In Fair Verona

Chapter 5

In Kenna's dreams, a mellow voice spoke harsh words. Hazel eyes that had seen tragedy fixed her with a woeful stare. The smoky mist licked at a pair of cothurnus boots.

It wasn't a dream.

As fragmented as the memories were, they were too vivid not to be real.

Kenna had really met Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, and offended her, a truth that struck her like lightning when she woke up in a strange place yet again.

This time, she found herself blinking up at a wooden ceiling. Still groggy, she tried to pull herself upright. Instead, she rolled.

The surface beneath her disappeared, leaving her to fall through space for a terrifying moment before she landed on her side with a dull thud.

"Ouch!" Kenna rubbed her shoulder and glared at the large wooden step on which she lay as if it had struck her deliberately.

It was one of four steps that formed a stand. Kenna's frown faded as her eyes followed it along its curving path.

It was a gallery, winding around a large area of flat ground like seats in a stadium. The midday sunlight passed over the building's thatched roof at a slant, casting a crescent-shaped shadow onto the dirt in front of Kenna. A stage dominated the central clearing.

Kenna scanned her surroundings again, putting the pieces into place.

She glanced at the gallery, imagining a group of sophisticated nobles enthralled by the onstage performance. Looking at the pit the ground formed at the centre of the seats, Kenna pictured the one penny-paying playgoers standing in a crowd, knocking elbows and treading on each other's toes. And when she gazed at the stage, she could almost see Juliet driving the dagger into her heart and taking her final resting place beside Romeo.

Kenna didn't know whether it was a vision of the past or just her overactive imagination, but one thing was for sure.

She was in an Elizabethan theatre.

Kenna had expected that the wooden floors would be rotting away and the balustrades would have fallen to pieces in the hundreds of years since the theatre had last been used, but maybe it had been restored for the enjoyment of tourists. It certainly looked like something right out of the 16th century.

Kenna started as a man appeared on the other side of the balustrade in front of her.

He brushed some stray strands of his unruly dark hair behind his ear. A small hoop glinted in his earlobe.

He paid Kenna no notice, keeping his eyes on the papers in his hands as he paced and muttered to himself.

Kenna sat up. "Excuse me..."

It was the man's turn to be startled. He looked up at Kenna, his pale blue eyes dazed as if he was drifting somewhere between this world and a daydream.

Kenna leaned forward and laid a hand on the balustrade. "Can you tell me where I am?"

The fog cleared from the man's eyes, but his answer didn't give Kenna the same clarity.

"What is this tongue thou speaks?"

Kenna knew that language well enough to know that it hadn't been spoken outside a classroom or a theatre in hundreds of years, but this man seemed too dreamy to be a teacher, and his puzzled frown made it clear that this wasn't an act.

A nauseating apprehension building within her, Kenna studied his clothing—his dark boots, his loose, puffy shorts and the syrup-brown short-sleeved jacket he wore over a beige long-sleeved shirt.