Free Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout Page A

communicate with your loved ones after death.” Romeo’s voice was strangely gentle. “And a terrible burden, as well.”
    “Yes, I suppose it is. The dead always want something, Romeo. Otherwise, they would be here. They only come back to our plane of existence if they have unfinished business.”
    “Your father was a king, with an heir. What unfinished business would be left?” He paused, and Hamlet let the man puzzle it out himself. “I still don’t understand why you’re not king, if your father was.”
    “Oh, you noticed that, did you? That I am not King of Denmark?” Bristling at the man would do him no good. Hamlet forced aside all the feelings of anger that had plagued him in the months after his father’s death, a considerable feat that would not hold for long. “No, I am not. We do things differently in Denmark. The people preferred Claudius’s succession to mine. One can hardly blame them. I had been tucked away at school for so long, they barely knew me. My uncle was far more familiar to them, and with the approval of my mother, the queen, well…he was a good enough replacement for my father in her eyes, so why not in everyone else’s?”
    “You said your mother betrayed your father. Do you believe she plotted with your uncle to secure the throne?”
    Hamlet arched a sardonic brow. “She married Claudius practically before the mortar sealed my father’s crypt. What conclusion do you come to?”
    He looked to Romeo and saw the other man’s face light in recognition.
    “Of course,” Romeo said slowly. “The state of your room, your caution upon meeting me…You prove no challenge for your uncle if you are dead.”
    “That is why my father came back to warn me,” Hamlet finished for him. “That, and to charge me with avenging him. Which I will do, once I make a plan for it.”
“Have you ever killed a man?” Romeo asked, as though he were asking about the weather. “It’s a terrible thing. Do you think you could live with yourself, after?”
    “Have you ever raised the dead?” Hamlet asked back, and he felt that answer was far more pressing. “You know how it feels to lose Juliet. Can you live your life with her, dreading that feeling every day?”
    Romeo took a long time to answer. “I had not considered it.”
    Hamlet sighed. “Right now, however, we have something greater to worry about.”
    “And what is that?” Romeo asked warily.
    Hamlet pointed ahead, to where the mist around them seemed to clear. “We’re almost at the end of this bridge, and we have no idea what is on the other side.”
    They moved from the terrifying suspension of Bifröst to solid stone beneath their feet, and Hamlet could not deny his relief. He’d never liked heights.
    Overhead, a cavern stretched long, pointed formations toward the ground. Mingled among the stalactites, tall windows of stained glass let in light that didn’t quite reach the crowd milling in the sandstone plaza below. There was no sky here, just an encroaching darkness.
    “These trees aren’t gold,” Romeo said, reaching up to pluck an apple. The plaza was dotted with fruit trees of all earthly varieties, and some Hamlet couldn’t be sure were earthly at all. They rose from tall stone urns and seemed to be thriving despite the lack of sunlight.
    Hamlet let Romeo raise the apple nearly to his lips, the fool, before he smacked it away. “Never eat anything in the underworld. Haven’t you ever heard of Persephone?”
    The Italian had the grace to look at least a little embarrassed by that. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    There were other people in the plaza, all kinds of people, milling about together in what appeared to be mass confusion. The babbling of many languages filled Hamlet’s ears. A man draped in a toga stood there, a Roman senator by his garb. Over there, a woman with tangled hair full of leaves and swirling designs tattooed on her skin could have been some prehistoric child of the forest.