Free Ink and Steel by Elizabeth Bear Page B

price.”
    Morgan’s lips moved on Kit’s. “Meanwhile, consider how you might repay me for returning your wits, that you might bandy words with the Mebd.”
    Remembering the white flame the Mebd had kindled in him with a mere smile and a turn of her hand, Kit shivered. “Anything, so long as it is mine to give, the lady may claim as her own. Only—how did you protect me, madam?”
    â€œYour boots,” she murmured, wickedly, “have iron nails.”
    He stopped. And then he laughed, delighted at the simplicity of it, and stretched against her as he took her in his arms. She wrapped him in silk, and Murchaud enfolded him in steel, and he could have wept at the silence they gave him, and the forgetting, that when they drew him down between them nothing whispered remember.
    Instead, the whisperer was Morgan, speaking against his ear: “Things are different in Faerie.”
    Christofer Marley closed tight his eye.
    The mirror was not hidden in a private chamber or guarded under lock and key. Rather, it stood at the end of a blind corridor, in an oval frame of tarnished silver—tall as a door—wrought with lilies and spirals. The stand was swathed in velvet. The polished glass could have been obsidian.
    â€œIt’s called the Darkling Glass,” Murchaud said when Kit hesitated.
    He stepped closer, laid one hand on cool crystal polished without a ripple. His palm left no print; his reflection was more a matte sheen than an image. “And I—”
    â€œStep through it.” Morgan came up beside him. A tall white candle he did not recollect having seen her light burned in her right hand. She raised it beside his face, illuminating the dark band of his new eyepatch crossing a pale seam of scar. Flecks of blood and scab showed where Morgan had pulled stitches free, but the ridged white line was straight from his hairline to where it vanished under the eyepatch.
    Morgan touched a finger to his mouth and he dressed it in a kiss. His lips had been called voluptuous by men and women both, his dark eyes enormous, exotic with the fairness of his hair. The heavy diagonal of eyepatch exaggerated the softness of his mouth. Not as good as an eye in his head, and he knew he’d have work to make up the lack, but it had a rakish dignity.
    And it might win him Walsingham’s sympathy.
    Morgan leaned against his shoulder. He caught a pale glimmer like the moon over his left shoulder: Murchaud’s reflection, further back. “Step through any mirror to return. I put that power in thee. And there’s something you need to know.”
    â€œI’ve tasted the food of Faerie.”
    Her gown gapped at the collar when she inclined her head. “It will draw you back. A few days, a week. A passing of the moon. It is impossible to predict.”
    â€œAnd if I do not come?”
    Her cool cheek brushed his ear; her dark hair spread across the black velvet of his doublet. “You will suffer, Christofer Marley,” she said with a luxurious smile. “And when you have suffered more than you can imagine, you will die. Look—there is your Walsingham now. Dost see him?”
    The old spymaster’s accustomed image swam into the glass. He bent over his desk examining a document with a lens held between bony fingers. Light streamed over Walsingham’s shoulder in a swirl of dust motes, limning his hair and beard silver-gilt like a cloud. “Now we know he lives, we can find him,” Morgan whispered. “Have a care.”
    Kit opened his mouth to reply, but a firm hand pressed the small of his back. He stepped forward and tripped through the mirror, and fell with ill grace into a stunned silence and Sir Francis Walsingham’s arms.
    That silence lasted moments, as Walsingham studied him, and turned as if to see what door in the air he’d fallen from, and then studied him again. And then knotted fingers like ribbons of steel in his hair and