Hell and Earth

The Queen of Faeries smiled and inclined her head. She seemed drawn, her rose‑petal skin pinched beside her eyes, and as if she–always willow‑slender–grew thin.

“Prince Murchaud,” Kit said, with a bow almost as low. Murchaud favored him with a sideways glance, and nodded to the empty chair at his left hand. Kit circled the table with some trepidation to take it, not allayed when Murchaud laid a buttered roll on his trencher and served Kit with his own hands.

Kit picked idly at the roast laid before him, trying to find his appetite again. “Thank you, my Prince.”

Murchaud laid a hand half over Kit’s. A carefully casual gesture, and Kit would not shame him in public by flinching away as if struck. “Kit,” he said, tilting his head to hide his lips against Kit’s hair. “I am not sorry I tried to prevent thee going, love. But nor am I sorry thou art home and safe; I did not lie when I said I cared for thee. Can we not be friends at least, if thou canst abide not my closer company? ”

“Aye,” Kit found himself answering, and then halted. “Tis not thee,” he said, as something in Murchaud’s tone ripped him to honesty. “I would fain – ”

“Aye?” Murchaud’s voice, and close and tight.

Kit bowed his head over his hands, and stifled a chuckle at the image of saying grace over fey victuals. He stole a sideways glance at Murchaud’s pale, intense blue eyes, the midnight coils of his hair, the elegant line of his nose, the faint sequined glitter of magic behind it. “Thou didst seek to protect me,” Kit said.

“I did wonder when thou wouldst notice.”

“And,” Kit continued, unperturbed, “I might… call thee friend. An thou wouldst permit it.”

Murchaud drew a breath. “Is’t so bad, Kit?”

“‘Tis worse,” Kit said, and busied himself with his bread and beef. A little later he looked up, and waited for the quiet conversation between the Mebd and Murchaud to flag. He spoke when it did, knowing the Mebd could hear him as well as the Prince. “I have not been about my duties – ”

“Thou’rt absolved,” the Prince answered, absently.

“Nay,” Kit said, still wondering at the words that seemed so inevitable as they passed his lips. “‘Tis time I accepted my place, here in Faerie. ‘Tis time I chose a side.”

Kit missed Amaranth leaving the hall by a few moments, and hurried his step as he followed the flicker of her tail through cool, sunlit corridors. Her progression was stately enough; he caught her up by the doors to a balcony overlooking the rose garden. “Lady Amaranth.”

“Sir Poet? How may I be of service?” She turned from the waist, her long body twisting like a ribbon, and extended a cold hand in welcome.

He bowed over it and mimed a kiss. Her chuckle sounded as if it rose the length of her in bubbles. “I had hoped you might assist me in finding a book. Some information on an angel–I think an angel, by his name. And perhaps a very old Bible.”

“In Faerie?” She drew her hand back as he straightened, and gestured him to accompany her. Not to the gardens after all, but down the corridor and back toward the library where he had spent the morning. “A Bible? New Testament and Old? Apocrypha? I might have one of those. How old?”

“Whatever you have. And as old as possible,” Kit answered.

Amaranth laughed. “Read you Aramaic?”

“A little Hebrew,” he admitted. “Greek would be better.”

She shrugged fluidly, dropping her body to a merely human height to grasp the handle of the library door and twist it open. “I can teach you a spell ‘twill render tongues –human and otherwise – comprehensible to thee. It can be done with music also, now thou art both bard and warlock, but the bardic spell lasts only as long as the song.”

“Rumors fly, I see,” Kit said. He followed Amaranth’s train into the room and turned to shut the door behind them. She draped a coil of herself over a massive dark wood table with legs as thick as Kit’s thigh; Kit hopped up on the table opposite, hugging a knee.

“Some of us see more than others,” Amaranth said. “And you came back from Hell and an interview with Satan with mismatched eyes. Tell me, Christofer –how look I to thee, now?”

“A bottomless sea in moonlight. Are mine eyes mismatched?” She smiled, her hair writhing about her head. “You have not looked in a mirror since you came back from Hell, I see – ” How could I? There are no mirrors in Faerie.”

“That is a difficulty.” She slid from the table edge like a fall of silk and crawled off among the rows of bookshelves. “I shall return,” she said. “Take your ease.”

Kit obeyed her, listening to the rustle of her scales over stone and carpet as she searched the shelves. “And so you will teach me more magic, Lady Amaranth? To what end?”

The room smelled of serpent’s musk and dried autumn leaves. Kit breathed deeply. Her voice drifted back, muffled as if the paper and leather absorbed its tones. “Fondness for thee and thy mortal poet are not answer enough?”

“And I should trust a Fae’s fondness?” He lay back on the weighty table and looked up at the gilt plaster relief netting the ceiling, letting his feet dangle over the edge.

“I’m not a Faerie,” Amaranth reminded him, over the sound of sliding books and rustling pages. “And just as happy not to be. William told me before he left that he thought the Fae might be responsible for the murder of his son.”

“More than thought. Had on good authority–”

“Aye.” The lamia sneezed, a sharp and diminishing hiss. “Did he tell you the culprits, then?”

Kit shook his head. “He did not say he knew them. I had assumed whomever it is who supports Baines and Essex’s faction of Prometheus, if they are still allies.”

“You know,” she said, emerging from behind a monumental book‑case with a black, leathery tome resting on the flat palms of her hands, “the spell I shall teach you can also be used to talk to trees. If the trees are forthcoming.”

“And if they’re not?”

“Many a wood hates man for wrongs wronged in centuries past.” Noncommittally. “Men generally win, when they go forearmed to deal with trees. Will you talk to Geoffrey, then?”

Why should I care to talk to trees?“I had meant to ask you if you knew where he was to be found,” Kit said, sitting up. “Why this sudden interest in politics, Lady?”

“Oh,” she answered, tipping the dust‑stippled Bible into his hands with an amused hiss. Her hair darted forward, every black eye bright with curiosity. “I care not for politics.”

“Then what is your interest?”

She shrugged. “Snakes are always interested in mysteries,” she said. “And Mehiel is well‑enough known. You can no doubt find him easily when you do return to London to speak with your friends. Now –about that spell – ”

Forty‑five minutes later, Kit was halfway up the stairs, holding the fragile old Greek Bible reverently in both hands, when he realized that wherever Amaranth had gotten the name Mehiel,it wasn’t from Kit’s lips at all.

Act IV, scene iii

If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for

thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,

thou shalt not escape calumny.

–William Shakespeare, Hamlet,Act III, scene i

In January of 1599, Edmund Spenser was buried under the towering pale vaults of Westminster Abbey alongside England’s greatest poets – save Marley,Will thought uncharitably, blowing on his reddened fingers. As if stung by the whispers of his criminal neglect of Spenser in the hour of his need, the Earl of Essex paid for an elaborate funeral, which the Queen herself attended. And eight of the poet’s most renowned fellows carried the body down the memorial‑cluttered aisle and laid it into a cold hole in the stones beside the grave of Geoffrey Chaucer.