A Red-Rose Chain

“A girl’s got to have a few talents,” I said, with a smile, and took a step backward before turning and opening my dresser. “I’m bringing a couple of ball gowns, but I figure I can probably get away with a few pairs of jeans, too. I look silly in tights, and I can’t fight in a dress.”


“Fashion is ever your nemesis, isn’t it?” asked Tybalt, sounding amused. I glanced over my shoulder to find him studying my open closet. “It’s a miracle we can make you presentable as often as we do.”

I paused, looking at him carefully. He was still considering the bed, but there was a tension in his shoulders that I recognized all too well. “You’re really worried, aren’t you?”

“I am following my fiancée, an alchemist, a half-trained squire, and a death omen to a hostile Kingdom, currently being influenced by a woman who has every reason to wish the lot of us dead,” he said, sounding oddly subdued. “A woman who, I feel I must remind you, once compelled me to tear your throat from your body.”

“Tybalt—” I began.

He raised a hand, motioning for me to be quiet. I stopped. For a long moment, silence held sway over the room, so thick with what wasn’t being said that I could barely breathe. Finally, he sighed, looking at me gravely. There were shadows in his malachite-banded eyes.

“We have not spoken of this, mostly, I feel, because I did not wish it, and you did not force the matter. You know I was under her control; you know I would die before I would harm you of my own volition. The matter, such as it is, is closed for you. I have known this since the moment you embraced me in Queen Windermere’s hall, and please do not doubt that I am grateful. All I have ever wished is your good regard.”

“That’s not true,” I protested. “You were alive for centuries before I was even born.” It was a stupid thing to say, but I needed to say something, and it was the only thing I could think of.

Tybalt smiled. It didn’t chase the shadows from his eyes. “True enough, and I won’t pretend the life I lived before you was somehow the lesser for your absence. There was no hole waiting for you to come along and fill it. I loved often, if not always well. I fought, I fled, I ruled my people, and I thought myself content. But since you have returned to us—since the waters of the Tea Gardens gave you up, and gave you back to me—not a day has passed without my considering the fragility of your smile, or the color of your eyes. You insinuated yourself into my heart like a worm into an apple, and I am consumed by you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I just blinked at him, struck silent by his words. Sometimes I could forget that Tybalt was a contemporary of Shakespeare, that his language wasn’t archaic because he was putting on airs, but because that was the way he’d learned to speak: all flourish and metaphor, and an anguished search for understanding.

“When the false Queen sang, all I heard was her voice; all I knew were her orders,” he said, expression all but begging me to understand. “I could no more have denied her in those moments than I could deny you now. I felt no love for her, thankfully—if I had, I think I might have died on the spot, my heart torn in two by the depth of my betrayal.”