by Rachel Caine
I could not forget Mercutio’s wild mood before dawn. Married and buried, wed and dead. Would they still wed him? Or would his family lock him away in some monastery, sworn against his will to holy orders—no, they dared not; he was their eldest son and must be made to run to heel. They’d marry him, and he was right: He’d hurt the girl, more now than ever before. Her family had been willing to sell her for position, as all girls of means were sold or bartered; they’d simply seek a better bargain now that Mercutio’s reputation lay in tatters, but marry her they would, and as quickly as possible. His father would demand it, to shore up the Ordelaffi name. I did not like to think on that unhappy wedding night. If it was consummated at all, it would be done coldly and ruthlessly. Mercutio had nothing in his heart now but ashes and gall, and that would make a bad marriage, a poisonously cruel one.
The certainty of seeing my sister at dinner made me feel sick with the desire to close my hands around her plump neck, but I rose, allowed Balthasar to dress me in appropriate clothes, and met Romeo in the hall, newly washed and berobed himself. He looked at me somberly, nodded, and the two of us strode into the dining hall together.
Conversation dimmed upon our entry, but we looked neither right nor left, heading steadily and calmly for our seats. They sat empty, awaiting us, and as we took our places servants quickly sprang into action to bring us wine and soup. I know not what flavor they placed in front of me, though certainly the cooks had labored for hours on the preparation. The wine and the soup and the napkin would, at the moment, all have the same inedible texture.
I ate mechanically, smiled when the occasion seemed to call for it, and made conversation with my mother, who watched me with unnerving focus. She was worried, I thought.
I did not look at nor speak with Veronica, who sat only a few places away. She, for her part, was busily whispering with our younger cousin Isabella. Their hushed giggles scraped raw on my nerves, but I resisted all the violent impulses that tried to move me, and smiled, and smiled, and smiled.
At last, someone spoke plainly, and it was my uncle. “Benvolio,” he said. He was several cups into the wine, and leaning on his elbow as he tasted the next, then nodded for it to be filled to the brim.
“Sir?”
“This business today with young Mercutio,” he said. “I trust there is no truth to the rumors of his behavior?”
“Rumors, sir?” I stared at him, blank faced, daring him to speak of such things at the table.
He was not quite that drunk. “No matter, no matter. I was only concerned for the safety of my nephew and my son, who have spent so much time with the boy. Nothing untoward occurred, then?”
I laughed, and it sounded surprisingly carefree to my ears. “We have always been the soul of propriety, I assure you, Uncle. I know not what rumors are being passed, but you know that our enemies often try to blacken reputations in unsavory ways.”
“For cert, yes, but this comes not from an enemy,” Montague said. A pin would have made a sound of thunder had it dropped; somewhere far down the table, a fork clattered noisily as it fell on a plate, and there was a hiss of disapproval like a pit of snakes disturbed. “This comes from his own household.”
I shrugged. “Mercutio and his father have been at odds lately, as you know; it comes of having a strong-willed heir, as you do yourself, sir.”
He laughed, casting a proud and indulgent look on Romeo, who seemed dangerously silent. “Of course, of course. A high-spirited boy is a credit to any father,” he said. “But you should be more cautious with your friend. I do not wish to think ill of him, but your own reputations may suffer should these rumors persist.”
“They won’t,” I said. “It’s air and nonsense. Why, Mercutio’s to be married soon.”
Montague was more acute than the wine would indicate, because while he still smiled at me, he cut his eyes toward his son and said, “Romeo? ’Tis true, what Benvolio says?”
“Has my cousin ever been a liar?” Romeo asked. “You wound my brother, and in wounding him, I bleed.”
“Come now, fond as I am of you both, you are not brothers.” No, because if I had been born of his loins, I would be the heir, a fact that made Montague justifiably unnerved. Heirs had died at the hands of their cousins before, many times, to make new heirs.
“As good as,” Romeo countered defiantly. “Raised as brothers, and brothers in affection and in temperament. Call you him a liar, sir, you call me one also.”
“Smooth your rough tongue, my son, I asked only out of love,” Montague said. Romeo attacked his game bird with such single-minded ferocity I could only think that he wanted to pull something apart with his bare hands, and dinner was the least dangerous choice he might have. “Well, then, that’s clear enough. My dear? Shall we retire and leave our children to their amusements?”
He stood, and Lady Capulet stood obediently to leave with him; it was her place to go, whether she was hungry or not, sated or not. I wondered whether she had always been so content with that lot, so biddable. Surely not. Surely once, she had been young and afire with her own potential. Even girls dreamed of what they might do, did they not? I had no idea what they dreamed about, but I did not think it was a lifetime of being ordered, of walking behind, or enduring whatever was allotted to them without complaint.
Some women created their own worlds, like my grandmother. Some, like my mother, were trapped like flies in amber by their choices and lives. I had never been sure which of those extremes described my aunt.
We finished the dinner, Romeo and I, in apparent good spirits, dissembling as if our lives depended on it, which might have been the case. I had left stolen goods at Mercutio’s apartments. If he was of a mood to turn on me, it would be a simple thing—he had seen us there by the wood; I knew it. He knew we had watched Tomasso die, and done nothing.
I could not imagine that he did not hate us.
Try as I might, we did not, as it happened, avoid Veronica in the end. She and the insipid younger cousin trailed us back from the dining hall—it seemed a deliberate strategy—and I heard part of a whisper with Mercutio’s name, and that shrill, muffled giggle, and it broke the fragile hold I had on my own fury.
I rounded on her.
My sister, concentrating on her gossip, did not see me until it was too late to dodge. I grabbed her by the back of the neck and dragged her squealing around the corner, into a darkened alcove, while Romeo forced the cousin along down to the hall with a firm arm over her shoulders. “Enough,” I told Veronica in a voice that ought to have made her grateful she still breathed. “If I hear you say his name again—”
“You’ll what?” She struck my hand away from her, color burning hot in her cheeks. “Hit me, as you did Romeo? Beat me, as Mercutio’s father did him? Do you imagine anyone will allow you to touch me? I am an asset. You—what are you? An extra Montague, of little value. They can’t even sell you for a dowry.”
“They hanged the boy today, while Mercutio was forced to watch,” I said, keeping my voice low and vicious and intimate between us. “Someone dropped a whisper in the wrong ears, and I know it was you, Veronica. I know.”
“Oh, do you?” A smirk danced at the corners of her full mouth now, and she fussed with the lace around her collar, fluffing it into just the right shape. “As I hear it, the first complaint came from someone who chanced to see the two of them in carnal embrace behind the church itself. Someone you would never suspect, I’ll wager.”
I had no idea what she was talking about, and I tightened my grip on her shoulders. I saw a flash of panic in her eyes before the arrogance returned. “Make yourself plain,” I said. “I’ve no time for this, and you know I am out of temper.”
“A Capulet,” Veronica said. “A Capulet girl was the one who complained of their unnatural embrace to the bishop himself. Or so it’s said.”
“Which Capulet girl?” I did not believe her. I did not want to believe her, truth be told, and I saw the vinegar-bitter flash of victory in her eyes.
“The one
Romeo is always bleating about,” Veronica said. “The plain one bound for the convent. Rosaline. And so, we are revenged upon her, too.”
I let her go and stepped back as if she’d caught fire. I wanted to believe she was lying; I did not want to believe that Rosaline, of all people, had been the one to do such a cruel and heartless thing. But she is devout, I thought. She plans for a life in the Church. She does not know Mercutio. All she would see is something ugly and venal and perverse, conducted in the dark. Small wonder she would be offended.
But it felt wrong to me. Very wrong.
“You’re lying,” I said. “You soul-rotted little villain, you lie. You’re the one who bent the bishop’s ear and blamed the Capulets for it.”
Her lips curled into a perfect bow of satisfaction. My clever, evil little sister, so good at twisting her words. “Your companion was a liability to the house of Montague with his behavior,” she said. “Bound to be caught eventually. Now he hates the Capulet wench for betraying him, when before he might have seen our quarrel with them as some game of chess, bloodless and adventuresome. I did you a favor, brother, binding him closer to us. I did him a favor. Don’t think Grandmother wouldn’t approve. It was her own idea.”
It had the breathtaking cruelty of something the old witch would order . . . betray Mercutio’s secret love, use the Capulets as scapegoat to bind the bitter, wounded boy closer to the Montagues. Politics at its most brutal.
“La Signora might have given the order,” I said in a voice just above a whisper, a voice I could hardly hear over the mad thudding of my pulse and the red rush of blood in my ears. “But she used you as her puppet, sister.”
Veronica lifted her hands in a gesture of utter indifference. “I am a woman. I must get used to being used.”
“You’re not a woman. You’re a child playing at things you don’t understand.”
“I’m as much a woman as you are a man, Benvolio! I’ve my blood for a year now! And soon I’ll be wed and bedded, and breed more allies for this house. What use are you, then? Another excess boy?” She shoved past me and rejoined her silly little cousin, and the two girls swept down the hall in a hiss of silk and a cloud of floral perfume.
That evil should smell so sweet . . .
“What quarrel was that?” Romeo asked, once I’d come back to him. “To do with Mercutio?”
“Malice,” I said. “And one day, she’ll feel the scorpion’s sting of it on her own back.” My tone was so dark that he gave me a sidelong look of concern. “I’ll go in secret tonight, to see that Mercutio’s well cared for.”
“Then I come, too,” Romeo said.
I did not have the heart to tell him no.
• • •
Slipping into Mercutio’s rooms was an old-established routine for me, but teaching Romeo my methods was less simple, and the Ordelaffi household was on edge, to complicate matters. We did manage, but it was a near thing, and on clambering sweaty and trembling through the window we found Mercutio’s rooms dark and silent. No lamps lit. No sign of life at all.
“They’ve sent him away,” Romeo said in a harsh voice. “Ben, they sent him away!”
“Or worse,” I said. I found a candle striker and lit one of the half-melted tapers on the wall sconce. The light was thin and feeble, but it served . . . and I found Mercutio’s bloody clothes in a heap nearby, piled in a way that meant a servant had not been allowed to attend him. There were drops drying on the floor. Romeo took the candle and followed me, holding it high enough for me to suss out the thinning trail, and it led us past the undisturbed bed, to the pallet where Mercutio’s manservant would have laid his head, in better days.
But tonight, huddled on it was our friend.
He’d had no care—not even the rudest. He lay in his smallclothes, smeared with blood, face swollen and near unrecognizable. Romeo and I said nothing for a long moment, and then I looked at my cousin, and he nodded and lit a second candle from the first. He left me with that light, and moved off. When he returned, he held a basin of water and a cloth. The water was clean, at least, as was the rag. Mercutio groaned when we helped him sit against the wall, but he did not try to resist as I sponged the worst of the crusted blood from his eyes, nose, and mouth.
Once cleaned, he did not look much improved at all. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose clearly bent, and while he had by some miracle not lost teeth, one had gone loose. Two fingers were broken, and Romeo reset them and helped me bind them fast for healing.
When Mercutio finally spoke, it came slow and slurred and dull. “Did they leave him there? In the tree?”
“Rest easy,” I said. “Friar Lawrence has seen him decently laid to rest.”
“He was brave,” my friend said. It was as if he were on a far distant shore, the words coming but dimly. “You saw, Benvolio. He was brave when they took him.”
“He was,” I agreed. It was suddenly hard to speak, and I had to look away, into the shadows, and not at his beaten face. Grotesque as it was, I knew it was only a small reflection of the pain within. “Most brave.”
“I would have died with him, you know.”
“I know,” Romeo said, when I did not. “You fought for him, Mercutio.”
“And I will never stop fighting for him,” he said, still in that cool, impartial, dull tone. It was not defeat in his voice—it was the opposite: a conviction so overwhelming that it was simply fact, requiring no passion to vindicate it. “I will find who betrayed him. I will have my vengeance, come the devil himself between us.”
I felt a chill crawl my spine, listening to him, because I knew he meant it. He would dig like a terrier until he found his rat, and crushed it.
But the rat was my sister, and beyond her, my grandmother.
His enemy was Montague.
There was a doom coming on us, and I could feel it as strongly as the prickling of the air before a storm. Better his father had sent him away, I thought, and it was a terrible thing, a traitorous thing, but true.
“Come,” Romeo said, and shouldered Mercutio’s sagging weight to help him rise. “A hot cup of wine, and your bed, and cold compresses for your bruising.”
“What a little mother you are, Romeo,” Mercutio said, and laughed. It was an awful sound, empty as a pebble rattling in a cup, but it died as soon as he sank down wearily into his bed. I fetched the wine, and Romeo the compresses. As I fed the wine into my friend’s swollen mouth, he caught my wrist in his broken hand and squeezed. He did not even wince at the pain he inflicted on himself. “I beg you, Benvolio, do not leave me tonight, else I may find a dagger a better friend than you.”
“You’ve often said my wits were sharp as any dagger,” I said, and forced a smile, though I did not think he could see it through those swollen eyes. “There’s no need for a poor substitute.”
“We will not stir from your side,” Romeo said quickly. “You have my word, as Montague.” He said it with pure sincerity, and I had to bite back a wince. What value did our words have, as Montagues, now? “I am sorrowed for you, Mercutio.”
“Sorrow,” Mercutio repeated, and let out a slow, weary sigh. “There will be sorrow enough soon, so that every mouth in Verona can chew a rancid feast of tears and bile and hate.”
“Think on that tomorrow,” Romeo said. He sounded unnerved now, just as I felt. “Tonight, you must rest and heal.”
“Tomorrow, and all the days after,” Mercutio agreed. He let out another sigh, as if giving up his ghost, and made a pathetically small whimper as Romeo pressed a cool compress over his swollen eyes. “Tomorrow, for my enemies. Tomorrow, for blood. Tomorrow, for the wretched living. Tonight is for the sainted dead.”
I got him to drink some wine then, and his shivering slowed as the feather bedding crowded close around him. When he finally slept, Romeo looked at me and said, soft enough not to wake him, “Was it the Capulets who struck at him so, do you think?”
He had not heard Veronica’s confession, nor guessed at it; he knew only that we’d quarreled.
“I think whoever did will soon regret it,” I said. I hated my sister, and I feared the selfish, cold chit, but she was still blood, still family. I should lie for her. I should lie to protect the Montague family and Romeo from his own better nature . . . and yet, I could not bring myself to it. “The truth, like blood, will out.”
I took the key from Mercutio’s neck. I tested the door and found his apartments locked from the outside. That was good; it meant Mercutio’s lord father had decreed his son be abandoned to his wounds and demons at least for the night; not even the most loyal of Mercutio’s servants had dared sneak back to his side. I left Romeo at the bed and opened the secret compartment where Mercutio had taken possession of the jewels, gold, and sword I had stolen the night before; those I put into a leather bag.
“Where are you going?” Romeo asked in a charged whisper, as I swung up into the window and checked the street below. It was the dregs of the night now, when even criminals stole off to their straw beds. “You promised him you’d not go!”
“I’ll come back,” I said. I lifted the bag. “If they search his rooms and find this, he’ll swing like Tomasso, and so may we. I’ll take it to a safer place. If he wakes, say I’m gone to the jakes. It’ll be true enough.”
I slipped out before he could object, swarmed down the wall, and went at a quick, light pace through the warren of streets to the public jakes located near the river. It was a foul place, and no matter how carefully I stepped, the ground was soft and wet and stank of effluence and rot, but that was all to the good.
I held my breath as I came to the bog house, with its wooden seats over the pits; I tied a thin silken rope, one of several I had hidden on me, to the buckles of the bag, and lowered it into the filthy liquid, then tied it to a rusty hook below the seat. I’d hidden things here before, and disposed of others. No sane man searched a waste-filled midden for treasure. It would be safe enough until I retrieved it—or not. I did not greatly care now, as long as it was not found in Mercutio’s possession, nor mine.
I came back to the Ordelaffi house before the blush of dawn rose, and slipped back in with more ease than I’d had when dragging Romeo along. I found my cousin asleep with his head pillowed on the bed next to Mercutio, whose face was still hidden under compresses. I kicked off my filthy boots and left them by the ruined, bloody clothes, and found a pair that fit me well enough from my friend’s closet. Then I changed out the compresses and drank wine and fought off my own exhaustion until I heard the rattle of a key in the door.
