Free Ink and Steel by Elizabeth Bear Page A

better awakening than the last, though Kit was surprised to sleep so deeply in a stranger’s bed, with a stranger’s arm around him. His right cheek pressed a pillow that smelled of Morgan’s rosemary, and he remembered before he opened his eye that it should hurt. It didn’t. He remembered as well Morgan snipping and pulling bloody stitches after the Mebd had healed it, and her lips and body drawing out the agony the Faerie Queen’s sorcery had darted in him. But it wasn’t Morgan’s arm around his waist, her hand splayed possessively across his belly—though the dark hair drifting across his face in unbraided waves did not belong to Murchaud.
    Kit, thou hast outdone thyself. He couldn’t recall Morgan returning, which frightened him: a man with enemies didn’t live long if he slept too heavily to hear an opening door.
    But Morgan le Fey probably had her own ways of moving quietly. And Kit couldn’t remember when he had last wakened with this silence still in him, the clamor of fear and rage and duty and bitterness and memory stilled.
    â€œUsually,” Kit murmured, when the hand that clipped him slid down to stroke his flank, “men whisper the delights of bedding sisters. Or mother and daughter.”
    â€œArt anyway satisfied?” Murchaud answered, cuddling closer.
    Kit turned to see him— “ ’Twill serve.” —and Morgan chuckled on his blind side. “Your Highness.” She rose into his field of view, hair spilled across her face. The break in his vision was worse than he’d expected, especially close in.
    She stopped his lips with a finger, eye corners crinkling, then touched his scar. It felt as if she stroked a bit of leather laid on his skin. “Aren’t we beyond that, my lord? Does this pain you still?”
    â€œOnly my heart,” he answered. “But if I may look upon a sight as fair as you with but one eye, I’ll count the other well lost. What—what did she do to me? Your Mebd?”
    â€œAlways the flatterer,” Morgan answered. “And my Mebd she isn’t, and what she did on thee was old sorcery, deep glamourie, to turn a man into a mindless, rutting stag.”
    Her fingers caressed his throat, and a low moan followed.
    â€œI’ve used it myself,” she admitted. “You feel it still.”
    â€œYes.”
    Murchaud’s hands tightened on his hips; Murchaud’s teeth closed on the nape of his neck like a stallion conquering a mare. He cried out, but Morgan’s mouth muffled the sound. “You’re wondering,” she whispered, her cheek pressed by his cheek as her son pulled him close, “when I’ll give thee a mirror to see how the Mebd healed thee. You’re wondering how she realized it, and you’re wondering that she englamoured thee of an evening, and at how you strode through sorcery where another would have been lost. And why I have taken an interest in you. Art not?”
    Murchaud nibbled the place where Kit’s neck ran into his shoulder, and his hands were adventurers. “Aye,” Kit whispered against Morgan’s lips. His fingers brushed breasts like heavy velvet, skin like petals. She pressed close, guiding his hands to her waist and the abutting curves. Her fingertips traced an old scar on his chest, another on his belly, a third along the inside of his thigh. They were puckered and white, old burns that he tried not to think on.
    â€œTime here answers the will of the Queen,” Morgan said. “She took a few months from your wound, is all: their passage dizzied and drained you. If thou hadst not been so brave in the cleaning, it would not have gone so well for thee.”
    â€œLye soap. I should thank you.”
    â€œThere’s one mirror in all the Blesséd Isle,” Murchaud said. “You’ve bought the use of it, although releasing the secret Walsingham’s un-death might prove a high