Such Sweet Sorrow by Jenny Trout Page A

hands holding hers, to his face. He knew he appeared different to her now, but his heartbeat would leave her no choice but to believe the truth. Her lips parted in surprise. “You’re alive.”
    “I am.” He did not add, “for now.” He did not want to ruin his heroic triumph with further proof of his feebleness. “I came for you.”
    “Came for me?” She frowned at him. “But where was I?”
    “You were here. In the Afterjord.” Romeo studied her expression as it changed subtly from confusion to relief and back again.
    “The Afterjord?” She snorted in disbelief. “No, I’ve never heard of such a place. The last thing I remember—”
    Her eyes went wide, and she pulled her hand away from him. She brushed it off on her skirt, as though she’d touched something diseased.
    He sat up with effort, and reached for her.
    A chill crept over his thinking. When he looked at her now, she did not seem quite like the Juliet he remembered. There had been something to her, a spark of life this Juliet did not have.
    What a stupid thing to think, he scolded himself. Of course she was not as lively as she had been. She wasn’t alive.
    But she would be, when they got back to the corpseway, back to their world.
    Wouldn’t she?
    His guide through all of this had been Hamlet. The prince had brought him here, and he’d known little of the place when they’d arrived, but he thought quickly and was more educated than Romeo. Juliet was smart as a whip, but confused, and rightly so, upon waking to a nightmare world.
    “Romeo, I don’t like this place,” she said, still backing away from him. She looked down and screamed, and Romeo saw that the monster he’d slain had dissolved into thousands of wriggling maggots at her feet.
    “Don’t look at them!” he ordered her, reaching out and pulling her to him, away from the cursed creatures. The river beside them was no longer a torrent of blood, but a pool of crawling grave worms that swelled and burst, flinging the tiny, wriggling white bodies onto their clothes and hair with horrifying puffs of weight. But when he looked up, Romeo saw nothing but his sword, his dagger, and Hamlet’s as well, lying in the blackness.
    Juliet sobbed against him, as disconsolate as the night he’d been banished.
    How she’d raged at him for his part in her cousin Tybalt’s death. It had been their wedding night, and rather than spending it in joy, they’d consummated their love in desperate fear and consuming grief; her, for her cousin, Romeo, for Mercutio.
    He wondered if either man roamed this bleak void. He hoped they would not meet them, for what could he say to Mercutio, a better man who’d met a crueler fate than he? Would there be anything Mercutio wished to hear, given his parting words to Romeo of a plague on both houses, Montagues and Capulets? And Tybalt, would he still bear the mark of the sword Romeo had plunged through him? The image haunted Romeo’s nightmares; he did not wish to see it again with his own eyes.
    Kissing Juliet’s forehead, he murmured comfort that was woefully inadequate for the situation. But what did one say to one’s deceased wife, who did not remember how she came to the land beyond death?
    He leaned back a little, his arms still tight about her. “Juliet, do you remember how you came to be here?”
    She nodded, and swiped at her face. “I was in the piazza,” she began, and a frown creased her forehead. “There was no one I knew. No one. And I couldn’t find my way home. Everywhere I turned…blackness.”
    Romeo thought of the terrified woman he’d seen fleeing the shade. If Juliet had experienced just a fraction of that panic…but he could not think of that now.
    “Do you remember how you got to the piazza?” he asked gently.
    She smiled—a part of her that had remained unchanged by death, untouched by the underworld. How he had missed her smile, so wide and bright, each perfect tooth like a pearl, her eyes shining like dark jewels flecked