Rachel Caine: Prince of Shadows

“Rosaline,” I said. Her hand was on it now, trembling with eagerness to pluck it from the stones. “Rosaline, in God’s holy name, where is it ?”

Her head turned, and she rose on her knees with the key cradled in both hands as tenderly as a nun might cradle a cross. She closed her eyes and swayed, and my whole body took flame at the sight of her barely concealed beneath the linen shift she wore, with the candlelight gliding over her like a lover’s hands. . . .

“Juliet’s nurse,” she said. “I gave the thing to Juliet’s nurse, who had broken her own rosary. I gave it as payment for taking you a message. I meant it a kindness, but what have I done?”

I remembered the old woman, collapsed in Juliet’s room, with her hands clasping prayer beads. It was only a few steps away, only a little distance, but I could not move. My flesh was married to this door, and all my will could not force me from it.

She must have known that all my resistance was fled, for Rosaline’s eyes opened, and she stared toward the door, toward the keyhole through which I peered.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, “but I know of no other way to stop myself.”

She took in a single deep breath, and then screamed.

This was no maiden’s cry, soft and tentative—it was a full-throated, awful sound that broke through all my drugged, cursed longing and shocked me, just for a moment, back to myself. Back to the Prince of Shadows, who knew that discovery in such circumstances meant death.

As she knew.

I heard the Capulet servants rousing below—even though they had fallen into disarray, her cry had rallied them, and they’d be up in only a few heartbeats to her defense. I would be cut to pieces on the stairs, or in the hall, and the curse would be well satisfied. Rosaline, knowing her cry had brought my death, would find a way to join me.

A plague upon both your houses.

“No,” I said, and forced myself up, back, away. Even then, I could hardly bear to tear my gaze from that keyhole, from the distant view of Rosaline clutching the key to our mutual destruction. “No!”

Two steps back, then three, and then I broke and ran for Juliet’s room.

Her nurse was not sleeping, but dead, eyes wide and staring, mouth agape—like my aunt, her breath had been stopped in the night. Her hand gripped the rosary with pale savagery, and I ripped it free and slammed the door on the startled faces of the arriving armed servants, then turned the key.

I had little time. They would break down the door if needed, and already they shouted for a heavy ram. The rosary felt cold in my hand, ice-cold, and slick as bone; menace clung to it like the miasma of death, and I felt Mercutio’s shade again in the room, avid and furious.

“No,” I told him. “Enough!”

Juliet’s fireplace still held dull red embers. I shoved in more wood, grabbed hold of a lantern, and crashed it into the mess; the oil spewed out, and the wood caught with an eager rustle that quickly became a roar.

The door shivered beneath the hit of something large—a bench, perhaps, carried by willing hands. It would not hold.

“Be at peace, my friend,” I said, and I thought of Mercutio as I had known him best in life—laughing, sharp, brilliant, and tender when no one watched. I thought of the glimpse I had once had of him in embrace with Tomasso, and the purity of the passion in his face. “What a scourge is laid upon hate, and heaven means to kill our joys with love. Let it be finished.”

I kissed the rosary, and tried to fling it into the fire.

It clung to my hands.

No.

I gave a raw cry of fury, and shook them, but the rosary had wrapped tight and would not loose me. There was a filthy kind of life to it, as if it did not want to perish any more than I.

I heard Rosaline calling my name, chanting it in a wretched, broken voice. I heard the doom in it, the despair. If I did not give in to this, it would kill her, too. It would take away the only reason I had to draw breath. I knew this as if Mercutio whispered it in my ear, and when I turned my head I saw his shade there, bending close. Bound to this rosary ripped from the hands of the dead.

He was just as I remembered him now. Fire and beauty, passion and wit, love and longing. All his fineness and all his awful tragedy bound up together.

“You are my friend,” I told him, and I felt the grief and heartbreak of it. “I should have helped you. I should have saved him. You are right to hate me, but for the love of God, for the love of Tomasso, spare her your hate. She deserves none of it.”

His pale shade gazed at me, and just for a moment, I saw a smile curve his lips. He bent forward, and I felt his hand close over mine.

The rosary loosened its grip, but not enough, and I saw the regret and sorrow on his ghostly face. He could not stop it in death any more than he could in life.

There was only one thing I could do, and I did not pause to think. I dared not.

I thrust my whole hand into the flames.

The agony hit in an instant, but I held; I held, though I heard my cry go up to echo from the walls. My sleeve caught fire, and I heard flesh sizzle.

Mercutio’s ghost wept.

My whole body shook, and I knew that I would die if I did not pull my hand back.

Better dead, I thought with absolute, cold clarity. Better it ends here, with me, and she might live.

Perhaps it was that release of my own selfish desire to live that caused the rosary to finally let go its grip on my fingers and slip away to drop into the flames.

I drew my poor hand back and batted out the flames on my sleeve as I collapsed to the floor beside Juliet’s perished nurse. I felt that same hell-borne heat of my grandmother’s rooms pressing on me, through me, as if it meant to ignite me from bones out. . . .

And then I felt it turn to ashes and dust, and all the terrible weight of it fled under the press of cool, still air.

The burning in my hand was gone. I turned my head and looked into the fire, and saw the rosary blackening, cracking apart, falling to ruins.

I lifted my hand and slowly clenched and unclenched the unburned flesh, the unscarred fingers. Then I looked at Mercutio’s shade, which still stood looking down on me.

And he smiled. It was the smile of my old friend, the smile of delight and mischief and glory. His lips shaped words, and I read them as if they were written on the air between us.

Love well, if not wisely.

And then he was gone.

I closed my eyes and struggled not to weep: for love of my friend, and for the loss of him, and Romeo, and innocents Juliet and Tomasso, and yes, even my sister, who in no way had been guiltless. For all of them, swept away on a senseless tide of grief.

Then I rose, wiped my face, and reached for the bedroom’s locked door.

It shuddered against my hand, leaping against the lock, and I realized that, incredibly, the world in some ways had not changed. I was a Montague, intruding in a Capulet’s rooms, with a woman lying dead beside me. There would be no quarter for me here. The door would give in one more blow, and I’d be taken and ripped apart out of their blind fury.

I ran to the balcony. Juliet’s balcony, from which she’d listened so ardently to my cousin’s declarations of love, and perhaps it had been love after all, true and wrongheaded, at least in the beginning, before the curse took its hold of them. Beneath, the garden was hushed and still, and only the fountain’s gentle whisper stirred it.

The door splintered behind me with sudden violence.

I knew I could still win my way free. I jumped up to the balustrade, balancing there; it was an easy jump to soft ground, and a wall I’d climbed more often than I ought to ever confess. An easy escape in the confusion.