by Jenny Trout
His first fear was that he had lost his sight when his head impacted the stone. Then he feared death, but that didn’t seem right either. He had walked with the dead, they did not feel this pain.
Then he heard the screaming. The wrenching screams of a wounded man dying.
A wounded man who wants to die.
Every movement was agony. His right arm wouldn’t move without spears of pain lancing his whole body. It hung at a strange angle, and he held it to his side as he went to Romeo.
The portal was stone, dark black as the walls of the cave around them, and Romeo clawed at it, beat it with his fists and howled.
Hamlet edged backward, found the cavern wall, and slid down it.
“Romeo and Juliet have been marked from birth to love each other across impossible barriers. Nothing you do can change that.”
Any warmth left in his heart froze.
“No! No, no, no!” Romeo slumped, sobbing, and with a last, wrenching breath, he screamed her name.
Hamlet would hear the sound in his nightmares until the day he died, and accept the punishment gratefully. No matter his good intention, no matter the love in his heart, he had failed his friend.
In the cold of the haunted caverns below Elsinore he ignored his pain and listened to his Romeo’s. He felt each ragged sob like the tail of a scourge against his unworthy heart.
It was Horatio that found them, hours later, Romeo weak and cold, Hamlet the same, blood from his broken arm slowed to a trickle down his side. It seemed ages before the guards arrived, Romeo’s friar with them. As they emerged from the cavern, into the full and glaring light of the morning sun, Hamlet knew only that he had been reborn into a cruel nightmare.
Chapter Twenty
Something was burning. Brimstone? No, embers, Romeo recognized, his nose twitching. And incense. To keep virulent humors at bay. He blinked his eyes.
Had it all been a dream? Had he woken beside Juliet, to the call of the lark and his banishment? Had he been forewarned by a nightmare? Or did he wake now in Friar Laurence’s care, the poison in his veins still killing his flesh from the inside even as the antidote worked itself through his blood?
No, neither of those, he knew in a shattering moment. None of it, from his near death to his sojourn through the land of the dead, had been a dream. He had found Juliet. He had found her and failed her.
The moment his eyelids fluttered, Friar Laurence was there, cradling the back of Romeo’s head and pressing a goblet of water to his mouth. “Drink. Your lips are like parchment. Drink.”
Romeo did not wish to drink. He considered Christ on the crucifix, begging for water, for mercy. Romeo had always wondered at that, the need for physical comfort amid the agony that would only be prolonged. He understood it even less now, for all he wished for was death.
“Where am I?” he croaked, reaching to push the cup away.
“Elisnore. We are…” Laurence grimaced. “We are prisoners, implicated in the kidnapping of Prince Hamlet.”
“Kidnapping?” Romeo laughed bitterly. “A man cannot leave his home for a day voluntarily?”
“A day?” Laurence’s shocked face contorted even more. “Romeo…Prince Hamlet has been missing for over a year.”
A year? Romeo pushed up and took the cup he had rejected. He saw now that the curtains about the bed were tattered, that the room was a jumble of draped furniture and dusty artifacts. “Where are we?”
“A tower room, under constant guard.” Laurence nodded to the door. “I enter and leave only at the King’s command. Usually, to go off on one of Horatio’s errands to track you down.”
“Horatio knew the truth. Why didn’t he just tell the King?” As he said it, Romeo answered his own question.
Laurence articulated it for him. “Tell the King that his nephew was on a quest to avenge his father’s murder? That Hamlet the Elder shows his ghostly face below the cliffs and names Claudius his murderer? And reveal the existence of the very portal Hamlet was charged to defend?”
There was no arguing with that.
“I found her.” Romeo closed his eyes. “I found her, and then I lost her. Or… She lost me. She pushed me over…”
How was he to explain it to Laurence, who had not seen the terror and wonder of the Afterjord for himself?
“I lost her,” Romeo repeated in defeat.
Laurence crossed himself and closed his eyes. “Then you must accept it as the will of God.”
“How?” Romeo asked bitterly. The good Friar was only trying to console him. Now that he’d seen the Afterjord, Romeo wasn’t certain he could believe as he had before. “Which God? For they all seem petty, vindictive and cruel.”
“No. Whatever foul realm you visited, whatever horrible things you saw there…you must not blame the Holy Father for them.”
Foul realm? Horrible things? “You’ve spoken with Hamlet.”
“I have. His uncle tried to forbid it, but he has come every day to see you. He worried about you.” Laurence’s face fell. “But he is unsure he can persuade his uncle to release us.”
“He can.” Romeo nodded grimly. “Hamlet can do anything.”
It was Romeo who had failed.
…
“Under no circumstances.”
Hamlet stood before his father’s throne and faced the pretender who sat upon it now.
Claudius did not wear the crown so well as his brother had. Hamlet the Elder had sat up tall and straight, the golden circle a gleaming halo of responsibility and honor. It was tarnished now, dimmed by the unworthy man who wore it. Despite being the younger brother, Claudius looked older; no doubt he had been aged prematurely by the guilt of killing his own kin. His cropped hair had gone to white, and the lines around his steely eyes had deepened.
Perhaps being king wasn’t exactly as he had envisioned it, Hamlet thought meanly. If one was entirely unsuited to the role, it must have been perilously stressful.
Hamlet hoped his uncle felt the full force of his unkind thoughts. “Romeo did not kidnap me, uncle. Your concern for my safety is touching, as always, but I left Elsinore of my own accord.”
It sounded like a lie, because it was a lie, and Hamlet cursed himself for not being better at deception. Since returning from the Afterjord, Midgard seemed surreal and unimportant, and he had no energy for intrigue, even when it would benefit his friend.
“It won’t happen again,” Claudius snapped. “You worried your poor mother half to death.”
Alas, she could not manage the other half. “Then she will understand the depth of grief that required me to absent myself from court.”
“You could have left a letter to say where you’d gone. Or at least that you were going at all.”
Hamlet noted that his uncle didn’t address the grief aspect. Possibly the guilt of knowing he’d caused it would keep him from concealing the truth of his treachery.
“Mourning makes one forget social niceties, I’m afraid.” Hamlet looked about him. “Where is my grief-stricken mother, then?”
“Consoling poor Ophelia, I am certain.” Claudius’s brows lifted in mock surprise. “You’ve been gone for so long, I had forgotten.”
“What? What’s happened to Ophelia?” The vision of Ophelia drowning again and again had faded from Hamlet’s thoughts as one by one the terrors had stacked against them. Now it swam to the front of Hamlet’s mind, and he saw Ophelia in her watery grave as though it had truly occurred.
“Your absence…” Claudius shook his head. “I fear she took your absence as a rejection of her love. She has gone quite mad.”
A cold sweat broke over Hamlet. “No.”
The role set aside for you brings you to your doom, and pain to those you love. There is no way for you to avoid it, and yet you plunge forward, taking everyone you love with you.
He shook the words from his mind. “No. I don’t believe you.”
“I would suggest you go to her, to see for yourself, but I fear you may only upset her further.” Claudius co
uld not hide the sick pleasure he obviously took in those words. “You hurt people, Hamlet. Now you must pay the price. Your friends must pay the price.”
“Romeo is already paying the price.” Hamlet glared at his uncle, his stepfather, his enemy. “Nothing you can do to him will ever compare to the hell he already endures.”
Claudius was unmoved. He sat back in the throne that should have belonged to Hamlet and said, with a malicious smile, “Well. We’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”
…
As weeks passed, the restrictions on Romeo and Friar Laurence did not abate. Hamlet visited his friend daily, brought books and paper for the Friar, brought extra food to relieve them from their meager rations, but he could not earn them their freedom.
“What is left for me in Verona, anyway?” Romeo asked Hamlet, for what seemed like the hundredth time. It had been days since Romeo had last risen from his bed, and he appeared to Hamlet a skeleton, frail and sweaty, his skin as white as the bed linens. The hollows around his eyes were like bruises; he was not eating.
If it was his intent to starve himself, Hamlet knew he had no power to force his friend to change his course. But he would not let him face the darkness alone.
“Your lady mother, who no doubt grieves your absence,” Friar Laurence piped up from his place at the desk. He wrote letter after letter, to the heads of as many countries as he could think of, begging for help to escape their imprisonment. The letters never left the castle, Claudius made sure of that.
Romeo had heard that before, Hamlet knew. He tried another tact. “All is not lost. If you regained your strength, we could try again.”
“The corpseway is closed. You told me so yourself.” Romeo coughed miserably.
“Yes, but…” Hamlet felt his doublet. He had kept a memento, one he should have given Romeo weeks ago. But some impulse had warned him to keep it, to save it for when he really needed it. “I think we might stand a chance.”
He pulled the key from his shirt and laid it beside Romeo.
“We needed the third key, and now we have only one.” Romeo reminded Hamlet weakly. “Take it away. There is nothing we can do now.”
“But shouldn’t we try?” Hamlet reached for that token of comfort, barely believing it had survived in Midgard. He pulled out the lock of hair Juliet had given him, that he had tied with a bit of string, and pressed it into Romeo’s lifeless hand.
He stared at it, disbelieving, and asked, “What?”
“She gave it to me, before the sirens. She wanted you to have this, if things went wrong. And I can’t help but wonder…”
Hamlet was not a romantic. No power on earth could convince him of the mystical properties of love to overcome obstacles, not even with what he had seen of Romeo and Juliet in the Afterjord.
“What if we could open the portal? This is a part of Juliet; she belongs to the Afterjord. I don’t know that it will work, for certain. But if there’s a chance…wouldn’t you try?” Hamlet knew he pleaded for something Romeo might not be able to give. He was too weak now, weaker than he had been when they’d first set out on their journey, with the poison still ravaging his body. But Romeo was his friend, whether they’d intended to become friends or not, and Hamlet could not sit idly by and watch him die. It was a slim hope, for Hamlet had no idea if a single key and a token from the Afterjord would work to stir the portal. But it was the only hope they had.
“Romeo,” Friar Laurence began, warning. “You used dark forces to your own ends before, and you are punished for it now. Do not do this.”
Romeo’s fist closed around the lock of hair. “I left her there. I do not know how they are torturing her for my actions. I must do what I can to free her.”
“There’s my friend back again.” Hamlet ignored the Friar’s utterance of despair and clasped Romeo’s shoulder. “The king won’t let you leave this room. So it will take some time, and some cunning, to return us to the portal. You need your strength. Promise me you’ll eat, and drink. You’ll need the good Friar’s assistance. You must commit to life. You have to live.”
“Will you help me, Laurence?” Romeo asked, trying to push his weakened body up on the flimsy, moth-eaten pillows.
“To keep you alive, boy, I would move heaven and earth itself.” Friar Laurence dropped his pen and went to the hiding place where he kept the extra food Hamlet had brought them.
“Thank you,” Romeo told Hamlet, and for the first time, there was no shame in his reliance upon his friend. That warmed Hamlet more than he’d expected.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he reminded Romeo gently. “We will need help. But I know who will be willing.”
…
Horatio held the torch aloft. “Come now, quickly.”
Romeo leaned heavily on Hamlet as they negotiated the stairs. His weeks abed had atrophied his limbs; though he could walk well enough on steady ground, the steps gave him trouble.
Horatio motioned to the young man behind him. Dressed in rags and skinny from starvation, he could have easily been mistaken for Romeo but a few days ago, before he’d given up his hunger strike. “Go inside. The Friar will instruct you.”
If any guards—any that Horatio had not plied with drugged wine—came to inspect the room, Laurence would make as many excuses as necessary to keep them away from “Romeo” in the bed, but the peasant would play his part if it came to it. In reward, he would receive enough gold to keep him and his family from hunger ever again.
Hamlet had to admit, Horatio was good at coming up with plans.
It seemed a dangerous thing, Hamlet reflected as they passed one of the drugged guards, to plan an escape on such a slender hope as they carried with them.
It had to be enough. It simply had to be.
Negotiating the main hall of the castle was not an issue; the winding tower steps led to a postern door they slipped out of to meet Bernardo. His round face was sweaty beneath his helm. “There’s a strangeness in the air tonight, your highness,” the guard warned.
“As well there should be. Lead us back to the place where you found us.”
The way seemed longer this time, perhaps because Hamlet was so aware of Romeo’s frailty. Horatio followed behind them, chewing his thumbnail. He didn’t like this business with the portal, and, Hamlet suspected, any business to do with the Italians in the tower. He was a good friend, though, and said nothing. Hamlet had impressed upon him the importance of this errand.
When they reached the corpseway, Hamlet’s heart fell. He had hoped, stupidly, that it would have opened once more. There was no reason for it to have done so, but it had been one of those vain hopes borne of desperation, a thing one believes without really wanting to, for they knew the disappointment that would come.
“What should we do now?” Romeo rasped, slumping to the stone floor of the cavern.
“I suppose we…” Hamlet pulled the key from around his neck and pressed them to the stone of the corpseway. Nothing happened. “Come on, you bastards. Let us back in,” he muttered under his breath.
The stone face of the corpseway held.
“Are there words you must say? An incantation?” Horatio asked.
Hamlet shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought…”
He didn’t know what he thought. He’d just blindly hoped he would be successful, because they’d deserved it. To be cruelly denied not once, but twice at the end of their quest was soul shattering.
“It’s time to give up,” Romeo said quietly. “Hamlet, it isn’t that I don’t appreciate all that you’ve done for me. I do. But it’s over.”
Hamlet pounded his fist against the stone. If Romeo had truly lost Juliet, then Hamlet had lost Romeo, and that, he could not accept. The key cut into his palm, and he cursed, dropping it. His blood smeared on the stone.
A crackle filled the air, like the feeling just after a bolt of lightning. Blue light streamed from a fissure in the stone.
“Hamlet,” Romeo said in disbelief. “Hamlet, what have you done?”
He wasn’t certain it was anything he had done, but there was no time to say so. The cracks spread over the stone in the corpseway, the water blue filling them, bursting the barrier apart. Through the corpseway, a golden figure emerged, bruised and bloodied, holding a sword and breathing heavily.
It was Juliet.
Chapter Twenty-One
Romeo was certain that this time, he had truly died. For his Juliet stood before him, whole, if not entirely healthy, smiling despite the rips in her toga and the blood streaming from her temple.
“See? I told you I would find you.”
The strength that had deserted him for weeks seemed to return all at once. He propelled himself to his feet, to her, pulling her into his arms. “My love, my love,” he murmured, kissing her forehead, her hair, her bloodied, split lips. “What did they do to you?”
“Time moves differently in the Afterjord,” Hamlet reminded him. “Juliet…You’ve just come from the battle. I saw you…”
“Saw me overcome, yes. But I’m immortal. They also called me valiant, so there’s something…I’m going to be rewarded.” She looked up at Romeo, and her expression changed from one of happiness to sorrow. “I am sorry I had to do that to you. But it was the only way, my love.”
“It matters not,” Romeo began, holding her tighter, as though he could stop the powers of the Afterjord from reclaiming her. “You’re here now. You’re safe.”
“I am only here for a short time. I wanted to tell you why I did what I had to do. I wanted to know that you weren’t angry with me.” The pleading in her eyes would be his undoing.
“I am…confused, not angry. But why, in God’s name? Why did you throw me from the bridge?” He remembered her face, the horror, sadness, and resolve in her expression, and he felt more pain on her behalf than on his own.
“Hildr told me to, before I crossed over to fight with you.”
Romeo recalled that moment, the low voiced comment that had aroused his suspicion. “You knew that by throwing me over, I would be returned here?”
