Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet

by Rachel Caine

  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.”