by Rachel Caine
The dark hood turned just a fraction toward me, enough that I saw the sliver of a pale cheek, a fine dark eye. “To tell you that there is something unnatural in this,” she said.
“Hatred is the most natural of things to men.”
“No,” she said. “Not hatred. There is a terrible thing at work here, and I believe it is hate disguised as love. Juliet is a quiet, biddable child; she is thoughtful and has always done as her parents wished. She made no complaints about the marriage to Paris when her father first approached him months ago; she seemed pleased at her good fortune, to be wedding a fine man such as he.”
“Yet she fell in love with Romeo.”
“It is not love,” Rosaline replied, and something dark in her voice struck a chord in me that shivered through my chest. “She scarce knows your cousin, yet she threw away her birthright, her life, for him. She is to marry Paris on Thursday, you know; she begins her married life in terrible sin, or worse—she will flee to join Romeo and throw our family into chaos. There is nothing good to come from this. It is all a ruin.”
I could not but agree; I wanted to think this admirable and fine, this passion of my cousin’s, but in truth it had seemed to distress him as much as pleasure him.
“It is something else,” Rosaline said. “If it did not sound like a madwoman’s rant, I would say that there is some dark sorcery in this.”
It seemed to me as if, in that moment, all sounds stopped in the cathedral, even the soaring song of the child; I heard nothing but the sudden pulse of my heartbeat, loud as a drum in my ears. Mercutio had said as much, in his dying deliriums . . . even the witch had told me he’d sought from her a curse. Love is the curse, Ben, love is the curse. Do you understand? He had sought some sign of comprehension in me, but I had not understood him, though I’d pretended.
“Mercutio,” I said. I blurted it out in surprise, and sat back on my heels; Rosaline drew in a startled breath, and made a quick hushing motion with one hand. I assumed a pious position again, fingers folded together. “Mercutio tried to warn us. ‘A plague on both your houses,’ he said.”
“Capulet and Montague alike,” she said.
It was time to make the confession; it could no longer hurt my sister, who had gone to other judgment. “You know that he thought what you said caused Tomasso’s death.”
“I know, but have always been innocent of that. I knew, of course. But I said nothing.” Her voice dropped even lower, and I had to lean closer, into her intimate perfume, to hear the rest. “It was your sister. I did not want you to know she had done it from sheer malice. I wanted you to think better of her.”
“I knew already,” I said. “She told me. And she told me she had put about that you had done it.” I swallowed, choking down my discomfort.
Rosaline shook her head a little, though whether it was denial or sadness I could not tell. “She was a child,” she said. “With a child’s thoughtless cruelty.”
Veronica had been many things, but thoughtless was not one of them. Still, I saw no reason to confess it. “How does this help us?”
She thought a moment, and whispered back, “If someone laid a curse upon the guilty party, but thought the guilty party was a Capulet . . . and a Montague was the real villain . . .”
“Then the curse would fall on both houses,” I said. “Ah, God, Mercutio . . .” He had tried to warn me. With his last breath, he had seen his wrongs, and tried to confess, and I had misunderstood. “But to make a curse, you need more than malice; you need—”
“You need a witch,” she whispered back, “and Juliet’s nurse babbled today that one makes potions here in Verona, and charms. A young, comely witch, recently come to town. We must seek her out, Benvolio. We must be sure this curse is lifted.”
“I know who she is,” I said. I crossed myself, and rose to my feet. “If there is a curse, I will see it finished. I promise you that.”
Her hand flashed out to wrap around my calf, and I froze, short of breath, swaying on my feet. Those were idolatrous feelings to have here, under the eyes of the Holy Mother. “Careful,” she whispered, and let go. “Be most careful, my Prince of Shadows.”
“And you,” I said, and backed away.
In turning, I narrowly missed a knife aimed for my back. I assume it was a Capulet knife, though the man wielding it had on simple clothes; the knife itself was sharp, double edged, and was of finer stuff than the attacker. He stumbled, off balance and surprised as I dodged away, and fury took me over; I kicked a foot into the bend of his knees and shoved him facedown to the marble floor as the failed dagger skittered from his hand; I knelt on his back and retrieved it, and put it to the base of his skull, preparing to drive it home . . .
...and a strong, feminine hand fell upon mine. “No,” Rosaline said. “Not here. Not now, I beg you. Not in this place.”
“He was not so delicate of stomach!”
“It is your soul I fear for, not his,” she said, and then she was gone, moving quickly away into the shadows of the Mazzini chapel. The sudden violence had caught the attention of my guards, who shoved the faithful—some of whom had become gawkers—aside to reach me.
I hesitated a long moment, then stood up. I still felt the need to hurt him, badly, but I only flipped the dagger and offered it hilt-first to Paolo, who took it and shoved it in his belt. “A gift,” I said, and managed a false smile. “The Capulets send us presents.”
“Aye, they are generous indeed,” he said, and hauled the suddenly chastened assassin to his feet. He was an older man, withered and shaking. Paolo shook him like a terrier with a rat. “What to do with this one, then?”
“Let him go,” I said.
“Let him go?”
I held Paolo’s stare, and he finally grinned, shrugged, and opened his hand. The man stumbled away, clinging to the columns for support, and escaping out into the dusty, dying sunlight.
“I don’t know if you’re brave or stupid, young sir,” Paolo said, “but I think I like you.”
“There’s no profit in killing a poor farmer underpaid for the privilege of murdering me,” I said. “Better to set my sights higher.”
His grin widened and became Luciferian, and he clapped a hand on the back of his fellow bravo. “I’m your man, sir,” he said, and the others echoed him with a gusto ill matched to the cathedral’s dusky silence. The priest preparing the altar for the mass turned to give us a disapproving frown, and I quickly led my men out into the falling Veronese twilight.
• • •
Locating the witch proved to be no trouble; I had scarce noticed my path carrying Mercutio’s dying weight, but Paolo fetched a torch as the stone-faced alleys drowned in shadows, and with that, I was able to track the vivid dark stains that Mercutio had left behind.
The blood led us straight to her door.
It looked the same as any other in the narrow street—made of good stout wood, heavily braced with crude iron. Paolo rained blows upon it, and I did not expect it to open . . . but it did, revealing not the witch at all, but—oh, strange irony—Friar Lawrence.
He seemed as surprised as I, and his fat cheeks pinked as he backed away. “Young master Benvolio,” he said, and tucked his hands into his sleeves in an effort to look saintly. “I thought you would be with your sad family this night.”
“My family can wait,” I said, and shoved past him into the narrow confines. Yes, there was the bed, stripped now of its bloody mattress; there were the dried herbs hanging from lengths of cloth, dangling everywhere and filling the room with a rich, dusty smell. Even so, death was here. Mercutio’s pallid ghost haunted the shadows. “Where is she?”
“Where is who?”
“The witch,” I said, and drew my dagger. I did not menace him, I only held it at my side, but he must have caught the look on my face, well limned by the single burning candle. “I would have her.”
“Witch, you say? Why, sir, she’s no witch, only a woman wise in herbs and medicines, fresh come from the country to see her cousi
n decently mourned. . . .”
I turned the dagger so the edge caught the light in a silvery line; his gaze darted to it nervously, then back. “Think well on your silence, Friar. There has been too much death today. I would not add more.”
He licked his lips and edged to the door, but Paolo leaned in, blocking the way with insolent ease. “You dare not threaten me, boy.”
“Where is she?”
“‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. . . .’”
“Men do the business of the Lord. Where is she?” I strode forward and took hold of his robe, pulling him toward me. I did not raise the dagger; there was still some chance, however small, that my immortal soul was not completely damned. “Talk, Friar, or I’ll loose your tongue a harder way.”
“Here,” said a voice, and I looked back to see the girl pushing her way out of a small, hidden alcove behind a heap of hanging clothes. “Here, sir, please, don’t hurt him.”
She was smaller than I remembered, and braver; she lifted her pointed chin to hold my gaze with bold resolve. She did not look the part of a witch, I thought, but rather like a saint, ready for her martyrdom.
I let go of the friar, but kept the knife at ready. Witches were unpredictable creatures; if she wished to have me dead, surely she could manage it in an instant, and then escape in a puff of smoke—or so it was said. I did not think she looked quite so fierce.
She raised her empty hands and settled herself on a low stool, then folded her hands in her lap. She looked hardly older than Rosaline, and a good deal more delicately built, as if a stern wind might shatter bones. Still, she’d been strong enough to lift Mercutio’s dying weight, and treat his wounds.
There was a focused, intent look upon her face that seemed almost like peace. “I expected you to return,” she said. “I thought you knew already.”
“Eventful days,” I said. “My friend killed, my cousin exiled, my sister murdered in the streets today before she was to wed. I had not spared a thought for you until now. Until I was reminded that ‘love is the curse.’”
She flinched, and her hands tightened together in her lap, but she did not look away. She raised her chin just a little more in defiance. “It can be, when those around you deem it so,” she said. “Mercutio saw that as clearly as day. Some loves bring nothing but pain; it is not the love that’s at fault, but us. He knew that. He hated you all for it, all of you who stood by, yet he did not mean to curse you. Only the guilty.”
I found I was restlessly turning the dagger in my fingers, and sheathed it, not out of any impulse to mercy but to prevent myself from striking at her. “Tell me the tale,” I said. There was no other seat in the hovel, save the unmattressed bed with its rope straps, but I perched myself on the frame. She gazed at me, then at Friar Lawrence, and bent her head, finally.
“The friar had no part in it,” she said. “He came tonight for herbs and tinctures, nothing that might be a sin. May he not depart?”
“No,” I said, when the friar seemed tempted. “I will need his ears on this. Now, confess, witch. Tell me of this plot between you and Mercutio.”
She licked her lips and began in a soft voice, so soft I strained to hear it. “My cousin Tomasso’s death undid him,” she said. “He always believed . . . believed that somehow they would be safe together. When it happened, when Tomasso was so foully murdered before his eyes . . . his faith was broken, sir, and rightfully so. He begged. He begged his father to spare him, but the rope was thrown up anyway. How should he not feel hate?”
“For his father, yes; for the men who hauled the rope, perhaps. But why us?”
“It is a sin to hate your father,” Friar Lawrence said, all unexpected. “And Mercutio tried to please him, as a son should do. Perhaps he could not curse him.”
“More’s the pity,” I shot back, “since no one bears more of the guilt.” I fixed the girl with my stare. “Continue.”
“He . . . he thought the Capulets were to blame, sir, and the Capulets were your sworn enemies; he wanted vengeance on them.”
“Then why did he cry ‘on both your houses’?”
“Because . . .” She hesitated, then shook her head. “Because the curse we forged named the Capulets, but also said, ‘the house who betrayed us.’ If that was not the Capulets, but instead someone else . . .”
“Then the curse would fall upon us both,” I said, and squeezed shut my aching eyes. What a tangle of pain this was, so many evil mistakes made, and such mounting consequences. “How do we remove the curse?”
“Remove it, sir?” She seemed startled at the question, and affrighted.
“Yes, remove it, before more deaths come from it, and for nothing!” I took her by the shoulders and forced her to meet my eyes; she flinched, and I remembered how unsettling some found the color of them. Why, I was but one step removed from sorcery myself. “How is it to be done?”
“If I tell you, I give you evidence you can use to damn me,” she said, quite sensibly. Friar Lawrence turned pale and crossed himself, no doubt realizing that he was guilty indeed of consorting with a witch. “You must swear I will not be punished for it. I only did as Mercutio asked.” I was well out of patience, and violence was a tool that fit well in my hand; she must have seen it on me, for she flinched and hurried on. “It was a three-part spell, sir, and all three parts must be destroyed before it can be ended.”
“What three parts?”
“One faith, one mind, one flesh,” she said, and looked away. “You saw the one in flesh. I drew it there myself.”
The inked inscription, the one I’d glimpsed on Mercutio’s breast. “The letters upon his skin.” She nodded. “Is his death enough to shatter it?”
“Yes. That link is already broken.”
“And the others?”
“Sir, please—”
This time I drew my dagger. “One time again I ask you: What of the others? Faith and mind?”
“For the mind, he wrote it down in his own hand,” she said, in a very small voice now. “The other . . . the other was cast upon rosary beads. Tomasso’s rosary, that Mercutio took from his grave.”
“How so?” Friar Lawrence was unexpectedly affronted by this. “I buried the boy myself, with his rosary in his hands. . . .” He paled even more, and crossed himself. “Merciful God, Mercutio did not desecrate the grave!”
“He unburied Tomasso, and took the beads,” she said. “And buried him again, with love. If that is desecration, good friar—”
“What else can it be called?” he demanded, but my mind was on Mercutio, digging by the light of the moon, and finding the corrupting body of his lover. No wonder his hatred had turned so poisonous as to infect those around him; I could not imagine the grief and rage that had driven him to it, nor to this.
“The rosary,” I said. “Where is it? And where is the writing of the spell?”
She shook her head now. “He did not tell me, sir; I only taught him. Where the things are now, I know not . . . but the rosary would have to be in Capulet hands; he meant it to be so.”
In Rosaline’s hands, if he believed Veronica’s story about Rosaline’s betrayal . . . yet it was Juliet who seemed to have given herself over to obsession. Juliet who seemed bent on self-destruction.
“You know nothing more?”
“Nothing.”
“Swear it,” I said, and pointed the dagger an inch from her eye. She did not blink. “Swear it now, upon your corrupted soul, witch.”
“My soul is not corrupted, but I swear it upon my soul, and upon God and his angels,” she said. “I know nothing more than I’ve said. If I could stop this, I would; Mercutio is gone, and vengeance is hollow. His spilled blood told me that, at least.” She smiled a little, through sudden tears. “He was not a bad man, you know.”
“He was a broken man, and he was my brother, and my friend. You need not tell me he was a good man, for I loved him,” I said. “And you should never have sent him down this dark path. You imperiled his soul.”
“So does murder,” she replied. “Yet no one shuns Lord Ordelaffi. Nor you, Benvolio, though you have blood on your hands.”
“Less than you would think,” I said, “and never but in the thick of a fight that might have cost me my own life. I am not Mercutio’s father.”
“You did not stop him,” she said, and met my eyes with level accusation. “You stood by and watched as Tomasso died, and Mercutio’s soul was torn in two.”
I had no answer for that, no clever riposte to give; I lowered the dagger, then sheathed it, and nodded to Paolo.
He drew his rapier. “I’ll kill the witch for you,” he said.
“No.” As he advanced, I backed to stand between them, and drew my own sword and beat his down. It was cramped quarters, between us; the ceiling was so low that my head cracked rafters when I moved unwisely. “Let the Church deal with her, or the prince, but I’ll not have her blood on our hands. Who knows what doom she might lay upon her killer?”
That set him back with a frown, and he nodded and backed from the room. I followed, ducking under the low doorway, and found Friar Lawrence behind me, tugging nervously at his habit. “That was well-done, young sir, very well-done,” he said. “I had no notion she was a witch, steeped in the black arts, I came only for her skilled medicaments. . . . Yes, yes, most proper you leave punishment to the city’s prince and the church elders. . . . I can give no evidence of wrongdoing, you understand. . . .”
“Why came you here?” I asked him. He seemed so uneasy it screamed of guilt, and fear, rank fear. “What medicaments did you purchase?”
“Nothing, sir, nothing harmful at all, only a . . . a certain draught, a vial of distilled liquor—”
“Liquor you can purchase anywhere,” I said. “What effect does this draught hold?”
“Benvolio, I would rather not say. . . .” He shook his head, but when pressed by silence, and the closing around of my guards, he said, “When you drink this liquor off, presently through your veins runs a cold and drowsy humor, and no pulse shall keep native progress . . . no warmth, no breath shall testify that you live. The roses of lips and cheeks fade to ashes, and the eyes’ windows fall like death. . . .”
