All Night Awake by Sarah A. Hoyt

knee, half closing one eye against the precipitous drop on one side of him. “Stand not amazed. Reach me that ink horn.” And yet, as he sat there, uncomfortable and dangerously balanced, he cast an eager eye inside the room, at the comfortless bed, the draggled stool, the precarious table.
    But nowhere did he catch another fleeting glimpse of skin like cream, of hair like midnight spun, entire, from the dreams of man. Or yet of golden hair and broad shoulder and the regal bearing of the elf prince that was the Lady Silver’s other aspect.
    Will knelt and offered the ink horn.
    Kit dipped his quill in it and wrote quickly, with the practice and ease of one accustomed to such task. And to none other, he thought, making a face at remembering how clumsy he had been with his father’s cobbler tools, in his far-off, despised childhood. He remembered his father’s frustrated rage at what he viewed as Kit’s intentional clumsiness, and Kit’s mind skittered away from further memory.
    Philip Henslowe, he wrote. I beg you as a favor and a consideration, if you wish me to bring you my next play first, that you look upon my friend, Will Shakespeare, of Warwickshire for a role in the play you currently present. It need not be a great part. A mute servant, a silent friend will do, provided he gets paid at the end of the day.
    He underlined the last line three times, well acquainted with Henslowe’s occasional lapses from honesty, with the actors that never got paid until they cornered the theater owner and, by the force of fists and daggers, demanded their share of the day’s take.
    But if you would, of your kind heart, do my friend a favor, this poor playwright would feel indebted enough not to show his next play to milord of Pembroke’s men first.
    He signed it with a flourish, writing his name with the same spelling he’d used at Cambridge, Christopher Merlin.
    The more ancient spelling of his patronymic appealed to Kit’s sense of being a wizard, a supernatural being, in control of his destiny. Of being other than a poor cobbler’s son, circled by plotters, a long way from home and terrified.
    He remembered the dark, swaying carriage, the threatening voices all the more threatening for rarely rising above a whisper. Sweat sprang upon his brow.
    Fearful that his fear, his sudden recoil, would show in his face, he handed the paper to Will and started, quickly, down the steps, not waiting for thanks, not trying to force his way into the room again.
    It was not until he was on firm ground that he realized, by the thin light of the distant moon, that he’d stained his fine new gloves with ink. The left one had a spot of ink near the index finger.
    He rubbed at it to no avail as he hurried home through darkened streets.
    Home to Imp, whose life depended on the cunning of his undeserving, unknowledged father.
    Will would do for baiting Kit’s trap, but now the trap remained to be built.
    And could Will indeed be made to appear the mastermind of a great plot?
    Kit shook his head. Hard to tell. For who knew what hid in the hearts of men? Kit had always been good with words and the building of fiery illusions with his rhetoric. And he’d ever been bad—bad indeed—at guessing what other people knew or felt.
    What if Will was truly a mastermind? What if he had secret contacts of his own?

Scene 9

    Will’s room. Amazed, Will closes the door and turns to Silver, who stands at the farthest corner of the room, leaning on the dingy wall.

    “W ill?” she asked, and her voice trembled in asking it. Silver bit her lip, but it didn’t help. It would not keep the tremor at bay, and her voice trembled again as she piped uncertainly, “Was that Kit Marlowe? Was it Kit Marlowe at the door?”
    Through her mind ran memories she thought long forgotten, memories of Kit Marlowe as a shy, demure divinity student.
    At least half the fun of seducing him had come from that shy way of his, his uncertainty about how to act, how to behave, his