“I . . . I . . . was trying to help,” Romeo whispered. “I thought it for the best. . . .”

“Help me into some house, Benvolio; I feel faint—a plague on both your houses, they have made worm’s meat of me . . . your houses . . .” He gripped my collar so tightly I thought he meant to strangle me. “Your houses, do you understand? It is a curse . . . Oh God, take me in. . . .”

I would not let him die here in the street, stared at and remarked upon by the common folk; Romeo seemed too stunned to act, so I stood, gathered Mercutio’s body up in my arms, and walked through the square. If he was heavy—and he must have been—I did not feel it. I felt little except a burning wish that he not die there on the ground, or in my arms, before we had reached some comfort.

“Benvolio?” Mercutio asked. He sounded thin and weak and far away, and I could not bring myself to look down at him.

“Hush,” I said. “I’m taking you home. Your father will call for a surgeon.”

“No surgeon, and I have no father,” he whispered. Though I did not stare down at him, I could see from the corner of my eye the pale, bloodless color of his skin, and the brilliant red still flowing over his doublet, soaking it hot and wet against my chest. “The surgeon’s already had me with his sharpest knife. Did you think Tybalt was such a deft hand with a blade? One thrust, clean . . .” He seemed, at this moment, to admire it. “I always mocked him, but he has proved his point on me.”

“Quiet. Save your strength.”

“I have none to save,” he said, and then, as if in surprise, “You carry me.”

“Aye.” I was gasping for breath, I realized, and staggering from effort. There must have been men and women in the way, but they’d drawn back like waves from Moses himself, save that the red sea was trailing behind me. Mercutio’s blood dripped from the points of my elbows and from the edges of my sleeves. I was carmined with it. Made Capulet.

My shoulder found a wall, and I leaned there a moment, just a moment, to clear the blurring from my eyes. My head and heart pounded together in a deafening chorus, and it came to me with sudden icy clarity that I might collapse well before I carried him the rest of the way to either his house or mine.

“Listen,” Mercutio whispered. His hand tugged hard at my collar. “Listen, I must make a confession; be my confessor, dear friend—”

“No,” I said. “No, you will not die.”

“Listen, I sinned. I sinned most gravely against you. I meant only for it to attach to the one who betrayed us, but I see now; I see I was wrong—”

“Quiet, for the love of God!” I was on the hottest verge of grief. Mercutio’s mind was wandering, and I could not listen; I could not.

Still, he talked on. “. . . not Capulet, not Capulet guilt at all, but Montague as well, enemies upon enemies, and poison to one is poison to all, and I am sorry—”

“Hsst! Young master! Here, bring him here!”

I lifted my head, and blinked. There was a young woman standing in a doorway ahead; I did not recognize her, except as someone who was willing to help in this most extreme darkness. I took in a deep breath and pushed off the wall, staggering the last ten feet and into the shadow of her lintel.

The inside was cool and dark, and smelled sweetly of herbs. It was no noble bed I laid Mercutio upon, only a narrow mattress stuffed with lumpy straw, but he sighed in relief just the same. The girl came behind us, carrying a steaming pot full of water, some rags, and some foul-smelling unguent in yet another pot, and then it came to me in a rush that I knew her.

The witch.

Her gaze was troubled as she stared down at my friend, and she shook her head as if she knew well what the outcome of this would be . . . but she said, “Help me take this off him,” and reached for the ties of his doublet. I caught her hand, staring at her, but she shook her head. “I mean to help, sir, only help.”

I heard nothing but regret and grief, and so I released her. I’d take help from the devil himself, if he’d appeared in a puff of smoke and promised to ease Mercutio’s pain.

Together we folded back the thick padded velvet; it was stabbed through, and sopping with blood. The linen shirt beneath was as red as any Capulet’s cloth. She bit her lip and rolled Mercutio on his side, saw the open bloody lips of the wound on his back, and let out a little resigned sigh before she wadded up pads of cloth and bade me press against the wound in his chest. As I did, I felt the stammering beat of his heart. I knew that if he lived, rot would carry him off in agony; a wound such as this would almost certainly fester, and no surgeon could stitch together what had been cut apart within him.

“We can buy him a little time,” she said in a low voice, “but the blade went too deep, and too true.”

Something arrested my attention then—beneath the thick red blood, there were dark stains on Mercutio’s chest. No, not stains—inked letters I did not recognize, with an odd and ancient slant to them. I rubbed at them, but they did not smear.

“Leave it,” the girl said. “He needs to save his strength.”

I knew she meant he would never regain it again, and nodded to tell her. Mercutio’s eyes had closed, and the lids looked translucently pale, all his healthy color fled. His lips were the color of cold seas.

I did not think he would ever open those eyes again, but he did, and lunged up to grab my arm with unnatural strength. “A plague on both your houses,” he blurted. “I never meant it so, Benvolio; I am sorry—break it . . . break it before it consumes . . . promise . . .”

And then his eyes rolled back into his head, and his mouth lolled open, and he fell back into the hands of the young witch who’d given her bed to soothe him.

“He is not yet dead,” she whispered, and eased him down again. She had packed the wound in his back, and now she smeared the cloth with thick white unguent. She motioned for me to do the same, and I fumbled my own handful of cloth in place, and anointed it. Then I held him up as she wrapped the bandage tight around his chest, from armpit to waist, covering the wound and the eldritch writing I’d seen upon him. Before she was through, though, a flower of red had bloomed on his chest, spreading its sinister petals in a slow, inevitable growth.

But still he breathed a little. It seemed a miracle, and one I was willing to embrace. “I thank you,” I said. “You did not have to help, after my rough treatment of you.”

She shook her head. “I could not do otherwise,” she said. “I grieve, but Mercutio knew the price he would pay for his revenge. I warned him.”

“You spoke of a curse—” I would have questioned her, but Mercutio opened his eyes just then, and the vague fear in them chilled me. “Hush, friend, I am here.” I gripped his bloody hand in mine and sank down next to him on the narrow space. He coughed, and blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. His face was ashy gray, the pallor of death already on him.

“Did I do wrong?” he asked me, and the childlike worry in his voice broke me within. “Ah, Ben, for love, I did it for love, and for justice; please, I never meant—I never meant it to harm you or Romeo. . . . Forgive me.”

“I forgive you,” I said. I thought it was confusion, as he wandered in the dark fogs closer to his end. “I would forgive you anything, Mercutio, my brother.”

Of a sudden, his eyes were bright and eerily clear, and he gripped my hand very hard as he said, “I will hold you to that, for I have done you dire wrongs. Love is the curse, Ben. Love is the curse. Do you understand?”

He was shaking, every muscle gone rigid, and I knew this was the last. He was clinging tight to that frayed and breaking rope, and I held his gaze, hard though it was. His grief for Tomasso had driven him to this. No wonder he loathed love so much. And thinking bitterly on Romeo, on his folly with Juliet Capulet, I thought Mercutio must be right.

I held his grip, though it bade fair to break my bones, and said, “I do. I understand.”

He searched my face most earnestly, and then closed his eyes. It looked like defeat. “No,” he said. “No, you do not. Ben—”

But whatever he might have said next was lost in a terrible bout of coughing, as he struggled for breath and drowned in his own blood, and though his lips moved, I heard not another word.

I felt the exact moment his spirit departed. It was only then that I realized I had let him die unshriven, here in this dark hut full of witch’s charms and herbs. Mercutio’s hand went slack in mine, and the tension in his face fell away. His eyes looked into eternity, and for a long moment I could not move for fear of breaking, but then I reached over and folded his hands on his shattered, bloody breast, and closed his eyes. I put two gold coins on his lids, and then turned to look at the girl cowering in the corner, now terrified.

She shook her head so violently curls came free from beneath her neat kerchief, and pressed her trembling hands to her mouth. Her eyes were bright with tears and terror. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, sir, I know you think me evil, but I only wanted to help him—”

“I care not,” I said, and handed her another coin. “Fetch Friar Lawrence here. Tell him Mercutio Ordelaffi needs last rites. It is the least I can do for him now.”

She looked wary, but she snatched the coin away, wrapped it in a fold of her skirt, and darted out into the street. I went to the door and breathed in the hot, still air, and gradually became aware of the shouting and furor coming from the piazza. A well-dressed merchant scurried past, trailing harried attendants; I stopped one with an outstretched hand—one well reddened with blood. Well, it made for a useful warning. “What proceeds?” I asked him. He flinched away from me. “What is that noise?”

“Romeo Montague,” he said. “Romeo is bent on dying on Tybalt Capulet’s sword, it seems, for grief!”

I thought that I could not feel anything, but suddenly fear blazed back up within me, real and immediate. “Wait, does Romeo live?”