the enemy.

He held the Elf-knight’s withering glance until it seemed the whole room must have noticed. Until conversation flagged around him and Amaranth herself turned to follow the course of his one-eyed stare, then leaned aside as if she would not break the strung tension. Murchaud looked down first, turning to laugh nastily at some comment whispered by the Mebd’s advisor, stag-horned old Peaseblossom. Kit watched a moment longer, then dropped his eye to his dinner and haggled off a bit of roast as if he could bear to put it in his mouth.

“What’s love-in-idleness?” Kit murmured, bringing his lips close to Puck’s twitching ear.

“What you wear on your bosom,” the Puck answered dryly. “That thing on your sleeve is your heart.”

When Kit stood to give his poem on Cairbre’s signal he chose something that spoke of the pastoral delights of summertime and never a chance of sorrow. But when he returned to his rooms after dinner, he worried an iron nail loosefrom his old riding boots, and slipped it into the sleeve pocket of his doublet, and felt just a little better for it.

‘Sweet Romeo: I apologize for the vagaries of my correspondence. My new masters it seems do not approve entirely that I maintain my friendships from service taken before but in this cause I am defiant. That I am your true friend do not doubt. I thank you for the word of little Mary & her nestling, that they are well. I will watch over you as my ability permits, & your letters (& those of FW) relating the situation in London fall most welcomely into my grateful hands. There is some change in my circumstances, not serious of yet but prone to developments, in which case you might say I am at mine old works again, & there are revelations that may suspend correspondence. These circumstances include the following: that I have been unfair in my judgement of TW, & rather those charges should have been levied at that abominable bastard in the peascod doublet he no doubt imagines conceals his paunch, you will know of whom I refer. Also, it is with sorrow that I must relate that he who I have considered your greatest ally (again you will know) is gravely ill. I have not managed a visit, or more than a word & a note, but I believe that the poison administered these four years since is at work again, & I do not think my dear friend will last through the winter in the lack of Doctor Lopez’s care. This places you in graver danger than I can express. It is imperative that Peascod-doublet not learn we know of his duplicity. Her Majesty, as you know, though it were sedition to speak it, grows in melancholy with the passing of each old friend & each treasured counselor. I cannot imagine that to lose mine old master will lie easy on her, for all their difficulties after the death of Mary Queen of Scots, & you must know it will make her more open to Essex & his machinations: the patron they have sought for you, Southampton, is useful as a link to Essex. There are rumors but I am sure the conclusion lies within your powers. FW s illness means also we must find another path of correspondence. Will you have a looking glass placed in your chambers? Steel-backed is best for these purposes though flawed at reflecting, & less dear than silver. I pine without your company.’