Rachel Caine: Prince of Shadows

I heard them catch the friar and drag him back, and as I achieved shelter behind another set of tombs—ironically, the graceful marble lines of the Montague death house, where lay my sister only newly arrived—here came a new line of torches and lanterns, and well-dressed nobles roused from their beds to see the horrors that awaited them. Prince Escalus, and with him Capulet and his wife. I was too far now to hear all but the loudest of cries, but Lady Capulet’s screams could have sundered a heart of stone.

As I stole away, feeling bruised and broken inside, and drawn like metal to a magnet toward the emptied-out Capulet house, I passed my own uncle hurrying through the streets to join the lamentation. He looked wild-eyed and not himself, and I grasped the arm of his manservant, Gianni. “Where is my aunt?” I asked. She was too strong-willed; she’d not have allowed herself to be left behind in such extremities.

“Oh, sir, great tragedy tonight—your aunt’s breath stopped, and none could rouse her. She died of grief, sir, for your cousin’s exile, and now they cry that Romeo is dead, and Juliet, and Count Paris, too; is it true?”

My aunt, dead in her bed. I let go of him, too numbed to feel much. “It’s true,” I said. “Be careful of him. Too many have died already, and I fear the shock may undo him.”

Gianni nodded and hurried after, anxious for my uncle’s health in such disasters.

And I stumbled on, moving the other direction, through predawn streets boiling with roused, confused citizens all telling dire tales of war, murder, treachery, and assassins.

A plague on both your houses, I heard Mercutio whisper, and give that mad laugh.

“You have your revenge,” I told his shade, which seemed to stalk me in the dark now. I felt dizzy, and there seemed no goodness in the air I gasped in. “Let it be, my brother; please let it be, . . .” But the ghost was not Mercutio, not him in whole; it was made of grief and fury and rage, and it knew no measure or mercy. And so it drove me straight on, through the chattering sleep-dazed crowds gathered by lantern light, through the Piazza delle Erbe and the fountain topped by the serene Madonna, into the streets past and toward the Capulet palace. There was a fell tension in the air, and I saw Capulet adherents fighting Montague on every corner, wildly shouting, “Murder!” and “Assassin!” without knowing anything of what had occurred.

Someone ran past me crying that the moon had turned to blood behind the clouds, and another screamed that Lord Ordelaffi had hanged himself from a tree in his orchard, and I stumbled on, anonymous in my gray clothes.

The Prince of Shadows. This was my realm, then, this confusion, for it seemed to me that the sun would never shine again on fair Verona.

The Capulet door was barred, but as I approached it a servant fled through the front, taking with her an apronful of precious silver. Chaos and disaster, and all the world gone to ruin . . .

Turn back, something screamed in me, but the heat inside urged me on, on, into the hall, past Capulet men and women who were too affrighted to challenge my purposeful steps. One man braver than the rest tried to bar my way, but I drew my sword, and he retreated. Juliet’s door was open, and her nurse lay senseless on the carpet beside her curtained bed, one hand clutching her prayer beads.

Rosaline’s door was shut and locked from within.

I banged my open hand upon it. I did not speak, because I knew she was there, as she would know I was without; I could feel her nearness beyond that barrier, pressed against it. I could almost feel the sweet whisper of her breath upon my face.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded choked and desperate to my burning ears, and I pounded again, more urgently. “No, Benvolio, for God’s own love, no, you must go; we must be stronger than this; we are the last two of our houses in this generation; if we die—”

If we died, the curse would be satisfied. Perhaps. Or perhaps it would only spin on, seeking ever more distant relations to ruin. But did not all mankind narrow back to a common root, of Adam and Eve? Would Mercutio’s curse carry away every living soul, in the end?

“I care not,” I said. My own voice sounded a stranger’s to me. “I care not for death, or doom, or curses; I care only for you, Rosaline, and I know you feel the same; I know—”

“The curse,” she said. I heard tears, and I also heard the key trembling in the lock, as if she had taken hold of it to turn. “There must be a way to break its hold over us. You must know a way!”

She pulled out the key and threw it away; I heard the clatter of metal on stone as it slid over the floor. I put my eye to the keyhole and saw her there, leaning against the door. Only a small, pale portion of her face, and a lock of her hair, but it was enough to drive me to desperation. “Please,” I said. “Please open the door, Rosaline. You know you cannot keep me out for long. I can pick the lock. I can climb the wall. I can open the shutters.”

“You won’t,” she said. It sounded weary now, and heartsick. “You won’t, because you are not such a man, Benvolio; you are an honorable man, and you will not do it. You need me to let you in, and it rips me in two that I deny you that mercy.”

“They are dead,” I said. “Romeo and Juliet. Both dead. Count Paris, my aunt, Mercutio’s father, all dead this night. Can we not find some comfort in all this?”

“Comfort in each other’s bodies, heedless of consequence. And how will it end?” she asked me. “With poison? Daggers? A rope for you and a cellar-dug grave for me when my uncle rages at my betrayal? There is no peace in it, Ben. Not until the curse is done. It must be broken. We must break it.”

“How?” I sank down to my haunches, resting against the solid bulk of the door, and my cheek pillowed against its hard surface as I gazed within at that tiny vision of her face. I felt hot, angry, desperate, and infinitely afraid—afraid of what I might do, equally afraid of not heeding my desires. “I have no way to find the rosary—”

“What rosary?”

I realized that she had not heard the witch’s confession—nor had I told her all of it. I had supposed she knew, since she had been at the priest’s house, but she had been looking not for the rosary, but for Mercutio’s diary—a diary I had already burned.

She did not know.

“The curse,” I said. “It is in three parts. One on Mercutio’s flesh, now broken. One in his own hand, in blood, in his diary. And the third placed upon a rosary that he took from his dead lover’s grave. I thought it was with the church, but I did not find it there.”

“A rosary,” she repeated, and there was something dull and strange in her voice. “I had a gift of a rosary, sent here to me. It came to me in secret, the way Romeo once delivered his love notes. I thought it was only another of his gestures.”

“Where is it?” My heart leaped within me, but at the same time, a terrible dark urgency was rising. The curse knew its danger, and the unreasoning fever increased, demanding that I batter down the door, shatter all resistance, do whatever must be done to be with the one I loved . . . if love this was. “Rosaline! Where is it?”

“I—I gave it away,” she whispered. “Ah, God, God, I cannot bear this, Ben; my soul cries out for you and I die every minute we are apart. . . .” Her voice grew softer, because she had moved. I peered through the keyhole and saw her crawling toward the key.

She would let me in. I had only to wait. Part of me rejoiced in unholy abandon, and part of me despaired, because I would never have the strength to stop. If Rosaline fell, I would fall with her, and we would both burn.