Ink and Steel

Act III, scene vii

Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,

A dearer birth then this his love had brought,

To march in ranks of better equipage:

But since he died and Poets better prove,

Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet 32

Kit lay on his back against the emerald coverlet, lamplight snarled in his light brown hair, and idly turned the swan-white quill between his fingers while Will watched from the chair by the window. The ornately carved back was winning the war against Will’s spine; Will leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.

“These lamps are very fine. They burn paraffin?”

“Spirits of some sort,” Kit said. “Tis a lovely bright light, isn’t it?”

“I might sit up a little,” Will said, feeling dishonest. “If the light will bother you, I can retreat to the library.”

“No need,” Kit said, kicking his legs high to swing himself out of the bed. He dropped the pen onto a shelf as he stood, his fingers returning to stroke the stainless plume briefly before he turned away. “What a little mystery this is, isn’t it?”

“What will you do with it?”

Kit shrugged, his eyebrows arching in cheerful mockery. “Tis too lovely to strip and stain with ink. Keep it as a token of affection, I suppose; I musthave an unconfessed admirer.”

“Perhaps she wants you to write a sonnet to her loveliness. Or,” Will grinned, “on her loveliness, for that matter.”

“Ah, but sonnets are thy idiom, not mine.”

Will leaned back into the shadows, feeling the grin slide down his face. “Where have you read my sonnets, Kit?” He managed to hide a guilty look at his cloak and the brownie-cleaned boots that he had come to Faerie in. They were tucked into the corner beside the clothes press with his sonnets rolled up inside them. Surely Kit would be, if anything, too proud to sneak.

“Romeo and Juliet,” Kit answered. “And nicely done it was. I wouldn’t mind seeing those others you mentioned, though, when you think they re fit for the public eye.”

Somehow, Will managed not to choke. “They may never be so.”

“Really? Not as off-color as Tom’s dildo poem, I trust.” Kit poured water to wash his hands and face and made a little ceremony of it.

“With a better meter, at least.”

Kit turned to him surprised, reaching for linen to dry his hands, and Will laughed. “No; I’ve a touch more decorum than Tom, though I’ve read the poem in question. I rather imagine that one will never see printer’s ink. You don’t mind my rustling papers and cursing by lamplight while you try to sleep?”

“Not at all.” Kit shrugged. “You re not like to have much time for work here. You re a puzzle to them, a toy, and if you claim the library, this palace holds enough creatures who do not sleep to distract you with their demands. Besides, if you’re here, you can wake me if I start to dream.”

“Sensible,” Will said. May I have that lamp by the bedside as well?”

“Yes, and use my table.” Kit brought the squat globe with its odd, tall chimney over to the broad walnut writing table, shoving layers of papers aside. Will picked up the lamp from the square table beside the window and joined him, angling the two so they gave enough light to write by.

“That’s not bad. Better than candles.”

“Aye.”

“Sleep well, Kit.”

Kit pursed his lips as he turned away. “Just don’t wish me dream sweetly, I pray.”

A few hours later, Will rolled the mismatched sheets of sonnetry into a tubeagain and fastened them with a ribbon. He weighed the poems in his hand: a few ounces of ink and paper and emotion and clever word play. Surely nothing to feel such pride and consternation over.

He’d lied to Kit when he said Jonson had a copy; a few he’d shown to friends, but not most of them. Certainly not to anyone who might recognize the subject.

Poley and Baines know Kit is alive now, he realized suddenly. I have to draft a letter to Tom Walsingham.Which he did, hastily, and sanded and sealed it, explaining the situation and that he, Will, would return by Christmas. ‘And may I meet my promise to a conspirator better than I meet my promises to my wife.” Will stood, the poems in one hand, the letter in the other, and hesitated. I don’t know how to send it.

He stole a glance at Marley, curled like a child under his spotted cloak, and stifled a yawn against the back of the hand that held the sonnets. He didn’t feel like sleeping, and he propped the letter and the poems upon the mantel and stepped into his boots before he blew the lamps out.

The latch clicked softly, well oiled, when he turned the handle, and he walked into the darkness of the hall. The Mebd’s palace changed in darkness and solitude. The airy corridors closed in, became low and medieval, and Will thought he saw things scuttle in the corners near the floor. He stopped his hand before he could cross himself, wondering where that ancient reflex had arisen from, and picked his way past the roiling shadows of infrequent torches, certain of restlessness, uncertain of his goal.

He found the spiral stair with ease and followed it down, noting landmarks so he would be able to find his way back when his wandering tired him. An unusual sense of well-being buoyed him; he wasn’t sure if Morgan’s medicines deserved the credit, or if it was simply the magic of Faerie. Will paused in the atrium, in the mellow moonlight drifting through high windows and magical skylights, and nodded to the unmoving suits of armor flanking the relief-wrought doors. He wasn’t sure they were inhabited, but in the very least they felt alive. Felt alive, Master Shakespeare? Can you explain what precisely that means, for our academic interest? Well… …no.But he nodded anyway, and continued past, down the winding side corridor that would bring him to the library. A library worthy of a Cambridgeman’s glee, in Will’s admittedly under-experienced opinion.

The light was better, candles that never seemed to drip or smoke ranged every few feet along the wall, and Will found the tall red cherry doors easily enough. They gleamed strangely in the candlelight as he pulled a taper from its sconce and fumbled for the crystal knob, pleased his hand didn’t shake. A dim strand of light crossed the floor as he eased the door; he slipped in and let it latch softly.

“Good night?”

“Master Shakespeare.” A pleased voice, a thrill of velvet that reminded him of the furry backs of fox moth caterpillars inching along a twig. Morgan le Fey looked up from reading, her light gilding one side of her face and casting the other into shadow. A folio whose illuminated leaves were shiny umber under the ink and gilt lay open before her; she held a thin glass rod in her right hand which she used, delicately, to turn the pages.

“Your Highness.” He bowed, balancing his candle, careful to spatter no wax. The scent of paper and leather filled the library. “An unexpected pleasure.”

“I haunt the place,” she said, laying her wand aside. “Sleepless? Too ill? I have herbs for that, too.”

“Rather, I am too well to sleep, Your Highness,” he answered. “And I thank you for it.” As he came forward, he saw that the light gleaming over her shoulder was neither lamp nor candle, but what seemed a swarm of green and golden atomies hovering in midair. He tucked his candle into a wall sconce, well away from the ancient tome, and seated himself across from her in acquiescence to her gesture.

She smiled. “I’m pleased to find I’m not the only one who seeks the dusty comfort of books when I am restless at night.”

She did not behave in the manner he expected of Queens, and truth to be told he was restless; restless with a sort of longing that his own poetry and his sleepless exhaustion had reawakened in his breast. He ached with the need of it, instead of the pain that had haunted him so much of late. He licked his lips and looked down at her text.

“What are you reading?” She wrapped her fingertips in her sleeve and turned the book so he could see, but the thick hand-drawn letters defeated him. The illuminations told him it was an herbal, though, and he thought it one in verse. “It’s beautiful.”

“Not quite so old as I am.” She smiled. Her near-black eyes caught sparks of light from her attendant atomies; they swirled about her hair like a tiara of jewels on invisible threads. Unbidden, Will thought of a line of Kit’s poetry

‘O, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’

And then, unbidden, a response and dark within that light; not so much a star herself. There’s a poem in that no, not a star, not so much a sun …

Her calm voice broke his reverie. “I could grow accustomed to being looked upon so, Master Shakespeare.”

He blushed, and blinked. “My lady is lovely,” he said, and blushed harder when she moved the priceless book aside and reached to take his hand. Her fingers were rough at the tips with callus, the hands shapely and long and the tendons plain against her skin as she turned his over to study the palm.

“Have you ever had your fortune told, Master Shakespeare?”

He bit his lip and shook his head. The dancing lights grew brighter, flitting like the fire-bugs that were supposed to inhabit the darkness of a New World country called Virginia. Her thumb traced the lines of his hand, and as she bent to study them her hair cascaded across his wrist. “The old women of the gipsy caravaneers practice an art handed down from ancient times, they say. They claim a man’s destiny is written in his hand, a predetermined fate.”

“The Puritans agree,” Will said with a smile that hurt the corners of his mouth. “And the Greeks.”

“And the Prometheans,” Morgan continued, without raising her eyes. “Their ideas are not so revolutionary as they believe. My history gives us prophecies of a different order: geas and fulfillment. You won’t have heard of them.

“No, madam.” He watched, fascinated, as she stroked a deep crease beside the heel of his hand.

“This is called Apollo’s. Tis said to indicate creativity and potential for greatness. Combined with the shape of your thumb, a fortune-teller would say that you are intuitive, passionate, intellectual. Quick of wit and great of talent.”

“A fortune-teller would say so? Aye, she said,” with a caressing touch that made him shiver. “I am not a fortune-teller, Master Shakespeare.” Her gaze rose again, her eyes blacker than ever. His shiver redoubled. “I am a witch.”

Strangely, his face tingled as if she stroked his cheek rather than his hand. He looked away, down, anywhere but into her laughing eyes.

“Great of talent, you say.” A chuckle. “Aye. Great enough for most purposes. And here: this line belongs to Saturn. It shows a destiny, as well… ”. Her voice trailed away.

He focused on amusement, on keeping his breaths even and slow when they wanted to flutter in his throat. “What destiny is that, Your Highness?”

“I cannot say, she answered. But if I were a fortune-teller, I would say that you would find it within twenty years, and no longer.”

“Anything could happen in two decades. That’s a fair spread.”

“Not so long as it now seems,” she answered. “Here is the fold that dictates your romantic nature. See how it curves up, and extends long?” She bent closer. “Ah, and it is braided.”

“Braided?”

“Aye. You’ve not one great love in store, Master Shakespeare, but three.”

He laughed. “Surely one great love is enough for any man.”

Her fingers moved again, and he thanked the opaque surface of the table between them for preserving his dignity.

“And this is your life line.”

“And what does that tell you, Morgan le Fey?” The challenge in his own voice surprised him. Her fingers followed the tracery down and under his thumb, stroking the soft flesh at the inside of his wrist. He caught his breath in shock at the delicacy of that touch.

“You will live to go home again, William Shakespeare,” she said.

“Do you say any of this will come true, Your Highness?”

“Tis the rankest charlatanry,” she answered. Bending her head further, she placed a moth’s-wing kiss in the center of his palm. He gasped again and almost pulled his hand away; she held the wrist and transferred her attentions there.

“Your Highness.”

“Hush,” she said, glancing up at him through the pall of her hair. “Say nothing, Poet, save yes or no.”

Will closed his eyes, aching. Annie, he thought hopelessly, and then almost laughed aloud at the next thing he thought: That was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Oh, Kit, trust you to make a hellish sort of sense of this.“Yes,” he said, and waited endless instants while Morgan sent her pixy-lights to bar and watch the door.