by M. L. Rio
I took my place upstage, my rapier hanging on my left hip. James and the rest of them were already in place—he at the top of the Bridge, the soldiers on stage left, Camilo and the herald on stage right. Meredith should have been there, too, but there was no sense summoning her when all she did was watch.
Me: “What’s he that speaks for Edmund Earl of Gloucester?”
James: “Himself. What say’st thou to him?”
I glared at him, fists clenched against the churning of my stomach. There was no need to impress anyone with emotions for a fight call, but I was already on edge.
Me: “Draw thy sword,
That, if my speech offend a noble heart,
Thy arm may do thee justice. Here is mine.”
I drew my sword, and James raised his eyebrows, faintly amused. I crossed downstage to the top of the Bridge.
Me: “Despite thy victor sword and fire-new fortune,
Thy valor and thy heart, thou art a traitor,
False to thy gods, thy brother, and thy father,
Conspirant ’gainst this high illustrious prince,
And from th’ extremest upward of thy head
To the descent and dust below thy foot,
A most toad-spotted traitor.”
Somewhere in the middle of my speech, James’s wry amusement faded from his face and was replaced with a cold, ugly look. When it was his turn to speak I watched him closely, uncertain whether he was acting only, or if he and I both were gnashing secrets between our teeth.
James: “What safe and nicely I might well delay
By rule of knighthood, I disdain and spurn.
Back do I toss those treasons to thy head!”
He may as well have spat at me.
James: “With the hell-hated lie o’erwhelm thy heart,
Which, for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise,
This sword of mine shall give them instant way
Where they shall rest for ever. Trumpets, speak!”
We raised our weapons, bowed to each other without breaking eye contact. He attacked first; my block was sloppy and his blade slid along mine to the hilt with an angry hiss. I threw him off and clumsily recovered my balance. Another blow, another block. I parried, struck at his left shoulder. The foils clattered together, their blunt edges colliding with the rattle and snap of a snare drum.
“Easy,” Camilo said. “Easy, now.”
We danced a rapid grapevine down a narrow aisle between two long lines of tape. That was the choreography: I beat him to the end of the Bridge, where he would fall, one hand on his stomach, blood blossoming beneath his fingers. (How this would happen, we had yet to be informed by the costume crew.) We fought with our bodies parallel, swords flashing between us. He staggered, lost his footing, but when I raised my arm to deliver the killing stroke, his fingers curled more tightly around the hilt of his sword. The pommel and guard cracked across my face, white-hot stars burst through my field of vision, and pain hit me like a battering ram. Camilo and one of the soldiers shouted at the same time. The rapier slipped loose from my fingers and crashed down beside me as I fell backward onto my elbows, blood gushing from my nose like someone had turned on a faucet.
James dropped his foil and gaped down at me with wide, bulging eyes.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Camilo yelled.
James stepped back like a sleepwalker, slowly, entranced. His fingers flexed at his side, his knuckles gleaming red. I tried to speak, but my mouth was full of iron, blood dribbling down my chin, soaking the front of my shirt. The two soldiers propped me up, and my head drooped heavily forward, like all the tendons in my neck had snapped.
Camilo was still shouting. “Unacceptable! What the hell’s gotten into you?”
James looked up at him instead of me. “I—” he began.
“Get out,” Camilo said. “I’ll deal with you later.”
James’s mouth moved wordlessly. Water suddenly welled in his eyes, and he turned and ran out of the room, leaving his coat and gloves and everything else behind.
“Oliver, are you all right?” Camilo crouched beside me, lifting my chin. “You got all your teeth?” I closed my lips, swallowed blood, and gulped hard against the reflex to vomit. He pointed first at the taller of the two soldiers, then at the other one. “You, help me get him to the infirmary. You, run and find Frederick, tell him I need to see him and Gwendolyn immediately. Move.”
The world reeled as they hoisted me up, and I hoped dully that I’d lose consciousness and never wake up again.
SCENE 6
I didn’t get out of the infirmary until after eleven. My nose was broken, but not badly. A splint had been taped over the bridge to keep it straight, and beneath that, red and purple bruises were spreading under both my eyes. Gwendolyn and Frederick had been to see me, asked what happened, apologized profusely, and then requested that I keep it as much to myself as possible and call it an accident if other students asked. We didn’t, they said, need any more gossip or any more trouble. By the time I got back to the Castle, I hadn’t decided whether I would comply or not.
I went immediately upstairs, but not to the Tower. It seemed unlikely that James would be there, but I didn’t want to risk it. Instead I knocked softly on Alexander’s door. I heard a drawer scrape shut, and a moment later he appeared, one hand on the doorknob.
“Fuck, Oliver,” he said. “Pip told me what happened, but I didn’t think it’d be this bad.” His eyes were bloodshot, his lips dry and cracked. He didn’t look much better than I did.
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough.” He sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Can I help?”
“My head hurts like a bitch and right now I’d rather not feel anything above the neck.”
He opened the door wider. “The doctor is in.”
I didn’t go in Alexander’s room often, and I was always surprised by how dark it was. Sometime in the last few weeks, he’d tacked a tapestry over the window. His bed was buried under a pile of books, which he gathered up and dropped on the already cluttered desk. Crumpled rolling papers, broken matches, and dirty clothes littered the floor. He gestured at the bed, and I sank gratefully down on the mattress, my pulse pounding hard between my temples.
“Can I ask what happened?” he said, as he rummaged in the top drawer of his desk. “I won’t make you talk about it. I just want to know whether I should shove James in the lake next time I see him.”
Unsure if the remark was simply Alexander’s morbid sense of humor or something more deliberate, I shifted on the bed, chalked it up to lingering paranoia, and decided to ignore it.
“Have you seen much of him lately?” I asked. “I feel like he’s never here.”
“He comes in and out. You’d know better than I would.”
“He usually comes in after I’ve gone to bed, and by the time I get up, he’s gone.”
Alexander shook a few little florets of weed out of a film canister and crumbled them into a cigarette paper. “If you ask me, he’s getting a little too deep into his role. Method, you know? Doesn’t know where he stops and Edmund starts anymore.”
“Well, that can’t be good.”
He looked up at me and my busted nose. “Clearly.” He made a face like he’d just bitten his tongue. “Did they give you some kind of painkillers for that?”
I produced a bottle of little white pills from my pocket.
“Grand,” he said. “Gimme two of those.”
I handed them over. He crushed both under the film canister and sprinkled the resulting powder on top of the weed in the paper. Then he reached into the drawer again, came up with another mysterious pill bottle. He popped the top off, tapped it on the heel of his palm. Another white powder, finer. He added this to the joint without telling me what it was. I didn’t ask.
“So what happened?” he said, as he started rolling. “You guys were doing the Five-Three combat and he just clocked you?”
; “Basically.”
“What the fuck. Why?”
“Believe me, I’d love to know.”
He ran his tongue along the sticky edge of the paper, then pasted it down with one fingertip. He twisted the end into a tiny curl and handed the joint to me. “There,” he said. “Smoke that in one go and you won’t feel anything for a week.”
“Terrific.” I stood and grabbed onto the back of his chair. My head was throbbing.
“You all right?”
“I will be in a few minutes.”
He didn’t sound convinced. “You sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” I felt my way to the door like a blind man, hands moving from one piece of furniture to the next until I reached the wall.
“Oliver,” he said, as I opened the door to let myself out.
“Yeah?”
He tossed me a lighter when I turned, then pointed at his nose and smiled sadly. I reached up to my face. There was a fresh spot of blood on my upper lip.
As a rule, we didn’t smoke in the Castle. I exited through the side door and stood in the driveway with the joint, spliff, whatever it was pinched tightly between my lips. I inhaled how Alexander had taught me two years before, deep into the lungs. It was cold, even for February, and my breath and the smoke came out of my mouth together in one long spiral. My sinuses felt heavy and thick, like they’d been plugged up with clay. I wondered when the bruises would fade, if my nose would look the same in three weeks’ time.
I leaned against the wall and tried not to think anymore, certain I’d drive myself crazy if I did. The forest was quiet and at the same time brimming with small sounds—the distant hoot of an owl, the dry rustle of leaves, a breeze slithering through the treetops. Somehow, slowly, my brain disconnected from the rest of me. I still felt pain, still twisted in the grip of indecision, but there was something between me and thought and feeling and everything else—a fine mist, a backlit scrim, shadow-puppet silhouettes moving softly on the other side. Whether it was the cold or Alexander’s joint I couldn’t say, but inch by inch I began to go numb.
The door opened, closed. I looked toward it without expectation or curiosity. Meredith. She hesitated on the porch for a moment, then came down. I didn’t move. She took the joint out of my mouth, threw it on the ground, and kissed me before I could speak. A dull throb of pain went up the bridge of my nose to my brain. Her palm was warm on the side of my face, her mouth magnetic. She took my hand like she had so many weeks ago and led me back inside.
SCENE 7
I slept through most of the following day, regaining consciousness for only a moment or two when Meredith slid out of bed, brushed my hair back off my forehead, and left for class. I murmured something at her, but the words never really took shape. Sleep crawled back on top of me like an affectionate, purring pet, and I didn’t wake again for eight hours. When I did, Filippa was sitting cross-legged on the bed beside me.
I gazed up at her blearily, groping through my muddled memory of the previous night, unsure whether I had any clothes on under the blanket. She pushed me back down when I tried to sit up. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“How do I look?”
“Honestly? Awful.”
“Coincidence? No. What time is it?”
The windows were already dark.
“Quarter to nine,” she said, and her forehead creased. “Have you slept all day?”
I groaned, shifted, reluctant to lift my head. “Mostly. How was class?”
“Very quiet.”
“Why?”
“Well, without you there were only four of us.”
“Who else was missing?”
“Who do you think?”
I turned my head away from her on the pillow, stared hard at the wall. The movement produced a painful thud in my sinus cavity that distracted me, but only for a moment.
“I suppose you’re waiting for me to ask where he is,” I said.
She plucked at the edge of the comforter where it was folded across my chest. “Nobody’s seen him since yesterday. After fight call he just disappeared.”
I grunted at her and said, “There’s a ‘but,’ I can hear it coming.”
She sighed, her shoulders rising slightly up and sinking down much farther. “But he’s back now. He’s up in the Tower.”
“In which case I will be staying right here until Meredith kicks me out.”
Her mouth made a flat pink line. Behind her glasses—I didn’t know why she was wearing them, she wasn’t reading anything—her eyes were drowsy ocean blue, patient but tired. “Come on, Oliver,” she said quietly. “It can’t hurt to go up and talk to him.”
I gestured at my face. “Um, apparently it can.”
“Look, we’re all mad at him, too. I think Meredith left a scorch mark on the floor where she was standing when he came in. Even Wren wouldn’t talk to him.”
“Good,” I said.
“Oliver.”
“What?”
She leaned her cheek on one hand and inexplicably, grudgingly, smiled.
“What?” I said again, more warily.
“You,” she said. “You know I wouldn’t even be in here if you were anyone else.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you have better reasons than the rest of us to hold a grudge, but you’re also the first one who’s going to forgive him.”
The unsettling feeling that Filippa could see right through my skin made me squirm deeper into the mattress. “Is that so?” I said, but it sounded weak and unpersuasive, even to me.
“Yeah.” Her smile faded. “We can’t afford to be at one another’s throats right now. Things are bad enough.” She seemed frail, all of a sudden. Thin and transparent, like a cancer patient. Unflappable Filippa. I felt a weird overwhelming urge to just hold her, ashamed that I had, however briefly, suspected her of anything. I wanted to pull her under the blanket and wrap my arms around her. I almost did it before I remembered that I (probably) wasn’t dressed.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him.”
She nodded, and I thought I saw the flash of a tear behind her glasses. “Thanks.” She waited a moment, realized I wasn’t moving, and said, “Okay, when?”
“Um, in a minute.”
She blinked, and all traces of the tear—if it had ever been there—were gone. “Are you naked?” she said.
“I might be.”
She left the room. I took my time getting dressed.
As I climbed the stairs to the Tower, I found myself walking in slow motion. It didn’t feel like I was going up to see James for the first time in only a day or two. I felt like I hadn’t really seen him, spoken to him, communicated with him in any significant way since before Christmas. The door at the top of the stairs was cracked. I nervously licked my lip and pushed it open.
He was perched on the side of the bed, eyes fixed on the floor. But it wasn’t his bed—it was mine.
“Comfortable?” I said.
He stood swiftly and took two steps forward. “Oliver—”
I raised one hand, palm out, like a crossing guard. “No—just stay over there, for a minute.”
He stopped in the middle of the room. “Okay. Whatever you want.”
My feet were unsteady on the floorboards. I swallowed, choked down a surge of strange, despondent affection. “I want to forgive you,” I blurted. “But James, I could kill you right now, honestly.” I reached toward him, clenched my fist on empty air. “I want to—God, I can’t even explain it. You’re like a bird, you know that?” He opened his mouth—a question, some expression of confusion caught on the tip of his tongue. I made a harsh, inelegant gesture, a chop of the hand, to keep him from speaking. My thoughts tumbled out manic and disorganized. “Alexander was right, Richard’s not the sparrow, it’s you. You’re—I don’t know, this fragile, elusive thing, and I feel like if I could just catch you, I could crush you.”
He had this terrible, wounded look on his face, and h
e had no right to it, not in that moment. Half a dozen conflicting feelings roared up in me at once, and I took a huge, ungainly step toward him.
“I want so badly to be so mad at you that I could do that, but I can’t, so I’m mad at myself instead. Do you even understand how unfair that is?” My voice was high and stringent, like a little boy’s. I hated it, so I swore, loudly. “Fuck! Fuck this, fuck me, fuck you— God damn it, James!” I wanted to throw him to the floor, fight him down—and do what? The violence of the thought alarmed me, and with a strangled noise of outrage, I seized a book off the trunk at the end of his bed and flung it at him, threw it at his knees. It was a paperback copy of Lear, limp and harmless, but he winced as it hit him. It fluttered to the floor at his feet, one page hanging crookedly out from the binding. When he looked up at me I averted my eyes immediately.
“Oliver, I—”
“Don’t!” I jabbed a finger at him for silence. “Don’t. Just let me—just—for a minute.” I dragged my fingers through my hair. A hard ball of pain had lodged behind the bridge of my nose, and my eyes were beginning to water. “What is it about you?” I asked, my words thick from the effort of keeping my voice steady. I glared at him, waiting for an answer I knew I wouldn’t get. “I should hate you right now. And I want to—God, I want to—but that’s not enough.”
I shook my head, utterly at a loss. What on earth was happening to us? I searched his face for a hint of it, some clue to seize on, but for a long time all he did was breathe, with his face twisted up like breathing hurt.
“My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,” he said. “Because it is an enemy to thee.”
The balcony scene. Too mistrustful to guess at the meaning, I said, “Don’t do that, James, please—right now can we just be ourselves?”
He crouched down, lifted the mangled script from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s easier now to be Romeo, or Macbeth, or Brutus, or Edmund. Someone else.”
“James,” I said again, more gently. “Are you all right?”
He shook his head, eyes downcast. His voice crept out of his mouth with fearful, cautious steps. “No. I’m not.”
“Okay.” I shifted my weight, foot to foot. The floor still didn’t feel firm enough. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”