I pulled away from it, and her, and I saw a flash of guilty relief in her eyes as she likewise stepped back. “I will trust your word,” she said, and she meant more than seemed obvious by it. “How do you mean to leave here?”

“Perhaps like Cleopatra, wrapped in a carpet?”

“I regret I have no carpet large enough to wrap your thick head.” We were back on even footing now, and she even summoned a smile for it. “The garden is too wet; you will leave tracks to betray your presence.”

“I will go out the servants’ door, as I came in,” I said, and reached beneath her bed to fetch the covered blue-glazed pot. She gasped, this time in dismayed amusement. “I was ordered to empty chamber pots, after all. Fear not. I’ll leave it there for your attendant to find for you.”

“You can’t—” I held up the chamber pot, and she bit her lip on a laugh. “You are mad, you know.”

“Though it is madness, there is method in it,” I said, and bowed a little. “Your servant, my lady.”

“I would give you a blow, were you not holding that thing.”

I put it aside on the floor. “Come, then. Give me the blow. I deserve it.”

She came forward and raised her hand, but when it fell, the slap was nothing but a gentle contact, and she leaned in, and then . . .

And then I was lost.

I had kissed her before, but lightly, gently, and this was no gentle thing; it was all the pent-up grief and loss and compromise we knew would be our lives from this moment onward; it was all that we would have been, could have been, and never would. It was madness, and magic, and in that moment I understood with fatal clarity how my cousin could have thrown away his life, and all our lives, for love. If this was sorcery, then I had learned to love it.

Rosaline Capulet tasted like all I had ever wanted in my life, and now I knew that for truth.

I do not know how she found the strength, but she stepped away from me. I saw how pale she was, how unsteady, how flushed and oddly awkward; I saw her hands curl into shaking fists, as if she would pummel herself for her sins.

I could not speak at all.

“You must go,” she whispered. “Dear God, what is happening to us? How is this possible? We are not fools; we understand the world. . . . This cannot be us. It cannot be.”

I shook my head. The wood of the door was at my back, and I used it for bracing until my legs had found their strength again. Then Rosaline backed away and took up the dagger from the carpet. She wedged herself into a corner as if terrified of her own passions.