“Is that my grandmother’s sentiment, or yours?”

That woke a flash of temper from her, after all. “I am still your mother, Benvolio. I am allowed some concern for my own child!”

“That doesn’t answer.”

She gave me a long, measured look that reminded me that buried very deep within that calm exterior lay the same fiery temper I carried burning like a coal within my breast. “I lost your father to this ages-old quarrel, and now your cousin has fallen prey to it, and your friend. If I do not fear for your safety, then I am naught but a fool.”

I smiled a little then. “I don’t think you a fool, Mother.”

“Only a cold schemer, like your grandmother?” Her own lips twitched in what might almost have been a smile then. “I come from warmer stock. Your sister has taken well after the Montague example, though.”

Veronica. Ah, yes, my dear, sweet sister, on whose plump shoulders so much of this must rest . . . She had, for sheer malice’s sake, betrayed Mercutio and Tomasso, and turned Mercutio’s rage against the Capulets. Her invisible hand had pushed the blade that had taken him, and Romeo’s that had killed Tybalt. Perhaps she was a worthy heir to the old crone, after all.

“Your uncle has asked her bridegroom to delay the wedding to next week, for the sake of propriety, but the old goat won’t have it,” my mother continued. “He says we have no sons to mourn, and the Capulets would not attend in any case, so why delay? He means to bed Veronica with unseemly haste, it seems.”

Perhaps, I thought, he had caught a whisper of my sister’s unmaidenly behavior . . . or he was simply randy and feared he might die unsatisfied. I might have pitied her the fate, if she were not such a coldhearted schemer and like to earn more from it than she paid.

But my mother’s point was not to bring my sympathy, but to warn, and I followed her there only a moment later. “At the wedding, we will be exposed,” I said. “All of Montague, defenseless in the cathedral for the ceremony. But surely even the Capulets would not attack us there, on sacred ground. . . .”

“Sacred ground did little to sway the assassins of the Medici,” she said, rightly; the story of the long-ago attack on Lorenzo the Magnificent was legend. They had failed to kill him in the cathedral, but they had bloodied the holy floors with his brother’s gore instead. Assassins struck in church all too often, where God seemed to take little interest in enforcing peace. “We must be tightly on our guard, my son. Always, but most especially, in the house of our Lord.”

It was a grim message, but I knew she was right; if I was to be made heir of Montague, I would be the first and most vital target for Capulet revenge. And revenge they would have for Tybalt’s death; that much was sure.