“What happens to them?” she asked.
“Some heal, and rise, and namelessly walk farther in. Others decay. None ever remember who they were.” The Eyes and the Teeth shrugged. “It’s not particularly my concern. I eat their names and guard their sleep.” She looked at Juliet, and now her seven eyes were not mocking, but full of compassion. “I tried to trick you first, but I’ll ask you fairly now. Would you like to sleep?”
No, thought Juliet, but though she could hold her head up now, she was still tired, and for a moment—for a moment she imagined sleeping. Imagined peace, imagined rest.
She remembered the first night she spent with Romeo. Not when she had first kissed him, all fear and longing and hope; and not when he had first kissed her bare shoulder, and turned all her longing into fire; and not when they had made love, and she thought her heart might break from so much bliss. But after, when she was his, and drowsed in his arms, and she felt like the whole world drowsed with them in sleepy delight.
She remembered that peace. And the price she paid for it, all the people who paid and bled and died for it, and she was not done with striving.
Not until Viyara was safe.
“No,” said Juliet, and rose to go.
31
WHEN JULIET LEFT THE FOREST of terrible sleep, she found the same dreamlike, flower-studded slope on the other side. The same dancing motes of light in the air.
This time, though, she felt a little less afraid as she continued her march downward. She still didn’t understand this strange world; she had no idea if she could find the reapers, let alone Death—
But she had faced one danger, and survived.
Surely that meant she had hope.
Then she heard far-off voices. And a roaring, as of water.
Suddenly, there was a dim, warm light before her: the edge of the sky was heated pink and gold, as if with sunset.
And she stood on the bank of a river.
It was vast: she could hardly see the other edge. It roared and steamed and bubbled, for it was boiling hot—a wave of heat struck her face, and she took a step back. For a moment, she thought it was the ruddy sunset light that made the river so red, but then she noticed how thick the ripples were, how heavily the waves fell.
Then she smelled it.
The river was made of blood.
The stench was overpowering, and Juliet choked as she remembered blood on the altar of the Sisters, blood in her father’s house, Romeo’s blood on the edge of her sword—
You killed them all, the river sang to her. You killed them.
“Come away!”
Hands grabbed her arm, pulled her back a few steps. Juliet wobbled and blinked, gasping for air. A cool breeze hit her face, and suddenly she could breathe again.
She was shaking. She didn’t know how the river had unstrung her courage, and she didn’t dare to look back at it.
So she looked at the person who had saved her.
It was a girl about her own age, with a heart-shaped face and sleek black hair. She looked human—she wore the same style of tunic that Juliet had seen on a hundred other girls in the Lower City—but Juliet remembered how the grove had looked harmless at first.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name’s Xanna,” said the girl.
It was a common name in Viyara. She spoke with the accent of the Lower City, and a little of Juliet’s uneasiness faded.
“Come away from the river,” said Xanna. “If you look at it too long, you’ll have to wade in. And if you wade into it, you’ll never come back. That’s why we made our festival here.”
She gestured, and suddenly Juliet saw, farther up on the slope to the left, a crowd of brightly colored tents. Strings of lamps hung glittering from every tent, crimson and gold.
They made her think of the glowing red orb that had been the man’s name, and she wondered if this place stole something from the people who trusted it.
“Join us!” said Xanna. “There’s food and dancing for everyone.”
Juliet knew that she should refuse. Viyara was dying. There was no time for a festival.
But when she thought of facing the river again, she felt sick with fear.
There was no way that she could ford or swim it. Perhaps in the festival, she would find somebody who could tell her another way around.
So Juliet followed Xanna up the slope, into the crowd of tents.
It was filled with people and life. She saw a woman cradling her baby, and a man laughing with his friends, and two lovers exchanging kisses in the shadows between two tents. She could hear chatter in a thousand tongues, the beat of drums and wild song of pipes.
Everywhere, people were eating the same thing, a fruit she had never seen before: large, teardrop-shaped, with a pale golden skin and moist, crimson flesh. It smelled salty and sweet at the same time, and her mouth watered.
Juliet remembered the Eyes and the Teeth swallowing up the man’s name, and she wondered what the fruit really was.
Perhaps it didn’t matter. She wasn’t here to feast.
“I must speak to Death,” she said to Xanna. “Is there a way to get across the river?”
“Oh, no,” said Xanna. “But they say if you are good enough at the dancing, a reaper will come and speak to you, and perhaps grant you a wish.”
“A reaper?” Juliet echoed, filled with sudden hope. Could this be the first of the reapers she was supposed to face before Death would speak to her?
“Oh, yes,” said Xanna. “They can’t harm us here. They come to watch the dancing.”
Juliet supposed that was no stranger than anything else in the land of the dead.
“Where’s the dancing?” she asked.
“This way,” said Xanna, and led her into a wide open square. People clustered around the edges, laughing and clapping. The music sang loudly, though Juliet could see no musicians.
Suddenly a great cheer went up. The person at the center had finished dancing—it was a sword dance: she saw the glint of the blade—and then Xanna gave a delighted shriek and ran forward, pushing her way through the crowd. Juliet followed.
The dancer stood with his back to her, but Juliet knew him even before he turned. She knew him by the proud set of his shoulders, by the tilt of his head. She knew him because he was Tybalt, her cousin, whom she once loved more than anyone else alive. Who she once thought loved her.
Xanna ran to him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her soundly.
Then he saw Juliet.
Their eyes met, and the world stopped as memory seized her, made her live the terrible hour once more:
Romeo kissed her again, again, and then she pushed him away to the window before he could kiss her for the hundredth time.
“You must go, it’s already dawn,” she said. “You’ll be back tonight.”
“I will die a thousand times before tonight,” he said, and she laughed as he kissed her palm and pressed his poem into it, before climbing out the window.
She had slid back into her bed and started to drowse when the key rattled in the lock. The door flung open, and Tybalt strode into the room and ripped the covers from the bed. He stared down at her through the slits of his mask.
“Someone climbed out your window,” he said, and there was a terrible coldness to his voice she had never heard before. “Who was it?”
Fear was a vise about her heart. But he was her most beloved cousin, and she had never been a liar. So she stood and she told him of her love, of the secret wedding two-thirds complete.
“He slept with you?” Tybalt asked, and his low voice made the words unclean.
Her cheeks were aflame with blushes, but she met his eyes. “The third night makes it a marriage,” she said. “It’s the custom of his people. He promised me—”
The slap to her face stung, but the words that tumbled out of Tybalt’s mouth were worse: whore and slut and traitor.
“I’ll kill him,” he said, and shook her by the arm. “I’ll kill him, an
d when I’m your Guardian, I will govern you as you deserve.”
Then he shoved her away and strode from the room.
She sank to the floor and hugged herself, thinking, He doesn’t really mean it. He wouldn’t really do it. But she was too afraid to follow him.
She never saw him alive again.
She saw him now. There were no masks here in the land of the dead, so she could see the derision that curled across his face as he recognized her, as he sauntered forward. The same mix of shame and fear and rage curled in her gut.
She did not want to be a coward. She waited, and tilted her head up to meet his eyes when he stood before her.
“I bled for you,” he said. “I died for you. I was raised a slave and I died again. Because of you, my lady.”
Romeo would have words for this bleeding, breaking feeling in her chest. Romeo, perhaps, would be able to weep. She stared up at Tybalt dry-eyed and said nothing.
“There are a hundred others here,” he said. “Good Catresou men who died because you wanted to warm your bed with Mahyanai filth.”
This was a worse trial than any reaper. But Juliet stood her ground, and stared him in the face. She had a mission that left her no time to surrender to her guilt and her shame.
“If none of them found the Paths of Light,” she said, “then none of them were good Catresou.”
Tybalt barked a laugh. “Dead, and you haven’t realized? There are no Paths of Light. There is nothing here in death but blood and memories.”
The light grew redder at his words, or perhaps it had already changed and only now she was noticing.
If you say that, you are no Catresou, she thought, but she couldn’t say it, because the same dread had been gnawing at her own heart ever since she came to this place.
This place, so like and unlike everything her people ever believed.
Xanna peered around Tybalt’s shoulder. “Who is she?”
“Don’t you know?” Tybalt’s voice rose. “Hasn’t anyone guessed?” He threw up his hands. “Gather round, all you noble dead, and take a look! This is the notable whore who fancied herself the wife of Mahyanai Romeo.”
There was a muttering from every direction, far vaster than the size of the crowd. Juliet saw faces, Catresou faces, and some that she recognized. They were pushing their way through the crowd toward her. They were molding themselves out of the air.
They were her reckoning. They were the blood she had shed, the fate she deserved, but she had a mission.
The music still played on, and her heart was as fast as the drumbeat.
Tybalt turned back to her. “Tell us, who died for you,” he said, “what joy did you get of him, that was worth our blood?”
She met his gaze and said, “It’s not modest for a wife to speak so of her husband. But I’ll show you the arts I used to ensnare him.”
And she drew her sword and began to dance.
The crowd pressed closer, but Juliet’s blade flashed and whirled in a circle around her. She was dizzy with fear and regret and fury, but she had known this dance since she was ten years old. It uncoiled itself from her bones and danced itself with her limbs, and there was nothing left in the world but the sword and her hands and her feet, the beat of the music and her drumming heart.
The sword and its dance had always been her language. She had loved Romeo first because he had caught the sword from her, had used those words to speak to her.
The music ceased. She realized she had closed her eyes, and she opened them.
Darkness was all around her, but she stood in a pool of light.
Before her was a reaper.
But it was not like the monsters she had seen in the world above. It was terrifyingly strange, but it was beautiful: a tall, lithe creature whose two golden eyes were alight with intelligence. Dark hair cascaded from its head. Its fingers were longer than human fingers, and tipped in claws; its mouth was a crow’s beak; little feathers dusted its cheekbones. But all that strangeness seemed only a kind of ornament, like the dizzying curlicues of an elaborate jeweled necklace.
And it had wings: huge wings of soft, dark feathers that beat the air in a slow, graceful dance.
“Why are you here?” asked the reaper. Its voice was low and sweet, neither male nor female.
“I am looking for Death,” said Juliet, and her heart beat fast with fear and exultation. Because she might still fail, the reaper might kill her, but she would not wander lost forever in the land of the dead. She was on the path to finding Death.
“Are you indeed?” The reaper tilted its head. “And what will you say to her?”
“I will beg her to stop the Ruining.”
“And what will you offer her?”
“Whatever I must,” said Juliet. Her fingers tightened on the hilt of her sword. “Whatever trial or test you want to give me, I am ready.”
“You are very brave,” said the reaper. “But you are not the first one to be so brave, and to beg a favor of Death.”
And the reaper’s voice fell into the cadence of a story, and Juliet saw it happening before her, as if in a dream:
There was a warlord, so ruthless and so terrible that all the world lived in fear of him. Whatever he wanted was his for the taking. Until one day he saw a sad-eyed slave girl singing to herself in his garden. In that moment, he loved her, and found himself wanting what could never be had by force. Long he courted her and long her heart was dead to him, until at last he wept at her feet, renouncing his sword and his armies and his pride. Then she raised him up, and kissed him, and they fled together into the wild.
But the warlord still had enemies. In the end they found him, and shot him with arrows as he rested in the girl’s arms. She screamed, and she wept, and she walked the whole world until she found a path to the land of the dead. There, in a field of poppies, she found Death: and Death wore her face, and smiled at her.
“Tell me,” said the girl, “where is the one I love?”
“He lies in a river of boiling blood,” said Death, “remembering all the blood he shed on earth. Tell me, why do you come here?”
“I wish to have him back,” said the girl. “I wish to have him live again. I wish only to kiss him one more time.”
“Those are three wishes,” said Death.
“I tell you,” said the girl, braver than any warrior, “I will suffer any torment, I will serve you any length of time, I will become any terrible thing, if you will only let me see him again.”
Oh, she was noble and terrible as the clash of arms. And Death loved her, as she loves all the dead. So this is the noble and terrible fate that she gave her: as the girl spoke, feathers grew from her face, and her fingers twisted into claws. Her sweet, soft lips turned into a razor-sharp beak, and she became a reaper. Death sent her up into the world, and tirelessly she still walks through plagues and battlefields, guiding lingering souls to the world below.
Once every hundred years, she approaches the river of blood. She wades into it, up to the knee and up to the neck and farther in: and there, beneath the boiling blood, she finds her lover. She draws him out to the shore, and for one hour she is human, and they may comfort each other. Then she changes back to a reaper in his arms; and she herself must lead him back to the blood and torment for another hundred years.
When the tale released her, Juliet was shaking. She thought she could hear the roar of the river again, and the muttering of the Catresou dead. She could not imagine another fate than being rent apart for her sins.
But Romeo and Runajo had trusted her. Viyara needed her. She could not let the sacrifices continue; she could not let the city fall.
“Still,” she said. “Still I must try.” She lifted her chin, and tried to steady her voice. “Did my dance please you? Then grant me a wish. Take me across the river. Or show me another way to Death.”
“Your dance was lovely as spilled blood,” said the reaper. “But if you wish to speak with Death, you must ford the river. There is no other way.”
The next moment, the darkness and the silence were gone. Juliet staggered, overwhelmed by a pandemonium of light and sound. She was back at the festival, back in the center of the crowd.
It was different now. The crowd still surged, but they were not dancing, they were running. The voices were not laughing, they were shouting and screaming. The music still played, but fiddles wailed high and desperate.
The light was from the tents burning.
She whirled, trying to find the source of the chaos. And then she saw them, among the crowd: people who did not have the faces of people anymore.
For one instant, she thought of the fanciful animal masks that the Catresou would sometimes wear at parties. But these people were not masked: the fangs and tusks, the scales and dripping fluid, the elongated mouths and extra eyes—they were real, and they made every face a different nightmare.
Juliet had fought armies of revenants, and yet this sight closed her throat in horror.
She ran.
Everyone was running, all around her. Some ran back up the slope, into the darkness. Some ran down, toward the river.
Juliet was running that way too, before she realized it. Her feet hungered for that direction; she only paused when the heat and the smell struck her across the face.
Then she saw the people plunging into the river. They screamed as they broke the surface; then they sank back down. Those on the bank wailed as well, but they were too close. They could not seem to stop themselves as they rushed forward into the boiling blood.
Above the chaos, pipes and fiddles were shrieking still.
Something shrieked behind her. She whirled—
It was not Tybalt anymore. And yet it was still Tybalt, this hissing creature with claws and a forked tongue. She saw the ruins of his face among the scales and the bony knobs.
She saw, but not in time. Her sword was already moving, and it slashed across his throat, cutting deep and releasing a rush of blood.
Tybalt staggered, and she cried out because she never wanted to kill him, never, not even when he hated her—
Endless Water, Starless Sky Page 24