Free Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet by Rachel Caine Page B

either of us. I’d heard of such things, of course, but never
seen
, and I confess to a certain unsettled embarrassment that drove me from them—from Mercutio—for almost a week, before he came to see me and, with an entirely strange attitude of gravitas, asked what I intended to do.
You hold our lives in your hands,
he had told me.
You know what they would do to us. I beg you to remember that whatever you think of me, whatever sins I may commit, I am always your friend.
    And as simply as that, the matter settled for me. Mercutio was Mercutio, whomever he loved, whatever he did. Perhaps, as the Church taught, it was a cursed perversion, but I was old enough to know that many in the city practiced far worse, and with far less love in their hearts. While I was not drawn to Mercutio in any way of the flesh, he would always be my spiritual brother.
    I don’t know how Romeo discovered the same, but soon we realized that each of us willingly lied and contrived for Mercutio, giving him excuses for absences to see his lover. I had never asked any details, and had only the one glimpse, but Romeo knew more than I, and shared it with me; Mercutio’s lover these past three years was a young scholar named Tomasso, who was considering the priesthood. He was the third son of a poor merchant, hardly moving in our social class.
    I would have said that Mercutio was in love with the risk, but I knew it wasn’t true; he was in love with Tomasso, as purely and passionately as (if far less demonstratively than) Romeo claimed to be with Rosaline. And it worried me. Mercutio’s family had already made a match for him with a girl he loathed; the wedding would be done within the next year, and I wondered what it would do to him, and to his love. I felt sorry for the girl, too. She was innocent of any wrongdoing, but she’d be punished all the same.
    “He’s clever,” I said, and closed and barred the window shutters. “Mercutio will never be caught out. He fears only betrayal.”
    “Not from us,” Romeo said. He cut a glance at me, and wiped a trickle of blood from his broken lip. “I am sorry, coz. But Rosaline
is
beautiful, is she not?”
    “Yes,” I said. “She is beautiful.”
    And then I retrieved my cup and demanded more wine, to wipe that admission from my mind.
    •   •   •
    I woke to a pounding head and a mouth that felt as if grape stompers had made merry in it. My manservant had somehow wrestled me out of my clothes and into a nightshirt, and I was sunk deep in my feather bed. The twitter of birds beyond the window, and the cries of merchants in the streets below, told me that I’d slept too long, and gradually I realized that the pounding was not simply inside my skull, but upon the door of my rooms.
    As I stirred and groaned, rolling on my side, a yawning Balthasar rose from his low, hard mattress near the hearth and stumbled to answer the call. I knew I was in difficulty when he straightened, swept the door wide, and bowed to his fullest.
    My lady mother, Elise Montague, entered in a cloud of rosewater and the soft glint of gold, and paused at the foot of my bed as Balthasar quickly hurried to the shutters and opened them to admit more light. I winced as the brightness lanced through and bounced from the red-gold chain around my mother’s neck, and the dangling drops in her ears. Her hair gleamed rich as well, the color of ripe wheat, and as always it was smooth and perfectly dressed, held in a gemmed net that framed her still-lovely face to perfection. I’d inherited my foreign green eyes from her, though my hair and skin were Italian-dark; even after so many years in the healthy climate of Verona she seemed wan and pale, and very thin in her dark, elegant gown.
    She regarded me with steady, cool assessment.
    “Good day to you, Mother,” I said, and sat up. “Did I miss mass?”
    “Yes,” she said. “And your absence was noticed. Are you well?”
    “I have a sickness of the stomach.”
    “Ah,” she