Prince of Shadows

QUARTO 3

One would believe that Tomasso had never existed, save for the new twist in Mercutio’s once-straight nose; the bruises had faded, and if our friend’s humor had taken a turn for the bizarre and bitter, I could scarce blame him. He had been wed, with all the necessary pomp, to a blushing young girl; Romeo and I had helped put Mercutio to bed with her according to custom, a strange and horrible business knowing what we did, but we’d been spared the awkward business of listening to any consummation behind the curtains, though some servant would have done so.

Instead, I had been forced to listen, still, to Romeo’s half-drunken rambling paeans to the beauty of a woman he would not name, but who must have been Rosaline Capulet. She was not, of course, in attendance at the wedding; the Capulets would not set foot where Montagues entertained. Yet her shadow loomed large over all.

Romeo had brought home the rumor that Rosaline had been the hot tongue who’d betrayed Mercutio’s secret; he mourned, but he forgave her this feminine weakness, which undoubtedly did not run true to my grandmother’s plans. I kept him from writing poetry, or going anywhere near her, but it seemed to me that he would never lose his infatuation. Romeo had never been so constant in love, and it worried me to think that he might have truly set his heart on something so massively unwise.

I stole.

I suppose I could claim that the pressure of knowing of my sister’s cruel betrayal, and Mercutio’s misaimed bitterness, was to blame for the Prince of Shadows’ thieving rampage in Verona; I made a list, sitting in the stillness of my rooms, and in the evenings, almost every evening, I escaped the claustrophobic pull of my guilt to bring misery to someone who deserved it more.

I stole the diary of the wife of the Ordelaffi servant, in which she confessed her horror of her husband’s fondness for unnatural acts, and—more damningly—the pilfering he’d done from his master’s coffers. The diary found its way into the chambers of the Ordelaffis’ busybody cook, who soon presented it to Lord Ordelaffi.

The servant was driven out into the streets, stripped and beaten. I watched from the safety of a nearby wine shop. It was a sour sort of victory, because with him went his innocent wife and children, now reduced to beggars.

I remedied my wrong by visiting the jakes late the next evening, and retrieving the stinking bag of gold and jewels that I’d hidden there. The jewels and the sword were too easily known, but the gold I transferred to a clean cloth bag. I found the sad little family huddled in a sour alley, shivering in the chill; the father, already weak, seemed likely to die. I could not bring myself to care overmuch. But the haunted terror of the wife, and the children . . .

I knew they could not see my face in the shadow of the gray hood, and even if they did make it out, the silk mask would tell them to seek no more.

“Sir,” the wife said, staring up at me from where she knelt on the cobbles beside a very meager little brazier, cooking what seemed to be a skinned rat for her frightened family. “Sir, I beg you, in God’s name, leave us be. . . .”

I threw the bag down on the cobbles beside her. It broke open, and coins scattered like dreams over her dirty skirts. She gasped and pulled back, as if the coins might turn to serpents . . . but when they did not, she looked up again, still openmouthed. Tears glittered in her widened eyes.

“Not for him,” I said. “He deserves his fate for what he’s done. Take your children and flee.”

She shook her head, but I knew, as she clawed the coins back into the bag and tied it shut, that she would do as I said. Her husband was dying. She might linger long enough to see him gone, but I’d read her diary; there was no love between them, and his death would free her.

Widows had more power than wives.

As far as the other villains, Tybalt Capulet still swaggered, cock o’ the walk, through the streets, ever more arrogant and overweening, and I badly itched to take him down, this time hard enough to leave scars, if not a corpse. My sister, Veronica’s, wedding drew near, a happy event that meant we would be shut of her forever, and I’d rarely have to spy her cruel, smiling face again. I wanted to avenge Tomasso’s death upon her, but her blood, if not her sex, protected her from my rage.

Fortunate for her.

As for Romeo, he was hopelessly entangled in family politics. I doubted he even bothered to learn whom it was they intended for him to wed. It would hardly matter what he thought about it, and so he plunged himself headlong into his empty worship of Rosaline, a girl he’d never so much as met, an impossible match that was a safe indulgence of his lovesick notions.

We were each gone mad, in our ways.

I continued to steal, relentlessly. I came near to getting caught several nights, as the prince’s men had become furious at my success and doubled their patrols; my likely targets also made it more difficult for me, and on two occasions I had been trapped in the house, hiding, until the stir had died and I’d been able to creep away with my ill-gotten goods. And a curious lot of things they were: the treasured riding whip from Lord Ordelaffi, with which he’d often lashed his son; the hoarded savings of two of the Ordelaffi men who’d pulled on the rope; the jeweled ring of the bishop himself, who had written a sermon praising the moral outrage of the people of Verona over the sinful perversions of sodomites, adulterers, and witches.

He’d delivered it at Mercutio’s wedding. A very pointed commentary indeed.

In my own small way, I continued to exact vengeance, though I knew the sin really flowered from the root of my own house.

I knew I should confess all these things, but I did not trust the slick, bland-faced priest who often occupied the booth in the cathedral; I knew he was an ambitious man, political, and it would be well within his interests to drop a word to the bishop I’d relieved of his precious ring. Better to let my sins fester in my heart and damn me in heaven’s eyes, rather than Verona’s.

My real confession came at an odd time, and in an odd way.

It was inevitable that my obsession would see me caught, sooner or later; I was a great thief, but not invisible, nor invincible. It was a very late Thursday eve when I burgled a fat purse of jewels from the shop of a Capulet goldsmith who beat his apprentices, and who’d blinded one with hot metals; all well and good, but I’d been surprised by a vicious dog, and as I limped away with ill-got goods weighing me down, I also left a bright red trail of blood from my badly bitten leg. It was not a graceful escape, nor an effective one, as the goldsmith roused his household and guards and sent them beating after me, with the vicious dog howling on its leash.

I had just enough time to make it to the small, shopworn chapel, where Friar Lawrence dozed near the altar in an untidy heap. He woke with a snort, glared at me, and then saw the blood trail I’d tracked inside. “What’s this?” he said, and started to his feet to waddle his way to me. “You cannot be here!”

“Trouble,” I said in a gasp. I’d doffed the mask—no point in straining our friendship—and I showed him the bloody gouge in my calf beneath the ripped hose. “They’re after me, Friar.”

“For what crime?”

“Being tasty to their pet?” I said, but my heart was not in the humor. “Later, later—for now, I stand well set to be hanged if you do nothing. I beg you for sanctuary.”

He frowned. “You must touch the altar for that.”

I limped forward, gritting my teeth against the burn, and laid my palm flat on the velvet-covered marble. The suffering Christ looked down on me with a severe expression, and I quickly crossed myself. “In all humility, I ask for sanctuary from those who would see me killed,” I said. “And best if they know not who they’re really hunting, Friar.”

He spied the bag I held in the other hand, and nodded toward it. “What carry you there?”

I tossed it to him. “A gift, for the Church,” I said. “Imagine the poor that might be fed from such a beneficence.”

He gazed at me for a moment, then opened the bag and made a gulping sound. “Stolen goods!” he thundered. I could hear the howling of the dog drawing nearer. “How dare you, boy!”

“I keep none of it,” I said. “I give it freely to the Church. May Christ himself witness my sincerity.”

Friar Lawrence was caught in a dilemma, and if the situation had been less dire it might have been amusing. He considered for far too long before he said, “Quickly, go behind the altar.” He tossed the heavy bag behind with me, tore the cloak from my shoulders, and used it to mop up the spots of blood, all the way to the door of the chapel, and then out to the street to confuse the trail. “Stay here and quiet, for the love of God and your mortal flesh!”

I eased back against the wall and took the respite to pull pieces from my linen shirt to bind up the wound tightly. The bleeding had slowed, which was lucky, but the limp would be difficult to conceal, and a nasty betrayal should anyone put out word to look for such to the guard. One problem at a time, I told myself. First, you must get home alive.

I heard the dog come nearer . . . nearer . . . and the shouts of the men, with the high-pitched, anxious tone of the goldsmith riding over all.

Then it all swept past, without a pause.

I collapsed in sweet relief for a few moments, and was about to rise when I heard the chapel door swing open. I thought it would be the friar returning, but instead, it was someone else. I heard the light tread, the quick, nervous breathing, and the rustle of stiff fabrics as someone knelt before the altar. I risked a quick glance over and saw a hooded figure—but not the figure of a monk, or a man.

Those were the skirts of a woman.

She began to raise her head, and I quickly ducked down again, silently swearing at the ill luck. “Friar?” Her voice was low, and a little uncertain. I heard her rise to her feet. “Friar Lawrence? Are you here? I’ve come at the appointed time. . . .”

All was clear, then; the friar’s vows of chastity were well lapsed, and this was some girl come for an assignation. I’d ruined the holy man’s night in many ways, it seemed—but then the chapel door opened and closed again, and I heard the hasty slap of sandals and the heavy, labored breaths of the monk. “My lady,” he said, “I am sorry; please sit. It’s been a . . . surprising night. I’ve another wayward lamb to tend, so if you would not mind—”

“Another . . .” She gasped. “There’s someone here! I knew it! I could hear him move!”

“Another with as little reason to be known as you, my lady, so please console yourself. He will not see your face, nor you his. Wait here, in the shadows, while I fetch him to the confessional.”

He appeared a moment later, frowning down at me. I gave him an innocent look and held out the bag, which he snatched away with righteous haste. “Up, you sinner,” he said. “And keep your mouth well shut on the lady’s presence here, mark me.”

I hobbled up. “I swear,” I said, “your amorous trysts are safe with me.”

I heard her gasp again, but this time it sounded less fear than fury, and though she had her hood up and face turned down, she could not resist an angry glare in my direction.

And the candlelight showed me just a small glimpse of sweetly familiar lines and flashing dark eyes, and I knew who she was, just as from the same glimpse she marked my face, and her lips parted in shock.

Rosaline Capulet rose, threw back her hood, and hastened to my side. “You’re hurt!” she said. I could not take my gaze from her. The beating’s effects had long passed, and though there was a thin scar near her hairline where she’d been cut, she looked as lovely as ever. I’d never thought to see her again, nor to be so close if I did, and the smell of pressed roses and oranges washed through me like warm rain.

And then she touched me, gentle fingers on my arm, and in flinching I almost fell. “Your face,” I said stupidly. I couldn’t stop drinking in the sight, the miracle of it. I controlled myself with an effort of sheer will. “I am glad you’re well healed.”

“You are not!”

“I’m well enough,” I said. Her presence was too overwhelming, and the implications were beyond me. “Why are you here, at such an hour, without escort?”

She looked quickly past me, at Friar Lawrence, who firmly took hold of my shoulders and steered me toward the confessional. “Now, now, sir, you’ve spoiled my efforts to keep fire and fuel apart, by which I mean Montague and Capulet, but you must mind your own affairs. The lady’s are none of yours.”

“But—” Surely she was not here for an assignation with this fat old man. The thought burned holes in me. “She should have taken her vows by now!”

“I delayed,” she said from behind me. “I dissembled. I pretended illness. But now my mummery’s come to an end. I am to be sent to a convent, where my faults will be . . . corrected,” she said from behind me, and I resisted the friar’s grip and turned to look straight at her. She was straight and tall now, hands clasped low, and the candlelight caressed the curve of her face like a lover’s hand. “Next week. The friar has promised me that he will send me tonight to a friendlier order, where I may at least be granted leave to read and study. My brother’s wish is that my spirit be broken, but I will thwart him in this. If I must be God’s, I will be God’s on my own terms, and not Tybalt’s.”

“Tonight,” I said. It felt like a blow, though there was no reason for that. “You go tonight.”

“Aye, boy, she’s risked much to steal away for this chance, and you’ll not ruin it from familial spite!” Friar Lawrence pushed me into one side of the confessional and tried to slam the door, but I caught it on both palms and shoved back. Rosaline had not moved.

“He’s not forgiven you, has he?” I asked. “For letting me go?”

She did not answer, but then, she did not have to; I knew the truth well enough. I was the reason her brother threatened her with the loss of the one thing she feared—her study. He’d see her sent to an order that held to the belief that women should be dumb beasts, content to parrot the responses given them and mortify their sinful flesh . . . and it would kill her; I could see it in her eyes. All that was precious in her would die.

My fault again.

“There are rumors about that you betrayed Mercutio and his lover,” I said, and saw her flinch. “I know you did not. It was said to put him against your family, not out of any truth.”

She let out a slow breath and nodded. “I heard of the boy’s murder,” she said. “I would never have betrayed them, even had I known. I believe God loves all, sinners and saints, and judgment is His business, not mine. But I’m grieved to be another excuse for hatred between our houses.”

I did not know what else to say to her. I’ve thought of you was true, but ridiculously wrong. . . . I was a Montague, and unlike Romeo, I knew my path. I finally said, “I am glad you’re well, lady.”

Her sharp gaze took in the blood on my dark clothing, and the bite beneath the ripped fabric. “I am glad the dog was slow,” she said, and smiled a little. “Though that limp will betray you tomorrow.”

“I know.”

“Stage a fall down the steps of your house,” she said, “in the early morning, before witnesses. Be sure the injury is well wrapped before you do; you’d not want blood to betray you, but you can feign a wrenched ankle then and none can disprove it.”

It was good, practical advice, and I nodded to her. I no longer trusted my voice; it wanted to soften, to warm, to say things I could not allow. It came to me with a horrible sense of sorrow that she would know these things from all her sad experience of concealing and explaining away her own injuries, suffered at the hands of her brother.

I let the friar shut the door, and sank down on the confessional seat with a feverish feeling of . . . what? Loss? I did not want to examine the feeling so closely; it felt too big, like a storm caged in the bone of my chest. She’d been alarmed for me. Worried. She’d touched me so gently, and the shape of her fingers burned and tingled still.

And tonight, she was leaving to fade away into a convent, never to be seen again. She’d have her books, her study. I should be happy that she was safe from her family’s ambition, from her brother’s fury.

But I could not be happy.

I waited in the cold, lonely confessional with my ears pricked for any words from her, any sounds; even the whisper of her skirts against the floor tantalized my senses. The smell of roses and oranges lingered on me, though I could not say why it clung so closely; she’d scarcely touched me at all (though it burned still on my skin). I ought to have been ordering my thoughts around salvation, around repentance, but all I truly repented was that I would never see her again. I gently bounced my head upon the hard wood behind me, trying to disrupt the thought. The chair was uncomfortable, the space narrow and close, and as the imaginary, intoxicating smell rising from Rosaline’s skin faded, the reality of stale incense and sweat descended around me. I heard Friar Lawrence whispering to her, his voice low and urgent, and her own replies carried some hints of reluctance. I thought she might wish to say something to me, some sort of good-bye . . . but perhaps it was only fear of change, of trusting to her fate.

I put my hand flat against the door, a silent valediction, a good-bye, a wish . . . and I waited, in silence, as I heard the groan of the chapel’s outer door open.

I slowly lowered my hand to my lap. I suppose it would have been appropriate to spend the time in prayer, but all I could think was that God had just taken away my only light in a dark, comfortless future—however distant and dim it might have been, still, it had been hope.

And now it was gone. No, I had to be honest with myself: Now she was gone.

I heard a sudden sharp cry, and a flurry of footsteps. I heard Friar Lawrence make a frustrated, deep-throated growl, and then the door of the confessional flung open.

Framed in the light from behind, with her cloak spreading wide with her motion, she looked an angel—more an angel than I was ever like to see. She stared at me with wide eyes, and I thought she had no more idea what to say than I, in that moment. We did not need words, I think, though fantasies tumbled through my mind in blurring bursts of color—her hair unbound and heavy as silk in my hands, her lips soft against mine, her breath whispering secrets.

And then I knew, with the fatal misery of a doomed man, that I wanted her, a Capulet, in ways that I had never wanted a woman before—not a hasty, impersonal fumbling in the dark, not the duty of a cold husband with an unfamiliar wife . . . something else, for the sake of passion, and fire, and challenge.

“Go,” I said. “I pray you will be safe.” My voice came out low and gentle, and I had the gift of her smile, for just a moment.

“Go with God, Benvolio,” she said. “Be careful.”

And then Friar Lawrence stepped between us, shook a finger at me in stern remonstrance, and slammed the door on me.

I did not mind. I closed my eyes in the dark and heard her say my name, again and again: Benvolio.

I had never realized how little happiness I had in life until she had shown me distant flickers of what it might appear.

I clung to one foolishly optimistic thought. . . .

She had not said good-bye.

• • •

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said to Friar Lawrence. He cleared his throat and leaned forward on the other side of the screen. He smelled like garlic and wine, and he needed a bath, but probably found them unholy.

“I’ve told you already, I am not a priest; I may not grant you any forgiveness,” he said. “And by sitting here and pretending to holy orders, I have sins of my own to confess!”

“Be quiet and listen,” I said. “I expect no absolution. I want only a friendly ear.”

“Well, then, you may have it, and right gladly,” he said. “Is it true, then? Are you this legendary Prince of Shadows?”

“Who told you so?”

“The girl, though hardly in so many words. I think she was sad to leave, when she had been lighthearted enough before. . . . Did you take her virtue, boy?”

“What? No!”

“You creep in the windows of the innocents,” he said sternly. “By her own admission, you came a-calling at the Capulet palace in the dark of night. I remember a certain evening when you importuned me to rush to her defense when her brother was angry. I thought it might be a case of lost family honor.”

“Rosaline’s honor is not her family’s,” I said. “And I did not take it, in any case.”

“Well, then. Continue, if you wish to confess.”

“I confess that I steal from the arrogant and the venal,” I said. “I steal to punish them for their insolence and their cruel pride. And I have no shame in that.”

“A straightforward nobleman would simply take it out in challenge,” he said. “And I hear you are no novice at the blade, and have a hot temper when pushed. Why this cold, dark-of-night pursuit?”

“Dueling is a death offense, by the prince’s own command,” I said. “And it takes skill to become a good thief. Skill, and nerve.”

“Very well, then. You steal. What else?”

“I’ve killed,” I said, more quietly. “Two Capulet men who cornered us in a narrow place, if I might answer for my servant’s sins as well.”

“A fair match?”

“Fair enough, and outnumbered.”

“Then you’ve no guilt for that, beyond that of any decent man. What else?”

I hesitated, and then said, “I let a boy be hanged, and I did not try to stop it.”

That brought a long silence from the monk, followed by a heavy, soul-deep sigh. “Aye, you are far from alone in that,” he said. “No doubt your cousin Romeo flinches from that memory as well. But to act on your own against a mob would have been foolish and useless. Your friend Mercutio courted his disaster, and the boy’s life was the price. You have sin, perhaps, but not in as great a part as he, who had not the courage to turn away from his lover, nor to defy his family. I knew Tomasso. He was a sweet young man, but weak willed and too much in love. It was never to end well; may God have mercy upon his soul.”

Now, to the hardest. “It was not the Capulets responsible for betraying Mercutio to his father,” I said. “It was my sister. Veronica. I know common talk blames Rosaline for it. That was Veronica’s malice.”

“It matters little now, and Veronica’s sins are not yours,” Friar Lawrence said, and I saw the shadow on the other side of the confessional screen shake its tonsured head. “The boy’s gone to God; Rosaline is safely on her way to the convent. The trouble between the Capulets and Montagues can get no worse.”

“It can if Mercutio takes it in his head to seek vengeance.”

“The boy was rashly angry, true, but he’s calmed now; he’s well married, and rumors say there will be a babe on the way soon. His grudge against the Capulets may well stand, but what of it? You have as good a reason, or better.” He meant my father’s death. But my father had been born into the feud; the Ordelaffi family had typically been Capulet allies, but only on the outskirts of the conflict. Mercutio might have cheerfully accepted his own death at the hands of a Capulet, but not his lover’s, by intrigue and at the end of a rope his own father had carried. There was no honor in it.

I judged it would not gain much to argue, so I let the point pass. “I have had lustful thoughts,” I said.

“So have all men, my son.”

“Forgive me, Friar, should you not upbraid me for my shortcomings, and make me promise to do better to earn my forgiveness?”

“Oh, yes, I see your point. Very well, then. Think on the girl no more; she’s lost to the world now. And I know you are sensible enough to know you’d never have had her in any case.”

I did not want to answer that, so I let silence answer for me, until Friar Lawrence’s shadow gave a sad sigh. “Ten Our Fathers and a donation to the poor for the part you played, however small, in Tomasso’s death. Ten Hail Marys for your lustful thoughts.”

“And my thieving?”

I heard him rattle the heavy bag I’d pressed into his hands. “I think this would buy you a dispensation even in the court of the pope, my son. Fear not; I will not waste it on sinful pursuits. I will commission a new saint for the chapel. Perhaps Saint Nicholas.” There was mischief in that. Saint Nicholas was commonly held to be the patron saint of thieves. In a sly way, it was a dedication to the Prince of Shadows as a generous donor.

“You’ll need to sell them far away,” I warned him. “Della Varda will recognize his own handiwork easily enough.”

“I will sell them in Fiorenza,” Friar Lawrence said placidly. “I was bound there soon in any case. And even should he track them to my door, what guilt has a holy brother for accepting a generous, and anonymous, donation? The bishop will never let him have it back. What’s given to Christ is always Christ’s.”

The friar had a streak of larceny in him, I thought, and I wondered what his occupation had been in the days before he’d shaved his pate. Something a good deal less holy, I thought. “I wish you luck, Friar.”

“And I you,” he said, with more concern in his voice. “Stay a moment, and hark me well. This stealing you do has less of greed in it than grief, and it will bring you more. You see it as an adventure, sir, and so the poets would name it, stealing grandly about in the moon and avenging your honor in secret. But I tell you, it will bring you nothing but pain in the end. I beg you, and I instruct you, to give it up and follow a straight path. Make me a promise, then, and receive your forgiveness with your God.”

I thought for a moment, and then said, reluctantly, “I cannot promise, Friar, for it’s worse to break a promise to God than to continue to sin, and seek forgiveness later.”

“Boy . . .” He sounded aggrieved, but the friar knew me better than to deliver another speech. “I cannot grant you absolution for what you do not regret.”

“You said you could not grant me absolution at all,” I reminded him, and opened the door of the confessional. “Thank you for listening, Friar. Be careful with your new donation.”

“God be with you,” he said.

But I felt, as I left the chapel and limped homeward, that I walked alone. More alone than ever.

• • •

Romeo was still an utter fool. I found this out nearly by chance, as I sought him out in the predawn morning. He was not abed, as he ought to have been. Instead, he was sitting at a table, bathed in candlelight, scribbling furiously with pen to paper. His handwriting, I saw when I leaned over his shoulder, had far too many ornate flourishes to be addressed to a merchant or banker.

No, this was to a girl. And so I did what any near-brother would do: I snatched it away from him and held it up to the candle’s glow to read it while he argued and tried to grab it back.

It was written, by name, to my lady Rosaline, and it was all the things he had been warned not to do, not to say, not to think or feel. It was a death sentence for me, should it ever see eyes beyond my own, and I cursed under my breath, stalked to the fireplace where the embers were banked low, and threw the thing in. I brought the blaze back to a brisk roar with a poker before my cousin attacked me with his full strength, knocking me almost into the inferno myself. I kept hold of the poker, more to prevent him from using it than out of any murderous impulse, though his stupidity was reason enough to bash him senseless.

I threw him back, but in the process my bad leg gave way, and I overbalanced with him, crashed over an inconveniently placed trunk, and ended up on the losing end of the battle, with my furious cousin sitting on my chest, fists clenched and ready to batter. “You puking dog!” he spat. “You vile, insolent—”

“You disobeyed me,” I said. I sounded calm, though I felt none of that. I still held the poker in my hand, and I could have brained him with it, but I did not. “We agreed you’d write no more to her.”

“I wasn’t!” His fury was already sliding past, his fists loosening. Romeo was still a child in many ways—he was quick to temper, and quick to forgive. He’d grow slower in both before long; the world would beat the gentleness from him, the way it had me. “I write not to her. I write for my own . . . my own amusement. I would have burned them when I was finished!”

“Then I just hastened it along,” I said, and winced as his weight came down harshly on my wounded leg. “Off with you; you’re as clumsy as a jackass on cartwheels.”

Even after he rose, I was slow to follow, and had to grasp a wall sconce for help in finding my balance. He frowned at me, my critique of his poetry already fading. “What’s the matter with your leg?”

“A dog,” I said. “He found me tasty. Worry not; it’s been well looked after; I’m not likely to burst and bleed.”

“A dog,” Romeo repeated, and his frown deepened. “A guard dog? Were you seen?”

“Espied,” I said. “But pursued. It’s been seen to, I tell you. All’s well.”

“Not if it’s known you were injured! Can you walk without betraying yourself?”

“I’ve a plan for that,” I said. Rosaline’s plan. “Tomorrow morning, you and several servants will be witness to my falling down the steps. So long as the wound is well wrapped, it can be passed off as a wrenched ankle.”

“And if they make you show them?”

“The day some common merchant’s street thugs can force a Montague to strip will be a dark day for our house,” I said. “You know it will never happen. All I need do is stand on the family’s honor and face them down. If not with bravado, at sword’s point.”

He nodded slowly, gravely. My cousin had acquired new gravity these past few months, especially since Mercutio had been removed from our presence. We had both felt heavier, I think. More tethered to our duties and responsibilities. Would that it were not so . . .

“Come,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “No more moping over women. Love is a pain that both of us can well do without. Off to our beds, and dream of nothing but sleep itself.”

He gave me a weary, crooked smile. “I dream only of red lips and sweet kisses,” he said. “If I did not know her destined for holy orders, I would think her a demon, to haunt me so.”

He loved an idea, I thought, and not the girl herself; to him, Rosaline was a perfect, unobtainable jewel, more icon than flesh. I did not, in that moment, hate him; instead, I rather pitied him. My cousin was in love with love, and it would never be requited.

At least I had seen the woman behind the pretty fog of words, seen the flash of temper and sweetness in her, known her for a wholly unique and engrossing puzzle. That puzzle would never be solved by me, nor by Romeo, and I had to be content with that.

I ruffled his hair, which made him give me an ungentle shove, which I returned, and the play went on until I cried for mercy with my poor, dog-chewed leg aching. Then I limped off to my bed, leaving Romeo to seek his.

And his poetry sizzled into ashes in the fire.

• • •

The morning brought my mummery of a fall—so well acted, in fact, that I knocked my head and was half a day dazed, aching, and bruised. That it had been done not only in front of servants and Romeo, but before my august uncle and aunt, was a great benefit. I was much fussed over, my aching ankle wrapped tight, and told very sternly to rest and allow it to heal. Content in the knowledge that my fall would be the talk of the day at the market, I hobbled back to bed, where I stayed for another two days until the dog bite had mended, and the aches and pains faded. I wore the bruise on my forehead as a badge of honor.

The next morning I rose, and Romeo and I strolled slowly through the market square, talking with the high and the low, bargaining for a list of things my mother had given, trailed by retainers and would-be friends. Without much warning, we spotted a familiar face in the crowd: Mercutio. Romeo saw him first, and gripped me tight by the arm—by happenstance, his thumb closed hard on a bruise, and I was for a moment silent as I resisted the urge to curse him roundly.

“Look you,” he said, and pointed. “Our hound has left his doghouse. And much changed he seems.”

He did. Mercutio seemed to stand taller, walk with a more confident and aggressive stride, though instead of the vibrant colors he had so recently affected, he wore black—a deep shade of night, slashed through with thin lines of orange. It suited him, and yet I felt a misgiving on seeing him. There was a certain bleakness to him, but also a sharper edge, like a knife whetted to its breaking point.

Yet, upon seeing us, his old familiar smile burst into glorious warmth, and he rushed upon us to throw arms around us both. “You familiar devils! How could you still live without me, fair-weather friends?” He shoved Romeo, and playfully batted at me, and we scuffled like happy schoolboys, laughing.

Romeo ruined it by blurting, “Marriage seems to agree with you, Mercutio!”

I saw it all in a blinding flash, sudden as a lightning strike: Mercutio’s eyes widened and darkened, and there was violence in him, hatred, fury, self-loathing . . . there, and then immediately gone, vanished beneath a smiling facade. If he shoved Romeo too hard then, if his smile was a bit too wild and harsh, well, then, who but me would know? Not Romeo, who had seen only what he wished.

“You should try it yourself, to settle your wild spirits,” Mercutio said. “Or are you still writing poor phrases to that coldhearted bitch?”

I put a hand on Romeo’s shoulder to prevent him from spitting out a reply; it was surprising to me how violent my own reaction was to hear such fury from my own friend. I did understand it. The anger, the pain, the self-loathing, all that I could grasp; he felt he had betrayed not just his dead lover, but his own true self. And he blamed Rosaline for it all.

“He’s well quit of his affliction,” I said, and Romeo—wiser than I’d feared—kept his silence, though anger smoldered in the tense lines of his face and shoulders. “We’re well pleased to see you out about the town, my friend. We have missed your cutting wit.”

It was a prime opportunity for him to respond with a play on words, a jest that would have made a brothelkeeper blush, but he only smiled that slightly unsettling smile, regarding me with eyes I could not easily read.

“Well, then,” he said, and put his arms around our shoulders, “the first thing we must do is to drown your wits in wine to make mine seem all the more clever. Especially yours, Benvolio. You’ve a thirsty look to you. Come, a cup of wine and tell me your troubles, then, for I’m a married and respectable gentleman now, and my wisdom has of course increased tenfold.”

The words held a mocking edge that discomforted me, but I went, and Romeo went, where Mercutio bade us—which was to an unsavory and ill-smelling hole of a tavern known to harbor the roughest of criminals. I pulled away as he turned us toward the door. “No,” I said, and tried to make it a joke. “Your wisdom may have increased tenfold, but my courage has not; let’s find someplace more congenial, my friend; this is only seeking a needless quarrel—”

“What?” Mercutio turned with a grandly opulent gesture, cape swirling like black fog, and fixed that strange smile upon me. “I’m the one dragged to the altar, and everyone knows marriage cools the blood. Yours should be hot still, and thirsty for Capulet swords.”

This was not a wholly new Mercutio, but it was my friend in his worst and blackest moods, and it worried me that instead of creeping out slyly in private, his distemper burst out of him in defiant daylight, while half the street gazed on it.

But still, I tried. “Mercutio, surely a Capulet loyalist lurks in that sinkhole. Kill a Capulet, and it’s our lives forfeited, and for what?”

“Worse,” Romeo said gloomily, retreating to stand next to me. “We might lose.”

“Then you’d be dead,” Mercutio said. “And beyond any shame.”

“You’ve met our grandmother,” said Romeo. “She’d pursue us well beyond the grave, that one.”

“I don’t do the bidding of an old woman,” Mercutio said. “Come, now, boys, I do not look to fight. I only give the fight the chance to look at me.”

“Why?” I grabbed his arm and held him back from entering, sure that if he did I’d never see him alive again. “Why do you do this?”

His eerie smile faded, and for a moment he regarded me with sober intensity before he said, “Grief cuts deeper than Capulets,” and shook off my restraint. “Go or stay. I care not.”

Then he walked inside the tavern, and Romeo and I were left to stare at each other. Balthasar, greatly daring, leaned forward to whisper, “Sir, for the sake of my children, I beg you, walk on.”

“You have no children, Balthasar.”

“I could have, someday. But not if you bid me stand at your back in there! We’ll all of us end the day facedown in a hasty grave, sir, if you follow him!”

“Are we then to let him die alone?” Romeo responded hotly, and plunged inside, after Mercutio.

“Well.” Balthasar sighed. “I suppose it’s as good a day as any to meet God, sir.”

And he, with Romeo’s retainer and three of our best bravos, followed me into the lion’s den.

• • •

As it happened, the Capulets were not in force within the confines of the tavern at present, though a few of their more ragged followers lurked in the corners; rather, we were presented with a wall of sweat and muscles who had no use for the more refined folk at all, save as a source for ready profit. Seeing the three of us, they must have thought the lambs had walked calmly into the butcher shop, ready to make a fine dinner.

They hadn’t reckoned on Mercutio, who strode in with a catlike grace, gave the room a wild, sharp smile, and bowed most mockingly. “Greetings, you fine fellows,” he said, and kept his hand provocatively on the hilt of his sword as he swaggered to the rough, stained wooden counter that served as a bar. “I’ll have wine for me and my good companions.” He winked and bounced a gold florin from the bar—a hundred times what any foul pressing available in this place was worth. The haggard woman standing behind the plank reflexively snatched the coin from the air, opened her hand, and gaped as if she’d never seen such a thing . . . and likely she hadn’t. Her grubby fist clenched hard around it, and she glared at the rough men staring in her direction to warn them off. They shrugged and turned their attention back toward Mercutio. Surely, if there was one gold florin, there were more.

“We should go,” I said quietly. “Whatever demon has possessed you, this is madness.”

“Love is that demon,” he said. The woman—a nightmare collection of beetled brows, moles, and wildly growing chin hairs—slapped down wine cups that were no cleaner than her hands. “If love be rough with you, be rough with love. . . . It is a disease, and this the very cure of it. Drink, my friends, drink and be merry; fine wine and cheerful company, what could be—”

A massive man, stinking of garlic and wine and wearing a dirty Capulet band on his arm, shoved Mercutio hard into the bar, sending the wine cups tumbling and flooding. The barkeep leaped away from the sudden crimson flow, both hands clutching her precious florin, and took to her heels behind a sagging curtain. She’d not be calling for the watch, that much was certain, and there were ten men between our outnumbered party and the dim door.

Mercutio calmly righted a cup, saving half the wine therein, and quaffed it in a convulsive, thirsty gulp. He then turned belly-to-belly with the man who’d shoved him. “Clumsy churl,” he said. “You owe us drinks.”

I shouted a wordless warning as the man yanked a dagger free from his belt, but it wasn’t needed; Mercutio, still smiling, slammed the chipped pottery cup into the man’s face, and as the mountain stumbled backward, roaring, Mercutio pulled his own dagger and stabbed down cleanly, pinning the man’s wrist to the bar. The man swung at him, still shouting, and Mercutio sank just enough to avoid the blow, came up with a second dagger in his hand and glittering murder in his eyes.

And that smile, oh, that smile, it chilled me even as I pulled my own dagger, and felt Romeo beside me doing the same. Balthasar had already drawn his cudgel and was laying about with it in an attempt to clear space around us. One of his fellows—Romeo’s man—had already fallen. The crowd of men around us churned like a stormy sea of flexed muscles, anger-darkened faces, and then it was just a fight for our lives, no sense to it, no strategy. There was no room for swords, only the sweaty, desperate work of daggers and clubs. If Balthasar had not been at my back, and Romeo at my side, we three would have been immediately overwhelmed, but we acquitted ourselves well enough.

Mercutio fought alone.

I had always known he had a dark, furious side in him, something fey and feckless, and now it had taken him over like a black spirit as he spun, stabbed, dispatched foes with elegant thrusts and clever twists of his body. He looked . . . alive. He looked disquietingly happy.

I had seen a caged tiger once, a beast brought by ship from India and destined for some grand palace; the thing’s brilliant beauty had impressed me, and so had its utter savagery. No mercy in those glowing, furious eyes, those bared fangs. To face it was to face death.

Mercutio was just such a tiger, alive with the desire to destroy everything in his path, for the sheer bloody sake of his own pain. I was afraid for all our lives, but I was most afraid of him, in that moment; there was something merciless and blind in him, something that required blood.

And oh, he claimed his due in that filthy tavern. I know not if he killed men, but if they were spared it was only God’s hand at work; by the time the crowd had fallen back from us, he was spattered with fresh red, and his dagger ran with it, and the floor was thick with writhing, groaning men. We had lost two of our own, fallen senseless, and I had two minor wounds; Balthasar limped from a cut on his thigh.

“Mercutio!” I shouted to him as we achieved the blessed sanctuary of the doorway. I could scarce believe we’d survived at all. “Mercutio, away, now!”

I watched him raise the dagger to his lips and kiss its bloody steel, sketch a mocking salute, and then jump lightly over the fallen foes to join us. In the brilliant sunlight, we were wine-stained, cut, bruised, and my heart still pounded from a sickening mix of exaltation and terror. I wiped my dagger roughly clean and sheathed it, then grabbed Mercutio by the shoulders. I felt the fine vibration of his body through the hard grip of my hands.

He was still smiling, but there was something entirely wrong in it.

“Do you wish death?” I said to him, and shook him hard. “You court it like a lover!”

He said nothing. Nothing at all. And I shoved him backward, threw a look at Romeo, who shook his head and wiped spots of blood from his cheek. “We must away,” Romeo said. “Now, coz. There are dead men to answer for, and best we not be here when the questions are asked.”

“I’m still thirsty,” Mercutio said. “And you never had your wine. We should go back.”

I cuffed him hard across the face, and for a moment I saw real confusion in his countenance, as if I’d woken him from a deep dream, but then he raised a hand to touch the raw spot where I’d hit him, and shook his head.

“What a sad thing,” he said, “when the sons of Montague have milk and water running in their veins.”

“Better water than that wine,” Romeo said. “Come, Mercutio, you’ve drunk too deeply already, for only that could explain what you’ve done. I beg you, let us see you safe home.”

“Home? To my wife?” Mercutio’s tone was so dark that I feared suddenly for that misfortunate girl’s safety. The friend I had known before his lover swung on the tree . . . that Mercutio could be as cruel as a gadfly, but it was all vinegar wit, no spite behind it. The venom in him now was new, and boded ill indeed. “After so long apart, do you long to see me gone so soon from your company, my friends? I thought you loved me well.”

“We do love you well, Mercutio, and you know that I would gladly die by your side, but this—this is black folly. Come away; come and have a quiet cup of wine in a congenial place. Will you?”

Romeo spoke so gently, so earnestly, that perhaps even Mercutio’s much-scarred heart was moved a bit. . . . He reached out and clapped a hand on Romeo’s shoulder. “Well, then,” Mercutio said. “Well, then, perhaps the loss of a florin is not so great a thing. But you, dear one, will buy the drinks.”

“One,” Romeo immediately replied. “One drink. And then safe conduct home.”

Whatever madness had taken hold of Mercutio seemed to pass, then; we wiped away what blood and stains we could, and found a quiet shaded corner. One drink turned to three before it was done, and Mercutio seemed in fine enough spirit—fine enough that when interlopers approached within a few feet of us on the other side of the screen, he bade us hush and listen. It was no mere underling, lurking near; it was the sour Capulet himself, walking attended by a dim-witted servant and Count Paris, a cousin of Mercutio’s and a relative of the prince himself. An earnest man, older than us, and in need of a wife, it would seem; rumor ran that he sought Capulet’s daughter’s hand in marriage. I heard only random moments of their conclave; Count Paris claimed that younger maids than Juliet had made happy mothers—a claim her father disputed, sagely, with the observation that those wed and bedded too soon were often marred by it. Eventually, they closed their business—apparently something of marriage, to do with the young Juliet—and moved on.

It was nothing to me, until Romeo said, “We need diversion, cousin.”

I looked at him, frowning, but not yet alarmed. We’d all had, perhaps, too much wine on too hot a day. Romeo lunged to his feet and hurried off, with Mercutio only a step behind. When I joined them, I saw Capulet and Count Paris walking off together, well satisfied, and the dim-witted servant was left struggling with a paper he had been given. Before I could stop him, Romeo fell into step with the fellow, looking over his shoulder at the paper he was scrying.

“God-den, good fellow,” Romeo said, and clasped his hands behind his back, the very picture of a polite young gentleman of Verona.

“God gi’ god-den,” the servant said, and thrust the paper out. “I pray, sir, can you read?”

“Ay, my own fortune is my misery,” Romeo said, and after some banter, he took the paper and read it. I hurried to join them, as he began to recite names . . . Count Anselme, the widow of Vitravio, Signor Placentio, Mercutio. Rosaline was on the list, though I well knew she was gone; so was Tybalt, and I assumed, though I had not caught their mention, that the Capulet household entire would be included.

“A fair assembly,” Romeo noted. “Whither should they come?”

“Up,” the servant said.

Romeo sent me an amused look and put a conspiratorial arm around the man’s neck. “Whither, again?”

“To supper,” the servant said. “To our house.”

“To whose house?”

“To my master’s.”

The man was duller than a bucket of pitch. Romeo almost laughed, but managed to contain it. “Indeed,” he said, “I should have asked you before.”

“My master is the great rich Capulet,” the servant said proudly, and puffed out his chest, as if absorbing the gold and status merely by attachment. “If you be not of the house of Montague, I pray, come and crush a cup of wine. Rest you merry!”

He darted on, intent on delivering his message, though I doubted he would remember half the names Romeo had recited to him.

Romeo stared after him thoughtfully, and I felt the first inkling of disquiet. “What, coz?” I asked him.

“Rosaline,” he said softly.

“She’s gone,” I said. “Gone to safety, far away. She’ll not be there.”

“And if she is?”

I threw an arm around his shoulders and walked him back toward where Mercutio waited. My thoughts whirled furiously, shouting in the dark cavern of my skull, but above all was the clear, bitter voice of my grandmother, reminding me astringently of my duty, and the consequences.

“I will go,” he declared. “It is a masked feast, I heard it said. I will go in secret. If she is there . . .”

“Coz, I said she would not be.”

“You could be wrong,” he said, and there was no levity in it now, only a calm certainty. “I will go, Benvolio. If she has been spirited off to the convent, then my love for her must fade, as God wills. But I will go, to see for myself that she is gone.”

“You risk your life for nothing.”

“No,” he said. “I risk it for an angel come to earth. And so would you, if you were not made of ice.”

He had no idea how much I burned within at that, hot as the devil’s breath; he had no right to take this risk. No right to love her so diligently.

No right to put me so far at risk, because I could not let him go alone, unguarded, into that pit of vipers.

Some of the anger came out in my voice as I said, “Then let us go to this masked feast. All the beauties of Verona will be assembled there. Look upon their faces, and you’ll think your swan a crow.”

I said this, but I did not mean it; there was no woman in Verona, however fair, who held the power of Rosaline, I thought—though Romeo had an appetite for beauty, and he’d have plenty to dine on at this Capulet party.

Mercutio, watching us with bright, malicious eyes, finished off his wine and dashed the cup onto the cobbles, where it shattered. When the merchant shouted, he threw a coin to him without looking. “What mischief are you proposing?” he asked, and flung his arms over our necks, more to sustain himself than to embrace us. “What amusements? And mention not any woman’s name, or I shall choke it from your wretched throat.”

“A fine amusement,” Romeo said. “But you must promise to be on your best behavior, Mercutio. If you hold your temper, it will be a great adventure, and a trick for the ages.”

I had never meant him to involve Mercutio in this folly. I was sickly aware that in doing so, he had raised the stakes of this game from merely dangerous to catastrophic.

“A trick?” Mercutio echoed, and gave us a slow, delighted grin. “You have only to lead me to it.”

• • •

Romeo and Mercutio had the bit between their teeth, and whatever misgivings I had mattered not. I gave up trying to persuade them, and instead hoped only to help them survive this adventure. Misadventure, more like.

That night, cleaned and dressed in nondescript finery, we stole out of the Montague palace without any colors to mark us, and took only a few servants, in case we had to take to our heels quickly. My mask was of an owl; Romeo’s was a cat, likely in mockery of Tybalt. As for Mercutio, he wore a fanciful gold thing, bright as the rising sun, but then he was—of all of us—the only one who had an excuse to be at the feast. “Being a distant cousin to the prince has its privileges,” he told us, as he tied on the gaudy thing. “Even the Capulets fear to slight my family, though they disapprove of my . . . friendships.” I wondered whether he referred to the one with us, or the one his family had tried so hard to erase. Poor Tomasso—he had vanished entirely from the memory of Verona, except in whispers. No one dared remember him.

No one except Mercutio, of course, though if that was who he was thinking of at that moment, I knew not. He seemed back to his usual merry self, full of mischief and sauce.

We were but moments from escaping cleanly when there was an imperative rap on my chamber door, and we all went still and quiet. Ignore it, Mercutio mouthed, but I shook my head, removed my mask, and went to answer the summons.

It was not a summons, however; it was a visitation. The knock had not come from knuckles, however bony; it had been the hard wooden top of my grandmother’s cane, and the old witch herself stood there, layered in black and swaddled in shawls. I’d rarely seen her standing, and never, never had she darkened my door. She was not alone, of course; no fewer than four attendants shuffled around her in the narrow spaces, hovering anxiously lest she drop suddenly under the strain. They were under the delusion that she was a frail elderly woman, but what I saw in her face was volcanic fury, and no weakness at all.

She stamped her cane on the flaggings with such force the echo silenced all other sounds, and glared at me under thick gray brows. “Well?” she demanded. “Do you mean to keep me waiting inhospitably on the step, like a rude churl? Or must I have your manners beaten into you?”

I stepped back and gave her a profound bow, and my grandmother doddered over the threshold, each stab of her cane an emphatic pounding, like coffin nails being driven deep. Her retinue followed, all in the same dreary black, even the footman, who by rights should have been liveried in Montague colors. The old woman detested bright things as much as she detested everything else.

The footman shut the door behind her party and stood against it with the obvious intention of keeping all inside. I did not protest. I was curious—too curious, perhaps—at what had winkled my grandmother from her blazing hearth.

She glared at us each in turn. “Take off those foolish masks,” she snapped at Romeo and Mercutio. Even Mercutio moved quickly to obey, and stood eyes cast down, clearly wishing not to be the reason for her appearance

He was not. She turned that dragon’s gaze upon me, instead. “I warned you,” she said, and stabbed an age-crooked finger toward my chest. “I warned you there would be consequences for misbehavior. Someone’s tongue wagged, boy. The three of you, in a tavern only a little better than a midden! Blows exchanged, and men sore wounded! Did you think the prince would not hear of it and summon your uncle—and you, fool Mercutio, your father!—to his presence? You’ve shamed us, and raised Capulet in his estimation, and that cannot be allowed.” Her watery eyes narrowed, and her lips tightened with it. “Montague must be seen to be of greater wit than mere tavern brawlers. If you would risk your skins on foolish games, then play one that favors us in the end! I hear you’ve taken it into your empty heads to sneak into the bosom of House Capulet. Then do so. Find a way to embarrass them in their own home. Perhaps seduce that less-favored girl cousin—”

“Rosaline?” Romeo asked, coming to alert like a greyhound spotting a rabbit to chase. “Did she not enter a convent?”

“Gossip says she never reached it,” Grandmother said, and a thin smile cut her lips. “Her brother Tybalt rode out to bring her back, since she ran to a convent of her own choosing rather than the one her family chose. She’s been kept close, but whispers say the Capulets wish to present happy families at their feast tonight, so she will be on display, and likely dancing. You wished to ruin the girl once, Romeo. This is the perfect time.”

“Ruin her?” He was taken aback, the innocent soul. “I never—”

“Men ruin women,” she interrupted him, “and that is all they do, never mind all the amatory nonsense. All you need do is lead her off alone. Surely that is no great challenge for your too-tender conscience. Now, go and goad the Capulets until they rise to the attack, and mark me well: If one of you is cut for it, I will not weep. A few scars are what’s needed to make you men instead of feckless boys!”

I could not stop myself. I said, “And if we are killed?”

“Then you are a martyr for your family’s honor, and there’s no better end for you,” she snapped back, and emphasized it with a crack of her cane on stone. “Go and humiliate the Capulets without spilling their blood in their home. I cannot count on your uncle to salvage our honor this night if you fail.”

She turned, and then, without any warning, lashed out with her cane and caught Mercutio on the thigh, hard enough to leave a bruise. His jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Grandmother glared at him with real menace. “And you,” she said, in a low and harsh voice. “You, pot stirrer, unnatural creature, redeem your reputation with either a sword or an heir of your blood, and do it quickly. Lead any of mine to your perversions and I’ll see you dead where your weak-willed father won’t. Keep your sword sheathed.”

Mercutio said nothing, but there was something glowing in his eyes that almost matched La Signora’s bile. He bowed his head, but neither she nor we were under any delusion that it was surrender. His gaze followed her as she hobbled her way to the door, and out, followed by her attendants.

Then he donned his mask again, and the malice was almost hidden behind it.

“If I heard rightly, your matriarch has given us orders to embarrass House Capulet,” he said. “And I intend to obey. What of you, Benvolio? Romeo?”

Romeo nodded, but the light in his eyes came not from mischief but hope. The only word he could hear from all that grandmother said was a name. Rosaline. I had a foolish boy and a man ridden by a demon as companions, and sad to say, Rosaline’s mention had affected me as well. Something within me had quickened, something I thought I had successfully rooted out.

Hope.

This was gravely unwise. I could feel it now, a deep and uneasy tide within me that warned me we were embarking on a road that would lead only one way: down, into the dark. Grandmother would not weep at our scars, nor our deaths; Mercutio was bent on proving himself as violent a man as any in Verona. Romeo, my kind cousin, would be as easily led into trouble as he was into love.

And I, the responsible one, I knew I ought to put a stop to it, take whatever fury came roaring from the dragon’s mouth . . . but instead, a traitorous whisper in my mind said Rosaline’s name once more, and I knew that whatever doom was to come, I would go, and willingly.

• • •

We did not steal off in darkness, as was my usual habit; instead, we went to the Capulets’ feast in full view, masked and escorted, with torches lighting our way and warning off all footpads who might have tried us. Three young noblemen, eager for the feast and dancing. As fast as Romeo and Mercutio strode, I still led them. My heart pounded, but not from exertion; I had not thought to ever set eyes on Rosaline again, and if I had not I would have been well content that she was safe. If she was God’s bride, I could not be jealous of that, but now she was here, alive and real, and Romeo was extolling her beauty to a bored and restless Mercutio.

“I tell you, she has the fairest skin of any I’ve seen,” Romeo said, a little breathless from the pace I’d set as we walked the Via Mazzini. We saw other torches burning, other parties making their way to the Capulets’ stronghold; from the look of things, our arrival would be little noted. Some of those I spied, in the colors of the Scala, were ten strong or more, bringing along wives, daughters, sons, and distant cousins to share in the feast—perhaps even my possibly affianced, Giuliana. Capulet would spend coin on this, to be sure, but so he should to impress Paris with his daughter’s social prominence. A count of Paris’s status needed a wife he could present proudly.

“I will seek out Rosaline,” Romeo said eagerly, as we came closer to the street, and all the lurid lines of torches began to converge. “I know she will come away with me. All you need do is lure Tybalt, and ensure her ladies are likewise occupied—perhaps in dancing—”

Mercutio ruffled his hair. “So eager to deflower the girl?” he said, and jumped lithely away as Romeo rounded on him. “’Tis the job your grandmother set you, or missed you her message? Humiliate Capulet by showing that their precious convent-bound virgin is a trull. Unless you’d rather I do it for you.”

Romeo shoved him away. I could not see his expression behind his mask, but I imagined his scowl resembled the one that twisted my own face. “Enough,” I said sharply. “I am the eldest Montague, and there’s no reason for Romeo to risk his life for this. If Tybalt wants to wet his blade, better I be the pincushion than Montague’s heir.”

“Don’t,” Romeo said, and grabbed my elbow. “Ben, don’t. Grandmother may win her wars this way, but we should not.”

“Women’s wars are the bloodiest of all,” Mercutio said, and laughed bitterly. “A Capulet woman betrayed Tomasso to hang, and well I know it. I care not for their honor, nor for their safety. Your grandmother is right. To the wall with the Capulet wench, and let her maiden’s blood be the price they pay for what she’s done.”

I shook free of Romeo and faced Mercutio instead. “What demon infected you?” I said. “Suffering for suffering, is that to be our lives? Blood for blood? Blow for blow?”

“Measure for measure,” Mercutio said. “It’s ever been our lives, brother Ben, and if you did not always know it, then you are a bigger fool than I ever knew, and it’s well your cousin is heir and not you. Weak English stock has watered your good Veronese blood.”

He turned his back on me, and I made a convulsive move for my sword, but reason stopped me—reason, and the knowledge that Mercutio would say anything, anything at all, to goad those near him. Even his friends.

“It is a demon riding you,” I said, “and the demon’s name is grief. But push me again and I will push back, Mercutio. Mark me.”

He held up a languid hand. “I care nothing for it,” he said. “Come if you are coming. If you do not, I’ll seek out this Rosaline myself and prove her false to her faith and family before the bells next ring.”

What could we do, then? Romeo and I each had our reasons for moving with him to the officious Capulet servant at the door ticking names from his invitation sheet. Mercutio gave his own, and waved at the two of us and named us country cousins. The servant frowned, but passed us in; Mercutio was a distant cousin of the Prince as well as Count Paris, after all, and no one wanted to be accused of slighting the potential bridegroom’s relatives.

Within the low-ceilinged hall, torches blazed, throwing a cheerful glow over groaning tables of food and drink pushed far against the walls. I’d not ventured into this space before, during my explorations of the enemy’s household, and my eye was caught by the grand silk Capulet banner fluttering on the wall, embroidered with the family’s crest and motto: We repay all. It was a clever enough turn of phrase, and it meant they paid debts and swore vengeance with equal vigor.

I was busily thinking of all the ways I might use that arrogant flag against them. I might steal it and use it to drape a donkey—yes, a donkey carrying a drunkard dressed in Capulet colors through the town square. The image made me smile, and I marked it down for later use. The ridicule would madden them, and Tybalt in particular.

My smile faded, because in the middle of the bright whirl of masked and anonymous strangers, I saw a girl’s straight back, high-held chin, and the graceful rise of her neck. She was too tall for common fashion, and her mask was plain white with only a small sparkling of red crystals to brighten it. She did not need much ornamentation, I thought. The dress she wore was also plain, and demure—it would not have been wrong gracing a dowager, and was well suited to a girl destined for the nunnery.

But despite its best efforts, her costume did not make her plain.

Rosaline stood against a pillar near the edges of the room, smiling politely and refusing all offers to join in the dancing; she held a small cup of wine, but I did not think she was drinking.

I was not the first to spot her. Mercutio was. He swept toward her without hesitation, sketched an elaborate bow, and kissed her hand with perfect gentility—and did not release it. He bent close, and I saw his lips move beneath the mask. I saw Rosaline seem to draw back against the pillar; whatever he had said, it had repelled her.

Romeo stood next to me, sighing. “I wish I had not come,” he said. “You have dancing shoes with nimble soles; I have a soul of lead that stakes me to the ground so I cannot move. I cannot see her.”

I realized, with a jolt of surprise, that he had looked right over Rosaline, the very girl he idolized so . . . and surveyed the crowd with all the joy of a mourner at the grave.

Mercutio had still not released Rosaline’s hand, and I could see the paleness of her knuckles as she struggled to pull free. His lips were moving near her ear, but as I watched, she finally tore her hand from his and edged past, disappearing into the crowd in a whirling flutter of skirts.

I felt unaccountably hot and flushed beneath the mask, and my fists had clenched tight. But I held myself still as Mercutio came back to us, still eyeing the crowd with a glitter I did not like. “Come, gentle Romeo, we must have you dance,” he said, and pushed my cousin a little. “You are a lover; borrow Cupid’s wings and soar with them above a common bound.” Another push. Romeo pushed back.

“I am too sore pierced with his shaft to soar with his feathers,” he said, and whatever else he said I lost, because I saw Rosaline again through the crowd. She was turned toward us, staring not at me, I thought, but at Mercutio. I could not read her expression past the mask, but she seemed to me disturbed.

Romeo and Mercutio continued to quarrel behind me—or rather, Romeo to insist he was done with love, and Mercutio to mock him with long-winded talk of dreams. I edged away from them, moving slowly so as not to attract their interest, and entered the dance that swirled in the center of the room. The older men and some of the women sat and watched the merrymaking, and I nodded and offered my hand to a passing young girl masked as a deer; we made our steps, and I handed her off to another man in rich Capulet colors, with a mask of bloodred and gold. Tybalt. I recognized the arrogant set of his jaw, and looked away in the hope he did not likewise know me. He did not seem to, and the dance passed on, steps and claps, turns and hands briefly clasped as the musicians sawed and brayed on . . .

...and then, suddenly, my hand was on Rosaline’s palm, and we were turning slowly, like petals in a lazy wind, and our gazes met and locked. Her lips parted, but she did not speak. So neither did I. When the measure was danced, rather than release her, I pulled her to the side, and she came, most willing.

“You should not be here,” she whispered. Her voice was low and urgent, her eyes fierce behind their covering. “If my brother spies you—”

“Do not let anyone lead you off alone,” I told her. “Promise me that you will not.”

“Mercutio already tried,” she said, and studied me with what I thought might be a frown. “I am no fool, to be so lightly ruined. What’s planned for me?”

“Nothing good,” I said. “Capulet seeks retribution for its losses today, and Montague will try to strike first—why are you here?” It came out more passionately than I had meant for it to, and more vexed.

“No fault of mine,” she said. “I was safely in the convent when Tybalt came to remove me; the abbess would have refused him, but he threatened to do great violence if deprived, so I agreed to return. They’ll send me on to their own choice of holy order soon. I only am put up here to provide a plain ground for Juliet’s brilliance.”

She did not sound bitter, I thought, only resigned. Like Mercutio, I was holding to her hand, but she did not try to pull free. If anything, her fingers tightened on mine, to the point of pain.

“Can you not try again?” I said. “Slip away, find a place they will not look . . . ?”

She shook her head slowly, never looking away. “The arm of my family is long, and there is no hole into which they will not reach. Best if I do not risk others for my own selfish purpose. Whatever comes, I will bear it.” She blinked, then, and glanced away. I followed the look to Mercutio, who had his head bent to listen to another young girl—a more distant relation, but still Capulet blood. “Your friend . . . I know he has been sorely tried, but he seems so greatly changed from what I remember.”

“What did he say to you?” I was aware of the dance moving behind us, of sharp glances from some of the older guests toward us; we could not be seen to linger. “Did he—”

“Look after him,” she said, and slipped her hand free of mine. “There’s a darkness in him that will spill out, if it has not already. Another reason I should withdraw to the peace of my rooms, and thence to the convent. This is my cousin Juliet’s triumph, after all. I would not wish to draw from it.”

“Rosaline . . .” I said her name, and heard the gentleness in my own voice; I saw the answering flash in her eyes, and heard the intake of her breath. I took another step to bring us closer, but I did not touch her. Not again. “God be with you, if I cannot.”

“And with you,” she said. I saw a quick, silver shine of tears over her eyes, quickly blinked away. “And with you.”

Then she turned and was gone, weaving her way out of the heady crowd.

I felt cold, suddenly, as if the only source of heat in the room had gone with her, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled with sudden alarm, for I saw Mercutio had disappeared as well . . . gone into the shadows with the tender young Capulet cousin. Mercutio nursed a wicked and sincere hatred, and there was little he would not do to avenge his lost lover.

Then I saw Romeo.

Juliet Capulet ought, by all rights, to have been on the arm of her suitor Paris, but the count had gone to greet his more powerful relative, the prince of Verona, who had arrived with much flourish in the hall. The disruption had broken apart the dancers, and all eyes were trained toward the prince and his party, not toward the blushing, inconsequential girl in whose nominal honor this feast had been devised.

And the girl, small and sweet and looking more child than woman in her gown and mask, was staring up into my cousin’s face. His unmasked face, for he’d pushed the covering up, and she had likewise displaced her own, and I saw the expressions on them both: rapt. An almost religious ecstasy, something beyond mere attraction. It verged into the profane.

Romeo had ever been a follower of Venus, but this . . . There was something new in his face, his eyes, in the bend of his shoulders toward hers, and the clasp of their hands. I saw it mirrored in her, blinding and beautiful but also dangerously fanatical.

Worse: I saw Tybalt had seen it, too. I was close enough by to hear him mutter to Capulet, “Uncle, this is a Montague, our foe—a villain come in spite to scorn us.”

Capulet was no fool; he spied my cousin immediately and said, “Young Romeo, is it?”

“’Tis he, that villain Romeo,” Tybalt spat, and pushed forward with his hand on his dagger. I tensed and felt for the familiar hilt of mine; it was worthless to start a brawl here, but I couldn’t let a Capulet murder my cousin without any attempt to foil him.

I did not need to put myself on the point of Tybalt’s knife, for his uncle drew him back sharply. “No,” he said. “Verona brags of him as a virtuous, well-governed youth, and I would not for the wealth of all the town do him harm here.” His words were honey, but his expression vinegar; he was thinking of the politics of the matter, and of the prince’s royal presence in the very room. “Be patient and take no note of him.” Tybalt made a rough, low sound of protest, and tried to pull free, but his uncle’s grip tightened to steel. “It is my will. Show a fair presence and put off these frowns. It ill becomes a feast.”

“It fits when such a villain is a guest; I’ll not endure him!” Tybalt said.

“He shall be endured!” Capulet said, and twisted the young man’s arm. “I say he shall. Am I the master here, or you?”

“You,” Tybalt gritted out from between his teeth, though his red-faced fury was plain beneath the mask. “’Tis a shame.”

“For shame, I’ll make you quiet,” his uncle replied, and the threat was plain in his voice. “Go to, and cheerfully.”

It was a dismissal, and Tybalt took it as such, though he looked straight murder upon my cousin Romeo, and I knew very well that this would not end with the eldest son of Capulet being sent away without his supper. He pushed his way through the crowd, leaving in the same direction as his sister but with a good deal less grace.

I watched, in outright horror, as Romeo drew the Capulet girl off behind the shadow of a pillar, and their hands entwined in love knots, and their lips met first softly, then more strongly. A Capulet girl would be well ruined tonight, without doubt, but I had not looked to find it here, and from the earnest hands of my cousin.

I was obscurely relieved to see the fat old nurse of the Capulets waddle over to spoil the moment, sending Juliet off to attend her mother, and staying a moment to answer eager questions from my cousin before shaking him off like dust.

I made my way to him, and marked well the pallor of his face, the dark and shocked look of his eyes.

“She is a Capulet,” he said; I do not think he said it to me, more to himself. “My life is my foe’s debt.”

“We must begone,” I said, and grasped his elbow to lead him out. “The sport is over.” If sport it had ever really been. I searched the room for Mercutio, and saw him emerging from an alcove. He spied us, and arrowed our direction, pausing to deliver mocking bows to Capulets along the way.

Capulet himself rose to block us from the exit. His eyes were bitter and black, but his tone had a honeyed, poisoned sweetness. “Gentlemen, do not prepare to be gone just yet; will you not have food from our feast?”

“We’ve had our fill, gentle Capulet,” Mercutio said, and gave him his very deepest, most mocking bow. “Our thanks to you.”

Capulet’s smile curdled like sour milk, and he nodded. “I thank you all; I thank you, honest gentlemen. Good night.” He called for torches to see us home, and as if our departure were a signal, many others began to offer their good-byes as well.

Romeo, like Lot’s wife, could not but stare back with pure and aching fascination while I drew him onward, and when I glanced as well I saw the Capulet girl Juliet straining to follow us, against all sense and decorum, and her nurse firmly anchoring her in place.

I felt the same irresistible pull through my cousin’s flesh, trying to draw him back to her. It was more than infatuation, more than love.

It was something darker than that, and with a darker end.

“I must turn back,” he said, as soon as we had him outside in the street. The chill of the night bit hard after the overheated gaiety of the feast, and I wrapped my cloak tighter around my shoulders as I fought to keep hold of him. “Benvolio, I must go back!”

Mercutio threw his own arm over Romeo’s shoulders and steered him firmly away from the Capulet palace, and toward our own safer territory. “Madness,” he said, and laughed to rub knuckles over Romeo’s curls. “Give him a taste of his fair Rosaline and he’s hungry all over again. There’s nothing so fair about that wench, or any.”

Romeo began to hotly fire back, but then withheld his choler, and I realized why almost at the same moment: Mercutio, it seemed, had missed Romeo’s encounter with Juliet, and therefore thought his longing was for his obsession of this morning. But no man who’d gazed so hotly on a girl as Romeo had on Juliet could still harbor feelings for another; he’d forgotten Rosaline in the second he’d fixed eyes on her younger cousin.

For some obscure reason, I did not wish to tell Mercutio of it, and I could see that Romeo was likewise reluctant.

“Mayhap you’re right,” I said, drawing the focus from Romeo’s sudden silence. “Home with us, then. We’ve scored a coup this night; Capulet had to swallow their pride and allow us to put our feet beneath their table. Grandmother will be well pleased with that.”

“I put my feet beneath more than their table,” Mercutio said, and gave me a wild, sharp grin like the edge of a dagger. “She’ll be better pleased than you know.”

I felt a surge of anger, of dislike, and looked away from him. He was not, I thought, the friend I had known for so long. He was whole without, and ruined within, twisted and burned and blackened, and I mourned for him, because the Mercutio I had loved died on a rope months ago.

“Home,” I said, under my breath. “Home and safe.”

Though I had the disquieting notion that what had just occurred would follow us no matter how far we ran, and that safety would never again be ours.

FROM THE DIARY OF VERONICA MONTAGUE, BURNED UPON ORDERS OF LADY MONTAGUE

My brother, Ben, has done everything possible to avoid me these past months, since the death of the pervert outside the city wall; God wills that these vile, unnatural sinners be condemned and cast out, and whatever Benvolio believes (heretic that he is), I believe that I did God’s business in whispering of the assignation—still, best the blame fall on the Capulet whore, for safety’s sake, for Mercutio makes a bad enemy. I had thought he would swing alongside, but his father was too merciful, and now I must beware constantly of his wrath. ’Tis lucky I thought to swing the guilt toward our enemies when I did.

Benvolio knows the truth, and hates me as much as a brother might hate a sister, but I do not think he would break ranks to betray me to his friend. I keep a watchful eye, nonetheless.

The banns have been cried, and my marriage day approaches! Would that I could marry a young and virile man, but Lord Enfeebled is still rich, and I will have wealth and position enough to move among the finest company. God grant that he expires soon, or I will have to visit that witch they whisper of in town to procure something to speed him on his way. My old nurse says that many a gouty old goat of a husband has been hurried to paradise; I think it more likely they have been shown the straight path to the devil’s own bedchamber.

When I am wedded, for safety’s sake, I will put it about that Benvolio and Mercutio are . . . more than friends. It will be easily believed, and this time, both with pay with their lives; even the softhearted prince will see that it must be done. All that I need do is purchase some commoner witnesses to swear they glimpsed such unnatural practices, and any risk from my brother will be finished.

But first, the wedding. I have insisted upon the finest quality for the feast, as befits a woman with such a well-endowed purse, and I am inviting the better half of Verona to celebrate with me. My mother is pinch-faced about the expense, but she’s ever treated me as her lesser child; I will see she pays me some due before I leave her maternal embrace.

’Tis a pity that men run the world. I was born to be a prince.

I suppose I will settle for marrying one, when this old fool is dead.

Weeks passed.

The mood between our houses turned ever darker. Hatred grew on hatred, quickly and violently, for slights both real and imagined. No edict from the prince could stop it from coming to blood. First, a distant Capulet cousin was knifed in the street by someone not even allied to our house, yet it was cried about on Montague; next, a Montague servant was set upon and beaten to death while on an errand for my aunt, and this was—possibly unfairly—set at the Capulets’ door.

And as untimely as ever, my sister’s wedding approached at the speed of a runaway horse, and with as much decorum; Veronica had turned shrill and moody, and nothing was good enough, not even the fit or fabric of the gown. My mother was tight-lipped on the subject, but my uncle was not so circumspect; he complained, loudly and often, of the lavish expense in ridding himself of the unwanted burden of a niece. Whatever he had cheated from her bridegroom would hardly cover the cost, though we all secretly rejoiced that she would soon be gone.

I came around the corner from my apartments on a bright Thursday morning, with the Angelus bell’s chime still hanging in the air, and found Veronica weeping on a bench in the garden. She was sitting uncovered in the sun, which was strange to see—she always claimed that sun ruined a woman’s skin, and yet here she was, bathed in the glow, disheveled and red eyed, with a single maid hovering anxiously nearby to catch the wet kerchiefs as Veronica finished with them. The maid had not escaped my sister’s ill temper, I saw; there was a red mark on her cheek in the shape of a plump small hand. Perhaps she’d not brought enough kerchiefs to soak up Veronica’s tears.

I tried to move past without incident, but Veronica looked up and in a choked, watery voice, whispered, “Benvolio? Please . . .”

I could not remember a time she had ever used such a word, and so I paused, to gaze down at her. I did not feel any sympathy. Whatever troubles she suffered, she had more than earned them, and I had not forgotten our filthy family secret. The blood that was on her dainty hands had rubbed off on mine, and I would never forgive her for that.

“What?” I asked. It sounded abrupt, but I did not care, not at all.

She burst into tears again, this time (I was sure) feigning grief. I was tempted to walk on, but the maid sent me a beseeching look, and since I pitied her mightily for her role in soothing Veronica, I sighed and sank down on the bench next to my sister. “What?” I asked again, more gently.

“Nothing’s as I thought it would be,” she said, and muffled her words against the kerchief. “The dress is wretched, Benvolio, our uncle has imposed such a restraint on it that it won’t flatter me, and the feast—why, there’s hardly a feast at all! It’s the one day when I can show my quality to the women of Verona, and he’s making me hardly better than a common fishwife. . . . How can I rise in esteem with such a beginning?”

Not so much a female complaint as a problem of ambition meeting its limits, then. “It’s of no matter,” I said. “You bring the family blood of Montague, and your husband is rich enough. Society will embrace you as a woman of quality, Veronica.” God help society, but what I said was true. “Now stop your tears. It ill becomes a woman grown to weep like a spoiled child.”

She sent me a murderous glare through swollen lids, but she wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and threw the soiled kerchief to her attendant. Then she stood up, smoothed her skirts and patted her hair (none of which made any difference to the red mottling on her tearstained face), and took in a deep, trembling breath. “You are acid and vinegar, brother dear, but at least you are bracing. Tell me, then, how fares your friend Mercutio?”

I sensed a barb under the honey, and was instantly wary. “Happily espoused. I see him little now. He has new responsibilities.”

“Espoused,” she agreed. “But happily? It stretches the word’s meaning to say so.” She leaned closer, and dropped her voice to a low whisper. “I hear that he saw a witch. Perhaps to cure himself of his . . . appetites?”

I shoved her away. “Peddle your gossip somewhere else,” I said. “Witches! What next, then? Furies and dragons? Will the old Roman gods come down from Olympus?”

She shuddered and crossed herself. “I pray not. But you should not mock, brother. Witches exist; all the churchmen say it. It takes a dire cause to drive him to one.”

“Then go be pious and pray for Mercutio’s immortal soul,” I said, and stood up. “Pray for mine, while you’re at it. I’m sure I have sins to be forgiven.”

“Many,” she agreed with false sweetness, and snapped open a fan. “I should leave this dreadful sunshine. It won’t do to go to my wedding with spots!”

I wished her a plague of them, as disfiguring as possible, but I said nothing, only stepped aside as she swept past me, heading indoors. Her servant followed with a handful of soiled kerchiefs she’d have to wash and iron and have ready for the next ill-tempered tempest, which might come any moment. She, at least, had my genuine sympathy.

Two more days passed, each another twist of the strangling cord of tension that gripped our household; I kept within the precincts of the palazzo, and so did most of us. Veronica threw more fits, but I observed them only at a hearty distance. My grandmother demanded my attendance once, to interrogate me on Romeo’s behavior and express her pleasure at what had occurred at the Capulet feast; it seemed rumor had run riot in the streets that we had trespassed with impunity, and that one of the minor Capulet girls had been sent, in haste, from the city. Mercutio’s doing, but the old witch was eager to take the credit for Montague.

As to Romeo, he seemed quiet. Subdued, in fact. I saw no more poesies from his pen lauding Rosaline’s beauty, at least, so perhaps the visit to the Capulet feast had yielded some positive result after all.

By the end of that time, the tension and suppressed violence of the household drove me out into the dark once more. I crawled rooftops, dropped silent into bedchambers, and took away the adornments and prizes and secrets our enemies cherished. It was a busy few nights, seeking out Capulet allies and discovering their vices; some were expensive but not sinful, like the man who had an entire room filled with brocades and silks—not for his wife or daughters, apparently, since there were also finished (and never worn) doublets and cloaks made to his measure. I took the richest selection of fabrics and had them sent to my mother and aunt as a gift from a friendly merchant willing to conceal the silk’s origins in order to draw their business toward him.

But there were far darker secrets, and less cheerful prizes. I found a heavy, locked chest in the home of a count, and instead of gems discovered inside the body of a young servant girl; this I left in place, as it was too unwieldy to move, but posted an accusing letter on the church door, along with the bloody silk banner in which she’d been wrapped. I doubted he would ever pay for the crime, but the girl’s pitiful, huddled end had deserved that much effort.

On a moonless night, carefully chosen for cover, I crept into Capulet’s feasting hall, removed the banner, and stole the most doleful-seeming donkey I could find; it bore the indignity of being tarted up with the florid silk banner, and the all-too-drunken Capulet adherent I’d paid to ride it through the streets as a tribute. Unfortunately for the fool, he ran afoul of a nest of his own. It did not end well for him.

I missed having Mercutio at my back. I was taking risks, I knew—ones that might destroy me. But it was as hard to stop stealing as others found it to give up drinking. Perhaps I’ll give it up for Lent, I thought as I crouched in the shadows atop a roof, watching the moon rise. It was only a quarter full, and was the color of rich cream. So many stars above, and as I stared upward, I spotted a vivid shooting star that burned as red as Lucifer’s horns. It was gone in a few seconds.

I heard someone passing below on the street, and flattened myself; in the dark, I would be just another decorative corner to the roof, but the moon illuminated the passerby clearly. He was alone, and anonymous in a worn cloak too big for him, but when a stray gust of wind caught the edges and sent them flying, I spotted the familiar, deadly line of a rapier. No commoner, though he had left off his finery save for the sword.

I was curious. The hour was very late, and I was very bored, waiting for my latest target to douse lights; I made a decision, lowered myself to the iron of a balcony, and then from there to the cobbles, where I quickly stepped to the shadows as he turned. I’d made no noise; this was a man on business just as illicit as mine, clearly.

I followed him down the winding streets. He turned in the shadow of the cathedral, and from there we were in less friendly territory—for me, at any rate, since it was Capulet controlled, and patrolled by their men. I took to higher ground again—rooftops—and watched the brave (or foolish) wanderer. He had sense enough to hide when Capulet guards ambled by, arrogant and loud, spoiling for a fight; as soon as they’d sauntered on, he hurried around the corner.

I dropped down to the street, following in the shadows, and was on the point of avoiding a man asleep in a doorway, cradling a wineskin, when my dark-adapted eyes picked out the familiar sigil of the Ordelaffi on the drunkard’s doublet, and the changeable, cloud-draped moonlight limned the sharp lines of his face.

Mercutio. He was drunk and asleep—muddy and filthy in a doorway that, unless my nose had numbed itself, had been used as a privy more than once.

My casual curiosity about the wayward traveler I’d been tracking vanished, and I glanced about to be sure no one was watching. I still held doubts about Mercutio—we’d avoided his company since the last ordeal of the Capulet feast—but for the love I had once borne him, I could not leave him lying dirty in the street, an object of mockery and a target for thieves and murderers.

I tossed the wine aside, which woke a sleepy murmur from him, and pulled him up to a sitting position. He was as boneless as a corpse, if considerably more mobile, since he shoved at me with ineffective, drunken fury and then flopped back flat on the dirty cobbles.

“I should leave you here, fool,” I said to him in a low, fierce voice, but in truth, my guts ached for him; this was no simple indulgence, coming here into enemy territory. He’d made himself a true foe of the Capulets at the feast by bringing us under his invitation, and for him to be lingering here, helpless . . . it smelled of a desperate desire to meet his God.

I got him on his feet, with great effort, and held him there with his arm around my shoulders. We had stumbled on for several steps before he seemed to realize that he was upright, and several more before he said, tentatively, “Benvolio?”

“Aye,” I said. “Hush, fool; know you not where we are?”

“In the lion’s den, my Daniel,” Mercutio said, and laughed, raw with wine and a barely suppressed wildness. “Hear them roar? Raaaaaar!” He swiped at me with a claw-crooked hand, which I slapped aside. He giggled and nearly slipped to the ground again, but I bolstered him up. “Have you any shiny trinkets tonight? No? What good are you, then, for a thief?”

“Quiet!” This, I realized, had been a mistake, however good-hearted my intentions. Whatever demon drove my friend to drink himself senseless within the easy grasp of his foes would also push him to betray us both. “For the love of God, man, even if you court your own death, don’t court mine!”

He giggled again and shushed himself—noisily—as we stumbled along. If we ran into a Capulet watch, all would be lost; I was anonymously dressed, but Mercutio wore Ordelaffi colors. I stripped off my long cloak and threw it over his shoulders, shrouding the betraying crest.

As we turned the corner, I spotted the single, stealthy traveler I’d started out to follow. He was staring up at a wall, and as I watched, he sprang up and began to climb it. I knew that clumsy scramble, especially when his hood fell back and moonlight exposed his face, angelic and determined beneath a riot of black curls.

My cousin Romeo.

I bit back the impulse to call to him, warn him; the wall, I well remembered, was trapped at the top, and he was ill prepared to deal with such things . . . but I had underestimated him, and as he scrambled up, he balanced carefully above the sharp points, and vaulted over with more grace than I’d have credited. Perhaps my cousin had learned something from me after all.

“Romeo!” Mercutio suddenly brayed, and I almost dropped him in my surprise.

“Hush, man; he’s leaped the orchard wall—”

“Nay, he’s stolen off to bed, but whose bed?” Mercutio thumped me painfully in the chest with an outstretched finger. “I’ll conjure him, like that mad old witch—no, hush; we speak not of witches. . . . Romeo! Humors! Madman! Passion! Lover!”

He was too loud, far too loud, and I shoved him onward, desperate to get him away. He dragged his heels, and would not quieten, rambling nonsense that I only half heard. “The ape is dead, and I must conjure him. . . . I conjure you by Rosaline’s bright eyes, by her high forehead and her scarlet lips, by her fine foot, straight leg, and quivering thigh, and the domains that there adjacent lie—”

“Be still!” I whispered furiously, and shoved him to the wall hard enough to bang his head on stone. “For the love of God—”

“That in your likeness you appear to us! Romeo!” Mercutio’s eyes were acid-bright, his face almost exalted with feverish intensity, as if he believed his childish nonsense was real spellcraft, as if he believed in witches and curses, devils and furies. “I conjure thee appear!”

I had no choice, because I could hear the fast-approaching footsteps of Capulet guards. I hit him hard, twice, to daze him into silence broken only with incoherent moans. As the guards turned the corner, swords drawn, I drove a fist hard into Mercutio’s stomach, and he bent over and promptly vomited up most of the wine he’d downed, all over my boots.

I supported him as he sagged, and stayed in the shadows; the hood covering his face would do well enough, but I was too recognizable to Capulet eyes. “Pardon,” I said, and slurred the word hard. “My fiend—my friend is worse for wine; your pardon, excellencies, most surely pardon—”

“Fool,” the taller of the three guards said, and kicked Mercutio’s leg so he staggered and fell in his own mess. “Wine-soaked idiots! Take your stinking hides home or I’ll carve them for you!”

“Pardon, lord, pardon, most sincere—” I groveled, cringed, and dragged Mercutio with me until he could find his feet again. The Capulets threw stones at us, and one hit with enough force to leave a fist-size bruise on my back; I was lucky he did not hold more ill will, or I’d have a broken rib. Mercutio stayed silent, panting and groaning, until we were well around the corner; then he shoved me hard away.

“You beat me,” he said—moping, like a child.

“I saved your life,” I snapped back. “Move; we must be gone quickly, before they follow.”

“Let them!” He pushed me again when I tried to take hold of him. “You think Romeo would be angry at my conjure? It would anger him to raise a spirit in his mistress’s circle of some stranger, to let it stand until she laid it down. That would be spite. My invocation was fair and honest, in his mistress’s name. . . .”

He was still fevered, I thought; all this talk of witchcraft, of conjuring and invocations gave me chills. Veronica had spoken of witches, and said that Mercutio had sought one out. What madness was this? A dangerous one.

A fatal one.

That, and the thought of Romeo beyond the Capulets’ garden wall, chilled me. Was he seeking Rosaline yet again? Had he misled me after all? No, not chills . . . the cold turned hot, flamed into anger.

Anger that he dared put her at risk.

I tried again to move Mercutio, but he shook me off. “Go, then,” I said. “Be off home.”

“I seek Romeo!”

“You seek him in vain, to seek him here where he means not to be found. Go.”

Changeable, like all drunkards, he suddenly threw his hot, sweated arm around my neck and gave me a sloppy smile. “Come with me,” he said, “my good friend. I am alone and lonely, and I need the comfort of my friends. What have I left but friends?”

“Go home,” I told him. “The cloak will hide you. I know not what you’ll say to your lady wife, but . . .”

His smile curdled, and he looked murder at me for a few seconds before he pulled away, settling the cloak heavily around his shoulders. “The brave Prince of Shadows,” he said, and acid dripped from the words. He sketched a bow that nearly ended with him collapsed on the street. “Prince of thieves, prince of liars, prince of idiots. Why have you killed no Capulets for me, Benvolio? Is there not death between them and me, for the sake of the one I don’t dare name under penalty of the same? You creep, you steal, you take your revenge in secret. I crave more; do you hear? I desire blood!”

“You desire your own ending,” I said to him, and it was brutally honest, and said in love and fear. “Please, my friend. There is blood between Capulets and Montagues, it is true—a lake of it large enough to row on at our leisure. But you can still escape the crimson stain. Let it be done. Look forward, to your future. Find your way, I beg you, before you’re lost to yourself, and to all of us.”

He grabbed me behind the neck and pulled me close, pressed our foreheads together, and said, “I’m already lost, my dear Ben. But I’ll drag those who’ve killed me to hell alongside me.” It was a broken whisper, full of the anguish I knew boiled within him, but in the next second he pushed away and staggered on, one hand trailing the wall for support.

I let him go. Mercutio trailed fate like a cold black cloud, and for a moment I could almost see the sinister shape of it in the cloak that rose and flapped in the night breeze.

Death, I thought. Death stalks behind him.

I should have gone with him, but fear for Romeo, and my family responsibility, held me there after he’d stumbled around the corner, heading vaguely in the direction of the Ordelaffi palazzo.

I looked up, found a handhold, and climbed to the roof of the two-floored shop building. As I passed the open shutters I heard the twin snores of the shopkeeper and his wife; his were low and rumbling, hers thin and halting, though from the lumps wrapped in sheets she was twice his size and half the volume. I scrambled up, balanced on the roof tiles, and ran lightly along to the far end, which overlooked the Capulets’ garden wall—from which I saw, in pantomime, the love-struck Romeo kneeling among the flowers, and the young Juliet bending toward him from her balcony. Well, a part of me thought, at least it is not Rosaline again. Though, in truth, I was not sure this was any better for Montague, and it might be a good deal worse. The yearning between them seemed almost a visible shimmer, like heat upon stones, and she went in and came out, went in and came out, as if she could not bear to be parted from him. Finally, though, in she went, and her doors shuttered to him, and Romeo, dejected and melancholy, climbed the garden wall to leave.

He looked up, then, and saw me perched there watching, and the guilt and horror that flashed across his face were, at least, a little gratifying.

But I forgot it, and nearly forgot him, as another set of windows opened, another set of curtains billowed, and another girl stepped to her balcony. Taller, stronger, older, more richly beautiful to my eyes. She did not look toward us, but up, to the eastern horizon.

Rosaline looked sad. So very sad, and so very alone.

Romeo dropped down into the street and put elbows on his hips, looking up at me. “You spy on me, coz? You dare to—”

I hushed him with an outstretched hand, still staring at Rosaline, whose gaze had sharpened now, and fixed on me exposed and visible across the way. She saw me—I knew she did, for her eyes widened and her hands tightened on the railing—but she said nothing, and raised no alarm.

I nodded toward her. She slowly nodded back. It lit a burning fire within me that drove away all the chills. That one single gesture told me more than all the flowery speeches that must have passed between my cousin and his new love.

She will be leaving soon, sent away to her tomb in the convent. You’ll never see her again, the solemn, practical part of me advised. And so I looked on her, with honest hunger, for as long as I dared. She was so beautiful in the soft glow, all her curves caressed by the dim light; her hair was a glossy dark fall with hints of blue, like a raven’s wing. The wind played with it, and I could imagine the heavy weight of it in my hands, warm and soft, scented of flowers.

Her lips parted, as if she would speak. I did not give her the chance, because I could not bear it.

I slid down the tile roof, took hold of the edge, and dropped lightly down into the street in front of my foolish cousin. “Come on,” I said, and dragged him homeward.

• • •

My cousin was not himself, in ways I could not begin to explain, nor to fathom.

He had always been headstrong and blind to the consequences of his actions, but he was never completely insane . . . poetry to a Capulet girl had been ill-advised, an embarrassment, but he had known full well the limits even as he wallowed in the hazy cloud of passion.

He well knew that there was no chance of any dalliance with the soon-to-be-wed Juliet, apple of Capulet’s eye. Or he should have understood. His infatuation with Rosaline had been a boy’s love, one that imagined an angel where a flesh-and-blood woman lived, and never expected to so much as brush his fingertips on the hem of her garment.

Yet that night, in the safety of his rooms, he said, “I shall have her, Benvolio. She shall be mine, only mine. I cannot live any other life than with her. I knew the instant I saw her, but the touch of her fingers, the taste of her lips . . .” He was not caught up in a fancy; I could see that. He was utterly serious, as serious as any man twice his age. It was only that it was a subject he dared not take seriously, on his life. “I know you think me foolish to go to her, but I could do nothing else. I could not sleep nor eat without seeing her smile again, and now that I have sated that hunger it only grows more fierce. I must marry her, Ben. Marry or die.”

“I think you mean marry and die,” I said, “because you know you cannot have her. Her family and ours will never stomach it.”

He shook his head in impatient disregard, and stalked the room restlessly. He’d dismissed his servants, and I’d left Balthasar behind, so there were no potentially prying eyes to carry tales back to our grandmother, but still I felt the hot breath of her presence on my neck. He is your responsibility, she had told me, and given me that devil’s look that meant I had best not disappoint her, and she would know—oh, yes, somehow, the ancient crone would know what was brewing here.

But more than my fear of her was my dread of the blind look in my cousin’s eyes. That was more than mere love. It was a martyr’s exaltation. And it was unnatural.

It raised chills along my spine.

“You can’t understand,” he told me, with the fever of a true fanatic. His eyes glowed with passion, and his face was alight with it. “Benvolio, you’ve never felt such joy as grips me even at the mention of her name: Juliet, Juliet. Was there ever a more beautiful sound since God first spoke? You can’t understand; you have not seen her. She is . . . she is perfection; she is the most perfect woman ever formed. . . . She is made of light and love. . . .”

“She’s a child,” I told him flatly, and stood up to block his path. He stopped, but did not back away, and the madness did not dim in his eyes. “She’s a Capulet daughter—no, the Capulet daughter, on whom they pin all their hopes—and she is all but married to Count Paris—”

“He cannot have her,” Romeo said, and the exaltation turned dark, then, and violent, and his right hand gripped the dagger at his side. “She is a precious flower; she cannot be so rudely plucked by such as him; I will not bear the thought of him pawing her—”

“Cousin, think! He is the prince’s own close friend and relative! You will not only humiliate your uncle; you will earn us the prince’s enmity for all time. You will destroy Montague, and for what? A girl, a girl barely of an age to bleed, much less know what she—”

He struck me. It was not a love tap, either; it was a full blow, delivered fast and strong and without any warning at all, and I was rocked back a step, but only a step . . . but as I brought up my own fist, he pulled his dagger, and the needle point aimed straight for my throat.

I stopped short, balanced on the balls of my feet with my neck a bare inch from the tip of the blade. There was a very dark, antic look in my young cousin’s eyes, something that I thought was eerily akin to Mercutio’s black moods; I was far from sure that he would not spike me straight through if I dared move. It would mean his life, but I was beginning to think, considering what I had seen this night, that Romeo no longer cared a fig for his life, or mine, or anyone’s, save this Capulet girl’s. I slowly took a step back, and some sanity came into him; he looked a bit ashamed as he lowered the dagger, though he did not sheathe it. “I warn you: Do not speak of her so,” he said. “I love you well, Ben, but I love her more than any creature on this earth. If it were not blasphemous, I would say I love her more than God and man alike. No, I may say that. I must say it, and if God must damn me, then let it be done.”

I winced, because even the boldest man did not tempt God so. “You don’t know what you say. I beg you, Romeo, for your life’s sake—”

“Beg away,” he said, and finally sheathed steel as he turned his back on me. “I should kill you, you know. I should at least cut out your tongue so that you can’t betray us before we can be wed in the sight of God.”

“Wed,” I repeated. He meant to climb it, then, this ultimate pinnacle of madness. I felt numbed. He had not threatened me so much as simply expressed aloud his logic, but in it was no room for the love we had always borne each other as brothers. I was simply a barrier to his desires now, one to be minimized, or destroyed if necessary. “You really mean to wed her.”

“Juliet,” he said, and turned back toward me. He held my gaze with that wild martyr’s look and beatific smile. No saint had ever seemed so exalted, nor so bent on self-destruction for the sake of his ecstasy. There was nothing sane in it, and nothing that could be reasoned to. “Her name is Juliet.”

“Romeo . . .” I said it gently, the way a man will address a strangely feral dog, and held up my hand in a gesture of peace. “Coz, I know you love her; it is plain to the blindest eyes. But I beg you think what you are doing to yourself—”

“I care not.”

It was a bitter pill, but I swallowed it, and said, “Then to her. Do you imagine for a moment her family will stand for such an insult? They’ll murder you, and the girl—at best, Juliet will be disgraced, spoiled, unmarriageable. And if you believe that Count Paris will not avenge the wrong done him—”

“I don’t care,” he said. “Christ forgive me, Benvolio, but there is nothing in the world for me but her, and nothing for her but me, and if I cannot have her, better I am dead, better we are both dead, better the world is dead and our dreams with it. Do you understand?” He wanted me to, desperately, but all I saw was a man in a sweated fever who was making no sense. “I can let nothing stand between us. Nothing, and no one.” He pulled in a breath. “I don’t wish to do it, but if you think to betray me, I will betray you first. The prince would do anything for a man willing to identify the Prince of Shadows.”

I did not believe it. He was my cousin, my brother, a bond as unbreakable as my heart to my chest . . . but I read the intention in his face, the determination and anguish in his eyes. He could not mean it, and yet he did.

I stared at Romeo in silence for a long, long moment, and then said, “You’re mad.”

He gave me a twitch of a smile, but it did not alter the truth of what was in his face. “If this is madness, then I would rather die mad than live sane.”

I backed away from him then, in defeat, and went back to my own apartments. I felt sickened and cold, and there was a bitter metal taste in my mouth. When Balthasar began helping me remove my clothes I realized I had sweated them through. He clucked his tongue as he took them. “It’s a wonder you’ve not caught your death of ague,” he said. “Terrible vapors out in the night.” He took a closer look at my face and frowned. “Master?”

I shook my head, and he found a heavy robe to drape around me. I still felt chilled inside it. “I need to take a message out,” I said. “I cannot go myself. Will you see it delivered?”

“Have I ever failed you?”

“Never,” I said, and sat down at the writing table to draw out paper and ink. I wrote quickly, sanded it, folded it, and sealed it with wax—but without the Montague marks—before handing it to him.

He glanced down at it, then up at me, eyebrows raised. I had written no names—neither inside nor out.

“Rosaline Capulet,” I said, very quietly. His eyebrows climbed higher, but he said nothing, only nodded. “Be most extremely careful.”

“Leave it to me,” he said. “Will you expect an answer?”

“I hope,” I said, and sat back, frowning. “I hope that I do.”

FROM THE HAND OF BENVOLIO MONTAGUE, TAKEN BY BALTHASAR, HIS MANSERVANT, TO FRIAR LAWRENCE BEFORE MATINS, AND THENCE DELIVERED BY THE FRIAR TO ROSALINE CAPULET

From your brother in Christ,

I am deeply concerned for the soul of your fair cousin, whose devotion to her most dear Lord is wavering; I believe she may be tempted by one who means to lead her astray. I pray you, watch for her safety and lead her to the paths of righteousness. I will likewise guide my wandering brother back to the fold.

Go with God’s love, and my own.

FROM THE HAND OF ROSALINE CAPULET, DIRECTED TO BENVOLIO MONTAGUE, CONFISCATED FROM HER SERVANT BY TYBALT CAPULET. NOT DELIVERED.

From your sister in Christ,

Alas, your warning has come too late, for I find that my innocent cousin’s true faith has been corrupted, and in its place a dangerous heresy has taken vital root. No words of mine will be sufficient to sway her from this false doctrine, though she knows she risks her immortal soul.

I urge you, do all you can to prevent this false prophet from further corrupting her sweet and trusting soul. I dare not entrust this to the friar’s delivery; he intrigues too closely with my cousin for my comfort, and may not bring this to you. I beg you, act swiftly to prevent what may be tragedy. I can do nothing but pray you succeed.

Walk carefully, and with God, beloved brother in Christ.

If only I had thought to write a letter also to Friar Lawrence, explaining in bare words the risk, all might have proceeded quite differently . . . but that is my sin of overbearing caution, and no one else’s. Romeo barred me from his rooms all the next day, but I thought him penned up inside; his manservant swore it was the case. It wasn’t until my grandmother summoned me to her chambers that I knew something had gone wrong. Badly wrong.

Into the smoldering, sweltering furnace I went, where my grandmother sat mounded in blankets and warmed by the blazing hearth. I was surprised to find that my mother was with her as well—not only my mother; beside her, looking fevered and mutinously angry, sat my sister, Veronica. She was all but married, and I had hoped to be spared any further contact with her until then.

At least she was sweating through her clothes as well, though she strove to look composed and elegant—a difficult thing when one’s hair clings in damp threads to one’s face, and sweat runs like a widow’s tears.

My mother did not sweat, though there was a faint glistening on her brow. She sat quietly, hands folded in her lap, and gazed at me with steady warning.

I bowed to her, to my grandmother, and threw Veronica a barely perceptible nod.

“Stand up,” my grandmother said. She looked pale and chill and half-dead, but her eyes gleamed with virile power. “Where is your cousin?”

“In his rooms,” I said, and was assaulted quickly by the conviction that I was wrong. I left it at that, because showing weakness would be like running from a lion. Sweat already beaded on my brow, and I could feel the damp patches soaking beneath my arms. Jesu, it was like the bowels of the devil in here.

She let me stew in silence for a full minute, and then snapped her fingers. A serving woman stepped forward out of the corner, eyes downcast, visibly terrified. She kept her shaking hands knotted in her apron.

“Tell him,” my grandmother said. The woman darted a quick look at my mother, who nodded encouragement.

She licked her lips, and her voice came softly, and faltering. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I empty chamber pots, and . . . and when I came to fetch it, young master Romeo was not there.”

“His manservant swears he’s within. You just didn’t see him.”

“No, sir, I . . .” She licked her lips again, and took in a deep breath, for courage. “Nobody marks my comings and goings. His chamber pot was under the bed, like always. I had to go all the way through. He wasn’t there.”

“Was his chamber pot used?” my grandmother asked. “Come on, girl; speak up. My ears are old!”

“Some part used,” the girl stammered. Her rough-scrubbed hands were white where they were pressed in on themselves. “As if he was there in the morning but no longer.”

My grandmother shoved her back in the shadows with a flick of her hand, and the girl was grateful for it. Then all the attention came back to me.

“He is not within these walls,” Grandmother said. “Do you know where he is?”

“No,” I said. Better to admit it. A lie would only make it look worse.

“Your cousin has been out many times recently without you. Were you aware of that?”

“Some of it,” I said. My own voice had tightened up, and I tried to ease my tone, and the tension that had taken hold of my shoulders. The heat, the intense heat was making me feel light-headed, and sweat dripped uncomfortably down my face. “I will find him.”

“Best you do, before something worse happens. Is he still on about that Rosaline girl?”

“No,” I said, which was the perfect truth. “He sees the wisdom of leaving Rosaline alone now.”

“Good,” Veronica said primly. “Loose-tongued viper that she is, she’d betray poor Romeo in a second. Look what came of her last gossip.”

My grandmother glanced her way, and Veronica shut her mouth, quick enough for her teeth to click together. “Did I seek your opinions, girl?” Veronica, I thought, had best watch herself. The temporary diversion did not last, because Grandmother’s attention turned back to me with the force of a shove. “Is it some other girl, then?”

I risked a lie. “I don’t know.”

“Pray God it is, and someone suitable,” she said. “You’ve been little use to me in the matter of Romeo, Benvolio. I am most displeased. Tell me, what do you believe your future is in this house?”

“Why, Grandmother,” I said, “I believe that it is whatever you decree it will be. But you have need of someone to avenge your wrongs and be your strong right hand.”

“Is that what you are, then? My strong right hand? The scriptures tell us, ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.’ I warn you, boy: Bring your cousin to heel and make him comport himself as befits the true heir of Montague, or there will be consequences. Grave consequences.”

My mother was uncharacteristically worried; I could see it in her normally unreadable face. She feared for me, and that meant more than Grandmother’s threats.

I bowed my head. “I will find him,” I said. “May I have your leave to—”

“Go,” my grandmother said, and pointed her cane at me with an unsteady hand. “Find the boy. Tybalt Capulet sent a much distempered letter here complaining of Romeo’s behavior at the feast, and I think he means to scrape a duel if he can. Prevent that at all costs. We cannot lose Romeo.”

She burst into wet, red coughs, and I escaped quickly. But I was not the only one. My mother rose and followed, and so did Veronica.

“Bide a moment,” my mother said, once we were without the doors. She took a dainty linen square from her sleeve and dabbed at her forehead. “I am sorry, my son, but she is in earnest in her anger. Romeo’s betrothal will be announced soon, and his behavior must be seen as above reproach. His promised bride is of excellent family, and far wealthier than we are. You understand the politics of this.”

I did. Children of such houses were bought and sold for favors and profits, all under the cloak of the Church and tradition. Romeo and Mercutio, my sister . . . all affianced without consent, and I dangled on the precipice, fighting the drop. Rosaline alone had escaped that customary fate, but she was soon to wed Christ. Maybe that’s your escape, part of me whispered. Take on that suffocating robe for good. Priests may claim celibacy, but it’s the exception, not the rule. Yet taking the cloth would not free me from the family; far from it. They would expect preferment, and push me from priest to monsignor to bishop to pope, if they could. At least Rosaline could look to a future of prayer and study, if lucky.

“I understand,” I said. “But the old woman will be on her deathbed soon, at the rate she coughs up her blood.”

“She’ll die in that chair, ordering us about,” my sister said sourly. “Doubt that not. And she’s got venom enough to poison us all if she’s roused to bite. So be quick about your work, Ben. I have only a few days until I’m free of all this. Don’t spoil it for me!”

“What motive could I have for that?” I asked her, in too-honeyed tones, and she frowned. She knew all too well what motive I harbored. And what hatred I concealed under the smile. “Mother.” I bowed to her, ignored Veronica, and walked away with fast, hard hits of my heel on the floor. My uncle was walking the other way across the atrium, head bent as he listened to one of the five or six rich men gaggled around him; he looked gravely interested in what they were saying, though I doubted he was. The masks that duty pressed upon us . . . He seemed not to note my passage at all, and I hastened my pace, went quickly up the stairs and into my rooms, where Balthasar nearly stumbled into me in hurrying to open the door.

I said nothing at all to him, changing to clothes that would best reflect the might and power of Montague; besides, the ones I had worn were stinking already, and I wanted the smell of the old woman’s room off of me. Balthasar silently presented me with sword and dagger, which I added, and donned his own before topping it with a half cloak, and then the two of us slipped away, out through the hallways and a little-used door that creaked when we opened it onto the back garden. It was a pleasant enough day, sunny and mild, and the flowers rioted in their colors among the sharply trimmed topiary trees. Like the Capulets, we had bravos in our pay, and some loitered in the sunny space; Balthasar summoned two of them, and we left through the side gate.

“Dare I ask?” he said then, as we walked through the square with pigeons exploding upward from our path. A child’s choir was singing near the fountain, and we avoided a loose chicken being chased by a red-faced servant. The market was still busy up ahead, full of movement and color, though it was late in the day to be buying anything but livestock or dry goods. I headed for the market, not knowing where else to stop; we could inquire among the stall merchants and malingering wealthy and see whether Romeo had been spotted. Someone would have seen him, most certainly. No one could hide for long in Verona.

I gave courteous, though brief, greetings to acquaintances as we entered the outskirts of the market, and sent Balthasar to ask after Romeo at various merchants friendly to the Montagues—they sometimes wrapped our house’s color into their shades, or flew it in a banner, though that was a risky venture in a city so polarized as ours was becoming. Capulet colors were also in evidence, in approximately the same numbers. I saw a few of their paid men sauntering through, but they seemed at ease, and one even escorted a plump woman I took to be his wife, trailed by two small children. Well, then, even the Capulet adherents were human.

I was not happy to know it, since it made hating them more difficult.

A stall haunted by a sinister-looking old woman proffering vials of oils and concoctions made me slow my steps, and Balthasar sent me a curious look. “Master? Are we not seeking Master Romeo? I don’t think you’ll find him in this old witch’s quarters.”

“Not this old witch,” I said, and turned on him. “There’s word of a witch doing business in Verona. Mercutio is said to have sought her out. What know you?”

“Little,” he said, and looked away at a grubby child running past carrying a struggling, squawking chicken, with a butcher wielding a cleaver in wrathful pursuit. “She’s said to be new to the city. Purveyor of potions and charms, telling of fortunes, the usual thing.”

“Why would Mercutio seek her out?”

“Perhaps his wife has been to see her. A husband’s well advised to see what a wife’s been up to, visiting those old hags. They’re known for their poisons.”

I hadn’t thought of it, but poison was a common weapon among all the classes in Verona—rich and poor, high and low. It was more often used by women than men, but politics was a dirty business, and poison a tool of the trade.

But not Mercutio, surely. As much as he hated those he saw as enemies, he would kill with close, personal violence. Not some subtle and cold design.

But if he did, some evil angel whispered, if he did, whom would he choose?

Not me, even if he blamed me. Not Romeo, for similar reasons . . . he loved us enough to kill us quick and clean, face to honest face.

But the Capulets . . . perhaps. A poisoned drink for a poisoned tongue. I went cold considering how easily Rosaline might be touched by such a thing . . . an innocent, struck down by one who was avenging an innocent. He might also be turning that cold hate on his own father, a thing that would surely damn his soul to eternal flames.

“Find her for me,” I told Balthasar. “Do it quietly.”

He looked gravely doubtful, now. “Your grandmother will take it ill if you make visits to such heretical company. . . .”

“I care not,” I said irritably, although of course I did care, and his warning was well-spoken. “It will not be Benvolio Montague who visits her, be assured. Find her; our secret friend will go in my place.”

“Ah,” he said, and looked much cheered. “You might tell our secret friend that these evil creatures are well used to threats. They generally require silver to loosen their tongues.”

“He is in funds.” Actually, the Prince of Shadows had been bent too much on revenge recently, and not enough upon profit; I would need to begin to remedy it soon. The thought of the remaining loot dangling below the jakes was tempting, but all that was left were pieces that would be easily recognized if traded in Verona; I needed to find a jeweler I could trust to cut the rubies that I’d stolen, and a trustworthy sword maker to refit the very fine blade to a new handle. But I had enough to bribe some low witch, certainly.

“Sir,” Balthasar said, and jerked his chin in the direction he wished me to look. I turned toward the cathedral and saw that Count Paris—accompanied, of course, by half an army of hangers-on—was making his leisurely way through the square in our direction. It was slow progress, because he paused every few steps to exchange politenesses, bow to ladies, inspect vendors’ wares. He spotted us, and corrected his wandering course to move in our direction.

Ever the dutiful servant of my family, I pasted on a smile and sketched a bow to him as he approached. “My lord Paris,” I said, and waited until he granted me a gracious, minimal gesture of his hand to straighten. “I trust this day finds you in fine health.”

“Tolerable, Benvolio. I hear your sister’s wedding day approaches. I anticipate the day.”

“As do I,” I said, with much feeling. The faster Veronica’s shadow left my door, the better life would seem. “My congratulations on your own recent match.”

“Ah, yes, young Juliet.” Count Paris was a handsome man, and, like all who’d survived the cutthroat world of Veronese nobility, no fool at all. He gave me a carefully measured smile. “A pity we could not arrange such a match with Montague, but alas, your fair sister’s hand was already promised.”

Your good fortune, I wanted to say, but I smiled back, with equal false sincerity. “I wish both bride and groom the happiest of lives,” I said. “Good sir, have you seen my cousin Romeo about today?”

“I have,” he said. “He seemed in a great hurry. I wish you luck in catching him. Fair day, Benvolio.”

“And to you.”

We bowed again, I much deeper than he, and his parade swept by us. Behind me, Balthasar let out a gusty sigh. “He’ll soon regret having Tybalt as a relation,” my man said.

“Anyone would,” I agreed. “Now be off with you, to find this witch woman.” I sent him a nod as a dismissal.

He did not go. “I shall not leave you alone and unattended,” he said. “’Twould not be right, sir.”

“Don’t be foolish. I can well care for myself.”

“All the same, it’s my head in your grandmother’s winepress if you tumble onto the point of a Capulet sword and I’m not dead before you to prove my loyalty. No, master, I’ll not leave your side unless you are with better company.”

He was maddeningly stubborn, but he was also right. It was dangerous to be left alone, wearing bold Montague livery, in a crowd that could, at any moment, erupt with partisan violence. I looked around for succor, and spotted a familiar face.

“Oh, no, sir,” Balthasar said in a low, disapproving tone. Because the familiar face was that of Mercutio, lounging like a lazy cat in the sun on the central fountain’s low ledge. He nursed an empty cup, and looked vaguely into the crowd with dull disinterest . . . until he spotted me.

“Well met, Benvolio!” he called as he lurched to his feet, and the sad relief in him was too much to deny. He was brokenly lonely, and I had not the heart to turn him away. “How fare you this fine day?”

Balthasar was giving me a disapproving shake of his head, and I grabbed him close to whisper, “As long as he clings to me, he cannot interfere with you and your mission. Go. Now.”

“Master—”

I shoved him hard away, and he stumbled off into a run, still frowning with unsettled worry.

My servant had ever had better sense than me, or any of my kinsmen.

I turned to Mercutio, and flung an arm around his shoulders in friendship. “I do well enough, though I lack for pleasant company,” I said. “I seek Romeo; have you seen him?”

“What, lost again? I thought he was never to be separated from your skirts, nursemaid!” He clapped an arm around my neck and squeezed, but not hard enough that I needed a defense. “I’ve not seen the villain, but shall we winkle him out of his hiding place? Surely you don’t think him still licking the cobbles behind that Capulet wench.”

I thought for a moment that he knew of my cousin’s new, mad obsession, but he was not, in fact, thinking of Juliet; I knew that from the bitter, angry expression that twisted his face from angel to devil. He was thinking of innocent Rosaline, into whose cipher he had poured all his grief, loathing, and hatred. I feared for her again, thinking of what he would do—or might have already done.

If he had resorted to poisons, I could not save an enemy’s daughter at the cost of my broken, wronged friend, and it might come to such a choice. But neither could I stomach sheltering Mercutio if he murdered the innocent, Capulet or no.

Mercutio was well drunken, even by the early hour; from the smell and state of his clothes, he’d not bothered to visit home, nor change his linen. His smell had a metallic edge of sweat and anger, sweetened with too much wine. But there was no peaceful looseness to his muscles, as there should have been; beneath my arm, his shoulders were bunched hard as a hangman’s rope. When a passing servant in Capulet livery gave us a wide berth, he lunged at him, clashing his teeth, and laughed as the youth blanched and scurried away.

“You’d best be off home, Mercutio,” I told him. “A bath would serve you.”

“Many things would serve me,” he said. “But none so well as a Capulet on the point of my blade.”

“Too hot for that, and the mood hotter still,” I told him. “If you will not go home, then will you not come with me? Balthasar is on errands, but I’ll order a bath for you, and a bed. You can sleep in peace under our roof.”

“Can I?” he asked, and drew in a sudden, wrenching breath. “I would much desire the peace of a dreamless rest, but, Ben, I will confess to you as I cannot to those hard-mouthed priests: I cannot sleep, in peace or out of it. I shut my eyes and Tomasso’s face is before me, or worse . . . he is not dead, and I cannot release him to his rightful rest.” He ran a hand over his face, wiping sweat, and I noted how it trembled. “He haunts me. He lies beside me, and will not speak; we are parted but not parted enough. How then may I sleep, unless wine weighs me down into the dark?”

He sounded as broken as I knew he was, and it made me cringe; weakness in our world drew wolves. “Come, then,” I said, and clapped him firmly on the back to brace him. “A bath, and a safe and solitary bed in a place where your ghosts cannot find you.”

“Your grandmother will take it ill.”

“My grandmother may take it as she likes.” Brave words, but he was right: She would resent that I sheltered Mercutio under her roof. Even decently married, and with a rumored babe on the way, he would never be beyond gossip. “It’s too bright a day for trouble.”

We might have escaped that trouble, save that in that last moment, Mercutio spied Romeo.

My cousin rounded the corner from the cathedral, walking with brisk, purposeful steps. I spotted him in the same instant, and noted the vivid, almost religious ecstasy of his smile; he was bestowing it upon the low and high alike, and making no effort to cast a careful eye upon his surroundings. My cousin, the strutting young peacock, was kitted in his finest, and he glowed and glimmered in the warm light like some hero of legend.

It was not a day to be making himself so obvious a target. He’d not even bothered with a single retainer to follow behind and keep the knives from his back. If my grandmother was right, Capulets would be sharpening their blades for just such an opportunity.

Mercutio saw none of that. He saw only a chance for rough play, and before I could stay him he lurched forward, shouting too loudly, “Signor Romeo, bonjour! That’s a French salutation to match the French cut of your breeches, sir, and where hid you last night?”

Romeo’s ecstatic smile faded. He did most ardently want to avoid the scene, but could not, so he pasted on false cheer and came toward Mercutio, with me following behind like a reluctant old uncle. “Good morning to you both. What do you mean, hid?”

“You gave us the slip, sir, the slip,” Mercutio said, and waggled his finger. “Your cousin’s been eaten with worry.”

“Pardon, good Mercutio.” Romeo bowed. “My business was great, and in such a case as mine, a man may strain courtesy.”

Mercutio laughed and likened courtesy to curtsies, and lifted invisible skirts to deliver a mincing little illustration of it. “I am the very pink of courtesy,” he said, and got in my cousin’s way as he tried to bow his way onward.

“Pink for flowers?” Romeo’s smile fixed, and was growing cold. This was a turn I did not much like; it was a taunt, a very pointed one. That earned us a murmur of disapproval and a scorching look from a passing old dowager and her entourage.

It also earned Romeo Mercutio’s shove. “Just so!”

“My pump is well flowered,” Romeo said. It was the sort of jest a gentleman might make only among close company, not on the streets in full hearing of passersby. It was also cruel, harkening as it did to Mercutio’s enforced marriage—a subject with which our friend was as much anguished as angry.

I stepped forward, but I might have as easily stepped between two men bent on duel. They ignored my intervention.

Mercutio laughed, and snapped teeth. “I will bite you by the ear for that.” He threw a heavy arm around Romeo’s neck, snake-quick, and locked him in embrace. “Come, is not this better than groaning for love? Now you are sociable; now you are Romeo. This driveling love of yours is like an idiot that runs up and down, the better to hide his toy in a hole.”

That earned us more angry glares, for it was too close to vulgarity for the public, and Romeo caught the hint quickly. “Stop—stop there.”

Mercutio tried to go on, and I was sure he would plunge us into real trouble, but then a fat nurse separated from the oncoming crowd, attended by a servant, and headed toward us with purpose. I nearly remembered her swollen, heat-pinked face; she huffed as she approached, and whisked the air vigorously with her fan. What now? I wondered, because I saw Romeo freeze in place like a schoolboy caught with a stolen apple. He writhed free of Mercutio’s headlock and shoved us both away.

“Go home,” Romeo said to me. “I’ll follow anon.”

I placed her, then, this overstuffed woman; she was Capulet, the nurse who sometimes hovered near young Juliet when the girl was allowed the freedom of the air. I had seen her quaffing large wine cups at the feast. “Coz . . .” I took Romeo by the arm, and he shook me off. The servant walking behind the nurse—a Capulet, though without the identifying colors—half drew his dagger as he looked at me, and I released my hold. “Come with us.”

“I said I will follow,” he said, and turned back to the nurse.

Perhaps, if I’d been alone, I’d have dared force the issue, but Mercutio was already offering more insult, in form of an offensive good-bye to the fat old nurse, and I could see her face purpling with outrage. Two of the city guard turned toward us and headed in our direction, and all I could do was grip Mercutio’s elbow to draw him away, and leave Romeo to his intrigues.

“Fool!” I said, and pushed Mercutio as soon as we were far enough away to pull no more attention. “What do you mean to do, humiliate him? He is your friend!”

“And your cousin,” Mercutio said, “yet I see you’re no more fond of him just now than I. All that bleating over the girl, the girl, the girl. I’ve my own female, and they’re not of much use, Benvolio, not of much use at all.”

“Save for heirs,” I said. “And once you have them, surely you will be free to do as you please. . . .”

“Will I? Here, in this city of righteous, upstanding deceivers, heretics, monsters, and murderers?” He laughed, but there was wildness in it, and despair. “There is no freedom, Benvolio; you should give up that folly now. This city is made of stone, and the stones will press us down, and down, cutting off all light and hope until dark is the only light you will ever see; do you understand me?” He gripped me by my arms, searching my face intently. “Dark is the only light.”

I nodded, because in that moment his intensity made me both wary and sad. My friend suffered, most intensely, and I knew there was nothing I could do to take it away. “I cannot leave Romeo on his own,” I said. “He’s . . . not himself.”

“Who is?” Mercutio barked a bitter laugh, and wiped sweat from his brow with his forearm. “Are you his fretting wet nurse now, and he a mewling infant? Has it come to such a pass?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s come to that.”

He shook his head, still smiling that odd, intense smile, and shrugged. “Very well,” he said. “A pity, a great pity, that you have no backbone to stand straight to an old woman. A sick one, at that. You’ve disappointed me, Benvolio. I thought you more of a man.”

“A man keeps his vows,” I said. It was difficult to say it calmly, but I managed. “And you’re no stranger to quaking in fear before that old woman. You said it yourself: She’d humble Hercules and affright Hector.”

“True,” he said. “Well, then, keep to your useless vows. I’m to the tavern to find merrier companions. Your face could curdle vinegar today.” He took a few steps, then turned back toward me, sudden devilish pleasure lighting his face. “Did you hear? There’s rumor of displeasure between Count Paris and Capulet. Something about his affianced’s behavior. Perhaps someone succeeded in ruining the girl after all. It wasn’t me; was it you?”

“No,” I said. My throat felt tight, my brow suddenly sweated. A crowd of boisterous lads had pushed between us and the shadowed corner where Romeo was huddled in private whispers with the nurse. The Capulet nurse. I broke away from Mercutio, ignoring him as he called my name, and pressed through the bodies.

When I broke through to the cleared space next to the wall, I saw the fat haunches of the nurse, flanked by her thin servant, waddling away down the street. A tight knot of Capulet bravos lingered at that end, glaring toward me; going that direction, chasing their servants, would earn me a useless confrontation and accomplish nothing. She’d never talk to me.

And Romeo was gone.

I heard a sharp, musical whistle, and looked up. On the low roof of the overhanging building, I saw my cousin’s face looming over the edge. He gave me a mad smile and mocking wave, and disappeared from view.

I cursed the Montague colors I wore; there were too many eyes on me now to follow him to the heights without exciting notice. I could not afford to put it in common minds that I had such criminal abilities, and he knew it.

“Oh, no, coz,” I muttered. “Not so easily as that.” I looked down, then, to the crouched, motionless beggars who ever huddled in shadows and rags, begging mutely with outstretched hands. Anonymous beneath filth and matted hair—men, women, children, all rendered invisible, save when they had the temerity to pluck at the garments of the rich. Then they were beaten.

I made my way to where they dwelled in misery, and sank down into a crouch, eye level with half a dozen glittering pairs of eyes. I took out my purse and counted out silver, which I deliberately laid in outstretched, shaking palms. “A gold florin to anyone who finds my cousin Romeo Montague before the next hour is sounded. Go quickly.”

Palsied and starving they might have been, but they moved, melting away in scurries and leaps.

If I could not find my cousin by stealth, I would follow him with hired, hungry eyes.

Let him hide from that.

I sent a runner back to Montague for the loan of a brace of bravos; I would need them soon, I thought. While I awaited arrival of the bravos, my servant Balthasar reappeared. He made his way through the square and sank down upon the lip of the fountain next to me, cupping water thirstily. I bought an orange from a passing fruit seller, and he peeled and ate it like a starving man.

“Well?” I asked him then, as he seemed in no hurry to report.

Between juicy mouthfuls, he nodded. “I found her out,” he said. “She’ll meet you, but she’s wary, that one. And frightened.”

There was, I sensed, something my faithful servant was neglecting to tell me, but I allowed it; he would never put me into deliberate danger, so the detail would be a harmless one, something that might bruise me but never cut. “Where?”

“A place near the river,” he said. “Two hours hence, no sooner.”

I nodded, thinking fast; I’d promised my spies rewards, and this witch would require gold as well, to loosen her tongue. “I’ve rogues out hunting for my cousin. Stay here, and should any find him, send one of the Montague men to track the clue before you part with a florin,” I said, my gaze following a fat old nobleman with an overstuffed doublet, and a downcast child of a wife trailing behind. His purse was as overstuffed as his shirt, and he wore it as arrogantly as his codpiece—an accessory now fading from fashion, but still prominent on his generation’s loins.

I rose to follow.

“Master, where are you— Oh.” He had spotted the man, too. Balthasar knew me all too well.

“I go fishing,” I said, and set off after my fat, well-fed trout.

• • •

Taking the merchant’s purse was a challenging affair, but gratifying, and the florins that spilled out when I counted them in a darkened alcove even more so. I now had funds to fuel my search for Romeo, who—considering the reports we began to receive—was ever more determined to evade me.

Beggars turned up, oh, yes, eager for florins, but the men sent to confirm came back with discouraging news—either the fools had identified the wrong young man, or Romeo, if he had actually been spotted, had quickly slipped away. One reported him near the cathedral, another near the river. Another still had sworn my cousin had been drinking and weeping in a wineshop half the city away.

It was not until the fourth of these beggars came looking for payment that I caught Romeo’s game. It was a fine one, and under different circumstances I might have enjoyed my cousin’s rhetorical response. Not today.

As the man stammered out his story of my cousin sighted in an unlikely spot, he not only avoided my gaze, as might be expected, but he patted at the stained, flat purse knotted to his rope belt. I listened to his story with half a mind, watching his fingers. They twitched, they patted, they stroked . . . and I knew.

I drew my dagger, eliciting a surprised intake of breath from Balthasar, and struck fast and accurately. Not for blood, but for money. I sliced open his purse, and out tumbled and rolled a bright gold florin.

“Did you pay him, Balthasar?” I asked, as the shocked beggar began scrambling after the coin, desperate to retrieve it.

“Why, no, sir, I would not. Not without proof of your cousin’s whereabouts.”

“Someone did.” As the beggar grabbed the coin in his shaking fingers, slapping away idle hands of passersby seeking to scoop it up, I took hold of a handful of his greasy curls and yanked him upright on his hams. “My cousin paid you, didn’t he? He knew what I’d do. He poured florins out and had you peddle me falsehoods.”

“Please, sir, please, I’m just a poor man; on my life, I meant no harm; I was only doing as I was bid—” He cowered, clutching the coin in death-grim fingers, and though I wanted to kick him, I shoved him away and wiped my hand in disgust. I just hoped his lice had not jumped to me.

“As you were bribed, you mean,” I said. “Go, then, tell your fellows that they’ll get no more from us. Take your gold and spend it, but expect nothing else from House Montague, lout.” I aimed a kick at him this time, but he dodged it—well used to that activity—and, clutching his bounty, he escaped into the crowd.

I had the taste of dust and metal in my mouth, and I could feel my skin going tight and cold. Balthasar, next to me, said quietly, “Master? What do we do?”

“Keep looking,” I said. “If you catch word of him, find me at the Lamberti Tower.”

“Sir—”

I shook my head and walked away. I scarce noticed the walk, though I avoided the worst of the street filth as I strode along. Balthasar must have dispatched a guard to follow—he’d scarce have allowed me to wander so—but I paid no attention to that, either. I turned the winding streets through the airless, hot afternoon. The red brick and tufa and gray stone caught flame in the light, making it seem I was walking through fire, and my only instinct was to get away. To find a perch above, and see the world as small and harmless. There was a darkness closing in; I knew it. I felt it all around me, like dagger points pressing my skin.

The Lamberti Tower was the highest point in Verona, set in the middle of the Piazza delle Erbe, and I knew it intimately; the narrow stairs were familiar to me, and it was well that I’d chosen a time when the massive bell was silent, or I’d have been forced to wait for the peals to die. It remained quiet, and I raced up the winding steps as if I might leave my troubles behind. The narrow tower had a curious smell—new mortar and ancient dust. They’d but recently built it to its present height. There was yet discussion of building it higher, though so far the prince had rejected such talk as irreligious and harkening back to the Tower of Babel; it wasn’t wise to risk God’s wrath.

Irreligious or not, I wished the tower had been built even twice as high. Lofty as this perch was, it was still too close to the streets, the teeming people in the square. To my own looming defeat.

I leaned my head against the bricks and let the cooler breeze fan my face and dry the sweat from my hair. I felt a surge of hot frustration, and a traitorous bit of admiration. My cousin had learned well, it seemed; he’d mastered just enough of the arts of stealth and misdirection to evade me. I’d have been proud, if not for the cause of it . . . the girl. The Capulet girl. Juliet.

I knew my cousin. I could believe him so bent on passion that he would sacrifice his own life, but what of the life of the one he supposedly loved? Romeo would never sacrifice her so lightly, if it was a true passion. Likewise, he’d never butcher his family’s honor so openly.

But perhaps it was just, as they’d always said, that I misunderstood true passion, that my veins were full of cold, thin water. My mother had always told us that courtly love was a poet’s invention, designed to make the process of arranged marriage a more pleasant one; my sister and I had never been under any illusions of our place in the great order of things, or that our happiness should come before our duty.

How then was it my cousin, the heir, who forgot those same lessons to drown in the gaze of an enemy’s daughter?

Being at a height slowed my pulse and calmed my agitation, and here, away from the noise and stench and bustle of the piazza, I could finally order my thoughts. The reports that had come to us were useless, paid lies, but my eyes focused on each of the places in turn, and in my mind, I blacked them out as possibilities. Four reports. Four sections of town where he would not be, unless he was more twisty-clever than I’d ever imagined.

I noticed a curious thing. At this lofty vantage, the false trails formed a pattern, a very visible pattern . . . and in the center of it . . .

In the center of it stood the Chiesa di San Fermo, that unprepossessing little religious sanctuary in which I’d once hidden, and in which Friar Lawrence regularly laid his head when avoiding his monastery. If Romeo was—however impossibly—serious in his quest to join his course with Juliet’s, then they would need a churchman’s blessing, though doubtless her family would immediately seek annulment once it was known. But the damage would be done. Her marriage to Paris, and to most any noble of good birth or merchant of good coffers, would be finished. She’d be damaged goods, a burden and a shame to the Capulets.

Was this Romeo’s plan? Was it all an elaborate charade to entrap and ruin the girl, for the shame of her family? I might believe it of Mercutio, in his current black and bitter moods, but my cousin had ever been good-hearted and sincere in his affections, even when they were wrongheaded. He lacked the coldness of a schemer.

His behavior smacked of something else . . . some dark purpose moving pieces in a game I could not yet fathom, not even when viewed from such a height.

I had to find my cousin—if not before the vows were exchanged, then before he could ruin Juliet’s prospects. If she remained a virgin, the rest could be smoothed over with Capulet gold and influence, but once her maidenhead was breached, it was nothing like so simple; her cousin Tybalt was not the forgiving sort, and she would likely meet with a convenient accident, or worse. They’d be rid of her, one way or the other. I cared not, except that the consequences of it would rebound on another, less-favored girl: Rosaline would be their only marriageable asset, however flawed they saw her. They’d sell her like a second-prize cow at market, for the hastiest of prices.

It should not have bothered me, but I could not deny that it did.

My cousin might have outsmarted me, but the fact that he had directed us away from the chapel said ominous things to me, and it told me we had little time to lose.

I descended the tower’s staircase, and ran into Balthasar, who was panting and sweating from his run in the hot streets. “Master,” he said, and braced himself on the stonework as he whooped in jagged breaths. “We should withdraw to home.”

“Why?”

“The streets are abuzz with the rumor that Tybalt Capulet beat a servant girl and sent her running from his door for her life.”

“No news there,” I said. “He’s a heavy hand with his own sister.”

“There’s more,” my servant said. “It’s said that he beat her for carrying secret love notes.”

“Romeo,” I said, and felt the doom sink deeper. “To Juliet.”

“No, sir,” Balthasar said. “’Tis said it was a note from his sister Rosaline to you, master. Tybalt was apoplectic with rage. He called you a whoreson coward, to be making peace in the streets and sullying their honor behind his back. The rumors say he declares that if Montague will make war on Capulet women, he will make war on ours! And, sir, it was not only him; his ally Paolo Mazzanti was with him.”

That chilled me to the core, even as the oppressive heat of the day closed around me like a boiling blanket. I needed to see to the safety of my mother, and my sister, and even Lady Capulet. Tybalt’s fury was clearly beyond control.

And I could not help but wonder: If Tybalt had near killed a serving woman for carrying the note, then what had he done to its author? “And the lady Rosaline?” I asked, and did not meet Balthasar’s wounded gaze. “What news of her?”

“Locked up, it’s said.” He knew. Yes, he knew. “O sir, ’tis most unwise—”

“I know it is unwise; I am no infant,” I snapped. “Mind your place.” I’d rarely said it to him, and never with such a cutting edge of warning. “It was no love note, whatever Tybalt says.” She’d replied to the note I’d sent, I thought, the one warning her to have a care for her cousin. Rosaline might be sheltered, but for all that, she had a streak of hard practicality that mirrored my own; it would have been a careful missive, cloaked in the most obscure language.

It was only that it was directed to me, and not to Friar Lawrence, the safe intermediary, that alarmed me so deeply. What had she found so urgent that she abandoned caution, and was now caught for it?

Juliet, and Romeo. The friar conspiring with them, misled and dazzled by their passions. He had a soft heart, our friar; he had been sheltered from the raw realities of our lives, and did not reckon on the outcomes.

My heartbeat had sped fast, and I felt my muscles tightening; all my instincts bade me to rush to Rosaline and see for myself that she bided safely, but I forced myself from it. Disaster loomed on every corner now; it was Romeo I needed to stop if this was not to become a bloody farce. War upon women. Like all of our wars, it would be one of stealth, of assassins, of sudden and unpredictable violence. My sister Veronica’s wedding approached, and in the procession we would all be in the open, exposed, ready to be picked off at will by Capulet and Mazzanti, allied together. Yet the wedding could be neither delayed nor avoided; if our family did not appear, it would be an unforgivable insult to her noble bridegroom and his house.

“We must go within our walls,” Balthasar urged me, with great good sense. “Sir, Tybalt seeks blood for the insult to his house, now more than before. You cannot be caught out.”

I knew that, and yet I also knew that I was the only one with a slim chance of preventing much worse. “I will go,” I said. “But first, I will stop my fool cousin from marrying Juliet.”

If I’d shocked him by sending supposed love notes to Rosaline, this made him a gaping, widemouthed fool fit for a cap and bells. “Sir! It cannot be so.”

“We must make it not be so,” I said. “Now.”

• • •

I arrived at the church and flung the doors wide, only to shock three wizened old women who had been on their knees in prayer. They did not rise—likely they could not, so easily as all that—but they cringed back from me as I strode inside. “Friar Lawrence!” I shouted, loud enough to ring from the walls. I swept aside the coverings on the confessional, but he was not there.

He was nowhere in the church, not even dozing on his narrow mat behind the curtain. The old women gaped at me as I searched, and finally one said, timidly, “Young sir, he has not been here for more than an hour.”

“What?” I rounded on her, scowling, and she flinched back into her companion, so alike in their wrinkles they might have been twinned. “Where did he go?”

“I know not; he did not say—”

“Which way?” I was grasping at straws now, but one by one, they all shook their heads. They had been deep in prayers, they said. He’d spoken kindly to them, but said nothing of his destination, only that he would return soon.

I would not give up. I could not. I left the church and looked up and down the street; a few houses down was an open shop of some kind, and from the smell it was selling baked goods. I paid three times the amount for an order of gingerbread the cooks of Montague most likely did not need, and purchased myself the news that Friar Lawrence had indeed passed by only an hour before. I followed the man’s pointing finger to another spot where the friar might have changed directions, and bribed another shopkeeper. In this way, I mapped the way to a small hovel near the river . . . an anchorite monk’s dwelling, as much a cell as any monastery room. There was little inside save a narrow bed, a few jugs of wine, half a loaf of stale bread, a half round of cheese, a table, and a chest of smallclothes and trinkets, none of any note or value. The crucifix on his wall was crude, but reverent.

He was nowhere to be seen . . . but something caught my eye as I made for the door again. Through the light spilling in the window, I saw something shining, as alien to the dull room as a flower in a field of ash. I plucked it up, and held it in the light.

It was a pearl, one that had been drilled through and sewn to a garment; it retained the loose thread that had been pulled loose. It was small, befitting something a modest young woman might have sewn to her dress, or an ornament for her hair. It was little enough, just a simple lost pearl, and it might have sparked a thousand theories for its presence.

But I had only one, as I turned its smooth, warm shape in my fingers.

Juliet Capulet had been here, in this monk’s cell. And if she had been here, so might have been my cousin Romeo.

I was too late.

“Sir,” Balthasar said from behind me. He sounded strained and grave. “The friar comes.”

I nodded, my face set and hard, and he put his back to the wall. His hand was on his cudgel, and he looked frightened, but ready to go where I led.

He was no doubt praying it would not take him to damnation for striking a holy man, but in this moment, in the white-hot burn of my fury, I cared not for my soul, nor for his.

I cared only to stop our unsafe little world from flying apart around us.

Friar Lawrence saw me, and his plump face went still for a moment, then took on an expression of resignation as he closed the door behind him. “Master Benvolio,” he said. “What brings you?”

I held out my palm and let the pearl roll from one side to the other. The guilt was plain to see in him, but he assumed a brave martyr’s stance, with his hands folded together in his sleeves.

“Don’t you know what will come of this?” I asked. My tone was tight and dangerous, and he took note, but he did not back down.

“Peace, if you will allow it,” he said. “Montague and Capulet have too long let their blood flow down these streets; your own father died for—”

“You betrayed us.”

“I am on no one’s side but God’s, my son. Their love was so strong that if I had refused to bless it, it would have been done without God’s seal; there is no doubt of it. Would you have me step aside and allow the sin instead?”

“You’ve said the words, but I may yet stop them from this folly. Where are they?”

“I’ll not say.”

“Where?” I gripped him by the shoulders and stared hard into his eyes, and he flinched. “He is my cousin, close as a brother, and I won’t see him dead on Tybalt’s sword. Now tell me where they plan to make their bower, and do it quickly!”

The look he gave me was oddly sad, as if he pitied me in that moment—and also knew that I might do him harm. “The passion between them is too great, Benvolio; I’ve never seen the like. A madness, you understand, a thirst slaked only by love’s drink, or death. Which would you have?”

This time I shoved him against the wall, and with my right hand I drew my dagger. I did not put it to his throat, but he knew that was where it would be bound if he delayed me again.

Friar Lawrence squeezed his eyes closed a moment, and his lips moved as if he prayed. Whatever God instructed, he did not seem happy with it, but he finally said, “They will do it by night, in secret. You need not seek them out now; they will wait. I made them vow it under the eyes of God. There is time to separate them, but I warn you: What pulls them together is nothing a mortal man may battle; it is a holy fire, I tell you, a most holy fire that burns in them.”

“The devil can stoke a fire as well as ever God could,” I shot back, but I sheathed my dagger. “You swear on the cross that they parted from each other?”

“Yes,” he said. “Juliet’s nurse has taken her home, and Romeo has gone as well. I swear it upon the cross.”

“If you see Romeo, tell him I know,” I said. “Tell him this is done. It goes no further.”

Friar Lawrence gave me a sad look, and poured himself a cup of wine, which he downed in a great, messy gulp. “I remember a boy swaddling in a robe and playing a monk one evening, for the love of a girl,” he said. “Have you no pity in your heart for your cousin’s strong desire?”

“No more than I will have pity for you, should this go badly,” I said, and drew the dagger. I sank it into the table to a depth that would have reached his heart. “Mark me, Friar. I speak not for myself, but for Montague.”

Balthasar shut the friar’s door behind us, heaving a sigh of relief that he had not been forced to crack the friar’s skull for me. I was not feeling lighter—the damage was still great, most certainly, and the marriage would have to be undone by the Capulet and Montague elders alike, but it could be fixed in secret, with careful diplomacy. Romeo would be punished; Juliet would be hastily married off. But all could still end well enough.

So I wished to believe.

• • •

I had frankly forgotten my appointment with Mercutio’s witch until Balthasar reminded me, skipping close to murmur it in my ear as we passed out of the cloister’s walls. We were not so very far from the river; the muddy, rotting stench of it hung heavily on the air, churned but not dispelled by surly gusts of wind. I was eager to make straight home and beard my cousin in his chambers . . . or beat him, as Tybalt had thrashed the servant. Perhaps pain would bring him to his senses. Failing that, my grandmother’s towering wrath certainly would.

But even so, I shifted course and followed Balthasar’s lead down narrowing, noisome alleys, stepping over drunkards and beggars and keeping a close eye out for villains. I was a richly dressed man in hostile quarters, and not all thirsty blades belonged to Capulet hands. Some merely wanted my purse. Ironic that it was full of fresh-stolen florins. But I was in no fit mood, and my scowl must have warned off any who might have accosted us; we arrived at the docks, where fishermen unloaded their cargoes, and costermongers loaded carts to trundle them to a late market. It was too hot, and the air was slick with the thick scent of rotten oceans.

“There,” Balthasar said, and pointed me in the direction of a cloaked form in the shadows.

He had kept a detail from me, indeed; I’d expected some broken old woman, with moles and an evil cast to her eye. As the woman pushed back her hood, I saw before me a lovely, pointed face, clever and calm, framed by thick brown curls only barely managed by carved wooden combs. She looked a little older than I, but not by more than a thin handful of years, and she might have been a modestly placed merchant’s wife or daughter. Her clothing was not fine, but it was well fitted, and clean. She carried a nosegay of herbs to ward off the stench of the docks.

She was hardly the crone I had expected to find. That, then, had been Balthasar’s juicy, withheld tidbit of information.

I was clearly not what she had expected to find her, because she cast a near-panicked, betrayed look toward my servant, and dropped into a quick curtsy. “Sir,” she said. “I little expected to see someone of your quality. I apologize for the condition of our meeting.”

“You’re the witch?” I had little patience for niceties, even given the pleasant surprise. “Mercutio has visited you?” I kept my voice low, but she still blanched, and cast anxious looks about us. No one noticed, in the clamor of the dock.

“I cannot tell you, sir, with great respect—”

“Is he planning to do harm?” I asked her bluntly. “Have you given him poison?”

“No!” she blurted, and put out a hand that showed she was no stranger to hard work. “No, sir. Please, I beg you, do not say so; I sell only helpful herbs. . . .”

“Then why does he seek you out?” I leaned in on her, threatening, and she shrank back against the wall. I put out an arm against the stones to block her escape, and Balthasar took up a post to hold her on the other side. “Confess. Now. I have no time for games.”

She looked pallid and terrified, and miserable. “Sir, it is only that your friend and I have a grief shared; his friend Tomasso was my cousin, and my dearest friend. I will confess that I hate those who took his life, and that also I share with Mercutio, but I have provided no poisons, I swear. Only—” She had babbled on too far, and I saw the realization of it cross her face in horror. If she could have breathed the words back in, she would have.

“If not poisons, then what?” I snapped, and grabbed her chin in my hand to raise her eyes to mine. She was frankly terrified, and she was right to be. I was in a killing mood. “Confess to me, and you might escape death. Defy me . . .”

“I only helped him,” she whispered. Tears shone wetly, and spilled down her cheeks; I felt the quiver in her flesh where I held her still. “I swear, my lord, the guilt is not mine; it is not—”

“Tell me!”

“I showed him how to cast a curse,” she whispered. “The sin is upon him, sir, not me; I swear, not me! Please, sir, let me go. Please!”

I would have dragged her to Prince Escalus in my fury, but Balthasar cried urgently, “Sir!” and instinct screamed at the same moment, and I released the girl and spun, drawing my sword and getting it free of its scabbard just in time to block a deadly blow aimed for my heart.

I did not know the man who faced me, snarling, until he said, “Dog of a thief! I know who you are!”

It was Roggocio, the fool I’d robbed on a night that seemed so far distant now, the one who’d ripped away my mask. He’d glimpsed my face indeed, though until this moment he had not known my name.

Shock ran through me, cold and hot, and as I settled into the chill silence of the fight, I knew that I could not let him walk from this. He knew too much, enough to betray me, enough to add even more chaos to the already brewing pot of poison.

That, and of course he intended to see me dead.

Balthasar cried another warning, and I heard his cudgel smack flesh; Roggocio had at least one friend willing to come to his aid. I trusted Balthasar to hold my back, and focused upon the blade in Roggocio’s hand. He was well practiced, as would be expected if he’d survived so long as a hired bravo; he wielded a plain but quality blade, well suited to his hand and height. I concentrated not on his eyes, nor on his hands, but on the whole of him: the tiny betraying flickers that would tell me where he’d strike.

It took two passes and clashes of steel, and then he showed his intentions too soon. I parried just enough to move the line of his blade past my chest, turned with it, and struck hard and low, aiming for finding the vulnerability of his inner thigh. My blade slipped easily in, through, and I cut sideways to open the vessels. Blood gouted like a fountain, sheeting gory down his hose, and he let out a short, sharp cry as he fell to his uninjured knee. It was a killing wound, and he knew it instantly. He’d be bled white in only a moment.

As deaths by the sword came, it was a quick and almost painless ending. But he fought it, trying to rise, failing, collapsing back to the cobbles. His sword continued to stab the air, trying to reach me, until his hand lost its grip.

He looked past me then, and I glanced back to see his compatriot rising dizzy from where Balthasar had struck him down. He was in no fighting condition, but he retrieved his fallen sword and sheathed it to show his peaceful intention.

And then Roggocio, with his fading last breaths, said, “Tell Tybalt that my murderer is the Prince of Shadows.”

It seemed as if the world stopped.

Few were close enough to hear or understand his ragged words, but I did, and Balthasar, and so did Roggocio’s companion.

I looked to him, and his eyes met mine, and widened.

Then he took to his heels, running.

“Get him!” I snapped to Balthasar. I’d forgotten the witch in the press of events, but now I saw her running as well, darting between fish carts and making for her own safety.

I had to let her go.

Tybalt could not learn the truth, or I was a dead man.

• • •

Balthasar was dogged, but while he was loyal and solid, he was no runner; Roggocio’s friend was as fast and lean as a greyhound set on deer, and as nimble. He used the crowds, carts, and obstructions to slow us, and within only a short distance I’d caught my servant and passed him, yet had not gained a step on the man running ahead.

The throng in the street was slowing me too much.

“Keep after!” I shouted to Balthasar, and turned sharply toward a stack of wooden crates beside a wine seller’s shop. I no longer feared excited comments on my acrobatic skills. There was far worse to be risked. I leaped and made the top of the first crate, then vaulted up to the next. From there, it was a leap to grasp the ledge of the roof, and I scrambled up, heedless of the birds that flapped in agitation at my boldness. Once on the low, flat roof, I raced without opposition.

The next building was built close, but still separated, and I sped faster and leaped the distance, risking a glance to the side as I did to see that Balthasar had fallen farther back, and the man we pursued still had half the street on us. He seemed to know where he was bound, which was worrying; I did not, and it was hard to form a strategy without a clear objective, except to catch and kill.

The next rooftop was more treacherous, littered with bottles left by someone who did their drinking in secret, and probably by moonlight; I managed to avoid them, and when I made the next leap, to a pitched tile roof, I saw that I’d gained on my target.

If I’d been thinking of my danger, I might have hesitated at the next jump, which was wider and to a higher point, but now I was fiercely committed, and I had forgotten caution. I could see that only half the next building’s length separated me from my quarry now. He’d run into a funeral procession, and though he was pressing through, to the outraged cries of mourners, he had lost his lead on me.

I put all I had into the dash to the edge, and launched myself into the gap, aiming for the next roof.

I missed.

The rise was higher than I’d thought, and the gap farther, and as I realized I’d miss the roof itself, I saw that I would instead fall inside a small stone balcony with a closed door. There was no real choice to make; I braced myself, landed hard, and threw myself forward with my shoulder as lead.

The balcony door slammed back, and I stumbled into a bedchamber. No one was inside save an old woman embroidering by an open window; she blinked at me as if I were a phantom, and I did not wait to see what she might do, but moved out and into the hallway. It ran straight the length of the house to another balcony, the mirror of the one I’d landed on.

I burst out into the sunlight, put both hands on the hot stonework, and vaulted over and down. I landed hard, rolled, and ignored the aches and bruises, because only a few feet ahead was the bravo I’d been chasing.

He glanced back and saw me. His eyes went wide, and he dodged to the right, down another street and away from the choking crowds. I raced after, but I tangled with a fat old priest and went down hard enough to leave me bruised and dazed.

I shook the impact away, scrambled up, and dashed in pursuit.

He was just throwing himself through the doors of a laundry when I spotted him at the corner, and I ran after. My breath was coming in fast pumps now, sweat soaking my Montague finery; I smelled the strong soaps and lye of the vats, and saw him as he shoved aside a burly washerwoman and ducked behind some hanging wet bedsheets.

I yanked them aside. Another door. I plunged through and had just enough time to see that he’d decided to make a stand; he’d hoped to catch me surprised, and he almost did, but I knocked his blade up with my elbow as I spun, and drew a dagger with my left hand. He was fast, faster than I, and he avoided the slash and turned to run on.

I aimed and threw the dagger, but he veered and it missed its mark, merely slicing a wound in his arm and then ending its course in the wood of a barrel. I snatched it free as I ran after him.

Our pursuit burst out into the open streets surrounding the Piazza delle Erbe, to shouts and cries and flocks of pigeons making for the skies, and as I dodged the fountain, I felt a hand grab at my shoulder.

I spun, blindly striking with the dagger, and it was a lucky thing that Mercutio was just as quick, or I’d have opened his throat. That earned me an instant response as he stepped back and put a hand on the hilt of his sword. There was unreasoning black murder in his eyes. “That was ill considered,” he said. “What game have you flushed?”

“A quick and deadly fox,” I said, and pushed into a run as I shouted back, “If you’re going with me, keep your head!”

I did not think he would do it—he was more drunken now than he had been before, when he’d left me in disgust—but he laughed, and easily caught up and paced me. “You’re like one of those fellows who enters a tavern, claps his sword upon the table, and says, ‘God send me no need of thee . . .’ and by the second cup, you’ll draw it for no reason!”

I had little breath for it, but I grinned and said, “Oh, am I such a fellow?”

“You’re as hot a Jack in your moods as any in Italy, and as soon moved to be moody,” he said, and dodged a squawking rooster that fluttered in his path. “And as soon moody to be moved!”

He went on, firing quick and razor-edged barbs at me, and he was not wrong in most of what he said. I had a bad temper, a black one when it moved over me. I had quarreled with a man once for coughing in the street, and with a tailor—but not for wearing his new Easter suit before Easter. I could not remember the quarrel rightly, in this blood-hot moment.

But he was right: I was a dangerous man when put into this evil mood.

Roggocio’s compatriot was ahead of us, but not far ahead, and he was tiring, as greyhounds do when the sprint bids fair to become a longer footrace. Mercutio whooped and passed me, vivid with the joy of taking unthinking action.

And then I saw where the bravo was taking us.

Tybalt, his cousin Petruchio, and many more of his adherents than I cared to number, all lounging like a pride of lions in the shade of a portico. Tybalt spotted the running Capulet bravo and came to his feet, sinuous and graceful, and around him his fellows roused.

They descended the steps to meet the man I’d chased, who pushed through to Tybalt’s side.

“Stop,” I said, and pulled on Mercutio’s shoulder. “The odds are against us.”

“Well against,” he said. “But I thought you were on a hunt. Will you let your quarry slip away so easily?”

“By my head, the Capulets will have us if we are not careful.”

“By my heel, I care not,” he said, and bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “Come, Benvolio, you led me a merry chase. ’Tis a shame to end it with a coward’s retreat.”

He spoke to my anger, my fury, my fear. My blood was up, and though I knew it was wrong, though I knew it was disastrous, I let him draw me onward at a walk.

Even then, it might have been avoided; we might all have passed like wary ships on the sea, all our gun ports opened and glares all around. But then Tybalt stepped into our path and said, “Gentlemen, good evening. A word with one of you.” The speech was courteous enough, but his hand was already on his rapier, and there was fury in his face. The sight of him made the skin tighten on my back—not in fear, oh, no, but in utter fury. I could not see him without thinking of Rosaline, and bruises, and threats.

And Roggocio’s companion was urgently whispering in his ear. I knew what he was telling him. I knew it from the way his expression shifted from casual malice to something more intent—no longer a lazy cat toying with mice, but a lion on a wounded, limping deer.

He knew who I was, what I was.

And now it remained only what hay he would make of it.

Mercutio, ignorant of the undercurrents, said, “But only one word, with one of us? Couple it with something; at least make it a word and a blow.” Sweetly said, with a poisonous sting in its tail. He meant to provoke, and Tybalt scarce needed it . . . but he spared a second from his pleasurable contemplation of my doom to send Mercutio a scorching, dismissive look.

“You’ll find me apt enough to it, sir, if you will give me occasion,” he said.

I felt the darkness come on the day, despite the sweltering sun, and put a warning hand on Mercutio’s shoulder. He shook it free, and his tone took on a sharp, angry edge. “Could you not take some occasion without giving?”

Tybalt pointed at me. “You, I shall save for a later feast, for the insult to my house and to my sister. I’ve weapons enough to wound you when I wish.” He altered his aim toward Mercutio. “You consort with Romeo.”

“Consort? What does that make us, minstrels? If you would make minstrels of us, you may expect nothing but discord.” Mercutio tipped the still-sheathed hilt of his rapier forward, the better to drive home his insults. “Here’s my fiddlestick, then. Here’s what will make you dance.”

We’d already attracted a crowd of onlookers—idlers and fools, but a few well-to-do and even here and there a noble, surrounded by their own attendants, all bearing witness to this folly. Not even a folly—a farce; Tybalt knew he held the winning ground, and his gaze upon me said as much. These were merely the first steps in a deadly serious dance.

We could not win, and I knew it. It was madness, but Mercutio was in the grip of a long-burning fever, and he gazed at Tybalt as if he held the cure for his distemper.

“We’re in the most public of eyes,” I said to them both. “Let us take this to some private place, or else keep a cool head and go. Mercutio—”

He shook me off, and stepped forward to Tybalt. A more blatant challenge I could not imagine, and Tybalt did not back away—nor did he answer it, not yet.

“Men’s eyes were made to look,” Mercutio said, and swept his own gaze up Tybalt, and down, in a lazy and insulting appraisal. “Let them gaze. I will not budge for any man’s pleasure.”

Tybalt laughed, a flash of white teeth like the glint of a blade. “Marriage has changed you, then. I wonder how much. Can a woman make a man of you?”

Mercutio let out a sound that was as much growl as curse, and tried to draw. I held him back, even though my own blood beat hard at my temples, urging me to draw, strike, end him and the smirking bravo next to him. End the threat to my close-held secret.

I saw a distinctive flash of Montague colors, and for a bare second I allowed myself a surge of relief. I thought that Balthasar had arrived to back us—but no. Not Balthasar, and no bravos pushing toward us, nor allies rushing to our backs.

Romeo alone had joined us.

My wandering cousin had chosen the wrong moment to show himself, but having done so, he did not back away; after a hesitation, he came forward, hands outstretched and empty, a calm and almost angelic light on his face.

Well, I’d meant to find him. And I had. But a worse place of discovery I could not imagine.

“Well,” Tybalt said, and stepped off from Mercutio. “Peace be with you, sir; here comes my man.”

“I’ll be hanged, sir, if he wears your livery. If you run, he’ll chase you; perhaps that makes him your man. . . .” Mercutio was still trying to bait the Capulet heir, but Tybalt had eyes only for Romeo. If there had been fury in him before, now it was nothing but rage, absolute and tipping toward insanity.

“Romeo,” Tybalt said, and closed the distance between them quickly. My cousin should have reached for his sword, but he did not. His hands remained empty and open. “The love I feel for you demands no better term than this: You are a villain.”

Romeo spread his hands even wider, and his smile did not falter. “The reason I have to love you excuses such a greeting. I am no villain, and therefore, I’ll say farewell. You know me not.”

He tried to pass and come to us, but Tybalt was having none of peace now; he lunged and shoved my cousin back in an explosion of violence as sudden as it was inevitable. “This does not excuse the injuries you’ve done me and my house. Turn and draw!”

“I never injured you. I love you better than you can know, until you know the reasons.” Romeo’s face was . . . exalted, like that of a saint going to the cross. I felt sick at the sight of it, the unreasoning and unwavering purpose of it. “Good Capulet—a name I love as dearly as my own—be satisfied with that.”

He tried to embrace Tybalt Capulet, who backed away as if my addled cousin bore some plague. It was more shocking, in its way, than Tybalt’s assault had been, and while I blurted out Romeo’s name in warning, Mercutio drew his sword, and that sound, the sound of blade clearing scabbard, was the only thing in the world that rang in my ears—that, and the indrawn breath of the crowd around us.

Tybalt turned toward Mercutio, toward the real danger.

“That was dishonorable, Romeo,” Mercutio said. “A vile submission, to make peace. Come, Tybalt, rat catcher, will you draw?”

The crowd was pressed closer now, avid, and I could smell the sweat and fear and excitement like lightning in the hot, still air. I did not draw, not yet. The chance that we could still make away from here, and kill Tybalt at a less public time, stayed my hand.

So perhaps the rest was, in the end, my fault for the hesitation.

“Why, Mercutio, what would you have with me?” Tybalt asked, and made a rude gesture a man would give to entice a whore, so that there was no mistaking his meaning. The onlookers laughed, and Mercutio’s face turned a dead, awful white, while his dark eyes blazed with the flames of hell.

“Good King of Cats, I’ll have nothing but one of your nine lives, and if I do not like your behavior, I’ll beat out the rest of the eight. Will you draw, sir? Make haste, lest mine is at your ears before it’s out.”

Tybalt’s mimicry ended, and in a cold voice he said, “I am for you, then.” And he drew his sword.

It started slowly, with a tap of blades, humble as spoons clanking, but the two of them circled, measuring, and I saw that Tybalt moved like the cat we’d always named him . . . lithe and quick and deadly. Mercutio was a fine swordsman, precise and strong, but he’d had drink, and there was emotion in him now, fueling a too-hot fire, while Tybalt seemed cold as a man three days dead. Tybalt glided right; Mercutio stumbled to counter. It was clear who would win, if it came to a real fight.

Romeo saw it, too, and he stepped forward again. “Good Mercutio, put up your sword.” But neither of them heeded, nor even could heed, so focused were they on each other. I felt a terrible surge of hopeless anger—at Romeo, for stumbling upon this; at Mercutio, for setting himself on this black and futile course; at myself, for failing to prevent it.

Tybalt flung himself forward in a deadly fast attack, a simple and elegant thrust headed straight for Mercutio’s breast. Whether slowed or not by the wine, Mercutio still beat it aside, and riposted toward Tybalt’s bent thigh, a cut that would have opened a vein and left him bled as white in the gutter as Roggocio, had it landed.

But it did not. Tybalt, Prince of Cats, leaped free of it, growled, circled, and came back for him while Mercutio was off-footed, and scored a shallow cut along my friend’s right arm. Not much, just a thin red line to dampen the white linen sleeve, but it was enough to show that death was coming, and coming fast.

Romeo shoved me aside, and pulled his own rapier free. “Draw, Benvolio! We can beat down their weapons; we must stop them. . . . Tybalt, Mercutio—the prince has expressly forbidden this in the streets— Hold, Tybalt! Mercutio!”

I drew then, but it was too late, too late, too late. Mercutio attacked, and, drunken or not, blinded by his demons or not, he would have killed Tybalt with that blow had it landed, but it failed . . . only because Tybalt’s heel slipped on some wet mess in the street, and he was not where he ought to have been when the steel slid past.

Romeo, seeing that it was about to come to real blood, lunged in between them and spread his arms to face Tybalt. What he meant to do, I do not know; maybe he meant to take Mercutio’s place in the duel, or perhaps only to stop the fight. But it did not matter. Tybalt had already begun his answering lunge, and I felt frozen in place as I saw the steel glide forward, point and edge, toward Romeo’s breast. But Romeo twisted, and the lunge slid on, grazing his ribs as it went. . . .

To bury half the rapier’s length in Mercutio’s chest.

Mercutio’s lips parted, and he gave a little cry of surprise as his rapier fell from his hand to rattle in the street. Tybalt seemed equally shocked as he recovered, and yanked his blade free of my friend’s ribs. It slid out with a terrible sound, steel grating bone, and the blood that gouted out was the exact shade of Capulet livery, the same that Tybalt wore on his doublet and his cap, the same slashed into Petruchio’s sleeves and particolored hose as he rushed forward to pull Tybalt away. I did not hear what the Capulets said; my ears seemed tuned only to the sound of Mercutio’s tortured, hitching breaths, and the pulse of his blood flowing to the stones. I was there with him without feeling myself move or ordering my body to make the effort; he was falling, and I was there to catch him.

And with me, Romeo, pallid Romeo, his face blank with shock that his peacemaking had gone so terribly wrong.

Mercutio’s blood was foaming pink on his lips, but he was still talking. If a grimace counted as a smile, he smiled. “Benvolio, I’m hurt,” he said. He sounded surprised. “May a plague curse both your families . . . both . . . your . . . families. . . .” With the repetition, it took on the edge of horror. His eyes rolled wildly, and his weight went heavy in my arms. “I’m finished. . . . Is he gone? Escaped?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. My breath was coming too fast, the lights were all too bright around us, and my heart pounded in my temples like a drum. I tasted sweat, or tears, or both. “You will be fine.”

He flashed bloodied teeth in something too fierce, too painful to be a smile. “Aye, aye, a scratch, but ’tis enough. Where is my page?”

He had no one, as ever he’d had no one . . . none but two of us, kneeling in his blood, holding him up. Romeo grabbed a gawking boy and twisted his ear until he yelped. “Go, fetch a surgeon!” Then he tried to smile for Mercutio. “Courage, man. The hurt cannot be so much.”

“Not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough; ’twill serve,” Mercutio said. He gave a bubbling, wet laugh that sounded too much like a death rattle. His breath smelled of blood. “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I am not long for this world, my friends—” Pain struck him deep, and his body arched against us, fists clenching and trembling as if he fought off death like an enemy. His face screwed up under the agony, and suddenly his eyes opened wide, and he grabbed for my collar and pulled me close—close enough to feel his hot, fevered breath on my face. “A plague on both your houses; mark me, Benvolio; I am sorry. . . .” But whatever he meant, it skittered away from him under a new wave of pain, and when he collapsed again, loose in our arms, he had wandered into black humor. “A dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat to scratch a man to death . . . a braggart, a rogue, a villain that fights by the numbers . . . Why the devil did you come between us?” His voice went suddenly and unexpectedly childish and petulant, as he caught Romeo’s stricken gaze. “I was hurt under your arm!”

“I . . . I . . . was trying to help,” Romeo whispered. “I thought it for the best. . . .”

“Help me into some house, Benvolio; I feel faint—a plague on both your houses, they have made worm’s meat of me . . . your houses . . .” He gripped my collar so tightly I thought he meant to strangle me. “Your houses, do you understand? It is a curse . . . Oh God, take me in. . . .”

I would not let him die here in the street, stared at and remarked upon by the common folk; Romeo seemed too stunned to act, so I stood, gathered Mercutio’s body up in my arms, and walked through the square. If he was heavy—and he must have been—I did not feel it. I felt little except a burning wish that he not die there on the ground, or in my arms, before we had reached some comfort.

“Benvolio?” Mercutio asked. He sounded thin and weak and far away, and I could not bring myself to look down at him.

“Hush,” I said. “I’m taking you home. Your father will call for a surgeon.”

“No surgeon, and I have no father,” he whispered. Though I did not stare down at him, I could see from the corner of my eye the pale, bloodless color of his skin, and the brilliant red still flowing over his doublet, soaking it hot and wet against my chest. “The surgeon’s already had me with his sharpest knife. Did you think Tybalt was such a deft hand with a blade? One thrust, clean . . .” He seemed, at this moment, to admire it. “I always mocked him, but he has proved his point on me.”

“Quiet. Save your strength.”

“I have none to save,” he said, and then, as if in surprise, “You carry me.”

“Aye.” I was gasping for breath, I realized, and staggering from effort. There must have been men and women in the way, but they’d drawn back like waves from Moses himself, save that the red sea was trailing behind me. Mercutio’s blood dripped from the points of my elbows and from the edges of my sleeves. I was carmined with it. Made Capulet.

My shoulder found a wall, and I leaned there a moment, just a moment, to clear the blurring from my eyes. My head and heart pounded together in a deafening chorus, and it came to me with sudden icy clarity that I might collapse well before I carried him the rest of the way to either his house or mine.

“Listen,” Mercutio whispered. His hand tugged hard at my collar. “Listen, I must make a confession; be my confessor, dear friend—”

“No,” I said. “No, you will not die.”

“Listen, I sinned. I sinned most gravely against you. I meant only for it to attach to the one who betrayed us, but I see now; I see I was wrong—”

“Quiet, for the love of God!” I was on the hottest verge of grief. Mercutio’s mind was wandering, and I could not listen; I could not.

Still, he talked on. “. . . not Capulet, not Capulet guilt at all, but Montague as well, enemies upon enemies, and poison to one is poison to all, and I am sorry—”

“Hsst! Young master! Here, bring him here!”

I lifted my head, and blinked. There was a young woman standing in a doorway ahead; I did not recognize her, except as someone who was willing to help in this most extreme darkness. I took in a deep breath and pushed off the wall, staggering the last ten feet and into the shadow of her lintel.

The inside was cool and dark, and smelled sweetly of herbs. It was no noble bed I laid Mercutio upon, only a narrow mattress stuffed with lumpy straw, but he sighed in relief just the same. The girl came behind us, carrying a steaming pot full of water, some rags, and some foul-smelling unguent in yet another pot, and then it came to me in a rush that I knew her.

The witch.

Her gaze was troubled as she stared down at my friend, and she shook her head as if she knew well what the outcome of this would be . . . but she said, “Help me take this off him,” and reached for the ties of his doublet. I caught her hand, staring at her, but she shook her head. “I mean to help, sir, only help.”

I heard nothing but regret and grief, and so I released her. I’d take help from the devil himself, if he’d appeared in a puff of smoke and promised to ease Mercutio’s pain.

Together we folded back the thick padded velvet; it was stabbed through, and sopping with blood. The linen shirt beneath was as red as any Capulet’s cloth. She bit her lip and rolled Mercutio on his side, saw the open bloody lips of the wound on his back, and let out a little resigned sigh before she wadded up pads of cloth and bade me press against the wound in his chest. As I did, I felt the stammering beat of his heart. I knew that if he lived, rot would carry him off in agony; a wound such as this would almost certainly fester, and no surgeon could stitch together what had been cut apart within him.

“We can buy him a little time,” she said in a low voice, “but the blade went too deep, and too true.”

Something arrested my attention then—beneath the thick red blood, there were dark stains on Mercutio’s chest. No, not stains—inked letters I did not recognize, with an odd and ancient slant to them. I rubbed at them, but they did not smear.

“Leave it,” the girl said. “He needs to save his strength.”

I knew she meant he would never regain it again, and nodded to tell her. Mercutio’s eyes had closed, and the lids looked translucently pale, all his healthy color fled. His lips were the color of cold seas.

I did not think he would ever open those eyes again, but he did, and lunged up to grab my arm with unnatural strength. “A plague on both your houses,” he blurted. “I never meant it so, Benvolio; I am sorry—break it . . . break it before it consumes . . . promise . . .”

And then his eyes rolled back into his head, and his mouth lolled open, and he fell back into the hands of the young witch who’d given her bed to soothe him.

“He is not yet dead,” she whispered, and eased him down again. She had packed the wound in his back, and now she smeared the cloth with thick white unguent. She motioned for me to do the same, and I fumbled my own handful of cloth in place, and anointed it. Then I held him up as she wrapped the bandage tight around his chest, from armpit to waist, covering the wound and the eldritch writing I’d seen upon him. Before she was through, though, a flower of red had bloomed on his chest, spreading its sinister petals in a slow, inevitable growth.

But still he breathed a little. It seemed a miracle, and one I was willing to embrace. “I thank you,” I said. “You did not have to help, after my rough treatment of you.”

She shook her head. “I could not do otherwise,” she said. “I grieve, but Mercutio knew the price he would pay for his revenge. I warned him.”

“You spoke of a curse—” I would have questioned her, but Mercutio opened his eyes just then, and the vague fear in them chilled me. “Hush, friend, I am here.” I gripped his bloody hand in mine and sank down next to him on the narrow space. He coughed, and blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. His face was ashy gray, the pallor of death already on him.

“Did I do wrong?” he asked me, and the childlike worry in his voice broke me within. “Ah, Ben, for love, I did it for love, and for justice; please, I never meant—I never meant it to harm you or Romeo. . . . Forgive me.”

“I forgive you,” I said. I thought it was confusion, as he wandered in the dark fogs closer to his end. “I would forgive you anything, Mercutio, my brother.”

Of a sudden, his eyes were bright and eerily clear, and he gripped my hand very hard as he said, “I will hold you to that, for I have done you dire wrongs. Love is the curse, Ben. Love is the curse. Do you understand?”

He was shaking, every muscle gone rigid, and I knew this was the last. He was clinging tight to that frayed and breaking rope, and I held his gaze, hard though it was. His grief for Tomasso had driven him to this. No wonder he loathed love so much. And thinking bitterly on Romeo, on his folly with Juliet Capulet, I thought Mercutio must be right.

I held his grip, though it bade fair to break my bones, and said, “I do. I understand.”

He searched my face most earnestly, and then closed his eyes. It looked like defeat. “No,” he said. “No, you do not. Ben—”

But whatever he might have said next was lost in a terrible bout of coughing, as he struggled for breath and drowned in his own blood, and though his lips moved, I heard not another word.

I felt the exact moment his spirit departed. It was only then that I realized I had let him die unshriven, here in this dark hut full of witch’s charms and herbs. Mercutio’s hand went slack in mine, and the tension in his face fell away. His eyes looked into eternity, and for a long moment I could not move for fear of breaking, but then I reached over and folded his hands on his shattered, bloody breast, and closed his eyes. I put two gold coins on his lids, and then turned to look at the girl cowering in the corner, now terrified.

She shook her head so violently curls came free from beneath her neat kerchief, and pressed her trembling hands to her mouth. Her eyes were bright with tears and terror. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, sir, I know you think me evil, but I only wanted to help him—”

“I care not,” I said, and handed her another coin. “Fetch Friar Lawrence here. Tell him Mercutio Ordelaffi needs last rites. It is the least I can do for him now.”

She looked wary, but she snatched the coin away, wrapped it in a fold of her skirt, and darted out into the street. I went to the door and breathed in the hot, still air, and gradually became aware of the shouting and furor coming from the piazza. A well-dressed merchant scurried past, trailing harried attendants; I stopped one with an outstretched hand—one well reddened with blood. Well, it made for a useful warning. “What proceeds?” I asked him. He flinched away from me. “What is that noise?”

“Romeo Montague,” he said. “Romeo is bent on dying on Tybalt Capulet’s sword, it seems, for grief!”

I thought that I could not feel anything, but suddenly fear blazed back up within me, real and immediate. “Wait, does Romeo live?”

“I know not!” he shouted back, and broke into a run. “If so, not for long!”

I cast a tormented look back at my friend, but there was naught I could do for him now. If my cousin would recklessly throw himself onto Tybalt’s sword now . . .

This might not be the only death I could regret today.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Mercutio. I bent and pressed my lips to his pale forehead, and then I ran for the piazza.

• • •

Tybalt had fled the place of Mercutio’s murder when I’d carried my friend away; he’d since returned, though his adherents urged him to flee. He stood still in the street, surrounded by his fellows, and his sword was out. He stalked restlessly back and forth, black gaze fixed on my cousin.

Romeo had likewise not put up his sword. Finally, some Montague cousins and bravos had arrived to back him, which was all, I thought, that had held the peace thus far—that, and the fact that they had waited to hear the news—bad news, I realized, that I was bringing. But it was too late to turn away; I had already been remarked, as I pushed through the crowd damp with Mercutio’s dying blood. Romeo’s gaze had fallen on me, and now Tybalt’s did as well. A hush went through the crowd in a rippling wave.

“How fares Mercutio?” Romeo asked me. He knew. Any man could see, from the evidence soaking my clothes. But still he asked, so that the answer would be clear to those watching.

“Mercutio is dead,” I said. It felt like fiction, though I knew it for fact.

Romeo nodded. He looked older than his years in this moment, older than I; he looked every inch the heir of House Montague, weighed down with the responsibilities of that office.

Tybalt, perhaps ten feet away, had gone very still in watching us. He could have put up his sword, and by all reasonable measures ought to have done so; his blade had already broken the peace, already claimed a life, but perhaps knowing that, he cared not for the future. I could smell the violence on him, and the rage. He was in the grip of a blood fever that only our two deaths would break.

“And here stands the furious Tybalt,” I said. I put my hand on my sword’s hilt. If the peace was broken, let it be well shattered and done. Mercutio’s death had been stupid, meaningless, and in part it was laid at my own door; if I hadn’t met with the witch, if Roggocio’s companion had not escaped to Tybalt’s side, then none of this would have happened.

“Alive in triumph, and Mercutio slain,” Romeo agreed. His voice rose, and hardened. “My forgiveness has gone to heaven with him. Now, Tybalt, call me villain again—Mercutio’s soul is but a little way above our heads, staying for you to keep him company, and either you or I will join him!”

“You consorted with him here, and will go with him there!” Tybalt answered.

Romeo lunged forward, all restraint fled. Tybalt met him in a clash of steel, both of them slipping in Mercutio’s spilled blood on the stones. One of the Capulet bravos drew his blade, and I lunged for him with a shout of fury, because, like my cousin, I needed to avenge my friend’s terrible, useless fate. I was aware of the striving of Tybalt and Romeo, but I dueled my own enemy—the bravo I’d chased through the city, who’d led me to this field of slaughter. He was as quick and deadly as any I’d faced. His blade slithered over mine in a lunge, and tore a bloody strip from my shoulder; we parted, circled, and I feinted high and lunged low, aiming for his thigh and the vulnerable vein there. He parried, and pinked me again, but he slipped on the cobbles and his point wavered, and I riposted hard and fast and ripped a thick red line on his cheek. He dropped his sword and staggered back, clapping a hand to the wound.

I stabbed him in the throat and ended him.

Not soon enough, since he’d told Tybalt what he knew of my secrets. I had to silence Tybalt before he could accuse me in public . . . and before he learned of Romeo’s ill-advised marriage vows with his cousin. Silence, but not kill so openly in the street, under a Capulet’s blade; this situation required quick, silent assassination away from prying eyes, if I was to save my house.

It was vital that Romeo not be seen, in public, to bring about his death.

I spun toward the other battle, intending to wound Tybalt enough to render him unable to speak—a blow to the throat would do—just as Romeo, down on the cobbles where Tybalt had toppled him, rolled and slashed, catching the Capulet—more by luck than skill—on his unprotected vitals.

Tybalt staggered back, eyes wide. For an instant, the cut looked small, but then it parted, and the blood, oh, the blood. He fell into the arms of his adherents, thrashing in his death agonies, and I scrambled forward and dragged my bloodied, hard-breathing cousin to his feet. His eyes were fiery with the fight, and his lips parted in a feral grimace.

It was all done, then. All hope gone. My problem had been solved, but Romeo’s, Montague’s, was only just begun.

I shook him, hard. “Romeo! Be gone from here. Tybalt’s slain, and the prince will see you dead if you’re taken; do you hear me? Be gone!”

The exaltation suddenly faltered in him, driven out by my words, and by something else, something much greater, and worse. He looked horrified well beyond what he ought to have done. “Oh, I am fortune’s fool!” he whispered, and clung to me for balance. “Benvolio—”

The Capulets were turning on us, screaming in their fury. “Why do you stay?” I shouted at him, and shoved him. “Go! Run!”

He did, the bloody sword still in his hand. Mine also was blooded, though not on Tybalt, but I quickly wiped it and put it away, because there was a loud shout from the piazza behind us. The city’s watch had finally arrived, and with them, summoned no doubt by breathless messengers, came the prince of Verona, my own aunt and uncle, and the Capulets as well. Mercutio’s father was not in the group, and I thanked God for it; I might have added him to the tally of corpses for the day, from pure bitterness.

My uncle looked at me with bewilderment, and a good deal of fear, and I understood in a moment—here I stood, in the center of the bloody scene, drenched in red, while Tybalt gasped his last among his cousins.

“Where are the vile beginners of this fray?” Prince Escalus snapped, as he stepped forward out of the watch’s protection. He looked every inch the city’s ruler, iron faced, tempered hard by his years. Even his gray hair had the glint of steel in the lingering sun.

His eyes swept the scene, and came to rest upon me.

I bowed low, and found the words to explain, sticking close to truth, since there were too many witnesses to Romeo’s act for any hope of clemency. Lady Capulet let out a bloodcurdling wail, and broke free of her husband’s hand to throw herself down beside Tybalt’s twitching corpse.

“Tybalt, my nephew, my brother’s child— Oh, my prince, my cousin, my husband, look, his blood is spilled! My prince, if you are true to your word, blood of ours was shed by Montague, and Montague blood must answer it!” She gathered Tybalt’s limp form in her arms, and though I knew there was more politics than grief to her emotion, still it raised a sympathetic murmur in the crowd.

The prince noted it, but he was not like to be moved by theatrics. “Benvolio, who began this bloody fray?”

“Tybalt,” I said without equivocation, and gave him the tale, ending, “Romeo came between them, beating down their blades, but Tybalt struck under his arm, and hit the life of Mercutio, then fled.”

“Fled?” The prince cast a significant look on the dead boy gathered in Lady Capulet’s arms. “Here he lies.”

I bowed my head. “He came back to have at Romeo, who was much aggrieved; he entertained revenge, and who could blame him? They went like lightning, and so was Tybalt slain.”

“And Romeo?”

“Fled, my prince. This is the truth, on my life.”

Lady Capulet gave me a bitter, hateful stare, and said, “A kinsman of the Montague! Affection makes him false, and he lies! Some twenty of them must have fought my Tybalt, to bring him down. I beg for justice, my prince, and you must give it. By his own cousin’s words, Romeo slew Tybalt. Romeo must not live!”

“Romeo slew him,” the prince agreed. “And Tybalt slew Mercutio. Who now owes the price of my kinsman’s dear blood?”

My uncle stepped forward then. “Not Romeo, Prince. He was Mercutio’s friend. His fault concludes but what the law should have ended: the life of Tybalt.”

“Whose word have we that Benvolio Montague did not kill my cousin himself!” Lady Capulet spat. “Look, you, he is drenched in red blood that cries for vengeance!”

“Mercutio’s blood,” I said. “My friend lies in a hovel not far from here, if you wish to water him with your tears. And his blood did cry out for vengeance, and you hold that vengeance in your arms.”

She gave a raw shriek of fury, and let Tybalt’s body thump back to the street as she rose. “Will no one kill this Montague?” she demanded, and turned that basilisk’s gaze on her own bravos, who quailed. “Tybalt’s death demands it!”

No one stirred hand or foot. The watch’s armed presence ensured it, and so did the prince’s moody, cold stare.

As the silence fell, the prince said, “It is fair that Capulet have a measure of vengeance, and so, Romeo—”

My aunt gripped her husband’s arm hard.

“Romeo,” the prince continued doggedly, “is immediately exiled hence from Verona, never to return. I have an interest in your grief; my blood also for your rude brawls lies bleeding. But I’ll punish you not with death, but with so strong a fine that you shall all repent the loss of Mercutio. Nay, Lady Montague, I am deaf to pleadings and excuses, and tears and prayers shall not purchase out your son’s abuses, so give me none. Let Romeo go in haste, or when he’s found, that hour will be his last. Go now, take Tybalt’s body and attend our will.”

The Capulets were pleased, I thought; if they had lost the ever-raging Tybalt, then it was public justice to them that Romeo had been taken from the Montagues, if not in body, then in fact. He would no longer be the heir on whom we rested our family’s future. He was disgraced, cast out, and exiled. The enormity of it had only begun to strike me. My cousin, feckless and reckless as he was, had been unquestionably the hope of Montague, and now, in an instant, in a lucky strike in the heat of a battle he had not invited, he had lost everything. Exiled from our family, our city, from everything and everyone he knew and loved.

From his own love.

If there was anything, anything at all, that could be gleaned as silvery hope from the ashes of this disaster, it was that at least that Romeo would now be forced to give up his mad pursuit of Juliet. His life would be forfeit if he lingered inside the city beyond this hour, and Friar Lawrence had told me that though vows had been spoken, no marriage bed had been made. Even in the eyes of God, it was still no marriage at all.

Still, Mercutio’s cry upon being mortally struck haunted me as I joined my family for the uncomfortable journey back to our palazzo. A plague on both your houses!

Surely his dying warning was already coming true.

• • •

I took my leave of my aunt and uncle and went to my rooms, where Balthasar had already arrived; who had found and informed him of the day’s dark events, I did not know, but he had arranged for a tub of hot water, and took away my bloody clothes. Whether they were to be cleaned or burned, I did not care. I sank into the steaming bath with an almost pitiful sense of gratitude, and washed death’s leavings away.

I stayed in the tub, easing stiffened muscles, until Balthasar came back with a bath sheet to dry me. As he scrubbed me down with rough, efficient motions, I felt I was a toddling boy again, and a strange lassitude washed over me. I wanted to take to my bed and be coddled until the fever passed, but this fever was cold, not hot, and I feared it might not be banished so easily.

Inside me was a wild, howling emptiness where all my certainties had once lived. I had lost Mercutio, burning bright in both anger and love; I had as much as lost Romeo, just as hot-spurred but with a sweetness to his temper that Mercutio had never dreamed. My brothers in spirit, if not in blood, and both gone, blown away on an ill wind.

I had never felt more alone.

Balthasar wisely said nothing to me, only brought me warm wine and sat me in a chair near the window, where I might look down on the streets below. After a moment, I rose and closed the shutters. The cobbles outside were stained with a sunset Mercutio would never see, and it put me too much in mind of the blood I’d washed away in the tub. The sight of gray Verona’s stones reminded me of his pallid face and slackened lips.

I closed my eyes awhile, and when I opened them, my mother was there.

Balthasar must have brought her a chair, for she sat straight-backed and proper across from me, dressed in her habitual mourning black with glints of gold at her throat and cuffs. In the privacy of our house, she had taken off the wimple; her hair was pinned up in a complex series of braids and knots that must have taken her lady’s maid hours to achieve. As always, she seemed almost blank of expression, but I thought there might have been a flicker of concern, at least a passing one.

“Benvolio,” she said.

“Mother.” My tone did not invite discussion.

She ignored the dismissal. “I am sorry for Mercutio,” she said. “He was a loyal friend, if sometimes a loose one.” I waited. She had not come to see me to give me her regrets. After a moment’s silence, she came to it. “Your cousin Romeo is ruined in Verona. No one faults him; he was right to kill the Capulet villain for Mercutio’s death. But without him, Montague has no male heir to take hold of its fortunes. Your uncle must name you, Benvolio.”

“Me?” I said. It was fool’s work to be surprised, but yet I was. I had not thought of it, and now that I had, it disgusted me. I had never wanted such a role, and never at the cost of Romeo’s future and fortune. “My uncle does not favor me, Mother. He never has.” I did not say, Because I am a half-blood. The English in me was a matter of constant suspicion, however much I looked or acted the part of a true Veronese. I would always be seen as an alien, either here or in my mother’s home of London.

“Needs must he favor you now,” she said, and looked down to fuss with a fold of her skirts. “Have you seen your poor cousin since the brawl?”

“Not since he fled, as I urged him to do,” I said. “Should I seek him out?”

“Under no account should you be seen to involve yourself in his troubles. He has done Montague a good turn, there is no doubt of it, but be careful, my son, lest you share his fate.”

The phrasing, I realized, was deliberate; I should not be seen to involve myself; she meant I should be careful. It was a masterful piece of misdirection. My mother gave nothing away in either her posture or her voice, but there was a slight tightening around her eyes that told me she was worried—worried to be sending me this message, which doubtless had not come from her. She was only the helpless messenger.

I sensed my grandmother’s palsied, iron-strong grip was behind it.

I nodded to show I understood, and my mother rose to go. She took a step, then stopped, and without turning said, “Do you grieve, my son?”

“Does it matter?” I asked.

She shook her head silently, and a little color burned in her cheeks. “I liked the boy,” she said. “He had a love of life, and a careless grace that was good for you, I think. I hope he taught you some of that joy.”

“You taught me to be cautious,” I told her. “And that lesson, at least, I’ve learned well.”

She turned and looked at me, and her light green eyes met my darker ones. She was still lovely, my mother, though her beauty had faded like a painting kept too long in the sun. I wondered what hopes she had once held for her life, and what dreams. She was far too practical to harbor anything so useless now. “Then be practical now. Guard yourself,” she said. “There’s a fey darkness in the air. I fear the bloodshed is not done, and as Montague’s heir, you will be at even more risk.”

“Is that my grandmother’s sentiment, or yours?”

That woke a flash of temper from her, after all. “I am still your mother, Benvolio. I am allowed some concern for my own child!”

“That doesn’t answer.”

She gave me a long, measured look that reminded me that buried very deep within that calm exterior lay the same fiery temper I carried burning like a coal within my breast. “I lost your father to this ages-old quarrel, and now your cousin has fallen prey to it, and your friend. If I do not fear for your safety, then I am naught but a fool.”

I smiled a little then. “I don’t think you a fool, Mother.”

“Only a cold schemer, like your grandmother?” Her own lips twitched in what might almost have been a smile then. “I come from warmer stock. Your sister has taken well after the Montague example, though.”

Veronica. Ah, yes, my dear, sweet sister, on whose plump shoulders so much of this must rest . . . She had, for sheer malice’s sake, betrayed Mercutio and Tomasso, and turned Mercutio’s rage against the Capulets. Her invisible hand had pushed the blade that had taken him, and Romeo’s that had killed Tybalt. Perhaps she was a worthy heir to the old crone, after all.

“Your uncle has asked her bridegroom to delay the wedding to next week, for the sake of propriety, but the old goat won’t have it,” my mother continued. “He says we have no sons to mourn, and the Capulets would not attend in any case, so why delay? He means to bed Veronica with unseemly haste, it seems.”

Perhaps, I thought, he had caught a whisper of my sister’s unmaidenly behavior . . . or he was simply randy and feared he might die unsatisfied. I might have pitied her the fate, if she were not such a coldhearted schemer and like to earn more from it than she paid.

But my mother’s point was not to bring my sympathy, but to warn, and I followed her there only a moment later. “At the wedding, we will be exposed,” I said. “All of Montague, defenseless in the cathedral for the ceremony. But surely even the Capulets would not attack us there, on sacred ground. . . .”

“Sacred ground did little to sway the assassins of the Medici,” she said, rightly; the story of the long-ago attack on Lorenzo the Magnificent was legend. They had failed to kill him in the cathedral, but they had bloodied the holy floors with his brother’s gore instead. Assassins struck in church all too often, where God seemed to take little interest in enforcing peace. “We must be tightly on our guard, my son. Always, but most especially, in the house of our Lord.”

It was a grim message, but I knew she was right; if I was to be made heir of Montague, I would be the first and most vital target for Capulet revenge. And revenge they would have for Tybalt’s death; that much was sure.

She nodded to me, and then left, proud and unbowed by all that fate had heaped upon her. There was something to admire in my mother, something more than her carefully lived life. She knew tragedy with an intimacy that was almost obscene, and yet it had left her unbroken.

I stood up and threw off the sheet. Balthasar caught it deftly and folded it, and said, “No house colors, then, sir?”

“No house colors,” I agreed. “It’s time to keep to the shadows.”

• • •

I scouted the night as the Prince of Shadows, all in gray, blending with the stones and shades.

I thought to find evidence of Romeo’s departure, but instead, and disquietingly, I heard tavern tales of my cousin being seen in the streets of Verona after his hour had passed—not riding hard for the city gates, either, nor buying supplies for his departure. He’d been seen moving with stealth in streets that I knew bordered the Capulet house—a way I knew well, as I’d watched him run it not so long ago, in darkness.

It came to me then, with a cold slap, that he was not intending to leave Verona at all. He meant to finish his marriage vows, tonight, with Juliet Capulet.

In her bed. Within Capulet’s walls.

That made cold sense; she was a prisoner there, rarely seen without the palazzo, and it had been a miracle she’d been allowed out to make her confession to Friar Lawrence today—even if it had been no confession at all, but a marriage. Romeo must go to her, if he wished to have his marriage rights.

But to do such a thing tonight, with his head in the noose—it defied all belief. Was this love, to betray one’s family, and to defy certain death? To risk the life of the one you adored? It seemed less love to me than a fever, a sickness burning away caution and good sense.

But perhaps I’d never really loved at all.

The heat had finally broken with a sharp snap, and clouds boiled the skies overhead. Winds stirred the torrents of darkness, and lightning seared and thunder rumbled. It covered any sound of my light-footed passage over roof tiles as I took to the heights, but the risk for me was worse. I felt the sizzling fury in the air, and any fool knew that lightning struck down those who stood tallest in its way. That was dangerous enough, but with the wind came the fat, still-hot drops of rain . . . a patter first, and then a torrent, making slick the tiles and bidding fair to send me tumbling. I lost my balance twice, and caught onto the leaded roof peaks in time to stop my slide. Once, as I neared the Capulets’ quarter, a white-hot bolt of God’s purest fury hit the top of the Lamberti Tower, and rattled the tiles under my feet. I heard the muffled cries and prayers of those in the house on whose roof I stood; someone clapped shut a window’s wooden doors.

Only a few rain-drenched beggars and disheartened curs watched my slow, cautious progress, and then only in the brief flashes of lightning. The murky dark was my friend, at least; if the watch dared to be about, they’d not easily spot me. My gray, cloaked figure was easily mistaken for a chimney pot, in the flash of a second.

The Capulet garden was silent. No fair maids haunted their balconies this evening; they would be sensibly tucked away from the storms. I paused on the wall, staring at the dark, shut doors of Rosaline’s room; she would still be within, sealed up on Tybalt’s orders, awaiting her quick dismissal to the convent. Perhaps—

No. I had more frightening business tonight. She was in no more danger from her brother, at least.

The Capulet household was silent without, but when I found an open window in the servants’ attic the room was empty. No servants were abed, which meant that the Capulets were still well awake themselves. I found an extra set of livery that fit me well enough, and left my wet clothes behind; my hair was dry, as it had been concealed beneath the hood. I could do little about my hose, or my shoes, but I hoped no one would look closely. The Capulets kept a large household, and I quickly gathered up a heaping armload of linens, the better to conceal my face. The servants’ stairs were narrow and hot, large enough for only one, and as I descended, a fat, red-faced wench waited impatiently at the bottom for her turn. “Be off with you!” she snapped, and shoved my shoulder as I edged past. “No dawdling tonight, you fool; they’re in shorter temper than ever, what with that young beast dead!”

I mumbled something from behind my laundry and hurried on. Clearly, Tybalt had no mourners among the servants, if she could speak so freely—and with such contempt and relief. I descended stairs to the next floor, where the rough, cramped confines changed to the fine stone, wood, and carpet of the family portion of the palazzo. My damp shoes were silent on the covered floors, and I paused to take my bearings. From the direction of the wide staircase at the end I heard the hum of voices, and low cries and sobs, no doubt from Lady Capulet and her attendants. Here, all was quiet. I tested the door on my left and found it locked; when I bent to peer through the lock, I saw a glint of candles on the other side. The key had been used and taken away.

Rosaline was locked within, as much a nun now as when she would be taken to her holy cell in mere days.

I could sense her lively, restless presence beyond that door, and I felt an impulse to speak with her, tell her what had occurred, ask her what might be done. As I stood indecisive, I realized that another had come upon me, footsteps also muffled by the carpets—the stout red-faced woman who’d braced me upstairs.

“Fool!” she hissed, and elbowed me aside from the door. “You should have asked me to come with you. You’ll not have a key for the lady’s rooms, and mind you, in and out; no conversing with her. Those were Master Tybalt’s orders, but I’d not ignore them just yet, for my life.” She twisted a key from her ring and unlocked the door, and stiff-armed it open. “Hurry, then; deliver your sheets. I must lock it after.”

Inside, Rosaline started up to her feet. She was fully dressed, I saw, in a rich black velvet gown; her hair was up in a style too severe for her face. She was pallid, and her eyes were red, but as her gaze fell on me, she grew even paler. For an instant I had a sick, terrible conviction she would betray me, but she finally pointed at a table close to her curtained bed. “Put them there,” she said. I carried the tray over and settled it there. “Bide a moment; I have things for you.” She quickly set a plate, a glass, and a bowl upon another tray on the table where the candle burned—dinner things, still crusted with uneaten food.

“Mistress, the boy has duties,” the servant at the door called. “I’ll send another to fetch those.”

I quickly grabbed the tray and bent closer to Rosaline. “I need your help,” I whispered. I made a show of fumbling things, while I waited for her response.

It did not come. She gazed at me for too long, and then finally whispered back, “Why should I help a Montague? This night, of all nights?”

“For your cousin,” I said.

I had no chance for anything else. The servant at the door was clearing her throat impatiently. Rosaline had said nothing in reply, and I could not be certain of her, not at all. My position here became more dangerous with every heartbeat.

I bowed and backed toward the door with the tray. As I did, I managed to tilt an uneaten piece of bread toward the edge, catch it between two fingers, and knead out a thick ball of the soft interior. As I backed through the door, I fumbled the tray again, the better to give the senior servant something to criticize, as with my other hand I pressed the dough in place to block the tongue of the lock.

“You’ll not last in this house, you clouted, beetle-headed dotard!” My shrewish superior followed that with a blow of her open hand to the back of my head, and this time the tray threatened to tumble free of its own accord. She pulled the door closed with a bare curtsy to Rosaline, turned the key, and put it back on her ring.

I quickly raised the tray to distract her from my face, but she ignored me as thoroughly as her noble masters would have done. I was far below her own social station. “Drop that and I’ll see you whipped, boy. I don’t need Lady Capulet boxing my ears for your incompetence—” She would have continued berating me, but suddenly she paled. Coming up the steps was a pinch-faced matron in better clothes—still not one of the Capulets, but a high order of servant, and, from the look she gave us, one in charge of our worthless hides. My tormentor quickly curtsied, and I bowed over the tray.

“You,” the newcomer said, fixing her beady dark eyes on the large woman next to me. “Downstairs to the kitchen. There are dishes to wash.” She glanced at me, still bent over the tray. “Take those with you, Maria. You, boy. Chamber pots. Quickly.”

She did not wait to see that she was obeyed; she only swept past us with majestic, eerie quiet, and in her wake, my companion—Maria—irritably snatched the tray from my hands. “Well?” She probably would have cuffed me again, if her hands had been idle. “Go about it, then! And quietly!”

I bowed again, as clumsily as I could, and she hurried toward the back steps with the tray.

I stepped back against Rosaline’s door. The dough had done its work, and the lock had not closed. It slid open, and I stepped through and swung it closed after me.

When I turned, Rosaline was standing not two feet from me, and she had a shining dagger pointed at my throat.

“You dare,” she said softly. “You dare come here, with my brother’s blood on your hands.”

“I had Mercutio’s blood on them, not Tybalt’s,” I said. “A man your brother killed without cause. My friend.” My hand flashed out and gripped her wrist, but I did not try to take away the knife. I focused instead on her face, her eyes, the fragile strength and grief in her. “You know I did not love your brother. For your sake, I am sorry, but for your sake, I also hated him. For every blow he gave you, I hated him, Rosaline.”

She caught her breath, and I saw her bite her lip; tears started in her eyes, and I would not have seen her cry, not for my life. “He was my brother.” Her voice broke on the word.

“Brother or not, he had no right. I cannot forgive him.” What was my treacherous hand doing? It had moved from her wrist, glided up her arm, and now it touched her cheek. The skin there was warm and silken, and suddenly I was aware of the scent of her, roses and spice and candle wax and tears, and the danger of the dagger in her hand meant nothing, nothing at all. I felt drugged with the tingles of pleasure of my skin on hers, even in so small a measure. My fingers trailed down, traced the tight line of her jaw, and I felt the fast beat of her pulse. She raised her chin, but did not step back. The point of the knife wavered a bare thread from my throat. It was good it was there, I thought absently, because the pull to go closer to her had the pulse and depth of the ocean.

She suddenly pulled in a trembling breath and saved me from courting my own murder by stepping away. She dropped the dagger as if it had burned her hand, then wrapped her arms around her body, bent her head, and turned away. A curl of dark hair shook loose and fell against the graceful curve of her neck, and I ached to ease it back . . . no, to take out the pins that held her hair, see it tumble loose and silky around her white shoulders.

“Why are you here?” she whispered. “Jesu, Benvolio, do you not know they will cut you to pieces?”

I snapped back to my purpose, but it was an effort; I had gone a great distance away, it seemed, and what I’d come to do had faded in proportion. I turned away from her, stared hard at a candle’s flame, and tried to clear my mind. “Your cousin,” I said. “She slipped her escorts this afternoon. She’s exchanged vows with Romeo.”

“What?” Rosaline whirled. “How? How could she— What folly is that? Does he not know my family would destroy them both?”

“Mine too,” I said. “My grandmother would sooner see them dead.”

“But . . . married? Oh, this is a disaster! I thought it only a flattery, a fantasy to sustain her before the reality of her coming wedding; I never thought . . . I thought she might act improperly, never with such recklessness!”

“We can still stop it,” I said. “But I need your help.”

“How?”

“I think Romeo is here,” I said, and I saw her press her hands to her mouth in horror. “In her room. Perhaps readying to be in her bed. I dare not go in; she’ll shriek the house down, and Romeo and I would both be food for the dogs. If you interrupt them . . .”

“Then I am only the concerned convent-bound cousin, shocked to find them contemplating such sin,” she finished, and flashed me a shaking smile. “Yes. I will go.”

It was a risk, even so; she was supposed to be locked in, though I supposed that they would see that as a minor enough rebellion if she was caught. I doubted Juliet would care.

“Make him leave quietly,” I cautioned her. “Any betrayal would cost him his life. Please.”

That woke a silvery flash in her eyes, and I knew she was remembering that Romeo’s sword had taken her brother’s life this day. It would be so simple, so easy to gain the revenge her family desired so much. Nothing but a raised voice, a shocked cry . . . and it would cost her nothing but my own regard.

I caught her hand as she moved past me, and for just a moment, our fingers curled in on one another, sealed in pain and urgency . . . and then she opened the door of her room, and was gone.

Fool, I told myself in a sudden, ice-cold fury. She’ll betray you; she must betray you; she is a Capulet born and bred, sister to Tybalt, dead by Montague hands . . . and you’ve trusted her with the life of Tybalt’s killer, on the day of his death. Yet I could not help but trust her. It was a faith that had no basis in fact, but what faith ever does?

I took the bar from the door and blew out the candle, then waited by the new-opened exit in tense silence. I heard nothing—no outcry, not even a muffled argument. What if instead she had gone down the stairs, warned her aunt and uncle? What if even now Capulet guards massed at my back and below in the garden? I could scramble up to the roof, but the Capulet palazzo was too removed from its neighbors. Not even I, with all my practice, could make such a leap, and not from rain-slicked tiles. I’d tumble to broken bones, at the very least, and capture, and a slow death.

I heard the creak of the door behind me, soft and stealthy, and drew my sword without turning.

I closed my eyes in sweet relief as Rosaline’s hands closed on my shoulders, and she leaned forward to whisper, “I would not betray you, Prince of Shadows. Not even today.”

I put up the sword, closed the balcony doors on the pounding silver curtain of rain, and braced them again with the wooden beam. When I turned back, she had sparked tinder to light the candle anew, and in its glow I saw there was high color in her cheeks, and a strange look in her eyes. She placed the light upon the table and sat, hands folded together. After a moment of hesitation, I did the same.

“Was he within?” I asked her, and saw the blush in her cheeks grow brighter.

“You might say it so,” she said, and avoided my gaze by fixing her own upon her hands. “Even if my uncle discovers this treachery and voids the vows they exchanged, Juliet will not go virgin to Paris’s marriage bed.”

I imagined her stumbling upon so intimate a scene, and silently removing herself without giving an alarm—because an alarm would do no good. The act of love brought the marriage vows to life, and Romeo’s sin was now made holy. It did not mean the Capulets would not see it undone, but Juliet would never marry highly, or marry at all, even if they cut Romeo down in the streets and hid the secret. The roles of the two girls had now been switched. Juliet was bound, at best, for the convent if they prevented her from escaping with Romeo; Rosaline, the untouched maiden, would be Capulet’s asset to spend now.

Perhaps Paris would take her. Or some other, richer man.

But not me.

Never me.

I felt a wild, furious urge to fling sense to the winds, to do what Romeo had done with his Juliet; my grandmother had ordered it. Ruin the girls, ruin the family; that had been her message, but it had been a hateful one, and one I could not believe had any place in Romeo’s heart.

“Benvolio,” she said, and her voice pulled me out of a dark contemplation—would she resist me if I took hold of her, kissed her, bore her back to that curtained mattress? Would she cry out for help, or would she sigh my name, rise to meet me, crave the same senseless release I did? “Benvolio, Juliet knows well that this is a fool’s course. Why has she done such a thing?”

“For love,” I said. My voice had dropped lower in my throat, and I could not stop gazing at her, not to save my soul.

She took in a deep breath and slowly let it out, but she did not meet my eyes. “Juliet is a child, but she is no fantastic. She has been raised knowing her duty to this house, and she has been at peace with it all her life. One chance meeting with a boy—the sworn enemy of her own family—would never overcome it. She might engage in flirtation, but this . . . Benvolio, this cannot simply be love. It borders on sorcery.”

She was right, I thought, and with a chill, I thought of the witch, of her talk of curses. Of Mercutio’s last words. “Madness or love, done is done, and this is very thoroughly done. Whatever passes now is beyond our ability to change.”

“Have you given thought to how it changes us?” Now, finally, she looked on me, and the color stayed high in her cheeks. Her fingers were restless, fretting at the wood of the table. “When this is known—and it must be known; she cannot be so foolish as to damn her soul with a bigamous marriage to Count Paris; nor would Friar Lawrence allow it—then Juliet will no longer be my uncle’s to give away.”

“You will be,” I said. “I know.” It impressed me how quickly she’d reasoned it out, even given the rapid shocks of the day. “I think you may no longer fear imprisonment in the convent, at least.”

“Perhaps not, but now I dread the other outcome. Unlike Juliet, I was never resigned to that duty, to marriage to a man I did not know, bearing children for the sake of family honor. I do not know . . . I do not know how I can manage it.” She was immediately ashamed of this confession, I saw, and turned the blade of it on me. “At least your station increases from this.”

“Ah, me, yes, I become the target of every Capulet assassin and ham-fisted fool seeking their favor,” I said. “Tell me again how great my good fortune might be, Rosaline. I fail to properly appreciate it.”

She laughed a little, and covered her mouth with one hand, as if afraid someone might hear her inappropriate merriment. She ought to be in mourning, I thought; she must feel guilt for that, too, for knowing relief that her brother would never torment her again. “I am sorry,” she said. “I should have guessed such a rose came with thorns.”

“Poisoned thorns, and poisoned wine and poisoned meat. I shall have no peace from my great fortune, I promise you.” I hesitated, then said, “And it is the last time the Prince of Shadows may walk the night. From now on, I will be only Benvolio Montague.”

“Only?” Her voice was unexpectedly warm now. “That is a great deal, you know.”

“A half-breed heir is hardly what my uncle dreamed of,” I said. “It is not so much as you think. The color of my eyes never lets them forget what I am.”

That startled her, as if she had never considered such a thing, and I liked her for it. “Your eyes are beautiful,” she said, and it was an honest and unconsidered thought, one she immediately regretted, from the way she looked away. “I mean to say, they do you credit, and—”

I stood up. She did, too, in reflexive defense, and her gaze darted to the dagger discarded near the bed.

“No,” I said. “I will not hurt you.”

“Will you not?” She licked her lips. I wished she had not; I wished I could stop admiring the shine of them in the flickering light. “It is what men do, hurt women.”

“Not all is pain,” I said. This was not how I had meant to bend the conversation, but it seemed to travel so on its own. “Did you see pain when you peeked in the curtains of your cousin’s bed?”

She looked away, color rising in her cheeks. “I do not think so.”

“Then what is it you fear?”

“Drowning. Losing myself. Being . . . being controlled.”

“Both may surrender in this battle,” I said, and somehow I had moved closer to her, fatally close. “And both may win. I know this.”

“From experience.”

I smiled a little. “I’m no child,” I said. “And men are expected to know a few things.”

Her lips parted, and her eyes widened, and I wanted . . . I wanted so badly just then to kiss her, to taste the sweet darkness of her, but to do it would be to drown, as Romeo drowned. I was not quite ready to trade my soul for it.

But oh, so very nearly.

I pulled away from it, and her, and I saw a flash of guilty relief in her eyes as she likewise stepped back. “I will trust your word,” she said, and she meant more than seemed obvious by it. “How do you mean to leave here?”

“Perhaps like Cleopatra, wrapped in a carpet?”

“I regret I have no carpet large enough to wrap your thick head.” We were back on even footing now, and she even summoned a smile for it. “The garden is too wet; you will leave tracks to betray your presence.”

“I will go out the servants’ door, as I came in,” I said, and reached beneath her bed to fetch the covered blue-glazed pot. She gasped, this time in dismayed amusement. “I was ordered to empty chamber pots, after all. Fear not. I’ll leave it there for your attendant to find for you.”

“You can’t—” I held up the chamber pot, and she bit her lip on a laugh. “You are mad, you know.”

“Though it is madness, there is method in it,” I said, and bowed a little. “Your servant, my lady.”

“I would give you a blow, were you not holding that thing.”

I put it aside on the floor. “Come, then. Give me the blow. I deserve it.”

She came forward and raised her hand, but when it fell, the slap was nothing but a gentle contact, and she leaned in, and then . . .

And then I was lost.

I had kissed her before, but lightly, gently, and this was no gentle thing; it was all the pent-up grief and loss and compromise we knew would be our lives from this moment onward; it was all that we would have been, could have been, and never would. It was madness, and magic, and in that moment I understood with fatal clarity how my cousin could have thrown away his life, and all our lives, for love. If this was sorcery, then I had learned to love it.

Rosaline Capulet tasted like all I had ever wanted in my life, and now I knew that for truth.

I do not know how she found the strength, but she stepped away from me. I saw how pale she was, how unsteady, how flushed and oddly awkward; I saw her hands curl into shaking fists, as if she would pummel herself for her sins.

I could not speak at all.

“You must go,” she whispered. “Dear God, what is happening to us? How is this possible? We are not fools; we understand the world. . . . This cannot be us. It cannot be.”

I shook my head. The wood of the door was at my back, and I used it for bracing until my legs had found their strength again. Then Rosaline backed away and took up the dagger from the carpet. She wedged herself into a corner as if terrified of her own passions.

“We cannot do this,” she said, and tears sparkled like stars in her eyes. “Please go away from me. Please.”

I picked up the chamber pot, opened the door, and escaped into the hall. I had the presence of mind to scrape loose the bread dough, and heard the lock click shut between us.

I was as hot as if poison coursed through my veins. Pick the lock, something in me cried. Pick the lock; forget all this; lose yourself in her. Let the future fall. Let houses burn, as long as you are together. Nothing else matters but love.

I thanked God for the sobering weight of the blue pot in my hands, and escaped down the back steps to the servants’ door; a bored guard gave me a glance and opened it. I walked to the jakes and dumped the thing, carried it back to the steps of the house, and left it there for someone else to discover.

Escaping into the rain cooled my hot blood, at least, and I spent an hour walking in it, staring up at the clouds, letting the water wash away thought and impulse and desire until I could, finally, get the strength to journey home.

I would have to tell them the truth about Romeo’s marriage to Juliet, but not yet.

Not until morning.

FROM THE HAND OF ROSALINE CAPULET TO FRIAR LAWRENCE

My faithful brother in Christ,

Today my lady aunt, the most kind Lady Capulet, has announced to me that as hasty as my brother’s burial might be, so must be her daughter Juliet’s marriage to Count Paris, who has most eagerly sought her hand. She believes that only thus will the tragedy of our family be healed.

We know why this must not happen.

Good friar, I beg you to come with all haste, as she is much distraught, and I am sure you know that her heart will admit no new love whatever comes.

I know that you are attending to the needs of House Montague, with the exile of the murderer Romeo, but I beg you come to our aid quickly, before terrible events overtake us all. You, good friar, must find a way to ensure Juliet’s happiness.

Your sister in Christ,

most faithfully,

Rosaline Capulet

FROM THE DIARY OF FRIAR LAWRENCE

I pray God will forgive me all the grievous sins that mount almost hourly before me. I thought that I abetted only a little sin, that of disobedience, for the sake of love, but now I find I am party to so much more, and so much worse.

First did I, against the laws of Verona and the express wishes of our prince, give aid and comfort to young Romeo, whom I hid against his exile from the city, though he was guilty of shedding Tybalt’s blood; and then, fearing Juliet’s despair would lead her to a greater sin of self-murder, God forgive me but I sent the boy to her bed. I meant only to sanctify the marriage they so greatly desired. I had no thought of the other consequences.

Now, with Romeo safely on his way to Mantua, Juliet is forced to marry Paris and forswear her lawful marriage. She speaks of daggers, and the great and terrible sin of self-murder lest her bridal bed be also her bed of adultery. I know not what to do. I will pray upon it, and let God lead me to His will.

Ah, the bells begin their sad tolling—for a wedding for Veronica Montague, and after, for the twin funerals of Mercutio and Tybalt. I must to the Lord’s duties, though my heart is ashes.

God forgive all I have done.

God forgive what I must do next.