When Mercutio finally spoke, it came slow and slurred and dull. “Did they leave him there? In the tree?”

“Rest easy,” I said. “Friar Lawrence has seen him decently laid to rest.”

“He was brave,” my friend said. It was as if he were on a far distant shore, the words coming but dimly. “You saw, Benvolio. He was brave when they took him.”

“He was,” I agreed. It was suddenly hard to speak, and I had to look away, into the shadows, and not at his beaten face. Grotesque as it was, I knew it was only a small reflection of the pain within. “Most brave.”

“I would have died with him, you know.”

“I know,” Romeo said, when I did not. “You fought for him, Mercutio.”

“And I will never stop fighting for him,” he said, still in that cool, impartial, dull tone. It was not defeat in his voice—it was the opposite: a conviction so overwhelming that it was simply fact, requiring no passion to vindicate it. “I will find who betrayed him. I will have my vengeance, come the devil himself between us.”

I felt a chill crawl my spine, listening to him, because I knew he meant it. He would dig like a terrier until he found his rat, and crushed it.

But the rat was my sister, and beyond her, my grandmother.

His enemy was Montague.

There was a doom coming on us, and I could feel it as strongly as the prickling of the air before a storm. Better his father had sent him away, I thought, and it was a terrible thing, a traitorous thing, but true.

“Come,” Romeo said, and shouldered Mercutio’s sagging weight to help him rise. “A hot cup of wine, and your bed, and cold compresses for your bruising.”

“What a little mother you are, Romeo,” Mercutio said, and laughed. It was an awful sound, empty as a pebble rattling in a cup, but it died as soon as he sank down wearily into his bed. I fetched the wine, and Romeo the compresses. As I fed the wine into my friend’s swollen mouth, he caught my wrist in his broken hand and squeezed. He did not even wince at the pain he inflicted on himself. “I beg you, Benvolio, do not leave me tonight, else I may find a dagger a better friend than you.”

“You’ve often said my wits were sharp as any dagger,” I said, and forced a smile, though I did not think he could see it through those swollen eyes. “There’s no need for a poor substitute.”

“We will not stir from your side,” Romeo said quickly. “You have my word, as Montague.” He said it with pure sincerity, and I had to bite back a wince. What value did our words have, as Montagues, now? “I am sorrowed for you, Mercutio.”

“Sorrow,” Mercutio repeated, and let out a slow, weary sigh. “There will be sorrow enough soon, so that every mouth in Verona can chew a rancid feast of tears and bile and hate.”