Kit, amused: “Of course.”

“And why Morgan would so lightly set you aside.”

He gestured Kit to follow with one expansive hoof. The beeches thinned, and yellow strands of grass began to thread between the leaves and roots.

“Why would a mortal man be important to the Fae?”

“We can’t fight a war without one,” Geoffrey answered, holding a branch aside. “A geas as old as the Fae. As for the heartsease. Its other name is love-in-idleness, did you know?”

“I’ve heard.” The branch was whippy and fine: Kit almost lost his grip on it after Geoffrey handed it across.

“Roses for passion and lilies for love and for death. Amaranth,” he smiled, “is undying love, eternity. And crocus is gladness, and pansy is thoughts but I do not think I’m so made mock of for a badge of thinking. So what, for the love of Hell, does a pansy signify?”

“Bondage,” Geoffrey answered without turning. “There’s your mistress house, poet. We will talk again.”

Kit turned to look through the gloom and the red twilight at a rose-twined cottage beyond a garden and a fieldstone wall. He turned back, to bid the stag thanks or something, but Geoffrey had vanished in a silence as utter as that of the dark wood behind him.

“Edakrusen o christos,” Kit muttered, because there was no Fae close enough to hear him. He placed one hand between the curling edges of lichen and vaulted the wall, rough stone gritting his palm and the turf denting under his feet.

A white gravel trail led him between beds of roses, red and white, and under an arch of blossoms damasked both. The beds below the roses were planted with mint, melissa, verbena, rosemary, lavender, and what seemed a thousand other sweet and savory herbs. The scent filled Kit’s head, almost dizzying, and he absently ran his hand across the bulge in his purse. The cottage was as earthed under with brambles as any in a fairy tale, and Kit smiled appreciation of the image. It didn’t look like the abode of a queen: the doorposts were skinned trunks, the door itself painted vermilionin a half-dozen coats that peeled as shaggy as the lichens. Lamplight gleamed through one small window, not yet shuttered against the night, and Kit’s breath ached in his breast as a shadow moved behind it.

I can feel her,he realized. Like a hand twisted in his collar, drawing him forward, and although his strides stayed as crisp as if he knew what he intended, he shivered. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering if the stag watched after, but the wood was dark and silent.

Bondage. His shoulder ached in a memory, blow of a silver dagger hard across its ridge, and he tasted an also-remembered trickle of lukewarm mint, and for a moment he wished he had, after all, brought his sword. Oh, he thought. Bondage. Yes, I see. More than her knight, her servant, her lover. More. Or less. Her slave.

“Hello the house!” Until the door swung open. “Good even, my lady.”

“Kit,” she said, gray-green eyes dark as moss in the twilight. Her hair lay unbound upon her shoulders, tumbling to her waist, its darkness shot with silver threads like a moonlit river. She wore only a low-cut smock with blackwork around the neckline and petticoat-bodies over it; a working woman’s home garb, her skirts kilted up to show a length of calf and a bare, clean foot, high-arched and more calloused than a lady’s foot ought be.

She tilted her head, and he looked down, studying her feet. His hand tightened on the nail in his purse; it parted the cloth and pricked his hand, but he didn’t let go.

[What brings you to my door, Sir Kit?” An arch smile, and her hand on his collar her physical hand, twisting the cloth and bringing him inside.

He moved as led, helpless under her touch, and thought of a stud horse rendered passive by the twist of a twitch on his lip. Kit opened his mouth, would have spoken accused her but the taste of bloody iron choked him. A vividly tactile memory of powerlessness: the savage wrench of his dislocated shoulder, gory drool slicking his chin and choking his throat with the effort of screaming and breathing through a mouth full of barbed metal, thinking If I could talk, I could explain my way out of this. There hadn’t been any talking. Not for a long time.

And it was still better than what Essex’s faction did to poor Thomas Kyd.

What greater cruelty to a playmaker than shatter his hand? Stop his tongue, show him his dignity and his sovereignty and his voice as easily rent from him as a girl’s Lavinia in Titus: raped, dismembered, silenced. She could have been a poet too, for all the benefit it got her.

Kit bit down on his tongue, knotted his fist on that nail, the pain shocking, before the memory went further. ah, but I lived.And there was satisfaction in that. “What have you,” like talking through a mouth full of blood. God help me. God have mercy…“What have you done to me?”

“Claimed you,” she said, and shut and latched the door, taking her time, giving him a moment to notice the airy interior of her cottage, the mud-chinked walls hung with tapestries and baubles and herbs. Roses grew through the gaps under the eaves to tangle across the loft where a high window gave them light: a perfumed, nodding mass of flowers. Her loom dominated the single room, her wide uncanopied bed against the far wall, a massive iron cauldron crouched upon the hearth.

“Iron,” he said, and let his bloody hand fall to his side, spattering a few drops on the rush-strewn slates rammed into the earthen floor. “Aye,” she said. “I’m afraid a little steel won’t protect you from Morgan le Fey. And I did no more to you than any lady might. I left you your freedom of speech and deed, which is more than the Mebd would have granted.”

She took up his bleeding hand and studied it; he hadn’t the strength to drag it away, and sagged against the wall beside the door, the stentorian echo of his own breath filling his ears.

“Freedom of deed? When I come to your bidding like a mannerly stud to the breeding paddock.”

“Have I interfered in your comings and goings?” She raised his fingers to her mouth and kissed the blood away. He turned his head as if he could burrow into the rough wool of the tapestry behind him. Her mouth claimed his fingertips. He moaned. She let his hand fall, then, and whispered, “Have I forbidden you London, for all tis foolery that takes you there? Have I forbidden you to amuse yourself as you wish, or made you pace at my heels like a cur?”

“Do I grant you dignity?”

“Arrogance and errantry, and how like a man not to understand what he’s given, and when his mistress is permissive, and how much more pleasant his station than it could be. At least a dog understands kindness.” He pressed his back against the wall, stomach-sick, eyes burning. Even when she stepped back, it was not distance enough.

“A cur, is it? Shall I bark at your door, madam? What dignity includes a slave’s collar and chains, a mark of shame?”

She turned away and moved toward her loom. He couldn’t watch her: it was a sort of agony to be in her presence, and searing pride alone kept him from prostrating himself before her. His fingers stung, still dripping blood.

The coolness of her voice cut through his fury. I see the first approach has come, then. “Who brought the flower to your attention?”

The wall was hard behind the tapestry. He blinked and straightened away fro mit. “Geoffrey the Stag. Wait, no. Puck and Cairbre, and the lamia Amaranth.”

“Excellent.” A rustle as she moved. He wished the taste of blood in his mouth were real; he wanted to spit.

“Look at me.”

He looked.

She stood as proud as a lioness, her long neck a predatory arch under her hair. He could have wept with his need to bury his face in it, but he thought she would have smiled to see his tears.

“You re mine,” she said, coming closer. “Don’t fight me, Kit: I’ve outlived kings and outwitted princes, and bent the noblest of knights to my will. In the end, they all did as I bid, or they died: I was a goddess before I became as you see me now.” Although her fingers cool on his throat, “Even Lancelot never fought me as you do.”