EXCERPT 1

PART I

Lumi

“So, dear cousin, are you excited for tonight?”

Juliet turned from her overstuffed wardrobe of glittering gowns and gave me an arch smile. “I dare not answer. You will mock me no matter what I say.”

“Will I? I wasn’t aware I had such a reputation for mockery,” I said, my eyes comically wide with feigned innocence.

“You know you do, Rosaline. If I say ‘yes’ you will laugh at me for being excited about something so silly, and if I say ‘no’—” She broke off and hastily held up a blood-red velvet dress that dazzled with gold brocade, tilting her head as if considering its merits, though I doubted she even perceived what color it was. Her eyes had a faraway look, and despite the lightness of her tone, there was a melancholy air about her.

“If you say no? Would you?” 

She pretended (because I knew it was pretense) to fuss over the other items before her. There seemed an endless number of them, all of the finest quality and highest fashion—my aunt Capulet’s doing, no doubt. She could tell you down to the tiniest satin ribbon what the good ladies of Venice and Milan would be wearing even before they knew it themselves—and could afford to dress herself and her daughter accordingly, despite Juliet’s lack of enthusiasm for these crucial matters.

Any other girl about to be presented at her first family banquet would have indulged in everything that her vanity craved. And hers was not just any ordinary family; these were the Capulets, one of the great families of Verona. Then again, Juliet was not just any ordinary girl. 

Nor was I, for that matter. This, after all, was not to be my first but rather my last appearance at this kind of event.

“They want me to marry,” Juliet said abruptly.

“Of course they do,” I replied, and waited a moment for her to continue.

“They want me to marry Count Paris.”

“And? How do you feel about the gallant young man? Yes, all right, I see what you mean; that sounded like mockery,” I added, softening. I could see she was brooding over something, and I had a feeling I knew what it was. “Do you object?”

“No,” she said, but she stretched out the word like a wistful note in a sad song.

“I will ask again, Cousin, with no mockery whatsoever: how do you feel about Count Paris?”

“I don’t,” she blurted. The delicate silk sash she had been fingering was now flung away as if it were a serpent. “I don’t feel anything about him. I don’t know him.”

“Ah, stop there,” I interrupted. “It’s not that you don’t know him. Don’t say that, for you know what the response will be: ‘You’ll have plenty of time to get to know him after you are married.’” My cousin’s weary sigh told me I was right and she’d heard this too many times already. “And what’s more, you won’t know the person you do fall in love with, not at all. That will be part of the reason you fall. Who doesn’t love a good mystery?”

Her delicate brows knitted together. “I know nothing about Paris and I feel nothing for Paris! And I’m supposed to marry him—to entwine the rest of my life with his?”

“It’s not just that you feel nothing for him, Juliet. You are being told what to feel about him, and that is impossible.”

Now Juliet’s eyes flashed astonishment, like two newly made stars. “Yes! That is it exactly. How can one love on command?”

“One does not. There is only one thing a person can do on command: obey. All else is irrelevant, at least to the one commanding.”

She waited eagerly, as though for some additional bit of wisdom I could bestow upon her that would somehow give her the answer to all her problems. I tried not to laugh, as that most certainly would come across as disdain. Since my announcement that I would be going to the convent at La Fortezza by the end of June, people treated me in one of only two ways: as the object of pity or else as a great sage, wise beyond her years. 

 “You’ll have to cut your lovely hair off, you know,” the first type always said. Then, “Ah, the poor hearts you’ll break if you do.” If. As though these stupid things they said would change my mind. As though the effect my decision had on others was the only thing that mattered, and not the effect it would have on me, on my life.

The other type, the seeker of sage wisdom, was rarer, but also more difficult to deal with. There she was, my lovely cousin, looking at me with forlorn longing, face open like a flower, waiting for answers. Whatever made her think I had any? I wasn’t interested in anything so dull as simple answers anyway; I wanted more than that.

 

EXCERPT 2

On the particular day that started it all, our tutor, Grigio, gave me something to translate which turned out to be an old recipe for a potion to be used for suppressing painful memories. It called for various common herbs which I knew Friar Lawrence grew in his garden, so I ran to him the first chance I got to ask for the ingredients. That, I found out later, was how the school at La Fortezza became interested in me. Friar Lawrence and, incredibly, my tutor both looked out for potential candidates to recruit for this secret school. Most of the tutor’s pupils, my cousin Juliet included, merely did the translation (perfectly, in her case). The very few with the curiosity to see if it would work, those were the ones that interested them. 

But I knew none of that at the time; I was only interested in making the potion work. Initially, it didn’t, and I figured out there had been an ingredient omitted—possibly deliberately, so Grigio’s students wouldn’t have the complete formula. That was laughable—and insulting. I immediately began experimenting on my own, trying to figure out the missing item. (This extra step, apparently, made La Fortezza very interested in me.) My creations, placed discretely in various rooms, made me sneeze (not magical), made the cook giggle (possibly magical, since she generally had a dour disposition), and made my parents look at each other in a way I hadn’t seen in years (which was uncomfortable to witness but also possibly magical). I noted these combinations of ingredients down and, not satisfied, kept trying.

When I couldn’t quite come up with the perfect formula on my own, I sought the friar again. If Grigio was a young man who seemed like an old one, Friar Lawrence was, if not old, then middle-aged at least, but cheerful, jovial, and youthful in every aspect of his demeanor. To put it another way, he was possibly the only priest that people my age actually liked, someone who talked to you like a person and not just a sinner. In his little garden behind the church he welcomed me with delight, a dirt-crusted trowel in one hand and some mysterious wrinkled root in the other, immediately asking how my potion had gone. 

“Not well, thank you. It didn’t work, but I think I know how I can fix it—with your help, if you would.”

“I would be most delighted to help,” he said, eager curiosity shining in his eyes. He put down the trowel and root, dusted his cassock off (though his hands were dirty too and he really only ended up shifting the soiling of the garment to different sections), and gestured me toward a bench where we both sat. “Now, how did you know it didn’t work?”

“I tried. A lot. The closest I got was when I tried it on Bruno, but even then it still wasn’t right.” 

“Bruno?”

“The old dog I found wandering around outside our gate. I named him Bruno. Poor thing. He had been treated very badly, we think by a man or several of them—he is afraid of men. I wanted to see if I could help him forget his suffering. He seemed to be calmer when I sprinkled one particular herbal powder mix around him, but he still growls and shrinks away when a man goes by, so he hasn’t completely forgotten.”

The friar smiled. “That was kind of you to try, though a human subject might have been more able to communicate what they were experiencing.”

I shrugged. I wanted to try it on the dog because I wanted to alleviate his suffering. His big brown eyes were deep with sorrow. How could I do otherwise? I went on impatiently, “I know why it didn’t work—there’s an ingredient missing, isn’t there?” 

Friar Lawrence tilted his head. “Yes and no. Well, yes and yes, I suppose. The recipe as you received it is in fact missing an ingredient, but that ingredient alone—stridolo petals, I believe—will not make this work. The real missing ingredient is you. Bruno calmed down because you were calm. Bruno cannot forget whatever suffering he went through, no matter what herbs you use, because you can’t forget it—because you never remembered it in the first place.”

“Of course not. I wasn’t there.” Now I frowned. Did I, too, have to be beaten and starved by cruel men for both of us to forget? Wasn’t there an easier way to help my poor sad-eyed friend? There was a limit to what even I wished to experience. “How can I make these things work without, well, going through terrible things?”

“It is a long and difficult journey to take, Rosaline. But I can try to show you the first steps.” He shifted a little on the bench so that he was facing me. “Think of a happy memory from your childhood, but don’t tell me about it.”

His simple request startled me. Was he going to read my mind?

 

EXCERPT 3

Syra was … scary. Possibly the most terrifying person I’ve ever encountered, and I could not for the life of me figure out why. There was nothing unusual about her appearance, other than an ageless quality—she wasn’t young anymore, clearly, but she could be anywhere from my mother’s age to well beyond my grandmother’s. She wore the same kind of shapeless gray cloak as Corri had. At one moment her complexion seemed as fair as sun-bleached bone and the next, as she turned her face just slightly to the side, dark as the unlit corners of a room. She was neither small nor large, tall nor short. But her presence in that room seemed to hush all sounds, freeze all movements, almost stopped my breathing. When she walked toward me, it felt more like I was being pulled toward her; with her eyes on mine, I felt stripped bare—not just of clothes but of my skin and flesh, as if she were observing the ever-faster beating of my heart.

She sat at the table opposite me, and the first words said to me were these: “You have done wrong.” Her voice was quiet, her accent not Veronese but from I knew not where, and I felt each syllable in my bones as if she’d roared like a lion.

And I regret to say I knew immediately what she meant.

All I did was turn his gaze from me to her. I had been thinking about the conversation I had with my cousin, her yearning for love, for someone to look at the way he looked at me, and for him to see her the same way, so I gave her that. I gave him that as well, because even if he exasperated me with his persistence, he deserved a chance to get what he desired. So when I noticed that Romeo and some of his Montague brethren had snuck into the Capulet banquet, I put my newly discovered powers of magic to use. 

I had been pondering what the friar had said about “seeing the present.” I had the sense that if you could put yourself in another’s point of view—sharing their perceptions and sensations—you might be able to influence their actions. Not in any excessive way, not in a way that might cause harm, but in small ways, and it wouldn’t even require concoctions of herbs, since the friar had suggested those were mainly for getting the magicker’s mind in the right frame and not so much for influencing the subject. It was certainly worth trying, I figured. I’d always wanted to perceive the world through other eyes.

I envisioned myself seeing the room as Romeo was seeing it at that moment—the glittering lights, the weaving bodies of dancers—and then envisioned turning just a little farther left, past the dancers and toward the back of the room, and seeing … her. Juliet. Radiant as the sun, she made everything else disappear before his eyes, including, to my delight, me. He stepped closer, and the movement caught her attention. She turned her eyes to him. 

It had worked. I knew it wasn’t just coincidence; I had felt it happen, felt our minds lock together and my mind moving him.

“I thought it would be all right,” I said softly, trying to control the trembling in my voice. “I thought everyone would get something they wanted—myself included,” I added for honesty’s sake.

But Syra would not be fooled. “You did not do that for them. You did it entirely for you. And you have no idea what will follow. You think they will fall in love and be happy? Part of that is correct, yes. But partial truth is no better than no truth at all.”

I could not speak, and clearly I was not supposed to. Syra’s stern face prohibited me almost from breathing. “Romeo and Juliet fall in love, yes. And it will be their ruin.”