Such Sweet Sorrow **Advanced Reader's Copy only. Not for resale or distribution**

by Jenny Trout

  “Your highness, you mustn’t!” Bernardo warned, but Hamlet paid him no mind.

  “This ghost is the reason you brought me here, is it not?” With one hand stretched out toward the specter and the other feeling along the rough wall, he forged ahead. “If it is my father, I will speak to it.”

  “And if it isn’t your father?” Horatio warned, his voice sounding very far away in the dark. “You said yourself that spirits can deceive.”

  “Only if you let them.” He drew closer to the apparition. The light took shape, a shroud of luminous blue falling over features that were at once familiar and strange. The high, pointed crown atop the king’s noble brow was unmistakable, as were his strong profile and broad shoulders. He was like a bust carved of mist, for his chest ended in wisps of blue. His eyes, as blank and pale as a statue’s, still stared, somehow, at his son, the prince.

  “Hamlet…”

  Hearing ghosts speak was one of Hamlet’s least favorite parts of the curse. The sound was like the worst winter wind howling through a haunted night, mingled with the screams of the damned and chimes like breaking glass. He knew that behind him, Bernardo and Horatio would cover their ears. For the living not afflicted with Hamlet’s strange ability, the voices of the dead were no more than the howl of a chill wind and a sensation of dire foreboding. Though Hamlet could make sense of the words, the rasping, sorrowful gasps still grated down his spine, filling him with dread.

  One long tendril of glowing mist beckoned like a finger, and the apparition drifted away.

  “Hamlet, don’t!” Horatio called. “You’ll be lost in the caves.”

  Hamlet ground his teeth. “If I am, then I suggest you and your man Bernardo come find me.”

  Putting aside all thoughts of dying trapped in the belly of the earth, Hamlet followed the shade, his rational mind warring with the grief that twisted his heart. His father had died only months ago. Until the last few days, the castle had still been in mourning for him. But by Claudius’s declaration, the black shrouds and grim court dress had been banished. Though the courtiers were eager to abandon their sorrow and please their new king, Hamlet’s grief for his father was so fresh that he woke in the mornings forgetting, only for a moment, that the king was gone.

  The spirit drifted wordlessly, drawing Hamlet deeper and deeper into the cliff below the castle. The sounds of Horatio and Bernardo were lost now, and Hamlet hoped the men still followed at a distance. He’d lost track of the twists he’d taken, the turns when the opening of a new tunnel would make itself known with a blast of cool air and the stink of fetid sea water. Ahead, a glimmer of the same strange blue as the specter flickered in the darkness. He drew closer to it, and soon the shaft of eerie luminescence lit the tunnel like a cold sun, lengthening Hamlet’s shadow and highlighting the absence of one where the ghost stood. With a tendril of mist taking the shape of a skeletal finger, the ghost of his father pointed, and Hamlet turned the corner.

  There, crackling and spitting like blue hell fire, a huge stone portal, oval like an eye turned on its side, radiated with the promise of menace and salvation. A freezing wind that rivaled even the most bitter seaside winter blew through the surface of the portal, which rippled with waves of light like water. All along the stone frame, ancient runes covered in mold and lichen spelled out words in a language Hamlet doubted any living person could decipher.

  Wetting his lips, Hamlet resisted the urge to plunge his hand into the beckoning void. “Well,” he said to the ghost, unable to tear his gaze from the looming opening, “This is wondrous strange, indeed.”

  …

  The kingdom was alive in celebration, from the lowliest peasant to the highest born lord. The king himself, the murderous, traitorous king, held a wedding gala that put every past celebration in the castle of Elsinore to shame.

  Hamlet might have enjoyed it, if he’d bothered to attend. Instead, he hunched over his cup in the lowest, dirtiest alehouse in all of Denmark, far from the shadow of Elsinore’s cruel spires, to forget all he had seen and heard in that fearful tunnel below the keep.

  It was true that Hamlet had disliked the marriage between his mother and his father’s brother, on moral and religious principles. That had been before the ghost of Hamlet’s father had spoken such ghastly secrets. Things Hamlet could not put out of his mind, no matter how many taverns he visited, or how long he avoided his royal family and duties.

  Revenge my murder, his father had said, the words hollow on the screaming wind of his spectral voice. Protect the corpseway.

  The corpseway, the unearthly portal that divided the realm of the living and the dead, would be a powerful tool in the hands of a king with a noble soul. But in the hands of a vile ruler such as his uncle…

  A devastating one.

  Hamlet had been living atop it his entire life, with no notion that it existed; perhaps it was to blame for his affliction. Even if it wasn’t, he finally understood his father’s repeated warnings to avoid the caverns below the keep. If young Hamlet had found the portal, his curious nature might have rendered him dead Hamlet, the lost prince.

  It was testament to his father’s greatness as king that he had not used the portal to his own ends…but how King Hamlet had known about the corpseway remained a mystery that maddened his son. Had his father shared his gift? Why hadn’t he told him? These were answers Hamlet sorely needed, but his father’s spirit had vanished before he’d thought to ask them.

  The existence of the corpseway did not trouble Hamlet half so much as his father’s charge to avenge him. For though Hamlet had never believed his father had been poisoned by a snake bite—and as a result, he’d taken numerous and paranoid precautions against assassination in the months after the king’s death—he’d also never suspected that the king’s own brother could be implicated in a murder so foul.

  Yet the spirit had insisted: The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.

  Not only was Hamlet charged with hiding the secret of the corpseway from his treacherous uncle, but he’d also agreed to regicide and treason. Though he’d fantasized about the joy he would feel in sending his father’s assassin to hell, those fantasies had not ended with Hamlet’s own neck on the block, an event that would certainly come to fruition should his uncle catch wind of Hamlet’s oath to avenge his father’s death.

  And spirits, even familiar spirits, could not always be trusted.

  The bench on which he sat rocked as new occupants took up the space beside him. Someone brushed his arm and upset his cup.

  “Mi scusi.“

  Italian?

  Hamlet lifted his head, squinting at the fellow. Young, about Hamlet’s own age. Like Hamlet, he was tall and handsome, but his hair was black as a raven’s feather, where Hamlet’s was pale gold. The stranger’s eyes were dark, and there they also differed, as they did in build; Hamlet wondered if the other young man’s slenderness was a result of starvation or sickness.

  “What are you doing here?” Hamlet asked, leaning his cheek on his hand, elbow propped firmly against the long wooden table he slumped over. “You sound strange.”

  “Because I am a stranger.” The Italian was in a surly mood, despite his pretty appearance. Next to him, an older man in monk’s robes with a monk’s tonsure shorn into his hair cast his furtive gaze about the alehouse, as if waiting for sin or vice to assail them from every corner.

  Figuring he might have better luck with a man of the cloth, Hamlet slurred, “Don’t worry, father. No one would dare trouble you here. We may be fierce Northerners, but we do have religion.”

  The friar responded in a rolling babble that took Hamlet a moment to decipher. When he did, he replied in the same tongue, “Ah, Italians are you? I never much cared for the language myself, but it is terrifically easy to rhyme.”

  “We did not come here for a language lesson,” the handsome one snapped in his native speech. His hair was shorn quite short, and he ran a hand over it in a self-conscious gesture that suggested he mi
ght not be so surly and forbidding as he wanted people to think. “Kindly mind your own business.”

  “I’m not in the business of minding my own business. Not anymore. Bad things happen when people mind their own business.” Hamlet had come to the tavern to drink away his dark thoughts, not invite new ones in. But the strangers were so intriguing, he could not help but think of them as a portent; after all, how many foreigners found their way this far north, with no clear purpose for being there? Speaking to his father’s ghost had made him both suspicious and curious at once. “You didn’t come here for a language lesson. What did you come here for?”

  “Shelter,” the friar spoke up, laying a warning hand on his companion’s arm. “Shelter and something to eat, before our pilgrimage carries us far from here. We wish no quarrel.”

  In taking stock of the pretty man’s appearance, Hamlet had already noted the spider’s web of silver guarding the hilt of a sword beneath his cloak. They wanted no quarrel, but they had not come unprepared should one arise. Why did a pilgrim need so fine a blade? “I want no quarrel with you, either. Indulge a poor drunkard’s curiosity. Where do you journey? You’re Italian, that means you came from the South. Or perhaps you’re traveling homeward? Where did you come from? There’s nothing above us but sea, and beyond the sea, more Northerners. Worse than us, even.”

  “Would you kindly shut your mouth?” The younger man no longer masked his fury. The conversations around them quieted.

  The priest was quick to calm his companion. “Now, wait, wait. You are tired and discouraged, that much is true. But perhaps this man could help us. We’ve come this far, Romeo.”

  With a pained sigh and a flexing of fingers into a fist that Hamlet deduced was meant for his face, the man called Romeo said, “I am on a quest.”

  “I suppose I didn’t realize people went on quests anymore.” The idea held a world of appeal to Hamlet. Striking out for an adventure, with a purpose, seemed far less dangerous than staying within his uncle’s reach. “What kind of quest?”

  Romeo’s patience had worn visibly thin. “We came here because I was told to go north, to the seat of a murdered king, at a castle by the sea. Now we’re here, where a living king sits in his castle by the sea, and I’ve no idea how to proceed. Is that enough for you, or would you like to sketch us so you’ll have something to remember us by?”

  The hairs on the back of Hamlet’s neck stood. This Romeo spoke of a secret only Hamlet knew, and then only through supernatural means. Were they soothsayers? Did they suffer the same spectral affliction as he?

  Or, perhaps, had Claudius sent them, to ascertain if Hamlet knew the truth of his father’s death? Were that the case, the sword beneath Romeo’s cloak would make all the difference in Hamlet’s answer.

  “You shouldn’t speak about murder so openly here. Especially as it pertains to the king.”

  “Can anyone here understand Italian?” the priest asked quietly.

  Hamlet checked about doubtfully, then called out in the same tongue, “The next round is on me!” When the other patrons paused to look incredulously at the man who spouted foreign gibberish loudly, he shook his head. “It doesn’t appear so. How did you know the king was murdered?”

  Some of the color drained from Romeo’s sunburned face. “Call it a religious vision.”

  If the Italians would not share their true purpose, Hamlet could force the information from them. “Any charlatan could claim God spoke to him. But this vision seems too specific. You say you seek the seat of a murdered king…what assurance do I have that you’re not here to kill the king? Perhaps my grasp of your language isn’t as good as I thought it was. Should I find a royal guard and see if your religious vision can save you?”

  “No!” The priest’s face paled; even his sunburned pate lost a shade of red at the threat. “No, please good sir, I beg of you. You misunderstand. We are but two wicked pilgrims, sent here on a foul lie. We mean your king no harm.”

  That’s a shame, Hamlet thought uncharitably. But if these men feared the king, perhaps they had not been sent by the king.

  Or perhaps it was another part of their ruse. “Wicked? I don’t care for the word. Isn’t killing a king wicked?”

  Romeo turned to the priest, who nodded and pressed the rosary clenched in his hand to his lips. His shoulders slumping in resignation, Romeo admitted, “A witch told me. I asked her how I could bring my beloved back from the dead, and the crone told me to seek my answer here.”

  “Did she?” A witch? That was no good at all. Hamlet had always believed in and feared witches, for it seemed unlikely to him that he was the only mortal afflicted with a supernatural curse. He’d never met a witch, so he had no clue if one would want to meddle with a corpseway. It was no coincidence that the Italians had shown up, eager to contact the dead, after Hamlet had been handed the awesome responsibility of protecting the portal. “Who have you spoken to here? How did you find me?”

  Romeo straightened at the affront. “What are you blathering about? You’re the only soul, besides Friar Laurence, to whom I have told this tale, and then only at his misguided urging.” He scoffed. “What guard would believe a word of it anyway? You stink of ale and speak nonsense.”

  “And you just happened to come here, to tell a convoluted story of lost love and triumph over death?” Hamlet’s mouth was thick, his thinking muddled. He’d had a point to make before, but now it slipped away, under the calm, soothing waves of intoxication. He struggled to keep his head clear, but it was futile; his earlier goal of oblivion had been achieved, but only after he’d changed his mind. These men had offended and confused him. Somehow. He wasn’t entirely clear on how. “My god, you’re probably not even Italians, are you? Just some peasant farmers come to torment me for curiosity’s sake!” Hamlet slapped his palm on the table. “Oh, what that witch must have paid you. What vile favors did she bestow upon you? What does she seek? Power over the fates of men? Or is it something deeper? I’m sure she thought I would be moved by your story of love stronger than death. Well, you can tell your witch to go back to hell from whence she came, for she’ll have none of my secrets.”

  Romeo’s hand snapped to the grip of his sword, and the priest hurried to intervene. “He speaks madness, Romeo, stay your hand!”

  “Mad, am I?” Hamlet rose, and downed his cup. “You’d be driven mad, too, if were suddenly forced to defend yourself from witches and wicked pilgrims! You would be mad if unquiet spirits tormented you in the night. Mad, you call me. We’ll see how mad I am when I make you one of them.”

  He did not have a knife to draw, but Hamlet thought he’d made himself fairly clear. He intended to duel this stranger. Not now, with his limbs still unsteady from drink, but in a few hours. “Meet me, at dawn. On the public green in front of the castle gates. We’ll see who is a mad man then.”

  He did not await a reply. He staggered from the alehouse, not certain if he’d settled up with the barman or not. Horatio would take care of it tomorrow, if Hamlet were to meet his death in the duel. Horatio was a good friend that way.

  “A good friend,” Hamlet burped, addressing the specter of an old man who slumped against the alehouse doorway. “A good friend, and the best of men.”

  …

  Romeo stared after the figure departing the tavern, a sense of understanding creeping over him. The exchange had been so bizarre, like falling into a tossing ocean and not knowing which way to swim, but with the confusing man departed, small pictures stood out. The cut of the man’s clothing, the fine silver buttons on his doublet…he was a rich man. A rich mad man, perhaps.

  “Laurence,” Romeo said slowly, his tongue thick in his mouth. “I think mayhap divine provenance has lit the way to my Juliet.”

  “Do not put too much stock in the words of a lunatic, or you may be disappointed.” The friar bent his head as though he would withdraw into his scratchy robe.

  “No… this man knows something. Madman he may be, but a drunken one. Tomorrow morning, he is sure to
be sober.” Romeo chewed his thumbnail and hunched his shoulders, avoiding the stares of the other patrons. “Did you see how he reacted, when I told him the strega’s words? He seemed nervous.”

  “Because you were speaking treason freely,” Laurence scolded. “It means nothing, Romeo. Let it be.”

  “I could meet with him tomorrow. Ask him what he meant by his words, and tell him all that I meant by mine.”

  “You’ll win the confidence of a madman,” Laurence said with a lift of his eyebrows and the tone of Pontius Pilate washing his hands. “I believe I’ve made my objections known, so I won’t waste my breath objecting further.”

  “Beer loosens men’s tongues,” Romeo said, shaking his head. “Any information he might have given us tonight could be lost to sobriety. And if he insists upon dueling, I shall have to kill him, and then it is lost for good.”

  Laurence grew thoughtful. “Do not kill him, Romeo. There is already a stain on your soul from your past deeds. Tybalt? Paris? Or have you forgotten your life before this sacrilegious quest?”

  “Why did you come with me?” Yet Romeo knew why. Because Laurence could not have considered letting his young friend take up such a dangerous journey alone. Because he felt guilty that his plan to save Romeo’s marriage to Juliet had instead doomed her to hell, and Romeo to a living one. Because he had regretted the antidote he’d administered from the moment Romeo had opened his eyes.

  Laurence’s spine straightened, his chin lifted. “You know why I am here. And you know that I will follow you into the underworld itself if I must. But I will not stand by idle while you send yourself there. What good is recovering Juliet, if only to separate yourself from her in the hereafter with your earthly deeds?”

  “You make a good point.”

  Romeo paid a wench for a pitcher of ale and two suppers, but he was not inclined to eat or drink. His heart no longer rejoiced in living, not with Juliet still cold in her tomb—yet the traitorous organ still beat within his chest.