Free Any Man So Daring by Sarah A. Hoyt

and distorted like a drowned landscape, like a scene seen from far off and only half-understood. A sob cut his speech, unexpected, like a visitation from outside himself. “And thus I got to live, I — unworthy. But my life is shadowed by Marlowe’s ghost and when I try to write it is his words, those great, echoing words that made the stage tremble, that drip upon my page like echoes of his blood. And thus, miserable, I, have sold my friend’s blood to make a living.” He realized tears were falling down his face, unashamed, like the great crying of a woman or a child. He turned his face away from the woman and sat down.
    Anger had left him. Fear had abandoned him. Nothing remained to him but this feeling of having run far and long and now having come to some sort of wall, some sort of end. He could go no further.
    A great sob tore through his lips, shaking him.
    When he looked back at the woman, he couldn’t read her expression.
    She was looking on him, frowningly, not as though she disapproved of what he’d said. More like someone evaluating a piece of work.
    Thus had Will’s father looked, when staring at a newly sewn glove. Thus did Nan look after planting flowers in a row, when looking at their arrangement.
    Thus this woman now looked on Will, her eyes squinting down, her gaze fixed.
    She was going to tell him that there was no ghost. She was going to tell him that Marlowe had died and did not walk the land as did shades that had some work to do, some wrong to right.
    She was going to tell him this and mock him and send him on his way like a truant child.
    Will found himself longing for such mocking. It was a consummation devoutly to be hoped for. Then could he believe that his work was his own and no one else’s. Then could he shrug that feeling of steps that doubled his own and actions that shaded his every movement — that feeling of words not his own falling in burning sentences upon his page.
    “You’ve done well enough from his words, have you not?” the witch asked. “He wanted to give you his words, and you’ve profited from them. Why would you wish it otherwise?”
    “It is his words, then?” Will asked, as his heart sank and his blood, seemingly, lost all heat and force. “It is his words I have?”
    “His words were a gift, magical, come to him from Merlin, his ancestor. Marlowe willed them to you, with his dying breath. They are yours now. Go home and live contented.” The woman looked at Will, the marks of her former outrage still upon her.
    It was, Will thought, as if she believed he was refusing a gift other men would kill to have.
    He felt his gorge rise. “Be contented? How can I? When I can’t write my own words? When the sentences that come from my brain and trickle upon the page through my hand are not my own?
    “Be contented, you say. I might as well be dead, then, and Marlowe alive, for when a man’s good words cannot be heard nor a man’s good wit understood, it strikes a man more dead than great reckoning in a small room.”
    The woman shook her head. “The gift has cost him dearly, for his ghost has been chained by his words and thus banned from the heaven or hell his actions merited. The kindest thing you can do is to accept gracefully what was so dearly purchased.”
    “It is his ghost?” Will said. “It is then truly his ghost that dogs my steps? That breathes down my neck? That writes through my pen?”
    “His ghost, aye,” the woman said. “And his ghost craves a word with you.”
    She waved a hand, and lifted it, the little finger wiggling, and set it down again, the edge of it outward, like a knife cutting the still, warm, homey air.
    There beside the great bench at which Will sat, Marlowe stood.
    Marlowe, still well attired and carefully combed, his auburn hair pulled back and tied with a blue satin ribbon.
    One almond-shaped gray eye looked at Will in great amusement, the other dripped gore and blood, to which Marlowe paid no more mind than if it were