“You’re not a woman. You’re a child playing at things you don’t understand.”

“I’m as much a woman as you are a man, Benvolio! I’ve my blood for a year now! And soon I’ll be wed and bedded, and breed more allies for this house. What use are you, then? Another excess boy?” She shoved past me and rejoined her silly little cousin, and the two girls swept down the hall in a hiss of silk and a cloud of floral perfume.

That evil should smell so sweet . . .

“What quarrel was that?” Romeo asked, once I’d come back to him. “To do with Mercutio?”

“Malice,” I said. “And one day, she’ll feel the scorpion’s sting of it on her own back.” My tone was so dark that he gave me a sidelong look of concern. “I’ll go in secret tonight, to see that Mercutio’s well cared for.”

“Then I come, too,” Romeo said.

I did not have the heart to tell him no.

•   •   •

Slipping into Mercutio’s rooms was an old-established routine for me, but teaching Romeo my methods was less simple, and the Ordelaffi household was on edge, to complicate matters. We did manage, but it was a near thing, and on clambering sweaty and trembling through the window we found Mercutio’s rooms dark and silent. No lamps lit. No sign of life at all.

“They’ve sent him away,” Romeo said in a harsh voice. “Ben, they sent him away!”

“Or worse,” I said. I found a candle striker and lit one of the half-melted tapers on the wall sconce. The light was thin and feeble, but it served . . . and I found Mercutio’s bloody clothes in a heap nearby, piled in a way that meant a servant had not been allowed to attend him. There were drops drying on the floor. Romeo took the candle and followed me, holding it high enough for me to suss out the thinning trail, and it led us past the undisturbed bed, to the pallet where Mercutio’s manservant would have laid his head, in better days.

But tonight, huddled on it was our friend.

He’d had no care—not even the rudest. He lay in his smallclothes, smeared with blood, face swollen and near unrecognizable. Romeo and I said nothing for a long moment, and then I looked at my cousin, and he nodded and lit a second candle from the first. He left me with that light, and moved off. When he returned, he held a basin of water and a cloth. The water was clean, at least, as was the rag. Mercutio groaned when we helped him sit against the wall, but he did not try to resist as I sponged the worst of the crusted blood from his eyes, nose, and mouth.

Once cleaned, he did not look much improved at all. His eyes were swollen shut, his nose clearly bent, and while he had by some miracle not lost teeth, one had gone loose. Two fingers were broken, and Romeo reset them and helped me bind them fast for healing.