For their sake, she could wait a little longer to be consumed.
For the beauty unfurled beneath her, she could still bear to hope.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, but she did not throw herself down. She rose.
And she heard a voice—so like her own—say, “Hail and well met, my child.”
She turned, and saw Death.
37
“I DON’T KNOW WHO ELSE has gone so deep in my kingdom, and yet looked back,” said Death.
Juliet couldn’t speak. A cold feeling blossomed behind her ribs, and it was like fear, but she was too dazzled and surprised to feel true fear. The song of the stars beneath still echoed in her ears.
No longer was she on the endless plain of dust. Instead, she stood on a little island filled with blue flowers and broken white columns. Surrounding her was dark water, slick and reflective as a mirror.
Before her stood Death: a girl her own age, wearing a red Catresou dress, dark hair falling free.
But Death did not wear her face.
It was like her face, but there was a shape to the eyes and chin that was different. There was no mistaking one for the other, and she wondered what that meant.
“I suppose you’ve come to bargain,” said Death. “Everybody does.”
Juliet caught her breath, and now she was afraid. Because she knew this was the final moment, the only moment that mattered, when one mouthful of words could redeem the world . . . or just as easily lose it.
Everybody bargained with Death, and nobody ever won. The reapers had told her this, and she still believed them. But she had to find a way.
“No,” she said.
“No?” Death raised elegant eyebrows.
Juliet bared her teeth. “Bargains are for equals,” she said, “and I know that you can use us as you will. But I came to tell you . . . Romeo returned what was stolen from you.”
“I know,” said Death, and smiled in satisfaction. “Already my land is healing.”
“Then why didn’t you end the Ruining when he did it?” Juliet could barely keep the anger out of her voice. “You have no right to hate us any longer.”
Death clasped her hands, pale fingers lacing together. “I hate no one. Do you not yet understand?”
“No,” said Juliet. “I’m not clever. I’m only the sword of my people.” She took a half step forward, feeling the terrible weight of the world swing upon her next breath. “And I only came to beg of you . . . let us go. You have us all in the end. Release the world from the Ruining, and let us live a little while before we come to you.”
“Do you?” Death tilted her head. “Do you beg?”
The line of her throat was as proud as Juliet’s father had ever been, and Juliet’s body shook with bitter laughter.
“Yes,” she said, and dropped to her knees. “Yes, I beg you. Do you think I would do anything less for my people?” She bent and kissed Death’s bare toes; they were cold against her lips. “Please, please release us.”
Death stooped to face her; she seemed taller now than she had before, less human. “Is that all you have to offer? Words?”
Romeo’s words had been enough to crack her world apart . . . but she was not Romeo. And Death was not a lonely maiden.
“No,” said Juliet. She drew a breath, remembering the tales the reapers told her. “I’m here to offer my life. And my death.”
She did not want to say these words. Even now, when life was so far lost to her, she wanted to save herself. But there were people to protect. She had promised.
“Make me a tree,” she said, “or a reaper, or a drop in the river of blood.” Every word was heavy as stone, but she did not cease speaking. “For all eternity, if it pleases you, let me suffer anything you like. Take me, as you took that handmaid of the last Imperial Princess, and let me pay for the world.”
There was a little space of silence where all she heard was her own heartbeat, her own desperate breaths. Then:
“That is not the bargain that I made with that girl,” said Death. “And even if it were—I never make the same bargain twice. And even though it is not—your life, child, is not half enough to pay for Romeo, let alone the whole world.”
Despair wrapped itself around Juliet’s heart.
Then Death shrugged her shoulders. “But you have done what that girl did not. You have righted all the wrongs of your people.”
Juliet stared at her. “All the wrongs?”
“Your people have been so reverent in their blasphemy,” said Death. “I cherish them for that. It was a very great blasphemy nonetheless, to seize the sacred words for themselves. You cannot understand how terrible. But now those words have been borne back into my kingdom on a living body. And you, sword of the Catresou, will you now relinquish those words on behalf of your people?”
Juliet couldn’t speak. She thought, It cannot be that easy.
“There will be no more Juliets,” said Death. “There are only two Catresou magi left alive, and when they wake tomorrow morning, they will remember nothing of the sacred words. Half the rites and the magics of your people will be gone. Will you ruin the pride of your people, to end the world’s Ruining?”
It should have been easy to say yes. Juliet had dreamed so long of finding a way to protect everyone. And this was not just protection: this was a new world, one not governed by the bloody, abominable equations of the Sisterhood. Where they could have a city that was not a charnel house, and their lives did not have to be bought in blood and murder.
And yet she was Catresou still. For one wretched moment she hesitated, remembering the prayers she had learned at her mother’s knee, the pride she had once felt when she stood beside her father.
In that moment, what gave her strength was Paris, who had become living dead, an abomination in the eyes of the Catresou, and yet still done his duty to them. She could bear that fate. She could accept it for all her people.
“Will we remember zoura?” she asked.
“All people remember it,” said Death, “unless they willfully forget. But that word your ancestors fashioned with their own tongues. So yes, you will remember it.”
“Then,” said Juliet, “yes. I yield the words back to you.”
Death smiled and laid her palm on Juliet’s forehead. Fire seared down Juliet’s back and across her palm. Juliet gasped, and she knew without looking that the words had unwritten themselves from her skin.
“The Ruining has ended,” said Death.
She spoke quietly, yet Juliet could feel the words echo through all of Death’s kingdom; they made the ground tremble beneath her knees. She did not trust the words, because she simply knew that they had accomplished their meaning.
The Ruining was over.
Juliet stared down at the little blue flowers by her knees, and wanted to weep in relief. Not for Viyara. She should have cared for her city first, but in that moment, all she could think was that Runajo’s vigil would not end in death. Romeo’s sacrifice would not be completely in vain.
“And now I am prepared to be kind,” said Death. “So I will grant you this. You may walk out of my land alive, as no one has before. You will never be Juliet again. But you will live in the world you have won.”
You will live.
The words slid off Juliet’s mind like water over glass. Life in a world without the Ruining, where she was not the Juliet any longer. She could hardly comprehend it. If she was not burned up and sacrificed for her people—if the world around her was no doomed—it was more than she had ever hoped for.
And yet.
“What becomes of Romeo?” she asked.
“He is dead,” said Death. “Do you think that you, more than anyone else, deserve to have your true love back?”
Juliet remembered Tybalt and the river of blood, and all who had died by her hands or because of her.
“No,” she said. “But I think that he deserves to live, and more than I do. He righted half the wrongs of my people, didn’t he? And he wasn?
??t even one of us. He deserves life far more than I do.”
“Oh,” said Death, almost laughing, “don’t tell me you still think deserving has anything to do with who lives and who dies.”
“No,” said Juliet. “But once you start picking people to live, then it does. Why else are you letting me go?”
“Because you, of all the people who ever stole into my kingdom, did not come alone. Whose face do you think I am wearing?”
Juliet stared at her, utterly baffled.
Death rolled her eyes. “Surely somebody told you what happened in the marriage bed.”
“Do you mean—”
“I mean you didn’t come here alone, you simpleton. I wear the face of the child you carry beneath your heart, whom you conceived the night that Romeo married you before both your clans.”
Juliet sat back on her heels. A child, she thought with dazed, terrified awe. I am carrying Romeo’s child.
All her life, she had been a weapon: a thing to be used up and sacrificed for the protection of others. To think that now she was going to be a mother—that there was life within her, that she was person enough to grow another person in her flesh—she could barely comprehend the idea.
“As each soul comes to me, so I deal with it.” Death’s voice was sweet and heartless, like the moonlight. “Those with clever plans, I outwit. Those with noble intentions, I sacrifice. But you came to me with life, so I am prepared to deal it back to you. Just a little.”
Death reached down, and took Juliet’s hands, and raised her to her feet.
“I will grant you this much mercy,” said Death. “If you can find Romeo among the souls in my realm, you may take him back with you, and he will live again. But know this: even if you do find him, and lead him back to the light of day, you will lose him. He will die before you, and no power in all the world can change that fate. Before the hair is white on your head, you will bury him. Is that a bargain you can bear to keep?”
Juliet stared at Death’s serene face—the promise of a future she could barely imagine—and she remembered the drumbeat as she performed the sword dance to celebrate the Night of Ghosts, and the moment when a masked boy caught her sword out of the air.
She said, “I have never loved him except under sentence of death.”
There were many islands. The water around them was black as the sky above, but the flowers that grew on every one were bright, bright blue, shining in the darkness.
Juliet wandered across the water; it cradled her feet and did not let her sink. At first she thought that the islands were empty, that Death had brought her to the only place in her kingdom with no souls. But then she realized that the shadowy lumps on the islands were not stones but sleeping people. Some lay alone, decorously laid out with hands clasped over their chests; others curled into each other, chins resting on shoulders and fingers gripping hair.
They were as still as the souls caught in the terrible grove of the Eyes and the Teeth, but they did not fill her heart with horror.
None were Romeo.
As she went farther, she saw some who were not asleep, who sat up half awake and drowsing, or whispering in quiet tones with each other. Then she saw an island with a looming, twisted shadow, and for a moment her chest clenched in fear—but then it shifted, and she realized it was a reaper, wings curving over a child it held sleeping in its lap.
Its eyes gleamed as she approached.
“What is this place?” she asked. “I thought everyone had to keep walking, or—” She remembered bodies absorbed into trees, half-animal faces, feet turning into stone.
The feathers in the reaper’s wings stirred gently, though Juliet felt no breeze on her face.
“All must complete the journey or turn to rot,” it said. “Some are allowed to rest first. This is their place.”
“I am looking for Romeo,” she said. “Is he here?”
Again its wings rustled. “Human names are not a thing I was made to remember.”
It stroked the hair of the child in its lap, and lowered its head, and began to croon a wordless song.
Dismissed, Juliet wandered onward. Because she did not know what else to do, she began to sing to herself:
“What is love? ’Tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come kiss me sweet and twenty;
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
She sang, and fell silent, and listened to the silence: the vast, sleeping silence that was only made emptier by the soft whisper of water against island, dead soul confiding in dead soul. She wondered if this was how Death would mock her, outmatch her: by saying that she could have Romeo if she found him, and leaving her in a place where she could never find him.
And then—beyond all hope—she heard his voice singing softly across the water:
“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear, your true love’s coming—”
She did not hear the rest, because she was breathlessly running, running across water and rock and infinite dark spaces—she thought she had been running forever—and then she skidded to a stop because there he was before her, there he was.
Romeo.
He sat on a small island, with his back against a white stone column. There was another soul cradled sleeping in his arms. He was waiting for her as he promised, and she had never felt so desperately relieved as when she knelt before him.
“I found you,” she said, and suddenly could not stop smiling.
“Juliet,” he said, staring at her in wonder and fear. “You—did you—”
“I followed you,” she said. “I spoke with Death. The Ruining is ended.”
He smiled, as beautifully as the first time she let him touch her face. “That’s wonderful,” he said, and then the smile dimmed. “But you . . . what did she ask of you?”
“She said that I could go back,” said Juliet. “She said that I could take you with me, if I found you. And I found you.”
But he did not smile again.
“I can’t,” he said.
She stared, her heart turning cold. “Why not?”
“Paris,” he said, and for the first time she realized whom he held sleeping in his arms. “I found him, and I promised I would stay with him. He will wake eventually, and he’ll need to walk farther, and—and even if he slept here forever, I couldn’t leave him. I swore by my name.” Romeo’s eyes were wide with distress. “I’m sorry.”
She thought this was what it meant to feel a heart break: to have it crack in two, between one beloved thing and another. Because Romeo was dearer than the breath in her mouth and the light in her eyes—but Paris was her kin, and he died for her, and she loved honor too well to wish that Romeo would break his oath.
She thought, I cannot accept this.
She said, “I’m glad I married a man of honor.” And she stood. Her heart was beating very fast, and her blood was singing with a pristine fury that felt like peace.
In any other time or place, in any other way, she might have accepted Romeo’s sacrifice. But not here. Not now. Not after all she had dared and done and suffered—not as recompense for Romeo’s kindness and Paris’s loyalty.
Those with clever plans, I outwit, Death had said. There was no trick or scheme that Juliet could hope to use against her.
There had been no hope for her to defy Lord Ineo, so she had turned her obedience into a weapon. If cleverness was always outmatched by Death, how would she treat faithfulness?
“Death,” she called out, her voice filling the great silence. “You broke your promise to me.”
“Did I?” said Death an instant later, from only a step behind her. “How rude of me. But what did I do wrong?”
Juliet turned to face Death, and stared fearlessly into those half-familiar eyes. “You said that I could bring Romeo back, if I could find him. And I found him, but he has vowed not
to leave Paris here, so I cannot take him with me. Your promise is broken.”
“And what would you have me do?” asked Death, grave and amused at once. “Send Paris back to life as well?”
“Yes,” said Juliet.
“That is a very childish wish,” said Death.
“Children,” said Juliet, “believe their elders will keep their promises. I know my father was a liar. Tell me, are you one too?”
And Death smiled. “That is the right answer, my child. Take him with you, if you can rouse him from his sleep. And try not to let me see you again for a very long time.”
In the next breath, she was gone, faded into the darkness of her kingdom. Juliet turned back to Romeo and Paris.
“I don’t know if we can—” Romeo began, but she ignored him.
“Paris Mavarinn Catresou,” she said. “I command you on your obedience, to me and to your clan, get up and walk.”
And his eyes opened. He blinked, drowsily, and then he sat up. “Lady Juliet?” he said.
“Not anymore,” she said, and hauled him to his feet. “But you’re still mine. And we’re all going home together.”
When they returned, it was dawn. The sky overhead was pink and gold.
Runajo was waiting still. But she no longer knelt in formal prayer like a Sister of Thorn. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chin, hands twisted together. When she saw them, her eyes widened, but she didn’t move, as if she could not believe they were real.
For a heartbeat, Juliet could not believe that Runajo was real either. She had never before looked on the other girl without feeling her mind as well, and it hurt to think she would never have that again.
But she had sacrificed that closeness when she gave up the sacred words of her people. And she had bought something far more precious.
Juliet let go of Romeo’s hand. She walked forward and knelt before Runajo. She reached across the invisible chasm between them and cradled Runajo’s face in her hands as she said, “I am no longer the Juliet. So I can finally tell you this: I forgive you.”
38
THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED WERE full of beginnings.
This was one: as they lay together in bed, she whispered to him, “I don’t have a name anymore. I never had a name, and now I’m not even the Juliet. But I would trust you to give me one.”