Bright Smoke, Cold Fire

  “Hm,” said Juliet. She laid down her swords—they were smeared with something black and thick—and with a sigh, sat down on the floor and leaned back against the wall.

  As if she’d been given permission to feel it, Runajo was suddenly dragged down by exhaustion. Her heart pounded and she could barely breathe.

  She had nearly died.

  Still, she had to keep working. She knelt by one of the racks, but her hands were shaking.

  Juliet cracked one eye open. “You’re not going to be much use for a while,” she said. “I’ve seen men come back from duels where they nearly died. Everybody needs a rest.”

  “How come you’re all right, then?” Runajo demanded crossly, but then she noticed the slight tremble to Juliet’s hands, and she realized that some—not all, but some of the shuddering relief-exhaustion-fear in her veins was Juliet’s.

  When she nearly dropped a scroll on the floor, she had to admit that Juliet was right. With a sigh, she sat down beside her and crossed her arms, tucking her hands under her elbows so that they would stop shaking.

  For a while they sat in silence together. Then Juliet said quietly, “Romeo would love this place.”

  Runajo thought of Romeo: sweet, enthusiastic, not terribly bright. (Dead.)

  “Why?” she asked. “There aren’t any pretty things for him to babble over.”

  Juliet gave her a disgruntled look. “Words,” she said. “He loved words.”

  Runajo thought about that. Yes, Romeo had always been in love with the pretty phrases he could string together. She’d always assumed he just loved the sound of his own voice, but maybe he liked the words themselves as well.

  “Anyone’s words,” Juliet went on. “He wanted to know the poetry of my people, though we have hardly any. He taught me the poetry of his. He would have . . . been so delighted, to read the words of the Sunken Library.”

  “Is that why you loved him?” asked Runajo. “He wrote you poems?”

  “You don’t believe I loved him,” Juliet said flatly.

  Runajo winced. She hadn’t meant to let that slip through the bond. Maybe it had just been obvious in her voice.

  “He was begging me to run away with him three months ago,” she said. “Whatever happened between you two, it wasn’t—”

  “It was real.” Juliet’s voice was unyielding. “It was swift and it was foolish, but it was real.”

  “Then what was it?” asked Runajo. “Because if it’s just that he treated you as a girl and not a weapon—”

  “No,” said Juliet. “It wasn’t just that.”

  She was quiet for a few moments, and then she began to speak, very slowly and softly. “The Catresou say . . . nothing is important unless it lasts forever. That’s why outsiders don’t matter: you will all perish in the darkness outside the Paths of Light. This world only matters because the duties we undertake, the knowledge we obtain, unlocks the world beyond for us.”

  Again Juliet was silent for a few heartbeats. Then she went on, “I don’t think I ever entirely believed that. I couldn’t, not when I was the Juliet. But I didn’t understand what I thought about it, until—he recited a poem for me. He wanted to tell me that I was beautiful, and he recited a poem about blossoms falling from a tree each year. How the same flowers never fall twice.”

  “Every six-year-old learns that poem,” said Runajo. “It’s the first in the lexicon.”

  Juliet shrugged. “That things can be beautiful, that they can matter, even as they vanish—I never had words for that before. He gave me the words. That’s why I love him.” Then she smiled faintly. “And, yes. He did write me poems.”

  “I should hope he did, if he spent the night with you,” said Runajo. The courtesy of a morning-after poem was what made a tryst honorable and not a mere seduction.

  Juliet was blushing bright red now and not meeting her eyes, and Runajo couldn’t help a soft snicker. She had forgotten that the Catresou were so peculiar and full of shame about their love affairs.

  That thought must have leaked through, because Juliet flinched, the blush fading from her face as some sort of cold, sick fear swirled around her.

  “Tell me the truth and I will know if you lie,” said Juliet, speaking rapidly and not looking at her. “He told me that if we spent three nights together and declared ourselves to my parents, that would be a marriage. Among your people, at least. Is that . . . was he . . .”

  Juliet was terrified, far more than she’d been when facing revenants. Runajo remembered a year when the Catresou’s offering had not been their usual condemned criminal, but a “volunteer”: a young woman disgraced for losing her virginity to one man when she was betrothed to another.

  Suddenly Juliet’s shame and fear didn’t seem amusing at all.

  “Yes,” said Runajo. “It’s an old custom. I don’t know of anyone alive who’s done it. Usually, to take a wife, men negotiate beforehand. It’s lovers they go to without asking the family. But if he declared himself for your hand on the third morning—yes. You would be his wife.”

  Juliet didn’t respond. She was staring straight ahead, her lips pressed together, her mind locked away as if behind glass. Finally she nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

  “Did he declare himself?” asked Runajo.

  “The third night,” said Juliet, her voice raw, “was the night after he killed my cousin Tybalt. They’d have slaughtered him on sight. But we were going to—after I made him my Guardian, we were going to go back to my family together. Only.” She shrugged. “I left a letter for my family, declaring what we’d done. I don’t know if that counts.”

  The Catresou wouldn’t consider it a marriage, and the Mahyanai wouldn’t care. Runajo didn’t bother saying it, because they both already knew.

  For the first time, Runajo truly wanted to comfort this girl.

  “He would have done it if he had the chance,” she said. “I can’t say I ever much liked Romeo, but he would never betray a girl. He’s too stupidly earnest for that.” She paused. “And he tried to make me love him for near on five years, so it’s not as if he gives up easily.”

  Juliet gave her a withering look. “I already knew about you.”

  “I hope he told you that I never did kiss him,” said Runajo. “I’m really not competition.”

  And then Juliet was blushing again, and Runajo probably shouldn’t still find that amusing, but she did.

  “What did you mean,” she asked, “when you said you couldn’t believe your people because you were the Juliet?”

  “Because justice is for things in this world,” said Juliet. “Even the things that are lost forever.”

  “I thought your only duty was to avenge the Catresou,” said Runajo.

  Juliet gave her a look of infinitely patient disdain. “You don’t know anything about the Juliet, do you?”

  “I know they put spells on you,” said Runajo, “to compel you to avenge them.”

  Juliet sighed. “You outsiders can’t think of anything but our obedience. As if that’s all we care about.”

  “What else is there?” asked Runajo, genuinely curious.

  Juliet stared at the shelves and the glimmering scrolls. “You Sisters are renowned for your knowledge of the Ancients,” she said. “Do you know they had the power of sacred words?”

  “Yes,” said Runajo. “That was one of their sins, presuming to know the language of the gods.”

  Juliet smiled crookedly. “You call it a sin, to blaspheme against the gods you don’t believe in?”

  Runajo felt her own mouth tugging up. “I call it a very bad idea. As proved by their destruction.”

  “Well,” said Juliet, “that language wasn’t all lost. Many of our sigils and sacred words are derived from it. But we have two words of that language preserved unchanged. One of them is on your palm. It’s the word for trust. That’s how we make the bond between the Juliet and the Guardian. And that’s how we make the Juliet. The word for justice is written on my back. All but the final strok
e.”

  Runajo looked up from her palm to stare at her. She didn’t know whether to be thrilled or horrified: the sacred, forbidden language. Here. On her skin.

  She had to know everything about it.

  “And that’s what makes you compelled to avenge them?” she asked.

  Juliet shook her head. “No. There are other seals and spells for that. They’re almost done too. The word for justice is . . . I can feel it. Not just as an idea in my head, something I was told or that I made up. It’s like the way the sun rises, or stones fall to the ground. It’s infinite and eternal and closer than my heartbeat. And when people are hurt—even people who die and are gone and become nothing in the darkness—people my family would say I should care nothing about—I can feel justice scream against it. Nobody in my family understands that. They all think justice is just for use, some kind of—of instructions on how to keep us safe and headed toward the Paths of Light. It’s not. It is real and it wants. It wants to reach into every corner of the world, and I want to make that happen. That’s what I wanted. To bring justice to the whole city, and not just my people.” She drew a ragged breath and fell silent.

  Oh, thought Runajo. Her too.

  She hadn’t known there was anyone else.

  “You think I’m foolish,” said Juliet. She was hugging herself now, her gaze shuttered, fixed on the floor.

  “No,” said Runajo. “No. Do you want to know why I joined the Sisters of Thorn?”

  “I thought it was some sort of nonsense about wanting to spill your blood.”

  Runajo waved a hand. “That’s part of it. But.” She took a deep breath. She had never told anyone this before, because she had been sure that nobody would ever understand.

  “I was a little girl,” she said. “I think maybe nine years old. It was one of those spring days where the sky is bright, bright blue but the air still tastes like winter. I was sitting in my family’s garden.” She closed her eyes and she could see it all again. “The sun was glowing through the grass and the flowers on the trees, and there was a little gust of wind and—it was as if the skin of the world peeled back, and I could see . . . I felt like I could almost see the very heart of the world and it was something impossible and perfect. It was so beautiful, and I could almost see it. All I’ve ever wanted since is to find that thing, that infinite, perfect truth, and understand it.” She grimaced. “But I was my family’s only child. It was my duty to take a husband or at least a lover, and bear children to inherit. I didn’t want to waste my time on that. The Sisters protected me from that fate, and they also—they know something about the nature of the world, even if they don’t know everything. I wanted to learn from them.”

  Juliet looked up, her mouth puckered in a way that might be wry or contemptuous or affectionate. “And you didn’t mind murdering to do it.”

  Runajo’s heart didn’t skip a beat. When had it become comforting, to hear Juliet call her a murderer?

  “Sacrifice,” she said pleasantly. “And remember that your destiny was killing as well.”

  “Did they teach you anything?” asked Juliet. “Besides their magic?”

  “That’s the whole point,” said Runajo. “Magic only works insofar as it understands the nature of the world. When they say that everything is bought in blood, that is true. Only, I am not sure it is the only truth.” She paused. “The Sisters of Thorn say there is a word that lies at the heart of the world, and that word is inkaad. It means . . .” Runajo struggled to sum up the concept. “Both cost and price. ‘Appropriate payment,’ maybe.”

  “That is not quite the same as justice.” Juliet clenched and released her hands. “My people would say it is zoura. Correct knowledge. Because it is knowledge of the correct spells that allows us to walk the Paths of Light.”

  “That’s a cold-blooded way to view the world,” said Runajo.

  “And the way of the Sisters isn’t?”

  “Blood is hot when you spill it,” said Runajo, and Juliet laughed suddenly, her head tilting back.

  “Would the Mahyanai have an answer?” she asked. “For what word lies at the heart of the world? Or do they not believe in that, any more than they believe in gods?”

  “We don’t believe in nothing,” Runajo said mildly. “We have our own sages. I suppose they would say it’s monyai. It means both ‘dust’ and ‘river.’” She paused, trying to think how to explain it to someone who had not grown up with the words of the sages, or the hundred and eight poems they had saved from the Ruining.

  “The Sisters of Thorn will tell you that all things move by the blood of the gods. This is false.” Runajo’s voice was soft, yet it echoed among the shelves and the scrolls. “The sages of our people tell a different story. They say that everything in all the world is made of particles like motes of dust. They spin and cling and part, and we are formed of their patterns.”

  Runajo’s throat tightened. She remembered her mother telling her this long ago, before any illness had touched their family. Before she had known what it meant for things to vanish forever.

  She drew a breath and went on. “Like a river, the particles are ever-moving, ever-changing; we are the ripples in the river, that vanish in a moment and never return. But while we are here, we are like dust motes caught in the afternoon sunlight, dazzling before we fall into the darkness.”

  The words had been beautiful and comforting, before anyone she knew had died.

  “So the sages say,” she finished dully.

  There was silence between them. Runajo stared at nothing and wondered how much dust floated in the air of the Sunken Library, and how much of that dust was made from bones and dried flesh.

  “And you?” Juliet asked finally. “What do you think lies at the heart of the world?”

  She couldn’t believe in the nine gods and the feasts they held for the sacrificed dead. She couldn’t believe that the world was nothing but dust. She definitely couldn’t believe in the superstitions of the Catresou.

  Buried beneath the temple of the Sisters, surrounded by revenants and ancient lore, remembering that she had sat at the very Mouth of Death and watched the souls walk in, Runajo said quietly, “I don’t know.”

  There wasn’t time to go through all the scrolls, but Runajo did the best she could. As she picked through them, trying to decide what to leave and what to take, Juliet paced back and forth by the door.

  “Don’t take too many,” she said. “We’ll have to run.”

  “I know,” Runajo said regretfully, examining a scroll that seemed to be mostly folktales about people meeting Death herself and trying to bargain. She nearly discarded it, but she supposed there might be some useful hints related to the Ruining.

  “If they’re waiting for us by the door, we’re dead,” said Juliet. “If not, we’re going to run for the shelves and climb them as fast as we can. I didn’t see any of them up high, so maybe they’re too stupid to work out ladders. You’ll need to strip off your outer tunic.”

  Juliet—whom Runajo had dressed in the simple gray of a novice before they started this adventure—started to pull off her robe.

  Runajo stared at her.

  “I’ve talked to men who had to hunt revenants. It’s part of my training.” Juliet pulled the tunic over her head, leaving her only in her shift. “They don’t see like we do; they mostly rely on sound and smell. If we drop something that smells like us near the start, it might distract them. On second thought, we should drop the shifts and wear the robes.”

  “Right,” said Runajo.

  A few minutes later, they were ready. The packs that Runajo had brought were full of scrolls and slung over their backs. Runajo held the shifts; Juliet had her swords drawn.

  “See if you can open the door just a crack,” Juliet said.

  Runajo did. The hallway outside was empty.

  Run, Juliet said silently, and they did.

  There was one revenant still near the door; Juliet dispatched it instantly, and the next moment they had dropped their sh
ifts and were swarming up ladders to the top of a bookcase.

  Then there was nothing for it but to run across the tops. Runajo had never been scared of heights, but up here in the yawning emptiness of the Sunken Library, running across a surface half as wide as she was tall, knowing that if she fell, she would break her bones and then be torn to pieces—

  She didn’t like it. But she ran faster.

  Noises from below. The revenants were on the move. Hunting them. Hungry.

  Ahead, the bookcase they were on came to an end. There was a short gap, and then another one started up. It looked possible to jump—it would have to be if she wanted to live—and Runajo didn’t let herself slow down as she approached the ledge, just flung herself into the leap, because she knew that if she hesitated, she would never be able to make herself do it.

  For one moment she was flying; then she landed, hard, and went down to her knees, grabbing at the wooden surface for purchase. Her heart was pounding. She was still alive.

  She thought, suddenly, of the poem Romeo had recited to Juliet, the first poem that any Mahyanai child ever learned, about how beautiful things were when they were about to die. She didn’t think the poet had imagined this.

  Juliet landed beside her and slapped her shoulder.

  Up, she said, and then they were both running again—and maybe there was something beautiful in their silent, desperate race.

  They crossed that bookcase. And the next. And now there were revenants following them below, waiting for them to fall or climb down.

  It’s not going to work, she told Juliet.

  Yes it will, Juliet said, and jumped to the next bookcase. Runajo jumped after her, but this time her feet skidded and she nearly fell. Juliet caught her by the hand as she wobbled and steadied her.

  They were on the last bookcase. They were nearly there.

  I’ll go down first, said Juliet. You follow after.

  She didn’t climb down the ladder; she jumped, and landed with her blades out. There was something terrifying in the way she fought: fast and fluid and utterly relentless.

  The Catresou had made her into this.