I supported him as he sagged, and stayed in the shadows; the hood covering his face would do well enough, but I was too recognizable to Capulet eyes. “Pardon,” I said, and slurred the word hard. “My fiend—my friend is worse for wine; your pardon, excellencies, most surely pardon—”

“Fool,” the taller of the three guards said, and kicked Mercutio’s leg so he staggered and fell in his own mess. “Wine-soaked idiots! Take your stinking hides home or I’ll carve them for you!”

“Pardon, lord, pardon, most sincere—” I groveled, cringed, and dragged Mercutio with me until he could find his feet again. The Capulets threw stones at us, and one hit with enough force to leave a fist-size bruise on my back; I was lucky he did not hold more ill will, or I’d have a broken rib. Mercutio stayed silent, panting and groaning, until we were well around the corner; then he shoved me hard away.

“You beat me,” he said—moping, like a child.

“I saved your life,” I snapped back. “Move; we must be gone quickly, before they follow.”

“Let them!” He pushed me again when I tried to take hold of him. “You think Romeo would be angry at my conjure? It would anger him to raise a spirit in his mistress’s circle of some stranger, to let it stand until she laid it down. That would be spite. My invocation was fair and honest, in his mistress’s name. . . .”

He was still fevered, I thought; all this talk of witchcraft, of conjuring and invocations gave me chills. Veronica had spoken of witches, and said that Mercutio had sought one out. What madness was this? A dangerous one.

A fatal one.

That, and the thought of Romeo beyond the Capulets’ garden wall, chilled me. Was he seeking Rosaline yet again? Had he misled me after all? No, not chills . . . the cold turned hot, flamed into anger.

Anger that he dared put her at risk.

I tried again to move Mercutio, but he shook me off. “Go, then,” I said. “Be off home.”

“I seek Romeo!”

“You seek him in vain, to seek him here where he means not to be found. Go.”

Changeable, like all drunkards, he suddenly threw his hot, sweated arm around my neck and gave me a sloppy smile. “Come with me,” he said, “my good friend. I am alone and lonely, and I need the comfort of my friends. What have I left but friends?”

“Go home,” I told him. “The cloak will hide you. I know not what you’ll say to your lady wife, but . . .”

His smile curdled, and he looked murder at me for a few seconds before he pulled away, settling the cloak heavily around his shoulders. “The brave Prince of Shadows,” he said, and acid dripped from the words. He sketched a bow that nearly ended with him collapsed on the street. “Prince of thieves, prince of liars, prince of idiots. Why have you killed no Capulets for me, Benvolio? Is there not death between them and me, for the sake of the one I don’t dare name under penalty of the same? You creep, you steal, you take your revenge in secret. I crave more; do you hear? I desire blood!”

“You desire your own ending,” I said to him, and it was brutally honest, and said in love and fear. “Please, my friend. There is blood between Capulets and Montagues, it is true—a lake of it large enough to row on at our leisure. But you can still escape the crimson stain. Let it be done. Look forward, to your future. Find your way, I beg you, before you’re lost to yourself, and to all of us.”

He grabbed me behind the neck and pulled me close, pressed our foreheads together, and said, “I’m already lost, my dear Ben. But I’ll drag those who’ve killed me to hell alongside me.” It was a broken whisper, full of the anguish I knew boiled within him, but in the next second he pushed away and staggered on, one hand trailing the wall for support.

I let him go. Mercutio trailed fate like a cold black cloud, and for a moment I could almost see the sinister shape of it in the cloak that rose and flapped in the night breeze.

Death, I thought. Death stalks behind him.

I should have gone with him, but fear for Romeo, and my family responsibility, held me there after he’d stumbled around the corner, heading vaguely in the direction of the Ordelaffi palazzo.

I looked up, found a handhold, and climbed to the roof of the two-floored shop building. As I passed the open shutters I heard the twin snores of the shopkeeper and his wife; his were low and rumbling, hers thin and halting, though from the lumps wrapped in sheets she was twice his size and half the volume. I scrambled up, balanced on the roof tiles, and ran lightly along to the far end, which overlooked the Capulets’ garden wall—from which I saw, in pantomime, the love-struck Romeo kneeling among the flowers, and the young Juliet bending toward him from her balcony. Well, a part of me thought, at least it is not Rosaline again. Though, in truth, I was not sure this was any better for Montague, and it might be a good deal worse. The yearning between them seemed almost a visible shimmer, like heat upon stones, and she went in and came out, went in and came out, as if she could not bear to be parted from him. Finally, though, in she went, and her doors shuttered to him, and Romeo, dejected and melancholy, climbed the garden wall to leave.

He looked up, then, and saw me perched there watching, and the guilt and horror that flashed across his face were, at least, a little gratifying.

But I forgot it, and nearly forgot him, as another set of windows opened, another set of curtains billowed, and another girl stepped to her balcony. Taller, stronger, older, more richly beautiful to my eyes. She did not look toward us, but up, to the eastern horizon.

Rosaline looked sad. So very sad, and so very alone.

Romeo dropped down into the street and put elbows on his hips, looking up at me. “You spy on me, coz? You dare to—”

I hushed him with an outstretched hand, still staring at Rosaline, whose gaze had sharpened now, and fixed on me exposed and visible across the way. She saw me—I knew she did, for her eyes widened and her hands tightened on the railing—but she said nothing, and raised no alarm.

I nodded toward her. She slowly nodded back. It lit a burning fire within me that drove away all the chills. That one single gesture told me more than all the flowery speeches that must have passed between my cousin and his new love.

She will be leaving soon, sent away to her tomb in the convent. You’ll never see her again, the solemn, practical part of me advised. And so I looked on her, with honest hunger, for as long as I dared. She was so beautiful in the soft glow, all her curves caressed by the dim light; her hair was a glossy dark fall with hints of blue, like a raven’s wing. The wind played with it, and I could imagine the heavy weight of it in my hands, warm and soft, scented of flowers.

Her lips parted, as if she would speak. I did not give her the chance, because I could not bear it.

I slid down the tile roof, took hold of the edge, and dropped lightly down into the street in front of my foolish cousin. “Come on,” I said, and dragged him homeward.

• • •

My cousin was not himself, in ways I could not begin to explain, nor to fathom.

He had always been headstrong and blind to the consequences of his actions, but he was never completely insane . . . poetry to a Capulet girl had been ill-advised, an embarrassment, but he had known full well the limits even as he wallowed in the hazy cloud of passion.

He well knew that there was no chance of any dalliance with the soon-to-be-wed Juliet, apple of Capulet’s eye. Or he should have understood. His infatuation with Rosaline had been a boy’s love, one that imagined an angel where a flesh-and-blood woman lived, and never expected to so much as brush his fingertips on the hem of her garment.

Yet that night, in the safety of his rooms, he said, “I shall have her, Benvolio. She shall be mine, only mine. I cannot live any other life than with her. I knew the instant I saw her, but the touch of her fingers, the taste of her lips . . .” He was not caught up in a fancy; I could see that. He was utterly serious, as serious as any man twice his age. It was only that it was a subject he dared not take seriously, on his life. “I know you think me foolish to go to her, but I could do nothing else. I could not sleep nor eat without seeing her smile again, and now that I have sated that hunger it only grows more fierce. I must marry her, Ben. Marry or die.”

“I think you mean marry and die,” I said, “because you know you cannot have her. Her family and ours will never stomach it.”

He shook his head in impatient disregard, and stalked the room restlessly. He’d dismissed his servants, and I’d left Balthasar behind, so there were no potentially prying eyes to carry tales back to our grandmother, but still I felt the hot breath of her presence on my neck. He is your responsibility, she had told me, and given me that devil’s look that meant I had best not disappoint her, and she would know—oh, yes, somehow, the ancient crone would know what was brewing here.

But more than my fear of her was my dread of the blind look in my cousin’s eyes. That was more than mere love. It was a martyr’s exaltation. And it was unnatural.

It raised chills along my spine.

“You can’t understand,” he told me, with the fever of a true fanatic. His eyes glowed with passion, and his face was alight with it. “Benvolio, you’ve never felt such joy as grips me even at the mention of her name: Juliet, Juliet. Was there ever a more beautiful sound since God first spoke? You can’t understand; you have not seen her. She is . . . she is perfection; she is the most perfect woman ever formed. . . . She is made of light and love. . . .”

“She’s a child,” I told him flatly, and stood up to block his path. He stopped, but did not back away, and the madness did not dim in his eyes. “She’s a Capulet daughter—no, the Capulet daughter, on whom they pin all their hopes—and she is all but married to Count Paris—”

“He cannot have her,” Romeo said, and the exaltation turned dark, then, and violent, and his right hand gripped the dagger at his side. “She is a precious flower; she cannot be so rudely plucked by such as him; I will not bear the thought of him pawing her—”