Текст книги "Hell and Earth"
Автор книги: Elizabeth Bear
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Snow creaked over crunching leaves as Kit left Mistress Shakespeare at the edge of the Arden wood and tromped forward, feeling her gaze on his back. His rucksack swayed against his shoulder. There was no path under the trees. Their black branches shone wet and rough against a dawning sky of pale porcelain blue; the white powder underneath was trellised with fallen laceworks of snow, but only Kit’s footprints marred it.
Not even a crow or a fox. And canst blame them?He glanced around, tugging the velvet collar of his cloak higher as if to ward the gaze of chilly eyes from his neck. The trees leaned over, their wind‑stirred fingers interlaced like bones. Kit found himself ducking as if through low doorways whenever he looked up, and drawing shallow breaths that tasted of moss and musk and mildew.
His right eye showed a smoky power moving within the coarse‑barked trunks. The trees were young, saplings scattered among a few old giants; the wood had been cut in living memory, and Kit wondered if that were the reason for the appalling stench of hate and old blood clotting his senses.
The bit of ribbon had bunched in the palm of his glove. He tugged his digits free and wiggled his hand out, checking over his shoulder to make sure Will’s wife was out of sight behind the barren oaks. Her silhouette had vanished. He stretched the band of scarlet velvet between his fingers – one hand gloved, the other bare –and blew a cloud of steam into the still morning.
His cherry‑varnished viola was in his pack. Kit crouched and slid it out, the ribbon dangling from his fingers as he balanced the case on his knee and opened it reverently. He tied the ribbon around the viola’s waist, under the strings, with a tidy bow at the back, returning the case to his pack to keep it dry before he stood. He would have hung the whole affair on a low branch, but given the wood and his purpose here, he thought perhaps that would be unwise.
That smoky pall of force began to shift as soon as he plucked the strings to tune, mentally apologizing both to the fae bard Cairbre and to the fine old instrument for bringing it out in such chill and unwholesome air. The smoke was not the only vitality in that wood: there was a power in the viola’s pregnant belly and graceful neck as well, a strength as red and resonant as its stain.
Kit felt the oak wood tremble, expectant, bathinghim and his music, and every mortal touch and scent on his soul and on his skin. He shrugged his cloak back from his shoulders and raised the viola and the rosined bow.
The trees screamed when he scraped the first note from the strings. Branches wore on branches like chalk on slate, a sharp grinding that sent Kit’s shoulders up around his ears and all but drowned the hollow lucidity of the viola’s tone. He persevered, found the upswing into a reel, planted his feet wide in the snow, and leaned into the music as best he could.
He would have closed his eyes and found the rhythm, submerged himself in the song, but a witch’s otherwisesight showed him that smoky puissance rising in the trunks of the oaks and the coiled crimson, potent as lifeblood, in the music streaming from his fingertips, and he didn’t dare let his attention waver.
Gauzy tendrils reached out and brushed his hair, his face, his moving hands. Kit felt a slight resistance, a child’s plucking fingers, and fiddled through it. The tendrils struck his cloak, the oaks’ gnarled branches grasping after; both slid back like oiled hands clutching ice and Kit played faster, fingers sailing over the viola’s neck, bow flying back and forth like the shuttle on a loom. He stumbled a note, almost hesitated as the crimson light quailed before an onslaught of dark– smoke and firelight–staggered, found his theme again, twisted his reel around it, and made it his own, gliding the tune over the discord of branch on branch that sought to drown him out.
The music soared. The chafe of wet bark became –not words, but something like enough words that Kit understood them, though the voices raised the hair along his spine. Witch. Witch. Witchery.
Aye,” Kit said, lowering the viola a moment, and holding the red light no other’s eyes would see steady about himself. “Witchery. And I command you in the names of my dread master Lucifer and of the Queen of the Daoine Sidhe to answer my questions, and answer them true.”
Like a saw on bone. Terrible, those voices. Thy master. Witch. Thy queen.
Not ours.
Not ours.
Not ouurzzz.
The black hands grasped as the first golden fingers of dawn filtered through branches. Kit stood fast, telling himself his shiver was cold and the morning mists, nothing else. The black hands touched his cloak and pressed it against his body, but could not push past. “Be that as it may. I am here, and I command you.”
A rattle of branch on branch, a stag knocking velvet from new tines. No. Witch. Witch. Not ours.
A white pain flared over his breastbone, and he flinched. Hell.No, not Hell; what burned was the mark over his heart, the final brand left on his skin when Richard Baines and his Prometheans had raped and tortured him in Rheims, when he had been a mortal man and innocent. Then, like a lightning caress down Kit’s belly and thighs, wherever the irons had touched, the same pain, brighter, so sharp it was almost sweet. He tasted blood but did not scream.
Kit spoke through grinding teeth, forcing his spine straight. I’ve felt worse.“Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
Not ours.
Witchery.
He touched the red ribbon on the red viola with the tip of his bow. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
No answer this time, just the clawing and sawing of the branches, the leaning threat of the sapling trees bent over him, their limbs poised like daggers. Smoky fingers coiled and drifted, wavering thick as banners now, redolent of hate. Somewhere, not too distant, a dead branch crashed to earth. A sort of croaking moan followed, the splintering resonance of splitting wood. Kit turned, following the path of the smoke of power against the wind, and yelped. He dove aside, a deadfall landing close enough to heave snow and splinters on him. He kept his grip on the viola, clutched it close when he rolled, guarded it with his body when he rose with a swordsman’s grace.
“Dammit,” he swore, and took a deep breath. Snowmelt trickled from his hair, down his neck. “Third time I command you then –as I am a man and the master and shepherd of trees since the wild God of the World gave Adam their naming – answer me not, and I shall return with fire.”
Silence, shivering silence. Kit spoke into it, each word measured and plain. “Who ordered the death of Hamnet Shakespeare?”
A breath held. A silence like the silence of any mortal wood in the golden sunrise, in the January snow. The smell of rotten wood, of loam under snow. No whispers. No mutters. No ghosts.
But a name.
Robin Goodfellow,the wood said.
Puck.
Act IV, scene v
Salisbury: God’s arm strike with us! ‘tis a fearful odds.
God be wi’ you, princes all; I’ll to my charge:
If we no more meet till we meet in heaven,…
–William Shakespeare, Henry V,Act IV, scene iii
Will glanced around the candlelit confines of a smoky little room in the chapel of Westminster Palace–almost more of a hallway with a narrow table and six tall chairs in the center–and sat himself down with a sigh. At the head of the table, near the flickering candelabra. He plucked a beeswax taper from one arm of the fixture and toyed with it while he waited, letting the wax drip along its sides in layered arabesques, making the shadows dance.
No matter how he tilted the taper between his fingers, the flame rose upright through the biting chill, shivering slightly in response to his palsy. He shook free beads of liquid wax and rising bubbles of smoke, amused by their transformation from transparency to a milky crystallized splash when they struck the cold wood of the table.
Beyond the windowless walls, a clock struck seven. And Sir Robert did not come. Am I forgotten? Or is this meant to teach me humility?He tilted the taper further, and this time the wax that fell dripped down the wick and flamed as it scattered through the air. A good effect,Will thought. ‘Tis pity there’s not a safe way to adapt it for the stage. ‘Twould be too fine a detail to read well, anyway.
The door opened, admitting the spare black‑robed shape of Robert Cecil; Will twisted the candle upright and stood, hot wax splattering his fingers as his trembling knocked it loose. He bowed, careful not to set himself on fire, and tucked the candle back into the candelabra. “Mr. Secretary.”
“Master Shakespeare, ” Sir Robert said, and shut the door firmly. “Sir Thomas passed along your note regarding the disposition of your … investigation … of Masters Baines and Poley. I would have preferred a personal report.”
“I am afraid that was impossible,” Will said, coming forward. “If I had been in London, I believe I would be dead.”
Cecil limped to the end of the table. “We’ve had the house under observation.” He pulled a chair out but did not sit. “The Inquisitor’s body has not turned up.”
“Then it’s still in the house, ” Will said, as if the situation could not be more plain. He picked wax from the crease of his thumb with his left hand, steadying his right when it would have trembled. It didn’t help, and he dug in his purse for a shilling, hoping the gesture looked absent. “He’s most certainly dead, Mr. Secretary.”
“I did notreceive a satisfactory explanation from Sir Thomas of how you yourself managed to escape, although I’ll not complain of any man who brings me the demise of a Papist pawn.
Will looked down, watching the silver coin cartwheel across his knuckles in the candlelight. “You’ve not had Baines arrested yet?”
Threadlike lips writhed as Sir Robert tried and failed to repress a smile. “We are arranging a suitable frame for your painting of Baines as counterfeiter. And an excuse to search the house. If he’s buried a body in his cellar, so much the better; at the very least, we can force Essex to act to protect him, and perhaps the Earl will show a soft underbelly.” Cecil sighed. “You know he supports James as the heir.”
“I know the Queen thinks it treason to speak of it, Sir Robert,” Will said.
Cecil coughed into his hand. “And yet speak of it we must.”
“Nay, Mr. Secretary.” Will shook his head. “Baines, Oxford, and Essex, and their Prometheans, are my concern, and the safety of the Queen we have. When that changes, I’ll address it, but I leave finer matters of politics to those who are equipped to understand the implications.”
Cecil watched Will silently, running his hands over the back of the chair, his brow furrowed as if he added sums in his head. “Marlowe would have argued the succession for an hour.”
“Marlowe cared about such things,” Will answered, feeling disloyal. Well. He does.
“And what do you care for, Master Shakespeare?”
Marley,Will almost said, and stopped himself just in time. It wouldn’t have been worth Cecil’s bewildered look. “The realm,” he said, which at least was true. Cecil stayed silent, and Will couldn’t resist. “The coins are hidden in the straw tick of a bed on the second floor. You’ll want to have the house searched before spring.”
“Before the housemaid turns them out with the straw, to dry in the sun of the garden?” It drew a smile, at least. “Very well, Master Shakespeare. One thing more – ”
“Aye?”
Sir Robert pushed the chair he had not sat in back against the table. “Your play for Her Majesty?”
“Aye.”
“Make it a potent one. An you value the realm of which you speak.”
Will nodded, running his thumb across the raised profile of Queen Elizabeth on the coin in his hand. And decided not to tell Robert Cecil just yet that he wasn’t entirely certain that the magic the Queen’s poets put into their words was still effective, given the fate of Edmund Spenser, and the way Elizabeth herself seemed to crumble before his very eyes.
Will wasn’t surprised to find Kit waiting in his rooms when he returned to Silver Street, shaking the cold rain and the night out of his hair. Half a dozen candles gleamed on table and mantel, and Will didn’t like the dark circles under Kit’s eyes, like the smear of an ink‑marked thumb, or the snarls drying in Kit’s uncombed hair. Or the hollow expression he turned on Will when Will opened the door and came in, already unlacing his jerkin, his cloak bunched over his arm.
Will paused just inside, making sure the door latched behind him. “Ill news.”
“Aye.” Kit stood and stretched, crossing to the fire he’d built up either to warm himself or in anticipation of Will’s return. He was dressed in a plain linen shirt and black wool breeches; another, waterlogged, shirt and a jerkin were laid across the back of a chair not far from the fire. “Where hast thou been?” “Sir Robert,” Will answered. He stepped out of soggy boots and found a flannel for his hair. “The entrapment of Baines and Poley proceeds apace. We hope. Art planning to impart thy news?”
“Bulldog.” Kit rose and came to Will, close enough that he could feel the warmth and moisture rising through Kit’s shirt, steaming from curls sprung tight in the humidity. Kit reached out and took the flannel from Will’s hands to dry his hair. Will ducked to permit the intimacy, smiling. “Dost think thine entanglement of Baines will succeed? ”
“He’s close to Essex,” Will answered. He reached to touch Kit’s arm, and Kit stepped away with a smile that was half apology. “And he and Poley both useful to the Queen – ”
“Aye, I think it unlikely too. Still, perhaps we can give him a bad moment. I went to Stratford, Will.” “And?”
“Thou toldst me not that Annie knew something of us.” “Ah.” Will nodded, half to himself, and crossed the room, intending to pour wine for both of them. “I should have known she’d read through the riddle of thy presence. What didst thou tell her?”
A low chuckle, honeyed with that pleased smugness that always put Will in mind of a satisfied tomcat. “That, dear William, is her business and mine. An thou wishest to know such things, shouldst arrange to be present when they are discussed. Thou’rt still wet through, love: take off thy shirt and dress thyself dry. I brought thee that Bible, but Ben or I shall have to read it thee.” “Greek?”
“Aye.”
Will turned in time to catch the clean woolen shirt Kit tossed. He tugged soft, scratchy cloth past his face while Kit cleared his throat once or twice, fussing with the wine cups; by the time Will had the shirt comfortably settled, Kit pressed a goblet into his hands. Kit’s hesitance–the way he turned his eyes aside when Will tried to catch his gaze – burrowed into Will’s composure as if with hook‑tipped nails. “Kit.” Will disciplined himself, leaning back against painted plaster, long fingers curved around the bowl of his cup. “Is thy news so dire?”
“Dire enough. I interviewed the oak wood – ”
“Interviewed the oak wood.” Will said it more to taste the sound of the words than because it needed saying. “What didst thou discern?”
Kit shrugged, staring at Will as if he expected Will to look down. The fireglow and the candlelight snagged in his right eye and flickered golden, the left side of his face cast into shadow. “I’ve questions to ask in Faerie before I come to thee with final answers.”
“Dammit, Kit – ”
“Nay.” A clipped, flat gesture with Kit’s right hand. Will swallowed his protest with a hasty mouthful of wine, and waited for Kit’s explanation. “I won’t lead thee to a hasty conclusion on a matter so dear. Don’t ask it of me.”
There was more darkness in Kit’s eyes than the angle of the light, Will decided. “What thou’rt doing– It takes a toll of thee, this witchery. Does it not? ”
Kit turned down, away. He brushed a bit of lint off the shoulder of his shirt. “It leaves me stronger than before,” Kit answered. “Full of strange echoes of power, and knowing things no mortal man should know. I know not who I am, Will.”
That hollowness–the only word Will could think of– echoed in Kit’s voice, and Will itched to go to him. “Thou’rt Christopher Marlowe,” he said. “Poet, playmaker, Queen’s Man, and the friend and lover of a lucky few who cannot hope to deserve thee –
He didn’t understand why Kit flinched at his name, or the watery grin which he offered Will when Will’s voice trailed off. “Aye, thou dost deserve better,” Kit muttered, and set his cup aside and turned to open a shutter. “‘Tis raining still.”
“‘Tis.” Will straightened away from the wall, turning his cup in his fingers to steady his hand, and scuffed a foot through the winter‑rank rushes on the floor. “We must put paid to Baines and Poley, Kit. Sir Robert didn’t say as much, but from him I have the impression that Gloriana is– unwell.”
“When she passes – ” Kit chewed his lower lip. He glanced down at his hands, and latched the shutters again. “It will have repercussions in Faerie. We’ll deal with it when we must. Needs must move faster than we have, in any case – ”
“Sir Robert won’t like it.”
Kit grinned. “Sir Thomas will. And your side of beef, Jonson, or I miss my guess.”
Will snorted. “Jonson is ever eager. Now that he knows you live, I may as well tell Burbage too. Wilt meet with us at Tom’s house, and we can start our Bible? If you have the book – ”
“Aye, I have the book.” Kit’s fingers drummed on the window ledge.
The pattern was erratic, a touch too quick, and ragged. It made Will’s heart feel as if it beat irregularly, in counterpoint. He kicked his heel against the wall, waiting for Kit to continue.
“Did Sir Robert say the Queen was dying? Dying now?”
“He insinuated she had not a year left in her.”
“Damme,” Kit said. “We need more strength, Will. If things go the way I think they will in Faerie, I may very well provoke a war. What that means for England I am not sure, but Morgan and Murchaud and others all have told me that there will be battle when Elizabeth dies. And I suspect Elizabeth’s passing may not go easy on the Queen of Faerie, either: the two are story‑linked. We’re weak, our faction. Damned weak – ”
Will exhaled. “There’s the witchcraft you got in Hell.”
“Aye, and if I’m clever I may make Baines regret his alliances. I mean to go there from here, and try my hand at the evil work of an evil eye. But there’s Oxford and Essex and our old friend Southampton – ” He shook his head.
“We can’t trust Sir Robert either, ” Will said, at last putting a name to the conviction the evening’s meeting had left in him. He’s already searching for the place he’ll put his feet when the Queen is gone. He’s not his father’s vision – ”
“Nor his father’s shortcomings, I hope,” Kit answered bitterly. “So it’s thee and me and Tom and Jonson and Dick Burbage against half the peerage and two of England’s greatest intelligencers.” His lips pursed as if it pained him to admit as much of Baines and Poley. “We need to take control back: we’ve lost the initiative utterly. Thy Lady Day play. Whatever Jonson’s working on. Has anyone talked to George?”
“Can we trust George?”
“Can we fail to?” Kit slumped, forehead to the shutters, taking his weight on locked elbows, his hair parting in ringlets at the nape of his neck. “He may already know more than we suspect. Tom was George’s patron before he was mine.”
“I’ll tell Richard,” Will said. He turned his cup over on the window ledge by Kit’s hand, and fumbled in his pocket for the silver coin so he wouldn’t reach out to tidy Kit’s hair. “I’ll ask Tom about George – ”
“Feel George out.” Kit pushed himself upright and turned to the chair by the fire, sliding his jerkin off the back and testing the dampness of the leather with curious fingertips.
“I will.”
“Who else have we?”
Will stopped and closed his eyes. “Edmund.” He pressed his fingertips to his eyelids and bowed his head.
“Edmund? Spenser? Will–”
“No,” Will said. “Edmund my brother. He’s playing at the Curtain now, Kit.”
“And thou wouldst risk him?”
Will laughed, slicking both hands back over his ever‑rising brow, and met Kit’s gaze more squarely than he felt the need to. “He’d be furious with me if I kept him from participating in any justice meted to Hamnet’s murderers. He had more to do with my son’s raising than I did myself– ”
He let the sentence hang, and Kit left it there long enough that Will filled the silence. “And thee?”
Kit shrugged the jerkin on, and found a bit of rawhide in a pocket to twist his unruly curls into a tail. “I’m going to try to kill Richard Baines.”
Act IV, scene vi
Behold and venge this Traitor’s perjury!
Thou, Christ, that art esteem’d omnipotent,
If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God,
Worthy the worship of all faithful hearts,
Be now reveng’d upon this Traitor’s soul,
And make the power I have left behind
(Too little to defend our guiltless lives)
Sufficient to discomfit and confound
The trustless force of those false Christians!–
–Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great,Part II, Act II, scene ii
The January rain drew cold fingers through Kit’s hair and down the back of his neck. The only lover’s touch you’re like to feel again.He shivered and tugged his cloak higher, settling the weight of his rapier at his hip as he made the turn from Muggle Street onto Silver. His fingers brushed the red velvet of Hamnet’s ribbon, tied to the hilt, and he laughed to himself at the irony. So Will raises Poley’s son– who might be Kit’s son, rather–and Edmund raises Will’s son.
And what dost thou contribute to the equation?
Blood. Blood and more blood.
That is all.
Kit left his hood down. The streets were deserted with the early winter curfew, leaving him without company except the odd stray dog and the odder feral pig, and the shadows he called would conceal his passage from most casual eyes. He pursed his lips and whistled an air, summoning a swarm of greeny‑gold glowing midges out from darkened alleys. They swirled like a minuscule waterspout over his open palm; he blew his breath and his music across it and they flocked like swallows and schooled like fish.
There was one useful thing in the marks Baines had branded into his flesh. They were a palpable trace of the man, and Kit could use their resonance to find him. “Richardum Baines mei invenite,” he commanded. The motes rose and sparkled, darted and flitted, arrowed in a general easterly direction and then jigged back and forth like a dog leading its master to the gate, impatient for supper. As Kit followed the guiding will‑o’‑the‑wisp through London’s slick, dark streets, the night grew colder. Water froze in his hair.
White flakes superceded the icy rain, turning the footing slushy and treacherous. Snow whispered on the reddish roofs as Kit’s guides led him to the theatre inns near Bishopsgate, each one closed for the night, narrow doors barred for curfew, and then through the twelve‑foot archway into the innyard of the Green Dragon.
Some candlelight still glowed through shutters on the second and third floors. Kit leaned back, shading the snow from his eyes with a hand held flat, and contemplated the diamond‑patterned railings on the galleries. Despite his better intentions he found himself glancing about the innyard; he’d lodged here when he first came to London, and seen several of his own plays performed to audiences that crowded those very galleries and the pavement upon which he now stood.
His witchlights twinkled along the railing by one shuttered window, a handful of emeralds set out in the sun. The second gallery, of course, and he wondered why it was that he never needed to scale a trellis in dry sunshine and gentle warmth.
I wish I’d brought a pistol.Aye, ‘Marlowe,’ ” he muttered. “If a sword and black magic won’t suffice, perhaps thou shouldst ensure thou hast a firearm so thou canst blow thine own clumsy fingers off when the damned thing misfires. How am I going to get up that gallery with the front door closed and no doubt barred?”
Add burglar to thine accomplishments.
He huddled under shadows in the innyard, watching the soft green jewels of his will‑o’‑the‑wisps shifting like sleepy doves on the railing, glowing dimly through the downy fall of snow. The chill on his skin, the numbness of his hands and tongue, couldhave been the cold. Aye, and thou hast lied to thyself so many times before.
Kit looked down at his hands, knotted in front of his belly. Courage, puss.” His own words, meant for irony, startled him; he’d captured Baines’ calming tone–the voice a man might use on a skittish animal – better than he’d expected. He drew a breath and kept on: intentionally now. “Come, kitten. It’ll soon be over. Be a little brave – ” He tasted blood, and couldn’t decide if it was real, or a ghost of memory. But his cheek stung; he’d bitten it hard enough to break the flesh. He turned and spat into the snow. Blood and more blood.
He looked up, untangling his fingers from their knot and then tangling them again when they wanted to creep up and press his jerkin and his shirt against the scar in the center of his breast. Fist doubled in fist, Kit punched himself in the thigh and snarled, “Baines was right. Here standeth as God‑damned a white‑livered coward as needeth a keeper to wipe his arse. Now get thee up there, Marley, and do thou what thou camest for.” If thou’rt going to whore thyself for the power to do, it ill befits thee to stand shaking in terror when couldst bedoing.
He shuffled forward, eyeing the lower gallery. White flakes dusted it, caught in the ripples on toothy icicles, but it wasn’t more than ten feet above the pavement, and Kit rather thought he could get his fingers over the lip. If he didn’t slip and dash his brains all over the pavement.
Here standeth a fine gallant figure of a hero.
Kit scrubbed his hands on his doublet one more time, made sure his sword was settled, and tucked his cloak tight. Then he took a breath and crouched, and leapt into the air.
I should have thought to sand my hands.But he grabbed and held, right hand burning on the ice, something gouging the softer flesh between ring and middle fingers. He wedged his left hand through the trellising, fingers around a rail post and jammed by the narrow gap, and he hung there, kicking.
And didn’t fall.
He wasn’t sure he could have managed what he did next when he was a student or a poet, and soft. But he had relentless Murchaud and their fencing sessions to thank for the easy strength across his shoulders and in his forearms that let him drag his leaden body higher. He levered himself up to the gallery and twisted to get an elf‑booted foot over the lip, then pushed himself upright amid a rattle of dislodged ice. He froze against the timber, calling his shadows about him, and listened for any sign that the landlord or his custom might have heard.
The whisper of snow softened everything. In the stable, a courier’s or a courtier’s steed snorted, stamped. Somewhere a church bell tolled, and that was all.
Kit leaned his forehead against the timber and gasped, holding the beam as close as a lover. I should have begged Lucifer for wings, while I was begging.And then he found himself pressing his free fist against the hollow of his chest like a man in panic, a pain like a cramp flexing his ribs.
Christ wept.
Aye. And is weeping still.
The witchlights gleamed under their icing of snow. A gentle glow: it put Kit in mind of sunlight through fine worked jade, or the new leaves of spring. Infinite riches.
And not a man would give a penny for them.
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
A grin to himself and one for Will, and no look down at the knotty cobbles behind and below his boots. Infinite riches.Aye, and they showed him precisely where to place his reaching hands.
The second gallery was harder, as it matched the overhang of the first. Kit hoisted himself, still clinging to his post, and balanced himself on the ice with trepidation. Still, his boots never slipped and the witchlights gave more guidance now that he pressed his hands into the snow between.
He lifted himself over the railing on the second gallery; his guidelights vanished as if snuffed. Kit stood in the heady darkness, sweat freezing with the rain under his hasty ponytail, and drew ragged breaths of the dank night air. A crack of brightness gleamed under the shutters of the nearest window, and he smiled and pressed his ear against the wall.
There were spells for listening, too, and for hearing more plainly. Easy enough: he mouthed one and cupped a hand.
No words, but Baines’ voice and then another, cultured and cultivated, and the rattle of bottle neck on cup. And if thou hadst not been as paralyzed with fear as a maid on her wedding night, thou wouldst have paused to wonder why Baines was sleeping in a coaching inn instead of his own good well‑warmed house. Arrant fool. Arrant. Bloody. Fool.
Damme.
Ah well,he thought, and resigned himself to more murders than one. It profits us not to damn fate nor ourselves, but rather we must trust in Providence.Which almost made him giggle. Not Poley with so cultivated a tone. Nor de Vere. Even now, I would know Edward–
Still. ‘Tis a familiar voice–
The snow fell harder, but, under the gallery roof, Kit was dry. He shook his cloak free of his belt and drew his rapier into his hand, frowning as he leveled himself at the door, which would be barred, without a doubt.
And can I not charm a bar from its pegs?
The tune he whistled under his breath. It didn’t matter: magic had no need to be loud.And then Kit leaned back and kicked with all his might at the door latch.
He felt the wood deflect under the ball of his foot, the door springing back an instant before the wood splintered under the impact and the bar jumped free of its slots. The door had rebounded against the frame by the time Kit’s foot touched the floor; as he started forward it swung open again and he blocked it with his left hand, brandishing the silver rapier in his right as he came into the presence of Richard Baines.
Richard Baines, who stood by the hearth in the bare little room, leaning against the warm stones, handsome and only a little wide‑eyed as he reached for the rapier at his hip. “Kit!” he said, smiling as the cold steel extended his reach. “What a pleasant surprise. What’s happened to thine eye?”
