Such Sweet Sorrow **Advanced Reader's Copy only. Not for resale or distribution**
Page 3
After several ravenous spoonfuls of the muck the barmaid had returned with, Laurence looked up, then cast his gaze down again to hide his worry. “I doubt dry bones will be able to complete this quest as ably as a living body. I beg you, Romeo, sustain yourself.”
“You are too good a man to refuse.” Romeo tried not to smell the greasy stew as he lifted his spoon to his mouth. It was better to ignore the scent. The taste was diminished that way. He remembered the days when he and his friends existed only to laze in the sun, rising at night to drink their fill and feast like kings. So many of them were gone now, lost to foolish feuding. Mercutio had died in his arms. His beloved Juliet had forsaken her own life. It was all so senseless, and so he had to try to bring it to right, no matter the consequence.
Even if it cost him his soul.
“I will go,” he said at last, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “To duel with the madman. If it proves a false end, if that witch has tricked us, then I say we turn for home.”
Laurence stared in open-mouthed disbelief, a pity, for he had not finished chewing. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? We’ve been at this for months, and we’ve found nothing.” It made Romeo feel foolish to admit it now, when they’d traveled so far from home. “We came all this way on the word of an old woman who had no stake in any of this.”
“When you emerged from the witch’s house, you told me of strange sights and terrible rituals. You believed then. Why does your trust in her words falter now?” Laurence raised one bushy eyebrow. “If you have forsaken your faith in God to confer with witches, what do you have left when you cast those sinful beliefs aside?”
“Nothing.” Romeo had taken stock all along the difficult journey. Yet every day that passed without even a glimmer of hope that Juliet would be returned to him, he longed for that cold tomb and for just a drop more poison.
His body ached, unaccustomed still to the weakness the vile potion had left in its wake. Though he boasted of skill and the certainty with which he would kill his opponent, he doubted his chances of besting the man at dawn, be the young Dane mad or drunk or both. “Do you really believe our answer lies at Elsinore?”
The friar considered. “You seem to. Have you taken my advice yet on this journey?”
Romeo rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I will meet the madman at dawn, then.”
Chapter Two
“You’re doing what?”
“I’m going to duel an impertinent Italian,” Hamlet repeated calmly, taking a few clumsy thrusts at the air with his sword. He frowned at the inelegant swipe that left the heavy blade quivering comically before him. He should have kept up his fencing studies while at university.
“Where did you meet an Italian?” Horatio closed the dusty tome he’d been studying. The small desk he sat behind swayed dangerously with the motion, laden down with too many books to remain upright for much longer.
Hamlet mimed a parry and knocked over a history of Caesar’s exploits in Gaul, seven volumes that turned into a landslide. “At the ale house.”
“Of course.” Horatio rubbed his hand over the close-fitting linen cap he wore. His pale blue eyes rolled heavenward. “Are you certain they were even Italian? They might have been just as stinking drunk as you were.”
Hamlet winced, and even that small motion made him feel the wrath of last night’s demons fighting it out inside his head. “They were Italian. Trust me.”
“I trusted you to be in the hall for the banquet last night! ‘I have a headache, go down without me, I just need a moment to rest my eyes in the dark.’ I didn’t realize that you meant you were going to rest them in a dark tavern and leave me to make your excuses all night.”
“If it makes you feel any better at all, I have a headache now.” With a sigh, Hamlet tossed the blade aside. It clattered onto the floor. He paced across his chamber, his boot steps echoing hollow off the stone. He resolved to be kinder to Horatio in the future. After all, the man had left the university to accompany Hamlet to Elsinore. His friendship had kept Hamlet from withering away in total despair while he had watched his father die a slow death.
A death that was not natural, Hamlet reminded himself angrily. He strode to his wardrobe, reaching for the key around his neck. Slipping it into the lock, he opened the doors and selected a loaf of bread and some hard cheese, then, securing the lock behind him, he turned and raised the food in silent offering.
“I’ll pass.” Horatio rose and carefully navigated the slowly narrowing path across the long room. He stopped at the pile of clothing on the floor beside the wardrobe. “You know, clothes can be poisoned as easily as food.”
“No, not as easily, actually.” Hamlet sat and cut into the cheese with the knife from his belt. “I’m not taking any chances. Not after what my father told me.”
“Your father’s ghost,” Horatio corrected. “Hamlet, I know you put faith in apparitions, but I do not. There must be another explanation for your father’s death.”
If anyone else had suggested such a thing, Hamlet would have had them thrown in the dungeon. This was Horatio, gentle Horatio, who cared only for his best friend’s well-being. Perhaps Horatio felt Hamlet’s doubt. It was an uncomfortable possibility, but Hamlet wouldn’t discount it. Horatio had an uncanny ability to see what Hamlet would never confess to another soul. Gently, he observed, “You saw him too.”
“I did,” Horatio admitted, after a time. The war in his rational mind would not be won over a meager breakfast of cheese.
So Hamlet changed the subject again. “What would you have me do about this duel?”
“I would have you choose someone to fight in your stead,” Horatio suggested, then quickly, with both hands held in the air before him, said, “Not me. Someone competent.”
“No, no one competent. I don’t want this fellow to die.” Hamlet had, the night before, when he’d been confident that he would murder the fiend in a single, glorious blow. The morning light had brought him clarity. Searing pain, as well, that had eventually dulled to a throb behind his eyes—he might never touch a drop of ale again—but clarity, foremost.
The specter of death, always around Hamlet, had intensified tenfold once he’d ventured through the glittering corpseway. What could his uncle, the new king, do if he gained knowledge from the world of the dead? Hamlet didn’t know, and that made the prospect of Claudius discovering the gate to the underworld all the more terrifying.
“These men claimed to be on a quest,” Hamlet confessed, looking away from Horatio. It sounded almost too absurd. “I thought they might be my uncle’s spies.”
“What kind of a quest?” Horatio seated himself on the mass of clothing. It was almost as tall as a chair and would do nicely in the role.
Hamlet hesitated. He did not fear ridicule, for Horatio had mocked him many times, and Hamlet always took it for an expression of love through sarcasm. He feared the possibility that Horatio, upon hearing the strangers’ tale, would agree that they were spies. It would make his uncle’s treachery that much closer.
“They were sent by a witch, to the seat of a dead Northern king. The young man, Romeo, believes he can bring his lost love back from the dead. A bit dramatic, but touching, really. A love stronger than death.” Something crucial twisted up from the broken pieces of his drunken interlude. “No. They did not seek a dead king. They sought a murdered king.”
Horatio took a long, deep breath, but said nothing.
“You see, then, why I might find their story suspect. Of all the ale houses, and in Denmark, of all places, they find the one man who knows the king was murdered?”
“Not the only man,” Horatio reminded him. “King Claudius almost certainly knows it as well.”
“Then you see my dilemma.” Hamlet shook his head, a rueful smile tugging the corners of his lips. “It seems too coincidental.”
“Perhaps it is fate?” Horatio shrugged. “Stranger things have happened in the course of human history, I’m sure of it. But as
you say, it is very convenient. The night after you learn the true circumstances of your father’s death, these strangers appear?”
“And yet that information may also prove their tale without any connection to my uncle. Suppose a witch really did tell him to seek the seat of a murdered king. No one else on earth, save vile Claudius, could possibly know that. No rumor doubting the nature of my father’s death could have flown south, without our hearing.” Hamlet took a deep breath, nostrils flaring. “You’re clever. What do you suggest?” It was a common, albeit surly, way for him to concede he was out of his depth and—grudgingly—that his friend was the smarter of the two of them.
“Your curse is proof enough that stranger things exist than we have dreamt of in our philosophies.” Horatio scowled and shook his head, scratching at his nape as he pronounced, “But it is an awfully big coincidence.”
It was a terrible thing for a scholar to be confronted by that which he could not explain with his rational mind. Hamlet pitied his friend, for Horatio did not have seventeen years of experience reconciling the rational and supernatural, as Hamlet had.
The more Hamlet ruminated on the solution to this puzzle, the more he recalled the sadness in Romeo’s eyes, the hopelessness that some might mistake for the weariness of a tired traveler.
“There was something about him,” Hamlet began slowly, “A melancholy. It was far too genuine to be a forgery. I could believe that he was truly grieving his love.”
“But could you believe he came all this way to try and raise her from the dead?”
Hamlet considered. “I could… if you did.”
“Let us speak with them. Proceed with caution, Hamlet, but I do not believe these men could be your uncle’s spies. After all, his majesty believed you to be in your bed last night. Why send an assassin to an alehouse, when he knew you to be asleep in your bed?” Almost the moment his sentence ended, Horatio’s shoulders sagged in defeat. “You cannot give up sleeping Hamlet, please don’t try.”
“Just not sleeping in the castle.” Hamlet rubbed his jaw. “It is decided then. We will go and meet these Italian fiends and speak to them with words instead of steel.”
Hamlet’s chambers were in a long gallery on the eastern side of the castle. He’d abandoned his place in the family quarters when his uncle had announced his intention to become king in Hamlet’s stead. Uncle Claudius had called him a “boy” and suggested that he “wait to come of age” before inheriting the throne. Hamlet’s mother, the queen, had turned on him, quick as the viper he’d believed had poisoned his father. She had been so eager to marry Claudius, she’d barely worn a scrap of black for King Hamlet. She no longer seemed all that concerned with Hamlet the younger, either. That had been proof enough that his place had been unfairly usurped. His uncle had not only stolen the throne, but Hamlet’s own mother, as well.
In the intervening months, he’d made his new room a home for himself and his friend, and they’d spent many long hours in study and drink, content to be left alone by the rest of the castle. He would occasionally forget his sorrows and think himself back at the university with Horatio. In those moments of blissful denial, Hamlet would imagine his parents in Elsinore, his father stern but proud of his son the scholar, his mother loving. That woman had disappeared when the king had died, and Hamlet had become an orphan. He could not be blamed for savoring the past.
Without the bustle of serving maids stripping beds and kitchen boys bringing breakfast to the royal family’s quarters, Hamlet and Horatio were free to sleep as late as they wanted, and as a consequence, the castle had woken hours before they had. Servants had broken their fast and now hurried about, sweeping the floors, beating the tapestries. Hamlet squinted one eye into the sunlight shining in a narrow shaft across his path as he realized his error. “I…may have told them to meet me at dawn. Do you think they’re still here?”
“Do I think a man waited five hours for a chance to kill you?” Horatio’s disbelief changed mid-thought. “Actually…”
“That’s enough from you, peasant.” Hamlet stalked ahead, through the dark corridors and down a curling stair. At the bottom, he nearly collided with a figure swathed in golden velvet.
“Hamlet!” Ophelia’s eyes, greener than any blade of grass Hamlet had ever seen, grew wide as he clasped her arms to steady her. Her waist-length ringlets bounced beneath the linen veil she wore, and the copper circlet over it matched the color glinting off her curls. She frowned as she searched his face. “You must be feeling better, then?”
“Better than what?” Hamlet asked, before Horatio elbowed him sharply in the ribs. Ophelia had a strange power about her, possibly stranger than Hamlet’s own curse, wherein she seemed to muddle a man’s brain by mere proximity. It seemed to only have grown worse as the years went on.
“I was so worried for you.” She placed her hand on Hamlet’s arm and continued their walking for them, gently pulling them along in the direction they had been heading, though Hamlet was certain both he and Horatio had forgotten where they’d been going in the first place.
“Oh, because of the headache, yes,” Hamlet feigned a grimace. “Too much reading by candlelight, I suppose.”
She clucked her tongue. “So much studying lately. Hardly any time at all to speak with your uncle on matters more…personal.”
Ah, so it was that again. Hamlet’s father hadn’t been keen for his son to grow too close to the daughter of his advisor. Somehow, Ophelia had gotten it into her head that the king had been the only impediment to their love, and now that he had passed away, there might be hope for them.
It was not that Hamlet didn’t find her pleasing. He did and enjoyed her company immensely when she was not set on matchmaking. It wasn’t that he never planned to marry. He would have to, at some point, but not now. Not at eighteen, when he hopefully had an entire life ahead of him for such drudgery. He would not resign himself to the prison of marriage at such a young age, no matter how Ophelia might wish otherwise.
Certainly not now when there were other mysterious matters of murder and quests with which to contend. Though he could not openly express it to Ophelia and risk misleading her further; he liked her too well to draw her into danger with him.
“I fear you would find my uncle’s answer much the same as my father’s,” Hamlet told her, hoping his sincerity covered his relief at having put her off a little while longer. “As long as I am heir to Elsinore and all of Denmark, I find myself at the mercy of my uncle’s political maneuvering. But never fear, dearest Ophelia, my heart is ever yours.”
Though she blushed and fluttered like the sweet maiden that she was, she was not a foolish girl. No doubt her mind calculated furiously behind her pretty face.
Nothing was more fearsome than a young lady plotting marriage.
“Are you going out this morning?” she asked sweetly.
“I am. To fight a duel.” Why, Hamlet scolded himself, do you persist in desiring her attention when you mean to discourage her?
“A duel?” Her free hand flew to cover her mouth. “I cannot bear to watch.”
“Thank God for small mercies,” Horatio muttered. Then to cover his gaff, “You would not wish to see a duel. They are messy, violent things.”
Hamlet eased Ophelia’s hand off his arm and raised it to his lips, like a knight in a story book. “If I die, know that I will carry your memory with me, and it will be all the heaven I need.”
She jerked her hand back coldly. “You said that last week, after you slipped on the stairs.”
As they watched Ophelia storm away, no doubt lamenting her poor taste in insincere men, Horatio said, “What has got it into her head that she could marry a prince? Her family may be noble, but your father largely improved their status. People won’t have forgotten that.”
“She’s been planning our wedding since we were five. She believes our great love will triumph the will of a king.” He shrugged. “Can I help it if I’m flattered? I’m rarely set upon as a romantic hero.”
As they made their way onto the wide lawn before the castle gates, Hamlet wondered if the Italians had already left. It had been rude of him not to at least send someone ahead at dawn. He hadn’t had the foresight, in the pounding aftermath of his inebriation. But there, just beyond the guard’s post, two cloaked figures waited. They caught sight of him at almost the same moment he’d noticed them, and they started toward him.
A guard stepped into their path at once, and Hamlet called ahead, quickening his pace, “No, no. Let them through, by order of Prince Hamlet.”
“Un principe?” Romeo spat on the ground. “Is this a trick? I’ve come to fight you, and you choose here? So a guard can stick a sword into my back after I stick mine into your belly?”
“Horatio, this is Romeo,” Hamlet responded in the travelers’ language, which both he and Horatio had studied at university. Hamlet searched his vague memory of the night before. “And his friend here is a friar.”
“Friar Laurence,” the holy man said, his eyes still on the guard at his post. “I beg of you, your highness, forgive my companion’s impertinence. His thoughts are much confused, shrouded as they are in sorrow.”
Romeo shot the friar a glance, as though he objected to the apology.
“Don’t worry,” Hamlet said, managing a cheerful smile. “I didn’t come here to fight you. Or punish you for your impudence, though it has been noted. I seem to remember that the two of you were on a quest?”
“I am,” Romeo answered, nodding past Hamlet to the figure of Horatio behind him, silently demanding an explanation.
“Romeo, Laurence, this is my closest friend and advisor, Horatio.” Hamlet tilted his head, studying the paleness of Romeo’s face, the deep circles beneath his dark eyes. He suspected it was more than just fatigue from travel that weakened the Italian…more than just sorrow for his lost love. “For example, he just now advised me not to duel you, for fear that I would not win. Looking at you, I think you got the better end of his advice, wouldn’t you say?”