Ink and Steel Read Free Page B

young. Two months older than Will, who was just barely twenty-nine. He sipped again. “They can’t all be genius.”
    Burbage laughed and tipped his mug. “Did you ever pause to wonder why not?”
    Oh, the brandy was making Will honest. “Heady stuff,” he commented. “If my skill were equal mine ambition, Richard—” Will shook his head. “What will we do for money if the playhouses can’t open? How long will Lord Strange champion players who cannot play? Anne and my children must eat.” He’d picked up the quill. He turned it over, admiring the way candlelight caught in its ink-spotted vanes.
    Burbage waved the bottle between his nose and the pen. “Have another drink, Will.”
    â€œI’ve a play to write—”
    â€œWhich opens tomorrow, doubtless? And poor Kit undeserving of a wake?”
    â€œUnfair!” But Will lifted the tankard and breathed the smoky fumes deep, feeling as though they seared his brain. “Poor Kit. . . .”
    â€œIndeed. Would serve your Queen so, Will?”
    â€œServe her to the death?” That brought him up short. “Is that what poor Marley did? Not stabbed for treason, or murdered by his conspirators before he could name their names. Nor killed for his”—Will lowered his voice—“atheism, and the talk of . . .” He drank again, but held his hand over his cup when Burbage would have filled it. “I can’t write.”
    â€œDrink will fix it.”
    Will did not uncover his tankard. “Drink fixes little, and what it doth fix can oft be not unfixed again.”
    â€œAh.” Burbage shifted his attention to his own cup as Will stood and paced. “In vino veritas. Is a Queen worth risking your life for, Will?”
    â€œWhy ask you these things of me?” Splinters curled from the wainscot shelf. Years of dry heat and creeping chill had cracked the wood long and deep between cheap plaster. Will picked spindled wood with one inkstained fingernail. He’d papered the walls with broadsheets, which also peeled. “A Queen. The idea of a Queen. . . .”
    â€œThe reality not worth your time?” Burbage leaned on the wall, brandy-sharp breath hot on Will’s cheek. He thrust Will’s cup into his hand; Will took it by reflex. “It’s her got Kit killed, isn’t it? Blood and a knife in the face. That’s what Queens get you.”
    â€œTreason,” Will whispered. Burbage’s face was flushed, his cheeks hot, red-blond hair straggled down in his too-bright eyes. Like a man fevered. Like a man mad. “You speak treason.”
    His hands were numb. The tankard slipped out of his fingers, and the brandy made a stream that glistened in the candlelight like liquid amber as it fell. The stink filled his room, sharp as the bile rising up Will’s throat. “That’s treason, man!”
    â€œTreason or truth? A ragged old slattern, belike. Bastard, excommunicate daughter of a fat pig of a glutton, a man who might have invented lust and greed he liked them so well—”
    Will’s hand acted before his mind got behind it; he struck Burbage across the face, a spinning slack-handed blow. Drunker than he’d thought, he overreached; the fallen tankard dented under his knee as he landed on it. “Fie!” Brandy soaked his stocking. At least he thought it brandy, and not blood. “Get from me!” Will pointed at the door with a trembling hand, though the player towered over him. “I’ll find another company an those are your sentiments!”
    But Burbage, pink-cheeked from the blow, extended his own hand to help Will to his feet. Will could only stare at it. “Your eloquence does desert you when you’re drunk enough. On your feet, man. You’ve passed the test.”
    â€œTest?” Will wobbled up, one hand on the wall, refusing Burbage’s aid. “You’ve maligned the