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It is late summer at Elsinore, and the flowers are dying.
The palace grounds are a many-colored profusion of petals, heavy with honeybees and too full of life to last.
This is, at any rate, the thought Horatio reads on Hamlet's face. He hopes the prince has at least noticed that they've left the palace walls. But these days, Hamlet's faraway stare might just as easily be fixed upon his father's ghost as on the wildflowers.
In the early days of their acquaintance, he would hardly have believed that Hamlet had the capacity for so much silence. Guildenstern liked to say that he had never used one word when a hundred would do. His wordlessness now unsettles Horatio more than even the wildest of his outbursts. There is too much swimming beneath the surface of Hamlet's mind, and Horatio cannot tell what words might draw it up into the light.
He realizes suddenly that they are almost upon the site of the ghost's last appearance. Horatio does not think himself a superstitious man, but he can see no good in retreading that ground. Instead, he takes a sharp left turn onto an oak-lined walk. As the first broad shadow falls across his face, Hamlet blinks and emerges from his reverie.
"You're quiet today," he observes in tones of mild bemusement.
Torn between relief and annoyance, Horatio answers, "Glass houses, my lord."
Hamlet chuckles. (A touch self-consciously, perhaps forced - or perhaps Horatio is merely conjuring his own anxieties into substance now. Damn this castle and its constant shadowy intrigues. Uncertainty must hang in the sea fog.)
"True," he says. "I must apologize for my company this morning. The actor's vanity, Horatio! It comes upon one like the plague. I have been consumed with wondering how my performance is received."
"Upon a stage, I think, it would find favor. The court is certainly concerned," says Horatio. This is only a confirmation of what they have both observed. He hesitates before adding, "Your mother spoke to me yesterday, in hopes that I could offer some new reason for your madness. She is much grieved to think your mind has strayed beyond her understanding."
"So am I hers," says Hamlet shortly.
Horatio nods. This rift, it seems to him, has cut as deeply as the old king's death to both his son and widow. The queen and Hamlet look more alike by the day, both drawn and red-eyed. It is painful to watch. He wishes fiercely that he and Hamlet were returned to Wittenberg already.
There is no world in which Horatio leaves Hamlet to his grief and his family's schemes. But he longs for the lightness of their university days, for a city whose gravestones bear no familiar names and and a time when neither of them was in the habit of glancing about for the king's spies.
The faint sounds of rushing water reach Horatio's ears: not the crash of ocean waves, but the softer noise of a wide brook that wends its way across the palace grounds. On a whim, he turns off of the footpath and follows the sound past the first neat row of trees, onto more thickly wooded ground and down a slope that swiftly hides the path from view.
He can hear Hamlet following with less than his usual grace. There's a reason they became friends over inkwells and crucibles; they are neither of them really in their element in wilderness.
At the bottom of the hill, Horatio turns - just in time to see Hamlet's feet entirely run away from him. The pride of the Danish court comes sliding the last several feet downhill and half-stumbles, half-crashes into Horatio's arms. It was prudent to place himself between Hamlet and the brook.
"At your service, my lord," Horatio says gravely, because they are not in court and Hamlet will know it for the mockery it is. He does, and he laughs without bitterness for the first time in days.
"It was your path I followed," he protests. "Am I to be condemned for a trusting, open heart?"
"Never condemned," Horatio answers, feeling his deadpan facade slip as Hamlet grins up at him. "Judged on your footwork, perhaps."
It is strange that, despite all his moments of distraction, Hamlet's attention can become such a heavy thing in an instant. Horatio feels suddenly rooted in place under the weight of Hamlet's gaze. It is not an unfamiliar sensation. A fragment of a myth surfaces in his memory: the first sunflower was a nymph whose face was always turned to seek the sun god, whom she loved.
"How would I fare without thee?" Hamlet says softly.
Horatio does not know how to answer him. He is thinking of his early, friendless days at Wittenberg, a bookish stranger to the city. He is thinking of the crowded lecture hall in which he met the Danish prince; of the burst of sunlight that was Hamlet's laughter, his eager questions, his flagrant, cheerful contrarianism when he had set his mind to bait Horatio into some new debate.
He is remembering the joy and disbelief and fear of being singled out by such a person. The fear came not from Hamlet's temperament - he was mercurial even then, but warmly loyal to his friends - but from the recollection of that early loneliness. Something in Horatio whispered that it was a risk, a weakness, to be so happy in Hamlet's company.
The question Hamlet asks so lightly is one Horatio has turned over silently a hundred times. There is a kind of reassurance in hearing it reflected back to him.
Their arms are a closed circle and Hamlet is smiling at him, knee-deep in bracken at the water's edge. Horatio holds on to him while he can.
It is late summer at Elsinore, and they are alive.