by Jenny Trout
Table of Contents
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
About the Author
Scintillate
Salt
Greta and the Goblin King
Relic
Chaos
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Armintrout. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 109
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Edited by Shannon Godwin
Cover design by Amber Shah
Cover art by Raquel Neira
Print ISBN 978-1-62266-158-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-62266-159-6
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition February 2014
Thanks to Nick Harris, Miriam Kriss, and The Story Foundation. I had a really good time creating this book with you!
Prologue
Two figures, both alike in stature and purpose, ducked beneath a bridge in Verona. The swollen river made mud of its banks. The men slid and fought against it, their torches flickering.
“Let’s turn back, Romeo,” Friar Laurence urged, pushing down the hood of his rough brown robe. “Can we not let poor Juliet rest in peace?”
The younger man fixed his friend with a critical eye. “Peace? My beloved Juliet knows no peace, only eternal torment. She took her own life, and that is my fault.”
They pressed on, Romeo’s steps becoming more determined the weaker his limbs grew. The poison that had incapacitated him, but not killed him, had ravaged his body. Tonight he traveled farther beyond his father’s walls than he’d dared since the night he’d returned to Verona. Even though the prince had lifted his banishment, the streets still felt unfriendly. Although a truce had been called between Montague and Capulet, there were plenty of young men who would like nothing more than to avenge their kin by killing Romeo.
Their destination lay far from the city center, in a small encampment of hovels beside the river. Faces peeked from behind tattered curtains as Romeo and Laurence traversed the narrow lanes between the dilapidated buildings, coming finally to the very wall of the city itself. It was at this border that they found the strega.
Her door was painted red, surrounded by talismans on long chains that hung from the recessed arch. Romeo ducked beneath a dried and crumbling chicken’s foot and brushed aside a crudely shaped metal eye.
“I go no further.” Friar Laurence backed away from the threshold, crossing himself. “Romeo, I warn you, this is a fearful path you tread. Your soul will be lost to darkness. You will perish in the flames of hell. I beg you not to do this.”
“I am already in hell.” Romeo pushed open the door and stepped inside.
The interior of the witch’s house was hot. It smelled of earth and the wood-like scent of herbs not used for cooking. A bent shape stood before the hearth, where a sulfurous cauldron bubbled. Romeo covered his nose and coughed.
“Ah, I was expecting a visitor this night.” The strega lifted her head, the veil of coins that obscured her face tinkling like fairy bells. “Your man of God could not dissuade you?”
“Nothing will dissuade me.” Even as he said it, his doubtful eyes took in the squawking black bird in the cage near the fire, the jars and bottles lining the shelves, murky objects floating in their slimy depths. “Benvolio told me you can communicate with the dead. He said you made him a charm to ward off attacks by ghosts.”
The strega shuffled across the room, her coins and jewelry clattering. She pointed a bony finger at a chair, and bade Romeo sit. “You are unwell. Poison, was it?”
“Poison, yes.” He could still taste the bite of it, still feel the stinging numbness in his veins. The physical evidence of it lay under his clothes, the dark stain of dying flesh spreading still, a little more each day. “Not enough.”
“That’s because you went to an apothecary,” the strega sniffed. “If you want poison to kill a man dead, you must see a witch.”
“I’ll…remember that. In the future.” Romeo clasped his hands and rested his elbows on his knees. “I came to you for knowledge of the dead. I will pay whatever it takes.”
“The price depends on the knowledge.” She rummaged through a trunk and produced a large, black bowl. Setting it on the floor, she reached into her clothes—it seemed she wore layers upon layers of tattered fabrics in all shades and thickness—and withdrew a vial. The sight of it winking in the light caused something to recoil inside Romeo. Too recently he had held a similar vessel.
Then everything had gone so wrong…
“What do you wish to know?” the strega asked, emptying the thick, black liquid into the bowl.
“My love, Juliet—” his voice trembled at her name, and he took a moment to repress his anguish.
“It was her you drank poison for.” The strega swirled the liquid in the basin. “I see her.”
“How do you know it’s her?” He leaned forward, peering into the dish. He saw nothing but his own reflection.
“The same as you know the sun rises in the east. I simply know.” She clucked softly behind her veil of coins. “Bound to you by the thread of holy matrimony. A secret wedding.”
Romeo swallowed back unexpected tears. “Yes, she was my…she was my wife.”
It still sounded strange to his ears. A wife was something an older man had, a man like his father. At only eighteen, Romeo could not imagine being so old one day. Perhaps that had been the poison’s cruelest jest, to let him believe his life would end in the vigor of his youth, only to return him with none of that youth left in body or mind.
“The young are foolish and brash.” The witch’s tone softened. “Black of hair, brown of eye. As fair as any maid from Verona.”
“Fairer,” he corrected her, his hand clenching to a fist. His nails bit into his palm as he struggled to hold back his tears. “Is she happy?”
The strega considered a moment, drawing one finger across the surface of the liquid. When she brought her hand away, it shone wet and red. “No. She is in despair. That is all I can see.”
His heart squeezed tightly. He couldn’t find his breath. He had hoped to hear that she was in a better place, as friar Laurence had assured him so many times. “There must be some way to assuage her grief. Some way to tell her—”
“Her eyes and ears are as closed as any dead woman’s. Whatever torments her will torment her for eternity.” There was no comfort to be had from the strega’s voice. She reached out one gnarled hand, palm up. “If that is all—”
“It is not all!” Romeo shot to his feet, placing his hand on the dagger at his side. He d
id not have the strength to use it, but the witch couldn’t know that. “You know dark magic. You can bring her back.”
The strega slowly unhooked her veil, letting the net of coins fall to her lap. Her face was as aged and withered as her hands. One eye protruded grotesquely, a milky blue, while the other, shrewd and black, fixed on him. “I no longer do such magic.”
“But it can be done?” Romeo asked, and when she nodded, he unsheathed his knife and prodded her knobby chin with the point. “Then you had better do it, witch.”
The old woman did not tremble in fear of him. She grabbed the blade and pushed it away; it felt as though he cut himself instead of her. He dropped the dagger and stepped back, cursing as blood coursed down his arm from the slice that split his palm. Faster than he could have anticipated, the old witch grabbed his wrist and jerked his hand over the basin, letting his blood fall into it.
“I no longer work such magic,” she repeated, swirling the blood in the bowl with her fingertip. “But there are others. To bring someone back, first you must find them. Are you prepared to walk with devils, boy?”
He nodded, his quick breaths flaring his nostrils.
“Are you willing to brave serpents and fire, to fight the keepers of the dead and hear ghosts speak?” She pushed his hand away. The blood on his palm stopped flowing at once, and the wound sealed itself, burning with invisible fire. He gasped and clutched his hand, watching with horror as the old witch’s good eye rolled back in her head and she called out words he did not understand.
In the bowl, the liquid lightened, then glowed and turned an unearthly blue. A maelstrom formed in the shallow basin, and lightning crackled on its surface. All the while, the old woman chanted and howled, until the room filled with a spectral wind that seemed to originate inside the blue light. The bird screamed in its cage, and jars and bottles rattled and broke on their shelves.
The surface of the liquid rose in waves capped with frothy blue. As the peaks grew higher, the aquamarine light faded, leaving only a bubbling, roiling fount of blood rising as tall as Romeo himself. The burbling red took shape, into a form so familiar that Romeo at once recoiled from it and yearned to touch it.
His Juliet stood before him, or at least, the shape of her, frozen in blood, monochromatic crimson, but unmistakably her. Thick chains bound her across neck and waist; manacles clasped her wrists. Her eyes were the worst of all, open, bloody, blank and unseeing, yet somehow still accusing. Still hating him, for having let her go before him.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his throat raw with emotion. He reached for her, knowing it a foolish thing to have done before his fingertips brushed her bloody cheek.
The vision of Juliet opened its mouth impossibly, terribly wide and a bone withering scream burst from her at the same time the vision burst, raining blood over the room.
The strega braced herself with her ancient hands on either side of the bowl, and lifted her head, the blood running in rivulets down her face. “You must go north. You will find the man who can help you there.”
“North?” He conjured up a map in his mind. “Grezzana?”
“Farther.” The strega pushed up from the floor, righting herself. She looked smaller somehow, more fragile than fearsome.
“Erbezzo?”
The eyebrow over her good eye arched in exasperation. “Farther. Farther than you have ever traveled. Over the mountains, to a castle by the sea. The seat of a murdered king.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off. “I know no more. In payment, I ask only that you never darken my door again.” She lifted the knife from the floor. He reached for it, and she threw it, so that the blade stuck in the lintel. At once, her terrible, craggy face transformed, her skin going smooth and youthful, her spider web hair turning to glossy black silk. She narrowed her eyes, no longer milky but deep black, and pointed to where the blade quivered in the wood. “Leave it. Let its absence remind you never to cross a sister of the fortunes again.”
When Romeo emerged, Friar Laurence rose to his feet. The worry that creased his brow relented only a bit. “I heard such howling, I thought you must surely be in the grips of the devil himself.”
“No devils here.” Romeo made no mention of the dagger. It embarrassed him now, to think he had threatened a woman so powerful. “To find those, I must go north.”
Chapter One
It was the perfect night to encounter a ghost. The stars did not deign to be seen in the moonless and cloudy sky. The crashing waves against the cliffs of Elsinore may as well have been the clawing fingers of a spectral sea hoping to catch an unwary soul and pull them down, down, into the depths.
And it was fantastically cold.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, bundled his cloak tighter around his shoulders and blew on his fingers to warm them. Above his hiding place against the earthen berm that surrounded the keep, Elsinore loomed, a darker black against the impenetrable night sky. In the daylight, it was a majestic castle, with ornate spires reaching toward the heavens. At night, it looked like a forest of daggers and sharp teeth stabbing and tearing deep furrows in the clouds.
“Are you about?” a voice hissed in the darkness. Wisely, it did not call out a name.
Hamlet answered, “Here,” and waited for some sign of Horatio’s approach. He hoped his friend did not slip and tumble off the tall berm. Hamlet had lived at Elsinore his entire life and still he found navigating the grounds in the dark a dangerous prospect.
When two hooded figures brushed close by him, he knew how his friend had made safe passage. “You were supposed to come alone.”
Horatio pushed his hood back, his face a lighter blue than the blue-black night. The man beside him pushed his cloak down, as well, his chain mail haubergeon clinking softly.
“This is Bernardo,” Horatio explained in low voice. “The man who first saw it.”
Bernardo dropped to one knee, his hands clasped around the hilt of his sword. “My prince.”
“Get up, get up.” This wasn’t the time for courtly manners or identification. “Show me where.”
“Yes, your highness. Yes, this way.” Bernardo gestured, but it was lost to the darkness. “Begging your pardon, but I’ve heard rumors about your affliction—”
“You shouldn’t listen to rumors,” Hamlet scolded. The kingdom had been rife with speculation about the prince’s affliction lately. Some whispers, that Hamlet was mad, or in league with the devil had obviously come from King Claudius and were meant to harm Hamlet. Others were merely foolish, suggesting the prince had the power to read thoughts and control the weather, and linked the storms that raged over the seas to his tempestuous moods. Some held a stroke of truth, if not the entire portrait; that Hamlet possessed a rare gift that allowed him to see the souls of the departed.
It was not rare, he’d discovered, for others to see the spirits that plagued him. After all, this lowly guard had spotted a ghost during his nightly travails. But Hamlet had never met another soul who could hear the dead, though he doubted any would admit to such a thing, at the risk of sounding mad or being accused of witchcraft. When Hamlet saw a ghost drifting among the living, that soul could speak to him, and unfortunately they all seemed to recognize this talent.
Hamlet kept his gaze on his feet, or where he estimated his feet might be. This was not a night for secret doings. On the morrow, his uncle, the newly crowned king, would marry Hamlet’s mother. The merry mood of the kingdom had not affected Hamlet; to the contrary, his demeanor grew more sour by the moment.
“Although, this rumor is one you may find proves true,” Horatio supplied unhelpfully, to soothe his friend’s surliness.
Hamlet tried to disguise his curse whenever possible—which had, so far, been his entire life. Only Horatio knew the truth. At the university, all manner of spirits had plagued Hamlet’s wakeful nights, and he’d finally confided in his friend. Still, the ability to see and communicate with ghosts wasn’t the sort of thing he liked to broadcast. Bad enough being a p
rince, everyone wanted something from him sooner or later.
But a prince who could speak to the dead, who seemed to pull specters from the abyss under his own power…
His father had once warned him that a king who ruled with fear would die in fear himself. How could anyone not fear a king who seemed to command spectral elements? When Hamlet was restored to the throne—the throne his uncle had stolen from him—he wanted to be loved for his good works, as his father had been, not dreaded by a resentful court who would find one way of replacing him or another.
The group of three made their way across a narrow wooden bridge that spanned the long, marshy drop. From there, they descended a short, rickety stair to a door so well hidden that even Bernardo could not find it on his first try. Once the watchman opened the door and ushered them inside, the sound of the raging sea was muffled by the thick bedrock of the cliffs.
“We met outside the castle, on a night like this, to go back inside?” Horatio muttered.
“I do not need my uncle’s spies following me,” Hamlet reminded him. Especially if the apparition they sought was who the guard claimed. The ceiling in the corridor was low, and dripping with moisture. Musty dampness scented the air, like the breath from some long-unopened tomb. The moonless night outside had been ink black, but the tunnel was darker. Hamlet groped along the sharp rock walls with clawed fingers, trying in vain to control his panicked gasps.
“Steady, your highness.” Horatio knew of Hamlet’s other affliction—his fear of close, inescapable places.
“There, your highness! There!” Bernardo whispered frantically.
Ahead of them, a light pierced the darkness. Only a mote of shimmering blue at first, it grew, swirling larger and larger, until Hamlet finally understood that his eyes had tricked him; the thing was not small at all, but far away. The tunnel wound on and on through the cliffs beneath the castle. The very thought of such a dreadful labyrinth made Hamlet’s heart beat a frightful tempo, but he took a step forward, and another, as the apparition approached him.
“Your highness, you mustn’t!” Bernardo warned, but Hamlet paid him no mind.
