The lake can never break a whole person.
It can only fill the empty ones.
Dane put a gun to his temple and asked a question, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. The specter of dreams gave him pause. Fear is such a creeping thing, but it doesn’t have to exist. Just a few steps …
I walk back to the shore, where Mama wordlessly helps me back into the dress, and I sit shivering next to her on the tangle of roots. Her hands move over my knotted hair, tying in bits of leaves and dried flowers from deconstructed crowns. She hums softly, a song I used to know, something about unfaithful knights and too-loyal damsels and tragic endings.
I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I just don’t know how to be less than afraid for Dane. For Dane, never of him. Never of him, never truly. There’s a girl who could do as he asks, who could take action unfettered by pale thoughts, who could race out into the unknown and trust people to catch her, who could throw herself headfirst into life and forge an unbreakable name, an identity that stands on its own without fathers or brothers or loves who devour and shatter.
I’ve never been that girl.
When Mama slips gracefully back into the lake to rejoin the morgens, I listen to the whispers of the star in my veins and wait for Horatio to make me feel real again, even if it’s only for a little while.
It isn’t Horatio who comes back for me, though, but the youngest under-gardener. As he eyes my sodden gown with concern, he tells me that Horatio has been sent on an errand for the Headmaster, and I marvel that it was asked of him, that he went.
The under-gardener follows me into the house, and as I pass through the kitchen I can hear his half-formed protest meant to keep me there, but the cook touches his arm, tears in her eyes, and shakes her head, and he lets me go without argument.
Gertrude rushes past me when I reach the stairs, one hand clapped over her mouth and tears bright in her eyes, on her cheeks. Rushing away so no one can see her cry, because she doesn’t realize we can hear her through the walls.
Skirts in hand to keep from stumbling on them, I retrace her steps to the Headmaster’s study, the door still slightly ajar. My brother paces inside, his fury a living force within him that will not let him stand still.
I sink down into a fountain of fabric in the doorway, hands clasped in my lap, a little girl ready to hear her lessons and lies. So I used to sit as I listened to Mama’s stories of bells beneath the waters or rage in the woods. So I used to sit as I listened to Father’s insistence that there was no such thing.
“Laertes, you cannot simply announce in front of Gertrude that you intend to kill her son!” snaps Claudius. Crystal clinks against glass.
“Do not think you can talk me out of it.”
“I have no intention of doing so.” The astonishment is heavy in Laertes’ silence, and Claudius knows to press his advantage. “The boy killed your father, and your desire for revenge is both natural and understandable. But you must think, Laertes! We do not live in a time of such lenient laws. Every death must be accounted for. You cannot go around proclaiming your intent to kill someone, especially not in front of that someone’s mother! For all his faults, Dane is her son, and Gertrude loves him deeply. To hear you speak so causes her great pain, and I cannot have that.”
“But—”
“If you are to achieve your aim, you must be more careful.”
“You’re serious about this.”
“I am. To have Dane arrested, to have him tried and imprisoned … it would be a wound forever against the Danemark name, against this school. I love this school, Laertes, as your father loved this school and dedicated his life to its well-being. If you race ahead without thought or planning, you will bring this school to its knees.”
For all his passion, my brother has never stopped to think what it actually means to kill someone. Claudius has.
He would have had friends in England do it for him, but now he has something better, something closer, something that cannot be placed upon him.
He has my brother.
Laertes, the biggest kind of fool, more than ever our father’s son.
Claudius sighs and presses a glass into my brother’s hand, a glass filled nearly to the brim with bourbon. “Drink this, Laertes, and sit down, and for love of all that’s holy, listen to me. You can have your revenge, and I will assist you in it, but you must trust me, and you must listen to me.”
“You would help me k—”
“I would help you avenge your father,” Claudius corrects with a pained grimace. Killing, after all, is such an ugly word. “Dane will be back in a few days—”
Laertes cuts him off with a furious stream of words and the scrape of a chair against a hardwood floor. He’s pacing again, lashing out against framed certificates and stacks of books and knickknacks atop filing cabinets, a storm of destruction confined in such a narrow space. My brother the boxer.
“Laertes Castellan! Sit down!”
Claudius has never been a father, but he is a man used to giving orders that must be obeyed. Laertes sits before his body even registers the command.
“As I was saying,” Claudius continues, his face and voice so very strained, “Dane will be back in a few days.” He holds up a letter on heavy, familiar paper. “I’ve sent Mr. Tennant to escort him back from Virginia, but we have some time to make our plans. His return will give us the opportunity to do what needs to be done.”
What needs to be done? Dane used those same words, minutes—hours—ago, days ago as he wrote the letter that sealed his promises in ink.
“Like what?”
“The first thing we must do is salvage the Danemark reputation. Elsinore Academy must be above reproach, so we must appear to welcome Dane back.”
“Welcome—”
“Shut up,” he says icily, and my brother sinks back into the chair, his protest dead on his lips. “We must appear to welcome him. Rumor is a plague, but there’s no proof that Dane killed your father. Only what Gertrude saw, and we will not ask her to speak against her son.”
“But—”
“Laertes, you will have your revenge, but unless you want to spend the rest of your life in prison for murder, you will help me in this! We must kill these rumors! And the swiftest, surest way to do this is for you to be the one who welcomes him back. After all, what son would knowingly embrace his father’s killer? Whatever happened in that room, we call it an unfortunate accident and say that Dane ran because he was scared. We can make up an intruder if we have to, but we show the world that there’s no ill will between the two of you.”
“I’m not that good an actor,” spits Laertes.
But Claudius chuckles, a menacing sound nearly lost to the splash of bourbon in his glass. “Your father thought you were a virgin; you lie well enough.”
Blood rushes to my brother’s faces, even as he gapes soundlessly.
“The Board of Governors is uneasy, and rightly so. We are going to reassure them.” Claudius takes a long drink and sets his glass down with a heavy thunk against the desk. “We are going to give Dane a few days to settle back into his home. Then we are going to invite the Board and their wives for a dinner, where they will see you and Dane being friends. Lie to them half as well as you’ve lied to the girls in your bed, and we’ll be well placed.”
There’s a small, traitorous part of me that admires Claudius’ directness. He has my brother squirming in his seat, his reputation dependent on Claudius holding his silence in the matter. Between that knowledge and the offer of revenge, he has my brother firmly in his debt.
A debt is a promise.
And Hamlet taught us to keep our promises.
Laertes swallows hard and shoves his tangled hair out of his face. It never used to be so long; Father wouldn’t allow it. “What then?” he asks hoarsely.
“As a cap to the evening, you and Dane will entertain our guests with a boxing match. An exhibition of sorts.”
“A boxing match!” Laertes kicks the desk, but under Claudius
’ minatory glare, he stays in his seat. “So I give him a good beating, so what? He killed my father!”
“You’ve never had to wait for anything in your life, have you?” Claudius leans back in his leather-backed chair, a dangerous smile on his lips. Smiles are supposed to soften, to brighten, but Claudius’ smile is like a razor slashed across the skin. He sips the spirits, replaces the glass exactly where it was. “The ring is where you’ll have your revenge, but the beating is only the beginning.”
“How?”
Leaning down, Claudius twists a key into a drawer of his desk and slides it open, rummaging briefly through its contents. “With these,” he answers, laying the objects on the smooth wood.
I can’t see the first from the floor in the doorway. Something metal that catches the light. But the second …
“Is that poison?”
Milky-white and semiopaque, clinging to the sides of the glass vial, and only half full.
Oh, Laertes, my stupid brother, can you really be such a fool? Do you really think he’ll let you live to tell his part in this?
“Coat the knuckles in the poison and wear them inside your glove,” instructs Claudius. “If you can deliver a few good blows, you’ll open the skin and that’s all this needs to work. A little goes a long way and will be less suspicious. Aim for his head, if you can. Boxing is a violent sport, you know. Aneurysms are an unfortunate consequence.”
Laertes stares at the weapons on the desk. “What if it’s … what if …” He closes his eyes, block them from sight, and tries again. “What if it’s not enough?” he whispers.
Irritation flashes across Claudius’ face, gone before my brother can open his eyes. “I intend to give each of you some wine for a toast before the match. Dane’s will have a potent … additive.”
Dane would never accept a glass from Claudius, and a heartbeat later, Laertes puts my thought into words.
“He will from his mother.”
Will she know? Will she ever know or wonder? Does she wonder about her husband?
His hands shake so badly the glass rattles against the metal knuckles with their vicious points, but Laertes takes them anyway and slips them carefully into his pocket. “How will you get Dane to agree to all this? There’s no prize, nothing to make it worth the risk.”
“Ah, but there is a prize.” That smile again. Goose bumps prickle along my spine. “One Dane cannot possibly resist.”
“Which is?”
“Before I tell you, there is one condition to all this,” he says firmly. “You must not speak of any of this. To anyone. As far as anyone outside this room is concerned, your father’s death was a regrettable accident and you look forward to Dane’s return. You absolutely cannot mention this to Gertrude; it would destroy her. Though it must be done for the good of us all, I would spare her what pain I could.”
The way he speaks, sometimes it’s easy to believe he really loves her, that all these years it’s been love alongside the jealousy that drives his actions. But such a love can only ever be poisoned, such a love can only ever bring about destruction and death, because such a love always wants the very thing it cannot have. It’s the love that leaves a good man dead, that breaks a boy who loves his father.
“I promise,” Laertes snaps. “What prize?”
Claudius turns his chair slightly, and suddenly he’s looking right at me with that horrible smile. He’s known I was here all along. “Your sister. With your father dead, Gertrude is now her legal guardian. If he comes back for anything, he’ll come back for her.”
Horatio isn’t here, he’s gone and isn’t here, and I have no way to tell him now—now while I can keep the thoughts where they ought to be—the danger that Dane faces, that my brother faces. I can’t write it because the letters and shapes lost their meaning, can’t tell someone else because they won’t believe me.
The star blazes down to my fingertips, fingers that trace the ring of bruises around my neck, my arms, the silver ring that keeps my soul tied to my body. It blazes and burns until there’s no air, not even the memory of what it means to breathe.
Dane will die.
Laertes will follow.
And Horatio …
The best of us will shatter until there’s nothing left.
There’s just nothing left.
The star blazes and burns.
And dies.
CHAPTER 40
There’s a terrible emptiness where my heart should be, where a star danced and twirled and whispered a name that meant so much more than my own.
Just a void, a void that spins and pulls and devours.
Consumes.
It tears the heat from my veins, destroys the tongues of flame.
There’s no cold.
No ice.
Just … nothing.
Dane will die.
Laertes will die.
They’ll both …
But the word doesn’t mean anything, lost to the hungry void and the ring of dazzling darkness that surrounds it, grows with it. It used to mean something, but it doesn’t anymore, the meaning gone along with the whispers and the murmurs and the words inked into my skin with sweat, tears, and kisses.
No one will escape.
The house reeks of death and fear.
Dane made a promise, but he’ll die before he can keep it. A promise is a noose around the neck.
Laertes follows Claudius’ gaze and sees me in the doorway, grabs me with bruising force and drags me up the stairs to my room. He’s frantic, terrified of what he’s about to do, but he’ll do it anyway, because my brother is the biggest kind of fool. He tears Mama’s gowns from the wall, tries to stuff them into the trunk, but there’s too much fabric and too much memory, and it scalds his skin until he runs away.
Always running away.
Running away from the Hunt.
Running away from the stories.
Running away from Mama, from grief, from Elsinore.
Running away from me.
Because Laertes has always been scared of me.
Of me.
And that kind of fear never dies.
Mama’s wedding dress spills from the trunk like a snowfall, a flag of surrender. I drop my dress to the floor, pull on the cloud of moonlight white. This dress tied Mama to Elsinore, to Father, to Laertes, and later to me, but I was the only one she could stand to be bound to, because I was the only one that understood that bonds didn’t have to be cages. Because I was the one who could never walk away.
All my life, I’ve been a bruise against the world.
Now I’m a ghost.
No one ever sees the ghosts.
Should never.
No good can come of ghosts.
Dark has fallen, the clouds of an endless day of grey blown away. Blue-white flames flicker in the cemetery, the soil hard and frozen beneath my feet. The staff buried Jack beside my mother and decked their graves in the last of the hothouse flowers before they let the doors stay open, let the cold kill the plants that were never truly alive. Ghosts of flowers.
They didn’t find my father.
But Jack’s grave is dark like my mother’s. There’s no ghost to lament the loss of a life.
Jack’s only regret was that he couldn’t keep the flowers alive.
Ghosts can’t help the flowers live.
Jack will never be a ghost.
But Hamlet is and Hamlet is and they watch me from their grave, solemn and weary. The rage still burns within one, but even he watches me with a terrible compassion, side by side with his better half, identical men whose faces have changed so much in death. They say nothing, just watch me pass through the graveyard, and when I look back over my shoulder from the wrought iron fence, they each lift a hand to me. One angel holds a sword, a terrible, patient justice, but the other clutches a dove rather than release it because it’s terrified at the thought of empty hands. “Good night, child,” they whisper together. “Sleep well.”
But beyond the graveyard are the woods, d
eep and dark and far from silent, and the flashes of white and grey that no one ever sees. So many of the trees are skeletons now, their leaves a dead blanket beneath my feet, and they reach up to the sky with bony fingers that try to pray, and the wind whistles through their branches to give them voice like a death rattle.
And then the hounds bay, mournful and lost, the despair past the cry that human throats can give, and the Hunt approaches. They glow in the night with their borrowed faerie graces, a warning to those who fear madness. They ride and they ride and they ride, a journey without end, every moment praying for the journey to stop. They slow to a walk and then rein in, and the horses’ heads droop with weariness. The men sit bowed and broken in their saddles, their eyes lost to a wildness and endlessness that human minds were never meant to bear, and the greyhounds across their laps bay and cry.
I lift my cupped hands and the nearest hound sniffs my palms cautiously, nuzzles into the unfamiliar touch. Its tail wags, ever so slightly, and then stops; his head drops back to the horse’s withers and the eyes close with a great, heaving sigh.
I look up into the face that was once human, transformed by centuries of hopelessness. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “Not yet.”
Maybe not ever.
The rider touches his hand to his heart, his lips, his forehead, extends it towards me in salute, and nudges his exhausted mount into motion. The others follow slowly, and then each step falls faster, harder against the frozen earth, and they’re a blur of sorrow and rage in the harsh, frigid wind that stings tears into my eyes.
The woods aren’t empty, overfull of despair that chokes and withers all it touches, but it drowns in the spinning void in my chest. A silver-white glow beckons me from the sleeping skeletons, and I follow the trail of the lament as it twists through the wind, follow it towards the weepers, the keeners, the sorrow singers, the wails of a night without stars.
They pull me into their circle, but my voice is suited to laughter, not to song, and through every note I can hear the endless, patient murmur of the lake in my bones, my veins, rushing into the void where my heart used to be. The bean sidhe kiss my cheeks and stroke my hair and re-form their circle behind me, their song soft and gentle and so full of love I would weep if I remembered how, but the lake never shares its water, never gives, only takes.
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