Such Sweet Sorrow (14 page)

“And you found this a comfort?” She couldn’t imagine a life of constantly looking over her shoulder, waiting for someone to kill her. As a child, she’d so envied the daughter of Verona’s prince, the fine gowns she wore and the servants trailing after her. She’d attended mass in a sedan chair carried by four young men, and she’d knelt on a satin cushion while everyone else suffered on the stone floor.

But if, in trade, one had to constantly guard against assassins, perhaps it was better to be the daughter of a decidedly minor noble. No one had ever tried to murder her but her.

“There’s a comfort in security,” Hamlet mused. “For example here. You might look about this place, with no doors or windows, and say that we are trapped. Or you might look about and think to yourself, ‘ah, there are no windows or doors. So nothing can get in, except me.’”

It was a good theory, but for one foolish part of it. “You’re assuming that the Afterjord plays by the rules of the real world—”

“Midgard,” he corrected her.

She rolled her eyes. “You’re assuming that things here are as they are in Midgard. But we already know that they aren’t. We don’t know if we’re alone. There could be all sorts of things in here with us that we just haven’t seen yet. For all we know, the floor could melt and become a throng of hungry ghosts with knives for eyes.”

“That’s horrible,” Hamlet said with a grin, finally giving her the courtesy of looking at her while he spoke to her. “You’re getting the hang of this quite well.”

The floor did not turn to hungry ghosts, but after a while of walking in strained silence with a person she had absolutely nothing in common with and no clue what to talk about, Juliet hoped that it might. They walked for what had seemed like hours, with the prince attempting uncomfortable small talk all the while. He asked about the weather in Italy, the food, whether or not Italians bathed.

She had just snapped, “Of course we do!” when a movement ahead broke the pattern of the floor. She gasped.

It was Romeo.

Ignoring Hamlet’s warning, she raced ahead. “There you are! I knew we would find you. Or you would find us.”

His arms surrounded her in a familiar embrace, and she held onto him tight. Being separated from him seemed to hurt more now that he was back. The uncertainty was over, the answer to a much larger question decided. She did want to be with him. She
was
glad he’d woken her from her slumber in Sheol.

She loved him. In his arms, she could remember her mortal life; she could remember what it was to
be
alive. It was where she belonged.

“Juliet,” Hamlet said, low and cautious. “Step away from him.”

No!
This couldn’t be a trick. Not when it felt so real. It couldn’t be.

“Juliet, please,” Hamlet urged softly. “Look around you.”

Reluctantly, Juliet raised her head. In the mirrors around them, she did not see herself. She saw only Romeo, standing exactly as he was before her now. But the reflections turned as one and came to stand so close to the mirrors that they seemed to touch them.

Then they did touch them, their fingertips pushing through the glass as though it were quicksilver. As Juliet backed up from the Romeo before her, the other Romeos escaped their prisons.

Surrounded on all sides, Juliet couldn’t breathe. It was all her childhood nightmares coming true, people climbing out of the mirror to attack her. But now, the nightmare creature was her only love, and he pulled a dagger from his belt.

“Juliet, come away,” Hamlet urged her.

She couldn’t move, and Romeo came toward her, the knife in his outstretched hand. Juliet saw the flash of the blade, remembered the bite of the steel in the tomb, and screamed.

Chapter Thirteen

“
Stay back!” Hamlet put himself between Juliet and the first Romeo.

Shame burned hot in Juliet’s cheeks. She’d wanted so badly to believe they had found Romeo, she’d ignored the danger that now seemed obvious. Of course he wasn’t what he appeared to be.

“Enough!” She shouted, pushing past Hamlet again. “I’m tired of this place. Everything and everyone is a monster hiding behind some more pleasing countenance! I understand that now. You’ve made your point quite clear.”

Her gaze dropped to the dagger in Romeo’s hand. Intricately carved from blackest obsidian, its thin blade looked sharp enough to kill her quickly. Not like last time.

“You’ve had worse,” Romeo said with a twist of his lips. He held the dagger out to her handle-first. “I would never kill you. Obviously, this is a trick of the Afterjord. As is our supposed friend here.”

Her chest loosened a bit, and she was about to take a relieved breath when another of the Romeos shouted, “It is a trick, but he’s the one playing you false! It’s me, Juliet. Don’t trust him.”

“So, the trick is to tell which of you is my Romeo, and which of you is just an apparition pretending to be Romeo?” She hefted the knife in her palm. “Is that the game? Is this the prize?”

“They’re both lying,” another insisted, his jaw set hard, dark eyes glittering with anger. “You know they’re false.”

Two others began shoving each other, shouting, and soon, all around them, the Romeos battled each other, punching, shoving, denying that they were the pretenders.

“I don’t think any of them are pretending,” Hamlet called to her over the chaos. “Each seem to really believe that they’re him.”

The sound of steel being drawn rippled all around her, blade after blade being unsheathed, and Juliet held her hands up. “Put away your weapons at once!”

They did as she commanded, looking hurt and suspicious as they did.

She addressed the first Romeo. “What is the trick, then?”

Hamlet put his hand on her arm. Juliet saw annoyance on all the faces around her. It was so absurd, she almost laughed.

“This reminds me of a tale my mother told me when I was a child. A test of courage.” Hamlet took a deep breath. “A wood cutter banished his two children to the forest at the request of his evil new wife. But she was a witch, and she’d put him under a spell. When the wood cutter realized what he’d done, he went looking for his children in the forest, only to find they had been turned into trees. To free them, he had to cut down two trees of his choosing. But if he cut down the trees containing the souls of his children, they would die.”

“What does a silly story like that matter?” the first Romeo asked impatiently. He sounded so like her Romeo that Juliet thought for certain it was him. “Juliet, you aren’t really going to fall for this, are you? Like you did with the sirens?”

“It means she has to kill one of you,” another Romeo suggested. Juliet did not see which.

“You mean, to end the spell, she has to kill one of us?” another Romeo asked.

“Juliet, be very careful,” Hamlet warned her.

Each one of the Romeos gave her such earnest, sad looks. She stared back at them in despair. “I don’t want to kill anyone.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever leave until you do.” Hamlet pointed at the one who’d given her the knife.

“What do you mean?” another asked. “That he’s the false Romeo?”

“You might all be false,” Juliet accused, pointing with the dagger at each of them. “Any of you.”

“They are,” another Romeo said. “Juliet, this is madness. Kill one of them, so we can escape.”

“The others came through the mirrors,” Juliet told Hamlet. “But they’re still thinking and speaking on their own. Look at them, they’re all clearly terrified.”

“I am not terrified,” another insisted.

“How many of them are there?” Hamlet turned around, his finger wagging as though he were counting them, but the hall was packed shoulder to shoulder with copy after copy of Romeo. It seemed impossible to count them all.

“There must be something I’m missing.” Juliet pressed her fingertips to her temples, cautious with the dagger in her hand. “I can’t kill anyone.”

“Don’t you see?” The first Romeo asked. “The Afterjord put you here with Hamlet, but he is not Hamlet. That is the test, Juliet. You know who you must kill.”

“This is madness, he speaks the truth there,” Hamlet agreed. “But I am no impostor.”

“Don’t listen to him, Juliet!” one Romeo shouted.

“I’m the real Romeo!” One cried out, and then another, “He’s not me, I am!”

“Oh, all of you just shut up, for one moment!” Juliet shrieked, clutching at her hair.

One of them, perhaps it was the very first Romeo she’d encountered—she couldn’t tell anymore—came forward, raising his hand to touch her face. He trailed the backs of his fingers down her cheek, brushing aside a tear.

“All you have to do is rid us of the imposter. Juliet, you know me, and I know all you have been through,” he said softly, as though they were the only two in the room. His touch calmed her like the warmth of the sun on her face. “I wish there were another way.”

She looked into his eyes, those darkly glittering eyes that had seemed so full of dangerous promise the night he’d scaled the wall of her father’s garden. She had no doubt that the others truly believed themselves to be Romeo. As she gazed up into Romeo’s face, she thought,
what a fearful thing that must be, to be certain of your identity, and to be wrong
. Because this Romeo before her was real. He was different from the others. He was flesh and blood and bone.

Which made it shockingly difficult when she pushed the knife into his throat. She had imagined such soft flesh would easily yield, but beneath his skin lay a network of veins and sinews that resisted the knife. Though he grabbed her wrists, she pushed on, his blood spraying her lovely gown until she stood before him dressed not in black and white, but black and red.

He staggered backward and fell, gurgling red from his throat.

“He wasn’t Romeo.” She wiped her face with her sleeve as she stepped back to join Hamlet.

“How do you—how did you know?” Hamlet stood between the two of them, hands open helplessly at his sides as though he wanted to run to Romeo’s aid, but doubted the impulse. “Juliet, were you certain? Tell me you were certain!”

The Romeo on the floor gave a last dying gurgle, and they all faded away, like sand being blown about in a storm. Not one of them remained.

“Romeo would never have asked me to kill you. Not after the way he left you with the grave worm. I know him.” There should have been no further explanation needed, but as she did not know if she would ever see him again, she added, “He knows how valuable you are. And he knows that he did you wrong. He is a good man. If you give him a chance, he will make it up to you, I know he will.”

“Will he?” Hamlet’s half-hearted scoff proved to Juliet that he was not so hardened against Romeo as he pretended to be.

She opened her mouth to tease him, but a sudden shift in the room caught all the sound before it could come out. Hamlet screamed a warning and leapt toward her, pushing her down and covering her body with his as all around them, the mirrors exploded in a rain of razor-sharp glass.

…

“
So, you hold the fate of all mortals in your hands,” Romeo began slowly. He wanted to make sure he really, truly understood what the mad witches had told him. “But you can’t help me get back to Midgard, or help me find Juliet?”

“Juliet is dead, and the dead belong to this realm. We have no power over them,” Wyrd answered, her toothless mouth working hard around the words.

“What about Hamlet? He’s not dead. He’s alive. You can do something to help me find him, couldn’t you?” The three were maddening. How could they possibly be all seeing and all powerful if they were so damned incompetent in their own realm? Unless the spiteful witches were lying to him, toying with him for their own perverse amusement.

Veroandi waved a hand. “We don’t treat with seers, that’s a fool’s game.”

“They always want to know about the future for their own gain,” Skuld interrupted. “They want to know who is going to die, who is going to come into money. Because they want that money for themselves.
Pff
. Mortals and their money.”

“What’s a seer?” Romeo was perfectly capable of deducing that a seer “saw” something, but he didn’t know it applied to Hamlet. “You mean because he can talk to the dead?”

“No mortal has ever talked to the dead and learned anything of value,” Wyrd pronounced. “We won’t bring him here, but he’s coming.”

“He is? Does he bring Juliet?”

“We can’t see her!” Skuld snapped. “Get it through your ugly head.”

I
have an ugly head?
He pushed the thought away. He didn’t know what powers the Norn commanded. If they could read his mind, he didn’t want them to find anything insulting there.

“What was the purpose of testing me with an apparition of Tybalt if you have no power here, you don’t necessarily care what happens to me, and you don’t have the power to help me get home?”

“We were bored,” Veroandi said with a shrug of her hunched shoulders. “It’s rare to find a mortal wandering here. Alive, anyway.”

“The least you could do is tell me where I am.” Greece after a wildfire was his nearest guess.

“This the Waste. A place where souls wander in eternal torment, their souls preyed upon by fire, but never purified. It is a realm of the damned.” Wyrd opened her palms, and a terrible river of flame flowed between them. She doused the flames by slapping her palms together. “Once you enter, you may never leave. Unless…”

“Unless what?” Wandering in eternal torment had never been a part of Romeo’s plan, though he supposed he should have at least considered the possibility. If there was a way to avoid it, however, he was keen to know it.

But instead of answering him, Wyrd looked to the sky and pronounced, “Ha. Right on time.”

An unbelievable amount of glass rained all around Romeo, and he whipped the hood of his cloak up to protect his head. Still, shards slipped into his collar, glass dust stung his nostrils. The violent breaking noises ceased, he pulled back his hood and shouted, “You couldn’t have warned me?”

Between him and the Norn, Hamlet and Juliet lay in a heap, Hamlet covering her body with his own. The back of his doublet was torn, and beneath the black velvet, his ripped shirt was spattered with blood.

Romeo ran to them, rolling Hamlet to his back. Every movement resulted in a sickening crunch of broken glass. Staring down into the prince’s face, Romeo felt the most unexpected pang of sadness. If he’d been killed protecting Juliet, Romeo would never forgive himself. It should have been him trapped with her in whatever horrible hell dimension they been banished to, not Hamlet.

“No, no, no,” he repeated to himself, gripping the front of his doublet. “You can’t be dead. You saved her!”

To Romeo’s great relief, Hamlet’s lips began to move. “No. She saved me.”

“I don’t want to do that ever again. It was awful,” Juliet groaned, sitting up beside him and carefully brushing broken glass from her hair.

“Juliet!” Romeo threw his arms around her, then remembered the glass, so he eased his hold. “I thought I would never find you. I thought you were…where did you get those clothes?”

Getting to her feet with some difficulty, Juliet explained, “We fell down the hill escaping the sirens, and we woke up like this. In the hall of mirrors.” She frowned as she examined him. “You weren’t there as well? We looked for you, but we never found you.”

“You found him,” Wyrd spoke up. Juliet gasped when she saw them, and Hamlet scrambled to his feet. “You saw him.”

“I saw false impressions of him.” Juliet’s chin raised defiantly. She grasped Romeo’s hand, lacing her fingers with his.

“You saw him,” Wyrd continued mildly. There was an air of something like admiration in the way she spoke to Juliet. “You saw many facets of him, and you removed the one that did not belong.”

“That’s right!” Hamlet said triumphantly. “The woodcutter had to cut down the one tree in the forest that was not his child. That was how the story went. I remember now.”

“Are you insane?” Juliet rounded on him, dropping Romeo’s hand. “You used a story you only half-remembered to convince me to kill Romeo?”

Romeo startled. “What are you talking about?”

“It was a test,” Juliet began, and though he listened to her every word, they became difficult to hear over the roar of his pulse. She’d killed him? At least, someone she thought could have been him. She’d done it so callously that she could have been at home with Romeo’s gang of fellows.

How could she have risked such a thing, when she knew all he’d been through to find her?

“Might I remind both of you, in the hopes of stemming what I fear is an inevitable tide of outrage, that I’ve never once put my life at stake, but he—” Hamlet pointed to Romeo. “—has done so twice already today? Perhaps endangering Romeo’s life just this once makes us even?”

“Enough!” Wyrd shouted, and all three of them turned to face the wizened crones before them. “If you are to have any hope of escaping the Afterjord, you will listen and heed us.”

“I thought you didn’t know how we could escape. That’s what you told me,” Romeo accused.

“We knew, we just didn’t want to explain it three times,” Skuld said with a shrug.

“But how did you know they were going to find me here?” Romeo pressed. He didn’t trust witches. Not that the only one he’d ever met, the one in Verona, had given him reason not to trust. She’d sent him exactly where he’d needed to go to find Juliet. But he didn’t appreciate anyone who traded in riddles and obfuscation.

“We knew you would find them again, and that you would leave Midgard,” Veroandi said. “We can see what will happen to you. It’s them we’re not concerned with.”

“We can hear you,” Juliet snapped.

“Tell them, sister,” Skuld urged. “About the keys.”

“Keys? Like this one?” Hamlet pulled the white feather from his doublet.

“Ooh, well if you have it all sorted, maybe you can tell
us
about them,” Skuld scolded.